An industry caught between eras
At the start of 1967, Hollywood was still operating under rules written in a very different America. The Production Code, adopted by the studios around 1930 and enforced more strictly from 1934, had long dictated what could be shown on screen: how crime was punished, how sex was implied, which words could be spoken. By the mid-1960s the Code was weakening. Foreign films that ignored it were finding audiences, and a few American releases, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, pushed its language limits and were still released. Jack Valenti, who became head of the Motion Picture Association of America in 1966, would eventually replace the Code with a ratings system, which took effect in November 1968.
In other words, 1967 was a transitional year. The old rules were still on the books, but they were bending, and several films released that year used the space to do something new.
Violence with a point of view
The film most often used to mark the change is Bonnie and Clyde, released in August 1967. Its depiction of Depression-era bank robbers combined comedy, romance and graphic gunfire, and it divided critics before winning many of them over. Violence was not new to American cinema, but showing it with such physical impact, and asking the audience to sympathise with the people committing it, felt like a break. The reaction to it, including the questions it raised about what films should be allowed to show, was a sign of how much was in flux.
Other 1967 releases also moved the boundaries. Cool Hand Luke, a prison drama released in November, presented institutional authority as brutal and arbitrary, and made a quiet rebel into a folk hero. Action films such as The Dirty Dozen, released in the summer, treated war as morally messy rather than purely heroic. Audiences watching these films were also seeing the Vietnam War on television news most evenings, and the mood of those months of Vietnam War escalation shaped what viewers were ready to accept.
Youth and the generation gap
Movie executives had been worrying for some time that younger viewers, who made up a large share of cinema-goers, were not being served. The Graduate, released in December 1967, spoke directly to that audience. Its story of a directionless college graduate and an affair with an older married woman was comic, awkward and unusually honest about alienation from the older generation. The film arrived at a time when the American counterculture was a daily subject of news coverage and the Summer of Love had just taken place in San Francisco, though The Graduate itself is a suburban Californian story rather than a hippie one.
Race on screen
Few years were as significant for Black performers in Hollywood as this one. Sidney Poitier appeared in three major releases: To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The last was released in December, a few months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia struck down the remaining state bans on interracial marriage. These films were widely seen at the time and have since been debated, in part because their carefully idealised Black characters reflected what mainstream white audiences were thought ready to accept. Even so, they placed race at the centre of box-office entertainment during a summer of urban unrest.
The Academy’s choices in April 1968 showed how mixed the picture still was. In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture, while the nominees included both Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, and also the lavish musical Doctor Dolittle, a reminder of the older studio style.
Television in a fast-changing medium
Television in 1967 was dominated by three networks, and its content was cautious by comparison with cinema. Even so, change was visible. The Monkees were a Monkees television band, created for NBC to capture the energy of the pop scene, and were popular with younger viewers. Star Trek used science fiction to touch on contemporary tensions in a manner that mainstream drama often avoided. On CBS, the Smothers Brothers brought antiwar and political humour into a Sunday-night variety slot, and their disputes with network censors became a public argument about what comedy could say. From Britain, The Prisoner offered an unsettling and deliberately puzzling alternative to routine adventure series.
Technology and policy were changing at the same time. The spread of color television gave the networks new reasons to promote visually striking programmes, and the Public Broadcasting Act, signed in November 1967, led to the creation of a non-commercial public system that would grow in the following years.
What the label New Hollywood does and does not mean
The phrase New Hollywood is usually applied to a wave of American films from the late 1960s into the late 1970s, made by directors who enjoyed unusual creative freedom and who were influenced by European cinema. Bonnie and Clyde is the commonly cited starting point; Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, both from 1969, are often used to illustrate its first flowering. Historians do not agree on precise start and end dates, and the older studio system did not disappear overnight. In 1967, large-scale musicals and family films were still popular, and Disney’s The Jungle Book was among the year’s well-liked releases.
It is therefore best to think of 1967 as a hinge. The audience was younger, the old censorship was fraying, and filmmakers and television writers were willing to test new material. The titles covered in this section, from Bonnie and Clyde to The Prisoner, show that change taking shape in real time rather than a finished revolution.