Again, we’re approoaching this from the perspective of an historian 100 years from now. What 10 1970’s movies should he or she watch to catch the “vibe” of the decade?
I’ll start with a couple of nominations from opposite ends of the movie-going spectrum:
First, there’s Taxi Driver, which captures the urban decay and economic distress of the late 70’s. The “malaise,” if you will. Plus you get to see the proto-punk mohawk that spawned them all.
On a more light-hearted note, I’ll nominate Up in Smoke for a look at 70’s drug culture.
The 70s, you say? Why, some of the best movies came out of that decade!
Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Saturday Night Fever, for obvious reasons already mentioned. Shaft and Slaughter’s Big Ripoff, capturing the Blacksploitation era. Rocky!Annie Hall, Woody Allen films are so good at that, and this one is especially. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Deer Hunter definitely, because it is a beautiful character study of a group of friends after the Vietnam War. Halloween because it spawned so many damn sequels. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a very famous coke-acid crap movie from that decade. The Bad News Bears Go to Japan- WTF? I bet you’re thinking. And you’d be right. The Jerk defininitely. Steve Martin was HUGE in the 70s. And its a good movie too, so I hear.
Airplane! Apparently, airport disaster movies were big in the 70’s (I was still in utero and can’t testify). Airplane! was the culmination of them, and hey, it’s contstantly rebroadcast even today.
I’d put Death Wish above Dirty Harry for covering the themes of concerns over crime and a desire to see criminals punished in an extreme method. And how about Apocalypse Now if you need your Viet Nam fix? If you want a disaster movie to stand in for the genre that was born, flared, and died out in the seventies then Towering Inferno is the one to go for (though The Posiden Adventure can certainly fit).
Some movies that represent the vibes of public and private life in America in the 1970s, not movies that best represent Hollywood trends of the 1970s (e.g., disaster movies):
All the President’s Men, An Unmarried Woman, Taxi Driver, Up in Smoke, Nashville, Claudine, Saturday Night Fever.
Okay, more seriously. How about The Conversation? Mainly because of how it portrays “high-tech” back then, big fat wires and dials and endless loops of analog reel-to-reel audio tape.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Network. The whole concept of “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” seemed to capture the mood of the country in 1976.
Just to clarify the OP, we’re looking for movies that capture the vibe of living in the 70’s (even if they’re bad movies). (Star Wars, by way of contrast, captures the vibe of living a long, long time ago in a place far away.)
I have a few more: Meatballs (which was a pretty close approximation of a couple of summers for me in the 70’s), Oh, God! (John Denver screams 70’s), and Walking Tall (for the rural South in the 70’s).
Say, there ought to be a movie that captured the granola-flavored, back-to-the-country, John-Denverish ethos of the early-to-mid 70’s.
