Art Vs Commerce: Dawn of the Blockbuster (1970s)

1970

Okay! Let’s go, 70s! Some real classics I’m excited to see for the first time! Not like today’s big Oscar movies with their long, slow Great Man Biopics. Ugh. Could you imagine. Well, I’ll just take a big sip of water and see what we’re starting wi–

And The Oscar Goes To

[Wipes water off screen]

Okay. Well. Fine.

That actually might be unfair, because maybe it’s not a Great Man Biopic? I’m honestly not sure. There’s that well-known opening sequence, which you can probably picture without me even describing it.

No not that–eh, close enough.

After a series of closeups of Patton’s medals and regalia while he salutes in front of a giant US flag, he delivers a speech about American military superiority including the famous phrases “no poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country, he won by making some other poor bastard die for his country,” and “when you reach into a pile of goo that used to be your best friend’s face you’ll know what to do…” which I thought was from Full Metal Jacket but apparently isn’t… It’s a sequence so blisteringly jingoistic that it makes This Is The Army look subtle, and given the line about how “America has never lost and will never lose a war,” it felt highly inappropriate for a movie released during late-stage Vietnam War.

But then as the movie went on… it felt like it spent more time on everything wrong with General Patton than any heroics he may have done during World War II. Sure it opens with him coming to Africa to push back against Rommel, and the US troops seem to do better when he gets there, but his strategy to improve troop performance is ruthless discipline: making doctors wear helmets, tearing down girlie posters, and demanding troops remain in full uniform including neckties despite the desert heat and neckties being horribly inappropriate combat wear. And then after his first win, he’s just mad that reports say Rommel wasn’t even there.

The movie continues to track Patton’s career all the way to being pushed into retirement after VE Day, and for every victory they credit him with there’s some fatal flaw to his character. Sure he does well in Africa, but his tactics seem to be based more on showing up his British counterpart Field Marshall Montgomery than forming a coherent multi-nation battle plan. Sure he does well in the invasion of Italy, but he slaps a solider with what we’d now call obvious mental trauma for being “yellow-bellied,” and it gets him sidelined, removed from combat and used as a decoy to trick the Germans into fortifying in the wrong spots. Sure Eisenhower eventually decides he’s needed in Europe after benching him for D-Day and nearly half the Battle of Normandy, but he also tends to run his mouth and offend the Russians. Sure he wins a lot of battles in Europe, but he’s outraged to be told to halt his advance so that supplies can be re-routed to Montgomery’s attempts to stop the V-2 rocket attacks on London; Patton cared more about being first to Berlin than he did civilian causalities in the world’s greatest city.

Okay I coloured that last one a little with personal bias but still, them rockets needed stopping, Patton.

And then as Victory Over Europe happens, his dreams of further glory in the South Pacific are shot, as he’s disliked by both President Truman and South Pacific bigwig General MacArthur. And his resistance to mandated denazification of seized territory, and insistence that now (mid 1945) is the time to attack the Russians, bring his career to an end, just like Churchill’s push to rearm Germany and immediately hit Russia got him kicked out of office for a minute.

Also he’s convinced he’s lived multiple lives, always a soldier if not a general, fighting for Rome and Napoleon and anywhere there was glory to be found. Because that’s what Patton loves: not country or protecting civilians or standing up to evil, just glory in combat.

Put all that together and it seems like a pretty damning portrait. My issue becomes I’m still not certain it’s meant to be. It’s possible that what they were trying to say was “Yeah he had flaws but he was an incredible general,” and I don’t know, some say his greatest victory for the Allies was sitting out D-Day to trick the Germans.

That said… maybe it doesn’t need to have been the filmmakers’ (including Francis Ford Coppola, who worked on the script) intention to do a tear-down piece on Patton. Intentional or not, they get there, and maybe that’s what’s important.

And Rotten Tomatoes Says: Lower middle at #52. Sure, fine, it’s pretty good but I have some issues with it.

What’s New, Hollywood? I mean if this is the decade of New Hollywood, we should track what that means, no? George C. Scott was the first person to refuse to accept an Oscar for acting. Apparently he didn’t care for acting contests. I considered using this movie as the time to start tracking how much coarse language was sneaking into award films, but then I thought “Well if we’re counting slurs, we crossed that Rubicon decades ago, and if we’re not, what’s the fucking point,” so never mind. That said, Patton assuring priests that he reads his bible “every goddamn day” still lands as a joke.

