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Silver Screen? Or Distant Mirror?
Half a century ago, as the final year of the Sixties unfolded, Hollywood studios looked at the youthful trends of the previous year and loaded themselves up with inexpensive campus political dramas, left-wing fare that would be ready for release in the spring and summer of 1970. “The Strawberry Statement”, “The Revolutionary”, “Revolutions Per Minute” and “Zabriskie Point” were one-sided bets on what audiences at the dawn of the Seventies would be eager to pay for—sympathetic, appealing violent dramas and coarse comedies about campus rioters who sleep around and curse a lot. To the chagrin of Hollywood planners, who were usually stuck with two-year lead times on feature film projects, they bet wrong. There will always be an audience for violent drama and coarse comedy; it was the “rioters” aspect, the anti-police violence as entertainment that proved to be an astoundingly tin-eared wrong step on Hollywood’s part. It would cause an enduring, decades-long counter-reaction that at the time was dismissed as a transient “backlash”.
The Vietnam War was still near its height as springtime ’70 brought on the protesting season, as it’s been in much of western Europe since the 1830s or thereabout. The first Earth Day was planned for April 22, and would be the most peaceful of the year’s mass demonstrations. The campuses were already primed to explode. Mine literally did in March, when a homemade bomb killed its radical builder and leveled a Greenwich Village townhouse. When President Nixon announced an incursion into Cambodia—okay, raids, an invasion, let’s not be too fussy—the semester was nearly over anyway and many campuses, although non-violent, were also non-functional. When four students were killed at Kent State University on May 4th, school ground to a halt all over the country.
On May 8, on New York’s Wall Street, a flash mob of union workers in construction and other trades attacked a peaceful high school antiwar march protesting the Kent State shooting, finally reaching, and beating up a core of college-aged kids, many of who, it turned out, rode in from Pennsylvania on a church bus. It wasn’t “fight back”; it was blue collar antifa. But at a time when all of the street violence came from the other side, even unfairly hitting the wrong target at least felt like hitting, for some people.
The Hard Hat Riots were swiftly worked into the promotion of the now forgotten “Joe”, (7/15/70) with Peter Boyle as a murderous rifleman who hated hippies. The new poster art shows Joe cradling a gun, wearing a hard hat with an American flag on it. He’s also holding a flag in one hand and a target in the other. The slogan was “Keep America Beautiful”. You could put that 1970 poster up in Brooklyn today and people would instantly claim to recognize it as depicting a Trump supporter.
Fox’s long-in-the-making “Patton” would reach theaters in rapidly changing times that, it was said, had different attitudes towards war. Fox considered retitling it “Patton: Salute to a Rebel”. The studio had next to no expectations for another of its war films, the cheaply made M.A.S.H., which became an unexpected hit that spring. A cynical, mildly dirty-mouthed Korean War service comedy whose most memorable moments are the humiliation of uptight, by-the-book characters, it became pressed into service as an anti-war movie.
In this nervous atmosphere, “Kelly’s Heroes” suffered more than most from marketing indecision. It was hastily recut to try to make it more of an anti-war satire, with an ironic, whimsical, non-heroic theme song and a new ad campaign, eschewing WWII images in favor of a sort of Peter Max-drawn hero sandwich with tank treads. “They Had a Message for the Army: Up the Brass!”
But something unexpected happened: “Patton” struck a nerve. The bold style of leading off with a giant American flag got spontaneous cheers even on jaded Broadway; I saw it myself. It not only made a ton of money but it kindled an earnest national debate about the sometime necessity of war and the need for gifted, imperfect men to lead us in it. It was touted as Richard Nixon’s favorite movie. The revised “Kelly’s Heroes” straining-to-be-hip poster art and ad campaign were hastily revised yet again for its September opening. Now it showed a conventional war movie illustration of a line of four tall tough G.I.s facing down a German tank, with the new slogan, “They Started Out to Rob a Bank…And Damn Near Won a War!”
The tumult of 1970 was deeply, lastingly counterproductive for the American Left. Everything they did boosted the poll numbers of the loathed, despised Nixon, who they felt had won 1968 on a fluke, backed by the country’s haters. They expected 1972 to be a pushover, yet they could see the country was slipping away. The angry reaction of middle class and lower class whites to pretty much everything since riots and crime started spiking in the Sixties was now too visible to ignore.
One of the first signs of it was meant to be a comedy takedown of the growing movement, “All in the Family”, first airing January 1971. Archie Bunker was the new image of the WWII-age veteran: paunchy, casually racist, crudely ignorant. A figure of fun, and of scorn. But partly because the writers did toss him a point or two, the show became a hit. The creators of the show were bemused that they’d inadvertently made Archie a hero for tens of millions. Of course, I don’t mean “hero” literally; nearly everybody knew that Archie went too far. Working class white-wise, he was closer to our id than our conscience. But we liked him for telling it like it is, no matter if our betters disapproved.
