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Abstract
Changes in the United States connected with sex, race, gender, and class ("women's liberation," "gay liberation," birth control, abortion rights, minority rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, the lifting of censorship restrictions) - that is, with anti-authoritarianism directed at the patriarchal "Establishment" - had, inevitably, changed the tone of its film industry. Of extremely uneven worth, movies like Bonnie and Clyde, and like the following group of films, not by accident all from the same year - Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969), Medium Cool (1969), Coming Apart (1969), Alice's Restaurant (1969), Butch Cassidi/ and the Sundance Kid (1969), Putney Sivope (1969), and Downhill Racer (1969) - all of these were united in recommending themselves, or being recommended, as sophisticated agents of seized truth, windows on an actual world, which, stripped of illusions and "false" stories, surrendered itself to the camera as to a long-awaited suitor whose triumphant virtue is his realism.