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Myndin er af Francis Ford Coppola við leikstjórn Apocalypse Now


HORROR FILMS

Horror films have always been and always will be popular. The genre soldiered on through the Silver Age, picking up some new things along the way. We will now take a look at the most notable horror films of the era.

First of those is Roman Polanski's first Hollywood film, Rosemary's Baby (1968). This film starred the late great John Cassavettes and young Mia Farrow as a couple who move into a new apartment, soon to find strange and spooky things going on. As it turns out, the elderly neighbours are Satanists who soon bring the young father into the fold, planning the birth of the Anti-Christ. The mother? You guessed it. The plot may not seem original for today's viewer, but the film gains enormously from Polanski's talent, and is therefore still pretty spooky.

The Satanism-theme was original for the time, horror films having previously dealt more in werewolfs, vampires and ghosts than with the Evil One himself. But whether it had to with the success of Rosemary's Baby or not, Satanism became the theme for 1970's horror films.

The next great horror film (some say the greatest horror film of all time) came in 1973 with William Friedkin's The Exorcist. This well crafted (and supposedly true..) tale of demonic possession has continued to scare new generations of audiences ever since. Max von Sydow had the title role, and Ellen Burstyn was the mother of the possessed little girl played by Linda Blair. Although building it's horror far more on the pshycological than the graphic, the film still had some pretty graphic scenes which were revolutionary at the time, scenes that no doubt contribute a whole lot to the legendary status the film now enjoys.

Again building on the Satan-theme was another highly influential and well-remembered film, The Omen (1976). Gregory Peck and Lee Remick play a wealthy middle aged couple who gradually find out that their adapted son is the Anti-Christ, no less. For all the apparent corniness of the plot, this is a well made horror film classic, heavily charged with a spooky atmosphere aided by a magnificent score by Jerry Goldsmith, and Peck gives his usual powerful performance. Again, this movie relied more on it's spooky score than gore for audience chills, but it nevertheless had a classic decapitation scene.

The Exorcist and The Omen both spawned more exorcists and omens inferior to the originals, as well as a deluge of ripoffs that flooded the shelfs of the newly opened videostores worldwide for the next few years.

Even if these movies define the 1970's style of horror movies, people were already starting the trends that were to reign supreme through the next two decades. The Night of the Living Dead (1968) was an indie film that started the sub-genre of the Splatter Movie, and Hollywood soon followed suit with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973).

Another sub-genre, the Teen-Horror Movie was of course by no means new, but with the help of one Stephen King, it found a new lease of life. The first major film to bear the (now infamous) credit “Story by Stephen King” was Brian DePalma's Carrie (1976). With horny teenagers and bucketfuls of blood, this film very much set the tone for things to come in the 1980's, but not as much as another movie called Halloween (1978) did.

Last but not least, mention must be made of another film made from a Stephen King novel. The great Stanley Kubrick tried his hand at horror films with The Shining (1980). This film is now legendary, thanks to Kubrick's brilliant directing and Jack Nicholson's equally brilliant portrayal of a possessed pshychopathic maniac. It is a cross between the atmosphere and the gore schools of horror filmmaking. Film-fans have somewhat differing opinions on this film, but it remains one of the most copied horror films ever made.


As we have seen, the 1970's style of horror films as defined by The Exorcist and The Omen, gave way to the more gore-and action orientated horror films in the ‘80’s and through the '90s. But it is now seeing a revival in films such as The Sixth Sense (1997) and The Others (2000). Perhaps it's because the makers of those films remember being more scared by the old '70s horror films than the gorefests of later years!


VIETNAM FILMS

It is doubtful if any conflict has ever had a more traumatic effect on the American national pshyce than the Vietnam War, and that war was a huge contributor to the social unrest and upheaval experienced in the times discussed on this website. It was inevitable that the war would find it's way into the films of the era, whether directly or indirectly.

It is interesting to note that the first bona-fide major “Vietnam War Films” did not come out until the late 1970's , several years after the war's end. But that does not mean that the war was not a subject in films while it was still ongoing. The war certainly found it's way into films from 1967-73, but in more sublte ways than actually depicting the war.

