What was the first number one movie of the 1970s?
By 1970, the counterculture was beginning to seriously shape Hollywood’s cinema landscape.
Music had long been scored by the new generation of hippies, political activists, and utopian radicals eager to upend the mores of their youth and wrestle a new rock soundtrack for the febrile end of the 1960s. Moulded by this tumultuous era was a cohort of film school graduates raised on a diet of Hollywood’s Golden Age, but eager to inject their own subversion and moral complexity, matching the anti-establishment cynicism racing through the college campuses and street marches.
And so, the New Hollywood era further marked its revolutionary presence in cinema into the 1970s’ first 12 months. Not that the eager crop of auteurs quite dominated yet. While the studios were certainly anxious they’d lost their youth market demographic, a smattering of yesteryear’s genre films and tried-and-tested A-picture feasts still proved popular.
Richard Harris’ frontier A Man Called Horse thriller, epic war biopic Patton, and faithful festive spin of Scrooge starring Albert Finney all felt like projects tethered to the old studio system and still peaked at box office number one.
The likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, or Steven Spielberg had a few years before they’d become household names, but their peers were beginning to nab hefty box office wins. Standing tall among 1970’s top grossers was the Woodstock documentary film, Robert Altman’s war black-comedy MASH, Five Easy Pieces’ early showcase of Jack Nicholson’s everyman anger, and the Jenny drama boasting Harry Nilsson’s ‘Waiting’ theme.
The times they were a-changin’, but, despite a filmland and broader pop culture in serious flux, the first US box office number one came from an already well-established film franchise, and happened to score the year’s gold medal with the highest gross in America.
So, what was the 1970s’ first movie number one?
It shouldn’t have worked. Already into its sixth entry, Eon Productions’ long-running James Bond series was now without its main star, Sean Connery, calling it quits on the 007 spy role after 1967’s You Only Live Twice. Taking a punt on an Australian model with zero credits for film or even TV, save some commercials, George Lazenby was recruited to step into Bond’s famous tuxedo and fill Connery’s almighty shoes for 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
While met with lukewarm critical reception, much umbrage was taken with Lazenby’s perceived lack of charisma and wooden acting, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service would storm the American box office, sitting at number one as 1970 arrived and earning $1.2 million in its opening week, the highest US grossing of the year.
Retrospective acclaim would eventually be showered on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, often touted as one of the finest entries of Bond’s 60-odd year history. During shooting, Lazenby reportedly announced to the crew that his turn as 007 would be his first and last. Connery would return for one more official Bond film for 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, then sign up in 1983 for Taliafilm’s Never Say Never Again while Roger Moore was looking creaky in that year’s Octopussy.
