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Back to Hollywood's America
The
"New" Hollywood
As the 1960s began, few would
have guessed that the decade would be one of the most socially
conscious and stylistically innovative in Hollywood's history.
Among the most popular films at the decade's start were Doris
Day romantic comedies like That Touch of Mink (1962) and epic
blockbusters like The Longest Day (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962),
and Cleopatra (1963). Yet, as the decade progressed, Hollywood
radically shifted focus and began to produce an increasing number
of anti-establishment films, laced with social commentary, directed
at the growing youth market.
By the early 1960s, an estimated
80 percent of the film-going population was between the ages of
16 and 25. At first, the major studios largely ignored this audience,
leaving it the hands of smaller studios like American International
Pictures, which produced a string of cheaply made horror movies,
beach blanket movies--like Bikini Beach (1964) and How to Stuff
a Wild Bikini (1965)--and motorcycle gang pictures--like The Wild
Angels (1966).
Two films released in 1967--Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate--awoke
Hollywood to the size and influence of the youth audience. Bonnie
and Clyde, the story of two depression era bank robbers, was advertised
with the slogan: "They're young, they're in love, they kill
people." Inspired by such French New Wave pictures as Breathless
(1960), the film aroused intense controversy for romanticizing
gangsters and transforming them into social rebels. A celebration
of youthful rebellion also appeared in The Graduate, which was
the third-highest grossing film up until this time. In this film,
a young college graduate rejects a hypocritical society and the
traditional values of his parents--and the promise of a career
in "plastics"--and finds salvation in love.
A number of most influential films
of the late '60s and early '70s sought to revise older film genres--like
the war film, the crime film, and the western--and rewrite Hollywood's
earlier versions of American history from a more critical perspective.
Three major war films--Little Big Man, Patton, and M*A*S*H-- reexamined
the nineteenth-century Indian wars, World War II, and the Korean
War in light of America's experience in Vietnam. The Wild Bunch
(1969) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) offered radical reappraisals
of the mythology of the American frontier. Francis Ford Coppola's
The Godfather (1972) revised and enhanced the gangster genre by
transforming it into a critical commentary on an immigrant family's
pursuit of the American dream.
During the mid- and late-70s,
the mood of American films shifted sharply. Unlike the highly
politicized films of the early part of the decade, the most popular
films of the late 1970s and early 1980s were escapist blockbusters
like Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost
Ark (1981)-- featuring spectacular special effects, action, and
simplistic conflicts between good and evil--inspirational tales
of the indomitable human spirit, like Rocky (1976)--or nostalgia
for a more innocent past--like Animal House (1978) and Grease
(1978).Glamorous outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde were replaced by
law and order avengers like Dirty Harry and Robocop. Sports--long
regarded as a sure box officer loser--became a major Hollywood
obsession, with movies like Hoosiers, Chariots of Fire, Karate
Kid, and The Mighty Ducks celebrating competitiveness and victory.
Movies which offered a tragic or subversive perspectives on American
society, like The Godfather or Chinatown, were replaced by more
upbeat, undemanding films, and especially by comedies, featuring
such actors as Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy, and Bill
Murray.
Critics partly blamed the trend
toward what Mark Crispin Miller has called "deliberate anti-realism"
upon economic changes within the film industry. In 1966, Gulf
and Western Industries executed a takeover of Paramount and the
conglomerization of the film industry began. In 1967, United Artists
merged with Transamerica Corporation; in 1969 Kinney Services
acquired Warner Brothers. In one sense the takeovers were logical.
Conglomerates wanted to acquire interests in businesses that serviced
Americans' leisure needs. The heads of the conglomerates, however,
had no idea how to make successful motion pictures. Too often
they believed that successful movies could be mass produced, that
statisticians could discover a scientific method for making box
office hits.
