|
The History of Cinema Part V:
Return of Greatness
The New Cinema arrives in the ’60s and ’70s and, with it, gripping, honest films
.jpg)
By Daniel Neman
The times, it has been noted, were a-changin’.
The dull conformity of the post-war years began to wear thin on artists. They were ready to explore new methods of expression and reject the staid conventions of the past – and the people who practiced them. The result was an exceptionally fertile period of great filmmaking.
Other art forms from music to painting turned the revolutionary corner long before the movies. Movies made the most money and had the most to lose. But when film started to change in the mid- to late-1960s, when it took experimental ideas and brought them into the mainstream, when it courted controversy and sought to show what it considered a more realistic view of sex and violence, it never was the same again.
TOM JONES, Dr. STRANGELOVE AND THE BEATLES LED THE TRAILBLAZING
Some changes were already in the works, from the trailblazing underground films of Kenneth Anger to the increasing influence of more artistically inclined movies from Europe. In 1963, the Oscar-winning Tom Jones made its own method of storytelling as much a part of the film as the plot. Audiences were astounded and delighted at the sped-up photography, the arch nature of the narration (“We are all as God made us, and many of us much worse”) and the bawdy, deliciously anti-establishment tone of the story. It took the 1960s to make a tale written in 1749 palatable to movie audiences.
In 1964, the cinema took another giant stride toward modernism with Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Perhaps the greatest satire ever filmed, Dr. Strangelove attacked the most serious subject on the national mind – nuclear annihilation – with blistering humor. Later that year, Sidney Lumet took a somber look at the same subject with Fail-Safe, with Henry Fonda starring as a president in a dire nuclear crisis. It’s an excellent film, but the one that is best remembered, the one that had the lasting influence, is Kubrick’s savage comedy. Fail-Safe was the conventional film told in the  conventional way, even with its shocking ending. Dr. Strangelove was something new, something no one had seen before; it used a rebellious humor to make its sobering political points, highlighted by Peter Sellers’ extraordinary portrayal of three main characters.
Also in 1964, another movie came out that was hugely influential, though no one realized it at the time. A Hard Day’s Night, starring The Beatles, is the genesis of every music video ever made. Director Richard Lester and writer Alun Owen were trying to capture the band’s spirit of youthful exuberance, channeled through the anarchy of the Marx Brothers’ movies, and they wound up creating a visual style characterized by rapid edits and unusual camera angles.
The film was a success, but the style did not catch on for almost 20 years. Many of the innovations of the ’60s were just as transient, from split screens to the jarring juxtaposition of images and sound.
VIOLENCE AND WAR WERE NEVER LIKE THIS
But some of the period’s new language of film did catch on, and remain with us today.
The movie that can be considered the American beginning of the New Cinema of the ’60s and ’70s did not come out until 1967. Director Arthur Penn, who had previously directed the stunningly inspirational The Miracle Worker, wanted to make a new version of a popular old genre, the gangster film. In keeping with the anti-establishment tenor of the times, his criminals would be enormously sympathetic; just high-spirited young people out for a good time until they are inevitably crushed by an unforgiving society. And for good measure, he based the story on real bank robbers, famous in their day. Their names were Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.
Bonnie and Clyde was a huge hit. Along with its theme of young iconoclasts whose sense of freedom is not tolerated by the traditional, older establishment, the film was notable for its brutally real images of violence. Penn had been in the infantry in World War II, and he wanted to show what really happens when people are shot.
Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 elegy to the faded west, The Wild Bunch, found a horrible beauty in its violence, a kind of poetry. But other films of the era used violence to push for social change. Robert Altman’s 1970 masterpiece M*A*S*H was the bloodiest movie ever made to that date, the blood all coming in gruesome scenes of battlefield surgery. Though it was set during the Korean War, the point was obvious – war, especially the ongoing one in Vietnam, leads to terrible suffering and senseless death. That lesson was driven home at the end with a pointed and hilarious football game metaphorically implying that war is fierce, brutal, and ultimately meaningless.
Audience reactions to the 1970 film Patton, though almost uniformly positive, were all over the political spectrum. Those in favor of the Vietnam War found it to be a stirring portrait of a brilliant warrior whose downfall was caused by incompetent superiors. Those opposed to the war found it equally stirring, a blistering exposé of the Army’s corrupt thinking and a story of a bullying narcissist brought low by his own deep flaws. Both ways of thinking were correct. The film’s star, George C. Scott, was a passionate liberal who thought he was making an anti-war film. The director, Franklin J. Schaffner, was just as passionately conservative and thought he was making a movie showing the necessity of good leadership in battle.
SEX BECOMES MORE VIVID … AND ENTICING 
Hand in hand with the increased violence in the movies, of course, was an increased emphasis on sex. Both had been vital driving forces in the industry since the very beginning, but as the Sixties began to take shape, movies took a quantum leap forward in how vividly they were shown. Some called this change an artistic movement to present both the beauty and horror of life with complete realism, while others called it a cheap but effective way to lure audiences into theaters.
The Graduate, which came out in 1967, was a completely new way of looking at sex. A predatory older woman (representing all parents and everyone who is older than the youthful generation) seduces an innocent but aimless young man, who finds his purpose in life by falling in love with the woman’s daughter. Youth triumphs over corrupt, immoral middle age, but the ending leaves the young lovers facing an uncertain future.
More shocking at the time, but just as successful, was Midnight Cowboy¸ still the only X-rated movie to win an Academy Award for best picture. Released in 1969, it tells the story of a naïve hick who comes to the big city, which almost devours him were it not for an unlikely friendship with a lonely con man. The story is not unlike many from the 1930s, in which a young woman would come to New York to work at a shop. The 1960s difference is that the male main character aspires to work as a sexual hustler.
A couple of the more ambitious movies of the era seamlessly blended the emphasis on sex with that on violence. Kubrick’s celebrated A Clockwork Orange (1971) strove to both titillate and repel with its futuristic story of a charming leader of murderous young hooligans. Though most great movies of the era sought to gain credibility among the burgeoning younger audiences by attacking the established order, A Clockwork Orange lashed out both against the rebellious youth and those who would tame them.
OF THE GREATEST, NONE WAS GREATER THAN COPPOLA
The Watergate scandal, which consumed the nation in 1973 and 1974, only served to reinforce the prevailing idea among filmmakers and much of the country that the government was lawless and corrupt. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, which came out in 1974, was a sinister updating of film noir, depicting a world where the powers that be held all the trump cards. And Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful The Conversation, also from 1974, was the ultimate exercise in paranoia. Anyone can be spied on, it said, anyone’s phones can be tapped, and with the deadliest of results.
Of all the great filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s, it is Coppola who stands above them all. Though it was the time of Woody Allen’s best and most insightful films (Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan), and Martin Scorsese was at his most brilliant (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), it was Coppola who made the greatest and most fully realized movies of the era.
The Conve rsation is one, and Apocalypse Now (1979), until it loses its way toward the end. Yet it is The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) that shine brighter than any other films of the period. Shot in gorgeous, golden hues by the incomparable cinematographer Gordon Willis, these two pictures make the awful profession of crime seem both romantic and horrible at the same time. They show the good and the bad, the redemptive and the damning.
They are two of the greatest pictures ever made. And they were revolutionary enough to be the representative pinnacle of the new era of filmmaking, the 1960s and the 1970s.
NEXT ISSUE: Part VI: The Blockbuster Era.
Daniel Neman was the movie critic at The Richmond News Leader and the Richmond Times-Dispatch for many years. He is now the food editor at The Toledo Blade.
|
