Hollywood's Last Golden Age

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times.These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.

Hollywood's Last Golden Age is an absorbing, well-structured look at the decade of American films that many consider the last great era of thoughtful, politically motivated filmmaking before the rise of the blockbuster.... For those who are already well versed in the period it functions as a great refresher which will likely fill in gaps in one's knowledge, and make one reach towards the DVD shelf for a viewing of one of the many remarkable and still-resonant films of the '70s., Kirshner... offers insightful, well-written interpretations of some two dozen films—with briefer references to others—that date from 1967 to 1976.... For Kirshner, the primary characteristics of this golden age include a 'moral ambiguity' that portrays the world in shades of gray rather than in black and white; plots driven by imperfect protagonists rather than by frenetic action; a concern for social and political implications; visual styles that were 'often shaky, darker, filtered, or grainy'; and a desire among filmmakers to create serious, meaningful works of art. A useful appendix lists 100 top films from this period, including 20 deemed canonical., Kirshner's commentary on these and other films is stimulating. He also provides a useful appendix of one hundred Seventies films. Kirshner's book provides intriguing insights for anyone interested in the relation between film and wider culture., Kirshner's writing is lively and informative, and the book excels when he discusses long forgotten seventies films (such as, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mickey and Nicky, and The Yakuza), suggest new ways to view popular films (although Michael Carelone as a Nixonian character in The Godfather, Part II could have been taken further), or focuses on topics often ignored in surveys of New Hollywood (the rising skepticism many felt towards capitalism, as discussed in relation to Nashville, Network, and Shampoo).... Kirshner's book expands on many themes discussed elsewhere, but his skillful analysis and solid research, especially pertaining to the cultural politics of the era, serves as a great introduction to this rich era of filmmaking., Renewed interest in Hollywood film of the 1970s, evident in documentaries, popular books, and a burgeoning reissue market, has generated myth and hagiography, and Hollywood's Last Golden Age supplies an important corrective to this tendency by substantiating the contexts for key films of the period. Readers of Hollywood's Last Golden Age will likewise be awakened to the ways that the political rhythms and feeling of this time reverberated through American screens, the way that cinema both announced and brought audiences into the 1970s.

Jonathan Kirshner is Professor of Government at Cornell University. He is the author most recently of Appeasing Bankers: Financial Caution on the Road to War and the coeditor of The Future of the Dollar, also from Cornell.