Best Picture and Director 1967

[FilmFan720]

I won't actually vote, as I have never seen The Graduate, but I thought I would chime in here anyways.

First off the list is Bonnie and Clyde, which is the perfect example of all style and no substance. It turns these vile human beings into "heroes," without every justifying a moment of the unnecessary bloodshed they enact. The performances range from dull to over-the-top (Estelle Parsons may be the worst performance ever to win an Oscar) and any moment where they aren't robbing a bank is just as dull as dirt. I haven't seen the film in years, but isn't there actually a film where they all sit in a field and Bonnie sings a song about how they are all going to die and become famous? It might be the most tasteless film ever to pick up a Best Picture nod (and certainly to garner a Best Director nod). I cannot believe anyone here would vote for it.

In Cold Blood takes a second-rate novel and turns it into a second rate film.

In the Heat of the Night is certainly less exploitative than the previous two films, but not by a whole lot. It features an overly simplified view of racism, where the almighty Black Man comes to the hateful South and manages to solve their dastardly crime. I agree with BJ that the crime itself is interesting enough to watch, but all of the racial overtones surrounding it are childish, superficial and boring.

Luckily, we have a much more nuanced look at racism in this year's nominees: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Here, Poitier gets a much more complex character to tackle, one who isn't afraid to question what it means to be a black man in a world controlled by white men. The acting is superb (I'll never understand why Katharine Houghton never became a major star), although the film has unfairly been remembered merely as the last Tracy-Hepburn film. As compared to In the Heat of the Night, it is a much more intricate examination of a very difficult subject (and a perfect time capsule of what 1960s culture was really like), and like all of Stanley Kramer's films, it gives us fabulous debates through humor, wit and intelligence. I would not hesitate a moment to vote for it in both categories.

But I won't vote for it here, because there is one film left that I have to vote for. I am shocked to see how down on Doctor Dolittle everyone here seems to be. The film is a magical journey to a strange world, done with as much grace, humor and creativity as the other great Hollywood children's films like The Wizard of Oz or Mary Poppins. Rex Harrison is at his best at the center of the film (and that score he is given is perfect), taking us through a fast-paced adventure with a showman quality that he never matched anywhere else. That storm scene is riveting, the Pushmi-Pullyu is one of cinema's great creatures and by the time Dolittle starts riding the giant snail the film has soared to great heights. The great thing about Doctor Dolittle, though, is that it is much more than a childhood adventure film. Through it all, Richard Fleischer also manages to make us consider how we treat animals, how we treat artists and creative souls, and most importantly, it may be the only film I can think of that makes the valid, and necessary, argument that science and creativity aren't opposing forces, but instead are fused together in the brain. It is a magical film, and the kind of film that the Academy Awards were invented to award.

My votes go to Doctor Doliitle and, since I can't vote Fleischer, Stanley Kramer.

But I should probably make myself sit through The Graduate.

[Greg]

The Graduate also remains a hugely influential movie, for paving the way for just about every multi-generational romantic comedy that has come since then. When was the last time you read a review for a movie that featured an older woman dating a younger man that DIDN'T compare her to Mrs. Robinson?

That is a big tribute to the acting of Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman, in that Bancroft was only 6 years older then Hoffman.

[The Original BJ]

Of the also-rans, the hugely influential Persona would be the one I'd go to bat for first. (I have Weekend down for next year, though it merits attention in whatever year it qualifies.) And of the American entries, the dazzling Two for the Road feels like a still-hip ancestor of Eternal Sunshine.

Doctor Dolittle is the worst, and I mean it is just THE WORST. I don't know if we've had a Best Picture nominee as bad since then. Even compared to the other bummer nominees this decade it's pretty appalling. Stuff like The Alamo and The Sand Pebbles are bland and boring, but they at least maintain a level of seriousness that makes one at least understand why voters of a certain type went for them. But Dolittle is just so silly, so ridiculous, and so dumb, it's hard to wrap my head around anyone enjoying this thing. By the time Rex Harrison was riding on that giant snail, I wondered if I might have been hallucinating. Perhaps the filmmakers were hallucinating. Certainly the Oscar voters were. (Quick: which film was nominated for Best Film Editing, Doctor Dolittle or Bonnie and Clyde?!)

