Twice upon a time in Hollywood: how history repeats itself for ageing directors

Martin Scorsese occupies a rarefied position on the internet these days: part elder statesman of film (on Letterboxd), part TikTok dad (to Francesca), and always good for an 8 to 12 minute YouTube sit-down. But in 2019, he found himself on the wrong side of internet ire when he compared Marvel films to theme parks.

It was a throwaway comment in a longread about his career and upcoming film, The Irishman (2019). But so fierce was the backlash that a full month after its initial publication the then-77-year-old director was compelled to write an op-ed in the New York Times clarifying his stance. No shade to the talent behind the MCU, he said; they’re just not for him, and he worried for the future of original and independent cinema. 

It’s human nature to think that we’re experiencing everything for the first time. So imagine my surprise when, five years later, I came across this quote by director and screenwriter John Milius: “When I was at USC, people were flocking to Blowup [1966], not going to the theatres to be jolted by a cheap amusement park ride.” This quote is from the 1997 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Later in the same book, Robert Altman says this about the cinematic offerings of the mid-1990s: ”It’s just become one big amusement park. It’s the death of film.”

An ageing filmmaker decrying the current state of cinema by comparing films to amusement parks? History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

The cyclical nature of Hollywood history becomes apparent when you consider that the emergence of Scorsese and his ilk, dubbed the New Hollywood, coincided with the decline of the golden-age studio system. Conversations around films of the 1960s and 70s tend to focus on the emergence of the former, and ignore the late-careers of the directors who had been stalwarts during the latter. 

It is this era, and that cohort of filmmakers, that is the focus of the latest season of Karina Longworth’s excellent film history podcast, You Must Remember This. 

At the beginning of each episode, Longworth dedicates the podcast to “the secret, and/or forgotten history of Hollywood’s first century”. In an industry as obsessed with novelty and youth as Hollywood, what is more readily forgotten than the work of ageing filmmakers?

And this is a shame, because as exciting as it is to experience fresh perspectives, work made by artists further along in life often displays mastery, confidence and an evolved vision that only comes with years of experience. Often, their work revisits and builds upon themes explored earlier in their filmography.

One of the old man directors highlighted is Billy Wilder, whose 1972 film Avanti! revisits the story of the company man climbing the corporate ladder, leaving shreds of his humanity on every rung as he ascends. 

In The Apartment (1960), Jack Lemmon’s Baxter and Shirley MacLaine’s Miss Kubelik are both so blinded by their personal ambitions that they fail to see two things: the hollowness of their goals, and how right they are for each other. Both are willing to be subjugated by the spiritually bankrupt values of corporate America to ascend to a higher social class, and the joy of watching this film is in knowing that what they really need – each other – is right in front of them.

Just over a decade later, Avanti! imagines Lemmon as a character like Baxter, but 15 years down the line: older, having bought into the dream of corporate ascendancy, and no less in need of direction. A great deal of the film’s comedy is rooted in his inability to understand that the social and economic structures that bolster his authority in his middle-American hometown are nonexistent on the island of Ischia. What he wants is for everything to run efficiently and bend to his will; what he needs is to understand that he can’t control everything. 

Working once again with his screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder’s talent for infusing comedy with despair is on full display in Avanti! At its core, it’s about two people being forced by tragedy to re-examine the rigid social values they have adhered to for too long. It essentially asks: what if The Apartment’s Baxter hadn’t quit his job, but found himself asking the same questions again in middle age?

Likewise, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) addresses the values perpetuated across his extensive filmography, and lands at a duality: that truth and myth co-exist in a nation’s history. 

After decades making films about the Wild West from the perspective of white cowboys and sheriffs, Ford shifts the focus within the landscape he helped to mythologise by centring the narrative on a Native American tribe attempting to migrate back to their ancestral homeland after the US government fails to deliver on its promises. Heroism and justice are at the centre of the film; but so is the idea that a nation’s history is equal parts truth, and what is printed as the legend. 

