The 1970s: Exploitation Joins the Mainstream

Abstract

Assaults on the moral probity that had ruled in Hollywood cinema for so long may have been initiated by filmmakers such as Otto Preminger in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was the trumpet call of a new cadre of rebels in the 1970s that really brought down the walls of Jericho. The decade saw a revolution in popular cinema, from the ‘women in prison’ series of films, with their sadistic lesbian warders and inmates in buttocks-exposing shorts and abbreviated halters, to ‘blaxploitation’ movies, with a ballsy Pam Grier taking on The Man while exposing her formidable assets. Through their confrontational tactics, their naked appeal to an ethnic demographic and their testing of boundaries, such films changed the face of mainstream cinema — although they may have lacked any overt artistic intentions.