The 1970s is one of the most consequential decades in cinema, seeing both the emergence of socially relevant and thought-provoking films like Deliverance and the birth of the summer blockbuster with Jaws.
Read on to discover the must-visit locations of the 1970s' biggest films. To enjoy these images FULL SCREEN on a desktop, click the icon in the top right...
Grease was the original High School Musical, a teen romance set in a US high school, soundtracked by irresistible tunes. Shot on a shoestring budget of $6 million, it made close to $9 million on the opening weekend alone, and spawned two No.1 hits. In 1978, Grease definitely was the word.
The school scenes were shot in various Los Angeles high schools, including Venice High School (the façade) and Huntington Park High School (the gym for the dance contest). The iconic opening scene where Sandy and Danny say their goodbyes (pictured) was shot at Leo Carrillo Beach in Malibu.
This 1.5 mile long (2.4km) state beach sits beside the West Pacific Coast Highway and is a popular spot for swimming, surfing, windsurfing and beach combing. There are also countless tidepools, coastal caves and reefs to explore. Sadly, the giant sycamores that shaded the campgrounds were destroyed in the 2025 LA fires.
The beach is also one of the most filmed beaches in cinematic history. As well as providing the romantic backdrop for Sandy and Danny’s touching farewell, it has appeared in movies as diverse as Beach Blanket Bingo and Point Break to Inception and The Usual Suspects.
The insanity of war has seldom been portrayed so vividly as in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now. Especially when Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall (pictured), orders a massive napalm strike on a village so that he and his soldiers can surf a break nearby.
Duvall’s character famously looks out over the destruction and declares, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning". When screenwriter John Milius wrote the line he thought it was too over-the-top, and the first thing Coppola would cut. It went on to become the movie’s most iconic quote.
The scene was filmed at Baler Bay, a stunning stretch of coastline just six hours northeast of the Filipino capital, Manilla. It is considered the birthplace of surfing in the Philippines and has breaks suitable for every level of surfer.
If you’re just starting out, try the gentle waves at Sabang Beach. Cemento Beach is great for intermediate surfers, while those looking for something a little more gnarly should head for Charlie's Point, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Tibag-Sabang River. Perfect for those who love the smell of surf wax in the morning.
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In an era dominated by dark, dystopian science fiction movies like Rollerball and Logan’s Run, the first Star Wars movie was a dazzling interstellar battle between good and evil, full of breathtaking special effects and action sequences. Director George Lucas wanted to create an adventure that would inspire interest in space travel, like the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movies he loved as a kid.
On a budget of just $11 million, he achieved so much more than that. The movie was an instant worldwide phenomenon, grossing $513 million on its original release, and cementing characters like Luke Skywalker (pictured) into global consciousness.
Lucas’s limited budget meant that much of the movie was shot in the North African country of Tunisia. The sets were built in remote desert locations like Tozeur and have become pilgrimage sites for ardent Star Wars fans.
One of the most famous sites is Hotel Sidi Driss in Matmata, a remote desert town famous for its ancient troglodyte dwellings. The hotel served as the Skywalker family home on Tatooine, and today visitors are greeted with the strains of John Williams' iconic film score, a glass of blue milk and the opportunity to stay overnight in Luke’s childhood home.
This 1970s favourite is often linked to the glitz and glamour of the disco era. But the reality of the life lived by John Travolta’s character, Tony (pictured), is a long way removed from the hedonistic clubs like Studio 54 in Manhattan.
The music is great and the iconic dance moves continue to be imitated at office parties and weddings around the world. But the crux of the movie is much darker, focussing on the harsh reality of Tony’s bleak family life in Brooklyn as much as the escape he finds on the dance floor of the 2001 Odyssey.
You may be surprised to learn that the 2001 Odyssey was a real night club. It was something of an institution in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, right up to 1995 when it was converted into a Chinese restaurant.
There’s nothing to stop you strutting through Bay Ridge like Tony did at the start of the movie, with a tin of paint, should you choose. The area is somewhat gentrified now, but areas like Fifth Avenue, with views of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (pictured) retain some of the area’s gritty charm.
When Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released in 1972, it was an immediate critical and commercial success. Viewers were swept up into the rich and detailed world of Italian-American mobsters where honour and family ruled supreme.
The movie makes much of the Corleone family’s strong ties with the culture of their ancestral home in Sicily. Michael’s deeply traditional marriage to Apollonia in Sicily (pictured) can be seen as a metaphorical marriage as well, to the old country and the ways of his father, Don Corleone, the Godfather.
Coppola shot the wedding scenes in Savoca, a beautiful mountain town on the Ionian coast of Sicily, just 26 miles (42km) from Messina, and is honoured by a striking steel sculpture in the town.
