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PaperclipPerfector  8hr ago (text post)   440 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

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It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed off as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch.

What are some of the offending films you have in mind here?

In spite of its critical and commercial success I think The French Connection (1971) epitomises a bunch of the worst tendencies of film of this era, I have never been able to get into it. The extremely shaky, low-quality and chaotic filmography is relentless, and gets tiring to look at after five minutes; in similar fashion the audio is very crunchy. Pacing and plot-wise, it's an otherwise uneventful police procedural that's often disjointed, drags unnecessarily and is saved every now and then by brief spurts of action (I did not actually make it to the famous car chase scene, because I was so underwhelmed by the rest of it). I'm sure this film has its lovers here, but so much of the filming and pacing felt so undercurated that it came off almost like a B-movie at some points.

You can even see some of these tendencies show up in blockbuster crowdpleasers of the era like The Sting (1973). It's not nearly as bad technically and definitely is paced far better, costuming and set dressing is nice, but there's a sort of 1970s stink to it still: it generally feels like it lacks a huge amount of intentionality in the staging department, it's packed full of dialogue that - in its attempts to be authentic/gritty - falls into a middle ground that's neither realistic enough to be believable or dramatic enough to be charming, and just feels like a rather simple caper movie that moves a good bit slower than it should. I am sure time has hurt both of these movies, and I am sure someone else here enjoys these for the very reasons I don't. But referring back to my previous example of Hitchcock, Psycho is old and cheesy as hell, and yet I still find myself thinking "That's some nice framing and presentation" at multiple points during the film (e.g. the shot of the water swirling down the shower drain, which fades into Marion's lifeless eye staring at the viewer while the camera twirls). Also, the man knew how to fucking block a scene. 1970s movies, on the other hand, are just lacking in this same kind of deliberateness.

It's obvious that films of the era were trying to incorporate more subversive elements and experiment with innovative approaches to filmmaking. But there's a fundamental identity crisis at its core, where much of it maintains the quality of trying to be viscerally crowdpleasing while at the same time incorporating some superficial aspects of art cinema into it (slow pacing, lingering shots focusing on small details, irresolution and nonlinearity) without the precise, fine-tuned control and stubborn commitment to a deeply individual aesthetic vision that makes art cinema fascinating even if you end up bouncing off the film. A lot of it is just a very unhappy middle ground for me.

I think lots of modern viewers have trouble with how non-optimized older movies are, and it's not necessarily an attention span thing. Almost every scene or bit of dialog in modern movies is Doing Something or Establishing Something. There's very little fat. Many older movies have stretches that are doing nothing but hanging out with a character or doing some non-essential worldbuilding or spending time on a sideplot that ultimately goes nowhere. This was taken to extreme lengths at times (like The Deer Hunter or Heaven's Gate) but many 60s-70s films have stuff like this. This is probably not applicable to you if you enjoy films like Psycho or The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

I'd be curious what you thought of any Robert Altman movies you've seen. His audio mixing is atrocious and his pacing is all over the place, but it's usually intentional. His framing, presentation, and scenes can all be top-notch.

I've always found The Sting to be stuffy and airless. It's a big studio crowd-pleaser that sanded off too many rough edges to hit the mass-market middle ground (and box office receipts show they nailed it). Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid had amazing scenery, great cinematography, a script by William Goldman, and the ridiculous chemistry of Newman and Redford, whereas The Sting was trying to get by on the latter. I agree with the 70s stink on that one.

There are a number of cop movies from the 60s-70s that suffer from "one-hour police procedural stretched into 2 hours." Bullitt is the prime example. I don't think I'd say French Connection is like that, but maybe it feels that way when the first half-hour of a 1:44 movie is a bunch of stuff establishing what kind of person and cop Hackman's character is.

I actually agree about The French Connection. The wife and I couldn't get past about 30 minutes of it since there was basically nothing going on.

There's definitely some gems among 70s films nevertheless, like The Conversation which feels excellently paced and realistically characterized.

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