10 Classic '70s Movies That Have Not Aged Well

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The 1970s were among the most transformative decades for filmmaking, especially in Hollywood. The cultural clashes of the '60s had given way to the young, brash, rule-breaking New Hollywood filmmakers who rejected the strict moral hand-wringing and often suffocating formula enforced by the studio system and the Hays Code. At the same time, as these filmmakers depicted morally gray anti-heroes in a paranoid, cynical era, the new statesmen of big-budget blockbusters were just getting started — the likes of "Jaws" and "Star Wars" would reinvent the way Hollywood approached its entire business model, leading to crowd-drawing tentpole pictures that would be fully consummated by the time the 1980s rolled around.

Indeed, the 1970s were full of change and masterpieces, which we've collected in our list of the best films of the '70s. But the decade also ended over 45 years ago, which means there are plenty of films that were contemporary hits and haven't survived the transition into a modern era. That could be for a number of reasons: updated audience expectations, changing cultural sensitivities, and approaches that were perhaps novel at the time but, under renewed scrutiny, don't actually hold up. Inevitably, as time marches on, certain films will be relegated to the status of vestiges of a bygone period, still affording value in understanding our cultural history. The films on this list have ideas and concepts that have withered over the decades, but their insights still remain invaluable.

Here are 10 classic '70s movies that have not aged well.

Universal Pictures

Clint Eastwood has a fascinating filmography both in front of and behind the camera, and I hate to pick on such an interesting artist too harshly. That said, the man had some strange output in the '70s, when he was just settling into the role of director, so "Breezy" will be the first of a few Eastwood ventures from the decade. This is the third film he directed and the first not to star him, instead handing the spotlight to newcomer Kay Lenz as the free-spirited hippie Breezy, who attaches herself to the stubborn, aging real estate salesman Frank (William Holden). The two develop a friendship... and then something more.

Aside from multiple Eastwood projects populating this list, this is also the first of another recurring trend: earnest, mishandled age-gap relationships. "Breezy" has a cursory interest in the disparate perceptions of the world as seen by generations at odds with each other, and perhaps there's some trenchant social critique buried in the way Frank staves off, yet eventually gives in to, Breezy's liberated charms. But if it's there, it's hard to latch onto, and the film ends up coming off more as an earnest study of characters giving in to their troubling desires rather than a keen sociological thesis.

To be fair, "Breezy" has some innate pleasures: It's handsomely shot, and some of the early back-and-forth between Holden and Lenz, when it appears their characters may take on a quasi-parent-child relationship rather than a romantic one, is endearing and played with a frequently amusing naturalism. To be certain, despite being an underseen film of his, Eastwood diehards should still check it out. Just don't expect a particularly lucid take on its sensitive material.

20th Century Fox

Robert Altman's breakthrough was a hit nobody expected: a shaggy, overlapping-dialogue comedy about a Korean War medical unit that, as was commonly understood, was really about Vietnam. It won the Palme d'Or, made stars of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland, and set the template Altman spent the rest of his career refining — the loose ensemble, the background noise, the anti-institutional prodding. Its shadow looms large. Without it, there's no "M*A*S*H" television series — of which Altman made known his distaste — and the sensibilities of the modern ensemble comedy writ large might not have taken shape.

It's also, some 50 years on, a movie whose idea of humor often lands in the realm of cruelty. The film's recurring targets are Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), and its signature set piece, in which some of the cadets rig a shower tent to expose Houlihan naked in front of the whole camp, now plays less like anti-authoritarian mischief and more like a group of lewd guys getting away with something. The film has minimal interest in her interiority beyond humiliation, and its version of camaraderie leans hard on a sense of misogyny that was a central strain of the cultural DNA in the '70s, a dynamic that just doesn't play in a film like this today.

That said, it's an Altman film, so there's stuff that works: the gallows humor, the sound design, the moments when the anger at institutions that swallow individuals whole actually finds a meaningful outlet. But that persona of callousness tends to override the sharper ideas trying to surface.

American International Pictures

"The Amityville Horror" made its money in 1979 on a premise its marketing insisted was true: that George and Kathy Lutz (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) moved into a Long Island house and fled 28 days later, chased out by a demonic presence tied to the house's grisly history — namely, the 1974 murders of the DeFeo family, all six of them shot in their beds by their own son, Ronald DeFeo Jr.

The film, adapted from Jay Anson's bestselling book, draws its haunted-house scares directly from that real, relatively recent mass killing, using the actual deaths as connective tissue and atmosphere for a fictional haunting that, as journalists and even the Lutzes' own attorney later acknowledged, appears to have been substantially embellished, if not outright invented, for profit. There's something queasy about a film built almost entirely on cashing in on someone else's tragedy under the guise of nonfiction, and the film sets the stage for other "true story" haunting pictures that would be produced for decades, the most recent being an entire cinematic universe-style franchise in service of the charlatans known as the Warrens with "The Conjuring" films. (To make matters worse, in terms of both a lack of ethical standards and the subjecting of viewers to terrible films, it also spawned a truly insane number of "Amityville"-branded movies.)

