'70s Flicks -- What Is It About Them?

You are probably correct.

If you get the DVD of George Clooney movie, Michael Clayton, one of the special features, I think the director's commentary ... he talks about using these seventies lenses (and having a DP who understood using them) that gave the movie a very special look.

Beyond that, I'm sure there are people who can tell you a lot more than I can!

Thanks for all those thoughts, and the info about the Michael Clayton flick and using '70s lenses. Yeah, I can certainly tell there is a 'special' type of cinema feel to '70 movies.

Five Easy Pieces is another good example. It just looks like a bunch of people got together one day and decided to make a movie. No one looks much like a movie star, not even Jack Nicholson. Like a slice of real life.

Looking at 70's movies, you see the hair, very long, on both men and women. The double knit pants on the guys, and the mini skirts and panty hose on the girls.
When filming on location the extras were not professional actors and thus weren't "pretty" as we see in film today. And the BIG cars. All this says 70's for those of us who lived there then. I know that's how I relate to those times.
Also in this film at least we see a nude young lady with a beautiful natural body, unlike the lypo'd, enhanced, botoxed, beauties ? in todays films.
Another film of the period that was an independent, original, written, produced, directed, financed and starred in by the lead actor, who also did his own stunt driving was "Gone in 60 Seconds". That film screams 70's. Although crude by modern standards it has the same look. As one poster commented the lenses or age of the film my also have something to do with the feeling you get from movies of that era.
I think many films were made with small budgets that required real places to film rather than expensive sets. This will give a gritty realism to the picture also.
I rank Vanishing Point, along with Bullitt, Gone In 60 Seconds, and The French Connection as some of the best "Driver's" films of the era ever made. Not for the critic, but for the average "car guy".
A modern car guy "chase" movie that fits in with these earlier works is "Ronin" with Richard DiNero.

The 'look of 70's films' included bell bottom pants, afros, long hair, Elliot Gould, Dustin Hoffman, Barry Newman types (i.e. non-macho looking heros), plus lots of films ending in the death of the lead character. Also, there was plenty of nudity for no other reason then the T&A factor :-).

This is an interesting string, but I need to chime in: I think you need to see these films in 35mm (some, very few in 70mm) to establish any trends. As a film fanatic I saw virtually every studio release in first run during that decade, and as many foreign films and indies (think New World, New Line, Crown, etc.) as possible during the '70s, and they came in all shapes and sizes. The British films, from Ken Russell, Nic Roeg and a dozen other talented directors had a completely different visual style than the American films, with Vanishing Point an interesting hybrid since it was a British production filmed in America. Even Sarafian's British films of the period (late '60s on) look radically different from his American ones. There were also a few far-from-gritty epic films still being made, though for budget reasons the '70s was a decade of mainly low-budget films (RECALL that from '71 through '75 there was a budget cap on all films being made set at $15 million due to the disasters of the '60s, not lifted till independent producers made King Kong and A Bridge to Far in 1976).

So I think that you will need to see 35mm revival prints of a good cross-section of these '70s films to make any judgments. Videos on a tv screen, and that includes Blu Ray, present an entirely different look. And 35mm revivals have another stumbling block in that color fading was a problem back then (Scorsese led the '80s march towards preservation, as even Jaws was faded in all its prints for awhile). The current vogue of reviving '70s porn on DVD shows the pitfall here: those old '70s hardcore films didn't look as crappy firstrun as they do in DVDs transferred from beat-up surviving prints. Similarly, the whole "grindhouse" nostalgia mentality misses the point -many of those B-movies in the '70s were seen in pristene prints -especially to fans early in the run. They only got beat up late in the day when shown in revival double features -Vanishing Point being a good example, as I got to see the film pristene in a sneak preview in Philadelphia before it was released, and 4 or 5 years later was still catching it from time to time at drive-in showings sporting plenty of green vertical lines & scratches, paired with other Fox product including compatible films like The French Connection and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.

I saw 2001 back in 1968 several times (I was one of the many cultists who sat up near the front row to get the full experience) in Cinerama on a vast curved screen, and that experience cannot be simulated at all with either a 35mm print (flat) exhibition or at home on video. Even the visual distortion (notable in the Margaret Tyzack scenes aboard the space station) was part of the "curved" experience.

And not to make this thread any more complex, but I've always felt there was a 'subset' of these '70s flicks - those of the gritty cop dramas of the northeast, particularly NYC. Movies like: The French Connection, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Seven Ups, etc. (There are others, but that's what comes to mind immediately). They were '70 flicks, but they dwelved deeper into the dingy, gritty streets of NYC, New Jersey, and Boston. They always seemed to be filmed in the cold, gray days of autumn where the actors got to wear their Robert Hall or John's Bargain Basement coats, leather jackets, and sporting goofy hats. Good, moody flicks to get into.