I come to the precise conclusion Mister Tee did regarding Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It didn't deserve these nominations, but in context of Dolittle's nod, it's hard to get too angry about it. I'm of two minds about the movie. As a drawing-room comedy of manners, I actually quite like it -- it's often very funny, and a lot of the actors play off one another in a manner that's entertaining enough to watch. On the other hand, as a drama about race relations, it's pretty milquetoast stuff, even when compared to other films that year. And Stanley Kramer, of course, was not much of a director -- watching something so stagey, it's almost hard to believe it WASN'T originally a play. But it has its genuine moments (especially Poitier's "You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.")

In the Heat of the Night is definitely the better of the two Poitier efforts -- the crime milieu makes its depiction of racial conflict feel more dangerous and urgent. And though Norman Jewison shared Kramer's preachier tendencies, his film is a lot more visually dynamic, and the best moments -- like Poitier returning the slap -- still land with real power even today. I also think it's worth noting that the mystery at the heart of this story is fairly compelling on its own -- it's not just a lame plot upon which a liberal message can be grafted. And yet, that message, while bracing in 1967, doesn't feel terribly complex today. I don't know that the movie gets at that much more beyond the notion that racism is not good, it exists in the South where appalling racist people are, and a successful black man can teach some of those people to be less racist. Significant it may have been, but nuanced it is not.

It's a real shame In Cold Blood was excluded from the Best Picture list, because I agree that this is certainly the finest of Richard Brooks's directing nominations. The film is hauntingly photographed, capturing the wide-open, isolated environment of the Midwestern plains as well as any movie, and the neat structure is gripping without ever feeling gimmicky. And Robert Blake's Perry Smith is a fascinating character, a young rebel who doesn't intend to commit such a horrific crime, but whose flirtations with lawlessness just unravel into something he can't begin to control. (Sort of like Bonnie and Clyde.) Richard Brooks, on the whole, wasn't a terribly special director, but the intensity of this material must have brought out the best in him, and I think the film stands up very well alongside the blazing auteurist triumphs of the era.

But this slate is all about The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, and the question isn't so much about which one do I have to choose, as it is why do I have to choose at all?

I've been on a bit of a Bonnie and Clyde kick lately. A couple weeks ago I visited the spot in Louisiana where the duo were gunned down, and visited the very interesting Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum nearby. What I learned was that the movie took an awful lot of liberties in telling this story, which wasn't necessarily surprising to me. What was more fascinating, however, was the realization that the film captured so well the myth that surrounded Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the time. Did you know that, for a while, polls indicated that a majority of the American people were SUPPORTIVE of Bonnie and Clyde, that they saw them as heroes willing to stand up to the corporate institutions that caused the Depression? Doesn't the movie capture this spirit incredibly well, with its stylishly dressed antiheroes who coolly get caught up in their own hype and iconography? And, according to the museum, there was one murder -- of a policeman -- that essentially marked the turning point, when the public began to feel as though the Barrow gang had just gone too far, and it became clear that an appointment with death was the only option in store for them. I think the movie also taps into this notion incredibly well -- I've always found the scene where Bonnie visits with her mother to be exceedingly sad, because she knows it will be the last time she will ever see her family. But I don't mean to turn this post into Bonnie and Clyde: The Research Project. The film, on its own merits, is glorious, a rollicking entertainment that is as exciting as it is disturbing, with a bevy of great performances from the cast. And I don't know that Arthur Penn ever even came close to matching this achievement -- though, of course, not many careers contain more than one Bonnie and Clyde. His blend of suspenseful action set pieces, overly-stylized visuals, and gallows humor remains influential even to this day -- it's hard to imagine people like Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone having the success they've had without directors like Penn paving they way.

