New Hollywood is one of the most important artistic movements in modern history. It placed directors, those in charge of movie productions on-set, in an unprecedented position of creative control. For the first time in Hollywood history, directors were given blank checks and full artistic freedom, in a way that not even John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles had been afforded on their own productions. This change transformed American filmmaking into a high art form, and the most essential directors of the New Hollywood movement into artists, treated with the same reverence as painters or poets.

Some of the most influential and acclaimed movie directors in history made their name during New Hollywood’s heyday, including Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Michael Cimino. However, the artistic license these celebrated auteur directors were given for their mainstream releases is now seen as an aberration in Hollywood history, which came to a swift end following the catastrophic financial failure of Cimino’s 1980 movie Heaven’s Gate. Nevertheless, New Hollywood’s defining movies are major cinematic landmarks, shaping both the franchise-driven commercial movies and low-budget, independent filmmaking that followed them.

1

Bonnie And Clyde

1967

Arthur Penn’s 1967 crime movie Bonnie and Clyde is generally viewed as the project that marked the real beginning of New Hollywood. Largely financed by its young star and producer Warren Beatty, the movie was unlike anything that American cinema had seen before it. Bonnie and Clyde’s script was influenced by the movies of French New Wave cinema, and Jean-Luc Godard was very nearly signed on to direct it.

This seminal crime film mixes graphic violence and Sєx scenes with comedy, in experimental forms previously untested on audiences in the United States. It also gave rise to many tropes of the modern road movie, and features several actors who’d become leading figures in the New Hollywood movement, including Beatty, Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman.

The movie’s spectacular commercial success opened the door for typically risk-averse Hollywood studio heads to take a punt on more experimental movies by young filmmakers, covering dark themes in ways previously regarded as taboo in Hollywood. In fact, it’s no coincidence that the Hays Motion Picture Production Code officially ended one year after Bonnie and Clyde’s release, although the code had already been ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the water for the previous decade in practical terms.

2

2001: A Space Odyssey

1968

Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is seen as his best movie by most critics, and it’s hard to argue that the work is one of the greatest ever made for the big screen. 2001: A Space Odyssey was recently praised by Ridley Scott for its prescient portrayal of AI, while the movie’s opening sequence is one of the most imitated and parodied in cinema history. The film’s profound exploration of humanity’s past, present and future, jawdropping visuals and technological wizardry would be groundbreaking in the movie industry today. In 1968, they were positively otherworldly.

At once scientific, ultra-realistic, tactile, surreal, terrifying, alien and abstract, 2001 is a movie with too many layers to count, mapped out beautifully across two hours and 20 minutes in glorious color, with Kubrick trademark clinical precision. Its release was the starting point for so much of modern cinema, single-handedly redefining the sci-fi genre, as well as what it was philosophically possible to contemplate during the course of a feature film, and inspiring dozens of subsequent filmmakers including Scott, Spielberg and George Lucas.

3

Night Of The Living ᴅᴇᴀᴅ

1968

A few years before the horror genre became an altogether different beast in the mid-1970s, two landmark Hollywood success stories in 1968 laid the groundwork for this transformation. One was Roman Polanski’s first Hollywood production Rosemary’s Baby, and the other, arguably even more revolutionary, movie was George A. Romero’s Night of the Living ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. The film’s no-holes-barred approach to graphic, hair-raising death scenes and portrayal of thoroughly human monsters were new phenomena in the horror genre, paving the way for pretty much every other zombie movie that followed, as well asThe Texas Chainsaw Mᴀssacre and other slasher films.

Combining the B-movie aesthetics of Roger Corman’s works with Hitchcock-style suspense and the realism of a contemporary war film, Night of the Living ᴅᴇᴀᴅ still stands up today as one of the scariest horror-movie depictions of a zombie apocalypse. George A. Romero found even more critical and commercial success with his color zombie movie Dawn of the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in 1978, but that movie wasn’t nearly as transformative for horror cinema as his seminal work a decade earlier.

