1970s American cinema holds a prominent place in Tarantino's preferences and essays. His journey includes canonical works and genre films that did not always receive the same recognition.
Rolling Thunder as a public, sustained choice
In May 2023, Tarantino presented Rolling Thunder at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight. The organization records that event in its edition archive. His choice offers concrete evidence of his interest: he brought a John Flynn film, released in 1977, to a public screening tied to his reflections on cinema.
Rolling Thunder makes it possible to observe an uneasy relationship between return, trauma, and revenge. The transition to civilian life is not presented as automatic. The character has to inhabit an environment whose expectations do not necessarily match his experience. The violence that follows grows out of that difficulty rather than appearing as an adventure wholly separate from his former state.
The film may be interesting for the economy of its gestures and for the way it creates a sense of emotional distance. The viewer watches someone who does not immediately explain everything that is happening to him. That restraint changes the weight of the actions. Analyzing it does not require sharing a single moral reading or turning Tarantino's recommendation into approval of the protagonist's behavior.
The culture of grindhouse theaters and drive-ins helps explain why a film could be part of a different kind of audience experience than a prestigious premiere. Exhibition circuits shape encounters and memories, but they do not determine a work's value on their own. The film retains formal choices that can be examined apart from the screening in which someone discovered it.
Carrie and Taxi Driver: isolation in different forms
Carrie and Taxi Driver are among Tarantino's choices in Sight and Sound in 2012. Both date from 1976, but that coincidence does not make them variations on the same story. One works with adolescence, humiliation, and supernatural power; the other follows an urban experience marked by isolation and violence. Their methods of identification require different readings.
In Carrie, the school and home environments place different pressures on the protagonist. The film takes time to help the viewer understand those relationships before a spectacular transformation. Suspense depends on expectations that build around an apparently recognizable social situation. The form can lead us toward a promise of acceptance and then brutally alter its meaning.
Taxi Driver makes the city feel filtered through a subjective experience that does not amount to a neutral description of its inhabitants. The protagonist observes, interprets, and projects. The viewer must distinguish between what the film shows and the way he understands it. Closeness to a character does not require accepting his vision as true or fair.
The presence of both titles in a selection makes it possible to recognize an interest in intense experiences, but it does not prove that Tarantino admires them for exactly the reasons above. His votes document a preference. Critical comparison can then develop as a reading of the films, without assigning the filmmaker arguments he did not formulate in the source consulted.
Cinema Speculation expands the journey beyond a list
Cinema Speculation, published in 2022, devotes chapters to films from that era and combines film discussion with a viewer's memory. Among the works addressed are The Outfit, Daisy Miller, and Paradise Alley. A chapter about a film does not mean the book praises it without reservation: analyzing, discussing, and recommending are related actions, but they are not the same.
The Outfit opens a path into crime cinema; Daisy Miller, into a drama of relationships and social conventions; Paradise Alley, into character construction within a popular setting. The range of subjects helps avoid an overly narrow view of the seventies as a decade devoted only to violent antiheroes. There is also humor, melodrama, acting styles, and changes in the presence of stars. The difference between a criminal urban setting and a space governed by social conventions can alter the way a gesture becomes dangerous. Tension does not always need to appear in the form of an immediate physical threat.
The connection with Richard Fleischer and his uneasy cinema is another area of that cinephile conversation. There is no need to turn every name associated with Tarantino into a list of equally preferred favorites. A statement about one specific film can coexist with reservations about another. The value of the journey lies in preserving those differences and recognizing the kind of document that supports each judgment.
The essay Cinema Speculation thus serves as a complement to the votes and public presentations. The lists point to titles; the book makes it possible to follow a broader discussion that includes disagreements and imagined possibilities. To begin seeing 1970s cinema through these affinities, it is more useful to choose one work and pay attention to its form than to try to reproduce a single hierarchy that the full set of sources does not establish.
Back to Tarantino's recommended films.