page_title: Cinema of the United Kingdom
section_title: 1970 to 1980
hierarchical_section_title: Cinema of the United Kingdom / History / 1970 to 1980
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait photograph of Peter Ustinov (1986)
context_page_description: The United Kingdom has had a significant film industry for over a century. While film production reached an all-time high in 1936, the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, during which the directors David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed produced their most critically acclaimed works. Many British actors have accrued critical success and worldwide recognition, such as Maggie Smith, Roger Moore, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson, and Kate Winslet. Some of the films with the largest ever box office returns have been made in the United Kingdom, including the third and fourth highest-grossing film franchises.
  The identity of the British film industry, particularly as it relates to Hollywood, has often been the subject of debate. Its history has often been affected by attempts to compete with the American industry. The career of the producer Alexander Korda was marked by this objective, the Rank Organisation attempted to do so in the 1940s, and Goldcrest in the 1980s.
context_section_description: American studios cut back on British productions, and in many cases withdrew from financing them altogether. Films financed by American interests were still being made, including Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), but for a time funds became hard to come by.
  More relaxed censorship also brought several controversial films, including Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) starring Malcolm McDowell as the leader of a gang of thugs in a dystopian future Britain.
  Other films during the early 1970s included the Edwardian drama The Go-Between (1971), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Nicolas Roeg's Venice-set supernatural thriller Don't Look Now (1973) and Mike Hodges' gangster drama Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine. Alfred Hitchcock returned to Britain to shoot Frenzy (1972), Other productions such as Richard Attenborough's Young Winston (1972) and A Bridge Too Far (1977) met with mixed commercial success. The British horror film cycle associated with Hammer Film Productions, Amicus and Tigon drew to a close, despite attempts by Hammer to spice up the formula with added nudity and gore. Although some attempts were made to broaden the range of British horror films, such as with The Wicker Man (1973), these films made little impact at the box office, In 1976, British Lion, who produced The Wicker Man, were finally absorbed into the film division of EMI, who had taken over ABPC in 1969. The duopoly in British cinema exhibition, via Rank and now EMI, continued.
  Some British producers, including Hammer, turned to television for inspiration, and big screen versions of popular sitcoms like On the Buses (1971) and Steptoe and Son (1972) proved successful with domestic audiences, the former had greater domestic box office returns in its year than the Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever and in 1973, an established British actor Roger Moore was cast as Bond in, Live and Let Die, it was a commercial success and Moore would continue the role for the next 12 years. Low-budget British sex comedies included the Confessions of ... series starring Robin Askwith, beginning with Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974). More elevated comedy films came from the Monty Python team, also from television. Their two most successful films were Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), the latter a major commercial success, probably at least in part due to the controversy at the time surrounding its subject.
  Some American productions did return to the major British studios in 1977–79, including the original Star Wars (1977) at Elstree Studios, Superman (1978) at Pinewood, and Alien (1979) at Shepperton. Successful adaptations were made in the decade of the Agatha Christie novels Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978). The entry of Lew Grade's company ITC into film production in the latter half of the decade brought only a few box office successes and an unsustainable number of failures
caption: Peter Ustinov (pictured in 1986) starred as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (1978)
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