Today, fans can visit famous locations like Bar Vitelli, where Michael asked the owner for the hand of his daughter in marriage, and the church of S. Nicolò (pictured), where the moving wedding took place. Or simply wander the timeless cobbled streets just like the newly married couple did, but sadly not accompanied by the whole town like in the movie.
Sylvester Stallone was a wannabe actor down to his last few dollars when Hollywood producers offered him $360,000 for his script for Rocky. They wanted Ryan O’Neal or Burt Reynolds to play Rocky. Stallone had written the part for himself and refused to sell it.
The producers eventually gave Stallone $1 million to make the movie, a pittance even back in the Seventies. But by casting family and friends and shooting footage on rudimentary Steadicams, usually in one take, it came in under budget. The film went on to earn $117 million and win three Oscars, including Best Movie and Best Director.
One of the most iconic scenes in Rocky is the training montage that sees him running through the streets of Philadelphia before sprinting up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and raising his arms triumphantly towards the city below.
Today, the spot is marked by imprints of Sylvester Stallone’s footprints, and on any given day you’ll see dozens of visitors recreating the famous scene. Not everyone sprints up the 72 steps to the top. But they do raise their arms before ambling over to get a selfie by the Rocky statue nearby.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is now considered one of the funniest comedy movies of the decade. But the truth is that it is a miracle this hilarious quest for the Holy Grail even got made in the first place.
Every major film studio turned the project down, forcing the British comedy troupe to call upon the largesse of their rock star mates. But even with Pink Floyd investing some of the royalties of The Dark Side of the Moon into the movie, the budget was tight. Too tight for horses, certainly, hence the need for coconuts.
Finding castles to film in proved problematic too. The British National Trust withdrew permission for use of its properties fearing the group wouldn’t 'respect the dignity of the fabric of the buildings', so they used privately owned ones like Doune Castle (pictured) instead.
It is from its parapets that French knights rudely taunted King Arthur and bombarded him with catapulted cows. And where, to this day, you can berate the people below you by telling them that their mother was a hamster and their father smelled of elderberries.
The summer of 1975 saw a dramatic drop in the number of people sunning themselves on American beaches and a startling increase in the number of phone calls to the police reporting shark sightings. It was also the summer that Steven Spielberg’s cinematic classic Jaws opened in theatres across the nation.
By shying away from using big name actors in the lead roles and shooting in real life locations around Martha’s Vineyard, Spielberg made a movie that felt viscerally real. And scared the living daylights out of the millions of cinema goers who flocked to see it.
Perversely, the success of the movie has seen thousands of visitors descend on Martha’s Vineyard. The beaches where the fictional Great White struck are particularly popular, including Joseph A. Sylvia State Beach (pictured), where young Alex Kintner was taken.
The local Chamber of Commerce in Martha’s Vineyard has embraced the infamy the movie brought to the island with an online guide to filming locations. There are also plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its release in June 2025 with an exhibition at the local museum and a possible 10-day ‘Jaws 50’ event.
Perhaps best known for its campfire flatulence scene, Mel Brooks’ hilarious satire of Western movies is actually a whip smart takedown of racism, chock full of quotable lines that make you laugh – and think – about the absurdity of prejudice and discrimination.
Cleavon Little plays Bart, a suave Black sheriff, appointed by a corrupt politician to cause unrest in a small western town whose land he wants to acquire for a railway. The role was originally meant for Richard Pryor, who helped write the script, but studio bosses felt his history of drug arrests made him unsuitable for the part.
Those keen to recreate the famous campfire scene should head to the Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park in Sierra Pelona, just north of Los Angeles, where much of the movie was shot.
The 945-acre park is famous for its iconic geology (pictured) and is criss-crossed with hiking and horse-riding trails that showcase its native flora and fauna and fascinating cultural history as well. There is a campsite, but make sure to check current fire restrictions before refrying your beans.
There is no director more New York than Woody Allen. And it could be argued that there is no movie that's more New York than his 1977 hit, Annie Hall. Set largely in and around Manhattan, it captures perfectly the neuroses and obsessions of living in the city in the mid-to-late 1970s.
The fashions are iconic too, especially the outfits worn by Diane Keaton who play the eponymous Annie. Her shirt, vest and tie combo became a kind of couture shorthand for the era, and one the actress loved so much that she still wears an evolving variation of it to this day.
Sadly, many of the movie’s iconic locations have long since been lost. The Wall Street Racquet Club where Alvy (Woody Allen) and Annie first meet was demolished in 2002. The Beekman Theatre where they watched Camille was knocked down three years later.
Thankfully, the block where Annie’s apartment was set, East 70th Street between Lexington Avenue and Park Avenue, still retains much of the Annie Hall vibe. Head to a café in the Upper East Side Historic District (pictured) and consider your life choices over a (possibly disappointing) latte.