Ford’s films are so closely linked to the enduring image of the American West that it’s often taken for granted he is evoking a lost time. But, did this mythical time ever really exist? Cheyenne Autumn spends a considerable amount of its expansive runtime exploring the tensions that fuel the dissemination of news and myth. In a scene set in a newsroom, it is suggested that the motivation behind the paper’s shifting of sympathies to favour the plight of the Cheyenne are motivated by economics rather than morals. Is Ford pointing the finger at himself here? 

At times both visually poetic and narratively unwieldy, the filmmaker’s intentions are undercut by the casting of Mexican and Italian-American actors in the lead Native American roles, and Navajo actors in the minor Cheyenne roles – all par for the course in mid-century Hollywood. But as an attempt at correcting the harmful effects of earlier depictions of Native American communities, and in exposing the mechanics of mythmaking, Ford’s penultimate feature is striking. 

I don’t know if a 21-year-old Martin Scorsese went to see Cheyenne Autumn at a movie theatre in his native New York in 1964, but given his cinematic zeal, I like to imagine that he did. Six decades on, he was the venerated director making a late-career corrective western that centred a Native American perspective. 

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is a western in the guise of a crime film – a genre that Scorsese helped define. He uses his skills as a visionary filmmaker to highlight the Osage people’s tragedy, and leverages his expertise in the crime genre to foreground the genocidal actions of the white perpetrators.

The framing device revealed at the end highlights the exploitative nature of true crime for entertainment, and how real-life tragedy can be transformed, reduced or forgotten entirely by the passage of time. It’s a piercing reminder of the distortion inherent in the act of storytelling, by a director who has shown time and time again – from Taxi Driver (1976) to Goodfellas (1990) – that he is always thinking about the importance of stories, as well as who gets to tell them.

While some directors got contemplative late in their careers, others – as Longworth puts it – “got weird”. 

Alfred Hitchcock was already pretty weird by the time he reached the late stage of his career. Having developed a signature style within the confines of the studio system, he entered the late stage of his career with a genre-defining hit, Psycho (1960). With this film, Hitchcock moved away from the lush, high-concept spectacles of the 1950s (North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief) and helped establish the concept of the mentally disturbed psycho killer. 

He continued to explore the darker side of human nature across his films of the 1960s, but things truly got crazy in his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972).

Frenzy saw Hitchcock return to his hometown of London, and part of the fun of watching it is seeing how much of it still looks recognisable from the early 1970s.The film starts like a travelogue, then wrongfoots the audience by quickly turning really, really nasty, and then immediately getting kind of meta.

After the naked body of a woman strangled with a necktie disrupts a public gathering on the South Bank, the shock of the discovery is immediately undercut by the on-screen characters discussing the situation as if it were a (Hitchcock?) film. 

Having made the foundational work on the movie psychopath, Hitchcock has fun directing knowing winks at the audience for their simultaneous hunger and repulsion for gruesome stories.

He also subverts our expectations of a Hitchcock film: the film’s protagonist Dick Blaney (Jon Finch) is a verified loser, an ex-RAF pilot whose gambling, drinking and thieving lead him to lose his wife, job and accommodation by the end of the first 10 minutes. As in North by Northwest, we learn early on that Blaney is the victim of mistaken identity: but Cary Grant, he is not. 

And while this film does have a Hitchcock blond, it isn’t an icy beauty in the Grace Kelly mold: it’s the sweaty, misogynistic serial killer, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). 

With Rusk, Hitchcock heralds the end of the era of the quiet, loner psychopath he helped to define in his earlier films, while (perhaps unknowingly) ushering in the Ted Bundy model of serial killer: one who can lure his victims with charm and gain the trust of his friends, all while harbouring a hatred of women who enjoy their economic and sexual power. It foreshadows the backlash towards the gains in sexual and financial autonomy that were made during second wave feminism, and it is a strain of misogyny that, sadly, still feels familiar in 2025. 

