A Chronology of Major Films and Filmmakers
1967: The Graduate
Nichols’ second film, The Graduate became the box office champion of the decade. Introduced off-broadway character actor, Dustin Hoffman who was to become one of the foremost actor/stars of his generation. Young audiences identified strongly with the confused protagonist, a recent college graduate trying to find a purpose to his life in a world dominated by his parents’ values of making money and acquiring status symbols. Confused and upset, he finds distraction from these problems through an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father’s business partner, then, ironically, falls into a doomed love with her college-age daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). He just knows he doesn’t want what his parents and their friends have–an overstuffed yet empty existence. The film presents an acid portrait of the sterile materialism of the bourgeoisie.
Editing sprinkled w. deliberate jump cuts and leaps in continuity. Sad songs of Simon and Garfunkel comment obliquely on the action. Widescreen images are strikingly composed, suggesting a multitude of feelings and ideas through the mise en scene.
WATCH: The Graduate TRAILER
Most film historians point to his Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as the turning pt. from the old sensibility to the new. This gangster film was based on real-life story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow from the Midwest who during the Depression fall in love, go on a spree of robberies and killings, and become national folk heroes in the process. Initially panned critically for its quirky blend of violence and comedy in its rendering of the true story crime spree of the young, restless and glamourous Depression era thieves—played by model-turned-actress Faye Dunaway and rising leading man Warren Beatty. Stealing from banks which were deemed responsible for the Depression, the young lovers become folk heroes—or rather, “anti-heroes”—who are getting their revenge against “the Establishment” –the 1960s term for all institutions upheld as important by the older generation. Their targets are not the common people but the avaricious banks and the armies of police that protect them–in other words, ‘the system.’—they are ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT heroes
Its strong sexual subtext (its implied that Bonnie and Clyde’s sexual relationship blossoms with their increasing skills at robbery) and graphic violence—featuring extensive bloody machine gun skirmishes—brought the film under fire by moralists but director Arthur Penn maintained that the film reflected the society in which it was made, and the film’s ensuing box office popularity caused some critics to re-evaluate their initial criticisms.
Though set in the Depression thirties, the film was widely perceived as a statement about 1967. Warner Bros advertised the movie with an appeal to the Vietnam generation: ‛They’re young! They’re in love! And they kill people!” Penn has said of his characters: ‟the only people who really interest me are the outcasts from society. My sympathies lie with that person who cannot accommodate himself to society and may have to lose his life to change it.” Penn’s outsiders and misfits rarely analyze their actions. Ideology is a foreign concept to most of them. Their rebellion is instinctive, spontaneous, and usually unfocused. Often they’re swept up by the immediacy of the moment, unable to anticipate the apocalyptic destiny that awaits them.
It’s new emphasis on visceral intensity of the violence, “puts the sting back into death,” to quote Pauline Kael’s panegyric on the movie. Others talked of obscene violence, though Penn maintained ‟Its a violent society engaged in a violent and ridiculous war.” The editing of final climactic death sequence w. four cameras running gives their deaths a legendary, mythic quality: Bonnie and Clyde are not simply killed; they are destroyed
WATCH: Bonnie & Clyde ending
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBMbrd6t350
Many critics also misinterpreted the function of comedy in the film, assuming that it was meant only to glamorize crime and ridicule the law. Penn responded, ‟A time creates its own myths and heroes. If the heroes are less than admirable, that is a clue to the times.” The unpredictable shifts of tone in the film, clearly indebted to the French. New Wave, were intended to keep the audience off balance and to make the characters less threatening–’jes folks. The transition from comedy to tragedy is swift as a gun blast.
1968: Wild in the Streets
‟Before you can decode and digest the contents of American International’s Wild in the Streets, you must accept the notion that an abysmally crude, cheap, incoherent, dishonest, contemptible motion picture made for no motive than profit can nevertheless also have enormous brute force and considerable significance.
