Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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the end of its first year of distribution, My Fair Lady had earned more than
$46 million worldwide. The movie was popular with audiences of all ages.
In contrast to a common image of the sixties, it’s worth noting that the film’s
opening in Hollywood at the Egyptian Theater was greeted by screaming
crowds of teenagers, estimated at fifteen thousand by the Los Angeles Police
Department. This was at the very same time that the Beatles’ tour of the
United States was changing the culture of American popular music forever,
but tastes in the United States, even among adolescents, still supported very
conventional entertainment like My Fair Lady.
The movie was directed by Hollywood veteran George Cukor, whose
directing career had begun in 1930 and whose work won him the Oscar for
Best Director for My Fair Lady. The following year, another veteran, Robert
Wise, coproduced The Sound of Music for a company called Argyle Enterprises
in conjunction with Twentieth Century-Fox and also directed the cast, led
by Julie Andrews. Not long after its release in movie theaters, the studio was
touting it as the most popular movie ever made, and, indeed, during its first
year, The Sound of Music substantially surpassed the previous year’s earnings
of My Fair Lady; furthermore, it held the rank of the most profitable motion
picture of all time until the mid-1970s.
My Fair Lady had received generally acceptable reviews from most critics
nationwide, but the response to The Sound of Music was more diverse. Two
of the nation’s better-known critics, Bosley Crowther and Judith Crist, liked
Wise’s version of the tale of the singing Von Trapp family of Austria, giving
their highest marks to Andrews for her acting and singing. By contrast, an-
other major national critic of the period, Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the
New Republic, pleaded that he deserved a special award “for sitting through
this Rodgers and Hammerstein atrocity, so studiously saccharine that one
feels that one has fallen into the hold of a tanker bringing molasses from the
Caribbean.” In his review of The Sound of Music for the National Catholic
Film Office, John E. Fitzgerald concluded: “While the story is as joyous and
as wholesome as anyone could want, the plot of this Austrian torte is as full of
holes as a Swiss cheese.”
EPIC LOVE STORY
The epic love story Doctor Zhivago won five Academy Awards and had been
nominated for an additional five. Produced by the Italian Carlo Ponti for
MGM and directed by David Lean, it was nominated for Best Picture. Its
Oscar wins were in the categories of Art Direction–Color (John Box, Terry
Hollywood on the Ropes 173
Marsh, Daro Simoni); Cinematography–Color (Freddie Young); Costume
Design–Color (Phyllis Dalton); Music (Maurice Jarre); and Screenwriting,
from Another Medium (Robert Bolt). This version of Boris Pasternak’s novel
starred Omar Sharif (an Egyptian who had starred for Lean in Lawrence of Ara-
bia in 1962) and Julie Christie; also featured were Geraldine Chaplin, Tom
Courtenay, Alec Guinness, Siobhan McKenna, Ralph Richardson, Rod Stei-
ger, and Rita Tushingham. Preproduction on Doctor Zhivago lasted more than
a year, and the movie subsequently took another full year for filming. Doctor
Zhivago was yet another example of a major movie of this era produced with
funding and North American distribution from a major Hollywood studio that
had an international cast and crew and was shot outside the United States—in
this case, in Spain and at locations in Finland.
A British citizen, Lean had earned the Academy’s recognition as Best
Director for films about a Japanese POW camp in World War II (The Bridge
on the River Kwai) and the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire (Lawrence of
Arabia). Both these movies had won Best Picture Oscars as well. Nonetheless,
of all Lean’s films, Doctor Zhivago is the most ambitious and overwhelming,
for its spectacular visual beauty, its complex storytelling, and the exemplary
performances of so many in its cast. It was a massive production project with
a shooting script that came in at 258 pages.
