Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (review)

Because film history is so often written with an eye to auteur, genre, or industry studies, books that step outside of these lenses are welcome additions to an ongoing and evolving conversation. Such is the case with the new Star Decades series from Rutgers University Press, which offers a new set of approaches to histories of film and culture. Rather than take a director- or film-centered approach, this set of volumes is devoted to the study of star images from the 1920s to the present day and how their meanings were circulated within their respective decades. The result is a much more nuanced study of film as well as a necessary corrective that expands our understanding of these eras.

In many ways, the 1970s is still one of the most exciting yet contested decades in film scholarship. As film studies came of age in the 1960s and 1970s—and many of the key writers and scholars came of age then also—the academic discipline is also one that relies most firmly on entrenched tropes of authorship, genre revisionism, and nostalgia for the era of the Hollywood renaissance. Nevertheless, the films of the 1970s openly reflected the volatile political issues of their day, including the Vietnam War, civil and women's rights, and Watergate, resulting in an artistic movement and a moment that were uniquely American. Thus, the films of the 1970s marked the transition between old and new guards, the influence of the European art cinema, and the emergence of a fully cine-literate generation of filmmakers.

As the decade has largely been theorized according to the orthodoxy of auteur cinema, any alternative to this approach presents a welcome set of voices to a dialogue that all too often seems closed. James Morrison's edited collection, Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s offers just such a perspective. Morrison has assembled a wide range of essays from a wide range of sources, each of which offers new insights into the cultural significance of previously overlooked yet extremely significant figures within the era. Not only does Hollywood Reborn include essays on the usual suspects of 1970s cinema—Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and, of course, Jane Fonda—but, more importantly, the volume offers comprehensive views of stars who have been previously omitted from this history, including Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972) star Divine, Blaxploitation icon Richard Roundtree, British imports Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave, child-actors such as Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields, as well as aging stars such as Shelley Winters.

Though all of these essays offer excellent correctives to our current account of the era, several of them stand out within the collection. One of these is Chris Cagle's astute essay "Robert Redford and Warren Beatty: Consensus Stars for a Post-Consensus Age." This piece argues that both of these actors achieved their popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s primarily by way of their all-American images but subsequently built on these successes to reflect the new politics in the latter half of the decade. Cagle wisely links the two actors together, outlining not only how their personas changed during the course of the decade but also how both developed their acting styles over time. Cagle also accounts for the prominence of politics within both actors' oeuvres, observing that their burgeoning views were well in line with changes within the mainstream of American society. One of Cagle's best observations pertains to how Beatty's and Redford's roles eventually expanded beyond the boundaries of mere stardom, resulting in what he dubs the "politicized actor-producer-auteur" (49). In this way, he presents both actors as transcending one role or another, resulting in an expanded conception of performers who not only hold power but who sometimes wield more of it than the people behind the camera. Finally, Cagle analyzes the actors' associations with evolving genres in the era. At first, Beatty and Redford served...