These 8 car movies from 1971 brought hot rubber to silver screen Hagerty 3/4/2021
With the era’s racing films and road movies, James Bond and
Bullitt, the 1960s gave us the genesis of the modern action film, but the decade that followed defined and refined it. Stunts and stunt driving were more impressive than ever, and there was a boom in road movies and car chases. The 1970s is remembered as one of the best and most innovative decades in film, and cool cars were essential to this cinematic evolution.
Road movies like
Bonnie and Clyde and
Easy Rider had been watershed moments in film history, and so the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s became a particularly prolific period for the genre: they reconfigured the western, trading in horses for cars. The American psyche had been fundamentally altered by a tumultuous period, from assassinations to the Vietnam War, and films reflected this change, abandoning the peace and love era for the new decade’s darkness, disillusionment, and fascination with antiheroes. And so the car-centered movies of the early ‘70s would be defined by rebellion and wanderlust and loners on the road in search of new frontiers in dusty muscle cars.