HOLLYWOOD’S OTHER ‘GREATEST YEAR’: When American Film Came of Age
By Gregory N. Joseph
Each year when the awards season rolls around, die-hard film aficionados and casual fans alike join hands and sigh with nostalgia in declaring that movies aren’t what they used to be, rattling off their favorites from years past. No year in American film draws as many reverential nods as 1939, the consensus pick by critics and fans alike as the greatest motion picture-making year Hollywood has ever had.
It’s easy to see why. Films released that year included, to name a few, “Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Gunga Din” and “Dark Victory.” Thanks to platforms like the Turner Classic Movies cable channel that primarily focuses on Golden Age film fare and frequent revival screenings of the likes of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz,” that belief is constantly being reinforced.
But I would beg to differ.
The mantle of Hollywood’s greatest year belongs to the movie season that exploded on screens 28 years later: 1967.
The 1960s was a decade of contradictions, evolution and revolution. Variously referred to as “countercultural” and “swinging,” it was a time when man was launched into space and walked on the Moon, but also a time here on Earth when social norms were challenged in religion, civil rights, sexuality, dress, drugs, and music. Some saw it as a decade of decadence and excess, exemplified by the assassination of a beloved young president, while others considered it a decade of truth and release.
The year 1967 was a distillation of all that, a spilling out of the decade’s anguish and pent-up emotion onto movie screens with an abandon that startled and alarmed the old order but delighted and was welcomed by those who sought change.
It was the year that American film came of age, and, significantly, caught up with the Europeans. A transitional, groundbreaking and taboo-shattering moment in this country’s movie-making history, when a palpable shift was taking place, with the “before” and “after” screening in theaters simultaneously. Two very different views of the world were vying for the hearts, minds, and dollars of a moviegoing public that itself had become splintered politically and ideologically, often violently so. It seemed as though the country, and households, were coming apart at the seams. For the first time, American film began to depict that.
Pigeonholing the liminal year of 1967 wasn’t easy, or simple.
On the one hand, movies were still being made that reflected the tastes and beliefs of “The Greatest Generation,” people who had come of age during the Great Depression and World War II who were accustomed to seeing a well-delineated sense of right and wrong put forth in movies, thanks to constraints placed on them by the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code. These industry guidelines, so-called “self-censorship” by major studios in the United States covering the period from 1934 to 1968, dictated what was “acceptable” and “unacceptable” content, resulting in neat and tidy plotlines that too often strained credibility and failed to sync with reality.
On the other, there was a manifestly different kind of American film emerging. Younger generations, the children of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers — those born from 1946 to 1964, during the mid-20th century’s so-called baby boom — were questioning their parents’ values. Confronted by a more complex, confusing world, one shaped by a blurred sense of right and wrong, of grays, of moral and ethical contradictions reflected in everything from the Vietnam War to drug use to the sexual revolution, they demanded movies that depicted what they were really living through. They felt betrayed, not only by their parents, but also by their parents’ films.
In 1967, even organized religion came under siege in a way rarely seen before, including from within its own ranks, as epitomized by the Roman Catholic priest Father James Kavanaugh in his controversial best-selling book, “A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church,” which called for church reforms on issues such as birth control, divorce, premarital sex and celibacy for priests. The New York Times called the book “a personal cry of anguish that goes to the heart of the troubles plaguing the Catholic Church.”
Complex, more realistic and socially relevant screen treatments, previously the hallmark of European films, were now finding their way into mainstream American pictures.
This split-personality in film offerings, of the old and the new appearing at the same time on screens across the country, was apparent in the top-10 box-office leaders of 1967.
The “escapist” fare reflecting the values and approach of the older generations was on full display in films such as “The Jungle Book” (№2), “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (№9), “Camelot” (№10), and even, to an extent, in the war film “The Dirty Dozen” (№5) and super-spy “You Only Live Twice” (№7).
But American movie houses also were often presenting more complex, socially relevant works that struck a nerve with boomers, like “The Graduate” (№1), “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (№3), “Bonnie and Clyde” (№4), “Valley of the Dolls” (№6) and “To Sir, with Love” (№8).
“The Graduate” especially personifies that generational shift and division, containing both competing world views in a single film. The fictitious story of a recent college graduate trying to find his way in life who is seduced by an older woman — the mother of the young lady he is pursuing, no less — its very plot pitted the old and new generations against each other in an engrossing, ingenious way, right down to the clever, deliciously subversive soundtrack featuring the folk rock pair Simon and Garfunkel.
The film grossed $104.9 million across the U.S. and Canada to lead the North American box office for the year, helping propel Hollywood toward bolder, riskier subject matter that had been considered taboo for the American screen. It not only registered with the public, but with critics, earning seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, winning in the latter category for Mike Nichols. It is now regarded as one of the most influential films of all time (as of 2007, the American Film Institute listed it as the 17 greatest American film ever).