Take, for example, the complex sequence when Zhivago is watching the
lawyer-pragmatist Komarovsky (Steiger) and his latest romantic conquest Lara
(Christie), who is the teenage daughter of Komarovsky’s current mistress. After
examining the darkened dressmaking rooms where Lara is doing her home-
work, Zhivago watches through a partition as Komarovsky tells Lara that her
mother, who has attempted suicide, will survive. The scene represents a recur-
ring theme of the movie, identifying Zhivago as a witness to moments of both
intense beauty and ugliness. As Zhivago watches Lara exclaim in relief and cling
to Komarovsky in pantomime of schoolgirl seductiveness reminiscent of silent
cinema, the soundtrack is dominated by the sound of a passing train.
Pasternak’s monumental best-selling novel on which the movie was
based had been avidly read by millions of Americans, and Boxoffice in May
1966 urged exhibitors to work on a tie-in with local bookstores to push the
book and the film version of it in tandem. The novel was viewed, at the height
of Cold War tensions, as spectacular in terms of fire, blood, and treachery,
alongside its moving love story. It was seen as the first true picture of how
ordinary men and women endured the cataclysm of hope and horror that was
the Russian Revolution and the Communist victory in Russia. The cinematic
gold that producer Ponti mined had come his way because Pasternak, who
lived in the Soviet Union under communism, had sold the rights for publica-
tion of his novel in all the non-Communist nations of the world to an Italian
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publisher. Throughout the non-Communist world, Pasternak was a symbol
of Soviet repression; Communist authorities had convinced him—through
threats to his lover—to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature that he was
awarded in 1958.
Doctor Zhivago is set in Russia during the tumultuous years between
1905 and 1935 and tells the story of an orphan son of an impoverished Rus-
sian nobleman who is raised by a gentle, aristocratic family and matures into
a sensitive poet and a physician. His emotions also turn toward the family’s
daughter Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), and he ultimately marries her. Their
lives appear to be blessed by love, cultural refinement, and professional stabil-
ity—until they are torn apart both by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and
by Zhivago’s love for Lara, with whom he runs away.
The review in the Hollywood Reporter enthused: “Despite the grim and
brooding background, Zhivago has a surging buoyant spirit that is unquench-
able. It’s far more than a masterful motion picture; it is a life experience.” The
movie was shot in 35mm with the use of an anamorphic lens system developed
by a company called Panavision, then blown up to a 70mm release print for
roadshow distribution in North America.
Doctor Zhivago did excellent, but not spectacular, box office business. As a
reflection of the growing cultural importance of popular music in the United
States, however, recordings of Jarre’s soundtrack sold over 600,000 units. Pro-
duced at a cost of $12 million, the film’s theatrical release grossed $16 million.
A TALE OF INTELLECT AND INTEGRITY
The following year’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, A Man for
All Seasons, was the product of yet another Hollywood company, Columbia
Pictures, partnering with a British producer, Highland Productions. With a
screenplay by Robert Bolt, who won the 1966 Oscar for Best Screenplay for
his work, this movie was based on the life of Sir Thomas More, the devout
Catholic who resigned from the service of King Henry VIII of England rather
than assist the king’s violation of Church authority when he desired to marry
Anne Boleyn.
Produced for a budget just under $2 million, A Man for All Seasons had
none of the swashbuckling action, none of the adventuresome heroes, nor any
of the romantic intrigues common to Hollywood’s historical epics of the late
1950s and early 1960s. It was a serious and subtle drama that might even have
been labeled intellectual in its content.
The movie starred British stage actor Paul Scofield in his first screen per-
formance, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. Because it was such a serious
Hollywood on the Ropes 175
drama, and because its cast lacked any Hollywood “name” performers, A Man
for All Seasons likely benefited as much at the box office from its Best Picture
selection by the Academy as did any similar Oscar winner in the modern era.
Nonetheless, even after its Oscar victory, the movie did only modest business
with American audiences.
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
The adaptation of a very different kind of stage production to the silver screen
was marked with the filming of Edward Albee’s successful Broadway play
with the highly literate title of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for a 1966 re-
lease. Warner Bros. selected Mike Nichols, an experienced stage director, to
try his hand as a first-time director for a feature film and supported him with
screenwriter/producer Ernest Lehman. Haskell Wexler, an emerging cinema-
tography virtuoso of the 1960s, was the director of photography, and music
for Virginia Woolf was composed by the veteran Alex North. Albee’s stage play
had opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962, ran for 664 performances, and
won five Tonys (Broadway theater’s equivalent to the Oscars).
