From 'Badlands' to 'Raging Bull,' film series celebrates New Hollywood

In came the rebels, the young Turks, with vision and talent to burn and a collective artistic chip on their shoulders. These hankering American (and a couple of British) filmmakers were infected by a new wave of European and Japanese cinema, from Antonioni to Bergman, Godard to Kurosawa, movies that shook up the form like a snow globe filled with mod ideas, boggling invention and radical inspiration.

It's axiomatic that the late '60s through the early '80s was a revolutionary stretch in American movies. Ambitious young directors Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, William Friedkin and the slightly older Robert Altman marshaled an exciting avant-garde in Hollywood, ready to address sex, violence and psychological, social and political topicality through a deeply personal, brazenly idiosyncratic lens.

This was the so-called New Hollywood, which amazingly worked within the studio system and produced, beginning in the mid-'60s, game-changers such as "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Wild Bunch," "Midnight Cowboy" and, one of the most influential films of the era, if not ever, "Easy Rider." From there we got "M*A*S*H," "Chinatown," "The Godfather," "The French Connection," "Harold and Maude," "Taxi Driver," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Deer Hunter." (This fecund period is famously chronicled in Peter Biskind's 1999 book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.")

The much anticipated Paramount Theatre Summer Film Classics series — starting May 21 with the Bogart double-header "Casablanca" and "The Maltese Falcon," two of the most pleasurable movie entertainments ever made — always offers a robust array of New Hollywood films in its schedule of 80-plus titles. Last summer the series showed "Nashville," "Easy Rider," "The Parallax View," "The Landlord," "Shampoo," "Catch-22," "Annie Hall" and "Jaws."

This year I've tallied 11 movies in the series that fall under that header, spanning 1970 to 1983. I've taken minor liberties, tip-toeing out of the strictest New Hollywood parameters while sticking to its spirit. I believe no heresies have been committed.

Hardly emblematic of the movement is 1977's ‘Black Sunday,' a middling commercial thriller about a terrorist group that wants to bomb the Super Bowl using a blimp. The great John Frankenheimer, better known for '60s corkers such as "The Manchurian Candidate," directs crack '70s character actors Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern. On the same bill, Shaw plays an urban terrorist who hijacks a New York subway for the risibly small ransom of $1 million in 1974's ‘The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three' (which was dreadfully remade last year by Tony Scott and John Travolta). The double feature plays June 13 and 14.

One of the punctuation marks (a grand exclamation point!) of the era is Martin Scorsese's exquisite 1980 ‘Raging Bull,' the bare-knuckled, Paul Schrader-written biopic of boxer Jake Lamotta that won Robert De Niro an Oscar. It plays June 15 and 16 with Scorsese and De Niro's rollicking 1990 gangster saga "Goodfellas." The Ransom Center's Steve Wilson will discuss the making of "Raging Bull" before the June 16 screening. (The Ransom holds the archives of Schrader and De Niro.)

A movie that gets better with each viewing, 1971's ‘The Last Picture Show'limns small-town Texas life in the finest brushstrokes, evoking period and place so strikingly that you know these characters and taste the dust and Coca-Cola. This is Peter Bogdanovich's director's cut, screening June 20 and 21. Co-written by Larry McMurtry from his book, it features an unforgettable cast, including Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman.

Ridley Scott is a Brit, but his second feature, 1979's ‘Alien,'achieved something like Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey": It reinvented the science-fiction film as high art. Don't diminish this movie — the director's cut plays July 2 and 3 — as pulp. Pioneering set design, a cast of top-tier actors and the notion of hostile alien life taken with dead seriousness, "Alien" is the gold standard for all space thrillers since. Watch, and especially listen. The pacing is immaculate, the sound design chilling perfection. A masterpiece.