Set all that aside, and what's left is a plodding haunted-house movie, competently shot and reliant on Rod Steiger's scenery-chewing turn as the tormented Father Delaney. It has enduring qualities that made it a hit in the first place, such as the uneasy atmosphere born from oozing walls and buzzing flies, but the film's pace sags greatly in the middle stretch, never justifying its runtime or actually offering the audience anything all that scary.

Universal Pictures

We already talked about Clint Eastwood's third-directed film, "Breezy," but his fourth film doesn't hold up much better. Released two years after "Breezy" and based on a hit novel by the author Trevanian, "The Eiger Sanction" is Eastwood's attempt to cast himself in a James Bond-esque, globetrotting espionage flick. It's complete with an eccentric villain — an albino goon named Dragon (Thayer David) who requires blood transfusions — gunplay amid government conspiracies, and super regressive stereotyping, such as the Black pseudo-Bond girl that Clint befriends, named Jemima Brown. Yes, Jemima Brown, about which Eastwood makes a bunch of jokes.

But "The Eiger Sanction" is an even stranger beast than it appears on the surface. The original novel was well known as a Bond spoof, lampooning the very retrograde ideas that result in a character named Jemima Brown. Eastwood doesn't have a satirical bone in his body, so it's a parody played straight. Eastwood is the hero jaunting through a world of ridiculous characters and scenarios, including a training montage in which the only thing that keeps him going is his Native American trainer, who takes her top off for him.

Strangest of all, the final section of "The Eiger Sanction" is full of insane, ridiculous stunt work that makes the film worth watching on its own. Suffer through Eastwood trying to mug his way into being an aloof special-operative badass, and you get the climactic scenes set on the actual Swiss mountain, the Eiger, known to locals as the "Murder Wall" because it's such an arduous venture for climbing enthusiasts. Eastwood insisted on doing his own stunts and capturing authentic footage by venturing up the mountain, resulting in electrifying filmmaking and, unfortunately, the death of one of the film's stuntmen.

Paramount Pictures

Arthur Hiller's "Love Story" was a 1970s cultural juggernaut, adapted from Erich Segal's novella (itself expanded from his own screenplay) into the year's highest-grossing film and an Oscar nominee seven times over. Ryan O'Neal plays Oliver, a preppy Harvard hockey player and heir to a WASP fortune, who falls for Jenny (Ali MacGraw), a wisecracking, working-class Radcliffe girl. They marry against his father's wishes, scrape by while Oliver finishes law school, and just as things start looking up, Jenny is diagnosed with a vague, movie-friendly terminal illness that leaves her lovelier and more serene with each scene.

The class-conflict stuff has some era-appropriate bite early on, and MacGraw's motor-mouthed charm paper-overs a script that's really just a mechanism to get to the orchestrated manipulation in the back half. But "Love Story," at its core, is a machine built to make its audience cry, one whose emotional engineering is now obvious and rankling. Jenny's illness is never named and never allowed to be perceived as an actual sickness: it leaves the character photogenic and articulate as she dispenses sappy wisdom from a hospital bed for the audience to take home and recite, teary-eyed. Meanwhile, "love means never having to say you're sorry," the line that became a pop-culture catchphrase, sounds less like romantic profundity and more like meaningless drivel mistaken for insight.

It has a beneficial slickness — it wasn't a hit for nothing, and it's historically significant as the film that made the modern Hollywood weepie commercially viable again. But if it's a deeply felt movie with realistically drawn characters and emotions you're looking for, this isn't it.

20th Century-Fox

Richard Donner's "The Omen" arrived in 1976 riding the commercial wake of "The Exorcist," another handsomely mounted entry in the era's fleeting vogue for prestige demonic horror. This one stars Gregory Peck as an American diplomat slowly convinced that his young son is the literal Antichrist — we've all been there, haven't we, folks?

Donner, a journeyman TV director making the leap to prestige feature filmmaking, approaches the material with a stately reserve: wide, mannerly frames, unhurried pacing, and a general sense that everyone involved is treating it as a somber international drama that happens to have a Satanic child at its center. That restraint read as classy 1976 — in 2026, the effect errs toward inertness. 

Long stretches of "The Omen" play out as a procedural investigation, as Peck runs around '70s Europe looking for the heritage of his adopted child, while some "Final Destination"-esque environmental-based deaths start piling up around him. Those more elaborate sequences are enough to occasionally snap the film awake, but otherwise the film feels too concentrated on remaining strangely decorous when it should be more panicked and dynamic.

The film is just a little too stuffy to really be scary, crafted with a sturdy hand but one that isn't best suited to a horror film that would benefit from being more fully wrapped up in the eroding psyche of its lead character. The film's real-life curse that haunted the set may be scarier than the movie itself.

