1967's Oscar Nominees (inspired by "Pictures at a Revolution")

I'm sort of partial to the material covering Doctor Dolittle, mostly because I'm a sucker for stories about productions out of control and how they got there. (See also Stuart Klawans' Film Follies.)

Bonnie and Clyde vs The Graduate for me.

And 99% of ILX, obviously.

I enjoy something in all those films tho, I just think they are the 2 clearly better movies.

B&C vs the Graduate definitely but I watched In the Heat of the Night for the first time off the back of reading the book and was surprised by how strange it was - the low-key mood, the unusual cinematography and the sudden, unglamorous bursts of violence made it far more radical than I anticipated. I was expecting a straightforward procedural with a soft liberal message and it's not that at all.

If we were voting for the best making-of story, though, Dolittle would walk it. It led me to read The Devil's Candy (about Bonfire of the Vanities) and Picture (not that Red Badge of Courage was out of control but the degree of postproduction meddling was ridiculous). Nurse Detrius, have you read John Griffin Dunne's The Studio? Lots of Harris's Dolittle material comes from there. I wonder if anyone's been able to get that kind of access since The Devil's Candy - I can't imagine this kind of fly-on-the-wall reportage being written now.

never saw Doctor Dolittle (is that the original which was later remade with Eddie Murphy?) and Guess Who's Coming to Diner.

but Bonnie vs. Grad. vs. Heat of the Night >> The Graduate (if only for Katherine Ross) :)

Wonderful book. The parts discussing the compromises Poitier was forced to make are heartbreaking.

This is between In the Heat of the Night and B&C for me, the least flawed of a very flawed bunch.

agree that In the Heat of the Night gets a bum rap... among Steiger and Poitier's best work.

B&C gets the most style points but I'm with Robbie Coltrane's Cracker character in finding its romanticism facile to the point of becoming repellent.

Probably haven't seen Dolittle since I was ten, on TV.

and as we know, after Elaine discovers her mom's affair with Ben, The Graduate just isn't very good.

oh and Tracy is just lovely in Guess? and that's about all that lasts.

I've only seen the last scene of Guess and I'm thinking it must've been the Brokeback of its day. Hell, you could take everything Spencer Tracy says and presume he's talking to his son and his son's boyfriend.

'the studio' is a classic.

think i'd go 'heat of the night' -- haven't seen it in 10 years but it didn't strike me as soft-serve at the time -- or 'graduate'.

in terms of datedness, b&c's dollar-book freud takes some beating. on the other hand faye dunaway.

The parts discussing the compromises Poitier was forced to make are heartbreaking.

This is the biggest surprise of the book for me. It's no secret I've never been able to appreciate Poitier's role in Hollywood history, but this book finally makes me understand why his performances strike me as limited and frustrating. It's sort of edifying to know that Poitier himself felt so too and the reasons why burned him up inside.

Dolittle put me to sleep when my parents bought a cheap VHS version. It's one of those rare and mythical movies that even my childhood self could just not finish for being so fantastically boring.

Nurse Detrius, have you read John Griffin Dunne's The Studio?

No, but now that's up next, along with Final Cut.

The set design in GWCTD looks like it was smuggled from a "Price is Right" set.

B&C's dollar-book Freud doesn't seem so bad knowing that the only reason it was there was because they couldn't show Beatty/Dunaway in bed with Pollard like they wanted to.

I feel like polling a few other years from Oscar's history that feel somewhat microcosmic about the industry as a whole: both 1969 and 1976 seem like good candidates.

Pauline Kael's review of B&C is better art than the film.

So is the essay that contains her review of The Graduate, respective to that film.

Polling certain Oscar years would be a lot of fun. I'd add: 1958, 1989, 1994.

no doubt bonnie and clyde for me. i can see the criticism of the "facile romanticism" morbs alludes to, but i just loved warren beatty's character so much, and his sexual frustration seemed so devastating when i watched it. and oh, that death scene is one of the best i've ever seen, and really hard to watch

Beatty's impotence is pretty funny, too.

Bonnie: "Don't you never just wanna be alone?"
Clyde: (smiling) "I'm hungry. Let's get us some sandwiches."

I've been in a few of those exchanges.

Oscar years that would be no fun to poll and illuminate very little about Hollywood: 1952, 1963, 1983, 2003.

I would like to illuminate ILE's film preferences.

B&C for sure. Morbz otm about the Graduate

In The Heat of the Night

Morbz not OTM the post-Elaine sequences of the Graduate are well worth it just for the gorgeous Berkeley backdrop and Norman Fell.

someone once said the last section of the graduate is like "crepey stalker gets the girl" and it made me go hmmm

It's pretty unapologetically exactly that.

a remake from elaine's POV would be interesting

But if you shook Elaine's head you'd hear a rattle.

