The "Impotent" Male in mid-1970s American Movies

First, I'll explain what I mean by "impotent."
It does not refer to the sexual potency of the male lead. It's a a term I thought of myself years ago to describe the inability of the male protagonist in certain American films of the mid-1970s to resolve the main issue(s) in the film. The term has been in my head for some years, and having just re-watched Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Conversation on TCM a couple of nights ago, it came back to me. So I thought I'd do a piece on my blog to share this idea.

Briefly, in The Conversation, Harry Caul (a masterful performance by Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert assigned by a faceless businessman to tape a certain conversation. Already wracked by guilt over a murder committed as a result of an earlier job, he realizes that this assignment may end similarly, but is unable to prevent it. In the end, he is powerless against, well, the powerful.

There are many more examples of this in films of this time. In Arthur Penn's 1975 Night Moves, Hackman again portrays a man, in this case a detective, who cannot solve the case he's taken on. In John Boorman's earlier Deliverance, it's Mother Nature herself, in the form of vicious rapids, and, er, vicious hillbillies, that defeats the would-be macho men (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty) who think they can take on any challenge. In Alan J. Pakula's 1974 The Parallax View, the protagonist (Warren Beatty) cannot defeat the eponymous mega-corporation.
I'm sure there are lots more examples that come to the mind of anyone reading this.

The big daddy of them all, though, may be Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir, Chinatown. Once again, a detective, this time in 1930s Los Angeles (Jack Nicholson) is up against men of wealth and power, and even though he solves the case, he is powerless to make a difference.
This is a pretty common theme in Polanski's films, which is why I set him apart. From The Tenant right up to Frantic, the male lead (played by Polanski and Harrison Ford, respectively) is decidedly not the victor.


The reasons for this trend? I've thought of a couple:
First, these films came out around the time of the end of the Vietnam War. Veterans had already been coming home to less-than-enthusiastic welcomes for some years, and with the Watergate scandal showing that politicians were as corrupt and cynical as any movie villain, a malaise crept into Hollywood scripts and productions.
I won't be the first (or last) to point out how Hollywood tends to reflect the zeitgeist of American society, and present it back to their audience in movie form.
A similar phenomenon occurred at the end of World War II, with the rise of film noir. These were not the popular genre that they are now - they were low-budget, "B" movies that, with only a few exceptions (The Postman Alway Rings Twice or Double Indemnity, for instance), were not mainstream entertainment. But they did reflect the sometimes helpless or defeated reality of the returning war veteran, just as the films above did for the Vietnam vet. WWII vets were welcomed as heroes, of course. but that didn't make their personal (mental or physical) struggles any the less difficult.

Another influence was certainly the newfound popularity of foreign films in North America at this time. Mainstream theatres were running films by Bertolucci (Last Tango In Paris) or Fellini (Casanova). The "UCLA Film School" bunch, of Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, etc., would have studied European or Asian films as part of their courses, and you can see their influence in some of their earliest films (Coppola's The Rain People; Lucas' THX 1138 - or the heavy influence of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress on Star Wars; Speilberg's Sugarland Express, to name a few). Polanski, of course, came from Europe already.
The male protagonists in these films were often not heroic, but flawed, or even villainous themselves. This would have worked its way into the movies of these writers and directors, along with, as mentioned above, the post-war angst and political cynicism of the times.


So, no, these characters are not sexually impotent. In the course of Chinatown, The Conversation, or Night Moves, the male leads all hook up, as the kids say. They are impotent, or powerless, though, to overcome their personal or professional issues, and the film often ends without "resolution."

I've always been fascinated by these types of movies; they represent more realistic, life-like situations to me. I admit, sometimes, I come away from them a little depressed, but maybe I've invested a little too much emotion in the character or situation. I always hope for a "happy ending," in movies or in real life - that's just how I am.