On Our Way to Where: Women of ’70s Cinema

Writing for Film Quarterly in 1979, Jonathan Rosenbaum called Remember My Name “the most exciting Hollywood fantasy to come along in quite some time” and noted that “Rudolph has said that he wanted to do ‘an update on the themes of the classic woman’s melodramas of the Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford era’; one could also cite the Warner Brothers social protest films of the ’30s as a useful reference point.”

Working with his producer and mentor Robert Altman, Rudolph keeps his audience guessing as to what motivates Geraldine Chaplin’s Emily, “who shambles into a downbeat Los Angeles apartment, ingratiates herself with the landlord (Moses Gunn), finds a job at a store run by a benevolent geek (Jeff Goldblum), clashes with a coworker (Alfre Woodard), and wreaks havoc on a construction worker (Anthony Perkins) and his new wife (Berry Berenson),” as the New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote in 2018. “Chaplin’s performance is a tour de force of frustrated tenderness and impulsive violence” and Rudolph “extracts new cinematic forms from venerable passions.”

In An Unmarried Woman, Jill Clayburgh’s Erica is dumped by her husband (Michael Murphy), mourns her marriage, starts over, and falls for a painter (Alan Bates)—but opts to carry on exploring her newfound independence. In her 2020 essay on this “film of rough-hewn intimacy, keen social observation, and supreme wit,” Angelica Jade Bastién notes that it “seems to hark back to an earlier era in Hollywood, working as a cultural linchpin—at once a bold descendant of women’s pictures from the past and a synthesizing of contemporary feminist concerns that even lightly points to attitudes in the decade to come.”

Each of the nine films in the series screens for four or five days, which leaves room in July for Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), starring Faye Dunaway as a supermodel on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Frank Perry’s Play It as It Lays (1972), an adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel written by Didion and John Gregory Dunne and featuring Tuesday Weld as a chronically depressed actor. In 2017, Melissa Anderson wrote in the Village Voice that both films “are emblematic of the neurasthenic-heroine genre then ascendant—quasi-avant-garde portraits of mentally fractured women whose instability is mirrored in each film’s disjointed sense of time.”

John Berry’s Claudine (1974), stars Diahann Carroll as a single mother of six who strikes up a romance with a garbage collector played by the late James Earl Jones. For Danielle Amir Jackson, the “push and pull between the toughness of Claudine’s circumstances and her grace, manifested in her physical beauty but also in her deftness at problem-solving and air of astute competence, is, for me—and, I suspect, for those I love—key to the film’s realism and enduring appeal.”

August begins with the incomparable Gena Rowlands delivering one of her most arresting turns in John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974). “If you look at it from one end of the telescope,” wrote Kent Jones in 2004, “it’s a hyperrealistic portrait of a woman going mad, a bravura performance in a vaguely working-class setting, a sort of déclassé American version of Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face (1976), without Bergman. From the other end, it’s a richly detailed experience, alternately soaring and gut-wrenching, composed in two long, mighty, almost but not quite unwieldy movements.”

Ellen Burstyn stars in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) as a widow determined to pursue her singing career even after she falls for a hunky rancher (Kris Kristofferson). Fernando F. Croce has called Alice “a comedy of effulgent grubbiness, a pugnacious treatise on melodrama (cf. Aldrich's Autumn Leaves),” and “an ode to the heroine who will have her song heard.”

Sidney J. Furie’s Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1975), starring Jeannie Berlin as a Pennsylvanian looking for love in the big city, has itself not found a whole lot of love over the years. But the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel greeted it with a hearty thumbs-up, calling it “a surprisingly warm and funny tale.”

Five years after breaking through as Michael Corleone’s Waspish wife in The Godfather and just months after resetting 1970s fashion trends with the loose ties, open vests, and flappy khakis she wore in Annie Hall, Diane Keaton swerved, playing a beloved schoolteacher exploring her long-suppressed sexual desires in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). “What makes the film—which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name—so fascinating and repellent at once,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Voice in 2016, “is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.”