When asked on BBC Radio 4 why a film about such horrendous murders constituted entertainment, Hitchcock replied: “This is the same entertainment element that people pay for when they go into the haunted house in the fairground… when they pay money to go onto the roller coaster, and scream when it goes into the big dip.”

Maybe comparing films to fairgrounds is something male directors just start to do in their old age?

Vincente Minnelli’s films certainly offer much in the way of amusement – the director is primarily known for the spectacular musicals he directed while under contract at MGM during Hollywood’s golden age, many of which were favourites of mine growing up. I have to admit though, I knew nothing of Minnelli’s post-MGM career (other than that he was the supportive dad to stage, screen and queer icon, Liza).

So watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) was eye-opening. In it, Minnelli’s technical mastery and visual artistry reach a level beyond what he even achieved at MGM. The film is a remake of the 1921 World War I film that launched Rudolph Valentino’s career, updated to World War II and starring Glenn Ford. Ford was 46 at the time, and is clearly miscast in the role of an amoral playboy named Julio (the script does somersaults to explain why this white man and his extended family live in Argentina, and all have Spanish names).

According to Longworth, Minnelli lost interest in getting decent performances out of the cast when his suggestion of Alain Delon in the lead role (just imagine!) was rejected in favour of the more established Ford, and instead focused his energy on spectacular set pieces. 

And it works: the film is simply more Minnelli. Its visual style evokes a 1950s late golden age musical, while its proto-psychedelic montages prefigure the visual signifiers of New Hollywood.

Horsemen does a wonderful job of depicting a family divided by politics. Better yet, its lengthy runtime actually rewards viewers with a satisfying pay off: Julio’s turn to heroism is effective because we have spent so long watching him be ineffectual, while those around him throw themselves into activism or fascism. 

Horsemen did badly at the box office, and I wonder if this was in part a disadvantage of timing. It doesn’t really match the tone of films about Nazis being released at the time. Films like the more sober Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) were beginning to grapple with the concept of the “banality of evil”. Horsemen’s visual excesses, and its lead character’s moral apathy, may have been unpalatable to a moviegoing audience for whom WWII was still within living memory. 

When I think about a modern-day filmmaker who made a bombastic late-career film, there’s no one who’s pushed the boat out quite as much as Francis Ford Coppola. Alongside Scorsese, Coppola is one of the most recognisable New Hollywood directors, having made some of the era’s most enduring films. But he’s also a maverick whose career has varied wildly. The only constant is his uncompromising vision. 

Megalopolis, his 2024 saga about a visionary architect, was received by many critics as a sprawling, bewildering mess, but you could never call it a cynical film. Coppola could easily have chosen to spend his golden years retreading his past achievements. Instead, time and time again, he has dipped into his own finances to fulfil creative ambitions (he self-funded this film, and it doesn’t look like he’ll be recouping the cost in his lifetime). He refuses to give up and submit to a late career of retrospectives of bygone glory days. In a cinema landscape that feels increasingly formulaic, Megalopolis’s audacity is a welcome jolt.

It’s tempting to see similarities between what was going on when the New Hollywood filmmakers were young men usurping the old guard in the late 1960s and 70s, and the turnover in directors that is happening now. In both eras, changes in cultural mores, technology and the way that films are distributed created a climate that, at first, benefitted new voices in film but then calcified into an industry that favoured blockbusters and franchises.

Part of what’s feeding my impulse to look for similarities is a need for some optimism: great movies survived the transition from the silent to talkies; they survived the fall of the studio system into New Hollywood, and – with respect to Mr Scorsese – independent cinema has continued to produce gems since his initial comment in 2019. In some ways, the threats posed by “theme park” films seem trifling when compared to the existential threat that AI poses to creativity and originality.

In the meantime, You Must Remember This is doing what it does best: casting light on a forgotten cache of films which are ripe for (re)discovery.

You Must Remember This presents… “The Old Man Is Still Alive” is at BFI Southbank throughout April.