Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Based on Donn Pearce's novel, this chain-gang prison film was a moving character study of a non-conformist, anti-hero loner who bullheadedly resisted authority and the Establishment. The spirited title character was an irreverent, social misfit named Luke (Paul Newman) who was arrested for destroying parking meters and imprisoned in a tough Southern prison farm, commanded by a sadistic, prison officer Captain (Strother Martin).

After boxing with the chain-gang boss Dragline (George Kennedy), he eventually became a hero to his fellow inmates, earning the title "Cool Hand Luke" because his will could not be broken. A visit by Luke's dying mother (Jo Van Fleet) revealed facts about his past. The stubborn, unruly and independent rebel refused to submit and continually and cooly defied the authorities with repeated escape attempts. As the inmates started worshipping him as a folk hero, he risked everything in order to live up to their expectations, and was sacrificed in the tragic climax.

"What we got here is (a) failure to communicate."

"Old Luke, he was some boy. Cool Hand Luke. Hell, he's a natural-born world-shaker."

The egg-eating contest, and the soap-sudsing car wash performed by a buxom blonde (Joy Harmon).

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Robert Aldrich's popular action-war film told about a group of a dozen convicted, death-row military convicts (including Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, Robert Ryan, George Kennedy and more) sent on a suicide mission (headed by a tough Lee Marvin as Major John Reisman) behind Nazi enemy lines to destroy a French chateau during World War II.

It was the ultimate 'guy's' movie with its exciting sequences of the training and then the behind-the-lines suicidal assault (named "Operation Amnesty" composed of 16 separate steps) on a Nazi-filled French chateau by the "Dirty Dozen" - only one of whom survived -- stoic Pole Joseph T. Wladislaw (Charles Bronson).

"...It gives you just about the most twisted, anti-social bunch of psychopathic deformities I have ever run into!...You've got one religious maniac, one malignant dwarf, two near-idiots, and the rest I don't even wanna think about!"

Jefferson's (Jim Brown) heroic run - to touch off the massive explosion of the chateau after being commanded: "All right, blow it!"

Bullitt (1968)

This guy film, a classic car-chase/cop film by director Peter Yates, contained one of the screen's all-time best car chase sequences (at up to 110 miles per hour). It was a 10-minute sequence filmed with hand-held cameras up and down the narrow, hilly streets of San Francisco as police lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) chased after criminals in his car through hazardous intersections. The classic chase ended when the bad guys lost control and crashed into a gas station - with a fiery explosion.

"Look. You work your side of the street and I'll work mine."

The San Francisco car chase scene.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

This classic western was director/co-writer Sam Peckinpah's provocative, brilliant yet controversial Western, shocking for its graphic and elevated portrayal of violence and savagely-explicit carnage, yet hailed for its truly realistic and reinterpreted vision of the dying West in the early 20th century. Its unrelenting, bleak tale told of aging, scroungy outlaws (the 'wild bunch') bound by a private code of honor, camaraderie and friendship, but they found that they were at odds with the society of 1913.

The lone band of men led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) came to the end of the line and were no longer living under the same rules in the Old West, and were relentlessly stalked by bounty hunters, one of whom was Pike's former friend Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). The film concluded with a spectacular, climactic bloodbath in the open courtyard as the gang took on an entire Mexican soldier regiment and commandered a big machine gun for awhile.

"If they move, kill 'em."

The film's opening ambush following a failed bank robbery in a Southwestern Texas border town, and the bloody finale signaled by the courageous, heroic march of the four remaining gang members to face ruthless General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) and his army for a showdown - a slow-motion massacre-shoot-out as the Wild Bunch suicidally attempted to rescue Angel (Jaime Sanchez) from 1,000 Mexicans.

Dirty Harry (1971)

Director Don Siegel's sensational film was a seminal vigilante film of the decade, appealing especially to male audiences because of its overt violence and occasional glimpses of nudity. The duelling combatants (the cop and the criminal) throughout the film - an individualistic, unconventional, neo-fascist, politically-incorrect super-hero police detective with a .44 Magnum weapon who threw away the rule book, and his complementary opposite - a pathological, malevolent and sadistic criminal named Scorpio (Andy Robinson) (based on the real Zodiac Killer) who demanded an extortionist ransom of $100,000, both shared traits of brutal violence and insanity.

Steely-eyed Clint Eastwood in a career-boosting role portrayed the title character, a maverick, renegade San Francisco cop named Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan ("Inspector 71") who was famous for sarcastic one-liners.

"I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?"

"No wonder they call him Dirty Harry. Always get the s--t-end of the stick."

Opening scene of a bank robbery with the taunt of Dirty Harry toward the the wounded bank robber (Albert Popwell) on the sidwalk.

Also, the confrontation with Scorpio on the field in the middle of the football stadium.

And the final hi-jacked school bus scene (with Harry riding on the top of the bus) and quarry gun battle ending when the wounded killer heard another challenge with the same famous threatening lines of dialogue.

The French Connection (1971)

And the sequel: French Connection II (1975)

William Friedkin's film was a brilliant, fast-paced, brutally-realistic urban police/crime film - his commercial break-through film. The true-to-life film about the largest narcotics seizure of all time in 1962 was told with an innovative semi-documentary-style technique that conveyed the story with very few words. It unsympathetically showed the untiring, violent and abusive counter tactics of two New York narcotics detectives fighting crime and an international narcotics smuggling ring: the two were the vulgar, brutal, tireless, unlikable, maniacal and sadistic Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) who toed the thin line between fighting crime and committing crimes himself, who passionately and obsessively pursued drug pushers with his partner Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider).

During the film's most famous sequence, "Popeye" pursued, at 90 mph, a suspected drug dealer in a hijacked elevated subway train above him, driving a hijacked civilian car: ("Police emergency: I need your car"); during the chase, he - among other things - half-collided with another car, dodged a mother and her baby carriage, and side- swiped a delivery van, all the while furiously honking the car's horn and frantically switching from his brake to accelerator.

"I've got a man in Poughkeepsie who wants to talk to you. You ever been to Poughkeepsie? Huh? Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?"

"All right, Popeye's here!"

The overhead subway-car chase scene.