To satisfy my neurotic film-watching habits, I take the following attitude to the streamers. The affordable Criterion Channel is a carefully cultivated Valhalla of classics and obscurities and everything in between, a film school and museum and video store in a single realm. Amazon isn’t bad for rando movies that you didn’t know you wanted to see again since first seeing them drunk in the middle of the night on TBS in college. Hulu satisfies a similar need, while offering a vast supply of sitcoms. Paramount + has a comparatively limited supply of films, but it specializes in glitzy studio offerings of the last 10 to 15 years, with a sampling of Paramount’s deep bench of classics. Max, the newly minted HBO site, is all over the place in the wake of its rebranding, though it still has all of HBO’s TV series, the culture-shaping and misbegotten alike, in one place.
And Netflix? I tend to think of it as the streaming equivalent of the discount DVD bin at Walmart. Until recently, there seemed to be little sense of cultivation, but rather a grab bag of bundle-priced movies that occasionally includes a worthwhile film seemingly by accident, somewhere in between dating series, baking shows, Hallmark titles, and the serialized crime docs that are still proliferating in the wake of Netflix’s controversial watercooler hit, “Making a Murderer,” a few years back. Netflix has been upping its game lately, though, making a play for credibility in the cinephile sector.
While I was sick earlier in the month, I had a comfort-dude-movie triple feature, “L.A. Confidential,” “Jackie Brown,” and “Heat,” three of the seminal American crime films of the 1990s. I was stunned that Netflix was the streamer making this possible. Earlier this week, I re-watched “Training Day,” the volatile Denzel Washington bad-cop thriller that plays in many ways like a hipper, nastier incarnation of “L.A. Confidential.” Maybe that one is on hand in conjunction with “The Equalizer 3,” also starring Denzel, of course, and also directed by “Training Day” maestro Antoine Fuqua. It’s serviceable but not great, as expected, but it is still surprising to see so recent and starry of a hit on Netflix.
The crown for Netflix this month, however, and the best evidence that it’s after cinephile eyeballs, is its tribute to various American classics of 1974, which is complemented by several other notable American films of the ‘70s, a few of which we’ll get into below.
As a moviegoer, I try to resist the valorization of 1970s-era cinema —just a little bit. Yes, the number of extraordinary mainstream or experimental films released in that decade is astonishing, and embarrasses the cinema scene of today. But the same could be said about the film scenes of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, and those decades offered more varied films than the 1970s, or at least more varied than the films of the 1970s that we tend to valorize. It is difficult to imagine an elegant, ironic filmmaker like Ernst Lubitsch flourishing in the 1970s, or, say, William Wyler, who specialized in lush studio films with a devastating sense of emotional precision. (See Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives,” one of the most moving of all American dramas.)
The typical American ‘70s cinematic canon is all about dudes and torment. They tend to be very macho, whether they’re the raw poetry of John Cassavetes or the escapism of “Rocky.” Tortured dudes were the thing, emblematic of roiling American tensions of the time, and they were often wrestling with the frictions between their personalities and surroundings. I’m far from the first person to suggest that the final scene of “The Godfather” was emblematic, with new mafia boss Michael Corleone closing the door of his inner sanctum on his wife, shutting her out of his life. Or: shutting women out of movies.
There are many exceptions to this rule, but they aren’t nearly so often valorized. Elaine May is finally getting the recognition that she deserves years after her career behind the camera stalled, though her masterwork, “Mikey and Nicky,” is a masterwork of men, with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk engaged in a more controlled version of the battle of wills that animates many of Cassavetes’ own films. Barbara Loden’s “Wanda” netted a Criterion edition a few years ago, and is earning more recognition as the masterpiece that it is. The same omissions apply to people of color, though the accepted ‘70s-era canon is gradually expanding.
If ‘70s American cinema lacks the range of previous high-watermark decades, the films of that time reveled in a blend of realism and traditional plotting that feels totally alien to our current, highly synthetic era. Working-class people in 1970s movies looked like people who actually went to work, rather than resembling extras who spend a collected 10 hours a day in the gym and Pilates studio, in case Marvel comes calling. The 1970s cinema has a sense of casualness that’s been brutally lost. Today, directors are so skittish with their cameras and so hopelessly tone-deaf with their exposition and preaching that they stop their films in their tracks to have characters explain their movies to you in cut-and-paste close-ups. In the 1970s, plots were frequently allowed to coalesce around human behavior. Even the blockbusters of the 1970s and ‘80s, so frequently vilified as the beginning of the end of American cinema as art, allowed for human behavior. Think of “Jaws,” a satiric comedy and character study that happens to have a shark at its center.