Crime in the streets and on the campus was violent and physical. It stirred anger for many years to come. Clint Eastwood made a cultish success for himself in Italian made “spaghetti westerns”, but the huge hit that would shape his image in the public mind was 1971’s “Dirty Harry”, a crowd-pleasing hero who was bracingly politically incorrect, to use a term that was still fifteen years in the future. We were tired of “Dragnet”-style polite, businesslike cops. We were ready for badasses who’d throw away the rule book to clean up the streets. The Dirty Harry character didn’t endorse vigilantes—in fact, he hunts them down—but audiences did. In time, the SWAT era would go too far. But in its day, anything that redressed the balance between police and criminals was welcome.
About those World War II guys. By 1973, Jack Lemmon’s garment industry executive in “Save the Tiger” (directed by John Avildsen, who also directed “Joe” and later, “Rocky”) was another update of the image of the WWII vet, truer in parts, more positive, still stereotyped to some degree. It was recognized that courage in wartime wasn’t easy. But there was still a lingering trace of false guilt for lack of social consciousness—”look what I’ve come to, the nice home, the wife, the business I fight to keep going. What a sellout I am”. This caricature wasn’t the fault of Baby Boomers, by the way; next to none of them had entered the industry yet.
Published in General
Thank you! Another fascinating and educational post!
I was hiding behind cars playing army with my buds during this time. Politics wasn’t on my radar. Nor should it have been . I appreciate a first hand account Gary. Thank you.
Fantastic! Thanks.
Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’ phrase, and on TV the overt effort of CBS to scrap all its rural comedies in the spring of 1971 in order to get younger and hipper, were a lite version of the current pop culture media attitudes towards Flyover Country, with the difference being in the age of the Internet and thousands of channels, the reality of narrowcasting allows that contempt to be more fully realized (i.e. — Norman Lear & crew couldn’t make Archie completely unsympathetic because the ratings would have collapsed once the shock factor wore off, and CBS would have seen their overall ratings dominance threatened. In 2019, you can pander to niche viewers and for some prime-time or late-night shows, not give a damn if the areas outside the major cities on the coasts and a few other key areas watch your show).
In theaters, you’ve already seen the corollary to the anti-war movies of the late 60s/early 70s with the anti-Iraq war movies in the latter part of the last decade, which all bombed (but for the most part were low-budget enough so the bombs could be written off as the cost of indoctrination). Since Trump has been reluctant to involve U.S. troops in any new foreign involvements, I suppose Hollywood will have to start doing movies that attack and demonize Border Patrol and other DHS agents in order to feed their hunger to cater to the cutting edge progressives.
Well, you know what they say, “anyone who remembers the 60s wasn’t really there . . . ” I have clear recollections of 1970 (was a sophomore/junior in high school).
Great post, @garymcvey!
You missed one, though. (I think it might have been the highest-grossing film of the year.) No worries. A minor oversight, one for which you don’t have to say you’re sorry.
I too had (mercifully) forgotten that one until you reminded me of it. My opinion of the saccharine Movie I Shall Not Name can be summed up by something Ryan O’Neal says at the end of What’s Up Doc when the Barbara Streisand character tells him “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” O’Neal gives her a look and replies, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
CBS tossed out a show featuring corny rural humor and country music in their Rural Purge. The producers of the show recognized that they had an audience out there so they went into syndication — for 22 years. And my country cousins and I still roared at the jokes, despite having heard them since we were little.
CBS left a lot of money on the table.
What iWe said.
Amen. In terms of cultural impact, though, I’m not sure it’s possible to overestimate its effect on a large segment of the country’s youth. It’s not hard to imagine Oliver on FB or Twitter, live-blogging his tragedy and misery from day-to-day, and I wonder how much it normalized, or at least made acceptable, that sort of daily and almost ritual public scab-picking and misery-wallowing.
I still think Kelly’s Heroes was a great movie.
“De Gaulle?!?!?!?! He ain’t even in this war!”
I’ve never seen the movie and never will. Looking at or listening to BS is like finger nails on a blackboard. Nothing to do with politics. Everything to do with her. So no impact on me.
I loved Kelly’s Heroes. The gunslinger scene in front of the tank had me rolling on the floor. I thought teaming Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland and Don Rickles was brilliant. Surprised they weren’t teamed more.
I’m surprised Bullitt didn’t make it into the mix. I liked it much better than the Dirty Harry movies, which I thought were gratuitously violent. I remember Bullitt car chase scenes but do you remember them from DH movies?
I remember Harry Callahan on that train trestle at the end.
Fascinating. I did not realize how successful and influential culturally the movie was, but learning this now, it makes sense that it would have been. I can see why people on the antiwar left liked Patton as much as people on the hawkish right. I didn’t see it when it came out, but I’ve watched it a couple of times in the last few years. I really love the movie. However, it’s unnerving to see the movie writers’ devotion to passive-aggressive annoying Omar Bradley and their negativity toward Patton. In far too many ways, it plays to the stereotypes about the military and its leadership, and it gives too much credence to the psychobabble armchair psychologists’ view of people that had become so popular at that time (and that still is, unfortunately).
I enjoyed the movie very much except for that aspect of it. I don’t believe he was as narcissistic and frankly crazy as the movie writers made him out to be. That was Bradley’s superior-attitude view of Patton, and I don’t accept it as fact.