They'd have to completely change the casting. Katherine Ross couldn't act her way out of paper bag.

plus she's 70 years old now, might be a little confusing for the audience

But if you shook Elaine's head you'd hear a rattle.

lolz where did you steal this line from

dimwitted coed stalked by greasy creepo, no wonder the movie was a hit

my fave scene in The Graduate, however, might be the very last NOW WHAT one on the bus.

I'm glad Eric no longer hates Sidney Poitier.

I think I only hated his performances, not necessarily his legacy, and now I'm seeing how the one clouded my judgement of the other.

The best scene/line in The Graduate is "You're missing a great effect here" as the tassels are twirling.

ive always liked the seduction scene and the "art talk"

at MoMA last week, Nichols quoted the MAD Magazine parody where Ben asks his parents, "Why am I Jewish and you're not?"

'in the heat of the night', that movie is really, really dope

except the murder mystery stinks

Eric, i should con you into viewing Guess once (for the ice cream scene at least) by reminding you that Isabel Sanford plays their maid.

the Graduate is the better film, but I enjoy Bonnie & Clyde more. GWCTD is no slouch, either, obv. I guess it is appropriate that '67 would be a year for zeitgeist films to be up for the top honors. I haven't seen the other two.

Doctor Doolittle is clearly the one thing that is not like the other on that list.

Point Blank smashes all of these.

my fave scene in The Graduate, however, might be the very last NOW WHAT one on the bus.

that's why i voted for it. it's not hard to love bonnie and clyde, but i think the graduate was smarter about where things were going. no blaze of glory, just a lot of wtf.

plus -- anne bancroft.

http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2008/03/cuar01_graduate0803.jpg

Here's where I say I'm definitely more in B&C's camp than Benjamin's.

It won't take much to con me into seeing any of these five films in the immediate aftermath of reading this book.

I know it's the boring old anti-challops, but the scuba-diving gear scene in TG is fucking awesome. I'm still voting B&C tho.

E, you're going to subject yourself to Anthony Newley?

Yes, when it comes down to it, this was the most compulsively entertaining read on moviemaking I think I've ever cracked.

Some of the old/new guard pairings were a hoot... Jack Warner to Beatty: "What the fuck's an homage?!"

"That was a three-piss picture!"

Yeah, I read this earlier this month -- in about a week, which is quick for me. Hard to put down.

However, it failed to inspire me to rent Dr Doolittle.

LOL!

Yes, when it comes down to it, this was the most compulsively entertaining read on moviemaking I think I've ever cracked.
― boring movies are the most boring (Eric H.), Monday, September 28, 2009

OTM. I re-read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls afterward and it was clearly the lesser book.

While acknowledging the impact of Bonnie and Clyde, etc, PAAR is less in love with the era's mythos than Easy Riders is about his.

Yep. The scale of it helps, too: the time frame is narrower and that helps keep things focused. But Harris is just a better writer, flat out.

Harris' empathy helps too. Who comes closest to receiving Biskind's pity in Easy Riders -- Hal Ashby? Bob Evans?

However, it failed to inspire me to rent Dr Doolittle.

I actually made a project out of it and watched all five movies before reading the book. (Only one I had seen before was The Graduate.) Liked Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, and The Graduate to varying degrees. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was terrible but fascinating as a historical artifact, while Dr. Dolittle was just a slog. Not even the sight of Rex Harrison serenading a seal in a bonnet was worth it, though it was on Netflix On Demand, so at least I didn't have to spend any money on it.

Rex was ill-equipped to be a movie star after a career as a Shavian stage comedian.

The only role in which he's at all bearable is as the composer in Unfaithfully Yours.

no, he's good in Major Barbara, Cleopatra, and even that ossified film version of MFLady.

(I am still kicking myself for not seeing him in Shaw's Heartbreak House on Broadway in the early '80s.)

This book really holds up.

OK this book obviously hit me a bit harder than I imagined. I had a dream last night in which I won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1967!

lol so much @ this

i watched guess who's coming to dinner for the 1st time -- it's not bad. tracy is great & its fun imo to watch almost every character pair off and have their own lil convo abt whats goin on, etc

graduate > b&c btw

I should poll Hepburn's Oscar-nominated performances.

