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

The Children's Hour (1961)

Yeah, the quality of Hollywood filmmaking really picked up in 1980.

It's about the absurdity of the idea that with its dismantling we could finally talk about this, that, or the other taboo subject in film.

oh yes how absurd.

...

What Compromises, on HOTN, did SidPoit have to make, like?

Still, voting that.

Yeah, the quality of Hollywood filmmaking really picked up in 1980.

Um, 1967-1980 isn't my periodization. That's the story the New Hollywood and its acolytes want everyone to believe, that from Bonnie & Clyde to Heaven's Gate (or Jaws in other estimations) we had some sort of cinematic paradise and that Hollywood films were soooo much more demonstrably worse or regressive after that. If you buy that reasoning, more power to ya, sweet cheeks.

And Scorsese, for one, really DID pick up after 1980.

oh yes how absurd.

Glad that's cleared up.

Um, 1967-1980 isn't my periodization. That's the story the New Hollywood and its acolytes want everyone to believe, that from Bonnie & Clyde to Heaven's Gate (or Jaws in other estimations) we had some sort of cinematic paradise and that Hollywood films were soooo much more demonstrably worse or regressive after that.

jesus, i think people overate the new hollywood cinema but you've strawmanned the shit out of this. leave it to the pros.

Look, it's enough to say that Hollywood produced more crap than good films before and after the Production Code, m'kay?

I don't buy that they were markedly worse after 1980 (I like Spielberg, after all), but I don't buy that they were so great in the period immediately leading up to 1967 either -- the auteurist heyday of the '50s had pretty much run out of gas.

I don't blame the Production Code for crappy, toothless Hollywood movies. I blame the fact that most of what topped the box-office charts during that time were crappy, toothless Hollywood movies.

hollywood has always, always produced more crap than good. you can argue about percentages if you want to. but this question is not about 'was hollywood in 1971 better than in 1946?'; it's about 'was hollywood in 1971 better than in 1965?'

yes, i reckon.

and it's also about, were 'taboo' subjects discussed more after the end of the code. unquestionably that's a yes, however flawed things were in practice.

people vastly overrate classic hollywood 'auteurs' imo -- very marginal differences in approach with most of 'em -- but the system functioned better than now in terms of acceptable minimums. shame about the racism etc.

In any case, I don't love Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because it is said to have directly ended the influence of the Production Code. I love it because it's a fucking fantastic movie that couldn't have been made as it was made even two or three years earlier.

It is not a fantastic movie, it's a very fine film of a fantastic (if arguably misogynist?) theatre piece.

That moany more great Hollywood films were made before '67 than after seems obvious.

And yet, I guess I kinda know where you're coming from in a sense. I don't have the book handy right now, but I remember something in Michael Gebert's "Encyclopedia of Movie Awards" declaring the exact moment when Old Hollywood truly died: Oct. 26, 1962 -- the day Whatever Happened to Baby Jane premiered and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were depicted as two shrill drag queen wannabes.

In other words, at least Old Hollywood had women's pictures. New Hollywood was for the boys alone.

I mean, if you buy that. Which I don't. But if you do.

xpost and Morbs presages that very point

How can Virginia Woolf be misogynistic if it's about four men?

Because it isnt?

Oops, my mistake. I was thinking about Oleanna.

That many more great Hollywood films were made before '67 than after seems obvious.

Wishful thinking. Michael Bay and Tom Cruise movies just seem louder.

Maria von Trapp right through to the danger zone

no-one has seen even a tiny fraction of hollywood's output, stop fronting with that shit.

It's funny we're arguing this because weren't the '70s also the era of the most rampant Golden Age Hollywood nostalgia?

Eric, you may be confusing Albee w/ Tennessee Wms on that score, tho it's possible neither of them knows much about women.

