Overview

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the ""seventies film."" In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period-including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves-were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These ""seventies films"" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood's embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters' interior lives.

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Reviews

<p> In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Jonathan Kirshner does a very good job of placing many now-classic movies in relation to the cultural ferment underway in the 1970s. Kirshner draws expertly on a huge range of sources to construct an elegant sociopolitical and cinematic history of the era. -Stephen Prince, Virginia Tech, author of Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism

<p> Neophytes and scholars alike will learn a great deal from Jonathan Kirshner's engaging story of the last great period of American filmmaking. Younger readers may benefit most of all from this clear-eyed analysis of the terrifically interesting cultural politics of the predigital visual world. Thomas Borstelmann, E. N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History, University of Nebraska Lincoln, author of The 1970s

<p> Neophytes and scholars alike will learn a great deal from Jonathan Kirshner's engaging story of the last great period of American filmmaking. Younger readers may benefit most of all from this clear-eyed analysis of the terrifically interesting cultural politics of the predigital visual world. -Thomas Borstelmann, E. N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, author of The 1970s

<p> The author, a professor of government at Cornell, draws a clear correlation between the rather startling shift in American filmmaking (increased violence and sexual themes, more overt establishment motifs, the rise of the antihero) and political and social events of the 1950s and early '60s (such as the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of key political figures, the Communist witch hunts). Libraries with active film-history collections will want to add this one. David Pitt, Booklist (1 November 2012)

<p> Jonathan Kirshner's Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, And the Seventies Film in America (Cornell University Press) is an absorbing, well-structured look at the decade of American films that many consider the last great era of thoughtful, politically motivated filmmaking before the rise of the blockbuster...For those who are already well versed in the period it functions as a great refresher which will likely fill in gaps in one s knowledge, and make one reach towards the DVD shelf for a viewing of one of the many remarkable and still resonant films of the '70s. Ian Gilchrist, Reel Ink #2 Part 1, March 2013

The author, a professor of government at Cornell, draws a clear correlation between the rather startling shift in American filmmaking (increased violence and sexual themes, more overt establishment motifs, the rise of the antihero) and political and social events of the 1950s and early '60s (such as the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of key political figures, the Communist witch hunts). Libraries with active film-history collections will want to add this one. David Pitt, Booklist (1 November 2012)

Author Information

Jonathan Kirshner is Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of International Political Economy at Cornell University.

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