Favorite American movies of the Kael era, 1967–1977

Bangers and M*A*S*H

More precisely, my clock runs from the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde (whose causal impact is overstated but it’s as clear a starting point as any) to the day before Star Wars came out (though I left out Eraserhead, which feels like the next period.) Calling this the New Hollywood era would be too limiting; I thought about “the Kael-Sarris era” out of courtesy but I hardly know anything about what Sarris thought about American movies after ’68. Kael was my way into the era, and if I’ve overcome anxiety of influence to the extent that I now like some Tarkovskies while hating others, the list below is still peppered with “oh yeah, that one got reviewed in Reeling”. As a failed but fond former movie critic, I can’t help but be nostalgic for a time when movie criticism mattered for more than tomato quantification. Writing three sentences about a movie is kind of torture for me nowadays, however, so I’ve only blurbed some of the less appreciated titles; feel free to mentally insert “Coppola/Scorsese/especially Altman are good at filmmaking” as necessary. Making the list convinced me this was the peak of the American documentary, with Direct Cinema en vogue (even though Wiseman for one disclaimed the term) and directors and editors making some effort to get works down to a digestible length.

I need my standard “I haven’t seen everything” disclaimer more than I usually do: I’m waiting, unhurried, for Polanski and Woody Allen to die, plus the chance of my actually having watched something drops precipitously with every minute the runtime extends past two hours. Hardcore avant-garde is omitted because I don’t know how to compare Wavelength to anything else here. Hardest decision was whether to include Rocky Horror, but if I did, I’d have to put The Room on a 2000s list (maybe I should put The Room on my 2000s list?) Where applicable, the best streaming service for U.S. viewers to see each work is given; otherwise, used DVDs are usually cheap, and when they aren’t, your public library is probably better than your local Blockbuster ever was.

1. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) Tubi

2. High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968) Kanopy

During 75 minutes in Northeast High School in Philly, just about everything the faculty and staff say seems to reveal another facet of the hidden ideology of the entire education system. Some of the scenes would be too on the nose for fiction, like one with Mrs. C. running a fashion show and genially body-shaming her students (as well as herself) while apparently being beloved by them. She gets namechecked in the closing letter from Vietnam, which is read with pride and is the most chilling movie ending of the era.

3. The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) Paramount

4. Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976) Criterion

A miners’ strike is a great subject, and Kopple and her team were willing to do the legwork to do it justice, at great personal risk (Bazel Collins had a hit out on her; he now has a bridge in Harlan named after him.) The movie shows the sense of community required to generate the immense solidarity required to win a prolonged labor struggle. Not unrelated: probably the best depiction of Christoper Small’s “musicking” in a documentary.

5. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) Max

6. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Paramount

7. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) Criterion, Prime

8. Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)

9. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) Tubi

10. Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) Tubi

11. Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) Criterion

“An extremely drab and limited piece of realism” said Kael, a common reaction at the time, and yet now Wanda’s cracked the Sight and Sound top 50. The key is Loden’s performance, which gets across that this passive, incapable character is a person, not too distant from Loden herself, shaped by her circumstances but of inherent interest in herself. As for “drab”, well, sometimes the truth is it takes a long time to get from one place to another.

12. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) Showtime

13. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) 

14. Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)

The forgotten one amongst Altman’s classic run, in part because of its limited digital availability. It invites comparison to Bonnie and Clyde, and unlike so many movies of the era it doesn’t come off too badly. Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall are one of the screen’s tenderest couples, and Altman gets at the centrality of two pillars of interwar American life: radio and Coca-Cola.

15. Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker, 1968) Criterion

Until Summer of Soul, this wasn’t rivaled as a documentation of a music festival at which things did not go horribly wrong. Criterion has lots of supplementary material, including the full sets of Otis Redding (huh, maybe he was the greatest live soul singer) and Jimi Hendrix (you can see why Christgau got him wrong at the time; still, he was wrong.) The original 80 minute cut, heavy on crowd scenes and Ravi Shankar, remains the touchstone: a counterculture discovering what it could be.

16. Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) Max

17. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (John Korty, 1974) Prime

Though you can see the TV movie budgetary limitations (not to mention the ideological ones), it still looks better than just about anything made by a Westerner born 1960. The reason to see it is Cicely Tyson, who gives one of the great performances of the era, portraysing Pittman from age 23 to 110, aided by actually good makeup effects. She gets across that joy is possible without forgetting tragedy, that continuing to live is a triumph.

18. Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971) 

19. Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967) Kanopy

Very rough compared to High School, but the subject—the treatment of patients at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane—and imagery (oh god, the feeding tube) are unforgettable. The judge who banned it called it a “nightmare of ghoulish obscenities” and somehow held that it was Wiseman’s fault, not the institution’s. The film led to change; suffice to say that deinstitutionalization with minimal social support hasn’t exactly worked out great either.

20. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) Criterion

21. Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976)

Acclaimed at the time, this never got much traction with audiences. A pity, as it might be the most loving depiction of ’50s boho life extant. Almost every character is annoying or shameful at some point, but if you’ve spent any time with bohos this definitely rings true. I presume that also goes for Shelley Winters playing the platonic ideal of the overbearing jewish mother, though I’m extrapolating there.

22. Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

23. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

24. Grey Gardens (Maysles Brothers, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer 1975) Criterion

25. The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973)

26. In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) Tubi

27. Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) Paramount

28. Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) Prime

A Kael cause célèbre that’s somewhat overlooked now, as is often the case with comedies that fall between It’s Just Laughs and Look at the State of Our Nation. It’s still very funny, however, and it does have something to say about the confusion of the period when discreet promiscuity became tacitly acceptable and nobody quite knew what the boundaries of appropriate conduct were. Now to never correlate this with the behavior of anybody involved in real life.

29. M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)

30. Salesman (Maysles Brothers & Charlotte Zwerin, 1969) Criterion

Kael thought this documentary was faked, and it does feel fake, but maybe that’s just Florida: who’d believe there’s a whole faux-Arabian city in upper Miami-Dade County? Certainly not a Boston Bible salesman without the benefit of GPS. With con-artistry now well-studied (see the HBO series Telemarketers for the latest update), at this point the main value is being able to look into American households of the Sixties, not least for the gender relations.