Best decade for film?

The whole gritty realism started to turn up in several film and it's when all the international breakthroughs came for several future big players:

Coppola: The Godfather 1 & 2, Apocalypse Now

The Alien-movies with the female action hero was born.

George Lucas and Star Wars

Comedy matured with Monty Python and movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian.

In the US Mel Brooks did the same with Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein etc.

Martin Scorsese broke through with movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver

Kubrick shocked filmgoers with A Clockwork Orange, a type of film no big director would have dared to make earlier.

Spielberg came into his own with Jaws and later Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Woody Allen with films like Annie Hall and Manhattan.

Actors like Pacino, De Niro and Nicholson became international household name.

Blaxploitation cinema.

The decade also saw some pretty influentual horror movies like The Exorcist, Deliverance and Dawn of the Dead.

And there were the cynical "anti-heroes" the 70's seeemed to need, like Gene Hackman's character in The French Connection, the Dirty Harry-character and actors like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.

for films in general i'd pick the 60s - i like almost every pick in that poll so far. the 30s might be a close second - sunrise, renoir, the marx brothers, lots of screwball...

Fuckit, I'll still pick the nineties. Such a great decade.

Years ago, somebody -- I want to say Molly Haskell -- wrote a piece for the NY Times about how the 70s were a great era for movies in every way but one: they signaled the near-total shutout of women from the center of Hollywood narratives. The writer used the famous final shot of THE GODFATHER -- the door being closed in Kay's face -- as her organizing metaphor. Occasionally you get an actress like Ellen Burstyn or Diane Keaton (or Linda Fiorentino, who had her moment about 10 years ago), but it seems to me the industry gets panicked if they start to get really famous, then shunts them off to the margins for a while.

There are plenty of take-no-shit women on TV, though. I think that's one of the ways in which, and one of the reasons why, TV has become more interesting and more culturally central than the movies.

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/01/genie-was-right.html

Big ups to The T.A.M.I. Show, though.

Night of the Hunter, Seven Samurai, Rear Window, All That Heaven Allows, The 400 Blows, Ugetsu, The Sweet Smell of Success, African Queen, Born Yesterday...

The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, Gold Diggers of 1933, The Thin Man, Bringing Up Baby, Angels With Dirty Faces, Modern Times, The Rules of the Game, A Night at the Opera, Modern Times, Top Hat, King Kong, City Lights, My Man Godfrey...

sheer quantity. genius was falling from the sky. you will never ever see anything like it again in your lifetime. staggering works of art by the score. a good case can be made for the 20's too though.

Plus 1945-55 had a lot goin on.

(sorry!)

I don't know why, but I feel more strongly about most of those films on a gut level than I do about most of my favorites in any other decade.