3:52 p.m. - 2009-02-08
Seventies Movies Minutiae Roundup, Part II
In the Altman film "MASH", Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould sport haircuts and facial hair that no one of that era, save beatniks, would have worn. Was this by design or just sloppy film-making? According to Altman, it was by design. Although set in the Korean war, Altman sought instead to evoke the then-current war in Vietnam. Although insignificant enough in itself, the syndrome of inappropriate film hair points to a larger problem in the works of Altman and other filmmakers of the seventies. Namely, they were obsessed with the seventies (the seventies, in this case, lasting from around 1968 to 1977). Instead of making a detective thriller set in the Chandler/Hammett era, Altman sets "The Long Goodbye" in the then-current seventies in order to offer commentary on the mores of the day. Sam Peckinpah's films, often set in the old west, contain extreme violence as commentary on seventies-era violence. Paul Schraeder, Scorcese, Coppola: seventies, seventies, seventies. Not to mention the scores of dreary, "Five Easy Pieces" type movies, films that practically drown in Watergate-era ennui and Jack Nicholson.
Did this decade-centrism yield a bunch of good movies? Of course. Perhaps, though, it was ultimately unhealthy for movies in general. By the time the last seventies movie, "Apocolypse Now", was released, seventies movie fatigue had set in to the point that the movies that people paid to see were either outer space movies full of talking robots or stabby horror movies set in no particular time or place. With the advent of the blockbuster, mass-market films became just a bunch of action surrounding nothing in particular. And Donald Sutherland's beatnik hair and Elliot Gould's heroic mustache must bear the blame.
