A number of writers have realized that sport and film can be effective lenses through which to better understand 1970s society. There is space for only a small sample of such works here, and while television and music are similarly vital to understanding the era, their literature is as of now less well fleshed out.
Nostalgia for the 1970s looms large in books on sports, as evidenced by Dan Epstein’s Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s, but Epstein also very seriously connects the changes in baseball and US society during that era. In When March Went Mad, Seth Davis look at how the 1979 NCAA men’s basketball championship game, pitting Larry Bird’s underdog Indiana State University team against Magic Johnson’s Michigan State, transformed the game of basketball. Perhaps more seriously, Brad Snyder’s A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports reveals the way the 1970s saw a fundamental transformation in the economics of sports and of athletes’ relationships with owners, the fans, and their sports, as well as the ways that race informed these discussions.
Boston sports in the wake of the busing crisis have proven to be especially fertile ground, in no small part because of the confluence of political circumstances and compelling sports stories. The 1975 World Series was one of the more riveting events in baseball history. Mark Frost’s Game Six, Doug Hornig’s The Boys of October, and Tom Adelman’s The Long Ball focus on the enthralling Red Sox-Cincinnati Reds clash, and especially the epic Game Six, which ended on a Carlton Fisk home run over the left-field foul pole and Fenway Park’s Green Monster in the twelfth inning. The 1978 American League East pennant race and one-game playoff between the Red Sox and their hated rivals, the New York Yankees, has produced Richard Bradley’s The Greatest Game and Bill Reynolds’s ‘78: The Boston Red Sox, a Historic Game, and a Divided City. Similarly, Michael Connelly has used the Boston Celtics as a lens for viewing the city’s racial divisions in his Rebound!: Basketball, Busing, Larry Bird, and the Rebirth of Boston. Connelly and Reynolds are especially effective at connecting politics, race, and sport.
New York’s political situation in the 1970s was little better than Boston’s. Widely perceived as dangerous, crime ridden, economically troubled, and culturally decadent, New York was far removed from its midcentury golden era. Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City intertwines two vital stories. The first involves the city’s politics, as embodied in the four-way mayoral race between Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Ed Koch, and Mario Cuomo; the second, the internal tensions on the New York Yankees. Similarly, Chad Millman and Shawn Coyne’s The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the ‘70s, and the Fight for America’s Soul places that NFL rivalry in the context of contrasting economic circumstances in the foundering steel industry in western Pennsylvania and the booming oil and banking industries in Texas. This story is more than a little evocative of Roy Blount’s book about the 1970s Steelers on the cusp of their dynasty, About Three Bricks Shy ... And the Load Filled Up.
The 1970s might have been grim, but filmmakers took advantage of the era’s insecurity to produce a decade’s worth of fantastic movies. The late 1960s to the early 1980s give Jonathan Kirshner the title of his book, Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America. Kirshner identifies the fundamental “interdependence” of the era and its films in a book not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the era’s films, but rather an investigation of a “coherent subculture.”
The era’s films certainly do not lack for ambitious works that aim for comprehensiveness, as much as such a thing is possible. Volume nine of the University of California Press’s ambitious “History of the American Cinema” series is David Cook’s Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. Largely due to the expectations of the series, Cook’s book (he wrote the bulk of it, but other contributors provided chapters addressing specific types of specialty films) sticks to the specific chronological parameters of the decade, but like Kirshner he reveals the myriad ways that the decade’s films reflected larger political, cultural, and social trends, as well as the larger mood of the country and world.
The most compulsively readable of the books on 1970s film may be Peter Biskind’s acclaimed Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Biskind, like Kirshner, sees the period from the mid to late 1960s to the early 1980s as a golden age of film, and he clearly embraces an auteur approach to film criticism whereby the vision of great directors fueled the successes of the era’s monumental movie output. But he also sees a cultural revolution that ultimately failed, as the gritty 1970s gave way, as they did in so many things, to the glossier 1980s.
In American Films of the ‘70s, Peter Lev by and large rejects the auteur theory but takes a scholarly approach to more than three-dozen films that he organizes by broad themes in this short book. His main concern is the way that movies in the 1970s reflected the country’s increasing commitment to equality. Lev also addresses a common theme across much of the writing on the 1970s—that the ideals of the 1960s counterculture manifested far more in the films of the succeeding decade than they did in the bulk of 1960s films.
Editor Lester Friedman and his ten contributors to American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations (including David Cook and Peter Lev) stick to the 1970s, with each of the ten chapters in the collection representing one year from 1970 to 1979 in addition to a particular theme or series of themes. This is a clever conceit, albeit one that can occasionally feels contrived. Nonetheless, the collection reveals the depth of themes that all of these books reveal about a decade that represented a pinnacle in creative, courageous, complex, intelligent filmmaking. The great movies of the era may have reflected its anxieties, but a disproportionate number of them were also accomplishments that endure. Robert Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness includes a range of essays on film history, with the 1970s getting a great deal of coverage and with some of the decade’s most vital figures, including Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman, actually contributing essays.
Other important thematic works of the era include editor Eric Schaefer’s Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, which goes beyond movies and reveals just how vital the 1970s were to transformations of depictions of sex and sexuality on screen. Stephen Vaughn’s Freedom and Entertainment: Rating the Movies in an Era of New Media explores the tensions over rating movies. The 1970s may also have represented a golden age of movie criticism, as reflected in books such as Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, Craig Seligman’s Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, and Raymond Haberski’s It’s Only a Movie!: Films and Critics in American Culture.
Whatever images of the grim 1970s continue to pervade popular culture, these books serve as a reminder that the decade’s films were transformative and vital and that the film industry, in any case, flourished. That the flourishing occurred is in no small part because of the decade’s difficulties, making this work all the more significant.
