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The 1960s
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 1970s
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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