Universal Pictures

"National Lampoon's Animal House" turned a scrappy humor magazine's sensibility into a genuine cultural phenomenon in 1978, launching John Belushi to stardom, minting the slobs-versus-snobs formula that would fuel campus comedies for decades, and becoming one of the year's biggest box-office hits (a development not everyone at National Lampoon was happy with). Director John Landis and a script by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller distill heightened ideas of fraternity anarchy, and large stretches of it are still genuinely funny, especially Belushi's entire drunken performance.

But much has curdled with age, especially the overarching throughline of humor centered on these simple, churlish college guys trying to pick up girls who want nothing to do with them. The film doesn't feel like it's investigating the leering, gross nature of frat culture so much as using it for comedic leverage in the screenplay, with the viewer meant to laugh along. A late-night encounter Pinto (Tom Hulce) has with Clorette (Sarah Holcomb), the mayor's passed-out, visibly underage daughter, while a cartoon angel and devil on his shoulders debate whether he should take advantage of her, feels like the film is playing with a dangerous brand of humor it can't properly reckon with.

That said, "Animal House" remains an influential, occasionally riotous comedy, the reasons for its legacy obvious in the ensemble and college-centered comedies that would follow in its wake. It's just one whose most anarchic impulses aren't always aimed at the right targets.

United Artists

Talking about any Woody Allen movie nowadays comes with the added labor of figuring out how to address the elephant in the room, which is maybe not such a hard thing to do with "Manhattan." This black-and-white love letter to New York is, on craft terms, a stunning work — Gordon Willis's cinematography ennobles the stature of NYC, and it's enhanced by the fabulous soundtrack of George Gershwin music.

The story is where it gets a little dicey: Allen plays Issac, a twice-divorced TV writer dating a 17-year-old high schooler named Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a relationship the film treats as basically sweet and grounding, even as Issac spends most of the runtime trying to talk himself out of it in favor of Diane Keaton's more age-appropriate and neurotic Mary.

Even divorced from its writer-director's subsequent history, the central relationship was never entirely comfortable. There's a queasiness to how Allen handles the power dynamic, with Tracy characterized as wiser and more emotionally grounded than all the adults in her orbit, thereby presumably offering some measure of reconciliation for the age gap. Otherwise, it feels impossible to separate "Manhattan" from what came after: the allegations, the marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, and the decades of public reckoning with Allen's relationships with much younger women. Allen's once-charming neuroses have soured into the less charming or romantic reality of a man telling on himself in plain sight.

Warner Bros.

The last Eastwood picture on this list is not one he directed, but it is the first film in a pair of his biggest hits as a movie star. "Every Which Way But Loose" demolished the box office on the back of its simple, silly premise: it pairs Clint up with an orangutan named Clyde, and the two basically hang out for the length of the movie.

This was a controversial project for Eastwood to choose, as his business colleagues and associates tried to convince him that the film was destined to be a flop and would pigeonhole him as the guy in the monkey movie. This was an early example of Eastwood following his gut when choosing a project. It paid off: "Every Which Way But Loose" was the second-highest-grossing film of 1978, attracting adult Eastwood fans and children alike with its fantastical premise and PG rating.

That's great and all, but today this movie really just plays like what Eastwood's cohorts thought it would be: an exceedingly strange detour in which one of cinema's most iconic screen stars tries to pad out two hours with buddy-comedy bits featuring an orangutan, and otherwise trying to pick up a girl or getting into fights with guys. To be clear, there's a novelty there that still plays in flashes, but this is mostly an overly shaggy, haphazard movie whose premise doesn't sell itself as strongly as it did nearly 50 years ago.

Paramount Pictures

"Pretty Baby" was an early Hollywood effort to ruin actress Brooke Shields. Louis Malle's first American film arrived in 1978 trailing arthouse pedigree — a French New Wave veteran adapting the photographs of E.J. Bellocq, the documentarian of Storyville, New Orleans' turn-of-the-century red-light district. A 12-year-old Shields plays Violet, who grows up among the workers of a brothel, and the film treats the auctioning of her virginity as a rite of passage. It is, of course, a horror, particularly when the film pairs her with the adult photographer who's been taking her picture (Keith Carradine).

At the time, this was defended as serious art. Sven Nykvist's warm, painterly cinematography, admittedly, lends some visual intelligence and congruity to the film's settings, and the likes of Susan Sarandon as Violet's mother afford some desperately needed outside credibility.

Otherwise, "Pretty Baby" has aged with a reprehensibility that's hard for other films to match. What was once a matter of critical debate is now close to unwatchable, as its ambiguity about Violet's exploitation reads less like nuance and more like an avoidance of the topic at large for the sake of its obscene concept. Malle supposedly wanted to make a movie about surviving in harsh environments, and there are the smallest of moments where that idea cuts through. But it's impossible to ever meet the film on that level, because doing so would require sitting with its child star's exploitation as an aesthetic proposition rather than an actual moral reckoning.