So that’s war, now here’s the other thing.

The Box Office Champ

Sometimes a blunt yet generic title indicates that the movie, play, book, or whatnot is going to perfectly encapsulate that idea: Snakes on a Plane, or my beloved The Play That Goes Wrong. Sometimes maybe it’s because there’s not much to convey beyond “This movie is about spies who are kids.” (Sorry Spy Kids, that was uncalled for.)

This feels a little like the latter.

The movie opens with narration from Ryan O’Neal’s Oliver Barrett, “What can you say about a 25 year old girl who dies?” And if I’m being honest, it seems by the end of the movie they still don’t know. We follow the relationship of wealthy Harvard legacy student Oliver and poor Radcliffe college student Jenny (Ali MacGraw) from meeting and exchanging the kind of flirting that is pretty mean but I guess sexy if both parties are into it, courtship, engagement, the struggles of married life after Oliver gets disowned for marrying Jenny too fast but not losing an infamously wealthy last name, and… well they told us from scene one Jenny was gonna die, scene one, so it does lose some impact when it finally comes up. And the initial scenes of them starting to date move so fast it reminded me of Sarah Z’s points regarding queer vs straight relationships, and how straight relationships in fiction never feel the need to justify themselves: they’re just expected to happen. Oliver and Jenny getting together has no more build-up or logic than James Bond hooking up with whichever female character is still alive at the end of the movie.

Look this is beloved classic and all, I see that, I understand the sentiment, and its score is the most iconic since Lawrence of Arabia, but… I’m not feeling it. Both characters tend to be abrasive, though Jenny’s caustic nature is easier to connect with than Oliver’s refusal to mend bridges with his father… The dialogue is so awkward and clunky it makes The Gilmore Girls look downright natural. The signature line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” doesn’t check out at all, and I still don’t know if Oliver repeating it to his estranged father minutes after Jenny dies means he forgives him or not. And, sorry, saying “she’ll be dead at 25” up front did diminish the impact of the end, especially when it’s cancer, and there’s not some tragic choice that could have been avoided like a Romeo and Juliet.

I can’t even give it props for being the OG of its genre, like It Happened One Night and screwball romantic comedy, because star-crossed lovers ending tragically go back centuries. Millenia. “I love you, you love me, oh no you died” wasn’t new and different in the 70s.

It does make me wonder what it says about us as a species that so many of our top-tier love stories have tragic endings.

And Rotten Tomatoes Says: Only a 68%, I am not alone in my assessment.

What’s New, Hollywood? End credits are back! I wondered when those would kick in as the default. Here they serve an artistic purpose: the credits roll over a far-away Oliver, having just watched his wife die, sitting by a skating rink, utterly alone in the winter snow thinking of happier times. Visually it’s the polar opposite of Call Me By Your Name but aiming for the same effect, that might not mean anything to you but I noticed it and I’m writing it down.

Other Events in Film

  • Love Story was also the film debut of Tommy Lee Jones, and seeing Young Tommy Lee Jones hurt my brain.
  • Airport, number two at the box office, might not be considered one of the top 10 romantic movies ever by the AFI*, started a trend for 70s cinema: the disaster movie.
  • Robert Altman sub-tweets the Vietnam War with his Korean War comedy, M*A*S*H. You’ve probably heard of its adaptation to television.
  • Joan Crawford makes her final film appearance in the low budget horror movie Trog no wait what
  • One of the earliest films to center on gay protagonists, The Boys in the Band, is considered a milestone of queer cinema.
  • Disney tries putting some cartoon cats in a jazz band with The Aristocats.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger makes his acting debut, albeit overdubbed, in Hercules in New York. Terminator it ain’t.
  • Robert Downey Jr. started a rocky but successful screen career in Pound, about human actors playing animals in a pound waiting to be put down. Eh, probably still better than Doolittle.
  • Sylvester Stallone does a soft-core porn movie for $200. Don’t worry, things turn around for him this decade.
  • Roger Ebert co-writes Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with schlock king Russ Meyer.
  • Expo ’70 in Osaka shows off a new leap in screen size: IMAX.

(*Gone With the Wind is at number two? They found that cautionary tale of sunk cost fallacy and marrying for money romantic?)

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Author: danny_g

Danny G, your humble host and blogger, has been working in community theatre since 1996, travelling the globe on and off since 1980, and caring more about nerd stuff than he should since before he can remember. And now he shares all of that with you.

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