I've watched Bonnie & Clyde every few years over three-plus decades--from an initial "Huh?", it gets better every time I go back to it, and Harris's book helped that along a little more. But I still would have voted for The Graduate, which is part of my movie-going DNA.

the whole 1960s was a horrid decade for mainstream american movies. but 1965–68 were probably the worst years of all. maybe the nadir of the commercial american cinema (the early '90s, excepting some shining indie films, were pretty bad too).

excepting experimental films (which is hard, because warhol, baillie, brakhage etc. were on fire this year), i guess these are my favorite films of 1967 in roughly descending order...

Point Blank
David Holzman's Diary
Two for the Road
Bonnie and Clyde
Portrait of Jason
In the Heat of the Night
In Cold Blood
The Fearless Vampire Killers
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
Cool Hand Luke
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
The Legend of Lylah Clare

most of these are pretty flawed films, but all have something to recommend them.

i left off hellman's 'the shooting' because it wasn't released until a few years later. if it counts, put it after portrait of jason.

i should have said those are my favorite AMERICAN films.

also dr. doolittle really is an atrocity.

I couldn't finish rewatching Two For the Road a few months ago.

yeah, that's a pretty good list but I didn't like Two for the Road either.

Stanley Donen also did Bedazzled that year, which is nominally British but was produced by Donen and Fox; whatever it is, it's not much more British than 2ftR.

Who's That Knocking at My Door was technically '67, although just a film festival screening. That'd be on my list, probably Titicut Follies, too, even though Wiseman got much better. It was a dire year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1967

the dirty dozen was much better than any of the Oscar-nominated American films from this year, IMHO.

(tho' i do like in the heat of the night, the graduate and bonnie & clyde well enough)

i love reflections in a golden eye more than any of these films with the exception of Point Blank

Stanley Donen also did Bedazzled that year, which is nominally British but was produced by Donen and Fox; whatever it is, it's not much more British than 2ftR.

― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Sunday, February 12, 2012 8:29 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's true, but like you said somehow bedazzled is considered a UK film b/c of financing.

in honesty i haven't seen 24tR in a few years. i remember being very impressed by it -- thinking its resnais-inspired scrambled timeline and elliptical editing was both virtuosic and put to good purpose. but i may just have come in w/ low expectations.

as a sort of supplement to his book, Mark Harris has a biweekly Film Comment column on '67 in film

Blowup (Dec '66) first up

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/cinema-67-revisited-blow/

Harris on Preminger and Ritt's topical race movies

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/cinema-67-revisited-hurry-sundown-hombre/

thought you were gonna post that terrible Beatty-Kael piece

rong year, silly

Not really -- B&C is a linchpin of the essay.

I think the Netflix series of Five Came Back is released tomorrow.

the 4K Criterion of The Graduate on Blu Ray is a thing of absolute beauty. not having seen it for a good 10-15 years or so i'd not thought of it as an especially good looking film, nor particularly well photographed. couldn't have been more wrong.

Some of it is (intentionally) grotesque--the first party scene, the wedding--but I agree that there's soft-focus stuff that's beautiful: Elaine leaving for Berkeley, the zoo, the "April Come She Will" sequence.

'67 best-ofs, including Mama Cass's

http://lwlies.com/articles/best-film-lists-of-1967/

I threw together my best-of for L'boxd; Weekend came closer to making it than any of the Oscar nominees.

1. PlayTime
2. Point Blank
3. Belle de Jour
4. Mouchette
5. Le Samouraï
6. The Red and the White
7. David Holzman’s Diary
8. Titicut Follies
9. Bedazzled
10. Wavelength
11. The President’s Analyst
12. The Two of Us

I had BDJ and Weekendp on my '68 list:

Playtime (Jacques Tati)
La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard)
Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville)
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn)
Point Blank (John Boorman)
Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki)
Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston)
La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, France)
Mouchette (Robert Bresson)
Love Affair; Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dusan Makavejev)

Reflections is close for me, Brando possible best actor (if not Marvin or Tati)

doctor doolittle is *the worst*, yet it contains cinema's greatest minute pic.twitter.com/nZRgY3Db9b

— Neely O'Horror (@_katiestebbins_) September 17, 2019

otm

have we rethought these?

I don’t think I was here for the first round, but those numbers look about right to me (still have never seen GWCtD, though).

The vote distribution almost perfectly parallels how the book views the films, I'd say--#2 and #4 could maybe add a couple of more votes each. Still think '75 would make a great sequel: two popular critical successes (Dog Day and winner Cuckoo's Nest), two sprawling auteur films (Nashville and Barry Lyndon--great ones, before the debacles that mark the turn of the decade), and, pointing the way to the future (and a greater film than almost all the massive box-office fare that follows), Jaws.