The twenty highest-grossing films of the year together suggest some
interesting ways of looking at public taste and attitudes, as well as provid-
ing a film industry bellwether for the rest of the decade. All told, it is not
hard to see a pattern: one group of films examines the dark underside and
deep hypocrisies of American society through a serious lens (The Godfather:
Part II, considerably darker than its predecessor, and Lenny, a brooding biog-
raphy of the brilliant, controversial, and tormented stand-up comedian
Lenny Bruce) or, in the form of disaster films, suggests political/corporate
corruption at the top (The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Airport 1975); another
is broadly concerned with genre parody, revision, and/or explosion (Blazing
Saddles, Young Frankenstein, The Three Musketeers, For Pete’s Sake); another
group might be called generically hybridized “comedies of subversion” (The
Longest Yard, Freebie and the Bean, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot). More generally,
there is an unmistakable gravitation toward nostalgia in films like That’s
Entertainment! Murder on the Orient Express, and The Great Gatsby. Finally,
there is the all but unprecedented mainstreaming of low budget exploita-
tion in films like The Trial of Billy Jack, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, and, exploitation films of a different sort, the family
movies Benji and Herbie Rides Again. These tendencies to a greater or lesser
degree can be seen to inflect nearly all of the commercially and/or artistically
successful films. Some, like The Parallax View, fit nicely into the slot (the
darkly critical paranoid thriller); others, like Chinatown, combine elements of
social/political criticism, genre revision, and nostalgia; but all in their way
look toward the next year’s blockbuster, Jaws, an exploitation film marketed
in classic exploitation-film fashion that mixes genres (monster/suspense/
adventure film) with anti-establishment criticism and sensational thrills.
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Hearts of Darkness: Criticism and Cynicism
Certainly the most interesting films of the year were those
that were explicitly or implicitly critical of American society and institu-
tions, since such films are relatively rare in the American canon. Artistically
and commercially, the most successful work in this category was Francis
Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II, which serves as both prequel and
sequel to Coppola’s 1972 triumph The Godfather. The later film parallels the
rise of young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) in Sicily and early-twentieth-
century America with his son Michael’s (Al Pacino) succession as the new
godfather during the 1950s and his attendant spiritual degeneration in a
welter of familial collapse, political corruption, and murder. The film cross-
cuts between Vito’s story, with Italian dialogue subtitled in English, and
1974 — MOVIES AND POLITICAL TRAUMA 117