The Best and Worst 70s Action Films: A Brutal Ranking

You've seen modern action, but back in the 70s directors filmed car chases without permits, actors fired live blanks, and chaos ruled. So which films became legends? And which burned out fast? Best, The French Connection, 1971. All right, Popeye's here. Get your hands on your heads, get off the bar and get on the wall. What's my name? A real cop, a real chase, and no permission from anyone. How did one film turn chaos into an Oscar-winning revolution? New York in 1971 wasn't a movie set, it was survival. Director William Friedkin didn't want a polished cop thriller, he wanted dirt, danger, and truth. So when Gene Hackman stepped into the role of Popeye Doyle, the NYPD narcotics cop, inspired by real-life detective Eddie Egan, Friedkin told him one thing, make it real or don't do it at all. The car chase that made history, under the elevated subway, had no city permits, no traffic control, and no stunt doubles for most of it. Friedkin literally filmed Hackman chasing a runaway train through Brooklyn traffic at nearly 90 miles per hour. Cars were actually hit, one pedestrian barely escaped. You can hear Friedkin's heartbeat in the footage. He was holding the camera himself, in the back seat of the car. The production cost barely 1.8 million dollars, but it exploded at the box office, pulling in over 50 million dollars worldwide. Critics didn't just praise it, they called it a turning point in realism. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Hackman. That was unheard of for a gritty police thriller filmed guerrilla style. Yet, what made it timeless wasn't the chase or the violence. It was Popeye Doyle's moral decay. Here was a hero who broke laws to enforce them. He wasn't clean, and that felt more honest than anything audiences had seen in action cinema before. Friedkin later said, I didn't know we were changing movies. I just wanted to catch lightning before it burned me. But lightning doesn't strike twice, unless it leads you straight into the next wild story of ambition gone too far and a plane crash no one wanted to watch. Worst. The Concorde. Airport 79. 1979. How do you crash a billion dollar jet without leaving the runway? Hollywood found out the hard way. By 1979, the Airport franchise had run out of altitude. The first film in 1970 was a blockbuster, earning more than 100 million dollars and launching the whole disaster movie craze. By the time the Concorde, Airport 79 arrived, audiences were done watching planes fall apart mid-air. Still, Universal Pictures wanted one last flight, bigger, louder, and filmed with the real Air France Concorde, the sleekest passenger jet ever built. The plot? A journalist uncovers an arms deal. Her boyfriend tries to silence her, and somehow everyone ends up shooting missiles at a commercial plane. Critics said it felt like a soap opera that wandered into an action movie. Alain Delon, one of Europe's biggest stars, played a pilot who smiled through chaos while George Kennedy reprised his role as the endlessly unlucky mechanic Joe Petroni. The budget ballooned to around 14 million dollars, a huge figure for 1979, but the result looked cheaper than ever. The dialogue was clunky, the models were obvious, and the missile effects looked like firecrackers. Universal even cut corners by recycling explosion shots from previous airport films. When it premiered, audiences laughed in the wrong places. Critics destroyed it. Time magazine called it a parody that forgot to be funny. The New York Times said the film flies straight into self-parody. The box office reflected the reviews. It barely scraped 13 million dollars in the US, a financial nosedive that ended the once lucrative series. Ironically, the real Concorde jet had just begun commercial service, symbolizing luxury and progress. Yet its movie version became the punchline that killed an entire genre. What happens when you try to turn a masterpiece into a joke? Hollywood thought it had a clever idea. Then, the laughter stopped. When Warner Brothers announced a sequel to The Maltese Falcon, people were curious. The original 1941 classic starred Humphrey Bogart and helped define the entire film noir genre. So, a sequel 30 years later sounded bold. But this one had a twist. It would be a comedy. The new film, The Black Bird, turned one of cinema's darkest stories into a parade of cheap laughs and confused winks. George Segal replaced Bogart's hard-boiled detective Sam Spade with a bumbling version, his son Sam Spade Jr. The script tried to mix slapstick with noir, but the result felt more like an inside joke that no one explained. Critics tore it apart. Variety called it an insult to noir. The Washington Post said, it mocks a masterpiece it never understood. Even fans of Segal couldn't figure out who the movie was for. The movie cost around three million dollars, but audiences avoided it like a bad rumor. It barely covered half its budget. Reviewers joked that the most suspenseful part was waiting for it to end. The shadow of Bogart loomed over every frame, reminding everyone how good the original was, and how lost this copy felt. Parody can work when it comes from love. The Black Bird came from confusion. Instead of honoring noir, it turned mystery into noise. The only mystery left was how anyone thought this would fly. But failure has a strange way of clearing the runway for greatness. Because just a few years later, a young Australian filmmaker used nothing but wrecked cars, empty