Obvious examples include the westerns Soldier Blue and Little Big Man (both 1970), both depicting graphically the massacre of the Native American Indians by U.S. Forces in the 19th Century. In both films the atrocities are depicted in such a way as to offer very strong condemnation, sadness and regret. To contemporary viewers, the allegory to the recent My-Lai massacre in Vietnam must have been all too glaringly obvious.

Less obvious allegories are found in films that on the surface depict past wars, such as Johnny Got His Gun (1971), about a completely crippled soldier just home from World War I, who lies pondering the horrors of war and only wishes to be put out of his misery. It was doubtless meant to convey a message to contemporary times. Same can be said of Robert Altmans hit comedy M*A*S*H (1970), which although set in the Korean War, offers scathing criticism on the war effort in Vietnam.

The only major Hollywood film made about the Vietnam War while it was still ongoing is a true oddity called The Green Berets . Made in 1968 by none other than John Wayne, who of course also plays the lead role, this film is pure propaganda in the style of his earlier films set in World War II. The ageing Duke plays the heroic sergeant leading a squad of noble American soldiers to save the freedom-loving people of Vietnam from the treacherous murdering VietCong, who among other things burn down a village and massacre the inhabitants. Complete with a heroic marching song over the opening credits, this film is almost unbelivable to watch today. It is a typical John Wayne war movie, only it is set in Vietnam instead of WWII.

In the late 1970's the war was over, America had for the first time in it's history lost a war, and the time was ripe for Hollywood's filmmakers to begin in earnest making films about the Vietnam experience. In 1978-79, three major Vietnam-films were made, all gaining great publicity, starting discussion on this largely “taboo” subject, as well as being classic films in their own right.

Jane Fonda had been one of the most outspoken opponents of the war, so it was only apt that she should star in Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978). She plays the estranged wife of a soldier (Bruce Dern) fighting in Vietnam, who volunteers to help crippled veterans coming home from the war. She gradually falls in love with one of them (Jon Voight). The pair comes to symbolize the feelings of dismayed veterans and those who stayed at home, while the pig-headed stubborness of the husband stands for the views and attitudes of the government.

Coming home was also a theme in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978). It tells the tale of six boyhood pals from a small mining town, before they go off to fight in Vietnam, during their ordeal there, and after they come home. The film had great performances by Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale (in which was sadly his last role), and Meryl Streep. The Russian-roulette scenes burned themselves into the memory of viewers, as did the haunting theme song by Stanley Myers.

But the greatest Vietnam-film of the era, and perhaps of all time, was Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Four years in the making due to extreme and constant production-troubles, this film succeeding as it did was by many considered a minor miracle.

A retelling of Joseph Conrad's 19th Century novel Heart of Darkness, the film tells a dark tale about an Army Intelligence operative (Martin Sheen) who is sent up river on a gunboat in order to “terminate” a Colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who, it seems, has gone haywire and is raising an army of his own deep inside the inland jungle, recruiting primitive natives by playing a god.

The journey up river becomes an “Alice in Wonderland”-ish nightmare as the crew of the boat encounter ever more weird characters and situations. Among these characters is the pshycotic Captain Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who “loves the smell of napalm in the morning”, Hugh Hefner's Playboy bunnies, and a drug-deranged photojournalist played by a drug-deranged Dennis Hopper. The film's ending is unfortunately an anti-climax with Brando's seemingly endless meaningless (and unscripted) monologue, but it does not manage to ruin this great film, which many say symbolizes America's experience in Vietnam - confusing, nightmarish, accompanied by a gradual loss of sense of purpose.

The genre had now been established, and dozens of Vietnam-films were to follow in the next decade, ranging all the way from the Rambo-style action movies to Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987).


WORLD WAR II FILMS

The World War II Movie, so immensly popular ever since the real-life event, died in the latter years of the Silver Age, or so it seemed at the time.

But that is not to say there weren't a few good films added to the genre during the first half of those years, some of them very traditional, others with that distinctive Silver Age dash.

