David Walsh Looks Back at the New Hollywood

This year can seem a fairly good time to look back on the history of film, and especially the film of the past half century. After all, the model of "high concept" filmmaking that emerged from it, long in decay, seems to be in the last stages of its breakdown amid a protracted, structural crisis in the cinematic market all too tied to the bigger crises through which we have been living these past many years. (It seems no accident that American theatergoing slipped importantly in the wake of the Great Recession, continued to erode in the years that followed, and collapsed after the pandemic only to stabilize well below the pre-pandemic level.) This can seem underscored by the extraordinary commercial success of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a film that from the high concept standpoint was an exceedingly unlikely hit--and may suggest a return to "adult" cinema making for big hits in the way that we saw before high concept, in the New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and 1970s.

As it happens, David Walsh recently announced just such a look back, marking the 50th anniversary of what he considers the peak of New Hollywood in 1974 with a series of articles about the films that made that year what it was. To date he and his colleagues have published three of those promised pieces, remembering Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (both of which films, not coincidentally, were written by Robert Towne and starred Jack Nicholson), and Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. Critical to Walsh's interest, and for many others looking at the New Hollywood's output, these were socially critical films, making for a sharp contrast with what we have got out of a Hollywood whose neoliberalism was evident not just in the structure and functioning of the business, but the politics of its content (as Walsh, of course, has remarked just about every year in his annual Oscar coverage). However, for critics like Walsh the limits to New Hollywood's more critical work also seem significant. If more than was to be the case later (as in this era in which wealth, power, status, traditional institutions and values, etc. are treated with so much respect by "artists") the makers of those movies looked at the world around them and saw much wrong in it and said so, they were also pessimistic about anything being done about the evils they identified--even though this did not wholly deny their criticisms force, or the richness their feel for and about the world brought to the films.