UNEASY RIDERS: AMERICAN FILM IN THE NIXON YEARS, 1970-1974
July 28-September 2, 2007

The beginning of the 1970s was a turbulent and fertile period for Hollywood. The social upheaval of the 1960s and unrest about Vietnam provided the backdrop for a film industry in economic recession. Before the studios regained their commercial footing with the advent of the wide-release blockbuster, there was a brief period when maverick directors could get studio financing to make edgy, idiosyncratic, and artistically ambitious movies. While the influence of the European art cinema could be clearly felt, these rarely seen gems reflected America's changing social mores and political anxieties.


Two-Lane Blacktop
Saturday, July 28, 3:00 p.m.

1971, 102 mins. 35mm. Directed by Monte Hellman. With Warren Oates, James Taylor, A cross-country drag race structures Monte Hellman’s laconic, existential road movie, an offbeat portrait of the American landscape in the early 1970s. As Hal Hartley described it, “Fixing the car. Driving the car. Trying to impress the girl. The essentials.”


Fat City
Saturday, July 28, 5:30 p.m.

1972, 96 mins. 35mm. Directed by John Huston. With Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrell. Veteran Hollywood director John Huston drew from his background as a boxer for this gritty, poetic drama about a washed-up fighter trying to make a comeback. Cinematographer Conrad Hall captures a seedy world of musty gyms, cheap bars, and low-rent apartments.


Puzzle of a Downfall Child
With Jerry Schatzberg in person
Sunday, July 29, 3:00 p.m.

1970, 105 mins. 35 mm. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg. With Faye Dunaway. The directorial debut of fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg (Scarecrow, Panic in Needle Park) is one of the era’s neglected gems, a stylish tour de force told in nonlinear flashbacks. Faye Dunaway gives a shattering performance as a fashion model living in isolation after a nervous breakdown. Followed by a discussion with Schatzberg moderated by Chief Curator David Schwartz.


Wanda
Sunday, July 29, 6:00 p.m.

1970, 100 mins. 16 mm. Directed by Barbara Loden. Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and starred in this impressive independent feature about a woman from a mining town who leaves her husband and children because “I’m just no good” and wanders into a world of one night stands and petty crime. Wanda is one of the few major features of its time directed by a woman.


Little Murders
Sunday, August 4, 2:00 p.m.

1971, 110 mins. 35mm. Directed by Alan Arkin. With Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd. In an impressive directorial debut, Alan Arkin deftly blends absurdist black comedy and genuine emotion, adapting Jules Feiffer’s play about an apathetic New York photographer reluctantly starting a relationship. “Not for the middlebrow or fainthearted,” warns Variety, “but could go over big with the M*A*S*H crowd.”


Loving
Saturday, August 4, 4:30 p.m.

1970, 89 mins. 35mm. Directed by Irvin Kershner. With George Segal, Eva Marie Saint. George Segal, a frequent Everyman figure in early-1970s film, gives one of his deepest and finest performances as a commercial artist trying to keep up appearances while juggling an unfulfilling job, a failing marriage, and a troubled affair.


Husbands
Sunday, August 5, 3:30 p.m.

1970, 154 mins. 35mm. Directed by John Cassavetes. With Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara. Real-life friends Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara give powerful improvisational performances in this alternately hilarious and lacerating buddy picture about a trio of boozing, self-loathing suburbanites fumbling towards personal freedom.


Play It As It Lays
Sunday, August 5, 6:30 p.m.

1972, 99 mins. 35mm. Directed by Frank Perry. With Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins. Frank Perry’s adaptation of Joan Didion’s taut novel about a crumbling actress facing bouts of existential despair is filmed in an elliptical style that evokes Antonioni. Painter Roy Lichtenstein was a visual advisor.


The King of Marvin Gardens
With Jacob Brackman in person
Saturday, August 11, 3:00 p.m.

1972, 104 mins. 35mm. Directed by Bob Rafelson. With Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn. “What went wrong?” asks David Staebler (Nicholson), surveying the wreckage in Atlantic City, where organized crime, real estate schemes, and kinky sex congeal in a faded vision of the American dream. The film was Rafelson’s and Nicholson’s ambitious follow-up to Five Easy Pieces, was beautifully written by Jacob Brackman, who will introduce the screening. Followed by a discussion with Brackman moderated by Assistant Curator Livia Bloom.


The Last Detail
Saturday, August 11, 5:30 p.m.

1973, 105 mins. 35mm. Directed by Hal Ashby. With Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid. Bawdy and boisterous behavior barely conceals the angst simmering beneath the surface of this astute road movie about two sailors taking a young thief to the brig. With Robert Towne’s screenplay, Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Being There) creates a poignant portrait of America’s masculine underbelly.


