Every age need not be a renaissance; it is only necessary for our own to be one. To that end, critics and audiences create their own masterpieces and their own masters. . . . We are not, as yet, living in a renaissance.
—Stefan Kanfer, Film 69/70, 1970
In recent years the period of film history sometimes known as the New Hollywood has become an increasingly visible area of inquiry. Nick Heffernan neatly summarizes the typical conception of the New Hollywood era as a “brief flowering of politically and culturally radical film-making that blossomed with the decline of the traditional movie mass audience in the mid-1960s and withered with the arrival of the big-budget blockbuster in the mid-1970s.”1 This now-familiar narrative, typified by Peter Biskind’s 1998 Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, envisions a New Hollywood era spanning the decade from 1967 to 1977, prompted by shifting distribution practices, heavy studio losses incurred through overproduction of historical epics and large-scale musicals throughout the mid-1960s, and the loss of the mass audience to television.2 Amid growing recognition of the financial power of the youth audience, major motion picture companies began investing in lower-budget, generically unconventional films, and acquiring independently produced titles for distribution. At the center of this narrative is the figure of the untried director, turned loose with studio backing and newfound creative freedom, emboldened by the collapse of the Motion Picture Production Code in the late 1960s.
Under this model, the New Hollywood begins with the films Bonnie and Clyde (dir. Arthur Penn, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1967) and The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, Embassy Pictures, 1967) and is closed off with Star Wars (dir. George Lucas, Twentieth Century Fox, 1977) and the associated rise of the blockbuster.
To date, most historical approaches to the films of this period have focused on auteurist accounts of individual directorial careers or attempted to convey broad, totalizing industrial histories. What is yet to emerge is an integrated formal/historical account of the films of the period that identifies the characteristics that distinguish New Hollywood films from the Classical Hollywood cinema that preceded them. Questions remain about the extent to which production conditions unique to the period shaped the aesthetic outcomes that now define retrospective categorizations of this body of films. There is also a dearth of analysis of the critical and discursive environment surrounding theatrical exhibition and the extent to which these commentaries influenced subsequent production trends. To that end, this book undertakes a formal analysis of a sample of key films, linking production practices with aesthetic outcomes and secondary materials associated with distribution and exhibition, while acknowledging the films’ essential status as historically and industrially determined cultural artifacts.
One of my central aims is to demonstrate the tightly bound links between industrial production and critical and audience reception. While box-office success is the dominant factor in determining the persistence of a film cycle, the potential for commercial impact is often determined, limited, foreclosed, or at least guided by critical reception. Furthermore, this initial period of critical reception plays an important role in determining whether or not a film may achieve canonical longevity beyond its commercial theatrical release. I plan to investigate the role that mainstream film critics played in shaping the film canon that would come to be known as the New Hollywood and the way that this canon has continued to shift over the course of the ensuing decades. My intention is to clarify aspects of the constitution and historical origins of the New Hollywood, the question of what might be considered a typical New Hollywood film, and the extent to which the parameters of such typicality are critically determined. In counterpoint to this notion of typicality, this book also explores the constraints of Hollywood’s capacity to be truly experimental in this period of purported creative freedom, as well as the critics’ ability to be the apparatus of those constraints.
To investigate the formation of the New Hollywood as we now know it, I explore a number of case studies that occupy various positions with respect to the conventional canon. The scope of this study permits the potential inclusion (or partial inclusion) of many movies that have not been considered in relation to New Hollywood in the past. The first of these case studies traces the cycle of road movies that followed in the wake of one of the key New Hollywood films, Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, Columbia Pictures, 1969). Unprecedented in both its commercial success and cultural influence, Easy Rider transcended its exploitation origins, becoming the kind of inspiration point that Richard Nowell dubs a “trailblazer hit,” initiating a cycle of commercially motivated imitators.3 Exploring some of the reasons for this, I undertake a close analysis of the formal and narrative workings of Hopper’s film in my first chapter. Amid Hopper’s contradictory play with loaded cultural signs, and in the absence of a coherently articulated political stance, the film functions as a malleable text, open to divergent interpretations. Despite its influence on the developing narrative and stylistic tropes of postclassical cinema, Easy Rider essentially adheres to the narrative conventions of Classical Hollywood cinema as defined by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson.4 Central to Easy Rider’s appeal is the use of self-contained motorcycle musical/montage sequences, which offer a break from narrative to revel in visual spectacle accompanied by commercially approved popular rock songs. In this sense, these sequences align with the stylistic mode described by Tom Gunning as the “cinema of attractions” and are a key factor in Easy Rider’s commercial success.5
