One thing I really enjoyed about the flavor and the overall mood of All the President’s Men is how it uses sounds so well. When the movie puts you in that news room, and you hear the click click clack of people typing and turning the rotary dials on their phones, the sound is so lush, there’s just a richness to it that seems to be missing in modern movies. I wonder what they were doing differently here in terms of sound that they don’t do in most modern movies anymore?
The other thing that really surprised me is how much this movie used actual news footage from 1972 and 1973. Were TV networks more lenient on what they allowed to be in movies? Also, did they have to pay Richard Nixon since he was in the movie on “TV” a lot?
Also, I know that I’ve been critical of 70s movies in this thread for not knowing how to end, but this is another great counterexample of that trend, because the ending with the typewriter and all the headlines that come over the wire is just a beautiful ending. One of the best I’ve ever seen.
Since this thread is bumped, the most recent season of You Must Remember This about Polly Platt has been getting “Best of 2020” awards, and those are well-deserved. YMRT is already one of the best podcasts ever…but the Polly Platt “season” this past year might even surpass previous outstanding work.
It is one of the best inside views/histories of 1970s American movie-making–obviously focused on her career, but it touches on a lot of 1970s filmmaking legends and stories, too.
As long as we are reviving old threads, I scanned the first 100 or so entries (and the 70s were SUCH an amazing decade for American Cinema–truly the peak of the field imo) and didn’t see Carnal Knowledge mentioned. Apologies if it did sneak in there somewhere.
Gordon mentioned it in this post, but it’s always good to get second and third and fourth recommendations because there’s too many movies and too little time to check them all out.
After listening to the full season on Polly Platt this summer, I was inspired to make my own Plex “New Hollywood” channel for 1970s Hollywood films.
No, I’m not sharing that library. :)
But here are the movies (it’s not meant to be comprehensive, btw):
All The President’s Men
American Graffiti
Annie Hall
Badlands
Blazing Saddles
Bonnie & Clyde
Breaking Away
The Candidate
Chinatown
Close Encounters
The Conversation
Days of Heaven
The Deer Hunter
Deliverance
Dirty Harry
Dog Day Afternoon
Easy Rider
The Exorcist
Five Easy Pieces
The French Connection
The Godfather (I & II)
The Graduate
Jaws
The Last Picture Show
Little Big Man
The Long Goodbye
MASH
McCabe & Mrs Miller
Mean Streets
Nashville
Network
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Outlaw Josey Wales
The Parallax View
The Sting
Taxi Driver
Three Days of the Condor
Wanda
Ehhh. I mean, importance is typically identified in retrospect, but I’m pretty sure that I could come up with a list like that in terms of quality for the last three decades at a minimum.
Edit: okay, the “US cinema” part would make it a bit more challenging. I suspect I could still manage it, though.
Same. It’s especially annoying how frequently, at least in NZ, films get pulled from the service. There also seems to be a dearth of pre-1980s movies in their catalogue.
If by ‘decade’ you mean ‘ten year period’ rather than ‘period of time in which all the years start with the same number in the tens column’ - Here is 1939-48 (granted, the list is going to suffer a bit if you trade '39 for '49):
Citizen Kane
Casablanca
Shadow of a Doubt
Rebecca
Gone With The Wind
The Wizard of Oz
The Best Years of Our Lives
Stagecoach
The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon
The Great Dictator
The Magnificent Ambersons
Lady From Shanghai
How Green Was My Valley
Gunga Din
The Philadelphia Story
It’s A Wonderful Life
The Grapes of Wrath
My Darling Clementine
Double Indemnity
Notorious
His Girl Friday
Out of the Past
High Sierra
Stormy Weather
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Red River
Young Mr. Lincoln
Cat People
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Stranger
Meet Me In St. Louis
Lifeboat
Fantasia
Pinocchio
The Bank Dick
The Shop Around the Corner
To Be Or Not To Be
Gaslight
Ninotchka
Rope
I’m not saying the '70s weren’t the best decade for U.S. cinema, but also I don’t think it’s some kind of a mortal lock.
Widening out to world cinema, I would put it at somewhere between about 1952 and 1965, where you see peak Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock, Antonioni, (Satyajit) Ray, (Nicholas) Ray, Joseph Mankiewicz, John Ford, Ozu, Truffaut, Godard, Tati, and Bergman all concurrent. (Plus arguably peak Kubrick, or at least near-peak Kubrick.)
Pre code films certainly have their particular charms. It’s not an era I’ve seen enough films from, but I like what I have seen. Though there’s a certain technical crudity in some cases compared to Golden Age fare.
