Everything in the 60s has a kind of halo effect and is automatically cool. 60s is like the early years in Goodfellas when they're stacking cash, 70s is when it starts unraveling. Connery is automatically the best Bond. Beatles are automatically respected by everyone even those who think their songs are lame, and no one could care less about their solo work from the 70s onward.

70s brought us New Hollywood which we're taught to worship by boomers. Give me Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Searchers, El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Spartacus, The Longest Day, 55 Days at Peking, Land of the Pharaohs, The Vikings, HTWWW. Yeah guys The Conversation is a triumph, great Film to sleep through while Hackman rewinds quarter-inch tape and the room temperature drops three degrees. The distinction imho is in command of spatial information. Wyler can put a dozen planes of action into the Circus and never lose eyeline, vector or threat; Mann can stage imperial decline as architecture and lateral pressure; Ford can make a doorway carry more metaphysics than three reels of Pakula lens-flare paranoia. DeMille is supposedly cornball because he understands procession, mass, frontal iconography and the basic fact that a 35mm frame is allowed to contain more than one distressed person near a lamp. Even The Robe, compromised as hell, is at least thinking in CinemaScope rather than treating anamorphic width as fuckin' unused desktop space. There was also a level of physical problem-solving that later auteur piety politely edits out. Canutt, second units, 65mm, crowd choreography, rear projection that had to survive an actual answer print, matte lines you could not bury under seventeen generations of DI sludge, Miklós Rózsa writing enough brass to kill a weak projectionist. Lean, Wyler, Mann, Ford, DeMille, Fleischer: these people had to understand horses, weather, depth, lenses, bodies and geography before somebody could write “alienation” in Sight and Sound. The spectacle picture could be stupid, but it generally knew where everybody was. Imho, New Hollywood’s real achievement was that it discovered that critics would reward attenuation itself: less décor, less score, less movement, less legibility, more zoom, more grain, more withholding, more men staring through glass. Obviously The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Nashville, McCabe....real Films. But there is a whole shelf of canonized 70s objects whose underlying formal proposition is basically that fluorescent light plus institutional malaise equals profundity. The old moguls would have watched ten minutes and asked where the fucking picture was, and imho the irony is that the New Hollywood guys themselves knew this. Spielberg raids DeMille constantly. Lucas understood Lean better than half the people writing about Lean. Scorsese knows Powell, Minnelli and Mann cold. Schrader can sermonize about Bresson all day and still wants you to remember the shot. The actual filmmakers kept stealing from spectacle while the discourse trained viewers to sneer at it. Sometimes Cinema is Heston taking the turn with four abreast while Canutt’s unit turns insurance fraud into montage. Sometimes it is Yul Brynner entering a set like he personally owns forced perspective. Sometimes it is Wayne framed against Ford’s black doorway and you already know what exile means before anyone says it. And sometimes it's Gene Hackman listening to the same tape again.

60s also had more white-ass-niggas going hard as fuck with Operation Northwoods and MKUltra, like deranged fucks who wanted to actually Project Power, protect western civilization, and not just say fuck it and let in 50,000,000k immigrants just to juice GDP and pay into boomer social security.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5906944&forum_id=2#50155884)