The Seventies: The Decade That Changed American Film Forever

Film buff LoBrutto (Stanley Kubrick) takes a revealing look at the cinematic movement that grew out of the turbulent 1970s. He presents a detailed analysis of the film world year by year, starting with “a long string of failures” of big budget films in the ’60s that indicated the “Golden Age of Hollywood” was over. From this came a vanguard of young, innovative directors who subverted the “beauty and glamour” of the first half of 20th-century film and created complex movies that treated the medium more like art, reacting to the fraught political and social climate caused by the war in Vietnam. These films “were unflinching in their approach to difficult content,” LoBrutto writes, and yielded a more realistic, if sometimes somber, style, bringing to the fore such talents as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese and encompasing cult classic movies like The Exorcist (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976). Charting the rise of stars including Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Jane Fonda, LoBrutto leaves no stone unturned in making his case, though the heavy barrage of movie titles and dates can get a bit tedious. Movie geeks won’t be disappointed. (May)