Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Errol Flynn as Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
film depicts British forces as hopelessly outnumbered by
Zulu opponents.
CHALLENGES AND CHANGE:
THE 1970s AND AFTER
With the collapse of the Production Code in 1968 and
the introduction of a ratings system, Hollywood action
films of the 1970s begin to push acceptable boundaries
with respect to screen violence. Arthur Penn’s stylish
gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam
Peckinpah’s elegiac western The Wild Bunch (1969), both
controversial at the time, have been read as important
markers in a move toward a clearly differentiated, adult
form of violent cinema in which scenes of dramatic and
bloody death are vividly portrayed. The series of films
initiated by Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), featuring
Clint Eastwood as the eponymous rogue cop, routinely
feature shocking images of death, violence, and torture.
The 1960s and 1970s saw not only a more explicit
rendition of violence but also a reinvigoration of various
chase and pursuit formats, a process facilitated by new
technologies including more mobile cameras (Action and
Adventure Cinema). For Romao, films such as Bullitt
(1968) work to harness the counter-cultural associations
of rebel masculinity signalled by the automobile, render-
Action and Adventure Films
ing old forms (the car chase) exciting for a new generation
(pp. 139–141).
Informed in a rather different way by anti-traditional
culture and politics, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the
emergence of a cycle of thrillers in which the protagonist
is caught within a bewildering and extensive conspiracy.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) features both brainwashing
by captors during the Korean War (a familiar
construction of Southeast Asia as threatening to the
United States) and a political conspiracy involving the
protagonist’s mother. The director John Frankenheimer
followed up with another conspiratorial thriller, Seven
Days in May (1964), which sees a military coup narrowly
averted. Paranoid traditions continued well into the
1970s with such films as The Parallax View (1974) and
Winter Kills (1979). Typically critics have framed this
tradition in terms of popular scepticism toward official
government in the wake of the Watergate scandal and US
military involvement in Vietnam. Later surveillance/persecution
fantasies, such as Enemy of the State (1998),
Conspiracy Theory (1997), and the futuristic Minority
Report (2002), suggest the more general appeal of this
mode of narrative.
The 1970s also saw the emergence of black action
cinema (sometimes called ‘‘blaxploitation’’) with both
male and female heroes deploying violence, gun power,
and martial arts against oppressive enemies and institutions.
The sports star Fred Williamson (b. 1938) appeared
in a variety of European and US productions during this
period, while Pam Grier (b. 1949) established herself as
an action icon in such films as Coffy (1973) and Foxy
Brown (1974). Many critics regard blaxploitation as a
problematic mode of film production because it typically
employed familiar but unwelcome racial and sexual stereotypes.
Significantly, though, black action films of
the 1970s strongly evince the influence of Hong Kong
filmmaking on American cinema. In particular, the
international stardom achieved by the Hong Kong cinema
martial arts icon Bruce Lee (1940–1973) suggests
the possibility of shifting the seemingly fixed association
between heroism and whiteness in US cinema. Lee’s
premature death, in the same year that his first (and
only) American production, Enter the Dragon (1973),
scored a huge commercial hit, reinforced his iconic
status.
Although some of these films have critical or cult
status, it is worth noting that many black action films,
and other films that potentially troubled traditional configurations
of American heroism, were associated with
low-budget production and/or restricted in their theatrical
distribution. Yet from the end of the 1970s to the
present day, action and adventure films have been associated
with some of the most costly, highly promoted,
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 31