The Last Great American Picture Show brings together essays by scholars and writers who chart the changing evaluations of the American cinema of the 1970s, sometimes referred to as the decade of the lost generation, but now more and more recognized as the first New Hollywood, without which the cinema of Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino could not have come into existence.
Identified with directors such as Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and James Toback, American cinema of the 1970s is long overdue for this re-evaluation. Many of the films have not only come back from oblivion, as the benchmark for new directorial talents. They have also become cult films in the video shops and the classics of film courses all over the world.
Table of Contents - 6 Part One Introductions - 8 The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967-1976 - 10 "The Last Good Time We Ever Had": Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema - 20 American Auteur Cinema: The Last - or First - Great Picture Show - 38 Part Two Histories - 72 The Decade When Movies Mattered - 74 A Walking Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction) - 84 The Exploitation Generation. or: How Marginal Movies Came in from the Cold - 108 New Hollywood and the Sixties Melting Pot - 132 Part Three People and Places - 154 Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile - 156 "The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name": The Films of Monte Hellman - 166 Nashville contra Jaws, or "The Imagination of Disaster" Revisited - 196 For Wanda - 224 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and Rock - 250 Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick's War Movie - 268 Part Four Critical Debates - 278 The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero [1975] - 280 Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood's Post-traumatic Cycle (1970-1976) - 294 Grim Fascination: Fingers, James Toback and 1970s American Cinema - 310 Allegories of Post-Fordism in 1970s New Hollywood: Countercultural Combat Films, Conspiracy Thrillers as Genre Recycling - 334 Bibliography - 360 List of Contributors - 372 Pictures (with credits) - 376 Index of Film Titles - 378
