The definition of a “Baby Boomer” has always been a tenuous thing. Offically the term refers to the giant uptick in birthrates after the end of World War II. When American G.I.s (as well as victors and survivors in every other part of the globe) got home, many were eager to marry, settle down, and start producing nuclear families. Even so, the Baby Boomer label applies to anyone born between the years 1946 and 1964. Consider that while Kamala Harris reads as a significantly younger individual than her political rival today, she is still technically a Boomer (albeit by less than three months).
That factoid alone reminds that the 18-year span defining the generation saw a vast amount of change social upheaval. Be that as it may, the culture Boomers created is still acutely tangible for anyone alive today—it shapes the pop culture we move through. More than any previous generation, those classified as Baby Boomers retained an unprecedented level of power and concentrated wealth while their music, literature, and yes, cinema, remain major touchstones and measuring sticks by which 21st century alternatives are compared… or react to.
It would be impossible to make a comprehensive list of “Boomer movies.” The subcultures, countercultures, and various clashes therein are too many. Nonetheless, there are the more obvious universally beloved or influential works that, broadly speaking, defined how this generation saw itself… as well as how their children and grandchildren might reinterpret their heyday. So without further ado here are some of the movies that defined the Baby Boomers.
Old Yeller (1957)
It seems necessary to begin a list about Baby Boomer cinema with Walt Disney. While Boomers were not the first generation to grow up with Disney movies, they were the first to live in a world where Disney as a lifestyle and ideal had seeped into the public consciousness. Disneyland opening its doors in 1955, and The Wonderful World of Disney invading families’ homes every week via the new allure of television beginning in 1954. So the question is less if a Disney movie should be included, and more which one?
There were a lot of classic Disney pictures produced when Walt was still alive in the 1950s and ‘60s, and many boys alive in those decades owned a coonskin cap in honor of Davy Crockett, a limited TV series starring Fess Parker that was eventually reedited as a pair of films. But the one that arguably had the largest impact was Old Yeller, the movie that made every child for the next 40 or so years cry buckets. A simple story set on the American frontier about a boy (Tommy Kirk) and a lovable mutt he found in the wilderness and raised as his own, the film made every viewer a dog person… and a wet mess when that dog gets rabies while defending its family and needs to be put down. Consider that nearly 30 years later, the way Bill Murray in Stripes got a diverse collection of Army grunts to stop punching each other was by asking “who cried at the end of Old Yeller?” Everyone raises his hand.
The Parent Trap (1961)
If we were to include one more Disney movie, it should probably be the original The Parent Trap of 1961 starring Haley Mills. Just as a remake 35 years later did for millennials, Disney’s first Parent Trap turned its teenage star Hayley Mills into an icon for young girls and probably a crush for many boys. The film starred Mills in dual roles as Sharon and Susan, two identical twins who’re separated at birth by their parents (Maureen O’Hara and Brian Keith) after a brutal divorce. Yet when the kids serendipitously discover each other at summer camp, the long lost sisters decide to trade places and lives.
The film has the sentimental wholesomeness (or saccharine syrupiness, depending on your disposition) of any other Disney movie of this era, but it also has a lot of spunk thanks to Mills’ double turn, which includes a memorable duet of her singing “Lets get together” opposite herself. Boys might’ve had Davy Crockett, but girls had Sharon and Susan.
Goldfinger (1964)
Ian Fleming invented James Bond to be his own personal avatar and fantasy of a romantic life in postwar espionage. 007 was a Cold War warrior defined on the page by 1950s cynicism and bitterness for the generation who raised the Boomers. But on the big screen, the next era of teens and kiddos were happy to see that fantasy transformed into something much broader and more exciting. Much of the early swinging ‘60s culture, in fact, saw the first crop of Boomers come of age during Bond’s “spymania:” a glut of movies informed by (male-skewing) fantasies about exotic locales, international mystery, sex, and danger.
