It was the year of the Kent State shootings, the Beatles’ breakup, and the birth of Matt Damon and Uma Thurman. At the Academy Awards, it was another year of schizophrenia, as the five nominated films for Best Picture veered from edgy modern cinema to Hollywood pablum.
Perhaps the most ridiculous nominee was Airport, a potboiler that was something of the grand-daddy of the spate of disaster films that would follow in the next few years. Set at a busy airport one snowy evening, it has Dean Martin as a pilot and Burt Lancaster as the airport manager dealing with a bomber on a plane and trying to clear a runway so that plane can land. It has its pleasures in a TV-movie sort of way, but to suggest it was the best film of any year is ludicrous. One of the pleasures of the film is to see how security measures have changed–imagine a man carrying a bomb in his briefacse right onto the plane, or an old lady stowaway (Helen Hayes, who won an Oscar) getting onto the plane without ticket or boarding pass. Lancaster called it a “piece of junk.”
One would be hard-pressed to think of a more different film from Airport than Five Easy Pieces. Directed by Bob Rafelson (the man who gave us the Monkees), it stars Jack Nicholson as a man adrift, an oil rit worker who comes from a family of classical musicians. The enduring legacy of the film is the diner scene, in which Nicholson tries in vain to order a side of wheat toast, which came to symbolize the struggle of the younger generation to get what they want, but the most impactful scene is the end, when Nicholson impulsively hitches a ride with a truck driver, without a coat or his wallet.
In the pablum category is Love Story, the biggest box office earner of the year, based on the best-selling book of the year (written, ironically, by a Harvard professor of classics). The story of young love that is doomed by disease it made stars of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, and gave us the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” which I don’t think is true. Sometimes an apology is in order. My friend saw it when it came out and recalls laughing while others were crying around her. Perhaps the funniest scene is McGraw, on her deathbed, looking like she’s ready for a magazine cover shoot.
M*A*S*H was Robert Altman’s debut film. Today it is overshadowed by the long-running TV series that it spawned, but it is one of my personal favorites; I have probably seen it a dozen times or more. The shambling anti-plot concerns irreverent surgeons during the Korean War, although Altman intended it to be a commentary on Vietnam, and a voiceover at the beginning of the movie announcing, “This is Korea” was added without his consent. This is where we first got the Altman touch of overlapping dialogue. Stars Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould thought Altman didn’t know what he was doing and wanted him fired. Altman’s teenage son, who wrote the song “Suicide Is Painless,” ended up making more money than anyone involved.
The winner was a much more standard war film, Patton, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, from a script co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. It’s a testosterone-fueled epic about the controversial World War II general who was brilliant but what we would call today politically incorrect–he nearly ruined his career by slapping a soldier he thinks is a coward. The opening monologue, with George C. Scott addressing his troops in front of a giant American flag has become a iconic. I also think the context is telling–in 1970 the war in Vietnam was highly unpopular, so Patton was a balm for us to remember a popular war, and a general who loved battle. He says, “America will never lose a war;” he was proved wrong just a few years later. No wonder this was Richard Nixon’s favorite film. Scott deservedly won the Oscar but refused it.
Other winners that year were Glenda Jackson for Women in Love and John Mills for Ryan’s Daughter.
Gone Elsewhere 
Actually seen all of these films (long time since I’ve seen Patton though).
As corny and old-fashioned (even for 1970) as it was, I quite enjoyed ‘Airport’; maybe in part because of its old-fashioned professionalism that seem to have been in all the films forgotten filmmaker George Seaton did. Also, how bad the sequel was and so many of the disaster films of the 1970s were make one more appreciative of it. Read those Lancaster comments before and it comes through in the film, clearly is bored and just going through the motions. In contrast, Dean Martin fully gets into the mood of it.
My favourite of these is ‘Five Easy Pieces’ which I’ve done a review on this site previously (can’t believe I wrote it 12 years ago, time sure does fly on this site)