[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
This might also have something to do with the clothes. Everyone back in the 70s, if movies are to believed, wore really drab clothes in various shades of brown and gray. Of course, there are the exceptions - the funkadelic bright colors of the rockers and pimps and psychedelic people and disco maniacs - so let me rephrase that - everyone in 70s movies over the age of 35 seems to only dress in drab shades of gray or brown. They also wore those big aviator-style eyeglasses a lot, and smoked cigarettes all the time. And all men wore suits, constantly.
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Yep, that was pretty much the 'Seventies in a nutshell; all you missed were the bug-ugly hideously overchromed cars and the ever-present Coors and Olympia beer. (Believe it or not, Coors was considerd some pretty high falutin beer in that era.)
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
The biggest thing about 70’s movies that I notice, even more so than earlier movies, is, as you said, the pacing. Jesus H. Christ, they’re slow. And I don’t need every movie I watch to be a music video, trust me. They’re just really, really slow.
[/QUOTE]
Filmmakers in the 'Seventies went for a more naturalistic style that got caught between the snappy dialogue of the Golden Age of Cinema and the quick cutting of the 'Eighties; as a result, you get a lot of what the o.p. describes; guys sitting around in drab clothes in dark paneled rooms smoking. As an example, take a look at Bullitt; the film is the archetype for the maverick cop movie and stars the era’s leading action hero icon, but the bulk of the movie is slower than a bassett hound on Qualuudes and with dialogue so stilted it was cliched before there was a cliche to compare it to. If not for the awesome but geographically impossible car chase scene and the final airport showdown, it would be a completely unmemorable entry in McQueen’s c.v.
[QUOTE=JohnT]
And a lot of this change (not all of it!) can be dated from May 25th, 1977. The turning-point between movies of “the 1970’s” and movies now is, of course, Star Wars. Once studios saw that hundreds of millions of dollars could be earned off opening wide original material that featured simplistic black and white villians and good guys arranged in plots so metronomic that you could keep time with them, it was all over for movies like Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, films which lived in a sea of moral ambiguity, no easy answers, and little comfort that the good guys would triumph in the end (how can the good guys triumph if there are no true “good guys” in a movie?)
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You just listed four of my favorite films. Movies like these would be considered “art house” films and likely given limited distribution. You might be able to salvage Chinatown for a major studio release–it isn’t too dissimilar from L.A. Confidential in theme and pacing–but you’d have to replace Polanski with a more action oriented director and have him rescue Fay Dunaway by gunning down John Huston in the end (which is more-or-less the end of the film as originally drafted).
Star Wars did good and bad things for cinema; it dramatically increased the scale of promotion and accelerated audience expectations for special effects (watching film like Logan’s Run today gives an idea of how utterly laughable “award winning” SFX was pre-Star Wars) and spurred a renewed interest in cinematic space opera; on the other hand, it undercut real science fiction and sold Hollywood on the notion of patching together influences from a bunch of different sources into a creaky story with canned dialogue. (To be fair, The Empire Strikes Back was a superior film in every way, multi-layered and complex; if the rest of the series, and cinematic sci-fi in general could meet that standard there would be little to complain about.)
Star Wars was a turning point, but it was hardly the only one; the Bond films in the 'Sixties, and the Schwartenegger and Stallone movies in the 'Eighties also redefined cinema pretty assuredly in terms of the portrayal of violence and the complexity (or lack thereof) of story. And Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Blowup broke the Production Code for better or worse. And you could do things in major studio release films between the collapse of the Production Code and the rise of simplistic films in 'Eightes that you couldn’t get away with now, like the metaphysical noodling in Point Blank (pointlessly remade as a straight actioneer as Payback).
Still, I think movies in the 'Eighties were worse, and hold up more poorly. Rewatching Beverly Hills Cop–a massive hit in its day–is just kind of painful in its crudity of editing and humor. And anything involving special effects generally looks bad; not humorously bad like Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, but just as if nobody really cared to try to make it look good; a rare film like Star Wars II: The Wrath of Khan stands out by having merely competent SFX.
[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
So if the film stock was of poor quality in the 70’s, how do we account for the sharp color of movies from the late 30’s, 40’s, 50’s? Do they look good because they were re-mastered and the 70’s movies haven’t been re-mastered yet?
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I’d wager that most pre-'Seventies era movies you find on DVD today have been remastered, often from something other than the original prints. The technology to digitally remaster films today is relatively mature and (mostly) automated, and film master prints of those eras are so badly degraded that taking the image directly from the master would give nothing useable. (See the restoration of Rear Window, which has a short feature on the DVD that compares the pre- and post-restoration images. Heck, watch it anyway; it’s a great, great movie.) It is also the case that color films of those eras commonly used a two or three strip color process such as Technicolor (see an explanation here) whereas most films after that era use a monopack film negative like the Kodachrome-based Eastmancolor film, which was much cheaper to process and used lighter, less complex cameras, but didn’t offer as much saturation and doesn’t hold up to age nearly as well.
It is also the case that in the late 'Seventies or early 'Eighties that film emulsions using tabular crystals (which gives a finer and more distinct “grain” to the image) were used, resulting in a better defined, higher resolution image. Misguided efforts have been made in some hidef transfers to correct for the graininess of older films, which paradoxically results in a more bland, scrubbed-looking image, like anti-aliasing a font until all you have is a blurred shape.
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