If you’re making any kind of realistic ’70s movie your wardrobe and hair choices are going to horrify or sicken a good portion of your audience, even those who lived through that sartorially-disastrous decade. This certainly seems to be the case with David O. Russell‘s American Hustle, a title which alludes to honest entrepeneurship as much as cons and flim-flams. The film formerly known as “Russell’s ABSCAM flick” (and before that American Bullshit) finally got a firm title yesterday.

American Hustle montage stolen from Indiewire.

When I said “realistic ’70s movie” I meant one that excludes X-factor people. Nobody wants to admit this and I’m sure I’ll be called an elitist for saying so, but only semi-clueless bridge-and-tunnel people from lower-middle-class “meathead” neighborhoods (i.e., those who weren’t connected to dynamic big-city culture) wore laughably grotesque ’70s threads.

I was bopping around on the fringes in the mid to late ’70s and I never wore a fucking leisure suit or elephant collars or gaudy sunglasses or had godawful “big-hair.” Okay, I wore flared jeans but I was mainly into T-shirts and Frye boots and Brian DePalma-styled khaki bush-safari jackets and that whole American Gigolo/Giorgi Armani/Milan-influenced thing (i.e., nifty sport jackets, Italian loafers, shirts with small pointed collars).