The Graduate also remains a hugely influential movie, for paving the way for just about every multi-generational romantic comedy that has come since then. When was the last time you read a review for a movie that featured an older woman dating a younger man that DIDN'T compare her to Mrs. Robinson? And the ending -- ostensibly happy yet also suggesting that Benjamin and Elaine have grave uncertainties about their future together -- is like the textbook example for any screenwriter or director looking to make a film with an emotionally ambiguous finale. Above all, it's a wonderful comedy about a young man trying to find his place in the world -- I first saw the film shortly before graduating from college, and thought the "What are you going to do now?" / "I was going to go upstairs for a minute" scene captured the feelings of pressure and uncertainty about post-collegiate life as anything I'd seen. And the film has a lot of other personal connections I enjoy -- the tunnel Benjamin drives through when traveling from Berkeley to Santa Barbara is not far from my childhood home (and Benjamin drives the WRONG WAY through that tunnel, which only goes northbound!), and I love seeing so much footage of my alma mater (USC standing in for Berkeley) from so many decades ago. Add to that, it's my mother's favorite movie, and I was raised on all of those Simon & Garfunkel songs even before I was old enough to finally see this film. So, perhaps a lot of those touches make the film feel more personal to me, and it gets my vote for Best Picture.

But, of course, it's a wonderful film objectively as well, unimaginable without the contributions of Hoffman and Bancroft in two great comic performances, and a hilarious screenplay that's full of so much human poignancy. As for Mike Nichols, I very nearly split the ticket to give Bonnie and Clyde a consolation prize...but I just couldn't vote a Nichols movie for Best Picture two years in a row and deny him for Best Director both times. Nichols's work is a bit more restrained than Penn's, but it's a huge asset to his film nonetheless. It's not insignificant that he made a contemporary comedy -- not the most visually exciting of genres, then or now -- with so many indelible images. (Hoffman appearing to stand underneath Bancroft's leg has been parodied too many times to count.) And tonally Nichols finds just the right spot between silliness and sadness that makes the film seem so fresh even today, despite the fact that it's such a great time capsule of 1967 as well. So, I vote a tandem ticket for The Graduate in both categories, but acknowledge that it might as well be a tie with Bonnie and Clyde in each.

Would that one of them were on the Best Picture ballot next year...

[anonymous1980]

I think I heard the only reason "Mrs. Robinson" was not nominated is that Simon & Garfunkel forgot to submit the necessary paperwork and was left off the ballot.

[Big Magilla]

I guess The Bare Necessities is still sung by kids and in shows that cater to families, but The Look of Love has long been a staple of supper clubs, jazz clubs and cabarets and is still recorded from time to time. Diana Krall and Anita Baker recorded it within the last dozen years or so and it is often sung in tribute to composer Burt Bacharach. The score for the film version of Thoroughly Modern Millie consisted mainly of standards from the 1920s including "Baby Face"; "Do It Again"; "Poor Butterfly" and "Jimmy" . The title song was the only thing new. It was catchy, but paled in comparison to the classics. The stage musical kept the title tune and jettisoned the classics in favor of totally forgettable new music. As far as I know the song has never been recorded aside form the soundtrack and original cast recordings, and no one to my knowledge has ever sung it outside of the show.

[Big Magilla]

It's certainly the only nominee that anyone dares sing professionally today.

This isn't even remotely true. "Thoroughly Modern Millie" made it into the Broadway musical of the same name, which gets performed professionally A LOT. And "The Bare Necessities" is a staple of the Disney canon -- I saw Dick Van Dyke perform it in concert six months ago.

The Broadway musical sucked, too.

[Mister Tee]

It's certainly the only nominee that anyone dares sing professionally today.

This isn't even remotely true. "Thoroughly Modern Millie" made it into the Broadway musical of the same name, which gets performed professionally A LOT. And "The Bare Necessities" is a staple of the Disney canon -- I saw Dick Van Dyke perform it in concert six months ago.

