Best Picture and Director 1967

[Mister Tee]

Can I make a gentle request that these polls be staggered just a bit more? I'm not talking once a week, but once every 5-6 days rather than 3-4? I put out major effort catching up on 1964-66, and it was incredibly disheartening to sign on the very next day and find I was once again in arrears. It doesn't seem I'm the only one having difficulty keeping up: BJ has been struggling, as well, and since between the two of us we provide a good percentage of the text around here, I'd hope our opinion would hold some sway.

I understand, we can always post later -- as I have to, someday, in those 50s threads I missed -- but I never get the sense late posts are fully read (they're certainly rarely responded to). And when, as has happened a few times recently, a tangential discussion pops up in a thread, that discussion stops cold as soon as the year in question is no longer on the front burner. I'm just trying to encourage lively discussion, here.

Hope to get to this year in the next 24 hours or so.

[Eric]

Eric, I think you posted your top ten for 1968.

Hah, oops.

01. Weekend
02. Playtime
03. Titicut Follies
04. Mouchette
05. Portrait of Jason
06. Belle de Jour
07. Bonnie and Clyde
08. Eye Myth
09. The White Rose
10. The Fearless Vampire Killers

[Big Magilla]

Compromise candidate? The Oscars are not the New York Film Critics or some other group that can't decide between two films supported by different factions who compromise on a third film.In the Heat of the Night won because more voters liked it than they did Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both of which were highly regarded in their own time.

Aside from Bosley Crowther and a few other old fogeys, Bonnie and Clyde was extravagantly praised and immediately accepted by the movie-going public, but then so was In the Heat of the Night. The Graduate was an immediate success which became the biggest box office hit of 1968, followed by another late 1967 release, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner which was cheered more for Spencer Tracy's last performance than anything else.

It's not that in later years Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate grew in acceptance, but rather that In the Heat of the Night fell from grace when it became a TV series in 1988 - a perfectly good TV series, but a TV series nonetheless, which had the effect of making the original seem less special, more ordinary.

[Sabin]

Hey, guys! What's up?

This is an interesting race to me because revisionist history states that the winner should have been The Graduate or Bonnie and Clyde, two movies linked by counterculture cool but couldn't be more different in subject matter. More so than being in the company of other Oscar races where there are two commonly agreed-upon masterpieces, what distinguished 1967 in my mind is that there were two Also Ran Shoulda Wons. Just as Ordinary People is a perfectly fine film but Raging Bull Shoulda Won and Dances with Wolves is perfectly fine but Goodfellas Shoulda Won (just go with me), In the Heat of the Night is perfectly fine but The Graduate Shoulda Won. Except Bonnie and Clyde Shoulda Won too. I would liken In the Heat of the Night to the compromise candidate that doesn't drum up enthusiasm but is perfectly respectable as opposed to the brilliant but polarizing champions of the cause who couldn't survive the primaries, but (and Tee might have to help me) were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate that polarizing? Especially considering that those who choose one or the other seem to be done by flip of a coin.

I know I'm flipping that coin. Ultimately, The Graduate just means more to me for a host of reasons. Rushmore remains my favorite movie and so my vote goes to The Graduate and Nichols.

[Okri]

Eric, I think you posted your top ten for 1968.

[Greg]

03. Flesh

I saw this on video. It makes Doctor Dolittle look like a masterpiece.

[Eric]

I won't say that reading Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution (which I already name-dropped in the '66 thread) changed my own personal rankings for these five films, but it gave me at least some appreciation for the circumstances surrounding their productions, especially the two I have the least respect for. There's Dolittle, a production which, as reported by John Gregory Dunne, perfectly encapsulates the sun setting on a particular style of film production (though one that has I think clearly seen a rebirth in the last few decades). And there's Dinner, which if only contemporarily useful as a statement on race relations in America still retains some residual power as a meta-crepuscular final curtain on one of the Golden Age's most revered pairings. Amid all sorts of new beginnings, these two films earn their place in the conversation as chapter-ends. To the extent that Oscar best picture nominees serve to represent a socio-pop-cultural snapshot of a year, Harris's book suggests they unquestionably merit the consideration.