American International is the company that used to flood the youth market with inexpensive, almost absurdly innocent ghost stories (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) and beach pictures (How To Stuff a Wild Bikini). In the past couple of years, however, the firm has been keeping up with its own cynical, astute reading of contemporary culture by offering kids such ominous trash as The Wild Angels (fascists on motorcycles) and The Trip (a lyrical tribute to lysergic acid). Wild in the Streets, then, is the latest in a lengthening line of shoddy goods that serves youth what it wants, or what adults think it wants, or what adults are willing to pretend it wants if there’s enough money in the pretense.
Robert Thom’s script makes some powerful appeals to the emotions, but rarely makes specific sense. Wild in the Streets is anti-Vietnam, antiwar, anti-foreign policy (ANY foreign policy), anti-rationalist (the President’s ‟brain trust” consists of lotus eaters, pot smokers and mind blowers) and, certainly, anti-youth. All adults are frauds or fools, but the’ youthocracy’ also finds its own form of fascism, setting up concentration camps to which all citizens are dispatched at the compulsory retirement age of thirty.
Wild in the Streets has the idiot courage, and therefore power, of its crudity. It is a witch’s brew prepared in the pressure cooker of commerce…It is nothing substantial and everything urgent, and most of all it is an infinitely extensible shoe that fits white youth, Black Panthers, Red Guards, John Birchers, the poor, the disenfranchised, the powerless, anyone and any group cursed with want and doubly cursed with not knowing what to want.” (Joseph Morgenstern, in Film 68/69, ed. by Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris)
1969: Alice’s Restaurant
Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant follows his most violent film (Bonnie and Clyde) with his most gentle. Affectionately celebrates the values of the hippie movement–its rejection of racism, militarism, materialism, and authoritarianism. The films’ tone swings abruptly from slapstick comedy to moments of poignant anguish. Penn wanted to pay tribute to the young men who defied the military draft for reasons of moral conscience. The movie is one of the few of its era to explore the hippie counterculture in an honest manner. Their music, rituals, and clothing are authentic depictions of their laid-back life style and innocent (and sometimes not so innocent) hedonism. But Penn refused to sentimentalize his characters…they are simply sometimes unable to handle the responsibility of their freedom, the film emerging a statement about the failed idealism of the protest movement due to the inability to reconcile human foibles w. the idealism of ‘free love.’
WATCH: Alice’s Restaurant TRAILER
Alice’s Restaurant trailer – CC
Science Fiction
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967) offered a mythic vision of the relationship between humanity and technology at a time when that relationship had crucial bearing on the future of American society and of the entire Western world. Kubrick set out to make a new kind of film–nonverbal, ambiguous, and mythical. He wanted to create a visual experience about ideas, an experience that reached the mind through the feelings and penetrated the subconscious with its emotional and philosophical content.
WATCH: 2001: A Space Odyssey TRAILER
Westerns
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), like his other westerns, is Revisionist–they subvert or call into question many of the values and traditions of the western genre in its classical phase. His stories take place not in the heroic nineteenth century, but in the neurotic twentieth century, which is portrayed as mechanistic, repressive, and emotionally sterile. The principle works here in Peckinpah pitting the bad guys against the guys who are even worse. In Peckinpah’s spiritual wasteland, the romantic outlaw is cynical, opportunistic, and corrupt in many of his moral values, but he does abide by a private code of honor that sets him above the Establishment–any Establishment. (Treatment of sex as controversial—women are almost invariably sex objects in his movies and his most attractive female characters are usually whores. But Peckinpah believed that we are all whores—himself included—and the professional hooker is simply more honest about her work. ) Peckinpah was a passionate champion of individualism, and his hostility toward all forms of authority verged on the implacable. His films tended to be personal, lengthy, and loosely structured, with many digressions and lyrical interludes, somewhat in the manner of Kurosawa, one of his idols.
WATCH: The Wild Bunch TRAILER
The Wild Bunch (1969) deals w. political hysteria that gripped the nation over the war; THIS film a mythic allegory of American intervention in Vietnam.
It opens w. the bloody massacre of an entire Texas town in the course of a payroll robbery, a gang of aging outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) finds itself increasingly confined by the closing of the American frontier and, pursued by bounty hunters, crosses the border into Mexico in search of greener pastures–only to encounter a Mexican general fighting against Pancho Villa with German backing.