Warner Bros. paid $500,000 for the film rights to the play, which is about
two couples spending a drunken and acerbic night together in a New England
college town. George (played by Richard Burton) is a beaten-down history
professor, and his wife Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) is the daughter of the col-
lege president. The other couple is a young biologist (George Segal) recently
hired by the college and his mousey wife (Sandy Dennis). Nichols reportedly
wanted Robert Redford for Segal’s part, but Redford turned him down.
Even though the screenwriter worked to rein in the cursing in Virginia
Woolf, it opened up a controversy with the Hollywood Production Code.
The Production Code Review Board, chaired by Geoffrey Shurlock, eventu-
ally granted a special exemption based on the exceptional quality of the film
(by a close vote of only eleven members of the twenty-one-member panel).
Albee’s international artistic reputation as a playwright surely helped getting
the vicious dialogue and salty language to the screen. Recognized as the
writing of an artistically serious author, even the Catholic Office for Motion
Pictures—still an influential body in the United States in 1966—rated Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? an approving A-4.
Still, the language of the film was considered shocking to many in the na-
tional audience of 1966 and was thought to be exceptionally daring by much
of the Hollywood community. The movie’s dialogue contained eleven “god-
damns,” seven “bastards,” a “screw you,” a “hump the hostess,” “up yours,”
and a reference to “monkey nipples.” Given Hollywood Code’s history of
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suppressing such language since 1934, these words were new terrain indeed,
but many observers believed they represented simply a belated catching up of
Hollywood dialogue to a changing culture and its norms. Warner Bros. took
the voluntary action of imposing its own limitation on attendance: “No one
under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent.”
The Academy establishment recognized the movie with a Best Picture
nomination, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won wide critical praise across
the United States from a variety of newspapers representing a cross-section
of the country: “It lives up to every expectation. An exhausting, draining,
two-hour Saint Walpurgis Night of excellence” (Atlanta Constitution). “The
effect is not soul-searing or explosive, but overwhelming” (Detroit Free Press).
“Elizabeth Taylor? You wouldn’t believe it if we told you how great she is”
(Miami Herald). “Virginia Woolf is a clear success. Indeed, fueled with brilliance,
it soars and blazes with artistic energy” (Kansas City Star). “It is literate in all its
dark descents, valid in the kind of characterization it employs by invoking the
claim of a sizable victory for its troubled people, the interpretations of actors
at their finest heights of frenzy” (Philadelphia Inquirer).
Time magazine predicted that Virginia Woolf would be rewarded at the
box office for its dirty words:
Albee, America’s current master of American theatrical invective, uses
it here for potshots and heavy artillery in a marital Armageddon. . . . As
George, the caustic, cynical master of revels, Burton is superb, shrewdly
measuring out his powerhouse talent in a part written for a far less heroic
actor. . . . Broadway director Mike Nichols, in his first movie job, can
claim a sizable victory for the performance he has wrung from Elizabeth
Taylor. Looking fat and fortyish under a smear of makeup, with her voice
pitched well below the belt, Liz as Martha is loud, sexy, vulgar, pungent,
and yet achieves moments of astonishing tenderness.
Variety reported Taylor’s salary at $1 million, editorializing that she had
earned every penny of it. The trade magazine also applauded Wexler’s black-
and-white cinematography for its exploration of dramatic hues, rarely pursued
so fully, and praised the studio’s decision to limit audiences under eighteen
from seeing it to protect from the salty language. James Powers, writing in
the Hollywood Reporter, summarized the contemporary criticism well: “The
screen has never held a more shattering and ravaging and incredible drama
than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
SUMMARY
The early 1960s were troubling for Hollywood. In 1963, the number of feature
films produced in the United States reached its lowest point in half a century.