This particular set of nominees, though, is one of the most indefensible in the long checkered history of the music branch, for the popular tunes it omitted.

I don't blame them for leaving off Mrs. Robinson, although in retrospect that's the most famous of the bunch. As anyone who's seen the film knows, however, the verses for which the song is renowned (including "Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio") aren't heard on-screen -- the song amounts to just a few bars of the chorus. And the lengthier hit version didn't reach the airwaves until around the time of the Oscars in '68, so there's no way Academy voters would have known it at voting time.

But there's no excuse for their not nominating The Supremes' hit title song for "The Happening", Dionne Warwick's "Theme from Valley of the Dolls", Petula Clark's "This Is My Song" from "The Countess from Hong Kong" (which seemed so up the Academy's alley I'd spent the whole year thinking it was a sure winner), and, above all, the title song from "To Sir With Love", whmich was not only a climactic moment from a hit film, it was the frickin' number one selling record of 1967.

[The Original BJ]

It's certainly the only nominee that anyone dares sing professionally today.

This isn't even remotely true. "Thoroughly Modern Millie" made it into the Broadway musical of the same name, which gets performed professionally A LOT. And "The Bare Necessities" is a staple of the Disney canon -- I saw Dick Van Dyke perform it in concert six months ago.

[Greg]

Regarding Doctor Dolittle, does anyone know how it receieved nominations for both original and adapted score?

[Big Magilla]

I've never read Mark Harris' book, but I have browsed through it. Something that disturbed me, though, was a blurb that is either on the back cover or in an on-line review of the book which is either a direct quote from the author or from one of his interviewees. It's to the effect that the reason Doctor Dolittle didn't win the Oscar is that Hollywood was changing. That's an absurd notion.

There have been some horrid choices for Best Picture in the annals of Oscar history as we all know, but they are usually explainable. Broadway Melody won because it was the first all-talking, all-singing-all dancing film and a box-office hit; Cavalcade won because Noel Coward meant class to Depression era Hollywood; The Great Ziegfeld won because MGM pushed it, but also because it was actually well-liked at the time; The Greatest Show on Earth won because it was the number one box-office hit at the time and because the two "best" nominees High Noon and The Quiet Man probably split the majority vote; Around the World in 80 Days won because of the tremendous hype surrounding it and because it was an event film that was tantamount to having the Olympics in your home town. Nothing about Doctor Dolittle, other than Fox's desperation, had anything going for it. It would not have won even if the other four nominees hadn't existed. It was a crap movie and everyone knew it. Musicals, which had reached their zenith with West Side Story; My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music were unable to sustain that level of magic. All of 1967's musicals and most of the musicals of the next three years were artistic disappointments as well as deserved box-office flops. I'll have more to say on specific films of successive years when we get to them, but the 1967 crop was particularly loathsome.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying suffered greatly from the producers' decision to make Robert Morse's character less edgy, more likeable which made it seem more like a dumbed down high school production of a great show.

Thoroughly Modern Millie was long and silly with only occasional moments of likeability.

Camelot should have been filmed with Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet or replacements who could duplicate their vibrancy. Richard Harris was OK, but Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, despite their smashing looks and obvious chemistry, stopped the film cold whenever they opened their mouths to sing.

The best thing about Doctor Dolittle was the catchy Oscar winning song, "Talk to the Animals", which was not a bad choice, although "The Look of Love" from the groan inducing James Bond spoof, Casino Royale, was probably the year's most memorable tune. It's certainly the only nominee that anyone dares sing professionally today.