One of the first WWII movies with a '60s dash was The Dirty Dozen (1967). In this film, Lee Marvin leads a magnificent bunch of scoundrels and misfits (some of whom were Telly Savalas, John Cassavettes, Donald Sutherland and Charles Bronson) on a dangerous mission into occupied France on the eve of D-Day. This film was unlike any previous WWII films in that it had no heroes. Lee Marvin was by no means a very likable character in this film, and as for the aptly named dirty dozen, most of them have been killed at the end. The “heroes” of this film are scumbags, and the military establishment that condems them to the suicide mission are inept imbeciles. Another factor placing this film apart from previous big-budget WWII shoot-em-ups was that it did not in any way take itself seriously, it was light-hearted fun in the new spirit of the times. It seems far-fetched to see an intentional Vietnam-analogy in this film, but it certainly does nothing to further the good reputation of the U.S. Armed Forces!

In the same vein, but taking it one step further, was Kelly's Heroes (1970). Clint Eastwood leads a ragtag gang of soldiers through war-torn France on a “private venture”, a hunt for a stolen Nazi treasure. Complete with a very hippie-sounding theme song and Donald Sutherland (again!) as a pot-smoking tank commander who paints flowers on his Sherman tank, this is a light hearted 1970's WWII action-adventure, and feel free to see any Vietnam-allegories you want if you so please.

Clint Eastwood also starred in the highly successful WWII action movie Where Eagles Dare (1969), adapted from an Alistair MacLean yarn. With an impregnable German fortress, sadistic SS-officers, lots of shooting and explosions and hapless German soldiers dropping like flies, this is a definate WWII action classic.

On a deadly serious note were two flawed but still very decent film adaptations of contemporary novels about american WWII experiences, Catch-22 (1970) by Joseph Heller, and Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) by Kurt Vonnegut jr. Both novels caused a stir in literature when they came out, and are classics today. The films do not quite capture the spirit of the novels, although not from lack of trying. But when viewed today, the films at least convey the same 1970's attitude as the novels when they first came out.


World War II epics had been popular throughout the 1950's and ‘60’s, and they continued to be made well into the ‘70’s, regardless of new trends and the public's preoccupation with another, current war. George C. Scott won (but declined) an Oscar for his portrayal of General George S. Patton in 1970. A fine film as war-epics go, this one was co-scripted by some guy named Frances Ford Coppola, and also won the Oscar for Best Picture in that year.

Another WWII epic in 1970 was Tora! Tora! Tora!, which told the story of the Pearl Harbour attack from both sides, being one of the first Hollywood films not to portray the Japanese as “lemon-faced bastards” to quote an earlier John Wayne movie. (Previously, a film called Hell in the Pacific (1968) had portrayed the Japanese in human terms. That film was later remade as a sci-fi movie called Enemy Mine (1985), but that's another story!).

In 1976 two WWII epics came out. Charlton Heston & The Old Timers (Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Glenn Ford & Robert Mitchum) fought the Battle of Midway in an easily forgettable and poorly made film. Almost as dull, even if better made, was A Bridge too Far, a 3-hour film sporting a such a star-studded cast that people asked "Who's not in it?". It went no farther towards reaching it's objectives than the allied offense it depicts.

Both these films died at the box office, and at the same time films about the Vietnam War started shooting. Hollywood finally declared an end to World War II, at least until some 20 years later when a film called Saving Private Ryan (1998) hit the screens. The battle rages on.


WESTERNS

For the vastly popular Western genre, it was business as usual in the mid-1960's. The Silver Age brought about some interesting takes on westerns, even while more traditional good old cowboy films were still being made. However, interest in the genre in general seemed to be fading after the mid 1970's, and by 1980 some people were writing the obituary of this time-honoured film-genre. Fortunately, it was premature.

The undisputed champion of the old-style Western is of course John Wayne. The Duke kept on playing good old American western heroes until his health failed in the mid ‘70s. His films were little or not at all affected by changing times, but his loyal fanbase didn’t care, or maybe wouldn't have it any other way. His most notable westerns in this era were El Dorado (1967), True Grit (1969), Chisum (1970) Howard Hawkes' Rio Lobo (1970), The Cowboys (1972) and his last film, The Shootist (1976). Even if old-fashioned for their time, some of those films are Western classics.

