The ‘70s: ‘Good, Bad and Strange’

THE 1970s were the best and worst of times for cinema, a fact the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian and Aero theatres is warmly embracing with its ambitious May festival, “The Seventies: The Good, the Bad and the Strange.”

“What people forget is that the freedom that came to Hollywood in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s led to so many absolutely great films, films that have stood the test of time and, to put it mildly, also led to some of the most terrible films ever produced,” says Rick Jewell, film professor at USC’s School of Cinema and Television. “I really believe this was the first time in American film that the studio executives lost control -- when the inmates were running the asylum.”

The old Hollywood studio system was on its last legs and had lost the ability to tap into the tastes of the moviegoing public. “They had no idea what would work with the public,” Jewell says. “Because films they didn’t anticipate would be big hits like ‘Easy Rider,’ they kind of threw up their hands and turned the filmmaking over to the kids. That had some wonderful results and absolutely appalling results.”

And the Egyptian and Aero are sampling the spectrum. Along with such classics as “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Shampoo,” “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Coming Home” and “The Deer Hunter,” the Cinematheque is also offering such turkeys as “Doctors’ Wives,” “The Love Machine,” “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Mandingo,” a 1975 hoot about slavery and sexual relationships -- “Thank goodness it didn’t have much of an impact on the civil rights movement,” Jewell quips, “because it could have set it back years and years.”

Some potboilers were made by the old Hollywood in a last-gasp effort to be hip. With the old production code gone, replaced by a ratings system, “Everyone is trying to push the edge of the envelope in terms of nudity and sex,” Jewell says. “But with these films, it seems they don’t know what they are doing. Pictures like ‘The Love Machine’ and ‘Doctors’ Wives’ are pretty hard to sit through these days.”

Jewell believes one of the fascinating aspects about the era is that “all kinds of doors suddenly were flung open that had been closed for years, and people from various backgrounds with a new kind of agenda got the opportunity to make films -- and some fabulous films were made.”

The ‘70s were also the “absolute peak” in American cinema of the “whole auteur business where people really did believe that directors were the gods of the cinema. When you look at it, I think many of our best directors were absolutely at their peak,” he says, naming Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Robert Altman.

“My goodness, they absolutely were just making magic,” says Jewell. “Not every film that they made was great, but their best work was pretty much in that decade.”

A lot of the young Turks of the 1970s fell victim to their own egos. “They read too much of Pauline Kael writing about them and saying how fantastic they were,” says Jewell. “Just crazy stuff comes from that kind of hubris, that kind of egomania that takes over people who think they are genius no matter what they do. It is sad in a way a lot of these people became so undisciplined over time.

“That period, of course, was turbulent in society with Vietnam and Watergate and the emergence of the feminist movement in a big way,” says Jewell. A film such as 1970’s “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” for which Carrie Snodgress received a best actress Oscar nomination, “is so culture-specific, so time-specific, that now when we look at it, it seems almost antique,” he says.

“But in its time, it was absolutely cutting edge to present the life of a woman more realistic, almost in an Ibsen kind of fashion, of how she was abused by the patriarchy of the time. Now, it doesn’t have the same resonance.”

susan.king@latimes.com

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‘The Seventies: The Good, the Bad and the Strange’

Where: American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica

When: Today through May 31 at the Egyptian; May 10 through 26 at the Aero

Price: $10

Contact: (323) 466-FILM or go to www.americancinematheque.com