One of the movie channels was showing Deliverance the other night. I started watching it, even though it I had missed the beginning. It was a timely reminder of just how good cinema was in the 70s but also how all those masterpieces would probably never get past the test screening audiences now.

Two things struck me about Deliverance: the pace and the cinematography. By today’s standards the film was terribly slow. We are so used to the quick edits, with few shots going beyond a few seconds, that it takes some adjustment to see shots held for minutes at a time. The thing is, every shot just looked so gorgeous, you could enjoy the look of the thing even if nothing was happening. I was not surprised to see Vilmos Zsigmond‘s name on the credits at the end.

When we did film studies at school, it seemed like just about every film we watched from the 70’s had either Vilmos Zsigmond or Laszlo Kovacs as cinematographer or director of photography. You know how you always used to know that if the name Fred Quimby came up at the beginning it was going to be a good one? I used to feel the same if I read the credits sheet before seeing a film and saw one of those names. It meant that even a film widely regarded as a monumental flop, like Heaven’s Gate, was at least a beautifully-shot financial failure.

The funny thing is, looking now on IMDB, they were not involved in as many films as I remembered – Images, Sugarland Express, The Deerhunter, Close Encounters, The Rose, Paper Moon… at the time it seemed like every other film had them involved, but maybe its just the way our film studies teacher chose the films for us.

Anyway, the television totally ruined the pace of Deliverance by breaking for adverts. The next film on was Zabriskie Point and I was torn. Another beautifully-shot film, my favourite director, Antonioni, in charge, Pink Floyd on the soundtrack, an amazing Frank Lloyd Wright house and a slow-motion explosion… but could I stand to see it stopped for adverts every 20 minutes?

The other thing about the 70’s was that it was the heyday for auteur movies. Back then it did matter who directed the film and you would start off knowing that you were going to watch a Don Siegel film, an Arthur Penn film, or Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, John Boorman or Stanley Kubrick – or (of course) Antonioni. All those long leisurely shots gave you time to mentally compare the film to the director’s other films.

It really was a golden age, and for every well-known classic like the Godfather, Straw Dogs or Chinatown, there was a pile of equally good but now largely forgotten wonders like Images, Night Moves, Brewster McCloud, Junior Bonner, The Beguiled, or The Missouri Breaks.

But for all the care, craft, and visual perfection the 70’s never came up with Snakes on a Plane…