There's a lot of 1950-1980 independent trash cinema here... horror movies, exploitation movies, drive-in movies, adult movies, 1960s sexploitation movies. The individual films aren't all great but taken together they tell a cultural story as interesting as the the parallel 1950-1980 Hollywood studio story.

Silent movies crossed language barriers; 90% of the story was visual and cutting in new title cards was much simpler than re-recording an entire soundtrack or superimposing subtitles. In the late 1920s world cinema flirted with coalescence. In America I think the first Oscar-winning actor was German great Emil Jannings. Did Jannings speak English? I don't remember... it wasn't an issue. Louise Brooks' greatest movies were made in Germany. World War One had been over long enough that European studios were making  French-German-English versions of movies with mixed French, German and English casts. Over time the profit implications of world-wide acceptance would probably have have driven the evolution of a global trans-national film style. The political implications of smoothing out cultural distinctions in the preeminent mass medium would have been tremendous.

Then sound recording came along and, like Yahweh over the Tower of Babel, split men back into tribes. Splintering the European markets was a boon for Hollywood, easily the biggest single national industry. Funny coincidence: within ten years half the countries in Europe had lost or abandoned democracy and the world's biggest war was breaking out. I'm not saying THE JAZZ SINGER caused Nazism or the Russian consolidation of eastern Europe but given the way things turned out it's hard to argue it helped matters. (Check out CINEMA EUROPE: THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD for an interesting overview of international 1920s cinema.)

The 1950-1980 period saw a different kind of coalescence. I don't have a compact theory of it, but to my eyes from the 1950s-1970s all national styles and genres were drifting toward a common attractor. LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972) looks like an art film, a Hollywood film, a French film, a porn film, a drama, an exploitation movie, a home movie, a TV movie... what the hell was it? JOE (1970) also hits me that way. You can't tell if it's a  Hollywood, art-house or "adults only" drive-in movie. Then movies flew apart again. Suburbanization and social reaction divided mainstream Hollywood theatres from art-houses and adult theatres. STAR WARS came along. Then the VCR lead to ghettoization of movies into thematic sections in video stores, which led to accelerated speciation of genres.

What I perceive as a period of coalescence happened to be the period of maximum competition from television. (After 1980 Hollywood picked up secondary income streams from home video and cable that eased the situation.) Censored 1950-1965 Hollywood couldn't be much more daring than television. Meanwhile television made people more comfortable with cheap production techniques. So the market grew for cheap movies that exceeded Hollywood code limits; both home-grown exploitation and racy foreign art movies. Meanwhile, the explosive 1950s-1960s teenage market created niches for really cheap horror movies and anything else aimed at indiscriminate teen audiences. And competition from TV hurt badly enough that many theatres were looking for anything that might put people in seats. All around it was a growth environment for trash cinema.

1960s Hollywood was completely lost. Why did THE GRADUATE and EASY RIDER made so much money? Nobody knew. Competition from trash and TV encouraged Hollywood to scrap censorship by the mid-1960s. By 1970 Hollywood exceeded the "candor" of 1960s exploitation movies. That forced the exploitation business to push ahead to more exploitive exploitation movies, gorier horror movies and more explicit sex movies.

I'm guessing that EASY RIDER and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD were the two most profitable (in % terms) late 1960s movies. Money legitimizes anything, so throughout the 1970s Hollywood movies became more gritty and immediate. Independent exploitation and horror became really gritty and immediate. Ironically, porn movies got glossier and more conventional in tone while Hollywood and the independent scene was getting grittier, so everything converged.

During 1975-1977 you couldn't automatically tell whether you were watching a Hollywood movie, a foreign film, a porn movie or an exploitation movie. The 1976 Oscar went to ROCKY, a movie that looks exactly like an exploitation movie. There were probably five adult movies made in 1976 with superior production values. ROCKY was directed by John Avildsen who had directed some awful soft-x sexploitation comedies and the magnificent JOE, the ultimate Hollywood-Exploitation genre cross-over movie.

Long-story-short: I think 1950s-1970s trash movies are interesting. They are also original source documents of the West's greatest cultural upheaval since the reformation, and sometimes pretty entertaining.

Part 4: Movies I Love

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