The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) ’70s Crime Movies

The 1970s was a great decade for American cinema as a whole — possibly the best in film history — as late-‘60s ground-breakers like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider set the stage for the “New Hollywood” movement. With visionary directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese leading the charge, this movement was paved with crime movies.

A gangster epic became the highest grossing movie of all time, and filmmakers from around the world, like Jean-Pierre Melville, ensured that the decade’s best crime films weren’t just confined to Hollywood. Here are the five best and five worst crime movies from the ‘70s.

10 Best: Mean Streets (1973)

After making two movies under the thumbs of various interfering producers, Martin Scorsese was finally able to spread his artistic wings with Mean Streets.

Starring Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro as Italian-American crooks making their way in New York, Mean Streets is a deeply personal portrait of life in Little Italy told through vaguely connected vignettes.

9 Worst: Boxcar Bertha (1972)

Although Mean Streets can be viewed as the first true Scorsese film, it was actually his third directorial effort. His sophomore outing as a director was Boxcar Bertha, a crime drama for producer Roger Corman.

A young Scorsese does everything in his power to elevate Boxcar Bertha above being a serviceable gangster flick, but under the watchful eye of Corman, it never really takes flight.

8 Best: Chinatown (1974)

Robert Towne’s script for Chinatown is one of the most perfectly structured screenplays ever written, taught by every screenwriting guru worth their salt.

Jack Nicholson stars as Jake Gittes, a private eye who stumbles upon a widespread conspiracy, and the unique visual language that Roman Polanski brought to the film – translating the tropes of old mystery stories to a contemporary setting – birthed the neo-noir genre.

7 Worst: 99 And 44/100 Percent Dead (1974)

John Frankenheimer is a great director, as proven by Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate, but not all his films work. 99 and 44/100 Percent Dead is a crime comedy that took its title from the advertising slogan for Ivory soap, which should give you an idea of how much substance the movie has.

Frankenheimer himself even considers 99 and 44/100 Percent Dead to be a failure that made him realize that he should avoid attempting satire.

6 Best: Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville recruited his go-to leading man Alain Delon for perhaps their finest collaboration in 1970 with Le Cercle Rouge, the brilliant writer-director’s penultimate film.

The star attraction in Le Cercle Rouge is the climactic heist sequence, which is edge-of-your-seat gripping, despite going on for about half an hour with virtually no dialogue.

5 Worst: The Swap (1979)

Technically, The Swap stars Robert De Niro at the height of his powers… but the footage was taken from a film that came out a decade earlier. Director Jordan Leondopoulos repurposed footage from his 1969 movie Sam’s Song, which featured De Niro, to make The Swap, and capitalize on the actor’s newfound fame.

De Niro was so furious that Leondopoulos used previously shot footage of him in a new movie that he considered taking legal action against Cannon Films for allowing it.

4 Best: The French Connection (1971)

William Friedkin nailed the crime genre with The French Connection, a captivating cat-and-mouse thriller about a detective’s relentless quest to bring down a French heroin smuggler operating in New York.

The movie has a car chase to rival those found in Bullitt and The Road Warrior. Gene Hackman’s portrayal of Popeye Doyle is one of the most iconic cop characters in film history, while Roy Scheider provides strong support as his partner, Cloudy.

3 Worst: Bloody Mama (1970)

Roger Corman is a master of low-budget filmmaking; any filmmaker who has to work with a low budget should study Corman’s method. But despite the fact that the director counts it among his personal favorites, Bloody Mama is a terrible showing.

Loosely based on the story of Ma Barker, who raised her kids to be criminals, Bloody Mama is a schlocky crime movie of the highest order — and, unfortunately, not in a fun way.

2 Best: The Godfather (1972)

Adapted from Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was the highest grossing movie of all time when it first hit theaters, and was instantly hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made.

The story of the Corleone family is a riveting crime saga, telling the parallel tales of infamous Don Vito’s fall from grace and his wayward son Michael’s descent into the criminal underworld. The Godfather is the quintessential American epic.

1 Worst: The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971)

Francis Ford Coppola asked producer Irwin Winkler for the chance to write and direct The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a wacky comedy about mafiosos, but Winkler turned him down because he didn’t think Coppola could handle a mob movie.

Over the next three years, Coppola would make The Godfather and The Godfather Part II and prove Winkler completely wrong. The director that Winkler did hire for The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, James Goldstone, botched the project with ham-fisted direction.

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Ben Sherlock
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Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, independent filmmaker, and Burt Reynolds enthusiast. He writes lists for Screen Rant and features and reviews for Game Rant. He’s currently in pre-production on his first feature (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop.

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