But some of the best or most illuminating details about Sidney Poitier in the book are in connection with the production of In the Heat of the Night, which Norman Jewison decided should be filmed in as deep south as possible. Everyone in the crew was apparently gung ho on the idea ... except Poitier. Also discussed: Poitier's unease with the sense that he was being used by the Hollywood liberal establishment, rather than embraced. A compelling explanation for an actor I've always found stilted and inexpressive, and truly a case of still waters running deep.

Interestingly enough, it's the two movies commonly accepted as the competing titans in this category that boast arguably less-than-compelling back stories. The outsized box-office gross of The Graduate speaks for itself, but so much of the package seems a case of "right place, right time." Bonnie & Clyde was initially intended to be a more overtly American-style French New Wave movie, but at a number of corners the filmmakers scaled back expectations (most notably excising a scene that would've explicitly depicted Clyde's bisexuality; Beatty got cold feet). Still, for those aspirations alone, Bonnie & Clyde and Penn get my vote here.

01. Night of the Living Dead
02. Rosemary’s Baby
03. Flesh
04. High School
05. 2001: A Space Odyssey
06. The Devil Rides Out
07. Therese And Isabelle
08. Head
09. If....
10. Witchfinder General

[mlrg]

Voted for The Graduate and Nichols

[Big Magilla]

I started making up my own awards with the 1960 calendar year releases when I was 17 because I had been unhappy with the Academy's choices. I had agreed only once in the preceding five years with Oscar. Ironically I found myself agreeing with Oscar's Best Picture choices for the next eight years. That streak comes to an end with 1967.

I suspect The Graduate will win this poll with Bonnie and Clyde coming in second, but In the Heat of the Night was the right choice at the time and still holds up for me.

I had seen both In the Heat of the Night and Bonnie and Clyde multiple times in theaters in 1967 and The Graduate only once, although I was first in line when the soundtrack album came out and played it incessantly throughout 1968.

Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night, edited by future director Hal Ashby, was groundbreaking in its treatment of race relations in the deep south. The scene in which Larry Gates slaps Sidney Poitier and Poitier strikes him back was a watershed moment in film history. Rod Steiger's three dimensional portrayal of the police chief in a racist town who nevertheless is willing to listen and learn and ultimately respect a black detective from up north of clearly superior intellect was novel and stunning. That this film won a week after the awards were delayed due to the assassination of Martin Luther King was historic. Beyond that, however, it's a rip-roaring good murder mystery and no murder mystery had won an Oscar before. or since for that matter. It was about time.

Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, the first of the modern gangster films, had great acting and style to spare but it's really the 1930s filtered through a 1960's sensibility, compulsively watchable but not as immediate as In the Heat of the Night in my estimation.

Mike Nichols' The Graduate is irreverent, funny and features a great against-type performance from Anne Bancroft, but its chief innovation stems from Nichols' use of SImon and Garfunkel's music which though great in itself has spawned decades of lazy imitations. Still, Nichols' complete about-face from the preceding year's equally brilliant but heavily dramatic Who's Afraid of Virignia Woolf clearly makes him the director of the year.

Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is one of the message director's lighter films with strong performances from Spencer Tracy in his last role, as well as Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and a handful of good supporting players, but it's clearly an also-ran in this company.

Richard Fleischer's Doctor Dolittle is one of the most embarrassing Best Picture nominees of all time. Its nine nominations are clearly attributable to fear, the fear of Fox employees losing their jobs if the studio doesn't stop losing money - hence the push to bring this turkey more respectability and more money at the box office through awards recognition. It wouldn't have so bad except that it took the place of some really interesting films, most notably Richard Brooks' film of Truman Captoe's In Cold Blood, which at least earned Brooks a Best Director nod.

Also left in the cold were such superior entertainments as Cool Hand Luke; The Family Way; The Whisperers; Two for the Road; Wait Until Dark; Persona and The Incident.

Voted for Heat and Nichols just like the majority of the Academy.