Hollywood on the Ropes 177
The financial catastrophe of Cleopatra all but destroyed one of the major Hol-
lywood companies. All the major Hollywood studios were in advanced stages
of retrenchment. In every production department, crafts personnel had been
fired or were not replaced when they retired. A pillar of classic Hollywood,
the contract player system, was being phased out, as long-term actor contracts
were not renewed and new talent was not being recruited. Studio orchestras
had been disbanded. Hollywood was becoming an industry of freelance crafts
personnel and screen talent.
Doubts about the global supremacy of Hollywood movies and their stars
increased. In the so-called art house movie theaters, college-age moviegoers
found foreign feature films that were more sophisticated and mature than
mainstream Hollywood fare. British movies were popular and did exception-
ally well in competing for the Oscars. The aging heads of the studios seemed
unable to comprehend the industry’s situation.
The brightest spots for Hollywood in this period could be identified
only in hindsight. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock introduced his audiences to the
elements of a cinema of sensation with the daring shower sequence in Psycho,
even though that aesthetic of sensation would take on true importance in the
American cinema only after 1967. Stanley Kubrick brought to the screen a
searing satire of the Cold War and its mentality with Dr. Strangelove, even if he
had to make the movie in Great Britain. Youth audiences loved it. And Mike
Nichols’s direction of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? may be seen as modestly
shifting Hollywood toward more mature material for the screen and pointing
toward the end of the Production Code.
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The Academy’s choice for Best Picture of 1967 was In the Heat of the Night, a
Walter Mirisch production that was directed by Norman Jewison. The movie
was about an African-American detective (Sidney Poitier) from Philadelphia
who winds up solving a murder in a Mississippi town by working with the
local white sheriff (Rod Steiger). With a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, who
won the screenwriting Oscar with his effort, and a haunting theme song per-
formed by Ray Charles, In the Heat of the Night could be seen as a throwback
to Classic Hollywood. It was a movie that revealed, through dialogue and
classic character development, a human relationship that strained plausibility
because these two people did not want to be involved with each other. In the
Heat of the Night beat out two movies that year, each of which had shown
enormous appeal to the youth audiences, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.
Each of these two movies marked a Hollywood turning point and pointed
toward Hollywood’s future, not its past.
THE TURNING POINT YEAR, 1967
The Graduate (1967) was about a recent graduate from college, Benjamin
(Dustin Hoffman), who moves into his parents’ home in Los Angeles and be-
gins a sexual affair with a bored middle-aged woman (Anne Bancroft) who is
married to one of his father’s business partners. Subsequently, Benjamin falls in
love with her daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross). Although Elaine rejects him,
Benjamin obsessively follows her to Berkeley, California, and, in the final se-
quence, disrupts her wedding to a medical student. In the melee, he saves her
from the dull conventionality of an upper-middle-class existence, first barring
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Indications of Revival
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the doors of the church with a giant wooden cross, and then fleeing with her
from the scene by boarding a city bus that happens to be passing by.
Although the screenplay for The Graduate was an adaptation of a novel
written by Charles Webb in the 1950s, much of America’s burgeoning youth
culture in the late 1960s appeared willing to accept the story as a vehicle that
expressed the shared resentment of many of them toward the affluent upper-
middle-class lifestyle in which they had grown up in suburbia. In its mix-
ing of sentimentality and satire, and its identification with two sympathetic
characters who are college-age, The Graduate came to be considered a “key
alienation film” for the college-age generation of the late 1960s. Moreover,
the soundtrack to the movie, at the insistence of the director Mike Nichols,
consisted of songs and lyrics by the young duo of Art Garfunkel and Paul
Simon. Their sound was new and very different from traditional Hollywood
movie scoring. Some critics pointed out that the lyrics matched the charac-
ters and that, in the end, the music was used to advance the story. Actually,
such a narrative function for movie music had been Hollywood conven-
tion since the coming of synchronous sound. The movie’s sexual frankness
was provocative, but clearly did not disturb the college-age audiences who
flocked to the film.