Bunch contains what one critic called ‟the bloodiest massacre in screen history.” In the final shootout, virtually an entire Mexican village is destroyed–heroes, villains, and innocent bystanders–in a stylized, balletic orgy of slow-motion violence. Peckinpah was subsequently known in the trade as ‟Bloody Sam.” Like many male-action directors, he treated violence as the ultimate test of manhood, and he was often imitated. His stylistic signature is best illustrated by his scenes of violence, which are orgasmic explosions of kinetic energy. The slow motion aestheticizes the gore, converting the mindless bloodletting into a surrealistic ballet of color and motion. The mesmerizing lyricism of Peckinpah’s brilliantly edited images blinds us to the fact that people are dying in all that terrible, apocalyptic beauty.
One of Peckinpah’s major themes is the flabbiness–both physical and spiritual–of modern life, our alienation from our own natural instincts.
- Both Penn and Peckinpah insisted for the first time in American cinema that the human body is made of real flesh and blood; that arterial blood spurts rather than drips demurely; that bullet wounds leave not trim little pinpricks but big, gaping holes; and in general, that violence has painful, unpretty, humanly destructive consequences.
Easy Rider (1969) Two hippies score a big drug deal and set off from California to Florida on their motorcycles “in search of America.” But, as the ad copy read, “they couldn’t find it anywhere.” Treated w. unmitigated contempt because of their appearance everywhere they go, the bikers are finally gunned down on a southern highway by some angry rednecks. Produced by Peter Fonda and directed by Dennis Hopper, who had both worked in mainstream films, this film shrewdly exploited the paranoia of a generation that felt itself at war w. a hostile and increasingly belligerent establishment, and it became the box office phenomena of the decade. A low-budget ($375,000) biker film w. no stars, it grossed $50 mill.
- by 1969, for the first time in twenty years, movie attendance in America rose rather than declined, a pattern that continued throughout the following decades
WATCH: Easy Rider TRAILER
1970: However in 1970 the Establishment fought back: John G. Avildsen (later famous for the conservative Rocky and Karate Kid series) made the sleeper Joe: A white collar executive accidentally murders his daughter’s drug dealer boyfriend. Badly shaken, he goes to a bar for a drink and finds himself confessing the deed to loudmouth hippie-hating blue-collar worker Joe (Peter Boyle). An uneasy friendship, first based on emotional blackmail, and then on sincere bonding against hippies results in an all-out bloodbath as the two middle-aged men slaughter a houseful of teens, including the man’s daughter.
WATCH: Joe TRAILER
Conclusions
The early 1960s had been a period of hope in the clean-cut, glamorous Kennedy era. Perhaps the final vestige of this romantic idealism was absorbed by the hippie movement, with its garlanded flower children and naive optimism. For many, this youthful spirit of hope and community was epitomized by the famous concert in Woodstock, New York, at the end of the decade. The movie documentary of the event, Woodstock, was released in the first year of the new decade. Vincent Canby, the film critic of THE NEW YORK TIMES, observed prophetically: ‟Underlying every moment of the film is the suspicion that what Woodstock came to represent–a spirit of tolerant, sweet togetherness in rain, mud, and refuse–has already vanished, passed into history and become obsolete.”
WATCH: Woodstock TRAILER
The Result
By 1968, the outmoded Production Code of the 1930s was finally scrapped in favor of a rating system, ushering in an era of unprecedented frankness, particularly in the areas of sex and violence, the two most popular subjects of the new movies.
- “G” for films appropriate for viewing by general audiences
- “PG” for films which require parental discretion to allow children to see films which may contain objectionable material
- “R” for films restricted to those under 17, unless accompanied by an adult
- “X” for films restricted for adults over 17 only.
Ten years after its inception it was found that approximately 50% of the films released are rated “R.” Despite attacks from religious groups charging lenience in ratings, they have remained in force, and have met their goal to allow greater freedom of expression, though whether or not the goal to make the artist responsible and sensitive to the standards of society still remains in question in the 2000s. The implementation of the ratings system has made possible the concept that every film be suitable for every viewer, allowing for the making of smaller films to target special interest groups.
By 1969, for the first time in twenty years, movie attendance in America rose rather than declined, a pattern that continued throughout the following decades.