Studios, then as now, get braver about films that confront controversial subjects when they make money.
As Stanley Kramer, who produced and directed another of that year’s mega-hits, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — a story about interracial marriage starring, appropriately enough, two different Hollywood generations, with the famous Golden Age duo Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn cast opposite Sidney Poitier and Hepburn’s niece, Katharine Houghton — told me in a 1983 interview: “People don’t object to message pictures — that includes the exhibitors and distributors — they object to message movies that don’t make money. There’s a big difference.
“Columbia didn’t want to make ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ — Katharine Hepburn and I had to put up our salaries in lieu of life insurance for Spence, who couldn’t be insured (the actor was in ill health during shooting of the movie and died of a heart attack three weeks after its completion). But I suppose with the grosses they received ($86 million), Columbia was very happy with it.”
Other 1967 films reflected the successful transition to edgier fare. Among the more notable ones:
— The Academy Award-winning Best Picture “In the Heat of the Night,” a racially charged crime drama about a Black Philadelphia homocide detective (Poitier) helping a small-town police chief (Rod Steiger) in Mississippi investigate a murder that featured the first time an African-American (Poitier) slapped a white person on screen. Directed by Norman Jewison with raw forthrightness, it was nominated for seven Oscars, winning five, including, besides Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay for Stirling Silliphant (best known as creator of the realistic, filmed-on-location television series “Naked City” and “Route 66”) from John Ball’s 1965 novel of the same name, and Best Actor for Steiger, while Quincy Jones’ score, featuring a title song performed by Ray Charles, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Regarded as one of the most consequential films of the 1960s, in 2002 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Fittingly, by a stroke of fate, the film’s Oscar presentation came just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
— “Cool Hand Luke,” with Paul Newman playing the ultimate antihero who confronts the inequities of the prison system and society as a whole. The hero wins by losing, offering us a gritty look at a neglected segment of life — and people — in the process. Directed with a sure hand by the respected Emmy-winning Stuart Rosenberg (“The Amityville Horror,” “Brubaker”), with a well-crafted script and a terrific, deep ensemble cast, it brought a richly deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for veteran character George Kennedy as a tough inmate.
— “In Cold Blood,” based on Truman Capote’s fact-based depiction of the capture and execution of two social outcasts after the brutal murders of a Kansas farm family. The killers are viewed as human beings, not monsters, even though what they have done is monstrous. Written, produced and directed by Richard Brooks (“Blackboard Jungle,” “Cat on a Hit Tin Roof”), a former newspaper reporter, it was shot in black and white as a neo-noir crime film on location at the real home where the murders occurred. The film garnered four Academy Award nominations (Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Cincematography and Best Adapted Screenplay), and in 2008 was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
— “The Born Losers,” an outlaw biker film that introduced Tom Laughlin as the half-Indigenous Green Beret Vietnam veteran Billy Jack. Quickly written and shot, based on an actual incident in which members of the Hells Angels biker gang were accused of raping two teenage girls in California, the film was made on a $400,000 budget and brought in $36 million at the box office. Violence was the answer to violence. Billy Jack was Dirty Harry before there was a Dirty Harry.
— “The Trip,” directed by Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson, and released through American International Pictures, it starred Peter Fonda as a young man experiencing his first LSD trip. Released during the “Summer of Love,” a so-called “psychedelic film,” it became a touchstone of the counterculture of the time. Shot on a shoestring budget of $100,000 over three weeks in and around Los Angeles, it took in $10 million at the box office. The huge hit “Easy Rider” released two years later used many of the same people and successfully appealed to the same audience.
The year 1967 also marked other significant changes in film. The prototype for the IMAX large format and screening system was exhibited at Expo 67 in Montreal, for example, while “Bonnie and Clyde” ushered in the slow-motion depiction of violence, a technique still in wide use to this day.
The year 1939 was, without question, a great year for film. No one can dispute that. It was the most golden of the Golden Age. What true film fan doesn’t enjoy a bowl of popcorn while watching Gable or Cooper or Flynn or Hepburn or Davis strut their stuff from that special time?
But 1967 was an introduction to the true story of us — a year that marked a turning of the page in the evolution of American film, bringing more honest storytelling that helped us understand who we really are. Leading actors started to look like real people, not picture-perfect, glammed-up stars. The stories were often raw and difficult to watch; sometimes they didn’t end at all, at least not in the classic sense to which we had become accustomed. Good didn’t always win out; in fact, sometimes it was impossible to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. This was a mirror, not a carnival-like funhouse distortion. This was our life, on celluloid.
Films released in the span of those twelve important months represented the emergence of the period or movement that came to be known variously as the New Hollywood, Hollywood Renaissance or the American New Wave. A new generation of filmmakers was bringing a difference in the kinds of films produced, how they were made, and how they were marketed.
It was the year that American film grew up, and took us along with it. We’ve never looked back.
