The Establishment on Trial

By 1960, it was clear that the movies had lost their battle with television
as America’s preeminent mass-entertainment medium. Despite
Hollywood’s brief flirtation with 3-D and its more lasting embrace
of color and widescreen images beyond the scope of most television
sets, movie receipts fell to an all-time low in 1963. Movie theaters
could entice audiences away from the free entertainment they could
find at home only by offering something television could not offer. In
the crime film, that something was first violence, then sex. The increasing
irrelevance of the Production Code ever since the challenges
of The Moon Is Blue and Baby Doll invited Hollywood filmmakers to
the greater explicitness the economic peril of the industry seemed
to justify.
The first important film to accept this invitation was Psycho, whose
director, Alfred Hitchcock, shot it in six weeks using a television crew
and a shoestring budget of $800,000.22 Psycho looked like nothing audiences
had ever seen on television, or in movie theaters either. With
its relentless omission of uplifting characters or subplots and its celebrated
forty-five-second butchering of its heroine in an innocuous
motel shower, it marked the beginning of a brutal new era in Hollywood
filmmaking. By the time Hitchcock matched the violence of Psycho
with the sexual candor of the rape in Frenzy (1972), however, the
wave of explictness he had begun had left him behind. William Castle’s
low-budget horror films (Homicidal, 1961; Strait-Jacket, 1964; etc.)
showed far more baroque violence than Psycho, and the sight of Janet
Leigh in a brassiere, so daring in 1960, was soon dated by the sexual
candor of Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning performance as the prostitute
Bree Daniels in Klute (1971). By 1969, Midnight Cowboy, one of the first
movies to be classified under the new MPAA ratings system established
that year,23 could become the first X-rated film to win the Academy
Award for Best Picture.
Even as industry executives were nervously watching the slow
growth of their box-office receipts through the later 1960s, they could
not have predicted the explosive impact on the new Hollywood violence
of the antiestablishment feelings sparked by the Vietnam War.
As college students at Berkeley and Columbia demonstrated against
racial injustice and the war and Mayor Richard Daley prepared to call
the Chicago police out against antiwar protestors at the 1968 Democratic
presidential convention, two films released during the summer
of 1967 unexpectedly reaped huge benefits from their antiestablishment
tone: The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. Arthur Penn’s flamboyant,
affecting, and ultimately tragic saga of a pair of Depression-era
gangsters, originally dismissed by reviewers as inconsistent and pointless,
not only set new, post-Psycho standards for onscreen violence but
helped identify a niche market of American teenagers who had previously
had to make do with the likes of Pat Boone and Elvis Presley.
Weighing Bonnie and Clyde’s amoral killing against their youthful ignorance,
the film managed to demonize the same American institutions
as the gangster cycle of the thirties – the police, the banks, the
law – but this time in metaphoric terms, using a pair of criminals from
the thirties to attack the moral injustice of the draft and the violent
injustice of the American experience in Vietnam [Fig. 7].24
At a time when images of the Vietnam War were playing on American
television news every evening yet Hollywood was virtually ignoring
the war – except for valentines like John Wayne’s triumphalist The
7. Bonnie and Clyde: Using thirties iconography to attack sixties authority.
(Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J.
Pollard)
Green Berets (1968) – Bonnie and Clyde, along with Sam Peckinpah’s
apocalyptic western The Wild Bunch (1969), used the metaphors of
comfortably formulaic genres to tap into antiestablishment rage.
Along with Point Blank (1967), John Boorman’s coolly elusive story of
a thief’s vendetta against the Army buddy who betrayed him and the
criminal organization that employs the buddy, it reaffirmed the primacy
of the heroic loner after a decade in which crime films had been
pressed into the service of communal values. And along with The
Graduate and the cult hit Easy Rider (1969), it helped identify the youth
audience – especially dating couples, who preferred films to television
because moviegoing allowed them to get out of their parents’ homes
– as the most loyal of all movie audiences, and the one to whom the
majority of Hollywood films would soon come to be directed.
In the meantime, Hollywood was courting other niche audiences.