Really any of the first four Bond movies starring Sean Connery could fit here, but it’s the latter two, Goldfinger and Thunderball (1965), which really cemented the 007 fantasy and formula for the younger audiences, and when adjusted for inflation Thunderball still sold more tickets than any other Bond movie in the U.S. and Britain. With that said, Goldfinger is the better of the two, with Connery in his bespoke gray suit and seductive smirk still seducing viewers as he fires henchmen out of ejector seats from his spy car—or beguiles a woman incredulously named Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). Sixty years later, Bond movies remain popular, with each still being compared to Goldfinger’s perfect blending of a cinematic martini.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
It was said that the revolution would not be televised. It was filmed, though, mostly in niche but fascinating documentaries or counterculture underground films that found highly specific audiences. This includes the Beatles filming their own disintegration for the documentary Let It Be (1970), which Peter Jackson reedited and rebuilt in the epic Get Back docu-series in 2021. Yet before all the drama, the Beatles were just an earth-shattering musical act who appealed to the whole globe. And still a wonderful memento of those happier times is Richard Lester’s groundbreaking musical-comedy, A Hard Day’s Night.
Casting rock ‘n roll sensations in a quickie movie was not a new phenomenon in 1964. Elvis Presley dimmed his career by starring in more than a dozen of ’em. But the Beatles and Lester’s A Hard’s Day Night was a little more subversive, and a lot cleverer, than studio United Artists could have anticipated. Essentially a satire of the band’s public persona, as well as how the media manipulates and frames them, the film sees the Fab Four play versions of themselves in a film that cultivates a faux cinema verté lens of their shenanigans. It’s a fun goof of a movie that nevertheless captures an authentic snapshot of Beatlemania during its most wholesome and jejune phase.
The Graduate (1967)
With The Graduate, we begin to see movies literally about the Baby Boomer generation, even if director Mike Nichols was a bit older (he was born in 1931). Released as essentially an indie in the same year Hollywood was still churning out creaky spectacles like Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate felt like a brazen blast of the future. It’s oblique cynicism about the generational divide between kids these days and the perceived soullessness of “our parents” also spoke to a generation of young people outraged by the Vietnam War and pushback against the Civil Rights movement.
In this context, Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock is an innocent, albeit of the corruptible sort as he’s seduced into sleeping with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a married friend of his parents. Mrs. Robinson sees Ben as a useful idiot to amuse her. Yet she has no interest in his interior life or aspirations. She even forbids him from dating her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), because she knows Elaine is too good for him. So imagine her horror when Ben breaks up Elaine’s wedding at the altar just as she says “I do” to another straight-laced throwback to the ‘50s. “It’s too late!” mama gloats. “Not for me!” Elaine screams back.
The euphoria of the movie’s ending, where Elaine and Ben literally escape their parents, gives way to jaded apathy as they, and the audience, realize they have little hope of being happy. Throw in some amazing Simon and Garfunkel songs and compositions, and you have the first true Boomer movie.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
1967 was a big year for youth culture at the movies. In the same calendar as The Graduate, Warren Beatty starred in and produced this actual Hollywood production which confirmed for good and all the Hays Code that defined the studio system of the last 30-plus years was dead and buried. It is also a successful attempt to tap into the zeitgeist of skepticism of authority at a time when the draft was being threatened (and would soon be implemented) for the Vietnam War. Hence how Bonnie and Clyde, two real-life bank robbers who murdered in cold blood unarmed innocents, including cops who threw down their firearms, were transformed into a sexy pair of Robin Hood-like vigilantes played by Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
The historical accuracy and politics of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde can be challenged, but its craftsmanship, entertainment value, and influence cannot. Before Bonnie and Clyde, even movies where “bad guys” were the heroes would end with the criminal realizing, in essence, crime doesn’t pay. The Leopold and Loeb stand-ins in Hitchcock’s Rope do not get away with it; they’re lectured for their nihilism. Meanwhile Walter Neff recognizes he was led to his doom by a blonde siren in Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Conversely, Bonnie and Clyde don’t even get time to process what is happening when the powers-at-be brutally and mercilessly slaughter them on the side of the road. The level of violence and blood splatter was shocking, visceral, and a game-changer.
