7 Essential Films From the 1970s
With all due respect to Hollywood’s golden age, you could make a convincing argument that the 1970s were the best decade in cinematic history. As the New Hollywood era reached its peak and visionary directors were given previously unseen control over their productions, creativity flourished in Tinseltown like never before. It came to a (perhaps inevitable) end in the early ’80s after a string of high-profile box-office failures, but even the movies considered responsible for ending New Hollywood (such as William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate) have since been reassessed as severely underappreciated in their own time.
Though there are hundreds of movies from the ’70s well worth your time — including such classics as The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars that you’ve likely already seen — these seven films are a great place to start exploring the decade further.
Wanda (1970)
There are innovators, and then there’s Barbara Loden. The actress-turned-filmmaker wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the semi-autobiographical film Wanda, a landmark of the then-nascent independent film movement. The movie centers on an aimless housewife who joins up with a bank robber after leaving her husband in Pennsylvania’s coal country. Made for just $100,000, it won an award at the Venice Film Festival in Italy for Best Foreign Film and paved the way for countless female filmmakers to follow. Sadly, it was the only feature Loden would direct. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 — by which point she’d also helmed two short films and a number of off-Broadway plays — and died in 1980 at the age of 48. Her legacy has only grown with time, as has Wanda’s.
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Solaris (1972)
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is often (and rightly) cited as one of the greatest films ever made, but not everyone enjoyed going beyond the infinite when the film first debuted. One notable dissenter was Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky, who considered 2001 “phony on many points” and “a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.” Seeking to bring more emotional depth to science fiction, a genre he feared was becoming cold and lifeless, Tarkovsky decided to put his convictions to the test by adapting Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris.
The result is a mind-altering exploration of a semi-sentient planet that creates hallucinations and/or physical manifestations of our deepest desires and fears, depending on which interpretation you choose to believe. For the protagonist Kris, a psychologist who’s been sent light-years from Earth to a space station orbiting Solaris, that comes in the form of his long-dead wife Hari. He’s haunted by her, which is to say he’s haunted by his own decisions — a problem no less urgent than the matter of how he’s going to get home.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, a married couple who collaborated on numerous films together, essentially invented American independent filmmaking in the late 1950s. Their shared filmography includes 10 movies, none quite as moving as A Woman Under the Influence. Rowlands delivered one of the most devastating performances in cinema history as Mabel, a housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her increasingly erratic behavior — strange tics, private and public outbursts — can only be partially explained by her reliance on alcohol, and would appear to speak to a deeper affliction.
Rowlands embodied her character in a way few performers ever have, and she earned the first of her two Oscar nominations for the performance — the second was for 1980’s Gloria, also directed by Cassavetes. Their pairing ended with Cassavetes’ untimely death in 1989, but Rowlands continued working for decades — including with the couple’s son Nick Cassavetes, who directed her in The Notebook.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Recently named the greatest film of all time by the British Film Institute’s once-per-decade poll of critics, filmmakers, and academics, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman serves as a before-and-after moment in the history of film. With much of its 201-minute running time consisting of its title character (a phenomenal Delphine Seyrig) performing her daily domestic tasks in real time, the movie is sure to alienate some potential viewers. Those who can get on its wavelength, however, will find it a uniquely immersive experience that has never been and likely never will be replicated.
Jeanne, a widowed mother who earns extra money by sleeping with a different male client shortly before her son returns home from school each afternoon, performs most of her mundane tasks with a silence that speaks to their mundanity — and, by extension, that of her entire existence. But tensions come to a boil just as surely as the water she cooks her potatoes in, and the film’s shocking climax is impossible to see as anything but inevitable in hindsight.
3 Women (1977)
Robert Altman once said that the idea for his strangest film came to him in a dream while his wife was in the hospital, and it shows. And while the movie’s title is accurate, it’s also something of a misdirection: 3 Women is at its heart a cinematic dyad, with two women named Mildred (one played by Shelley Duvall, who goes by Millie, and the other, nicknamed Pinky, played by Sissy Spacek) coming into each other’s lives in the California desert with increasingly bizarre consequences. It’s not unlike Ingmar Bergman’s Persona or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in the way the personalities of the two female leads refract through a shared lens, until they seem to merge into something darker than the sum of their parts.
Days of Heaven (1978)
Terrence Malick burst onto the scene with 1973’s Badlands, a lovers-on-the-lam drama that helped launch the careers of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in addition to his own. It was one of the most exciting debut films in years, and Malick followed it up with the even more accomplished Days of Heaven. Not that it was easy: Malick, whose loose filmmaking style entails shooting hours of footage and settling on a narrative in the editing room, had cinematographers Néstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler shoot almost entirely during magic hour, the brief period around sunset when the sky is at its most painterly, with a warm glow of light. The result, accompanied by legendary composer Ennio Morricone’s evocative score, is, well, magical. Set in 1916, it follows wayward couple Bill and Abby (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, respectively), who flee Chicago for the Texas panhandle, where they pretend to be siblings in order to trick a wealthy, ailing farmer (Sam Shepard) into falling in love with Abby so they can inherit his money.
Also along for this ill-fated journey is Bill’s actual kid sister Linda (Linda Manz), who provides the film’s lyrical, evocative narration: “The sun looks ghostly when there’s a mist on a river and everything’s quiet,” she’ll say in one scene, and in another, “You're only on this Earth once. And I — to my opinion, as long as you’re around, you should have it nice.” Days of Heaven premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where Malick won the prize for Best Director; it went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards, with Almendros winning Best Cinematography. It’s still considered one of the most beautiful films ever made, and few who’ve seen it would disagree.
Alien (1979)
In space no one can hear you scream, but here on Earth, your neighbors will certainly hear you the first time you watch Alien. Ridley Scott’s first masterpiece remains the measuring stick for sci-fi horror 45 years later, and the only movie to match it was one released shortly after it: John Carpenter’s The Thing. Before it was a massive franchise consisting of sequels, prequels, comic books, and toys, Alien was a fairly straightforward story of a cosmic entity coming aboard a spaceship and picking off its inhabitants one by one. And while it’s obvious to anyone watching today that Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is the heroine all along, it wasn’t at the time — Weaver was a relative unknown then, whereas Tom Skerritt, in the role of Captain Dallas, was the character audiences expected to save the day. In addition to the xenomorph itself — an enduringly horrifying creature designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger — Alien also introduced moviegoers to Jonesy, a fan-favorite feline who in some ways is the franchise’s ultimate survivor.
