BREAKDOWN: 1975 – Review by Lynn Venhaus

Ah, the good old days of paranoia, conspiracy theories, disillusionment about government institutions, inflation, recession and extraordinary movies coming out of Hollywood.

In this Wayback Machine, called Breakdown: 1975, we travel back 50 years to a pivotal year that defined daring, imaginative filmmaking, and how coincidentally, it happened between the resignation of President Nixon and the Bicentennial birthday celebration.

In Morgan Neville’s well-intentioned documentary, he puts the chaotic 1970s in perspective, touching on how young talented filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg were inspiring a cinematic revolution.

Studios took risks, and moviegoers responded in this heralded New Hollywood. As exuberant as this fertile time was, in real life, America was going through dismal days post-Watergate and Vietnam.

We’d become a nation of cynics. But oh, we could see emerging greats on screen. For those who lived through those years, many movies from 1974 – 1976 are indelible. While this doc puts 1975 in the title, other movies before and after are included, which admittedly, can be a muddled message.

But what a long esteemed list it is: All the President’s Men, Chinatown, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather Part II, Jaws, Marathon Man, Nashville, Network, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Parallax View, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Three Days of the Condor, and more.

For those who were not born yet, this is a period that deserves introspection, a second Golden Age of Hollywood. The classic films are fondly recalled by actors Josh Brolin, Albert Brooks, Ellen Burstyn, Patton Oswalt and Seth Rogen, along with Scorsese and director Oliver Stone.

New York Times critic Wesley Morris astutely takes note of the lack of black representation, and actor Lawrence Hilton Jacobs talks about Cooley High, which came out in 1975. Blaxploitation is touched upon, and the emergence of Richard Pryor as a boundary pusher is mentioned, particularly after his hosting of Saturday Night Live on Dec. 13, 1975, during the groundbreaking first season.

Other thoughtful talking heads include Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote the screenplay of “Nashville,” culture critic Frank Rich, former Variety editor Peter Bart, who worked in the studio system, and Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs and -Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1999).

Neville weaves in copious amounts of film scenes, archival news interviews and newspaper headlines. He has many ideas to get to, and because there are so many points to make, some don’t get as much intention as they should. But this documented transformation of movies is hard to argue with, contrasting the political turmoil and how that influenced passionate young filmmakers.

To revisit Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in their prime is a marvelous refresher course.

Comedy isn’t a focus, and Neville only briefly touches upon Bad News Bears, Young Frankenstein and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. His agenda is narrow, but he does bring up crowd-pleasers with little artistic merit, like Benji for family audiences and The Towering Inferno, part of the disaster movie trend.

And then, just like that, disco and polyester took over the nation, so did The Me Generation, and the zeitgeist changed.

Jodie Foster, whose breakout role in Taxi Driver led to her first Oscar nomination and changed the trajectory of her career, narrates in a calm and steady tone.

Neville is a prolific filmmaker, who won an Oscar in 2014 for the documentary feature “20 Feet from Stardom,” and is known for “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and “Piece by Piece.” He set out to zero in on a pivotal time in America, but that cultural context is broader – and what could be contained in 92 minutes seems like we didn’t get the total big picture.

However, this is an insightful, engaging retrospective that had me at the reel-to-reel tapes of The Conversation while Donna Summer was singing her breakthrough hit Love to Love You Baby.

Perhaps a docuseries could have effectively presented a sharper analysis because there are too many films, genres and influential people to highlight in a short period of time. Yet, he captured the solid gold hits when moviegoing was a food-for-thought adventure.

It mattered. This national turning point shaped me when I was a college student soaking up as many films as possible back then, especially as a future journalist, so my enthusiasm is very high for this cinephile paradise.

Those of us who stood in long lines to see Jaws, The Exorcist, Nashville and Star Wars at single-movie-showing houses, know of this era’s impact, and how unlikely it will ever happen again (although a revolutionary artistic infusion during this currently unsettling time would be welcome).

Here’s to the dreamers, long may you run.