After the international quagmire that was the Vietnam War,movies were no longer all fun and games. The glossy, Hollywood spectacle of your favorite studio backlot musical or weepy melodrama didn’t seem appropriate in the late 1960s and early 1970s —a period marred by an unwinnable war with oblique intentionsbeing fought by the helpless youth of America. While the film industry flourished during other times of national panic and concern, includingthe Great DepressionandWorld War II, audiences were too dismayed and disgruntled to have Hollywood fantasies fed to them.They wanted movies that werebold, aggressive, anti-establishment, and truthful to the rotten core and broken soul of the country.Luckily, audiences were gifted with the most gifted class of young directors in American history, who were all equally frustrated with the status quo like everyone else.
The Vietnam War Upended Hollywood Expectations
The Vietnam War and the rise of New Hollywood: the American cinematic movement consisting of the esteemed “movie brats,“includingFrancis Ford Coppola,Martin Scorsese, andSteven Spielberg. Whether New Hollywood would’ve emerged if not for a destructive political and social crisis infecting the national spirit is unclear, but the period is undeniably inseparable from their work and attitude toward filmmaking as a cultural document. Other filmmakers in this storied class, includingArthur Penn,Sam Peckinpah,Dennis Hopper,Peter Bogdanovich,William Friedkin, andPaul Schrader,were cited as the first crop of directors to emerge out of film school, which experienced aboom in enrollment during the 1960s. For many of these visionary wunderkinds, their influences were not seminal Hollywood classics, but rather, artful, avant-garde international work of theFrench New Waveand Italian neorealism.
As American involvement in the Vietnam War peaked in the late ’60s,Hollywood had a complicated relationship with the war,in that there was none at all.Studios avoided the subject at all costs, with the only notablecontemporaneous Vietnam picturebeing the overtly patriotic and simplisticJohn Waynewar epic,The Green Berets. It wasn’t until the war had ended, and when filmmakers who grew up watching the war on television or fought in it themselves,did Vietnam movies become a viable genre on their own.Because Hollywood prided itself on escapist entertainment, a promise realized during previous national hardships, forcing audiences to confrontevents already dominating their television screensseemed averse to commercial success.
This Classic War Thriller Blends Suspense and Romance Into an Unforgettable Masterpiece
This is classic Powell and Pressburger.
However, the tides were changing in the industry.For New Hollywood to emerge, the old guards needed to step down. By the end of the ’60s, big, bloated musicals and historical epics were becoming tiresome, similar to audiences’jaded relationship towards comic book moviesin 2024.A younger, rebellious audience craved a different flavor of art and movies,especially since explicitcommentaries on the ongoing war were more or less forbidden.As a result, rather than woefully attempting to get Vietnam-set movies green-lit,these maverick filmmakers made allegorical Vietnam moviesrooted in the iconoclastic attitude of those fed up with the powers that be.
Films Like ‘Easy Rider’ and ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Illustrated a Dark Side of America
Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’squintessential counterculture road-trip drama, is recognized as one of the foundational New Hollywood texts — one that depicts bike riders on the outskirts of society with a fatal destiny. The film valorizes the anti-authoritarian riders, who mirror the anti-war protesters who were marching in the streets, butHopper never loses sight of the bleak inevitability of their demise in America. A cousin toEasy Rider,Bonnie and Clyde, changed the cinematic landscape foreverwith its blistering display of outlaw violence and a scintillating portrait of anti-heroes. Despite its historical background and period setting,Arthur Penn’s film plunged into the heart of disaffected Americans in the Vietnam era who wouldn’t know any better but toroot for the bad guys.When directing the legendary climax whereWarren BeattyandFaye Dunaway’s titular characters are viciously gunned down in broad daylight, Penn was influenced by thewidespread broadcasting of war combat on television.Bonnie and Clydecould only be made by a generation of people desensitized to the depravity of violence.Sam Peckinpah’sThe Wild Bunchsignaled the end of the Old Westby showing aging gunfighters without an ounce of glamor, representing a decay in traditional American values and iconography.
When analyzing Vietnam-coded cinema,the prevailing theme is distrust.Whether it was the national government or corporate America, offices of authority and influence were not only untrustworthy but deeply sinister. With this shared sentiment in the country,paranoid thrillers thrived.The master of the genre, Alan Pakula, directed films about fictional and biographical cover-ups and scandals, notablyThe Parallax ViewandAll the President’s Men. Francis Coppola’sThe Conversationfollows a protagonist whose life is irreversibly destroyed once he begins looking into evil corporate affairs. These gripping and angst-riddled paranoid thrillers, includingZ,Three Days of the Condor, andMarathon Man, double as Watergate/Richard Nixonallegories, as these filmsheld up a mirror to America’s current cryptic and dishonest state at the time —we’re constantly being watched, especially by authority figures propagating lies.
The Rotten Underbelly of America Portrayed in ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Jaws'
As the ’70s progressed, Vietnam became more explicit in New Hollywood films,particularly in the decade’s prominent sobering character studies about complex people grappling with a rotten world or existential crisis. Rather than existing as a blatant talking point,the seismic impact of the war lingered throughout films likeTaxi Driver, with Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) being a cautionary tale of howVietnam service tarnished the psyche of young men.Scorsese’searly student film,The Big Shave, is a direct indictment of the war, as it shows a man shaving his face to death, pointing to the self-inflicting pain the nation is taking part in overseas. WithMAS*H,the war satire was setduring the Korean War, but everyone knew thatRobert Altman’s film was a biting anti-Vietnam text about the crude disregarding of human decency. Altman’s masterpiece,Nashville, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the country music capital of the world, chronicles its innocent American beingtaken over by unshakable government influence and political assassination. Even the crowd-pleasing blockbusters in the ’70s were coded with bleak Vietnam commentary, asJawscenters around afaceless villain killing youthsand a government that leaves its people vulnerable to a shark attack.
Everytent-pole New Hollywood classic, fromThe GodfathertoRocky, offersample opportunity for reasoned analysis tracing back to the Vietnam War.Because the international conflict and its effect on the home-front were so all-encompassing, filmmakers couldn’t bury their heads in the sand. If any film during this time was dark, cynical, and disillusioned about the state of America (and many were), chances are, they are at least implicitly reflecting on Vietnam.Hollywood movies were turned on their head,idyllic Americans turned to organized crime,killer beastsmade the ocean uninhabitable, andcab drivers went on rampages.Everyone and everything seemed to snap on the big screen, just like in the real world.Many of the signature New Hollywood voices, including Scorsese, Spielberg, and Coppola, are still active today, and their influence will extend beyond their lifetime.
Taxi Driver
A mentally unstable veteran works as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City, where the perceived decadence and sleaze fuels his urge for violent action.
Taxi Driveris available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.
