Movies set in the 70s: Getting beyond disco and double knits – The Boston Globe

Sometimes the idea is to play the decade for laughs, as does Dick (1999), about Richard Nixon, or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), about, yes, Ron Burgundy. Sometimes its to portray a specific event or set of events that took place in the 70s, rather than evoke the decade itself: Summer of Sam (1999), Munich (2005), Frost/Nixon (2008), Argo (2012).

Whats of more interest here are those movies that dont just use the 70s as a means to an end. Theyre the one for which the decade is an end in itself: the 70s as mood, style, attitude.

A partial list would include Richard Linklaters Dazed and Confused (1993), Ang Lees The Ice Storm(1997); Cameron Crowes Almost Famous (2000); Ridley Scotts American Gangster (that floor-length chinchilla coat Denzel Washington wears ringside at the first Ali-Frazier fight!) and David Finchers Zodiac (both 2007), J.J. Abramss Super 8 (2011); David O. Russells American Hustle (2013), which is so 70s its practically the decade in drag (thats a compliment); Craig Brewers Dolemite Is My Name (2019).

The cinematographer Harris Savides should get a 70s special citation. He shot both American Gangster and Zodiac the 70s from literally A to Z as well as the biopic Milk (2008), about Harvey Milk, the murdered San Francisco city supervisor and gay rights activist.

The appeal of the 70s for those filmmakers has little if anything to do with disco, earth tones, and Ultrasuede. It begins with the decades having been one of the great periods in Hollywood history, American films Silver Age. No one is more aware of that than Anderson. His chief artistic influence is a 70s master, Robert Altman. Boogie Nights and Andersons Magnolia (1999) are in a kind of one-way dialogue with Altmans Shorts Cuts (1993), also set in Southern California. More distantly and even more formative, that dialogue extends to Altmans Nashville (1975).

So focusing on the 70s can be a kind of paying homage. And the homage being paid need not just be to classics like Mean Streets (1973), Chinatown (1974), or the Altman pictures. The ferment in American film that decade very much included blaxploitation, which American Gangster touches on and Dolemite most happily embraces.

The 70s arent thought of as a great decade for music, certainly not as they are for movies. But there was a remarkable aural churn going on. The headlong rush of the 60s (60s movies are a very different subject) was succeeded by the going-in-many-different-directions of the 70s. Its hard to get more different, just to cite the most obvious examples, than disco and punk.

The nicest chiming of 70s music and 70s movie is Almost Famous, where Philip Seymour Hoffman has a cameo as the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, and extends to Licorice Pizza, where Hoffmans son Cooper plays the male lead. In addition, the movie takes its title from a fondly remembered Southern California record-store chain that flourished in the 70s.

Other examples of 70s movies, musical division, would be Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), the Freddie Mercury biopic, and Rocketman (2019), the Elton John biopic both of them largely, though not entirely, set in the decade 54 (1998), about that late-70s sanctum sanctorum, Studio 54, and The Runaways (2010). Is there such a thing as band biopics?

The musical churn of the 70s was minor compared to the social churn: the decades cusp quotient. The 60s introduced sex and drugs and rock n roll, so to speak, but it was the 70s that domesticated them. Set in 1973, The Ice Storm quite creepily captures that process going on in upper-middle-class Connecticut. Its simply taken for granted by the high school students in Dazed and Confused, which takes place on the last day of class and through the next morning in 1976 (yes, the year of the Bicentennial, a very 70s event).

If the peak of the Silver Age is the first two Godfather movies (the first of which celebrates its golden anniversary next year), then its only fitting that The Godfather Part III should be set as the 70s were ending, in 1979. The decade really is kind of inescapable, isnt it? As Michael Corleone says in that movies most famous line, Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.

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Movies set in the 70s: Getting beyond disco and double knits - The Boston Globe