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
1967 also saw two movies starring Sidney Poitier dealing with race in America. Both were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and each was embraced by a different generation. While Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was posited to be about young people today and their changing social mores, with Poitier dating and intending to marry a young white woman (Katharine Houghton), Stanley Kramer’s important “message movie” was really about these kids’ parents: specifically those of Houghton’s Joey, who are played by icons of yesteryear Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Incredulously, the two young people in that movie would let their lives and marriage be dictated by old Spencer Tracy’s comfort level with a Black man sleeping with his daughter.
In other words, it was an oblivious and out of touch movie meant for the olds. But for all its considerable more self-awareness and urgency, In the Heat of the Night still repeated the same subtextual mistake. Poitier gets a lot more to play here as a Black detective from the big city who refuses to take shit from any white man. “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” Poitier declares in one of the all-time great movie lines; in another he slaps a cracker who all but dons a white hood. However, the excellent Norman Jewison movie is still essentially about a Black man winning the approval and respect of a white man, in this case a racist police chief (Rod Steiger) who initially profiles Poitier’s Tibbs as a murder suspect because he happens to be a Black man passing through a Mississippi small town.
It’s a good movie, but in retrospect it sets the template of how almost every movie made by and for the Boomer generation, at least in Hollywood, handled race: these are stories about Black leads endearing themselves to initially white racists who find redemption. It’s a trend that starts here and with Guess Who, and carries straight on to Driving Miss Daisy, The Help, and Green Book decades later. Black filmmakers of this generation, obviously, did not make such stories. Yet the older set were largely relegated to the world of independent cinema or “Blaxploitation” in the ‘70s, which rarely could match the cultural cache of a Hollywood picture. It wouldn’t be until another generation of filmmakers, or at least young Boomers who could make films for younger people—think Spike Lee and John Singleton—would mainstream American movies seriously change.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
It is doubtful that when Stanley Kubrick began work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, he imagined he was making a movie that hippies of the day would find a good excuse to drop acid and have their minds blown by. But we imagine he didn’t mind that phenomenon occurring in a movie that was designed to change the way films were thought about and produced.
A startling science fiction epic that still challenges and visually stuns nearly 60 years later, 2001: A Space Odyssey takes a galaxy-brained view of the history of the human race, beginning at the dawn of time when Homo sapiens have still not fully evolved, and ending with the next stage of evolution when an astronaut meets our “gods” (an unknowable alien race mysteriously personified by a monolith). In the space between, Kubrick produced a movie that correctly predicted what the Earth would look like from the perspective of the moon, as well as our current struggles with artificial intelligence. The movie trope of a synthetic intelligence turning on us and attempting to wipe us out begins in 2001, and it would define science fiction, and perhaps soon enough science fact, forever after.
Easy Rider (1969)
Another indie game-changer from the ‘60s, writer, director, and star Dennis Hopper aimed and succeeded at bringing the counterculture to the mainstream at large via Easy Rider. More a film about tone and aesthetics—or “vibes” in the modern parlance—than an actual story, Easy Rider made stars out of Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson by depicting them as the modern evolution of the lone cowboy.
Fonda and Hopper’s Wyatt and Billy are presented as the last American rebels who prowl the heartland’s highways and backroads while on massive motorcycles and with joints in their lips. Wyatt even goes by the nickname of “Captain America” after painting the Stars and Stripes on his helmet and chopper. They don’t subscribe to the “square” deal promised on television. Rather they seek to parade their freedom while dropping acid and maybe selling a little cocaine. So of course they’re murdered by the real degenerates who demand conformity.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
By and large, Boomers rejected the culture of their parents. If the World War II generation loved themselves some musicals and Westerns, the next era would see those genres curdle into dust. The ones that did find audiences by the time Boomer tastes defined Hollywood would be the deconstructions, a la Bob Fosse’s bleak portrait of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism in Cabaret (1972), and Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Butch Cassidy isn’t the most downbeat or mean-spirited of the revisionist Westerns that would come to saturate the 1970s. Its in fact a perfectly satisfying buddy film starring some of New Hollywood’s most beloved leading men, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. However, there’s a distinct melancholy and self-awareness about Butch and Sundance’s West. Either the West romanticized by old Hollywood was dead by the time these fictionalized versions of real-life outlaws from the turn of the 20th century got there, or it never existed in the first place. Either way, Butch and Sundance are fighting a losing battle against modernity, and their good old boy antics are even undercut by the movie’s anachronistic soundtrack with songs like Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” They’re doomed well before William Goldman’s script gets to Bolivia, where the pair go down in a hail of bullets. Kind of like the Western itself.
