American Movies in the 1960s and 1970s

Despite these century-long preconceptions about Hollywood movies, we should recall that -- not so long ago -- the films people the world over cared and argued about, that seemed to speak directly to their personal or social dilemmas, came from the United States. From the late 1960s until the end of the 1970s, American filmmaking underwent an extraordinary renaissance. In few other periods were American directors so influential or their movies so central in shaping the experience and values of audiences everywhere.

One reason for this renaissance was that, with the advent of the counterculture, the major Hollywood studios were no longer certain about what sorts of movies would make money or about what the new, young audiences who came of age in the 1960s wanted. So the studios were willing, for a brief time, to let anyone with an idea make a movie. They turned over Hollywood to a group of gifted and often eccentric directors (Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Woody Allen) who wanted to make European-style movies: films that were mostly character studies, without conventional plots or linear narratives, and with lots of stylistic experimentation.

Beginning in 1967, with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, the Americans released a flood of improvisational and autobiographical movies, many of them appealing especially to college students and young adults who were disaffected by the war in Vietnam and disillusioned with what had once been called, in a more innocent age, the American Dream. The movies included Mike Nichols's The Graduate; Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch; Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider; Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show; Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces; Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (parts I and II), The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now; George Lucas's American Graffiti and Star Wars; Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Nashville; Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver; Alan Pakula's All the President's Men; Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman; Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan; Bob Fosse's Cabaret and All That Jazz; and the most wrenching film of the 1970s, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter.

These movies offered a vision of an America drenched in loneliness, conspiracy and corruption, psychic injury, and death. Yet despite their melancholy view of American life, the films themselves were made with wit and exceptional exuberance, reinforced by the vitality of a new and distinctly un-Hollywood-like generation of stars -- Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, Jill Clayburgh, Meryl Streep.