Film Study: The 70s Movies That Turned Boomers Left

The current controversy over Woke insertions into Ridley Scott's The Odyssey is a reminder of how far Hollywood will go to promote its radical orthodoxy. From the ahistoric black Helen of Troy who launched a thousand scripts to Elliot Page as a warrior to Matt Damon clunking around in sandals it's a veritable cornucopia of radical new think.

What's interesting is not that younger people absorb all this without blinking — their frame of reference being 15 minutes ago — but that the lobotomized Boomers of Elbows Up and The View are ingesting the meal without complaint. Age is supposed to bring wisdom, but in this generation it brings surrender — especially to the Jane Fonda fainting goats.

For those whose frame of reference stretches back to the cradle of the Boomers, there is a direct link between the perpetually indignant blue hairs and the movies they were fed in their formative years. 1970s progressive themes and cultural guilt are not recent phenomenons. They remain as motivational as ever. Here are some of the famous films that changed the dialogue.

Robert Altman's 1970 war epic in the context of a faded WWII generation and the Flower Power hippies shocked audiences with its brutality. Technically this black comedy was remarkable. It modernized how we hear dialogue in films. It introduced new stars. It was both amusing and shocking, cutting paths into the portrayal of medicine, war and sex.

For our demo it was must-see for the spurting blood and the classic football game. Everyone wanted to be cool Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland shagging nurses and defying authority. War was an abomination that simple kids fought and the privileged looked down upon.

In retrospect the movie had a corrosive mean streak that we laughed at in 1970.

From the perch of 2026, the treatment of people of faith and the callous treatment of Hot Lips Houlihan are crude and obvious. But they were marching orders for today's DSA generation shedding traditional religion and embracing sexual liberation. Today's Boomers maintain much of the NIMBY insouciance of the film. Their smug superiority is reflected in unrepentant modern actors like Mark Ruffalo, Robert DeNiro, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.

What Altman was to modern war and manners, director Arthur Penn was to the politicization of American Indians. Before Little Big Man they were portrayed as wallpaper in westerns. Either docile sidekicks like Tonto or bloodthirsty savages. Director John Ford was considered a rebel for casting real natives not Italians or Lebanese actors.

Little Big Man flipped the script, telling the story from inside the Indian perspective as Dustin Hoffman's character alternates between the white world of the 1870s and the Indians scrabbling to survive. While the whites — including General Custer — are caricatures, Canadian Chief Dan George and the Indians are seen as funny, loving, touching and doomed.

For the generation that took its attitude to war from MASH, Little Big Man supplied "colonizers" to the same people. Three years later, Marlon Brando rejected his Godfather Oscar, choosing native activist Sacheen Littlefeather to accept it. The colonizer mania reached its peak with Justin Trudeau grandstanding in a Kamloops cemetery in 2022. The placement of a teddy bear on the alleged graves of Rez school children spawned the UN calling Canada genocidal.

Ken Kesey's novel was already a counterculture touchstone when Miloš Forman brought it to the screen with Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, the rebel committed to a mental institution who wages war against the authoritarian Nurse Ratched. It swept the Big Five Oscars — the first film to do so since It Happened One Night in 1934.

For Boomers it was a manifesto. The institution was The Man. McMurphy was every kid who'd been told to sit down and shut up by a teacher, a parent, a priest. Nurse Ratched — Louise Fletcher's chilling performance — became the face of institutional control, the bureaucrat who crushes the human spirit in the name of order.

The film's legacy is the permanent suspicion of authority, expertise and institutions that defines the Boomer left. Every government health mandate, every school board diktat, every HR department edict is Nurse Ratched with a clipboard. Except now the Boomers are Nurse Ratched — and they don't see the irony.

Roman Polanski's neo-noir masterpiece starring Jack Nicholson as private detective Jake Gittes uncovering corruption in 1930s Los Angeles water politics. It ends badly — famously, irredeemably badly. No redemption. No justice. The bad guys win.

That nihilism was the point. Post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, the idea that the system was irredeemably corrupt and the powerful always prevailed was catnip for a generation losing faith in institutions. Chinatown told them they were right to be cynical.

The film's DNA runs through every conspiracy theory, every "follow the money" instinct, every assumption that behind every civic project lurks a Noah Cross getting richer. It is the founding text of the Boomer suspicion that power is always malevolent — a suspicion that has curdled, in 2026, into the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Elbows Up crowd.

Michael Cimino's Vietnam epic was the most visceral anti-war statement of the decade. Three friends from a Pennsylvania steel town go to Vietnam; what comes back is broken. The Russian roulette sequences remain among the most harrowing ever filmed.

For the Boomer generation it completed the arc that MASH began. War wasn't just absurd — it was a machine that destroyed working-class men for the benefit of people who would never fight. The steel town, the church, the union hall — all the institutions that gave these men meaning — were powerless against the state's appetite for cannon fodder.

The film's politics were complicated — it was attacked by the left for its portrayal of Vietnamese villains — but its emotional argument was simple: the people who send boys to war are not the people who fight it. That argument, absorbed by a generation, explains much of the reflexive anti-militarism that still defines progressive Boomer politics in 2026.