The collapse of classical Hollywood’s studio system in the 1960s mirrored much of America’s cultural and political uncertainties at the time. The assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement and the escalating Vietnam war provided a background that destabilised the optimism with which the decade began.
It’s not surprising that narratives of many films at the time may have been hinting at an ominous dystopian turn.
The decade opened with Hitchcock’s premature dispatching of his heroine in Psycho (1960) and ended with the haphazard slaughter of Dennis Hopper’s protagonists in Easy Rider and George Roy Hill’s outgunned antiheroes in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (both 1969).