A trend toward the creation of
interlocking media companies, encompassing movies, magazines,
and newspapers, and books accelerated in 1985 when the Department
of Justice overturned the 1948 anti-trust decree which had ended
vertical integration within the film industry. As a result, many
of the major studios were acquired by large media and entertainment
corporations, like Sony, which purchased Columbia Pictures, Time
Warner (which owns Time magazine, Simon & Schuster publishers,
and Warner Brothers), and Rupert Murdoch, whose holdings include
HarperCollins publishers, the Fox television network, and Twentieth
Century Fox. At the same time that these large entertainment conglomerates
arose, many smaller independent producers like Lorimar and De
Laurentiis, disappeared.
Nevertheless, important issues
continued to be addressed through film. Many films focused on
problems of romance, family, gender, and sexuality--aspects of
life radically changed by the social transformations of the 1960s
and early 1970s. Certainly, some films tried to evade the profound
changes that had taken place in gender relations--like An Officer
and a Gentleman, an old-fashioned screen romance--or Flashdance--an
updated version of the Cinderella story--or 10 and Splash--which
depict male fantasies about relationships with beautiful, utterly
compliant women. But many other popular films addressed such serious
questions as the conflict between the family responsibilities
and personal needs (for example, Kramer v. Kramer) or women's
need to develop their independence (like An Unmarried Woman, Desperately
Seeking Susan, and Thelma and Louise).
At a time when politicians and
news journalists were neglecting racial and urban issues, movies
like Boyz in the Hood, Grand Canyon, Do the Right Thing, and Jungle
Fever focused on such problems as the racial gulf separating blacks
and whites, the conditions in the nation's inner cities, the increasing
number of poor single parent families, police brutality, and urban
violence.
Ironically, the most controversial
issue of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War, only began
to be seriously examined on the screen in the late '70s. Although
many films of the late 60s and early 70s embodied the bitter aftertaste
of the war, the conflict itself remained strikingly absent from
the screen, as Hollywood, like the country as a whole, had difficulty
adjusting to the grim legacy of a lost and troubling war. During
the conflict, Hollywood produced only a single film dealing with
Vietnam--John Wayne's The Green Berets. Modeled along the lines
of such World War II combat epics as The Sands of Iwo Jima and
earlier John Wayne westerns like The Alamo, the film portrayed
decent Americans struggling to defend an embattled outpost along
the Laotian border nicknamed Dodge City.
Although America's active military
participation in the Vietnam War ended in 1973, the controversy
engendered by the war raged on long after the firing of the last
shot. Much of the controversy centered on the returning veterans.
Veterans were shocked by the cold, hostile reception they received
when they returned to the United States. In First Blood (1982),
John Rambo captured the pain of the returning veterans: "It
wasn't my war-- you asked me, I didn't ask you...and I did what
I had to do to win....Then I came back to the world and I see
all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me,
calling me a baby- killer...."
During the 1970s and '80s, the
returning Vietnam War veteran loomed large in American popular
culture. He was first portrayed as a dangerous killer, a deranged
ticking time bomb that could explode at any time and in any place.
He was Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), a veteran wound so
tight that he seemed perpetually on the verge of snapping. Or
he was Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), who adjusted to
a mad war by going mad himself.
Not until the end of the '70s
did popular culture begin to treat the Vietnam War veteran as
a victim of the war rather than a madman produced by the war.
Coming Home (1978) and The Deer Hunter (1978) began the popular
rehabilitation of the veteran, and such films as Missing in Action
(1984) and Rambo: First Blood II (1985) transformed the veteran
into a misunderstood hero.
Where some films, like the Rambo series, focused on the exploits
of one-man armies or vigilantes armed to the teeth, who had been
kept from winning the war because of government cowardice and
betrayal, another group of Vietnam War films--like Platoon, Casualties
of War, and Born on the Fourth of July--took quite a different
view of the war. Focusing on innocent, naive "grunts"--the
ground troops who actually fought the war--these movies retold
the story of the Vietnam War in terms of the soldiers' loss of
idealism, the breakdown of unit cohesion, and the struggle to
survive and sustain a sense of humanity and integrity in the midst
of war.
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