4

Easy Rider

1969

If Bonnie and Clyde started Hollywood’s journey towards the great modern road trip movie, then Dennis Hopper’s 1969 movie Easy Rider took American cinema the rest of the way there. While the journey that Hopper’s character Billy and his fellow biker Wyatt, played by Peter Fonda, ostensibly have an end point to their journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans, the movie itself doesn’t really have anywhere to go. Nothing more than Mardi Gras is motivating its two protagonists, small-time drug smugglers who are a far cry from traditional Hollywood heroes, to ride their choppers across the United States.

Easy Rider unapologetically indulges in their carefree pursuit of a good time, steadfastly refusing to superimpose meaning onto any one of their stops along the way. Even their journey’s endpoint doesn’t seem to have any greater significance other than the experience it gives Wyatt and Billy, while the movie’s tragic ending comes as a sudden and unexpected shock to the system. Easy Rider showed just how little New Hollywood needed to adhere to the traditional hero’s journey to make an intense, powerful and immensely entertaining film.

5

The Godfather

1972

It might seem odd, at first, to define Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1972 crime epic The Godfather as a New Hollywood movie. In the decades since its release, the work has become so celebrated that it’s taken on a certain timeless quality, seemingly standing apart from its cinematic context. However, it’s important to remember that if The Godfather hadn’t been produced during the peak of New Hollywood, it would likely never have been greenlit as a project.

Paramount Studios took a major risk giving relatively unknown, 31-year-old director Francis Ford Coppola $6 million to adapt what was essentially considered a work of pulp fiction for the big screen. Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather may have been a bestseller, but it was far removed from the kind of material which was traditionally adapted into summer blockbusters capable of pulling in tens of millions at the box office. What’s more, much to Paramount’s surprise Coppola wanted to cast Marlon Brando as The Godfather’s lead, at a time when Brando was considered “box office poison”.

That Coppola got his way, not only with the casting of Brando, but with hiring screen-acting newcomer Al Pacino for the role of Michael Corleone, is a reflection of how things went during the era of New Hollywood. The young director made a movie widely thought of as the greatest of the past 50 years, if not the best movie of all time. He couldn’t have done so without doing it on his own terms, the way only a New Hollywood auteur could.

6

Mean Streets

1973

Francis Ford Coppola is just one of several Italian-American directors from the East Coast of the United States to have been at the forefront of the New Hollywood movement, alongside Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma, and, most prominently, Martin Scorsese. Mean Streets is Scorsese’s first great movie, foreshadowing his entire oeuvre with its gritty depiction of New York’s criminal underbelly. The film was also the one that put both Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, two of the greatest actors to have come out of the New Hollywood movement, on the map.

Scorsese’s later works like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas might get more attention in conversations about all-time greats, but Mean Streets is the one that established what a movie directed by Martin Scorsese looks, sounds and feels like. It also exemplified a new way of filmmaking, turning the crime genre, which had traditionally been populated by stock characters and set in godforsaken places removed from the worlds of ordinary people, upside down.

Scorsese’s criminals are within the real world of New York City, could be part of our everyday lives, and have complex and ambiguous characteristics. In some ways, how real they are makes them more frightening than the James Cagney and Richard Conte characters of crime movies in decades gone by. The gritty realism that Scorsese brought to the crime genre is perhaps one of New Hollywood’s most recognizable traits.

7

The Exorcist

1973

If we were to separate horror cinema into two categories, the most obvious and straightforward categories we could choose would be movies released before and after The Exorcist. William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic is still the yardstick by which all other movies in the genre are measured, in terms of both the genuine fear and the outright repulsion they instill in their audience. As with The Godfather in the crime genre, it’s a horror movie that would never have gotten made without the unusual level of artistic freedom afforded to its creators by New Hollywood.