roads, and raw nerve to change action movies forever. Best. Mad Max. 1979. How far can one camera, a few wrecked cars, and raw anger go? Turns out, all the way to a new kind of cinema. In 1979, Australia had no real action movie industry. George Miller, a young doctor from Sydney, decided to make one from scratch. He had no Hollywood studio, no stars, and only $350,000. Barely enough to buy a single American stunt car, yet he wanted to capture the chaos he saw on real highways while treating accident victims. That memory of twisted steel and screeching tires became the soul of Mad Max. Mel Gibson, still a college student, landed the lead role almost by accident. He'd gone to the audition to support a friend. With a bruised face from a bar fight, Miller thought the rough look was perfect for his world of broken roads and outlaws. The result was lightning in a bottle. The crew filmed in the Australian outback, shutting down roads illegally, using friends as extras, and fixing cars with duct tape between takes. Some stunts used real crashes. One sequence with a motorcycle hitting a car door was done in one take because the vehicle never worked again. The speed, dust, and noise felt real because it was. When Mad Max hit theaters, it exploded. It made over $100 million worldwide, becoming the most profitable movie ever made at the time, a 28,000% return on investment. Critics were split. Some called it savage genius. Others called it chaos. But audiences didn't care. They'd never seen anything like it. This wasn't just a movie. It was the birth of action realism. Every tire squeal, every scream carried danger that could be felt. It influenced everything from The Terminator to The Road Warrior, and even modern blockbusters like Fury Road. But success comes with strange echoes. Because the same decade that gave us raw, dusty freedom also produced a shining example of Hollywood hubris, a musical where action met ego, and both fell flat. Worst, At Long Last Love, 1975. What happens when a director falls in love with his own idea? Hollywood found out the hard way in one of its most painful flops. In 1975, Peter Bogdanovich was untouchable. He just made The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, both critical darlings. So when he decided to make a throwback musical, studios opened their wallets. Fox gave him six million dollars, a huge sum at the time, and complete creative control. His dream? A live-sung old Hollywood-style musical with action and charm. The problem? Neither his stars nor his concept were ready. Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd, two major box office names, sang every song live on set. No dubbing, no retakes. Bogdanovich wanted it real, but microphones picked up everything. Every off-note, every breath, even footsteps on the marble floors. What was meant to feel elegant came across as awkward, almost surreal. Critics couldn't decide if it was a parody or a vanity project. The New York Times called it a disaster of tone. Others said it looked like a dinner party that forgot to end. The movie opened in March 1975 and tanked immediately. Many theaters pulled it within a week. It earned back less than one million dollars, turning a prestige project into an industry joke. Fox tried to bury it quietly, but the story spread fast. Bogdanovich's career, once golden, never fully recovered. Years later, he admitted he should have listened to editors who warned him that good taste and ego don't mix. Yet from those ashes came a lesson that still echoes today. Big budgets can't fake heart, because by the end of the decade, another hero would step out of the smoke, armed with a .44 Magnum and a moral code sharp enough to split the 1970s in half. Best. Dirty Harry. 1971. When one man points a gun at crime and the law at the same time, who decides what justice really means? That question changed cinema forever. Clint Eastwood had already become a face of American toughness by the early 70s, but Dirty Harry pushed that image into something darker, something that reflected the decade's chaos. The movie came out in 1971, right after the Zodiac Killer terrified San Francisco. People were tired of crime, tired of red tape, and Dirty Harry gave them a cop who didn't wait for permission. Eastwood played Inspector Harry Callahan, a man who shot first and asked moral questions later. The .44 Magnum became more than a gun, it became a symbol of raw authority. One of his lines, Do you feel lucky, punk? entered pop culture instantly. But behind the quote was a growing debate. Was he a hero or a menace? Critics split right down the middle. Some called it fascist fantasy. Others said it was the only honest movie about frustration in modern America. Director Don Siegel shot the film across real San Francisco streets, using handheld cameras and natural light to capture grit that glossy Hollywood avoided. The budget stayed tight, around $4 million, but the return was explosive. Over $36 million in box office receipts, and five sequels over the next two decades. The film's villain, loosely inspired by the Zodiac case, made the tension feel real. That mix of truth and fiction hit audiences like a gut punch. Dirty Harry didn't invent the vigilante cop, but it defined him for generations. It influenced movies like Death Wish, Lethal Weapon, and even The Dark Knight. By the end of the 70s, Harry Callahan stood as both hero and warning, a reflection of a country torn between order and rebellion. Until next time, stay nostalgic.