10 Action Movies From the '70s
You Should've Seen by Now
Most people's action movie history starts in the '80s. That's a mistake.
The decade before it was rawer, angrier, and shot in cities that actually looked dangerous. The budgets were lower. The stakes felt higher.
These 10 films are the ones worth going back for. A few you've heard of. Several you haven't actually watched yet.
That's worth fixing.
Dirty Harry
1971A San Francisco detective hunts a sniper who won't stop killing. Clint Eastwood plays a cop who doesn't much care for procedure.
It basically invented the rogue cop archetype. Everything that came after — including every buddy cop movie you've ever seen — owes something to this.
Enter the Dragon
1973Bruce Lee infiltrates an underground martial arts tournament on behalf of British intelligence. That's the setup. The execution is something else.
Lee died before it released. This is the film that locked in his legacy forever. The fight scenes aren't choreographed — they're designed.
The French Connection
1971Two New York detectives stumble onto a major heroin smuggling operation. Gene Hackman plays a cop who's aggressive, effective, and not particularly likable.
The car chase under the elevated subway is one of the most referenced sequences in film history. Shot practically, in real traffic. It shows.
Mad Max
1979A highway cop in a collapsing Australia watches the order he's supposed to enforce slowly come apart. Then it gets personal.
Made for almost nothing. Looks like it was filmed at the edge of the world. Fury Road gets the praise, but this is where it all started — and it's meaner.
The Warriors
1979A street gang from Coney Island gets framed for a murder they didn't commit. Now they have to get home across New York City at night, with every crew in the city after them.
The style is unlike anything else from this era. Feels like a comic book that got loose on the subway. The tension never really lets up.
Death Wish
1974An architect's family is attacked by criminals in New York. The police don't move fast enough. He decides to handle it himself.
Morally uncomfortable in a way that's intentional. New York in the '70s is as much a character as Bronson. You leave it with something sitting in your chest.
The Getaway
1972A career criminal gets out of prison, pulls one last job, and then everything goes wrong. Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw spend the film running from everyone.
Sam Peckinpah directed it, so nothing is clean and nothing is safe. Lean, fast, and mean — exactly what a heist film should be.
Shaft
1971A Black private detective in Harlem gets hired to find a mob boss's missing daughter. The city is the backdrop. Richard Roundtree is the whole foreground.
The film changed what action heroes looked like on screen. Isaac Hayes won the Oscar for the soundtrack. Both of them earned it.
Rolling Thunder
1977A Vietnam veteran returns home to find nothing waiting for him. Then someone takes what little he has left.
Written by Paul Schrader — same writer as Taxi Driver. It has that same quiet, building fury. Underseen and underrated in a way that's genuinely hard to explain.
Assault on Precinct 13
1976A nearly empty police precinct gets besieged by a street gang with nothing to negotiate. John Carpenter made this on a shoestring and it doesn't matter.
Stripped down to pure tension. No subplots, no fat — just the building and the people trying to survive the night. Carpenter never wasted a frame.
They don't make them like this anymore. Not because the tools are worse — they're better. The willingness to be uncomfortable is just gone.
These films weren't trying to launch franchises. They were trying to be good.
Written by StreamRoulette Editorial
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