Baby Boomer Films Now Part of College Curriculums

Published: January 13, 2024 by 24/7 Tempo Staff

Each generation shares numerous parallels, from birth years and age to significant life events, and like the generation before and after, they all experience their own crucial incidents that define them. Baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, grew up at a time when the country was rapidly changing, witnessing, and sometimes taking part in, the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the Vietnam War. The films they watched as they came of age reflected many of the cultural shifts that were taking place around them.

The Hays Code, a guideline for movie censorship that limited depictions of profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic violence, and more was abolished by Hollywood in 1968. This ushered in a generation of young filmmakers who made increasingly innovative films that explored themes and content previously impermissible in the industry. Many of these films are still celebrated today as among the most influential movies ever made – shaping the efforts of later filmmakers and themselves becoming objects of study in colleges and universities. (Here is a list of the best movies that defined the boomer generation.)

24/7 Tempo reviewed data on syllabus citation counts from the non-profit Open Syllabus. This open-source project tallies the number of times a movie, book, or other media has been assigned across a corpus of millions of college syllabi which helped us to assemble a list of movies baby boomers loved that kids study in college. Movies released between 1967 and 1985 were ranked based on the number of times they appeared as assigned films on syllabi, considering the movies that have been assigned the most to be the most influential. Documentary films were not considered. Supplemental data on user reviews from IMDb, an online movie and TV database owned by Amazon, and audience and Tomatometer rankings from Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, are current as of July 2023. Only movies with at least 2,000 IMDb user ratings were included. Director information is from IMDb.

Filmmakers whose artistic control and personal influence over a movie are hugely influential, known as auteurs, include Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick who emerged during this era, and each of these directors has three films on the list. An interest in foreign films grew in the 1960s, and a few of the most influential films of the generation are from Japan, Belgium, Mexico, and Germany.

Many of these movies listed deal with race, including “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which features one of the first positive depictions of an interracial couple. Others explore youth culture including “American Graffiti” and “Easy Rider.” Technological advancements were reflected in the sci-fi and action movies of the day, including Ridley Scott’s “Bladerunner,” and James Cameron’s “The Terminator.” (These are the best R-rated sci-fi movies of all time.)

Here are beloved baby boomer films now part of college curriculums