Dirty Harry (1971)
There are plenty of cop movies and action flicks that were popular during this era. Dirty Harry isn’t even the best one set in San Francisco—that honor belongs to Bullitt from three years earlier. However, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry is the most representative of a conservative streak on the other side of the Boomer culture wars that would continue in perpetuity.
Released a few years after the Zodiac Killer’s reign of terror in the Bay Area, Dirty Harry imagines a fictional version of that manhunt in which the limp-wristed, bleeding-heart liberals in City Hall are the real menace to society as they let a sadistic serial killer get off on technicalities. Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is therefore an antidote to the progressive activism and relaxing morality represented by movies like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde. In other words, Harry is the sizable portion of America who never wanted the 1950s to end, and he’ll try to bring it back one dead punk at a time, felled each by the end of his .44 magnum.
Shaft (1971)
On the flip side of Dirty Harry’s mean streak is Shaft, arguably the most successful of the Blaxploitation movies and one with major Hollywood financing (it saved MGM!). Directed by Gordon Parks, Shaft presented a Black action hero who need not impress any white man. In fact, when one such mobster calls him the N-word, Shaft slaps him around and smashes a bottle on his head. When NYPD attempt to pressure him to cooperate, private detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) dismisses them out of hand and towers over their feckless frames.
Roundtree was the epitome of 1970s cool, and in his slick leather jacket and high collars he presented virile independence from the power structures usually reinforced by Hollywood entertainment. He was financially well-to-do, giving out money to his community, and unbowed and unbent before white authority. He also had the best damn theme song. As the trailer promises, “Shaft: hotter than Bond, cooler than Bullitt.”
The Godfather (1972)
If you were to reduce this generation’s cinema to just one movie, it might be The Godfather. While Francis Ford Coppola also is just a little too old to technically qualify as a Boomer himself, he really represented the paterfamilias of “the film school generation” of actual Boomers coming up in his era. He also made the defining studio picture of the 1970s—at least for the years before his pal George Lucas invented the Death Star.
The Godfather and its 1974 sequel are a continuous, monumental epic which reimagines the American story as a tale of immigrant dreams being realized, and then corrupted, by the allure of big business capitalism. Ironically this is embodied here by the Old World’s malignant Cosa Nostra (or “Mafia”). A rich tapestry of amazing career-defining performances, from Marlon Brando to Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton, this grand opera of light and shadow is often listed as the greatest movie of all time by people who were alive in 1972.
American Graffiti (1973)
George Lucas’ achingly nostalgic love letter to the oldest set of Baby Boomers’ youth, American Graffiti eulogized teenage cruising and car culture from the 1950s and early ‘60s with all the wistfulness of Gone with the Wind. The film is set in any small town, albeit of a distinctly Californian flavor here, on a single Friday night ahead of high school graduation.
Filled with up-and-coming talent like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, and Harrison Ford, American Graffiti is an ensemble about the many misadventures a youth could get up to in their hot rod at a time when Kennedy was president and the culture wars, not to mention the Vietnam War, had yet to erupt. Perhaps the most impressive thing is the film’s lack of an orchestral soundtrack. Instead Lucas used wall-to-wall rock ’n roll hits and pop standards from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, creating a misty-eyed time machine back to his generation’s glory days. It would not be the last movie to employ such rose-tinted longing for the ‘60s.
The Exorcist (1973)
It is hard to pick a horror movie that really encapsulated the point-of-view of a generation, but William Friedkin’s The Exorcist certainly tapped into something powerful. Still one of the top 10 highest grossing films in the U.S. when adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist represented more than just a spooky spectacle; it reflected the anxieties and fears of a nation increasingly embracing secularization.