Reflective of these trends, Netflix’s current 1970s-era offerings are very, very dude-heavy, and also frequently brilliant and revealing and adventurous in a manner that’s unthinkable to all but the most esoteric of movies now. Below, a sampling:
“California Split” (Robert Altman, 1974)
This seriocomic study of two gambling addicts, played by Elliott Gould and George Segal at the apex of their charisma, ranks with Robert Altman’s greatest films. Altman’s oft-celebrated techniques—overlapping dialogue, fluid camerawork, an interest in actors—are in perfect harmony here, imbuing “California Split” with a loose, expressive, anything-can-happen texture that’s galvanizing and exhilarating. The final scene, suggesting that addiction can be a fever that burns itself out if given time, embodies the Altman tone: haunting, moving, not entirely hopeless.
“The Parallax View” (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)
A very creepy American conspiracy thriller led by Warren Beatty, with unusual settings and an unexpected foray into “A Clockwork Orange”-style brainwashing techniques. With a downer twist ending that would prove hugely influential.
“Chinatown” (Roman Polanski, 1974)
This stylish, despairing noir bridged the glamour of the big studio murder mysteries of the 1930s and ‘40s with the cynicism of the 1970s. In other words, it’s a blend of screenwriter Robert Towne’s pseudo-ironic nostalgia and Polanski’s pitch-black sense of humor and decay. There are definitive star turns by Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, and John Huston’s Noah Cross is one of the greatest villains in all of American cinema. Watch the film again to see how often, and how subtly, Dunaway’s fate is foreshadowed.
“The Conversation” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Christ, 1974 really was a year in cinema, wasn’t it? And this is not counting the monumental “Godfather, Part II,” which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola the same year that he released this paranoid classic, an American riff on Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” Coppola trades Antonioni’s chic sex for a study in nerdish isolation. An early scene, in which Gene Hackman opens up to a woman who is actually taking part in a cruel joke, unforgettably anticipates the no-man’s land of alienation in which the electronics expert and phone tapper will soon find himself. “The Conversation” is propelled by a nifty mystery, with a brutal twist, but Hackman’s study in loneliness is still the chief draw: a supreme accomplishment by one of cinema’s greatest actors.
“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (Martin Scorsese, 1974)
These days, Martin Scorsese spends five years on every movie, as all of his movies must now be a new Mount Rushmore erected in testament to his brilliance. I love some of these huge Scorsese epics, but it’s jolting to be reminded that he was once a much more spontaneous and fluid director. “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” is a “woman’s picture,” 1970s-style, with Ellen Burstyn reinventing herself, with her son in tow, in the wake of her cretin husband’s death. Cretin though he may be, Scorsese has the nerve and the empathy to show him embracing Burstyn after rebuffing her, a gesture that shows his cruelty to be rooted in a pain that rhymes with her own. Atypical in the Scorsese catalogue, though it’s as livewire and moving in its own way as “Mean Streets.”
“Play Misty for Me” (1971, Clint Eastwood) and “High Plains Drifter” (1973, Eastwood)
Early in his career behind the camera, Eastwood directed these two nontraditional horror films, both of which are essential to understanding his canon. “Play Misty for Me” is a pseudo-misogynistic stalker thriller with a masterful sense of menace and atmosphere, and “High Plains Drifter” finds Eastwood as a supernatural avenger whose way of making reparations is at least as sadistic as the crimes he’s avenging. “High Plains Drifter” is top-shelf Eastwood: devoid of the slightest shred of sentimentality and cloaked in a surreal atmosphere that occasionally evokes, seriously, the fevered horror films of Italian master Mario Bava.
“Charley Varrick” (Don Siegel, 1973)
Walter Matthau robs a bank and inadvertently triggers the wrath of the mob, who summons an enforcer played by Joe Don Baker at his sleekest, scariest, and most grisly funny. “Charley Varrick” does not have anywhere near the polish of Siegel classics like “Dirty Harry” and “Escape from Alcatraz,” but it trades in a taciturn, smart-ass vibe that was something like the 1970s-era American crime film house style. Influential on Quentin Tarantino, who quoted it directly in “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill, Volume 2.”
Check Netflix for a full listing of their current 1970s-era catalogue of films available to stream now.