[Big Magilla]

Bonnie and Clyde timeline:

Film screens at Montreal Film Festival August 4th; opens in New York at the Forum and Murray Hill theatres on August 13th, first reviews appear August 14th. Kael's article appears October 31st. Time's cover story "The New Cinema: Violence...Sex...Art..." appears December 8th and declares the film the U.S. counterpart of the work of European directors such as Antonioni. I'm not sure when Flatt and Scruggs recording of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" became popular, but I think it had already charted by then. Dunaway's beret had certainly had an influence on style by then. In fact, as I recall, the biggest outrage coming out of the Oscars the following April was that Bonnie and Clyde lost Best Costume Design to Camelot.

On the other hand, In the Heat of the Night opened August 2nd at the Capitol and 86th Street East so maybe I saw that first. In any event I saw both four times each within a relatively short period of time and before Warner Bros. widened Bonnie and Clyde's release which may have been an obstacle outside of NYC, though for the life of me I can't recall where the damn Forum theatre was.

[Big Magilla]

A few things.

Yes, La Guerre Est Finie and Ulysses were the big non-Hollywood films at the critics' awards. And, yes, there is a large group of Academy members who, to this day, vote for "big" over quality. Beyond fear of losing one's job at the studio, a major concern in the last gasps of the studio era, there has always been the support of those Academy members who make their living behind the scenes who want the big movies to succeed so that more big films will be made on which they might be given a job. Desperate studio pressure, though, was the major reason for the support of the deservedly critically lambasted Doctor Dolittle. Otherwise such big but clunky films as Far From the Madding Crowd (the National Board of Review winner); Thoroughly Modern Millie and Camelot might have crept onto the Best Picture list instead, or (gasp!) even in addition to.

For behind-the-scenes details on the voting at the New York Film Critics awards, I read the Daily News for their accounts which were in those days were much more detailed than the New York Times' recaps.

As for my military service, I was separated from the Army at the end of May. Although we had a movie theatre on base within a few feet of my barracks in Darmstadt where I conducted weekly training classes Saturday mornings, the films we got were usually six months old by the time we got them. I did get to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf; Alfie and most of the 1966 releases before leaving Germany. Two films I did not get to see were A Man for All Seasons and You're a Big Boy Now, which were still playing in New York in June, 1967, and which were the first films I saw upon separation. If memory serves, Ulysses was the first film released earlier in 1967 that I saw while playing catch up. By July, however, I was all caught up. Bonnie and Clyde was probably the first film I saw on opening day, or close to it, in New York, ever. I saw it another three times before In the Heat of the Night opened and then saw that at least as many times. The only other film I remember paying to see multiple times in its first run was Midnight Cowboy which I had seen six or seven times.

I was well aware of the initial critical reception to Bonnie and Clyde, which was mixed, but later reversed by many of the naysayers which I thought included Bosley Crowther, but maybe not. But I didn't need that foul old hag at the New Yorker, which I didn't read until the 70s, to tell me what movies I ought to see. I did read Time and Newsweek, but don't recall what their initial reviews were.

As for the NYFCC voting, I don't have access to old New York Daily News articles, but according to Tom O'Neil's Movie Awards based on Variety's account at the time, Bonnie and Clyde led on the first ballot, but after Crowther railed against it, five more ballots were taken. In the Heat of the Night won 8-5 on the sixth ballot. Mike Nichols won on the sixth ballot as Best Director with 7 votes to Norman Jewison and Arthur Penn's four each. Bonnie and Clyde won the Best Screenplay award.

Rod Steiger won Best Actor on the third ballot with 12 votes to 2 for Yves Montand (La Guerre Est Finie) and one for Spencer Tracy. Dame Edith Evans (The Whisperers won Best Actress with two-thirds of the vote on the second ballot. No indication of who the also-rans were. One thing I do remember from the contemporary accounting in the Daily News was one of the male critics saying "there is nothing like a dame - Dame Edith Evans". The comment stuck. When she introduced at the Oscars to present the Editing award, the orchestra played the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic from South Pacific.