Central character Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) certainly isn’t religious. She’s a movie star who never goes to church. Yet when her angelic daughter Regan (Linda Blair) begins calling herself the Devil and violating her body with a crucifix, modern science and medicine can offer no solutions. The film’s depiction of the medieval practices of the Catholic Church being the only salvation in the face of true, demonic evil is captured with documentarian disaffection by Friedkin. It felt real enough that you understood why a priest racked with his own set of doubts (Jason Miller) would find his faith, and martyrdom, in the face of such horror. For audiences drifting away from their parents’ religion, or those desperate for us to return to those houses of worship, it struck a nerve that is still sensitive.
Jaws (1975)
The first modern blockbuster is also the first movie on this list directed by a full-fledged Boomer (Lucas is about one year too old to completely qualify). It’s also a masterpiece. At only 28 years of age, Steven Spielberg takes what could have easily been a schlocky monster movie comparable to the popular disaster flicks of the 1970s and makes a primordial epic about man versus nature. It also enjoys an undercurrent of the culture clashes timely for its era.
Without necessarily being about small town values versus big city expertise, the film derives much from the conflict between the scientist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the working class hero Quint (Robert Shaw), both of whom are subject to the whims and politics of big business as a community denies the hard evidence of facts to their own peril. Quint’s chilling story of surviving the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, a detail originally added by Spielberg and screenwriter John Milius, also spoke to the emerging sense of renewed appreciation for the Boomers’ parents generation. Ultimately though, Jaws is just one of the greatest adventure flicks ever produced that changed how everyone, from Baby Boomers on down, would go to the movies.
The Stepford Wives (1975)
An unsettling fable that crystallized the anxieties and obstacles being challenged by second-wave feminism, The Stepford Wives is one of those parables so insidious you know the ending even if you never saw the film. Based on a book by Ira Levin (who also wrote the horror-leaning feminist novel Rosemary’s Baby) and adapted for the screen by William Goldman, The Stepford Wives follows Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), a young wife and photographer who agrees to move out of the metropolitan big city and into the cloistered suburbs of Connecticut with her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and their two daughters.
Of course what Joanna and her new friend Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) discover to their horror is that all of the submissive, vacuous women of Stepford used to be careerist professionals or political activists before moving with their husbands to the ‘burbs. Now they have returned to the ‘50s ideal of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen… brainwashed and replaced by the men of Stepford. By the end of the film, Joanna is, uh, convinced to likewise conform. It was Get Out before Get Out, and without the happy ending.
All the President’s Men (1976)
Alan J. Pakula and William Goldman’s grand hurrah for investigative journalism definitely feels like a relic from a forgotten world: one where newspapers were healthy, journalistic objectivity was celebrated, and politicians could actually face consequences for their actions. Fun fact: Republican operative Roger Ailes allegedly got the idea to create Fox News after the Watergate scandal with the hope of insulating future Republican politicians from accountability in the press.
Be that as it may, All the President’s Men is a gripping thriller even though every viewer, especially in 1976, knew the ending. As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) get ever closer to uncovering the truth of the Watergate Hotel break-in during the 1972 presidential election, the tension mounts and the shadows multiply. Like many a ‘70s thriller, All the President’s Men is downbeat and world-weary to its core. Unlike most of the others, though, it has a triumphant ending scored to the clack, clack, clack of truth-telling typewriters.
Taxi Driver (1976)
When Taxi Driver came out, American audiences were already eager to turn the page on the previous decade of acrimony, at least on the big screen. Consider that Rocky won Best Picture in the same year. Yet Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s neo-noir happily picks at the despairing underbelly still dragging beneath the culture. Set in a Manhattan that was in a state of urban decay (the city government nearly declared bankruptcy the year before), Taxi Driver addressed a sense of growing disaffection and isolation for a particular strain of white men.
A character study of an incel before the term existed, Taxi Driver’s eponymous cabbie (Robert De Niro) is a paranoid, racist, and lonely malcontent who wears a service jacket he never earned. Yet he looks aptly at home in a city that is so much worse than he is, as symbolized by drug dealers and pimps like Sport (Harvey Keitel), who sells the body of a 14-year-old kid (Jodie Foster) on the street corner. Travis is rightfully disgusted by this world, but just because he ultimately channels that rage into a good deed by saving little Jodie Foster does not mean this is a typical story of conservative revenge and restoration, a la Dirty Harry.
