I watched this programme with great interest, not just to get a feel for the changes in film making attitudes, but also because a great deal of the programme is given over to interviews with Martin Scorsese, and having just read Scorsese on Scorsese it was interesting to hear him speak about his early days as a film maker in an environment that was having to change to meet public demand, and how it was a new generation of directors, appreciating the work of avant garde film makers, that steered Hollywood through the slump that it had experienced at the end of the 1960s.
The programme told of the influences on this new generation of directors, Martin Scorsese tells of how watching films, such as The Searchers starring John Wayne, as he got older, he and his friends noticed scenes that they hadn't noticed as kids and how one scene in particular, where the sister in law folds John Wayne's coat, suddenly had a new meaning and they noticed that this changed how they viewed the rest of the film. (Now knowing that there was an unspoken love between them.) Scorsese says that this scene suddenly gave the film a whole new angle and therefore a whole new depth.
The documentary also focuses on how, with public feeling about the war running high, anti-heroes such as Bonnie and Clyde became popular. Although the characters were notorious gun-toting criminals, the film was careful not to show them as cold blooded killers and portrayed them as fighting the establishment, which appealed to the sympathies of the movie going public at the time.
This paved the way for many films that were bold, daring and shocking, such as Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.
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