Paul Thomas Anderson likes a specific place, Southern California. Most of his movies are set there, including his latest, “Licorice Pizza.” It opens Christmas Day. Anderson also likes a specific time, the 1970s. “Licorice Pizza” is set then, too, as are his “Boogie Nights” (1997) and “Inherent Vice”(2014).
“Licorice Pizza” takes place in 1973. That’s also when “The Tender Bar,” George Clooney’s adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s best-selling memoir, starts, though it soon enough moves on. There are a lot of movies partly set in the ‘70s — “Goodfellas” (1990), say — or mostly set, such as “Boogie Nights.” But then there are those that are ‘70s through and through.
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Sometimes the idea is to play the decade for laughs, as does “Dick” (1999), about Richard Nixon, or “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004), about, yes, Ron Burgundy. Sometimes it’s to portray a specific event or set of events that took place in the ‘70s, rather than evoke the decade itself: “Summer of Sam” (1999), “Munich” (2005), “Frost/Nixon” (2008), “Argo” (2012).
What’s of more interest here are those movies that don’t just use the ‘70s as a means to an end. They’re the one for which the decade is an end in itself: the ‘70s as mood, style, attitude.
A partial list would include Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” (1993), Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm”(1997); Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” (2000); Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” (that floor-length chinchilla coat Denzel Washington wears ringside at the first Ali-Frazier fight!) and David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (both 2007), J.J. Abrams’s “Super 8″ (2011); David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” (2013), which is so ‘70s it’s practically the decade in drag (that’s a compliment); Craig Brewer’s “Dolemite Is My Name” (2019).
The cinematographer Harris Savides should get a ‘70s special citation. He shot both “American Gangster” and “Zodiac” — the ‘70s from literally A to Z — as well as the biopic “Milk” (2008), about Harvey Milk, the murdered San Francisco city supervisor and gay rights activist.
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The appeal of the ‘70s for those filmmakers has little if anything to do with disco, earth tones, and Ultrasuede. It begins with the decade’s having been one of the great periods in Hollywood history, American film’s Silver Age. No one is more aware of that than Anderson. His chief artistic influence is a ‘70s master, Robert Altman. “Boogie Nights” and Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999) are in a kind of one-way dialogue with Altman’s “Shorts Cuts” (1993), also set in Southern California. More distantly and even more formative, that dialogue extends to Altman’s “Nashville” (1975).
So focusing on the ‘70s can be a kind of paying homage. And the homage being paid need not just be to classics like “Mean Streets” (1973), “Chinatown” (1974), or the Altman pictures. The ferment in American film that decade very much included blaxploitation, which “American Gangster” touches on and “Dolemite” most happily embraces.
The ‘70s aren’t thought of as a great decade for music, certainly not as they are for movies. But there was a remarkable aural churn going on. The headlong rush of the ‘60s (’60s movies are a very different subject) was succeeded by the going-in-many-different-directions of the ‘70s. It’s hard to get more different, just to cite the most obvious examples, than disco and punk.
The nicest chiming of ‘70s music and ‘70s movie is “Almost Famous,” where Philip Seymour Hoffman has a cameo as the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, and extends to “Licorice Pizza,” where Hoffman’s son Cooper plays the male lead. In addition, the movie takes its title from a fondly remembered Southern California record-store chain that flourished in the ‘70s.
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Other examples of ‘70s movies, musical division, would be “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), the Freddie Mercury biopic, and “Rocketman” (2019), the Elton John biopic — both of them largely, though not entirely, set in the decade — “54″ (1998), about that late-’70s sanctum sanctorum, Studio 54, and “The Runaways” (2010). Is there such a thing as band biopics?
The musical churn of the ‘70s was minor compared to the social churn: the decade’s cusp quotient. The ‘60s introduced sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, so to speak, but it was the ‘70s that domesticated them. Set in 1973, “The Ice Storm” quite creepily captures that process going on in upper-middle-class Connecticut. It’s simply taken for granted by the high school students in “Dazed and Confused,” which takes place on the last day of class and through the next morning in 1976 (yes, the year of the Bicentennial, a very ‘70s event).
If the peak of the Silver Age is the first two “Godfather” movies (the first of which celebrates its golden anniversary next year), then it’s only fitting that “The Godfather Part III” should be set as the ‘70s were ending, in 1979. The decade really is kind of inescapable, isn’t it? As Michael Corleone says in that movie’s most famous line, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
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Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.