Bickle is still a ticking time bomb who in one breath echoes recent tragedies like Lee Harvey Oswald with a rifle, and in another predicts the future, be it John Lennon’s assassination by someone who also wanted to be famous or the would-be killer of Ronald Reagan who literally took aim at the president because he became infatuated with this movie’s version of Jodie Foster…
Annie Hall (1977)
As hard to fathom as it is today, there was a time when Woody Allen was adored as one of the wittiest and most astute voices in American life. That admiration comes from a series of interesting films, but one in particular that wowed audiences so strongly it would be awarded Best Picture… over Star Wars. Annie Hall technically hails from one of cinema and theater’s oldest genres, the romantic comedy, but Allen brought a specific sensibility reflective of his generation and personal worldview.
In addition to featuring many of Allen’s most acerbic observations (though the famous line about life being like a restaurant where the food is terrible “and with such small portions” is lifted from Groucho Marx), Annie Hall also features a titanic performance by Diane Keaton as the eponymous Annie. Some might dismiss her today as a forerunner of the manic pixie dream girl trope, however there is a reason women responded so strongly to Keaton’s performance. She is eccentric, nerdy, refreshingly odd, and sometimes petty at a time when female characters rarely were written (usually by men) as anything but ideal or obligatory. Allen might have written Annie, but she was based on his real-life relationship with Keaton, who obviously infused much of her personality and biography into the character.
Theirs also is a love story that, unlike most rom-coms before the film, ends with the pair breaking up as Annie and Allen’s Alvy grow apart. The true measurement of the movie’s enduring power is how it rewards multiple viewings by audiences who may come to realize despite the film being told from Alvy’s point-of-view that this is a story of a woman outgrowing her emotionally stunted male counterpart. This is not how love stories were supposed to end at the movies, and it struck a chord while also, perhaps, predicting the destinies of its protagonists and performers.
Animal House (1978)
There are more than a few films to choose from when looking at how Baby Boomers’ sense of humor, especially as defined by new influence of Second City and Saturday Night Live, changed popular comedy. We’d even argue there are better movies descended from those early wild and crazy years at SNL: Ghostbusters comes to mind, as does The Blues Brothers, which also starred SNL alumni John Belushi and was directed by John Landis.
Yet Animal House feels the most reflective of that seismic shift in comedy. Lewd, crude, and frankly leering, Animal House seemed to exist in another universe from the previous decade’s comedy titans, such as Martin and Lewis or Peter Sellers. It even felt removed from Mel Brooks, with Animal House having still some semblance of grounding in the real world. Like American Graffiti five years earlier, Animal House is a time capsule movie that romanticizes the early 1960s as an innocent golden age Camelot without war or, perhaps, repercussions at frat parties for date rape.
Beyond the questionable sexual politics, Animal House can be gregariously funny at times, defined the tropes of the “college comedy,” and made a star out of Belushi when he donned a toga and tore down the house to Otis Day and the Knights’ rendition of “Shout.” The movie was among the first, too, with enough hindsight to poke fun at the social divides of Boomers that remain with us to this day, as represented by the economic and class tension between the lovable scamps of Delta Tau Chi and the elite blue bloods of Omega Theta Pi.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
It was a deliberate choice to leave Star Wars off this list for the same reason it did not appear in the Generation X list. Star Wars is such a multi-headed franchise nowadays that it seems to cross all living generations and eras. The same probably could apply to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which like Star Wars was first dreamed up by George Lucas as love letter to the 1930s and ‘40s serials of his youth. Yet Raiders even more so than Star Wars feels defined by the kid culture of Boomers and those age-adjacent.
Literally set in the 1930s with an archaeologist adventurer who might’ve been played by Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart back int he day, Raiders of the Lost Ark allows Lucas to salute his boyhood favorites, while Spielberg further romanticizes his war hero father’s heyday. This would be a recurring motif for Spielberg, who time and again would make a movie about Nazis in need of punching. And for his audiences of the same age, it was a chance to see a guy reminiscent of their dads, or at least characters in movies their dads watched (think Bogie in Casablanca), going on an adventure where the good guys and bad guys were clearly defined by whether they wore a fedora or swastika. Also like Jaws, it’s one of the all-time great entertainments—with this one almost never relenting as it gallops into the next magnificent set piece.
