You can literally feel the soot and creosote emanating from the screen here. So grubby, dirty, gritty. Cinema verite comes to Beantown. Robert Mitchum was a force of nature.
The combination of Nixon, Kent State, the debt crisis, and Vietnam produced a sort of deep cynicism of the 70s that made the neo-noir a staple of New Hollywood filmmaking. The 1970s is peak American cinema.
One of the most indelible shocks in all my years of watching horror was the image of the man programmatically opening his mouth assuming the position to impale himself on the jagged edge of a scissor. Truly psychotic and macabre stuff.
Another brilliant footnote in the New Hollywood style of filmmaking, and another reason why the 1970s was considered "the peak of bleak".
A psychedelic rollercoaster featuring the unhinged Peter Boyle, who encapsulates the tragically funny Middle American mythos and its relationship to class politics and identity.
Sadly forgotten due to its similarities to Taxi Driver, even though it preceded it, this film draws on eerily prescient themes that show that the
angst of the culture wars is the one social…