If any one man exemplified the the advent of the new-style Silver Age Western, it was of course Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” in the “Dollars-Trilogy”. It is ironical that these films that started this upheaval and new style in westerns, originated not in Hollywood but in (of all places!) Italy. Sergio Leone's “Spaghetti Westerns” are of course not Hollywood films, but their very distinctive style became so popular that Hollywood tried hard to emulate it, but with varying degrees of success.

In fact, the only one completely succeeding in making an “American Spaghetti Western” was Sergio Leone himself. He came to Hollywood in 1969 and made Once Upon a Time in West, starring not Eastwood but Charles Bronson as the mysterious rough stranger with initially selfish motives. Old hand Henry Fonda played a memorable role as the usual sadistic & pshycotic villain. In the distinctive Sergio Leone Spaghetti-style, this film takes it's time in getting where it's going, with beautiful cinematography and a great soundtrack.

The Spaghetti Westerns made Clint Eastwood a new superstar in the Western genre, and between his homecoming from Italy in 1967 and his own directorial debut (non-western) in 1971, he starred in such films as Hang 'em High (1967), the musical-western-comedy Paint your Wagon (1969), Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970) and The Beguiled (1971). In Coogan's Bluff (1968) he was a modern day cowboy visiting New York. And High Plains Drifter (1973) was a strange amalgam of Spaghetti and Rawhide.

But Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood were by no means the only ones treading new western trails in these years. In 1969 a hugely popular film came out starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, displaying for the first time their wonderful chemistry, as Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. A film sporting a very contemporary music score, it is a humorous tale of two western bandits trying to somehow make their way in the fast-vanishing Wild West of the early 20th Century. Their frustration and inability to adapt to changing times eventually destroys them, and maybe it was meant as a sublte message for contemporary times!


Little Big Man (1970) was the western-epic for the new generation. It tells an epic story of the New Frontier, but more in the style of Baron Munchausen than John Ford. The protagonist and narrator of this great story is Dustin Hoffman. His ramblings when he tells the story are that of a senile old man, and it's a story stock-full with exactly the cynical attitude that characterized the New Mentality. Supposed heroes are scumbags, drunkards and liars. Supposed bloodthirsty Indians are nature-loving peaceful people (one of them even being gay!). And General Custer's 7th Cavalry are no better than the contemporary “baby-killers” of Vietnam, dying as much with their pants down as their boots on.

For all of it's hippie-era political message-hammering, this film is a classic. It's humour stands up to the test of time, and it must have been somewhat of a relief for moviegoers to see a new historical perspective on the Wild West. I very much doubt if John Wayne agreed, though.

Back to Eastwood. After his great success both as an actor and director in non-westerns in the early '70s, he showed his affection for his roots in 1976, directing and starring in The Outlaw Josey Wales. In this one he's a vigilante on the trail of northern soldiers who murdered his family in the Civil War. Despite the serious subject-matter, this film is not without it's sublte humour, some of it at the expense of the Western-film tradition. Although well recieved by fans and critics, this was to be Eastwood's last western for almost a decade.

For whatever reason, the public's interest in westerns seemed to wane in the late 1970's. The major Hollywood studios only made the occasional cheapo action-western in those years, like the two Charles Bronson vehiches White Buffalo (1977) and Breakheart Pass (1976). What public interest there was in the Old West, was seemingly tied up in the Little House on the Praire series on TV.

If the Western had fallen on hard times in the late 1970's, the financial disaster that was Heaven's Gate (1980) certainly did not help. United Artists made the fatal mistake of giving director Michael Cimino (of Deer Hunter fame) almost free access to their funds in making this supposedly epic film about immigrant settlers in the 19th Century. The film, although not completely without merit, unfortunately fell flat with critics and audiences alike, and drove the time-honoured United Artists studio into effective bankruptcy.

This sent the Western genre into a coma for many years. In the 1980's, hardly a western was made. Exeptions include the lackluster Silverado (1985) and starting the sub-genre of the “Teen-Western”, Young Guns (1988). And of course Clint Eastwood stayed loyal, making the moderately successful (and often underrated) Pale Rider in 1985.

But the Western revival didn't come until the 1990's with Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) and Eastwood's magnificent Unforgiven (1992). Thanks to those films the genre survived, and is today going as strong as can be expected.