Was Altman the best American filmmaker of the 70s?

Today, I've been watching one of my favorite '70s films, one of the great under-seen masterpieces -- 1973's The Long Goodbye. I owe it, but it is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and I strongly recommend it. It's an usual movie, but if you can get on its wavelength it emerges as one of the decade's best. A dark comedy which both satirizes its subjects and treats them deadly serious.

It got me thinking about 70s directors which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that the 1970s are my favorite movie decade by a country mile. So many legendary directors did their very best work that decade, and few were more prolific and perfect than Robert Altman.

He would go one to be active for several more decades but the '70s are what made him both a star and a legend. Still, he has some stiff competition for who was the decades best.

There are the upstarts Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, who both made three very good to great films during the decade before stumbling and then going on the make even more great work for the next forty years.

Brian De Palma, I would argue deserves a look in this conversation. Keep in mind, I'm dealing strictly with America. I simply have not seen enough of Fellini or Bergman's output during this period to compare it fairly to these others.

I think Woody Allen came into his own as a filmmaker during the '70s, you can't dismiss him, but I feel that his early broader comedies don't hold up very well, and so I mostly admire his late 70s trio of masterpieces (caveats about their inherent creepiness aside): Annie Hall, Interiors and Manhattan. That's a pretty impressive slate that you would have to maybe put him in the top five.

Kubrick, how can I forget Kubrick?! Crazily enough, he only has two movies that decade -- of course they're both classics: A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. But that's just two movies. There are a few wunderkind talents who also have two-fers like Bogdonovich and Cimino. William Friedkin has three home runs, so does Bob Fosse, and so does Alan J. Pakula, whose paranoid thrillers still hold up.

Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye

I think Peckipah had a fantastic decade but I think his work was so inconsistent at times that it's hard to pin him down. Sidney Lumet was more consistent, but less of a traditional auteur, hence him making both The Wiz, Dog Day Afternoon and Murder on the Orient Express. All wonderful movies, but also lacking a coherent vision.

But to me it comes down to Coppola v. Altman. Altman had more A+ movies: MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Nashville, 3 Women... I mean c'mon, and there are a few more I really like that I could have named here too.

What makes his run even more impressive is the fact that only one of those movies -- MASH -- was a big hit, and yet he still managed to regularly crank out iconoclastic, genre-bending greatness.

Still, Coppola only made four movies in the 1970s, and as far as I am concerned, they're all perfect. I don't know what he was smoking -- actually, let's be real, probably a lot of weed -- but The Godfather I & II, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now? Has there ever been a more impressive run? Maybe the streak P.T. Anderson is currently on (or arguably Quentin Tarantino). All films were nominated by Best Picture and Best Director. Two of them won Best Picture. I mean, bow down.

So for me it's neck and neck, and for now, I'd say it's Coppola by a nose.