When Shaft (1971) revealed the extent of an underserved African-
American audience by showcasing a black private eye and a title song
by Isaac Hayes, the first African-American composer to win an Oscar,
studios rushed to follow it with Superfly (1972), Black Caesar (1973),
Coffy (1973), Cleopatra Jones (1973), Black Godfather (1974), Foxy
Brown (1974), The Black Six (1974), and enough others to create a new
genre: the blaxploitation film. The label aptly implied that the films
were produced and marketed by white Americans for the sole purpose
of attracting, even pandering to, a new audience. Certainly most of
their stars – Richard Roundtree, Ron O’Neal, Fred Williamson, Pam
Grier, Rod Perry, Tamara Dobson – proved a tough sell to white audiences.
25 But although this new infusion of ethnic talent, channeled almost
exclusively into crime films pitting trash-talking heroes and heroines
against the Man, was slower to cross over into the Hollywood
mainstream than the sensibility of the European émigrés a generation
before, the blaxploitation genre offered a new showcase to established
African-American stars like Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte,
Flip Wilson, and Richard Pryor (Uptown Saturday Night, 1974), gave a
new impetus to interracial crime stories (In the Heat of the Night, 1967;
Across 110th Street, 1972), and occasionally captured an authentic
sense of ethnic rage (Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song, 1971).
It was only a matter of time before the growing rage against the establishment,
as virulent as during the Depression but now unfettered
by the Depression-era Production Code, spilled over into the portrayal
of the police themselves. Only three years after Bullitt (1968) had
set the saintly cop Lt. Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) between ruthless
mob killers and equally ruthless politicians, and four years after In the
Heat of the Night had been the first crime film to win a Best Picture
Oscar, the Oscar-winning police drama The French Connection (1971)
dispensed with Bullitt’s noble hero and In the Heat of the Night’s uplifting
endorsement of racial equality in its annihilating portrait of the
NYPD, personified in maverick cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene
Hackman). Tireless, brutal, vicious, indifferent to the constraints of
the law and his superiors, as violent as the druglords he pursued,
Doyle represented both the ideally intuitive police detective popularized
by decades of films since “G” Men and the audience’s worst nightmares
of the public abuse of authority.
The film’s portrait of institutional authority was too lacerating to be
simply recycled. Its 1975 sequel – in which Doyle, traveling to Marseilles
in search of the French druglord (Fernando Rey) who eluded
him at the end of the first film, is kidnapped, hooked on heroin, and
then released to the French police, who hold him in secret while forcing
him to go through the horrors of cold-turkey withdrawal – makes
him far more sympathetic, even to restoring a speech attesting his
fondness for Willie Mays that had been cut from the earlier film.
Meanwhile, The Godfather (1972) had rivaled The French Connection’s
success at the Academy Awards, winning Oscars for Best Actor,
Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture, and exceeded Popeye
Doyle’s pull at the box office. This time, however, audiences and critics
were responding not only to the film’s portrait of a hero corrupted
by the “family business” of organized crime, but by its nostalgic celebration
of the strong, if ultimately tragic, ties among the Corleones.
In a world in which no one can be trusted, the film seemed to suggest,
family, for better or worse, is everything. Other crime films seemed
equally ready to burrow into the past, either as a strategic retreat
from the present (Murder on the Orient Express, 1974) or as a safely distant
vantage point from which to explore the intractable contemporary
problems of corruption and greed (Chinatown, 1974).
When movies turned again to establishment heroes, their criticism
was more measured and equivocal. Even Dirty Harry (1971) and its
four sequels (1973–88) gave its rogue cop better excuses for his reckless
behavior than The French Connection had for Doyle’s, from more
dangerous criminal adversaries like the well-organized rogue cops in
Magnum Force (1973) to a fistful of Christian analogues that helped
establish his credentials as a traditional, though unexpected, moral
hero. Yet the antiauthoritarian legacy of Vietnam left law enforcers of
every stripe under a shadow, particularly after the Watergate scandal
had the effect of criminalizing in the public imagination the entire executive
branch of the federal government. Lawyers, the most obvious
villains in the Watergate cover-up, fell to such a low point in public esteem
that the most admirable Hollywood lawyer heroes were the antilawyers
of . . . And Justice for All (1979), The Verdict (1982), and My
Cousin Vinny (1992) [Fig. 8] and the nonlawyers of Regarding Henry
(1991) and The Pelican Brief (1993). Even the blue-sky heroics of Superman
(1978) and its three sequels (1981–7) gave way to the darker heroics
of Batman (1989) and its three sequels (1992–7), in which the
Dark Knight is repeatedly upstaged, like Dick Tracy, by villains more
interesting than he is.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org