The Big Chill (1983)
Like their target audience, The Big Chill ensemble, which includes Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Glenn Close, JoBeth Williams, and Jeff Goldblum, had mostly reached a certain age by 1983. Either in their early 40s, or about to turn it, they all have fond memories of fighting the good fight during the heady 1960s: it’s also the era where most of the characters in this film were friends. So, as they approach middle age, their youthful idealism has given way to small-minded practicalities like mortgages, home renovations, neighbors’ opinions, and raising children. Theirs also… what comes next.
The Big Chill is one of the most Boomer-y movies to ever boom, because it is about that exact generation who can bask in their Marvin Gaye and the Rolling Stones soundtrack all they want, but they can’t fight time. And after one of their own (Kevin Costner) kills himself before the movie starts, they’re forced to spend a weekend together for the funeral and consider what they’ve done with their lives since the ‘60s, and what they can still do as that hill starts sloping downward. The movie was a monumental hit for director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan. Albeit he seemed to want to ask his audience to take stock of their mortality; in reality, it seems most folks preferred just grooving to the soundtrack.
Platoon (1986)
There could have been more than one Vietnam movie on this list. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, and more all made an impact. However, the one that felt the most in its day like it spoke for veterans, as opposed to an artist trying to interpret their experience, was the first major Hollywood release produced by one of their own. Oliver Stone’s Platoon is a fictional passion play heightened to the level of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Even so, it remains grounded in the memories and experiences of writer-director Oliver Stone. He was a Yale undergraduate who dropped out so he could enlist into the U.S. Army—where he requested combat duty in the war.
It’s an unusual path to Saigon, and one echoed by Platoon’s Chris (Charlie Sheen), a rich kid who begins the movie when he’s fresh off the plane to Southeast Asia. Through his point-of-view we see a grim and earnest dramatization of the eclectic personalities, lifestyles, and finally factions that composed almost any platoon of conscripts and enlisted men. Tom Berenger’s Sgt. Barnes and Willem Dafoe’s Sgt. Elias are the thinly veiled devil and angel of American foreign policy on Chris and every other grunt’s shoulders. But no one finds salvation in this devastating portrait of the war that still shapes competing worldviews.
Wall Street (1987)
In the mid to late 1980s, Oliver Stone had his finger on the pulse of the American psyche, or at least the psyche of those of a certain age. After all, he was immersed into the ideals and bitter ironies of the 1960s, both as an Ivy League intellectual and then a Vietnam veteran. He also saw how idealism gave way to the “Me Decade” of the 1970s and later the greater excesses of 1980s capitalism unbound. The son of a Wall Street stockbroker lived long enough to see Ronald Reagan declare it’s “morning in America.” Wall Street is thus a barely disguised morality play where Charlie Sheen’s fresh-faced Gen X yuppie-in-training, Bud Fox, offers his soul to Lucifer-in-Suspenders, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).
The movie is an unsubtle fable about the aspirations of youth being seduced and corrupted by the allure of corporate America, complete with one of the most popular Boomer actors uttering the line “greed is good.” Of course Gekko’s sales pitch about the virtues of selfishness was supposed to be a front, as exposed by a movie that ends with Gekko getting Bud nabbed for crimes he committed at Gekko’s urging. However, it’s telling that most moviegoers, be they Boomers or younger, walked away agreeing with Gekko’s (a)moral philosophy. He became the patron saint of business schools everywhere, and even Stone came around to sympathizing with the devil considering the direction of the disastrous Wall Street 2 made 20 years later.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
While on the subject of 1987 movies where Michael Douglas plays a selfish bastard, there’s also Fatal Attraction, the most popular erotic thriller in a decade full of ‘em—and arguably the first in which male-produced movies reasserted control over a genre that was getting too transgressive for middle-American tastes. Whereas Lawrence Kasdan remade Double Indemnity in all but name a few years earlier with the steamy Body Heat, and changed the ending so the femme fatale got away with luring the a dopey dude to his doom, Adrian Lyne’s trashy Fatal Attraction acted as a monument to traditional “family values” reasserting authority over the menace of powerful women.
Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest is indeed a 1980s modernization of “the demon lover.” Here she’s been summoned by second-wave feminism to ruin a poor innocent schmuck named Dan (Michael Douglas). She is a single, successful woman in the business world, but she is jealous of the idyllic family life Dan has with his wife Beth (Anne Archer) and their daughter. So after seducing helpless Dan with promises of no-strings-attached sex, she attempts to steal him from Beth and upset the nuclear family. The film ends with Alex being punished for her false sense of liberation when Beth personally puts the witch down with a slug in the chest. It was the third biggest movie of 1987 and reinforced a middle-aged drift back toward traditional, conservative values and fear of empowered women. It’s a fear still reflected in many Boomers’ politics.
Christmas Vacation (1989)
To be honest, this entry could apply to any movie where an iconoclast of his generation ended up doing a beloved family movie filled with good cheer and domesticity: Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby; Steve Martin in Father of the Bride; Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire or opposite Dustin Hoffman in Hook. Yet Christmas Vacation seems the most apropos since it is the one still watched every December and was a sequel to several movies where Chevy Chase got on the bandwagon early.
It’s hard to remember these days, but there was a moment where Chase was considered something of a sex symbol after the first season of SNL and starring opposite Goldie Hawn in 1978’s Foul Play. He also remained a popular post-SNL star throughout the ‘80s, largely thanks to these Vacation movies. Christmas is the best of them, and also the first truly wholesome entry (it is PG versus the prior installments being decidedly R-rated). In that sense, it was a genuine family film that crossed over to all generations, including Gen X and older millennials. And like all these movies where once R-rated funnymen played goofy dads, it represents a sudden lurch toward domesticity and familial life which would define many movies targeted toward Baby Boomers in the 1990s and beyond.
Forrest Gump (1994)
By the time the 1990s rolled around, the general perception of what it means to be a “Baby Boomer” had pretty much solidified. Perhaps that’s why one of the few movies that had anything left to add to the pop culture image was the one to most brazenly and extravagantly romanticize the whole experience as something wonderful. Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump is indeed a valedictory about the last 40 years of pop culture. The movie proved many audiences were likewise eager to pat themselves on the back for reaching a point where it felt like they could all share a laugh. As it turns out, all we needed was for a well-meaning veteran like Forrest (Tom Hanks) and a naive hippie who could get over herself, a la Jenny (Robin Wright), hugging it out in Washington D.C.’s reflecting pool.
The film is a time capsule of ‘60s culture clashes, nostalgia for the “simple times” of Elvis rock ’n roll, and ‘70s New Age philosophy. It even ends with the ‘80s AIDS scare (like Alex in Fatal Attraction, Jenny needs to be punished in some way for her transgressions). Also worth noting is that like most of the popular movies on this list, its fantasy version of America’s struggles are defined almost entirely by white individuals who end up in comfortable upper-middle class lifestyles. But it obviously struck a nerve with the audiences who saw themselves in that version of events, with Forrest Gump grossing more money than any other live-action film in 1994 and incredulously winning Best Picture over Pulp Fiction.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
One last movie to add is less a film directly about Baby Boomers than it is about how the generation’s pop culture image of their parents did a complete 180. Consider that 30 years before Saving Private Ryan, the movie of the moment was The Graduate, a film where two young people lock their parents in a church by bolting a door with a desecrated crucifix. Three decades later, the general opinion of the age group who endured the Great Depression and Second World War not only softened, but was recast in marble.
It’s fitting, then, that the filmmaker who never forgot the horrors (or the narrative thrills) of World War II would be the one to enshrine that image in cinema. In the same year Tom Brokaw popularized the term “the Greatest Generation,” Steven Spielberg offered the most intense, viscerally violent, and ultimately revering portrait of the era of Americans who gave the best years of their lives to a world at war. And the movie is also about how we relate to them, as demonstrated by the film beginning and ending with the eponymous Pvt. Ryan touring the modern day Normandy cemetery with his children and grandchildren. Both younger generations look on in awe.
The post The Movies That Defined the Baby Boomer Generation appeared first on Den of Geek.
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