Since The Graduate was produced and distributed by Avco-Embassy, a
company founded by Joseph E. Levine, a New Yorker who had made his
money as an importer and distributor of foreign movies and the owner of a
chain of art-house cinemas, the movie was not subject to the waning strictures
of the Motion Picture Production Code. Some critics praised the new style
of The Graduate, celebrating the ways in which Benjamin’s subjective point of
view was conveyed through camera positioning and movement, overlapping
sound that began at the end of one scene and carried over to the next, and
Sam O’Steen’s radical editing choices (for example, Benjamin rises from the
water in a pool to land on a floating air mattress but lands instead in bed on
top of his lover, Mrs. Robinson).
At the time, only one major critic argued strongly against interpretations
emphasizing the newness of The Graduate. Andrew Sarris wrote that there was
really nothing new in the movie “except Dustin Hoffman’s face.” In other
words, The Graduate was simply an updated and hip version of a well-seasoned
Hollywood genre, the screwball comedy. With The Graduate, Hollywood es-
tablished that movies could do good business by taking the conventions of past
movie successes and updating those conventions to fit a perception of being
up-to-date and embracing a changing culture.
Even more important as a turning-point movie in 1967 was Bonnie and
Clyde. This movie managed not only to capture the shifting values and atti-
tudes of a substantial number of young adults who were its core audience but
Indications of Revival 181
also to establish more forcefully than any previous film its distinct aesthetic
principles and production values. Bonnie and Clyde was a pet project of young
actor Warren Beatty, which he undertook with Warner Bros. financing as
both the movie’s producer and male lead. Beatty had wanted to recruit one
of the veteran directors of the French New Wave, either Francois Truffaut or
Jean-Luc Godard, but when neither was available, he turned to a renowned
director from television, Arthur Penn.
Based on a first screenplay by two magazine writers, Robert Benton and
David Newman, and with the relatively inexperienced producer Beatty at the
helm, Warner Bros. had generally written off the movie as a “popcorn circuit”
feature, meaning that it would make money only in smaller markets where
there was nothing else to do on a weekend except go to see whatever movie
was playing locally. Initially, it appeared that the studio’s projections were
correct. Bonnie and Clyde was reviewed savagely in the New York Times, and
then Time dismissed it as “sheer, tasteless aimlessness.” With reviews like this,
sophisticated audiences would stay away, and the only business left for such a
movie would indeed come from the popcorn circuit.
But a strange thing happened on the way to dumping Bonnie and Clyde
onto the ash heap of cinema history. All around the country, late adolescents
and young adults began lining up to see the movie. Especially for college-age
moviegoers, and most assuredly with the hippest moviegoers among them, its
popularity was spreading like wildfire, apparently by word of mouth. Hol-
lywood had experienced sleeper hits in the past, but the sudden box office
popularity of Bonnie and Clyde was unprecedented.
What the critics said clearly did not matter at the box office. Moreover,
Time’s Stefan Kanter retracted his earlier criticism, and, in a rare second re-
view, declared Bonnie and Clyde not only the best movie of the year but also
the sleeper of the decade. In similar fashion, a contrite Joseph Morgenstern
at Newsweek acknowledged that his initial, negative review of the movie had
been “grossly unfair.”
Negative reviews had been the norm initially. Bonnie and Clyde was dis-
liked, and evidently misunderstood, by nearly all the major movie critics na-
tionwide. From the beginning, the notable exception had been Pauline Kael.
At the time, she was the ascendant champion of sociological criticism of the
movies, guiding her readers toward understanding popular films as parables of
contemporary social and political issues. It was Kael’s discovery of an ideo-
logical message in Bonnie and Clyde that explained for her its extraordinary
appeal to young adults. “In 1967,” she wrote, “the moviemakers know that
the audience wants to believe, maybe even prefers to believe, that Bonnie and
Clyde were guilty of crime, all right, but that they were innocent in general;
that is, naïve and ignorant compared with us.” Writing in the Village Voice a