Steven Spielberg scared millions of people with his shark movie Jaws. Robert DeNiro was featured in Taxi Driver as a radicalizing veteran in rotten New York. Jack Nicholson played the private detective who runs afoul of corruption Chinatown.
These films, and several other classics, make 1975 the most important year in the history of American cinema, argues the Netflix documentary Breakdown 1975. According to director Morgan Neville, cinema flourished because the American people experienced an identity crisis that year.
President Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal, the military made a hasty withdrawal from Vietnam, the Church report exposed shocking crimes by the CIA. Economic crisis, crime was growing, the big cities were in decline. The iron optimism on which Americans have traditionally built their identity was temporarily gone.
At about the same time, Hollywood loosened the reins, allowing film directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, Kubrick and Sidney Lumet to do their thing. Surprisingly enough, the daring, often gloomy films full of sex and violence that ‘New Hollywood’ produced also found a large audience. According to Neville, all these films reflect the prevailing social atmosphere of “unrest, paranoia, and deep soul searching”.
The progressive wind that was blowing soon encountered opposition from conservative quarters. The decency police of the Moral Majority emerged, film actor Ronald Reagan entered politics. America wanted to believe in itself again. The artistic films were pushed out of the market in 1976 by escapist blockbusters such as Rockythe documentary argues. At the Oscars, all socially inspired films were defeated by that optimistic boxing film.
Jack Nicholson in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
Great grip
To demonstrate this, Neville turned the documentary into an attractive mix of news and film footage, often in conversation with each other. Network, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – in Neville’s montage they all seem like fiercely realistic reports about the US in 1975. Even if they are not. His grip is very large. Blaxploitation, feminism, the self-era – they flash by but are not given a clear place in the story.
It gradually starts to bother the film connoisseur. Do all those classics come from that one wonder year? No, important building blocks of Neville’s argument were made sooner rather than later. Chinatown is from 1974, Taxi Driver, Network and All The President’s Men are from 1976. Much of the social unrest on display dates from earlier in the decade, and the Republican revival described is actually later. I get it, it’s attractive to cram all the films and social malaise of the 1970s into one year, but that costs you your power of persuasion. And what has Jaws to do with it anyway?
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