Michael Phillips: Bleak, bittersweet and tough: I miss 1970s movies, the ones for grown-ups before ‘Star Wars’

This column started with a quote-tweet, or whatever we’re calling them now. Last week, film critic Sean Burns posted a comment on X after seeing a screening of “Chinatown.” He wrote: “I love watching audiences who haven’t seen this before stagger out of the auditorium,” adding that the woman sitting behind him “looked like she’d been mugged.”

I knew the feeling. I saw that film when I was 13, and had the same reaction to its devastatingly fatalistic ending, rewritten far, far away from screenwriter Robert Towne’s original ending by director Roman Polanski, who preferred a coda of ashes in the mouth. Fifty years later we’re still debating it.

Another critic, Farran Nehme, reposted Burns’ item and added her own, about another key Jack Nicholson film from the same decade. “My college-age twins watched ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ over the break. The ending flattened them. They could not believe a movie was even allowed to be that sad. I told them it was the ‘70s. You were just expected to cope.”

In just a few words, Nehme, one of the sharpest authorities on 20th-century Hollywood across many decades and a multiplicity of genres, caught the ethos of what some consider the last golden era of idiosyncratic, challenging, sensibly budgeted studio filmmaking. This wasn’t escapism, at least not entirely, or carefree diversion. This was for grown-ups and their cynical, disillusioned offspring, whether the rating was an R or a PG.

By the time “Star Wars” came along and changed everything in the summer of 1977, mainstream audiences were ready for a break, a “Flash Gordon” riff with lightsabers. Those of us who came of age with films like “Cabaret,” “The Long Goodbye,” “The Last Detail,” “The Conversation,” “The Godfather: Part II” and so many other vital, unsettling provocations may have been ready, too. And yet we were lucky, I think, even if we romanticize it, the way composer Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting “Chinatown” theme romanticized a film spelling the death of romance.

Nehme, whose writing includes Criterion Collection essays on everything from Orson Welles’ voice to “The Philadelphia Story,” joined me in a conversation about getting to know ‘70s cinema when she moved to New York City. She joined me via Zoom from her Brooklyn residence. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Farran, your tweet about ‘70s movies requiring audiences to cope with a pretty bleak vision of America and the world: perfect.

A: I actually feel bad about that tweet. I didn’t want people to think my children, home from college on break, were these tender young plants. I can actually show them anything. But the ending of “Cuckoo’s Nest” — they just didn’t see it coming. They loved Jack Nicholson in it, they loved the character of McMurphy, and they thought they were watching a comedy. And it just slammed them at the end.

Q: You’re a few years younger than me, so I think we came to some of these ‘70s movies at different times in our lives.

A: Right. I grew up in Alabama, in Vestavia Hills, a suburb of Birmingham. My mother had read Dr. Spock, and she had a thing about children not being permitted to see violence, realistic violence on screen. She was fine with Warner Bros. cartoons. Since it was Alabama, sex on TV was not a factor then. I watched a lot of old black-and-white movies as a kid because those got an automatic free pass, even though you and I know they can be quite objectionable in their own ways! The way they smuggle certain things in. But my mother could deal with that.

Meanwhile my dad had a subscription to The New Yorker, and I loved the listings up front. I’d read Pauline Kael’s descriptions of all these movies I wasn’t seeing. So I went to NYU, at the tail end of the great art house and revival era of moviegoing. This was in 1983.

By the time I started becoming a serious moviegoer, we were well into the Reagan era, and it’s not like that meant a sudden shift into every film having a happy ending. But there was a palpable shift. That’s when I started looking into movies from the ‘70s and thinking: Wow. They used to be a lot tougher. That’s how I’d describe them: tough.

In my own late teens and early 20s, I wasn’t enamored with the big movies everyone was talking about. This was the slightly later era of “Ghostbusters,” or “Top Gun,” which to me was just plain propaganda. There’s a certain arrogance when you’re starting out as a young cinephile, you know, when you think your taste is everything. I mean, I certainly enjoyed the first three “Star Wars” movies. But that was really about Harrison Ford (laughs).

When I finally caught up with something like “Taxi Driver” (1976), that was a different sort of experience. This was a movie for adults, not because it had something to say, but because it had more than one thing to say. Lots of things, with different ways you could read them.

Q: Doesn’t that film just play it brilliantly down the middle in terms of how we see the antihero played by Robert De Niro? Half the audience responded to it like it was a straight-up vigilante revenge action picture, another “Death Wish.” The other half saw it, and sees it now, as an unsettling subversion of that.

A: I’m in the latter camp! I came across this thread on (”Taxi Driver” screenwriter) Paul Schrader’s Facebook page that was dominated by people who did indeed see it like “Death Wish,” and saw Travis Bickle as a hero. And I was like, so we’re just going to skip the part where he tries to assassinate the senator? We’re going to ignore that because (Bickle) kills some criminals in the end and everything’s OK?

Q: Do you think, as some do, that a film like “Taxi Driver” and that decade overall fed a kind of national pessimism?

A: Well, not all movies in the ‘70s were like that.

Q: Right, “The Sting” and “Rocky” both won the Oscar for best picture and were huge successes with the public.

A: And there were plenty of other happy commercial films that did well. But the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate fallout was real. Maybe that’s why “Jaws” hit everyone as well as it did (in 1975). You’ve got both things going in “Jaws,” the corrupt mayor refusing to listen to reason because of money, and the guys overcoming that obstacle and killing the shark in the end. So it’s both. And everybody saw it.

Q: Today, “Jaws” plays like a character study, with all this time in between the artfully spaced jolts.

A: Here’s what I find with my own kids, and younger audiences today overall: They have to be ready for the rhythms of older movies. The way pacing in screenplays has changed. How editing has changed. How the many ways of giving audiences information and exposition have changed. What shark movie today would let you sit around on the beach with Roy Scheider before somebody gets killed?

Around the time they saw “Cuckoo’s Nest,” my children also saw “The Conversation” (Francis Ford Coppola’s moody, downbeat surveillance thriller starring Gene Hackman). And that’s a slow movie. But they stuck with it. And the ending of that one got them, too. They both really loved “The Godfather.” And my daughter is a huge fan of “Mean Streets.” I saw that one with her. We saw it, we went out to dinner, we’re coming home, we’re talking about other things, and all of a sudden she turns to me and says: “Mom? I don’t think Charlie (the Harvey Keitel character) is going to get that restaurant.” She was still thinking about him.

I suppose you have to prepare (today’s audiences) for the fact that there may be 10 or 15 minutes of movie before what they consider “something” (air quotes) starting happening. Of course with most good movies, there’s something happening right away. Just not what they’re used to.

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