The worst era in cinema history, according to the Coen brothers: “The shittiest period”
There’s no such thing as a definitive decade for cinema because anyone with a compelling enough argument can state their case for any given era. It’s an entirely subjective debate, although the Coen brothers know which period they’d call the worst.
Some people look back on the early days of the moving image with rose-tinted nostalgia and dream of a simpler time before the industry fell victim to business and politics, while others have no interest whatsoever in revisiting the classics of a bygone age regardless of their reputations.
In short, people like what they like, and nobody can change their mind about it. For the Coens, they grew up in rural Minnesota and watched whatever they could lay their eyes on. Spending their free time parked in front of the family television, Joel and Ethan didn’t care what the scheduled programming was as long as their eyes remained glued to the screen.
Naturally, that exposed them to the good, the bad, and the ugly. The siblings were only kids at the time, but their opinion on what was rolling off the production pipeline throughout the 1960s hadn’t changed four decades later when they were reflecting on their beginnings shooting homemade films on a Super 8.
“We’d remake what we saw on TV,” Joel admitted to Variety of their earliest inspirations before Ethan drove a dagger through the heart of the decade’s ardent supporters. “We were watching movies from the shittiest period of Hollywood history,” he said. “The ’60s was pretty poor material. Bob Hope movies, but not Bob and Bing Crosby.”
In their defence, it was an evolutionary period for Tinseltown. The last embers of the ‘Golden Age’ were starting to burn out, and the ‘New Hollywood’ brats were lurking over the horizon, waiting to remould the entire industry in their own image, which inevitably left the Coens susceptible to some eclectic efforts.
“We saw a lot of stuff that was programmed by a guy in Minneapolis who had the Joseph E Levine catalogue,” Joel explained. “You would see a Hercules movie one day, and the next day you’d see 8½. And that mix of high and low, we took in.”
To illustrate that point, he singled out Cary Grant’s rom-com That Touch of Mink, Bob Hope’s caper I’ll Take Sweden, and Otto Preminger’s political drama Advise & Consent and three titles that stood out alongside John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, which was released in 1941 but didn’t reach the Coens’ eyeballs until two decades later.
It may have been the decade that gifted the world with Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, Psycho, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia, Once Upon a Time in the West, and countless more, but the Coens don’t see it as a high point.