Even cracks in the Production Code had almost killed the romantic comedy by 1950. Now we have sex comedies, very unfortunate.

ethasn you fucking dipshit, no kidding, we're talking about the good stuff we've seen and making educated guesses on the crap.

ethan is also arguing against people who would rather see a bad movie from a perceived golden era than a good movie from a perceived overpraised/cool era

OK now I'm completely confused about the terms of the conversation here. But part of what I was getting at is that the Production Code was not federal law. It was not mandated that all films/producers adhere to it. So the American film landscape pre-1967 was much more varied that New Hollywooders proclaim (oh and strawman, my ass - do you know how many times that story gets repeated, esp. in film school?). Does that mean that more people flocked to see Maniac instead of Maytime? Of course not. But Hollywood wasn't the only game and that reality allowed a film like Mom and Dad (1945) to become ridiculously successful.

And when it comes to homosexuality, which always falls victim to the tyranny of evidence, to what extent didn't the classical Hollywood cinema "discuss" it?

As for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, oooh doggies! I cannot think of any pre-1967 film with more arch, unnatural, wince-inducing dialogue. That film's rep completely baffles me.

Morbs, FREE DOM AND ETHAN is NRQ, not ethan.

I mean, the extent to which people fetishize the good old days of "sophistication", "wit" and artillery-style "crafstmanship" is usually every bit as arrogant as the mass of cinephile fratboy-fanboys who will never tire of the taste of Scorsese's cock.

If you regard it as a filmed play (as I do), it won't gall as much. I don't mind Long Day's Journey Into Night either.

Morbs, FREE DOM AND ETHAN is NRQ, not ethan.

Oops, I knew that. I was going to bring up Sirk because of it, but refrained.

well, arch and unnatural is what Virginia is all about. xxxxp

But if taboo-breaking was what cinema is all about, Preminger would be recognized as king.

The Production Code ensured subtext (from filmmakers who knew how to supply it, at least).

(yeah it's nrq; same shit, different shitter)

Morbs OTM.

So is Woolf supposed to be like The Bald Soprano then?

ethan is also arguing against people who would rather see a bad movie from a perceived golden era than a good movie from a perceived overpraised/cool era

And that ain't me, babe! I've seen every Joan Crawford film of the 1930s and 95% are godawful. I've seen Maytime (biggest moneymaker of 1937) and, um, Maniac is easier to sit through. I've seen buckets of mind-numbingly bad obscure musicals that should have remained in whatever vault they were rotting in. I'm a Mill Creek Entertainment junkie so I've seen enough Poverty Row crap for a lifetime.

I adore the classical Hollywood cinema, But you won't catch me calling it a Golden Age. Or any other era, for that matter.

And fwiw, my two favorite films are form 1973 and 1970.

Oh and after Sirk, Preminger WAS king.

And that ain't me, babe! I've seen every Joan Crawford film of the 1930s and 95% are godawful. I've seen Maytime (biggest moneymaker of 1937) and, um, Maniac is easier to sit through. I've seen buckets of mind-numbingly bad obscure musicals that should have remained in whatever vault they were rotting in. I'm a Mill Creek Entertainment junkie so I've seen enough Poverty Row crap for a lifetime.

The fact that you've sat through them all doesn't exactly dissuade me from my notion that you get off on the era.

this "subtext" thing is more or less an invention of post-70s academia so far as i can tell. never seen audience studies to back it up, just "enlightened" readings.

And there ya have the tyranny of evidence.

This all said, I'd be very interested to see your take on this book, KJB. I don't think it's drunk on the Kool-Aid of easy riders and raging bulls, and even though it takes totally defensible potshots against SOME aspects of Old Hollywood (most of the Dolittle material, though it's rarely used as a strawman IMO), it doesn't needlessly fawn over the supposedly obvious greatness of B&C or The Graduate.

im not sure what 'tyranny of evidence' means. but i've not seen contemporary readings of sirk that notice what crazy radical ideas he snuck into his films. they came later, in the '70s. unless someone has counter-evidence. so in other words, if those films had a subtext, who read it at the time?

