With the collapse of the Production Code in 1968 and the introduction of the ratings system, Hollywood action films of the 1970s begin to push the acceptable boundaries for on-screen violence. Arthur Penn’s stylish gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac western The Wild Bunch (1969), both controversial at the time, were seen as important markers of the movement towards a clearly differentiated, adult form of violent cinema that vividly depicted scenes of dramatic and bloody death. The series of films, initiated by Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), starring Clint Eastwood as the rogue cop of the same name, regularly show shocking depictions of death, violence and torture. The 1960s and 1970s saw not only a more explicit depiction of violence, but also a revival of various chase and pursuit formats, facilitated by new technologies such as mobile cameras (action and adventure cinema). For Romao, films such as Bullitt (1968) work to exploit the countercultural associations of insurgent masculinity signalled by the automobile, making old forms (the car chase) exciting for a new generation.
In the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of anti-traditional culture and politics, a series of thrillers appeared in which the protagonist finds himself inside an amazing and extensive conspiracy. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) tells the story of brainwashing by captors during the Korean War (a well-known construction of Southeast Asia as a threat to the United States), as well as a political conspiracy involving the protagonist’s mother. Director John Frankenheimer followed up with another conspiracy thriller, Seven Days in May (1964), in which a military coup was narrowly averted. The paranoid tradition continued even in the 1970s with films such as A View of Parallax (1974) and Winter Kills (1979). Critics generally frame this tradition in terms of popular skepticism about the official government in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the US military involvement in Vietnam. Later surveillance/persecution fantasies, such as Enemy of the State (1998), Conspiracy Theory (1997), and the futuristic Minority Report (2002), attest to the more general appeal of this mode of storytelling.
The 1970s also saw the emergence of the black action film (sometimes called “blaxploitation”), in which male and female heroes used violence, guns and martial arts against oppressive enemies and institutions. Sports star Fred Williamson (b. 1938) appeared in many European and American films during this period, while Pam Grier (b. 1949) established herself as an action icon in films such as Coffey (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974).
Although some of these films enjoy critical or cult status, it is worth noting that many black action films and other films that potentially disturbed traditional configurations of American heroism were associated with low-budget production and/or limited in their distribution. However, from the late 1970s to the present day, action and adventure films have been associated with some of the most expensive, hyped and highly profitable Hollywood films and franchises. Thus, while the 1970s saw action and adventure forms take on challenging material (both in terms of censorship and mainstream taste), the decade also saw a reinterpretation of the family adventure tradition that continued to do well commercially, if not critically.
The action film, as opposed to the adventure, was significantly redefined in 1980s American cinema: “action” became a widely used term to promote films as generic, rather than to describe a single element of a film’s repertoire of pleasures or type of sequence. Because of its association with the blockbuster, action and adventure cinema is increasingly characterized by the pleasure of spectacle and excess, a showcase for innovations in special effects, including three-dimensional computerized imagery. Action and comedy were also becoming an increasingly common combination, as the serious action films of the 1980s gave way to more or less overt action comedies and brazen mockery of genre conventions and character types, as seen in films such as Con Air (1997) and Charlie’s Angels (2000).
Two male stars are particularly associated with the prominence of the genre in the 1980s: Sylvester Stallone (b. 1946), star of the hugely successful and culturally controversial Rambo series (1982, 1985, 1988), about a vengeful Vietnam veteran’s quest for redemption; and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947), whose film career proved to be much longer than Stallone’s, perhaps due to his greater talent for comedy. The muscular bodies of these stars replaced the general excess associated with 1980s action. By shifting this emphasis to body display, a new group of male action stars became prominent during the 1980s and 1990s, including A-list stars such as Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and Will Smith.