Eastwood, George Roy Hill, Jim Jarmusch, Diane
Keaton, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet,
David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Gordon Parks, Sam
Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, John Sayles, Paul
Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and
Gus Van Sant. Typical of Hollywood, males out-
number females. But that ratio is changing, and
reversing the Hollywood tradition, women as well
as African American, Hispanic, and Asian direc-
tors have begun to write and direct movies.
Their guiding principle was not to discard cine-
matic conventions, but to adapt them to the new
audience. In terms of content, the most noticeable
changes were in the predominance of sex and vio-
lence and in the nature of the protagonists, both
male and female. To quote film historians Bruce F.
Mast and Gerald Kawin, “In most cases, the pro-
tagonists... were social misfits, deviates, or out-
laws; the villains were the legal, respectable
defenders of society. The old bad guys became the
good guys; the old good guys, the bad guys.”^15 In a
further twist of traditional gender roles, the female
protagonists in two of the most distinctive movies
of the period, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde(1967)
and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974)—both
insightful analyses of America in the 1930s—were
as evil as, if not more evil than, the men. Although
sex and violence still dominate U.S. movies, there is
a large, appreciative audience for films that tackle
the other serious issues that were formerly the
province primarily of foreign movies that played
only in small “art houses.”
In terms of form, the strongest influences were
such contemporary directors as Ingmar Bergman,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc
Godard, and François Truffaut. Plots became more
complex in structure and embodied new story-
telling techniques. For example, Penn’s Bonnie and
Clyde(1967), which tells the story of two notorious
bank robbers that could have been taken from a
1930s Hollywood model, was easily read by the audi-
ence as a comic/tragic parable of violent, amoral
dissent against an authoritarian social order. Its
style reflects not only the director’s experience as a
Hollywood veteran but also the dynamic of Eisen-
stein’s montage and the surprise of Kurosawa’s
slow-motion violence.
Stories became palpably more sexual and vio-
lent in such movies as Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Peter
Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1969), Sam
Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Bob Rafelson’s474 CHAPTER 10FILM HISTORY
12Femmes fatales in the New American CinemaFaye
Dunaway stars in two of the most important movies of the
New American Cinema: Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde
(1967) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown(1974). As Bonnie
Parker, she participates fully in a bank robbery with two
other members of the fearless, violent Barrow gang: (left to
right) Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) and Clyde Barrow
(Warren Beatty) [1]. In Chinatown[2], she plays Evelyn
Mulwray, the neurotic, scheming liar who tries to outwit J. J.
Gittes (Jack Nicholson, pictured left). In both cases, thanks in
part to the rising feminist movement, these characters are at
least as equal to their male counterparts as they can be. But
Dunaway is also beautiful and seductive, preserving the role
of the classic film-noir femme fatale.
(^15) Mast and Kawin, p. 517.