Hollywood has never matched the gritty masterpieces of the 1970s

The actor James Caan had a point when he took modern cinema to task at the Cannes Film Festival

The taut, grainy film-making style of 1970s directors such as Sidney Lumet, who directed Al Pacino in 'Serpico' (pictured), inspired Ben Affleck's 'Argo'
The taut, grainy film-making style of 1970s film-makers such as Sidney Lumet, who directed Al Pacino in 'Serpico' (above), inspired Ben Affleck's 'Argo' Credit: Photo: Alamy

When James Caan, who played Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, appeared in Cannes this week, he delivered a stinging slap to modern Hollywood. “Most of the films they’re doing, in Hollywood anyway, are these franchise films,” he said. “I’ve become very negative about the films of today… I was very fortunate in the 1970s to work with the best actors, the best directors, and the best cinematographers.”

One might, perhaps, be tempted to dismiss it as the nostalgia of a veteran actor for his own glory days, except that many other leading figures in cinema seem to share his view. Caan’s latest film, Blood Ties, is set amid organised crime in 1970s Brooklyn – almost as though its director, Guillaume Canet, yearned to dive back into the era and the city that spawned that decade’s gritty masterpieces, from Mean Streets to Serpico.

The film that swept the boards at the Oscars this year, Ben Affleck’s Argo, was a conscious return not just to the events surrounding the 1979 Iranian revolution, but to the taut, grainy film-making style of 1970s directors such as Sidney Lumet and Alan J Pakula. Steven Soderbergh – the toast of Cannes with his film Behind the Candelabra, on the life of Liberace – none the less recently announced that he was leaving Hollywood for television: “The worst development in film-making – particularly in the last five years – is how badly directors are treated. It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide that they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly.”

Put like that, you can understand why today’s directors look to the 1970s with yearning: it was the age of the auteur, when bold young bucks broke into a paralysed studio system to put their stamp on a changing culture. In fact, the “New Hollywood” really began earlier, with an Academy Awards battle between 1967 Best Picture nominees whom the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the dragons” and “the dragonflies”. As Mark Harris recalls in his book Scenes from a Revolution, the “dragons” were Stanley Kramer, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Rex Harrison, while the “dragonflies” included Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty and directors Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison. In the end, Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture, and Mike Nichols took Best Director for The Graduate: the dragonflies had triumphed, and the coming decade belonged to them.

The films of that time were obsessed with the outsider: mobsters, misfits, outlaws and whistleblowers. In some, such as The Godfather, they supplied a powerful portrait of dynastic corruption; in others, such as Serpico, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and All the President’s Men, they emphasised the struggle of mavericks to act decisively against a rotten establishment. With Annie Hall, Woody Allen reinvented the romantic comedy – and next to many of today’s formulaic female leads, Diane Keaton’s Annie still looks endearingly original.

If Hollywood film-making was excitingly unpredictable in the 1970s, it still wasn’t easy: the producer Robert Evans, in his zesty memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture, recalls an industry sizzling with spats, affairs, walk-outs and battles with bosses. Studios were reluctant to make The Godfather – “Sicilian mobster films don’t play” – and numerous directors turned it down for romanticising the Mafia. Even Francis Ford Coppola was reluctant to direct, for fear of tainting the image of the Italian community. He finally agreed to do it as “a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America”, and when the news broke that Coppola was hired, Dick Zanuck, then head of Twentieth Century Fox, called up to jeer: “Do it in animation, you’ve got a better chance.” It won three Oscars.

One risks romanticising an era as one grows distant from it, and it is absurd to insinuate that Hollywood is no longer capable of making great films. But with the rise of the blockbuster film in the 1980s, the studios realised that spectacle rather than drama offered new ways of luring mass audiences. In recent years, studio money has flowed into the comic-book franchises and animated features – children’s films for adults – that now dominate screens, on the understanding that the investment will be repaid at the box office.

Violence has always been part of life and films, but the nature of it on screen is changing: today, it is more gloatingly explicit and free from any form of moral framework (for that profound sense of context, one must turn to a masterly US television series such as Breaking Bad). Where 1970s films tended to depict violence in a clear-eyed but essentially critical manner, the Hollywood director’s stance now often tends more towards lascivious celebration. In Cannes this week, Nicolas Winding Refn said he had approached the extreme violence in his most recent film, Only God Forgives, “like a pornographer”, because it aroused him: “I have surely a fetish for violent emotion and images.” Some audience members protested at the screening.

The most popular career in Hollywood movies currently seems that of “trained assassin”, regarded as icily brutal enough to be cool. How many of those have you met in real life? Yet cinema both shapes our tastes and feeds us what we seem to crave: compared to the 1970s, there is an uneasy sense that we may be witnessing the rise of spectacle, and the slow death of ideas.