Description: With all the upheaval of the 1970s -- social, political, sexual, and psychological -- it's no wonder at the movies of that decade broke new ground. To the degree that the arts reflect their times, the movies of the 1970s were bound to stretch limits concerning sex ("Carnal Knowledge"), war ("Apocalypse Now"), violence ("Raging Bull"), business ("Save the Tiger"), politics ("All the President's Men"), the media ("Network"), drugs ("Panic in Needle Park"), crime ("The Godfather"), relationships ("Annie Hall"), the environment ("The China Syndrome"), and entertainment ("All that Jazz").

The above list is only a sampler. For a better list, organized chronologically through the spirited decade, consult the Table of Contents in Hollywood's Revolutionary Decade, a newly published Collection of film reviews from the Los Angeles Times, by Charles Charnplin, the principal film critic for the Times from 1967 to 1980.

As Champlin points out in his Introduction to this book, it wasn't only the social climate of the 1970s that freed the movies to explore new territory. The industry in fact liberated itself responding to the commercial competition of television and the artistic competition of foreign films, Hollywood dumped the Hays Code in 1968 and adopted a rating system that made possible the prayer -- and better -- movies of the "revolutionary decade".

Did the "revolution" end with the 1970s? Perhaps not, but the excitement of liberation and growth was unique to that decade. There may never again be such fresh expression, As Martin Scorsese said in the New York Times Magazine, "The end of the 70s was the last golden period of cinema in America".

As for now, we live in a fortunate age. Forone thing, the movies of our contemporary decade owe a lot to the progress realized by Hollywood in the 1970s. Also, thanks to the advent of video rentals, we have practically the whole library of that exciting decade available to us nightly. And, finally, we have, for the record, the thoughtful and insightful reviews of Charles Champlin to guide us as we review the movies of Hollywood's Revolutionary Decade.

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