Watching the 1970s

New York in 1974 was a frightening place. Not only was it not safe to walk down the street for fear of being mugged but, even at home, that last bulwark against the horrors of the street, there is the very real danger of invaders raping and pillaging. So is the New York of Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974). Time has been good to New York, which is now touted as one of the safest cities in the world. It makes sense then, for a remake of Death Wish to seek out a new location for its vigilante hero – and where better than the City of Death, Chicago? While initially following the same plot, there is a point of divergence at which more than just the location makes these two films so very different. Once such difference is Bruce Willis’ Paul Kersey having a brother rather than the weaslley son-in-law of the Bronson film. Maybe it just couldn’t be expected, in the 21 st Century, that a man would remain to support a wife who had been raped and traumatized to the point of catatonia? As ...

The conflicting visions of which Peter Lev writes in his book American Films of the 70s are largely the differing world-views of the generations before the Sixties and the hippies and other subcultures that arose during the decade of flower-power and free-love. The former represents all that is conservative and right-wing and the latter all that is experimental and left-leaning. Though a gross over-generalisation, Lev does classify films in favour of the counterculture and those opposed. Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film, Dirty Harry , definitely falls into the opposition. Roger Ebert calls the moral position of Dirty Harry fascist. Lev informs us that Pauline Kael slammed the film as “fascist medievalism” and a “right-wing fantasy.” (Lev, 2000, p.35) Lev, himself, says of the film that it “advocate(s) a more-or-less autonomous police power.” And, Daniel Baldwin, writing for Forbes , says of the character at the centre of the film, “Harry Callahan was never really tolera...