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1973 Movies and Legacies of War and Corruption FRANCES GATEWARD If one word succinctly describes the year, it would be crisis. The nation’s economic future looked bleak as the recession continued and inflation spiraled out of control. The prime lending rate of banks climbed to 8 percent. President Nixon ordered a sixty-day price freeze for consumer products in an attempt to provide a cooling-off period. Industries previously considered stable were now struggling to avoid bankruptcy. General Motors, for example, laid off 86,000 workers, adding more unfortunates to the already high unemployment rolls. Straining wallets were not helped by OPEC’s embargo against Western Europe and the United States, motivated by American and European support for Israel during the October Yom Kippur War against Syria and Egypt. The price of heating oil and gasoline skyrocketed, and Congress acted to conserve fuel by lowering the interstate speed limit to fifty-five miles per hour. The Nixon administration, reinaugurated in January, soon began to unravel as investigations into the Watergate scandal began on Capitol Hill. At the same time, the Justice Department revealed that Nixon’s reelection committee had accepted illegal campaign contributions from Gulf Oil, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Braniff Airways, Phillips Petroleum, American Airlines, and Ashland Oil, among others. Vice President Spiro Agnew, under investigation for receiving kickbacks while serving as the governor of Maryland, pleaded nolo contendere to charges of income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of other criminal charges. He resigned his office and was given a three-year suspended sentence and a fine of $10,000. Corruption seemed to be as pervasive in American culture as Coca-Cola and began to show up increasingly on movie screens across the nation. The antagonists in crime thrillers were no longer threats to the social order from without, but rather from within the very institutions whose mandates were to “protect and serve.” “Dirty Harry” Callahan, the tough extra-legal vigilante cop from Don Siegel’s 1971 film, returned to mete out justice in the 95 violence-laden Magnum Force, this time against corrupt cops. Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, based on the true story of Frank Serpico, was a policeman who revealed the bribery and cover-ups plaguing a New York City police precinct. Walking Tall and Billy Jack demonstrated that corruption was not just an urban phenomenon, but also pervaded the seemingly bucolic countryside . In Walking Tall, also based on a real lawman, Buford Pusser returns from the Vietnam War to his rural hometown in Tennessee to find it run by criminal elements who have bribed the local law enforcement to protect their illegal activities. Pusser takes up the role of sheriff and cleans up the town. Similarly, in Billy Jack, the lead character returns from the war to discover that corruption in the form of racism and criminality has similarly affected a town in the Southwest. The direct references to Vietnam through the presence of veterans in these two films speak to the country’s preoccupation and understanding of the psychic costs of the Southeast Asian conflict. The coming-toconsciousness about criminality in the justice system experienced by the returning soldiers mirrored the population’s loss of faith in America’s institutions and mythologies. As citizens withdrew their willingness to support the war, the government was forced to reach a peace settlement, ending the involvement of ground troops in the Vietnam conflict and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn, a pop tune about a man who, having completed his prison sentence, hopes to see a yellow ribbon tied around a tree as a sign of his acceptance when he returns home, was the best-selling single of the year, catapulted to number one by families anxiously awaiting the return of soldiers. The first group of POWs was released as America contended with the trauma of the war, considered the first major defeat of the U.S. military in an armed conflict. The failure of American ideals was literally felt closer to home as the normative definitions of the basic human social unit—the principal form of social control and the primary agent of socialization—continued to disintegrate : the nuclear family. Marriage rates dropped from the previous year as the divorce rates rose steadily. The media’s representation of the breakup of the family began with the groundbreaking PBS documentary “An American Family.” Alan and Susan...

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