American cinema of the seventies occupies a broad place in Tarantino's preferences and essays. His journey includes acclaimed works and genre films that did not always receive the same recognition.
Rolling Thunder as a public and sustained choice
In May 2023, Tarantino presented Rolling Thunder at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in Cannes. The organisation records that event in the archive of its edition. The choice offers concrete evidence of his interest: he brought a John Flynn film, released in 1977, to a public screening linked to his reflections on cinema.
Rolling Thunder allows us to observe an uneasy relationship between return, trauma and revenge. The adaptation to civilian life is not presented as an automatic transition. The character must inhabit an environment whose expectations do not necessarily match his experience. The violence that follows is built on that difficulty, rather than appearing as an adventure wholly separate from his previous state.
The film may be of interest for the economy of its gestures and for the way it creates an emotional distance. The viewer watches someone who does not immediately explain everything that happens to him. That restraint alters the weight of the actions. Analysing it does not require sharing a single moral reading, nor turning Tarantino's recommendation into approval of the protagonist's behaviour.
The culture of grindhouse cinemas and drive-ins helps to explain why a film could form part of a public experience different from a prestigious first run. Exhibition circuits shape encounters and memories, but they do not determine a work's value on their own. The film retains formal decisions that can be examined outside the screening in which someone discovered it.
Carrie and Taxi Driver: isolation in different forms
Carrie and Taxi Driver feature among Tarantino's choices in Sight and Sound in 2012. Both are 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 call for different readings.
In Carrie, the school and home environments create different pressures on the protagonist. The film takes time for the viewer to understand those relationships before a spectacular transformation. Suspense depends on expectations that build around an apparently recognisable social situation. The form can lead us towards a promise of acceptance and then brutally alter its meaning.
Taxi Driver makes the city seem to be perceived through a subjective experience that is not the same as a neutral description of its inhabitants. The protagonist watches, 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 us to accept his view as true or fair.
The presence of both titles in a selection makes it possible to recognise an interest in intense experiences, but it does not prove that Tarantino admires them for exactly those reasons. His votes attest to a preference. Critical comparison can then develop as a reading of the films, without attributing to the filmmaker arguments he did not set out in the source document.
Cinema Speculation extends the journey beyond a list
Cinema Speculation, published in 2022, devotes chapters to films from that period and combines film discussion with the viewer's memory. The works discussed include The Outfit, Daisy Miller and Paradise Alley. The fact that a film has a chapter does not mean the book praises it without reservation: analysing, discussing and recommending are related actions, but different ones.
The Outfit opens a route into crime cinema; Daisy Miller into a drama of relationships and social conventions; Paradise Alley into the construction of characters within a popular setting. The variety of subjects helps avoid an overly narrow image of the seventies as a decade devoted solely to violent anti-heroes. There is also humour, 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 relationship with Richard Fleischer and his disquieting cinema is another area of that cinephile conversation. There is no need to turn every name associated with Tarantino into a list of equivalent favourites. A statement about one particular film can coexist with reservations about another. The value of the journey lies in preserving those differences and recognising the kind of document that supports each judgement.
The Cinema Speculation essay 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, including disagreements and imagined possibilities. To begin seeing seventies 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 set of sources does not establish.
Back to the films recommended by Tarantino.