Watching the 1970s

Of the ten films in which John Wayne starred during the 1970s all but two of them were Westerns. Ranker.com lists 7 of these movies on its list of Top 45 Westerns of the 1970s – only ‘The Train Robbers’ (1973) failing to make the cut. According to this list, the highest ranked Wayne Western is, of course, ‘The Shootist’ at No.4. Flickchart.com has only four of John Waynes’s 1970s Westerns on its list of The Best Westerns of the 1970s, with, again, ‘The Shootist’ ranked highest, this time at No.9. Filmsite.org , which lists movies alphabetically rather than by rank, has only two of Wayne’s 1970s Westerns appear on its list of 100 Greatest Westerns – ‘The Shootist’, inevitably, and, surprisingly, ‘Chisum’ (1970). Time Out ’s list of 50 Greatest Westerns has five John Wayne Westerns on its list, but none – not even ‘The Shootist’ – from the 1970s. Most-Wanted-Western-Movies.com has the same mix as does Time Out , minus ‘Rio Bravo’ (1959), so, again, the 70s go unrepresented. PasteMag...

I have never been a great fan of horror movies. There are, of course, certain exceptions to this – as a kid I used to love going to bed straight after watching Christopher Lee play Dracula in a Hammer Horror film. And I didn’t sleep a wink after watching The Omen (1976). Though I remain quite partial to a good vampire movie (there not being that many good ones, these days!), horror is probably my least favourite movie genre. Why? Well, mostly just because I remain unhorrified. It may well be, as Steve Rose claims in his article for The Guardian , that “horror is the place where we explore our mortal and societal fears”, but Edward Scissorhands on Elm Street wearing a ski mask to hide the weird possibility of the hills having eyes, wielding a Texas chainsaw while Conjuring the Blair Witch just don’t hold a candle to what I would consider one of the scariest movies of all time - 1971’s ‘The Andromeda Strain’. Christopher Lee in his Dracula heyday was nowhere near as scary as Dr. Jere...

In his quick answer to the question, What was the New Hollywood Movement? , Jeff Saporito concludes: Representing a productive union between studio and director in which the director takes creative control of the film, New Hollywood resulted in commercially viable pictures that explored previously taboo subjects in innovative new ways. That male-on-male rape is so rarely depicted in film, any way in which John Boorman chose to portray it in 1972’s ‘Deliverance’ would likely have been innovatively new. But this scene has been discussed so much there’s little left to be said about it. What is more interesting is the notion that the director had creative control of the film. Boorman proves this within the first five minutes of ‘Deliverance’. So, it is on these opening few minutes of camera work that I want to focus. Probably showing my ignorance of the technicalities of film-making, ‘Deliverance’ opens with what I’d say is a tracking shot. The camera is positioned mid-stream, sligh...

There is much that has been said and written about the movies of the 1970s. Indeed, the period is a whole area of study in its own right. It is not for me to even attempt to join such a rarefied atmosphere of theoretical discourse – mainly because I have never ‘studied’ film and, for the life of me, could never write something like: Given the ostensibly dramatic changes to the cinema's technological base, a significant body of recent film theory has called for the reinstitution of classical theories of filmic ontology, but often at the expense of excluding 1970s film theory and its paranoiac search for the discursive legibility behind the image. (Croombs, Matthew (2011, June) Pasts and Futures of 1970s Film Theory. Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies . Retrieved from: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2011/june-2011/croombs.pdf ) So, why watch movies from the 1970s? The answer to that question is simply a matter of dawning fascination. If sty...