the 70s whispering in the background
8 titles
Films set in the 1970s where the Vietnam War, Watergate, a presidential campaign or the oil crisis remains in the background of a story about something else. None is a war film or a political thriller.
The war reaches two of them through a single character. In The Holdovers, Mary, the head cook at a New England boarding school, has just lost a son in Vietnam, and the Christmas break of 1970 leaves her on campus with a curmudgeonly teacher and a troublemaker of a student. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War who cannot sleep and takes a night job driving a cab around New York.
Television carries the history in the next two. In The Ice Storm, the Hood family spends Thanksgiving weekend of 1973 in a Connecticut suburb. At the dinner table the adults talk about Watergate, and Richard Nixon keeps turning up on the television. In 20th Century Women, Dorothea, a single mother in 1979 Santa Barbara, and her household sit down to watch President Carter's Crisis of Confidence speech, which he gave while millions of people waited in gas lines.
Two more leave it in the scenery. In The Mastermind, an unemployed family man in a Massachusetts suburb in 1970 sets out on his first art heist, and the film's sets are filled with anti-war leaflets and effigies of Nixon. In Nashville, twenty-four people connected to the music business cross paths over five days in 1970s Tennessee, while a van with a loudspeaker for a presidential candidate nobody sees drives around town.
In the last two, the history is a date and a fuel shortage. In Dazed and Confused, Texas teenagers spend the last day of school in 1976, a year after Saigon fell, cruising town and drinking. In Licorice Pizza, Gary and Alana run around the San Fernando Valley in 1973 while the oil crisis closes Gary's waterbed company and Alana has to steer a truck backward down a hill to reach a gas station.