The Heartbreak Kid
Saturday, August 18, 3:00 p.m.

1972, 106 mins. New 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive. Directed by Elaine May. With Charles Grodin, Jeannie Berlin, Cybill Shepard. “A masterpiece of social pathology,” wrote J. Hoberman of Elaine May’s acerbic variation on The Graduate, in which a young husband and wife get to know—and hate—each other on their honeymoon, as the husband falls for a blonde shiksa.


Drive, He Said
Saturday, August 18, 5:30 p.m.

1971, 90 mins. 35mm. Directed by Jack Nicholson. With William Tepper, Karen Black. Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut is a campus drama that turns the friendship between an earnest basketball player and his radical roommate into a microcosm of the era. “Very much a film of its time,” wrote Dave Kehr, “charged with all the morbid romanticism of the false optimism of the hippies.”


Charley Varrick
Sunday, August 19, 3:00 p.m.

1973, 111 mins. 35mm. Directed by Don Siegel. With Walter Matthau. A small-time crook (Walter Matthau, in one of his most hardboiled performances) unwittingly robs a mafia-run bank in this riveting thriller by the director of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry.


Play Misty For Me
Sunday, August 19, 5:30 p.m.

1971, 102 mins. 35mm. Directed by Clint Eastwood. With Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills. After a one-night stand with a disc jockey, a fan (Jessica Walter) decides he’ll love her or die. Eastwood’s finely tuned debut pays homage to Psycho and to his mentor Don Siegel, who has a cameo role.


The Crazies
Saturday, August 25, 3:00 p.m.

1973, 103 mins. 35mm. Directed by George A. Romero. With Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan. The citizens of a quarantined town, infected by a deadly virus, turn on the military and on each other in George A. Romero’s outrageous Vietnam allegory.


Straw Dogs
Saturday, August 25, 5:30 p.m.

1971, 118 mins. 35mm. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. With Dustin Hoffman. A vacationing mathematician and his sultry young wife are confronted by rapacious small-town violence in Peckinpah’s harrowing study of machismo. “He is so passionate and sensual a film artist that you may experience his romantic perversity kinesthetically, and get quite giddy from feeling trapped and liberated,” wrote Pauline Kael.


Bone
With Joyce Van Patten in person. Note: Larry Cohen is unable to attend.
Sunday, August 26, 3:00 p.m.

1972, 95 mins. Director's 35mm print. Directed by Larry Cohen. With Yaphet Kotto. In Cohen’s directorial debut, Bone (Yaphet Kotto) breaks into the home of an affluent Beverly Hills couple. His invasion exposes the deception and anger underlying the couple’s seemingly happy marriage. This provocative satire of American corruption upends stereotypes and defies expectations. Actress Joyce Van Patten, one of the stars of Bone, will introduce the screening and participate in a discussion following the film.


The Spook Who Sat By The Door
Sunday, August 26, 6:00 p.m.

1973, 102 mins. New 35mm print. Directed by Ivan Dixon. With Lawrence Cook. In one of the most audacious political films of the “blaxploitation” era, an activist (Lawrence Cook) infiltrates the CIA to learn guerilla war tactics, then takes his skills to the streets of Chicago, forming a revolutionary commando group.


Klute
Saturday, September 1, 3:00 p.m.

1971, 114 mins. 35mm. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. With Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Roy Scheider. The conventions of film noir mingle with Sexual Revolution candor in this archetypal example of 1970s “paranoia cinema.” Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for her complex performance as Bree, a toughminded prostitute who falls in love with a detective.


Hickey and Boggs
Saturday, September 1, 5:30 p.m.

1972, 111 mins. 35mm. Directed by Robert Culp. With Bill Cosby, Culp. I Spy co-stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp re-teamed for this tough thriller about a pair of down-and-out Los Angeles detectives searching for a missing woman in a web of violence, cadavers, and cash. Walter Hill (The Warriors) wrote the screenplay.


Ulzana's Raid
Sunday, September 2, 3:00 p.m.

1972, 103 mins. 35mm. Directed by Robert Aldrich. With Burt Lancaster. In this complex, probing drama about two U.S. cavalry officers trying to capture renegade Apaches in the 1880s, Aldrich made one of his best films, and one of the era’s most interesting Vietnam allegories.


The Last Movie
Sunday, September 2, 5:30 p.m.

1971, 110 mins. Director's 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive. Directed by Dennis Hopper. With Peter Fonda. The most avant-garde Hollywood feature of its day, Hopper’s post-Easy Rider head trip begins as a fictional western directed by Sam Fuller and becomes a bizarrely imploding comic documentary.