Quentin Tarantino names the movies that killed Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’: “Dead on arrival”
All good things must come to an end, and when the ‘New Hollywood’ era burst into life towards the end of the 1960s, the writing was on the wall for the ‘Golden Age’. The increasingly irrelevant embers continued to burn for several years, though, even if Quentin Tarantino is adamant that eight films in particular helped hammer the final nail into the coffin.
Ever since the moving image was first invented, cinema has remained in a constant state of evolution. Trends, fads, and crazes come and go, but complete paradigm shifts are much rarer. That said, once it became clear that a new generation of stars, filmmakers, and storytellers was emerging, it was only a matter of time before the landscape became unrecognisable.
1967 was viewed as a pivotal year in the transition from the ‘Golden Age’ to ‘New Hollywood’ with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate leading the charge, but it was the release of Easy Rider two years later that made it undeniable. Just like that, counterculture was in, and it was almost the complete antithesis of what the industry had been for the previous four decades.
The ‘Golden Age’ was a largely star-powered affair, with big names contracted under the studio system to make populist films that traded on their name value and bankability, with little concern paid to any relevant, timely, or resonant themes, at least the mainstream films that were coming from the old ‘Big Five’ of MGM, Warner Bros, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and RKO.
‘New Hollywood’ placed the power in the hands of the auteur, upending the status quo and setting the stage for subversive, dynamic, and uninhibited writers and directors like John Cassavetes, Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, Miloš Forman, Stanley Kubrick, and countless more to take centre stage.
The same was true on the opposite side of the camera, with ‘Golden Age’ staples, including John Wayne, James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Kirk Douglas, being phased out in favour of Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Robert Redford. Try as they might to hold onto former glories, the old guard’s days were well and truly numbered as a sea change washed over Tinseltown.
For Tarantino, an octet of films that were released between December 1969 and December 1970 were the tipping point, and it’s not a coincidence that all of them featured plenty of ‘Golden Age’ staples on either side of the camera, but they instantly felt like movies from another time when ‘New Hollywood’ was gathering pace at such a rapid rate.
“By 1970, this ‘New Hollywood’ was Hollywood,” Tarantino wrote in Cinema Speculation. “And films left over from that other sensibility like Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Blake Edwards’ Darling Lili, Vincente Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Guy Green’s A Walk in the Spring Rain, George Stevens’ The Only Game in Town, William Wyler’s The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz, and Howard Hawks’ Rio Lobo were deemed dead on arrival.”
Between them, Wilder, Edwards, Minnelli, Green, Stevens, Wyler, Hitchcock, and Hawks were responsible for some of the greatest pictures ever made, winning a combined total of 11 Academy Awards from 46 nominations, and Tarantino’s assessment is lent further weight by the fact none of them earned a single competitive Oscar nomination after 1970. They had their moment, but it was time to step aside for the next wave of directorial superstars.
Time is the one thing that nobody can ever escape, and trying to maintain ‘Golden Age’ sensibilities in the burgeoning flames of ‘New Hollywood’ was always doomed to fail.
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