People like me sometimes get eye-rolled for being among the admittedly large number of people overly nostalgic for the movies of the 1970s. But it’s easy to explain why the period appeals: The notion that films were much more commonly made for actual grown-ups then is borne out simply by noting that the big Christmas releases for 1971 were as follows: A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Polanski’s Macbeth, and savage satire The Hospital. All but the last were “ultra-violent,” and all controversial in their way. (Yes, there was a Disney musical and a James Bond in there, too, but never mind.) The target audience or audiences were different then; there were a lot less one-size-fits-all films, let alone ones with a median demographic of teenagers. The whole family wasn’t

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