ANDREW FERGUSON: Before the Flood.

“In Hollywood during the early 1970s,” [Ronald] Brownstein writes [in his new book, Rock Me on the Water: 1974, The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics], “the boldest statements about America, the most piercing social critiques, came from a large group of other directors who were, like [Robert] Altman, born decades before the boomers.” Aside from Altman, director of M*A*S*H and Nashville, he mentions Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), and Hal Ashby (Coming Home), among others. Indeed, the reactionaries of Brownstein’s account, creating much more traditional, resolutely apolitical movies, were most of them boomers, or close to it: George Lucas (American Graffiti), Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon), and above all Steven Spielberg (Jaws et seq.). Spielberg didn’t succumb to the infection of relevance until The Color Purple in 1985, and even then he spent the rest of the year producing The Goonies.

By the way, Brownstein’s line about “the most piercing social critiques” and “bold statements about America” is just how liberals talk about other liberals; the rest of us are free to translate “piercing social critiques” as “leftwing cant.” Brownstein isn’t an ideologue, though, and he’s too smart to be completely suckered by boomer nostalgia and self-aggrandizement. He knows what’s hard to ignore: Most of the supposed idealism of the ’60s and ’70s turned to dross. At book’s end he tells the revolting tale of Roman Polanski, director of 1974’s best movie, Chinatown, and his conviction a few years later for raping a child. The arc of 1974 is long, and it bends toward pedophilia, at least in Polanski’s case.

Ouch. Similarly, here’s your exit quote, regarding Jane Fonda: “Any decade that transforms a sex kitten into a Maoist cannot be counted a success.”

Read the whole thing.