British director John Boorman’s film about a weekend canoe trip in the wilds of Georgia gone wrong, is one of the most disturbing and unnerving movies of the Seventies. It shone an unrelenting spotlight on masculinity, the destruction of the natural world and America’s city/rural divide, forcing the country to answer questions it didn’t want to answer.
It was also one of the most successful movies of 1972, grossing $46 million at the US box office alone and turning the sound of duelling banjos into one of the most terrifying and triggering sounds to have ever come out of the Appalachians.
The movie was set almost entirely on the Chattooga River in Clayton, Georgia, a river that almost no one had canoed. Deliverance introduced the world to the wild beauty of northern Georgia and created a thriving rafting and outdoor sports industry along the river (pictured).
Locals may still bristle at the movie’s portrayal of them as uneducated hillbillies, but with weekend rafters bringing more than $20 million into the area each year, it’s a cross they are willing to bear. Just make sure you buy a 'Paddle faster, I hear banjos' bumper sticker while you’re there to ease any discomfort.
In the parlance of UFOlogy, a close encounter of the third kind involves actual contact with aliens (first involves a sighting, a second, physical evidence). Fittingly, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster was inspired by real-life witness testimonies – particularly from a series of UFO sightings in Michigan in the summer of 1966.
The movie sees Spielberg reunited with Richard Dreyfuss, who plays Roy, an electrical lineman who encounters a UFO and is inexplicably drawn to the Devils Tower in Wyoming, where contact with alien lifeforms is finally made.
When you visit Devils Tower, you’ll immediately see why Spielberg chose it as the site for an intergalactic encounter. The strikingly striated rock formation stands 1,267 feet tall (386m), rising above the surrounding prairies and ponderosa pine forests like a rocky sentinel.
The towering rock formation was declared a National Monument in 1906, the first natural attraction to receive the honour. If crack climbing is your thing, the hundreds of parallel fissures, formed by cooling molten lava, make it one of the finest crack climbing areas in North America.
This 1975 farce sees Peter Sellers return as the hilariously clueless French detective, Inspector Clouseau. It was originally intended to be a 26-part mini-series, but mercifully it was filmed as a taut 113-minute cinema release instead, delighting movie goers around the world.
The movie finds Clouseau once again in pursuit of the stolen Pink Panther diamond, the largest diamond in the world, a trail that leads him from the chaos of medinas of Morocco to the stately Gstaad Palace hotel in Switzerland.
In the movie, the Inspector follows Lady Claudine Litton to Gstaad hoping to find her husband Charles, who he suspects has stolen the diamond. Lady Claudine is staying in the fairytale Gstaad Palace hotel, opened in 1913, and seen here perched on a hill overlooking Gstaad.
While Inspector Clouseau didn’t get to stay in this achingly glamorous hotel, you can, but be warned, room prices start from $818 (£655) per night. If you’re lucky, your stay will coincide with one of the hotel’s famous Gala dinners, a favourite with politicians, movie stars and musicians including Marlene Dietrich and Louis Armstrong.
The British folk horror movie The Wicker Man unnerved cinema goers around the world and continues to influence film makers to this day, most notably in 2019’s Midsommar, starring Florence Pugh.
The movie sees a puritan police sergeant (Edward Woodward) arrive in a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl, who the pagan locals claim never existed. They are led by Lord Summerisle (pictured), a wild, cultish leader played by Christopher Lee, who considered the movie the best of his illustrious career.
The film was set on the tiny island of Whithorn in southwestern Scotland (pictured), connected to the mainland by a causeway built in 1790. Ironically, it was once the real-life home of St Ninian, Scotland’s first saint and the man who brought Christianity to the country in 397.
The movie’s iconic giant wicker man was erected further south at the tip of the Whithorn peninsula. Head for the wild cliffs just in front of the Burrowhead Holiday Village, where you’ll find what remains of its concrete base, with the letters 'WM' and '1972' carved into the slab.
Roger Moore once said that The Spy Who Loved Me was his favourite of all the seven Bond movies he starred in and it’s hard to disagree. He gets to ski off mountain tops, unfurl a Union Jack parachute and sip Dom Perignon 1952 Champagne in an escape pod with the glamourous Russian spy who’d been trying to kill him.
And that’s not to mention Bond’s ice white Lotus Esprit (pictured), specially modified to ‘drive’ underwater and arguably one of Q’s most iconic creations.
Bond famously takes the Esprit for a spin in Sardinia. He is chased by villain Karl Stromberg’s henchmen along the mountain roads of the island’s stunning Costa Smeralda, before going ‘submersible’ near the small port of Palau. Known as the Caribbean of Italy, the area is famous for its stunning beaches and startling turquoise waters.
Today, Costa Smeralda is the preserve of mega yachts and the mega rich, especially around Marina di Porto Cervo. Thankfully, the stunning islands of the Maddalena Archipelago are but a short ferry trip away, including this magical pink sand beach on the island of Budelli.
Read on for more James Bond locations you can actually visit...