Variously called the American New Wave, the New Hollywood, and the Hollywood Renaissance, the late 1960s and early 1970s is cast as an exceptionally rich moment in American film history. In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Jonathan Kirshner charts how Hollywood film interacted with the social and political transformations of the period to produce what he calls “the seventies film.” Not just a film produced during the decade, for Kirshner the seventies film is a very particular type of commercial cinema, one which challenged the moral vision popular American cinema had previously upheld and confronted the challenges of its historical moment. In the book's prologue, Kirshner writes that his aim is to indicate an “essential interdependence” between the films and the times in which they emerged (2). He suggests we view the seventies film not simply as a reflection of the era, but as “shaped by, and in dialogue with, the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of [its] times” (2).

A key development for the cinema of the 1960s was the gradual slackening of the Hollywood Production Code, which not only removed the prohibition on depictions of taboo subject matter, but, more significantly, unyoked feature films from the edict of moral clarity. Though noted for their explicit portrayals of sex and violence, the more striking achievement of films like Bonnie & Clyde (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Klute (1971) was in their ethically ambivalent characters and overall moral ambiguity – the new Hollywood no longer modeled virtue. The seventies film is therefore more than just the result of lifting a taboo. Kirshner argues that its positive development was to visualize the uncertainty and anxiety endemic to American life in the wake of the 1960s.

Across eight chapters, Kirshner follows the trail of the seventies film through dominant themes of the period, including generational indeterminacy and interiority, the women's movement, the Vietnam War, political paranoia, the questioning of American myth, and urban crisis. Unsurprisingly, Richard M. Nixon is a recurring character and Kirshner convincingly sets the malevolence, delusion, and ubiquitous surveillance of Nixon's White House alongside films like Medium Cool (1969), The Conversation (1974), and The Parallax View (1974). Kirshner also offers compelling perspectives on social transformations. The counterculture and the New Left, he points out, were in many ways enterprises unsupportive of, and often antagonistic to, the women's movement. Women found themselves caught between the sexual revolution and an enduring, and structural, sexism. These uneven developments thread themselves through films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Klute (1971), and Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Kirshner argues that, contrary to much critical commentary, these films embody and negotiate the sexual antagonisms of their era. With similar verve, Kirshner shows how revisionist westerns, paranoia thrillers, and detective films likewise braided historical tensions into their plots, visual style, and thematic preoccupations.

A professor of government at Cornell University, Kirshner is adept at moving between the broad strokes of America's morphology and telling details of its political life. His ongoing characterization of the corruption of the Nixon presidency and the spreading stain of distrust it left on the nation is particularly well rendered and often chilling – no small feat given the mythical status of Nixon's treachery. At times, however, political synopses threaten to overtake attendance to the films. The chronicle of Nixon's disintegrating power opening chapter 6 fills twelve pages before a single film is mentioned. Chapter 5 opens in a similar fashion with five pages dedicated to Nixon's Vietnam War strategy. While these episodes are well described, tighter editing might have kept the “essential interdependence,” otherwise carefully plotted, more focussed.

But there is another, perhaps generational, wrinkle in Kirshner's approach. Kirshner's commitment to a time when movies were passionately debated and discussed reproduces a familiar trope, one reiterated by critics and filmmakers who venerate the New Hollywood era. The idea is that after about the mid-1970s something in American film culture died, in either the audience, the films themselves, or both. The implication, of course, is that movies after the rise of the blockbuster (roughly 1975–77) ceased to matter – a marking of time roughly corresponding with the dawn of postmodern culture and the glossy logic of 1980s capitalism. Yet for many cinephiles, especially those raised on cable, VHS, suburban multiplexes, and film studies classes, the seventies film is not the end but one point in an expanding cinematic geography. Moreover, the suggestion of the seventies film as “a distinct and identifiable era … one that came and went like a window opening and closing” not only forecloses lines of inheritance prior and subsequent to the period (classical Hollywood, whether disavowed, revised, or sustained, is undeniably omnipresent in the 1970s); it also has a chilling effect on the 1980s, when Brian DePalma, Abel Ferrara, David Cronenberg, and many others made commercial films that were formally daring and indelibly marked by their era in precisely the manner Kirshner ascribes to the seventies film (2).

Renewed interest in Hollywood film of the 1970s, evident in documentaries, popular books, and a burgeoning reissue market, has generated myth and hagiography, and Hollywood's Last Golden Age supplies an important corrective to this tendency by substantiating the contexts for key films of the period. Despite its elegiac markings, Kirshner enlivens and energizes his subject, showing the films of this era to be interpenetrated by historical tensions and shifting national horizons. Readers of Hollywood's Last Golden Age will likewise be awakened to the ways that the political rhythms and feeling of this time reverberated through American screens, the way that cinema both announced and brought audiences into the 1970s.