The “greatest decade in cinema history”, according to Quentin Tarantino
Trying to decide the best ever decade for movies is an incredibly tough ask, like attempting to pick the finest flavour of ice cream or which Conservative MP you would kick in the shins the hardest. But for someone with an ego like Quentin Tarantino, it’s possibly not a surprise that he reckons it could well be the one during which he released his best-known movies.
Personally, if I had to choose, I’d go for the 1970s – not only do you have the gritty New Hollywood dramas like Serpico, but you also get Spielberg’s Jaws, plus some of the finest sci-fi in the likes of Alien.
But let’s be honest, you can probably make a decent argument for any decade from the 1930s onwards as being the best. The 1960s had Cool Hand Luke, Steve McQueen, Disney classics like Mary Poppins and Clint Eastwood; the ‘40s had Casablanca, The Third Man and Citizen Kane; while even the 2000s had The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Rings, There Will Be Blood and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
But Tarantino made his mark on the 1990s, in a very big way, with not just his debut Reservoir Dogs but the astonishing Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown too, not to mention the fact that he wrote True Romance in betwee, with his movies and personality being everywhere during the decade; other directors wanted to copy him, writers wrote screenplays with Tarantino-esque dialogue, actors were desperate to be cast by him, and the wait to see what he did next was tangible. That’s aside from every group of young men walking anywhere suddenly doing it in slow motion while wearing Wayfarers.
Speaking back in 2015 about Steven Spielberg’s then-fear that smaller independent movies could stop being made if big-budget blockbusters flopped, Tarantino told Vulture: “People say that every six years. We all agree that the ’70s – or the ’30s, depending on what you feel – is probably the greatest decade in cinema history, as far as Hollywood cinema is concerned. I think the ’90s is right up there. But people said what Spielberg is saying all through the ’90s, and they said it all through the ’70s (too).”
Tarantino has a point about the 1990s being on a par with the ‘70s, which is borne out when you take a look at the best movies that came out in that decade, from his own efforts to Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Unforgiven, Goodfellas, Toy Story, Heat, Jurassic Park – it’s outrageous when you look back on it really.
It was a decade in which special effects were really starting to come into their own, as seen on movies like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, while a young Paul Thomas Anderson was beginning his career with Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
Now we’re more than halfway through the 2020s it doesn’t seem like we are currently in a ten-year period that’s going to even slightly match up to those classic decades; there are probably many reasons why, but even Tarantino himself has decided to scrap what would have been his tenth film, titled The Movie Critic, and go back to the drawing board.
His last film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, was released at the tail end of the 2010s, and while predictably acclaimed by critics, it fell somewhat flat with the movie-going public, certainly more so than his other two movies in that decade, 2012’s Django Unchained and 2015’s The Hateful Eight.
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