[Mister Tee]

The truly exceptional foreign films -- Persona and Weekend – were to my knowledge not given a moment’s thought…other than by the National Society, which staked out positions then viewed as far left field. The only token overseas Academy mention was for Resnais’ actually pretty good La Guerre est Finie (Eric, I believe Belle du Jour – another overseas classic from that incredible 60s stretch – was Oscar-eligible in 1968.) Also in the high art category was the Joseph Strick film of Ulysses. It’s many years since I saw it (college, early 70s), but at the time I thought it was surprisingly impressive. (Tangential: also while in college, I was reading back year editions of The Hollywood Reporter at the NU library. Their coverage of the 1967 Oscars offered a guide for judging the screenplay categories, positing that the only fair way to judge adapted was to read the original work and then look at the film. Ulysses was one of that year’s nominees, and their dry comment was “Better put a weekend aside for that one”)

There were some quite solid mainstream American films denied best picture nods, as well – films like Cool Hand Luke, Two for the Road, and the one that did at least make it under best director, all of which would have been stellar candidates in the lackluster years preceding. (Although who knows if they would have made it even with more room this year. I know such reports are to be treated with skepticism, but I have a distinct recollection from the time of hearing the closest runner-up in the best picture field had been Thoroughly Modern Millie)

Finding out the major nominations was a more elaborate process back then; I didn’t read that year’s list until I bought the NY Times on the way to school the next day. I can’t tell you how flabbergasted I was to see Dr. Dolittle among the five. Not only had the film received scathing reviews, it was common knowledge it was a major box-office flop. What could have possessed voters to go for it? Studio solidarity/paranoia, as Magilla suggests, was a good part of it. But it’s also possible – looking over the films that preceded and followed it five years in either direction – there was a segment of the Academy that simply craved bigness/epic size above all, and none of the other contenders fed that appetite. I didn’t finally see Dolittle until decades later. I of course found it utterly uninspired (except for the effects, which were decent for the time). Leslie Bricusse is, to me, of all songwriters of the last half-century, maybe the least able to turn out a single appealing melody, and the story was simply stupidity. There were, as we’ve seen, plenty of bad best picture nominees in these years, but I don’t think any other one was as pointlessly bad as this Dolittle nomination.

In such stupefying context, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? only seems a mildly objectionable nominee. Of course it’s a complete trivialization of a then-hot topic (Loving v. Virginia had only preceded it by six months); Sidney Poitier’s character was even by fans of the film viewed as hopelessly idealized; and Katharine Houghton was an easy winner of “actress I’d pay to never see again”. But it was our last chance to see the famed team work together, and the movie was on the side of the angels, so… I’ll acknowledge: I might not be so forgiving of the film had I not seen it (and – confession – quite liked it) at the age of 15. I’m not saying (good god) I’d vote for it, or that it deserves to be here. But I can’t work up major animus for it.

In the Heat of the Night opened to excellent reviews in early August – though one might caution that the same batch of critics had been exultant over Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming a year earlier. I saw the film quite soon after it opened, and even then felt some let-down. It was definitely respectable – way better than you’d expect from a social message movie of the era, thanks to some uncharacteristically wry humor and irony (as Sabin and I discussed last year, kicking off with Poitier’s surprising “I’m a Police Officer”). But in the end the film did settle for feel-good sentiment; as Pauline Kael noted, the final tableau had great comic undertones -- Steiger essentially playing Pullman porter for Poitier – but the moment was so buried in brotherhood-of-man bonhomie that it barely registered. I believe Sabin and I agreed in that thread last year that, as a result of winning best picture, In the Heat of the Night has become somewhat underrated: it was one of the few top winners of the 60s to deal with contemporary issues in an inventive way, and should have been viewed fondly. Its sad fate, though, is to be remembered by history (which is to say, most people not named Magilla) as the middlebrow effort that robbed two of the most influential films of the new Hollwood era. I mostly concur with that historical position – I’m not voting for the film (though I did stick with Steiger as best actor). But I will say in the Heat of the Night is one of a half dozen or so American films that made 1967 a memorable year even beyond the big two.