This situation is not without precedent. The Paramount Decree of 1948 spelled the end of studio vertical integration, requiring the Hollywood major motion picture companies to divest themselves of their exhibition chains. As a result, throughout the 1950s independent distribution companies had a newfound freedom to deal directly with exhibitors. Major distributors increasingly began acquiring independent productions, as B-film production fell out of favor at the studios. At the same time, producers such as Sam Katzman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, and Roger Corman began successfully pitching their low-budget exploitation titles to the burgeoning US teenage audience, which was gaining economic and cultural cachet and increasing visibility throughout the 1950s amid economic prosperity, burgeoning suburbanization, and the rise of car culture. In particular, AIP’s mid-1960s biker exploitation cycle borrowed the anarchic sensibility and biker iconography of The Wild One (László Benedek, Columbia Pictures, 1953) and subsequent cycle of youth in revolt films. Tim Snelson locates an even earlier cycle in which Hollywood employed juvenile delinquency as a commercial lure for B movies in the 1940s, and Peter Stanfield and Thomas Doherty demonstrate that throughout the 1950s Sam Katzman successfully used contemporary pop soundtracks as a key point of commercial exploitation for his teen-oriented titles.6 Peter Stanfield has explored the distribution strategies that undergirded the 1960s biker exploitation cycle, and Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda applied the same strategies to Easy Rider, having learned valuable lessons from their years under Corman’s tutelage.7 Presold on the cross-promotional prospects of its soundtrack and supported by the promotional apparatus of Columbia Pictures, Easy Rider’s commercial success was assured, and a film cycle was spawned.8
Steve Neale defines a film cycle as a “[group] of films made within a specific and limited time-span, and founded, for the most part, on the characteristics of individual commercial successes.”9 Following this model, my book is divided into three parts, each of which examines a distinct post–Easy Rider cycle. Part I, “Variations on a Theme: Five Easy Riders,” looks at a variety of films released in the wake of Easy Rider’s unprecedented box-office success, each of which reworks the earlier film’s elements in a different generic mold. Five Easy Pieces (dir. Bob Rafelson, Columbia Pictures, 1970) uproots the intergenerational, road-wandering alienation of Easy Rider and grafts it to an Ingmar Bergman–esque chamber drama, drawing on the thematic traditions of European art cinema; Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, Twentieth Century Fox, 1971) recasts Easy Rider as chase/action movie; and Two-Lane Blacktop (dir. Monte Hellman, Universal Pictures, 1971) employs cinematic minimalism to obfuscate narrative motivation and cinematic style to the brink of abstraction, until the film itself is pulled apart. Consideration of these films’ production contexts helps illuminate the extent of the influence that Easy Rider exerted over subsequent productions. Furthermore, by charting the critical reception that greeted each of these films upon its release and the subsequent development of Two-Lane Blacktop’s canonical reassessment, I begin to identify the characteristics shared by the films of the critically constructed New Hollywood: contemporary resonance; genre frustration and revisionism; an emphasis on performance over stardom; location shooting; antiauthoritarian themes; downbeat, fatalistic endings; and a self-conscious foregrounding of cinematic style. Each of these films also borrows another of Easy Rider’s important innovations: the incorporation of a freewheeling brand of existentialist wanderlust that owes more to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the spirit of the Beats than to the more concertedly antisocial aggressions of the AIP biker exploitation cycle.
An important question here is why only some of the post–Easy Rider films achieved canonization within the New Hollywood ranks, rather than being relegated to the more specific and industrially accurate category of the “youth-cult cycle,” retrospectively identified by David A. Cook and subsequently discussed by Derek Nystrom.10 In seeking to explain why some movies found their way into the New Hollywood canon while others did not, I consider the implications of stardom, and the persistent relevance of studio distribution power, with reference to two largely forgotten films of the post–Easy Rider road movie cycle: Little Fauss and Big Halsy (dir. Sidney J. Furie, Paramount Pictures, 1970) and Adam at 6 A.M. (dir. Robert Scheerer, National General Pictures, 1970).
Part II, “Politicizing Genre,” moves away from the post–Easy Rider road movies to consider two contemporaneous studio films that straddle the boundary between New and Old Hollywoods: Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel, Warner Bros., 1971) and The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin, Twentieth Century Fox, 1971). The differing stylistic practices, adherence to generic conventions, and modes of stardom in each film guided the politicized responses that they elicited from mainstream film critics, which in turn has determined the way each film has been remembered in the broader history of cinema. Two key critical reference points in this chapter are Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. Kael’s exceptional prominence as a high-profile, mainstream critic in the early 1970s allowed her to cast herself as something of a self-styled arbiter of popular taste, in contrast to the more introspective inclinations of, for example, her rival, Andrew Sarris. While Ebert was not so prominent in the early 1970s, his stature undeniably grew in the following decades, as he became one of the preeminent American film critics. Indeed, Mark Kermode has dubbed Ebert “the most important and influential film critic in the English language.”11 The continued availability of Ebert’s reviews, both online and in published anthologies, has rendered him a particularly visible historical marker of critical tastes of the period. Similarly, Kael’s anthologized criticism remains in print and widely available, and she prevails as an influential figure in the popular imagination. As a result, both critics’ reviews of Dirty Harry and The French Connection offer a generalized entry point to a consideration of the broader set of critical responses engendered by those two films.
