People like me sometimes get eye-rolled for being among the admittedly large number of people overly nostalgic for the movies of the 1970s. But it's easy to explain why the period appeals: The notion that films were much more commonly made for actual grown-ups then is borne out simply by noting that the big Christmas releases for 1971 were as follows: A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Polanski's Macbeth, and savage satire The Hospital.
I would place a sizable wager, however, that next to no one says Billy Wilder when thinking about the 1970s. Wilder's most celebrated work is likely "Sunset Boulevard," the scathing, cautionary tale of Hollywood gone wrong - squarely defined by its 1950 release date. "The Apartment" is another seminal work, thag one positioned firmly in 1960 corporate America. "Some Like it Hot," "The Lost Weekend," "Stalag 17," hell, even "The Fortune Cookie" each made their way into the marrow popular culture, breaking through the crowded zeitgeist to represent something tangible about their respective decades.