Apart from pushing the boundaries of violence, visual and verbal obscenity, and gross-out horror far beyond anything that Hollywood had witnessed to that point, The Exorcist is one of the scariest movies of all time by any measure. It doesn’t rely on genre gimmicks to succeed, but employs groundbreaking horror tropes to its advantage in telling a story that’s engrossing and petrifying in equal measure.

8

Chinatown

1974

Aside from Roman Polanski’s direction and extraordinary performances from Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, Chinatown is synonymous with an aspect of New Hollywood filmmaking that often gets overlooked. The movie’s screenplay, written by Roger Corman-collaborator Robert Towne, is generally regarded as the greatest film script ever put down on paper. Chinatown blends the real story of how the California water wars helped develop Hollywood into the global heart of the movie industry with a razor-sharp noir narrative, which features one of the most unspeakably evil characters ever committed to film.

Although Nicholson’s New Hollywood period is perhaps best encapsulated by his memorable roles in Miloš Forman’s 1975 classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in Chinatown he plays against type superbly as PI Jake Gittes. Huston is effortlessly menacing as depraved financier Noah Cross, and Dunaway is at her most emotive as Cross’ daughter Evelyn. The movie is unflinchingly sinister, free from any semblance of justice or happy ending that would have been forced upon it during Hollywood’s Golden Age. This is New Hollywood at its dark, brilliant best.

9

Dog Day Afternoon

1975

During the mid-1970s, spurred on by the advent of New Hollywood, visionary director Sidney Lumet went on a historic run of making cinematic classics. Lumet had already been a highly acclaimed filmmaker before this period, ever since his 1957 feature film debut 12 Angry Men. With the release of his 1973 crime movie, Serpico, however, his status was elevated to a whole new plane. Lumet’s most beloved film is probably the jet-black satire that he made three years later, Network. But his defining New Hollywood work has to be a movie he made in between, 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon.

Featuring the only other Al Pacino performance to rival his rival in the Godfather trilogy, Dog Day Afternoon’s true story of a heist gone wrong has all the hallmarks of a New Hollywood great. Its depiction of an attempted bank robbery at close quarters is agonisingly tense, with every character involved, whatever side they’re on, unquestionably a real human being.

The movie doesn’t shirk a subplot in its story that was controversial at the time, involving a transgender character who’s portrayed sympathetically as the victim of desperate financial circumstances. Meanwhile, protagonists Sonny Wortzik and Sal Naturile are, in many ways, quintessential New Hollywood antiheroes. They’re social outcasts who, through a violent, criminal act that challenges the established order, manage to win the audience over to their side. Of course, this being New Hollywood, tragedy ultimately prevails over genuine justice for Sonny and Sal.

10

Heaven’s Gate

1980

In retrospect, Michael Cimino’s three-hour, 39-minute Western epic Heaven’s Gate is rightly held up as one of New Hollywood’s final masterpieces. At the time of its release, though, the movie was the final nail in the coffin of unbridled, big-budget auteur cinema, as it became the most colossal financial loss for a Hollywood studio of all time up to that point. In fact, its distributor United Artists had to be bought by MGM out the year after its release to pay for this biggest of box office bombs.

Heaven’s Gate is unquestionably lengthy for its story and indulgent in parts, and is all the better for it. It contains some of the greatest visual spectacles of the New Hollywood era, and some excellent performances that Cimino exacted from his talented cast. The movie simply came at the wrong time, as the arrival of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, George Lucas’ Star Wars and John Carpenter’s Halloween in the second half of the 1970s had already signaled the beginning of the end for New Hollywood.

In franchise filmmaking, major studios had found a more bankable way to invest their bucks, and any director looking to make something niche or experimental would have to find a cost-effective way of doing so, or put their ideas back on the shelf. The benefit of hindsight has allowed for the rehabilitation of Heaven’s Gate via the 2012 Venice Film Festival. It now stands as one last totemic monument to New Hollywood, before the movement gave way to blockbuster cinema.