But part of what I was getting at is that the Production Code was not federal law. It was not mandated that all films/producers adhere to it.

Nobody stops the studios from making NC-17 films either, and yet here we are.

I don't think it's drunk on the Kool-Aid of easy riders and raging bulls

Sold! I'll get on it ASAP.

if those films had a subtext, who read it at the time?

Gay people, for one.

as i say, i've never seen evidence of that... though haven't look too hard because i don't think sirk's films are very good. moving the goalposts a bit, i don't think saying "well they DID deal with that, but it was all SUBTEXTUAL" is a super argument. audiences will get what they'll get from a film.

sirk begfan to get attention in the late 60s not because of the gays but because he was a former leftist with brechtian connections (yawn) from back in the day.

xpost Did they have a choice? It's not like they had such comprehensive representation otherwise, at least not until the post office were finally allowed to delive them their physique pictorals.

(That sed, I'm definitely in the camp arguing on behalf of subtext.)

An example of a film that's ALL subtext and no text: Far From Heaven.

Imitation of Life and Written on the Wind don't require examination of subtext to be entertaining; that's what's been lost after years of graduate theses written on Sirk. I mean, there's a reason why his films were massive box office hits.

It's not like they had such comprehensive representation otherwise

I don't know. Do the careers of the great priss queens like Franklin Pangborn or Clifton Webb count as representation? There's a good essay in Cinema Journal about the "open secret" of Webb's career.

What about William Haines? Cary Grant (check his Tijuana Bible)? The MGM musicals (Steven Cohan's Incongruous Entertainment is superb on this)?

What counts as evidence of homosexuality?

An example of a film that's ALL subtext and no text: Far From Heaven.

Game, set and match.

far from heaven was an ok exercise de style.

Do the careers of the great priss queens like Franklin Pangborn or Clifton Webb count as representation? There's a good essay in Cinema Journal about the "open secret" of Webb's career.

yea exactly, there's a good essay *many decades later* explaining how something nobody perceived was actually a thing.

arguing that that state of affairs was better seems weird. things aren't perfect now, of course, but there's a kind of process of projection onto the past going on here imho.

yea exactly, there's a good essay *many decades later* explaining how something nobody perceived was actually a thing.

Don't be mad just because Larry Kramer said every American president up to and including Abraham Lincoln was gay.

something nobody perceived

Nobody perceived it? Absolutely nobody? Do you honestly believe this?

maybe this is what you mean by 'tyranny of evidence', but... that kind of thing needs evidence! not a very radical proposition.

even then, as i say, people will project what they want on to a film. maybe they'll be able to read x-character as 'gay', but there's quite obviously going to be massive parts of that that just won't be, could not be put on screen.

(and sure enough things did not change overnight in 1967, but are you really arguing that it's better to deal with things 'subtextually' than not. i think denby agrees with that.)

and sure enough things did not change overnight in 1967

Hence, as I'm just getting to in the book, Beatty and Penn backing out of the original script's fairly explicit acknowledgement of Clyde's homo- or bisexuality. While Harris doesn't cut either any slack, he also points out that 1966 was the year that Time Magazine could print out-and-out antigay vitriol and sell it as journalism without anyone batting an eye.

are you really arguing that it's better to deal with things 'subtextually' than not

But to what extent were Franklin Pangborn's characters subtextually gay? Did these characters NEED to say "Yo, I am homosexual. Now let's get on with some Sturges slapstick!"? Did they NEED to passionately kiss other men in the first shot? Yet again, what counts as evidence? And what does it mean to perpetually require such evidence?

Look, I'm not being naive here. I'm not saying that millions of Americans were hip to homosexuality or whatever pre-The New Hollywood/1967/Stonewall. But we have diaries and letters and photographs that even predate cinema which offer the kind of evidence you seem to require. It's not for nothing Tom Waugh called his remarkable book of pre-Stonewall gay male photography Hard To Imagine. But there's your evidence?

Now what?