The story segment in the movie that sent me off to learn more about Patton on my own, and not accept the movie writers’ version of him, was that of Patton’s 6th Armored Division of the Third Army marching in the snow all night to reach Buchenwald. It’s quite a story, and from the research I’ve done, it seems that the movie got something right in spite of itself.
That was not accomplished by a crazy person. Only sane people see things clearly and act.
Great post, as always, Gary. :-)
I believe that Bradley was an advisor on the movie.
I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he write six posts on Hollywood or only five’? Well to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being that this is Ricochet, the most powerful website in the world, and would blow your socks clean off, in a polite, code-of-conduct way, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya, punk?
My father was in the Ohio Guard from I think ’66 through ’71. At that time the National Guard wasn’t routinely sent overseas, but they were regularly used in-state for assorted work. Kent State is obviously the most infamous (and I knew one of the NCOs who was there that day – the story he told me about what happened is illuminating), but its symbolic status to this day of peaceful protests innocent college kids gone horribly awry is something of a lie.
Several times my father’s unit was called up for riot duty on the Ohio State campus, and he observed something interesting: by and large most of the students were opposed to the riots and protests. The campus fraternities, in fact, were often out counter-demonstrating, and helping do clean up when it was all said and done. It was a very vocal, but very much a minority core of students, aided and abetted by outsiders coming in to make trouble, that allowed the OSU protestors to “punch above their weight” – I would guess this was very often true elsewhere too. The public and the campus in general detested the protests, whatever the rose-colored glasses of the media then, or nostalgia today say.
Hey, I gotsta know;
Pretty much my experience in Ann Arbor with the University of Michigan.
Note – I grew up in Ann Arbor. I was in a Civil Air Patrol squadron as a young teen, and we met at North Hall, the ROTC building, when I was first in the unit. Then the CAP cadets(we were age 13-18) were attacked by anti-war protestors leaving a meeting one night. I noticed they attacked the female cadets, especially the small ones, ignoring the husky male cadets – at least until we waded in to rescue the females. Then the protestors scattered. (We guys were younger than them, but we were out for blood.) Two weeks later North Hall was bombed, and the adults running the squadron moved to an American Legion hall in Ann Arbor.
“Be yourself” has long been common dating advice because the predatory approach doesn’t work for most people and ultimately makes everyone miserable. If you act according to what you think the “audience” wants, you will probably be mistaken and then regret that you didn’t at least gamble on honesty.
It never ceases to amaze me how much entertainment companies skew their works to fit imaginary audiences.
Artists can only be sure of their own preferences. If no significant audience enjoys what the artist enjoys, then he or she shouldn’t be in the business. Insincere and ignorant placations are always transparent and disappointing.
Aaron, I’ll quibble with this. An artist should, and generally will, stick with it even without an audience. The audience may one day come, even if the artist doesn’t live to see that happen.
Why? The term “company” is a dead giveaway.
If you want to be “true” to yourself and your “art,” then do something non-collaborative, such as painting. Everything else is entertainment by committee. And when you’re putting up a production budget that’s huge you’re going to get a lot of pressure from a lot of directions to get it right.
I saw both Patton and Joe in the theaters. Patton remains a classic but looking back on Joe it was embarrassingly bad though it launched Peter Boyle’s career. Boyle was also part of the radical Hollywood crowd around Jane Fonda during the 70s.
It also seems to me that a lot of movies from the late 60s to the mid-70s just looked like they were filmed poorly. Were they using different cinematography techniques?
Why bother hiring a director if you won’t let him direct? Why hire a scriptwriter you don’t trust?
Design by committee doesn’t work. Even larger productions rely on a team of directors to manage specific elements under the guidance of a lead director.
At least game design is iterative and requires frequent evaluations throughout production. The most important aspects of film design can be mapped out before filming a single scene. Spielberg draws his scenes on storyboards.
It was a transitional time in film technique, using (slightly) smaller, more mobile equipment and “faster” (more sensitive) color film that didn’t require as many lights. This allowed much more location shooting than in Hollywood’s studio-bound Golden Age. But the new stuff looked rough for quite a while. In “Tora, Tora, Tora!”, the climactic mass launching of the Japanese air armada was done both ways–faked, with studio lights; and real, photographed at dawn–and intercut the two, creating an unintentional showcase of how different it looks.
“Bullitt” came out before Nixon’s election. It’s got great action, but it didn’t illustrate the OP point about a national cultural backlash against being force-fed Left rhetoric.
BTW, some things to note in “Bullitt”: the night time scenes on the tarmac at SFO must have used every gigantic light in San Francisco. That’s real night, not daytime with a blue filter over the lens.
Hollywood figured that out and dropped the subject. The next time it came up in a mainstream film was “Forrest Gump” a generation later, when the protesters were now jerks.
I have to think Death Wish qualifies.
So did Hitchcock. And when you get a reputation and a box office track record like those two gentlemen artistic freedom follows.
Rule #1: If it ain’t your money there are always strings attached.
Rule #2: See Rule #1.
It absolutely qualifies.
Many thanks!