Five brilliant and brutal old thrillers you’ve never seen
In the ten years between around 1967 and 1977, a succession of directors made some of the most thrilling and action-packed movies imaginable. Dark, gritty and uncompromising, they usually featured troubled, no-nonsense central characters plunged into nightmarish scenarios, playing on the paranoia of a post-cold war, Watergate-obsessed United States, nothing to lose, fearing the motives of everyone around them.
These emerging directors were young, often in their late 20s and early 30s and didn’t want to sugar-coat anything. Some called the movies part of the movement that was New Hollywood, or American New Wave, but whatever they were, they included vicious examples that were as far away from the popular big-budget musicals and Disney films like Mary Poppins as it was possible to get.
Out of this often violent set of films came actors like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, being joined in the 1970s by the likes of Al Pacino in bloody classics like Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico.
Those latter films are some of the more famous examples of the genre, together with The French Connection, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and Terrence Malick’s Badlands. But there are some other lesser known but equally superb movies you might not have heard about. Let’s kick things off with just five…
Targets – (Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
If ever a movie subverted the white picket fence American dream of a family life it’s this one, as first-time director Peter Bogdanovich writes and helms a still-shocking film about a young man from a quiet suburb who one day, unprovoked, decides to use his gun collection to drive around randomly shooting as many people as he can. Just as powerful now, it shows how long America’s mass shootings have been an issue.
Point Blank (Directed by John Boorman, 1967)
Lee Marvin was well- known in Hollywood for his successful Westerns, but in this stylish, head-spinning thriller he put on a suit, grabbed a gun and went on the warpath, looking for the gang that stole his ill-gotten money at Alcatraz, mercilessly dispatching anyone who gets in his way. A perfectly paced 92 minute thriller, it is one of Steven Soderbergh’s favourite films.
The Seven-Ups (Directed by Philip D’Antoni, 1973)
To simplify this one, if you liked Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, and you liked The French Connection, you’ll love The Seven Ups. All three films feature car chases by the same stunt co-ordinator and two years before Jaws, Roy Scheider is brilliant as the head of a unit of bent cops rampaging around in a horribly bleak looking 1970s New York.
Night Moves (Directed by Arthur Penn, 1975)
Another link to The French Connection here as private investigator Gene Hackman is sucked into what at first looks like a simple case of a runaway teenager that needs collecting and bringing home, but soon unravels to land him in a dark, twisted and murderous plot. A neo-noir with some genuinely disturbing moments, it is Hackman at his absolute peak.
Rolling Thunder (Directed by John Flynn, 1977)
Patriotic Americans had absolutely no idea what to do with this: a revenge movie penned by Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader in which a decorated Vietnam war vet returns home to a heroes welcome only to psychologically fall to pieces thanks to terrible PTSD and a robbery at his home that leaves him an amputee. He then proceeds to obliterate anyone no matter how mildly involved they are. Shocking stuff.
