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 The Cinema industry found itself in crisis in the Sixties.
Television had destroyed its old confidence and had stolen its
traditional audience. Television was cheap, accessible, and quick
to produce. Film making was comparatively slow and cumbersome, and
very expensive.
So Hollywood bounced back by spending ever more money. Ben-Hur
won 11 Oscars in 1960 and set the pattern for much of the decade.
Epics that followed included El Cid, Lawrence of Arabia and
Cleopatra. More humbly, the British film industry kept going with
a series of anti-hero films (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
This Sporting Life, Alfie), but was shaken if not stirred when
Bond came along.
Darryl F Zanuck gambled on recouping the losses he had suffered
over Cleopatra with profits he hoped to make with The Sound Of
Music. He won. Hitchcock lost his touch but made his money with
Psycho, The Birds and Marnie. Towards the end of the decade,
Hollywood abandoned history and entered new alien worlds with
2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
The issues of the Seventies provided fertile ground both for
Hollywood and Europe. A whole series of films reflected the
preoccupations of the world. The war in Vietnam was the subject of
many films, notably The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.
The China
Syndrome was released almost on the day that news broke of the
disaster at Three Mile Island nuclear reactor.
But Hollywood was changing. Tinseltown was invaded by a new
wave of directors - foremost amongst them were Francis Ford
Coppola, Brian de Palma, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin
Scorsese. Between them they directed a fistful of films that made
enormous money at the box office and were critical successes.
The first half of the Eighties saw many "feel good"
movies and everyone felt very secure. The second half of the
decade spawned many films about despair and difficulty. . . Bogus!
Things changed up to the crash of 1987, eventually leading the
way to the nihilism of grunge in the 1990's . . . But if the 80's
are remembered for any particular movie genre, it would have to be
'Teen Movies'.
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