The Movies Nobody Expected

Part 4

Hollywood in 1970 was a studio system having a nervous breakdown in slow motion, and that breakdown, as it turned out, was the best thing that could have happened to American cinema.

Here's the context you need, because it explains everything that follows. By the end of the sixties, the old studio machine — the one that had produced glossy, safe, family-friendly spectacle for decades — was hemorrhaging money on bloated musicals nobody under the age of fifty wanted to watch anymore. Paint Your Wagon. Doctor Dolittle. Hello, Dolly! Films built by executives who were still, essentially, making product for an audience that had stopped existing, an audience that had grown up, moved to the suburbs, and started watching television instead of driving to the theater. Meanwhile, the actual moviegoing audience left standing was young, disillusioned, freshly radicalized by Vietnam and civil rights and a general and growing distrust of every institution their parents had told them to respect. And that audience did not want Doctor Dolittle. That audience wanted to see something that looked and felt like their actual lives, or at least like the chaos they sensed underneath the surface of their actual lives.

So the studios, panicking, terrified, genuinely unsure what else to try, did something almost unthinkable for a risk-averse industry — they started handing money and creative control to young, difficult, largely unproven directors who had absolutely no interest in making anything that resembled the old product. And 1970 is the year you can watch that gamble start paying off in real time.

MASH hit theaters in January, directed by Robert Altman, a filmmaker nobody in the old studio establishment particularly trusted, working from a script that had been passed over by several other directors first. It was messy on purpose, overlapping dialogue on purpose, structurally loose on purpose, a black comedy about battlefield surgeons in Korea that every single person watching it in a theater understood, without a word of the film ever saying so directly, was actually about Vietnam. Altman had smuggled a genuinely subversive antiwar statement into a studio picture by dressing it up as a raunchy comedy, and audiences rewarded him for it, turning MASH into one of the year's biggest hits and eventually a Best Picture nominee. That's the whole story of seventies cinema in miniature, right there in January — an industry too broke and too confused to say no to something genuinely dangerous, and a filmmaker smart enough to walk straight through the door they'd accidentally left open.

Five Easy Pieces came that fall, and if MAS*H had smuggled its politics into comedy, this film didn't bother smuggling anything. Jack Nicholson played Bobby Dupea, a man who had abandoned a promising career as a classical pianist to work oil rigs, drift through diners, and generally run from every form of expectation anyone had ever placed on him. There's a scene — the diner scene, the one everybody remembers, where Nicholson tries and fails to get a side of toast that isn't on the menu and eventually just clears the entire table with his arm in a burst of pure, inarticulate frustration — that has been endlessly quoted and parodied for fifty years, and for good reason. It's not really about toast. It's about a generation that had rejected every rule the previous generation had handed down, and had discovered, on the other side of that rejection, not liberation but a kind of directionless, low-grade rage with nowhere productive to go. Five Easy Pieces refused to resolve that rage into anything tidy. Bobby doesn't find himself by the end of the film. He just keeps running, and the film trusts its audience enough not to punish him for it or redeem him from it. That trust — the assumption that adult audiences could sit with genuine ambiguity rather than demanding a moral at the end — is the single biggest thing that separates seventies filmmaking from almost everything that came both before and after it.

And then there's Patton, which I mentioned back in the Kent State portion but which deserves a fuller look here, because it's maybe the single best example of how differently 1970 audiences experienced the exact same piece of art depending on which side of the era's central argument they were standing on. George C. Scott's performance as General George Patton opens the film with him standing in front of a massive American flag, delivering a blistering, profane speech about war and glory and what it takes to win, and that opening alone became one of the most quoted scenes in American film history. Nixon reportedly watched the movie repeatedly in the White House, drawing something like personal inspiration from Patton's uncompromising, damn-the-consequences military ethos, right around the same time he was planning the Cambodia incursion that would get four students killed at Kent State a few weeks later. And yet plenty of the same younger, antiwar audiences who despised everything Nixon represented also went to see Patton, and came away from it with an almost opposite reading — not a celebration of martial glory but a genuinely unsettling character study of a brilliant man whose obsession with warfare had curdled into something closer to a pathology, a general so thoroughly a creature of combat that peacetime left him lost and dangerous. Same film. Same scenes. Two completely different audiences drawing two completely opposite conclusions, and the film itself never definitively picks a side. That's not an accident of ambiguous filmmaking. That's a movie that understood, correctly, that America in 1970 had split into two countries that could watch the exact same screen and see two entirely different films.

None of this happens without the collapse of the old Production Code and the arrival of the modern ratings system just two years earlier, in 1968, which for the first time in Hollywood's history gave filmmakers real permission to make movies for adults rather than for the lowest common denominator of a theoretical family audience. And none of it happens without directors like Altman, and soon Coppola and Friedkin and Scorsese and Bogdanovich, all of them film-school kids or hungry outsiders who'd grown up idolizing European art cinema and Japanese masters rather than the polished studio product of their own childhoods, finally getting handed the keys because the old guard genuinely had no other ideas left.

This is why I keep coming back to the same core argument every time this book touches on 1970's films. The greatness of seventies cinema wasn't an accident that happened to occur alongside all the political and musical chaos of the decade. It was produced by that chaos, directly and unmistakably. A country tearing itself apart over an unwinnable war and a government that had stopped being trusted produced an audience that wanted movies willing to sit inside that same discomfort rather than paper over it with easy resolution. The Godfather is still two years away. Chinatown is four years away. The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver — all of it still ahead, all of it building on exactly the foundation being poured in 1970, when a black comedy about Korea and a meandering character study about a man who can't stop running both became defining hits of the year, and a general's biopic managed to be embraced simultaneously by a paranoid president and the college kids marching against him.

Hollywood, for one strange and fertile decade, stopped underestimating its own audience. And the audience, in turn, showed up in droves to prove the old executives had been wrong about them all along.