The generic and thematic material shared by The French Connection and Dirty Harry, and their temporal proximity, suggests an origin point for another possible film cycle. The fact that this never cohered as rigidly as the post–Easy Rider road movie cycle at least partially indicates the importance critics played in designating the categories that eventually coalesced as the New Hollywood canon. Ultimately, the varyingly hybrid natures of each film excluded both from being comfortably categorized as New Hollywood works, demonstrating the limitations of that classification. Like film noir, New Hollywood is an historically specific industrial phenomenon transformed into an ahistorical critical category. Unable to be contained neatly within the parameters of the New Hollywood categorization, the influence of Dirty Harry and The French Connection was instead absorbed into the broader realm of genre. And while the protagonists of both films exhibit antagonistic and belligerent attitudes toward African American characters, the films were released concurrently with the burgeoning blaxploitation cycle. Shaft (dir. Gordon Parks, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1971) demonstrated that conventionally generic material, inflected in a specifically African American ideation with the promotional resources of a major distributor, could be a commercial success. Just as the post–Easy Rider cycle was addressed directly to the projected tastes and concerns of the youth audience, the subsequent blaxploitation cycle is further evidence of the segregation of Hollywood content in an increasingly fragmented market.
Part III, “The Limits of Auteurism,” returns to Easy Rider and considers the next two projects mounted by that film’s key creative figures for Universal Pictures: The Last Movie (dir. Dennis Hopper, Universal Pictures, 1971) and The Hired Hand (dir. Peter Fonda, Universal Pictures, 1971). The manifest commercial failure of these two very different films, the critical vituperation that was reserved for Hopper’s film, and the general indifference that greeted Fonda’s all indicate the end point for one potential New Hollywood. The profound ambition of Hopper’s film, which drew influence from the French New Wave and the alienation techniques of playwright Bertolt Brecht, departs dramatically from the classical, industrially enshrined aesthetic and narrative modes in Hollywood. On the other hand, Fonda’s Hired Hand was a more generically conventional entity, which failed to curry critical or commercial favor.
Viewed in the light of 1971’s commercial successes, such as Fiddler on the Roof (dir. Norman Jewison, United Artists, 1971), Diamonds Are Forever (dir. Guy Hamilton, United Artists, 1971), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (dir. Robert Stevenson, Walt Disney Productions/Buena Vista Distribution, 1971), it is clear that the stylistic and generic modes of Classical Hollywood endured and coexisted alongside the films of the New Hollywood and its more radical, short-lived offshoots, such as The Last Movie.12 Critical tastes effectively curtailed the directorial ambitions of both Hopper and Fonda, so out of step were the two directors with the popular critics’ conception of the permissible American art film. Far from the watershed success of Easy Rider, the critical and commercial failures of both The Last Movie and The Hired Hand point to the fact that the criteria for inclusion in the New Hollywood canon were already clearly delineated by the critical community of 1971, and indeed the two subsequent films remain marginal to most conceptions of the New Hollywood canon, if not excluded outright.
In referring to the first of these film cycles, the post–Easy Rider road movie cycle, I borrow Cook and Nystrom’s phrase “youth-cult” road movie cycle; for the second cycle, which encompasses The French Connection and Dirty Harry, I use the phrase “violent cop cycle.” For the purposes of this book, The Last Movie and The Hired Hand are not contained within any particular cyclical model; in fact, their very uncontainability is of prime importance.
I recognize that in discussing such overly familiar films as Easy Rider there may be a risk that I perpetuate the same kind of reductive retrospective selectivity that Neale has cautioned against. With this in mind, I attempt to avoid restricting my analysis to a discussion of canonically enshrined entries at the expense of contemporaneous films that have eluded canonical inclusion. Instead, I consider canonical titles alongside some of their lesser known contemporaries, combining close formal analysis with an appraisal of what Steve Neale, Gregory Lukow, and Steven Ricci call the “inter-textual relay” that exists among films, the studios and distributors, and the audiences that consume them.13 Encompassing the publicity and marketing materials that accompany a film, along with critical and popular reception, this intertextual relay places the films within the context of their cultural consumption, while also acknowledging the “central role [of] the critic in identifying genres and in constructing . . . corpuses of films.”14
While the entire notion of the New Hollywood is predicated upon the assumption that things were beginning to happen differently in Hollywood between the years 1967 and 1977, those differences were primarily discerned, defined, and enshrined in print retrospectively by critics, both mainstream and academic. To date, most studies of the films of this period have overlooked the cycle of influence that occurs between production and reception. By returning to key film cycles of the period, the circumstances of their production, and the initial responses these films garnered from contemporary critics, I hope to interrogate where this critically constructed concept of the New Hollywood originated, where it shifted, and how it continues to shift over time. During the period I spent researching and writing this book, several of its creative and industrial subjects passed away. As the period itself becomes increasingly distant from us, and the principal participants continue to age, what remains are the films themselves and the writings they have inspired; now more than ever, a new historical approach to the New Hollywood is essential.