And let me add that the film most definitely did qualify as a compromise choice. It was a self-evident mid-point between Dolittle and Dinner on one side and Bonnie/Graduate on the other, and its biggest boost on the way to the Oscars was being named best picture by the NY Critics, then at the height of their influence on the Oscars (17 of its preceding 22 best picture choices having gone on to win on Academy night). We don’t fully know what happened at the Critics’ voting that year. Both Michael Gebert and Film Comment have noted the uncharacteristic lack of detail in the NY Times reporting of the conclave -- where usually they gave round-by-round reports, that year they announced winners only, which suggested some level of concealment. We do know that Bonnie and Clyde won screenplay and The Graduate won director, that Bosley Crowther really-really hated Bonnie and Clyde, and that somehow, from that, In the Heat of the Night emerged as best picture. It’s not hard to intuit a hard-fought battle and an eventual compromise on the movie that no one hated.

To me, a minor injustice in all this is a lack of greater outrage over the exclusion of In Cold Blood from the best picture list – a film I think is easily Richard Brooks’ best, and a more powerful effort than In the Heat of the Night. I’d not read Capote’s book when I saw the film, and the experience pretty much overwhelmed me – the incredibly tense moment-by-moment lead-up to the crime, then the skipping-over of the murder itself, which left the audience still gripped through the pursuit and capture segment, and finally the catharsis of watching the bloody event unfold. Robert Blake was not yet an asshole or wife-killer – in fact, I’d never heard of him before – but I thought his Perry Smith was sensational, a sensitive yet brutal figure, a performance definitely on par with the nominated actors. It happens that crime procedurals are a particular enthusiasm of mine, so maybe I was a soft touch for the film. But most people I’ve spoken with about the film seem to be equally enthusiastic. It’s great that Brooks got his most-deserved nomination, but criminal the film didn’t make the best picture ballot. Oh, and, by the way: I did read the book, some 15-20 years later – at which point I concluded the film was not only powerful, but as faithful an adaptation as could be imagined.

All that praise notwithstanding, Brooks won’t be getting my vote, because 1967 in the end was about two ground-breaking films – two films you can without much argument say made the entire decade that followed possible, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

Of the two, Eric is correct: The Graduate was the less surprising success. I remember seeing the poster on a subway weeks before the movie’s opening, and a friend saying “Mike Nichols, and Simon and Garfunkel – how can it not be good?” What no one was prepared for, though, was the scale of the success – right from the start, crowds were huge, and they didn’t slack off as weeks (later months) went by. Obviously audiences loved the movie, and why not? The first half of the film was often hilarious – Dustin Hoffman a comic natural, Anne Bancroft a perfect foil. And then it turned into a glorious romantic fantasy where the Nerd won the Princess! For any adolescent or young adult who felt like a misfit (have I left anyone out?), the movie was the ultimate rebellion dream. And have I mentioned the movie was, by 1967 standards, incredibly hot? You could make a case the most distinctive quality of the movies of that New Hollywood Golden Age was their willingness to up the ante on sex and violence, and The Graduate stood foursquare in the sex camp. Obviously it seems tame today, but, especially for those of us of teen-age at the time, Mrs. Robinson was like our most elaborate fantasies come to life. The Graduate was my absolute favorite movie that year. I sometimes wonder if I’d feel the same if I saw it cold today – would it seem more manipulative? But I can’t ever shake the feeling of euphoria it gave me in early 1968. Oh, and Mike Nichols! I hadn’t as yet seen the European films from which (it became obvious in retrospect) he’d cribbed. To me it seemed as if he’d reinvented film-making. Obviously that no longer is the case. But many of the techniques/images he used in the film remain indelible – none moreso than the famous shot of Hoffman in bed in Bancroft jump-cut to him landing on the float in his pool.

