As the years pass, viewers’ preference for Thriller films and storylines continues to rise. With enough suspense for those who don’t like horror, enough drama for those who don’t like dramatic or romantic movies. Enough action for those who don’t like pure action movies, thriller movies have something to appeal to everyone. Great and innovative years for storytelling and filmmaking were the 1970s. Given how many enduring thriller movies were produced throughout the 1970s, the thriller subgenre may have been the decade’s biggest genre earner. The top thriller movies from the 1970s are highlighted in the list below.
1. The French Connection (1971)
Director- William Friedkin
In the grim police thriller directed by William Friedkin, two tenacious New York City police officers are shown attempting to stop a sizable shipment of heroin arriving from France. The contrast between Alain Charnier is a suave and urban man who is still a criminal and one of the biggest pure heroin traffickers to North America. ‘Popeye’ Doyle is a short-tempered, drunken bigot who is still a hard-working and committed police officer, is an amusing one. Friedkin creates one of the most exciting and iconic automobile chase scenes ever captured throughout the surveillance and subsequent bust.
2. Klute (1971)
Director- Alan J. Pakula
Peter Cable, Tom’s coworker, hires detective John Klute to look for his old buddy Tom Gruneman when the laboratory engineer goes missing. Klute travels to New York to look into Tom’s disappearance after receiving a novel lead—an explicit letter purportedly sent by Tom to Bree Daniels, a call prostitute there. Using audio tapes of her phone calls that he had covertly taped, Klute uses blackmail to force Bree to assist him discover other prostitutes who could have information. While Klute falls in love with Bree and she experiences an unfathomable emotion for him, they come to the realisation that someone is stalking Bree.
3. Frenzy (1972)
Director- Alfred Hitchcock
London is under the control of a serial killer whose preferred method of murder is necktie strangulation. Richard Blaney, an ex-Royal Air Force officer with a short fuse, is a suspect after finding his ex-wife killed. When forced to flee, Blaney makes an attempt to find safety with his best buddy, fruit vendor Bob Rusk, but it turns out that Rusk might actually be the necktie killer.
4. The Conversation (1974)
Director- Francis Ford Coppola
Definitely at the top of his game is the guilt-ridden San Francisco surveillance expert Harry Caul, who is committed to impartiality. Caul, who prefers to keep his cards close to his breast, goes about his usual business of listening in on a young couple’s chats in San Francisco’s busy Union Square, not realising that a startling reality is hiding there. Innocent-sounding murderous clues cause Harry’s buried conscience to awaken as he puts together a master tape with key evidence, sending him into a deadly web of concealment, paranoia, and self-destruction.
5. Jaws (1975)
Director- Steven Spielberg
Martin Brody, the newly appointed police chief of Amity Island, a small summer vacation town, has reason to suspect that the mangled body of the missing teenage swimmer found washed up on shore is the work of a predatory shark just one short week before the holiday’s traditional celebrations. Brody insists on closing the beaches because he worries about the unwary tourists. However, because of greed and Mayor Larry Vaughn, security measures are impeding. It leads to a string of additional brutal attacks. All eyes are now on the deep blue ocean as Brody, marine biologist Matt Hooper, and shark specialist Quint search for the undisputed ocean king. A massive, slate-grey great white shark that patrols the oceans in search of human meat.
6. Taxi Driver (1976)
Director- Martin Scorsese
Travis Bickle, a sad former U.S. Marine and chronic insomniac lone wolf, prowls the nighttime streets of the city’s seedy underbelly in his yellow taxi in the shadow of the busy Big Apple. Travis descends deeper and deeper into his world of obsession and vituperative revulsion as an endless string of bitter rejections from unattainable objects of desire; condemned young souls, and even his colleagues, can only result in a flaming manifesto of violence. Travis is a nobody among nobodies against the backdrop of an increasingly distorting perceive reality. The hungry and deadly weapons Travis has at his disposal will now serve as the harsh messengers of his truth as he prepares to clean up this dirty metropolis.
