People can complain about the seventies all they want but it was a watershed decade in terms of launching new film genres like disaster movies (Airport, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno), Blaxploitation (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Superfly), conspiracy thrillers (Executive Action, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), Eco-horror/sci-fi (Frogs, Night of the Lepus, Soylent Green) and slasher flicks (Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, Halloween). Arriving later in the decade was the environmental drama as represented by The China Syndrome (1979) and other films that addressed the dangers of nuclear power, man-made toxins and air pollution. Interestingly enough, one of the first movies to address the lethal health hazards of air pollution in the guise of an investigative thriller came from Canada entitled One Man (1977). It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, directed and co-written by Robin Spry and featured Len Cariou in the leading role of a television reporter who is threatened by a powerful corporation over a controversial news story
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The Stiletto Club
Conspiracy thrillers have been a popular subgenre in movies ever since the silent era with such memorable entries as The Ace of Hearts (1921) in which Lon Chaney stars as a member of a secret society that gets rid of people deemed unfit to live among them. Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) is an equally menacing early talkie classic and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), about a brainwashed ex-military hero being controlled by political subversives, is probably the best-known representative of all. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that conspiracy thrillers reached an all-time high in popularity as witnessed by such iconic Hollywood releases as The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Capricorn One (1977) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). Other countries contributed their own variations on the genre like Spain, which released La Casa sin Fronteras (English title: The House Without Frontiers), a deeply unsettling effort from director Pedro Olea, which was made while General Franco was still in power and which prefigures the paranoid scenarios made popular by The Parallax View and others.
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