duff beer

From movies like
French Connection
Dirty Harry
Death Wish
Serpico
Shaft

and television like
Hawaii Five-O
Streets of San Francisco
Starsky and Hutch
Columbo

Why did everything get more realistic and focusing on inner city stuff after the 1960s which was about the outlandish like spies, spaghetti westerns, sword epics, etc? I can only point to 1968 having the movie Bullitt and Coogan's Bluff of the renegade cop, but why was this so popular?

Rypro 525

Because the early 70s were when filmmakers finally had the freedom to make gritty movies without censorship or controversy. Hell the first american movie to have the word 'fuck' in it was 1970's M*A*S*H.

duff beer

So you mean if there was no censorship in the 60s there would be these gritty movies?

Paul_SD

I would guess a bunch of factors contributed to it-
the social unrest of the 60's (driven by the division over the war/race riots/ political assassinations) combined with the baby boom generation now into their mid 20's who were now jaded/cynical and looking for more adult-minded fare, along with a younger class of up and coming auteurs who were more inclined to push the envelope in the wake of the new ratings structure.
And just like men's adventure magazines changed after WWII- becoming more violent and sexually aggressive to appeal to an audience that had lived through hellish conditions- the violent/justice paradigm of the gritty cop movie was probably something that was going to appeal to vets returning from Viet-nam.
I think that in general, when nations beat the drum for war- it has ramifications throughout the culture and for a while after the actual hostilities are over. There is definitely a reflection in the arts (the nihilism of film noir was in part a reaction from WWII).


As far as why big cities as locales- there was a lot of urban unrest in the mid to late 60's on into the early 70's. Also NYC had a ton of drama in terms of strikes (including a famous garbage/sanitation workers strike), rising violent crime rates, blackouts...lot's of attention in the pages of newspapers of the times and lots to work with as far as story potential.

Ash Ketchum

To add to Paul's insights, I would stress that, in the wake of the anti-war protests, the youth "revolution," the Black Power movement, etc., there was a sense of society breaking down, of things getting out of control and some clever filmmakers figured out that people would pay to see tough cops like Dirty Harry exercising some form of control or Bronson in DEATH WISH offering a form of payback. And they were right. People DID want to see that. As Harry said with thinly veiled contempt when confronted with the question of whether Scorpio's rights were violated during his arrest, "Well I'm all broken up about that man's rights."

Plus, there were new documentary style techniques for shooting on the streets, with lighter cameras and faster film stock, so you could get nighttime scenes like those in DIRTY HARRY or elaborate street action like you see in THE FRENCH CONNECTION. You didn't have to use studio lighting and slow film stock the way filmmakers did a few short years earlier.

hanshotfirst1138

The 70s movies like that, which filmmakers seem so endlessly intent upon recapturing, was also born of a very specific time. There was a whole confluence of social and political factors which contributed to the films of the time (the end of Vietnam, different audience tastes in the pre-blockbuster years, a growing cynicism following the collapse of the futile hippie rebellions, etc.), and world simply looked different then. Shaking the camera and scratching the film doesn't recapture it either.

Norm de Plume

Good insights already. Additionally, the Hays Code was abolished in 1967.

inri222

Lots of things started loosening up at that time. Directors were given more artistic freedon in Hollywood.

The 70's also kicked off the 'Golden Age of Porn'.

Paul_SD

Yeah- as far the trend towards gritty realism, that's definitely a huge contributor to the aesthetic.

You also had the breakdown of the old studio system, beginning in the 60's, and it's reliance on back lots and miles of soundstages. MGM's was famously sold off in the early-mid 70's (the dismantling was used to good effect as the backdrop for the TV movie The Phantom Of Hollywood).

I'd also guess that since the baby boomers were the first TV generation, they grew up seeing a ton of films on TV- along with so much that was produced for broadcast- that they were intimately familiar with the typical artificial studio gloss and responded well to the material that broke away from that because it was fresh and felt more real. In other words, it wasn't their father's Oldsmobile.
And initial success begot a whole legion of more properties chasing the dragon.

Because like Tina Fey's line at the GG's- "this is Hollywood and if it kinda works, they'll just keep doing it until everybody hates it."

Rypro 525

on the French Connection commentary, Freidkin almost braggingly mentions that nothing was shot on a set