Magilla, I’m wondering if you were still off doing your army hitch when this year was going down, because a lot of your facts about Bonnie and Clyde simply don’t match reality, as chronicled in both Easy Riders Raging Bulls and Pictures at a Revolution. Critical response was substantially divided even once you got past Bosley Crowther and his pack of mossbacks. Time Magazine dismissed it. Joseph Morgenstern at Newsweek panned the film (then, famously, went back a week later and reversed himself in print). And, as far as audiences…the initial release was an infamous fizzle. Warners had treated the movie like a standard shoot ‘em up and booked it into low-end theatres; it was basically played out by early Fall. Two things happened at once to change the film’s fate: Pauline Kael led a loud campaign for the film (you’d have to say this was the film that made Kael the influential voice she was the rest of her life), and her campaign led to other critical revaluation (in October, Time gave the film a cover-story, calling it a watershed film -- in the process dismissing its own initial review). At the same time, Warren Beatty talked Jack Warner into booking the film into single theatres in the major cities (standard release pattern at the time for serious films with some commercial pretensions). This second release was massively more successful than the first, and by the time the Oscars rolled around, the film was beloved enough in some quarters to share the lead in nominations. But it remained divisive enough that it limped home with just two wins from all those nominations.

The divisiveness is easy enough to understand, because something truly new is always resisted at first, and Bonnie and Clyde was clearly something new. It’s true, as Eric reports, that changes were made along the way that kept it from being the all-the-way plunge into the New Wave Benton and Newman originally foresaw. But the result was maybe even more exciting for that, as it (as The Graduate had) blended those elements borrowed from the Europeans with ingredients that were fully American to create something that finally jumped out of the art-house and fashioned a new American cinema.

Bonnie and Clyde was hailed/loathed for its violence, which was beyond anything we’d then seen in American movies. But the most striking element was how it blended that violence with comedy. The key scene in the movie was that famous robbery where C.W. Moss decides, lamebrainedly, to try and park the getaway car. His inability to get out of the space is hilarious at first – but then it suddenly turns horrifying, as Clyde has to shoot the bank teller in the face to enable their escape. I don’t think we’d ever seen a moment like that on film, turning from laugh to horror in a flash. And it created a whole new mode/tone of film. Films prior to that were somewhat stratified: there were comedies, that made you laugh, and dramas, that by and large were serious about moving you. There had been some films that mixed the two – some of Wilder’s films did, which may be why they still feel fresh to us all these years later. And Manchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove did, just prior. But those last two existed as satire; Bonnie and Clyde was a straightforward, intense dramatic film… that just happened to have some very funny scenes. This mixture of comedy and drama became a commonplace of film over the next decade: Midnight Cowboy, MASH, Nashville, Network…the lines between the serious and the hilarious had been broken down for good.

Because of all this, even over and above its technical expertise and great performances, I think Bonnie and Clyde rates the vote as best picture of 1967, and Arthur Penn deserves best director. This was not what I thought at the time – The Graduate, as I say, was my favorite film, with In Cold Blood probably ranking second over Bonnie and then In the Heat of the Night. But viewings at an older age, and the judgment of history, persuade me that Bonnie and Clyde is the greatest achievement of this great year in American film.

[Big Magilla]

No problem. I'll hold off 1968 until next Monday or Tuesday and 1969 the following weekend.

[The Original BJ]

I'm completely on board with staggering these a bit more. I think a big challenge was a number of years in close proximity where we had EIGHT movies to discuss, which made some of the years rather daunting, and difficult to keep up with (at least for me).

Also, I anticipate that as we move into more contemporary years, people will likely have more to say, partly because we're getting into Oscar races that some folks experienced in real time, but also because it's a lot less simple to dismiss some of the candidates in the '70's as quickly as we wrote off the '50's white elephant candidates or the 30's throwaway nominees. And I think MORE posters will start to chime in as we get to the more contemporary films.

And, I think there's a lot more to say in general about the movies/directors overall than in the performance threads, so they do seem to be taking a bit more time.

Mister Tee, I do hope you feel that if you chime in on those '50's threads, your analysis will certainly be read, it's always so interesting.