Without resorting to the romantic hyperbole that pervades Peter Biskind's ''Easy Riders, The agent Sue Mengers observed to me back then, ''Movies are becoming like dinosaurs - their bodies are getting bigger and bigger and their brains are getting smallerīut with the passage of time, the artistic landmarks of a period become clearer and the schlock (even if it presaged the future) vanishes into the mist. Misogynistic buddy pictures and bloated disaster epics. For every ''Chinatown'' and ''Godfather,'' I had to sit through dozens of schlocky car-chase movies, brutal revenge fantasies, Occasional success in slipping masterpieces through the system. When I covered that period as a reporter and reviewer for Daily Variety, I felt American movies were in a perilous state of decline, mired in a coarsening process thrown into stark relief by filmmakers' I felt much the same sense of surprise when I began to hear people talk about the early-to-mid-70'sĪs Hollywood's last golden age. Talk about the 1930's as a golden age, when he and other actors remembered those years as a constant struggle to escape mediocre projects. Late in his long career, Melvyn Douglas said he was flabbergasted to hear film buffs Golden Age seldom seems like a golden age when you're living through it.

Critic's Notebook: Hollywood Under the Influence (May 5, 1998).

Despite (or because of) the excesses of the 70's, great films got made.

Easy riders raging bulls review