The Skeptical Eye
Notes on the Cinema of the 70s, by Jürgen Müller & Jörn Hetebrügge. Excerpt from the book 'Movies of the 70s', by Jürgen Müller
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The classical Western had always taken an optimistic attitude to history and progress. Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) is a sorrowful elegy for the old Western, and a complete reversal of its basic worldview. As the film sees it, the growing influence of capital on social relationships meant the end of the utopia of freedom. Individuals can only succumb and conform to a corrupt society, or else they are doomed to perish, like Billy the Kid. Kris Kristofferson gave Billy the aura of a hippie idol - and with the outlaw's demise, the film also buried the hopes and ideals of the Woodstock generation.
It was clear that Western heroes would no longer serve as the icons of reactionary America. Their successors were "urban cowboys" like the protagonist of Don Siegel's controversial Dirty Harry (1971): Clint Eastwood plays a cynical cop who takes the law into his own hands - because the legal system only serves crooks - and who makes no bones about despising the democratic legitimation of power. When Dirty Harry Callahan has completed his mission by killing the psychopath, he gazes down on the floating corpse - and throws his police badge in the water.
The primordial American yearning for freedom and the open road were now better expressed in Road Movies such as Easy Rider, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) or even star vehicles like Smokey and the Bandit (1977), featuring Burt Reynolds. But as demonstrated by Steven Spielberg's feature-film debut Duel (1971), even the endless highway offered no refuge from the paranoid nightmares of the 70s.
Seite 1 2 3 4
Seite 1 2 3 4
The classical Western had always taken an optimistic attitude to history and progress. Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) is a sorrowful elegy for the old Western, and a complete reversal of its basic worldview. As the film sees it, the growing influence of capital on social relationships meant the end of the utopia of freedom. Individuals can only succumb and conform to a corrupt society, or else they are doomed to perish, like Billy the Kid. Kris Kristofferson gave Billy the aura of a hippie idol - and with the outlaw's demise, the film also buried the hopes and ideals of the Woodstock generation.
It was clear that Western heroes would no longer serve as the icons of reactionary America. Their successors were "urban cowboys" like the protagonist of Don Siegel's controversial Dirty Harry (1971): Clint Eastwood plays a cynical cop who takes the law into his own hands - because the legal system only serves crooks - and who makes no bones about despising the democratic legitimation of power. When Dirty Harry Callahan has completed his mission by killing the psychopath, he gazes down on the floating corpse - and throws his police badge in the water.
The primordial American yearning for freedom and the open road were now better expressed in Road Movies such as Easy Rider, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) or even star vehicles like Smokey and the Bandit (1977), featuring Burt Reynolds. But as demonstrated by Steven Spielberg's feature-film debut Duel (1971), even the endless highway offered no refuge from the paranoid nightmares of the 70s.
Seite 1 2 3 4
