The New Hollywood by Peter Krämer

Author:Peter Krämer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Having learned to be brutally candid in word and deed, cynical, pessimistic, unsparing – discoveries which are by no means unimportant – the movies tended to forget that all of us would in fact rather be romantic, idealistic, optimistic, and that if we have a capacity for violence we have a larger capacity for caring … If you have forgotten you could leave a movie feeling good rather than depressed, you might just want to join the queue outside Love Story. (Champlin 1970a)

For Time it was the beginning of a ‘counter-revolution’ against ‘sexual license and ‘X’-rated sprees’ (Kanfer 1970). For the Saturday Review the film was a reminder of ‘what movies once were all about: … a catharsis that was all the more joyous because it reaffirmed our essential humanity’ (Knight 1971). The magazine concluded that, together with Airport, ‘Love Story is going to bring back to the theaters large sections of that “lost audience” that hasn’t gone to a movie in years.’ (Three years later, similar comments were made about The Sting; see for example, Anon. 1973 and Meade 1973.)

When the ‘G’-rated Airport had received its initial roadshow release in February 1970, Variety had described it as ‘a handsome, often dramatically involving $10-million epitaph to a bygone brand of filmmaking’ (Elley 2000: 11). According to Entertainment World, ‘it’s heartening that Hollywood still occasionally surfaces from the contemporary, psychedelic subculture and produces what should be a whoppingly successful, old-fashioned film’ (Gilbert 1970). The Los Angeles Times found the film ‘breathtaking in its celebration of anything which used to work when Hollywood was younger and we were all more innocent’, and found it to be ‘a deliberate appeal to the sedentary majority’ who had come to prefer watching television to going to the movies (Champlin 1970b). The Hollywood-Citizen News pointed out that ‘you can take your children along’, and also that the film’s producer had an excellent track record with Doris Day ‘women’s pictures’, thus suggesting that Airport was less male-oriented than most high-profile releases of those years (Scott 1970).

These themes recurred in the reception of subsequent disaster movies. In its review of The Poseidon Adventure, for example, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner wrote that the film was ‘an old-fashioned adventure suspense thriller … something of an aquatic Airport which departed from Hollywood’s recent preoccupations insofar as it made ‘no social comment. There’s no nudity. No drugs. No homosexuality … only the man in the street may like The Poseidon Adventure – but he and she will like it very much indeed’ (Scott 1972). Similarly, the Evening Outlook noted under the headline ‘At Last – Good Family Film’: ‘If you have been wondering what happened to old-fashioned movies … all-star casts, suspense, adventure and something you take the kids to without blushing, the answer is, they are back … There is no sex, no nudity, no drugs’ (Gropenwaldt 1972). While reviewers of disaster movies wrote increasingly – and ever more critically – about costs, special effects and technological spectacle, they explicitly related the films back to the tradition of big-budget epic filmmaking.

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