The Brutal Landmarks

There are movies considered to be landmarks because they expanded the boundaries of what was previously considered “acceptable” in the portrayal of violence. The nine films on these pages significantly altered the face of movie mayhem over the past three decades.

There are movies considered to be landmark because they expanded the boundaries of what was previously considered “acceptable” in the portrayal of violence. The nine films on these pages significantly altered the face of movie mayhem over the past three decades.

Psycho / 1961

12 cabins, 12 vacancies . . . and 12 showers. The Alfred Hitchcock film’s grisly violence and crazed-loner protagonist set the agenda for virtually every slasher film in the past three decades. Its influence, at best, can be seen in the films of Brian De Palma, particularly “Dressed to Kill,” with its cracked, razor-blade wielding transvestite shrink, and “Carrie,” with Piper Laurie’s dagger-toting Holy-Roller mom. At worst, you can locate the film’s bloody thumbprint on the “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” series.

Bonnie and Clyde / 1967

Arthur Penn’s classic was the first crime movie to mix comedy and horror and slapstick and social commentary. Its violence, culminating in the oft-imitated slow-motion shoot-out finale, was more plentiful and graphic than audiences had seen before and with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty cast as the leads, violence and glamour were joined. The movies it directly influenced have mostly debased its best qualities. Comedy crossed with sudden, extreme bursts of violence finds itself trivialized in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), and, more recently, in the “Lethal Weapon” and “Beverly Hills Cop” series.

The Wild Bunch / 1969

Sam Peckinpah’s epic Western included scenes of such balletic brutality that the film was accused of making violence “beautiful.” The Western has always been a genre that explored violence; in “The Wild Bunch,” Peckinpah made that exploration his theme. The few Westerns of stature since “The Wild Bunch” have been greatly influenced by Peckinpah’s virtuoso stagings, particularly Phil Kaufman’s 1972 “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid” and Walter Hill’s 1980 “The Long Riders.” Movies like Hill’s “The Warriors” and “Southern Comfort” examined our ambivalence to violence at the same as they moved us viscerally.

Straw Dogs / 1971

Sam Peckinpah, again. This time he’s out to demonstrate that violence is a man’s birthright. When Dustin Hoffman, as a timid mathematician besieged by murderous louts in a remote English village, shouts “I will not allow violence against this house!” he becomes the poster boy of the territorial imperative. Peckinpah went further into the themes he set out in “The Wild Bunch” here, linking violence with sexuality. By making the violence-eroticism theme explicit, Peckinpah brought his movie into a realm of controversy that made it, with Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” the Op Ed movie of choice for its day.

Dirty Harry / 1971

Don Siegel used Clint Eastwood as an icon of vigilante vengeance against an unspeakably deranged killer who sports a peace symbol belt buckle. A key example of violence used for the purposes of reactionary political melodrama. Its influence was felt not only in the “Dirty Harry” sequels, but in “Death Wish” (and its sequels) and such rural-vigilante variants as “Walking Tall” (and its sequel) and, on a more expansive and cartoonish scale, the Stallone “Rambo” movies and the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone “The Year of the Dragon,” where Mickey Rourke’s monomania takes Harry Callahan’s righteous cop-crusade to new heights of derangement.

The Godfather / 1972

Francis Coppola used violence as the centerpiece to an encompassing vision of modern American corruption. Coppola gave the violence the stature of tragedy; it was violence as the American way of doing business, as the American way of life. In its panoramic display of national corruption, the film was tremendously influential on Sergio Leone’s similarly themed “Once Upon A Time in America.” Coppola used violence as the armature of American depravity; Leone used it as myth. Thirteen years later, John Huston’s crafted his own alternate-universe “Godfather” in “Prizzi’s Honor,” where violence was a black-comic jape.

Taxi Driver / 1976

Martin Scorsese’s film, with a script by Paul Schrader, brought the psycho of urban nightmare into the broad daylight of the immediate post-Vietnam era. Robert DeNiro’s Travis Bickle was a singular case, and yet he seemed to personify a national anxiety. The slow-motion violence of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch” reached its apotheosis in the film’s climactic blood bath. For better and for worse, the film set in motion the sicko Vietnam vet cycle, with films ranging from the 1977 “Rolling Thunder,” also scripted by Schrader, through “The Year of the Dragon” to Mel Gibson in “Lethal Weapon”--Travis Bickle as a gun-toting action cartoon.

Halloween / 1978

If Hitchcock set the agenda for the slasher film, John Carpenter--along with Tobe Hooper, whose “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” predates “Halloween” by four years--carried it into the ‘80s. This film initiated the cycle of teen-gore movies and their many sequels, including the “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, the Stephen King adaptations like “Cujo” and “Pet Sematary,” the Wes Craven films like “The Hills Have Eyes,” and assorted other lovelies, like “Terror Train” and “Prom Night.”

The Terminator / 1984

James Cameron’s futuristic killing fantasy brought techno-violence into the movie arena, and it has been here ever since. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg became the prototype for the new computer-age destructo derbies like “RoboCop” and “Total Recall,” as well as spin-offs like “Predator.” The “Die Hard” films, machine-tooled blow-outs featuring quipping stick figures, also owe a dubious debt to Cameron’s film.