A year with no single winner
Rankings of 1967’s biggest films are less tidy than they sound. Studios reported “rentals”, the share of ticket money returned to the distributor, rather than the gross itself, and several of the year’s most successful films opened late in December and earned most of their money in 1968. Different lists therefore give different orders, and the exact figures are best treated as approximate. What is clear is the mix: war adventure, family animation, a message drama, a crime romance and a bleakly funny coming-of-age story all drew large crowds.
The Dirty Dozen: the summer hit
The Dirty Dozen, released in June 1967 and directed by Robert Aldrich, was one of the year’s major earners. Lee Marvin leads a group of convicted soldiers on a dangerous mission behind German lines in the Second World War, and the cast included Charles Bronson, Jim Brown and John Cassavetes.
Its success is usually read against the Vietnam War. The film’s heroes are disobedient and distrustful of officers, and the violence is frank by the standards of earlier war pictures. Audiences may have enjoyed the story without making that connection, but the film fitted a period in which respect for authority was being questioned.
The Jungle Book: Disney’s last of an era
The Jungle Book arrived in October 1967 and was a hit with families. It was the last animated feature Walt Disney supervised before his death in December 1966, and it has been rereleased many times since. Its loose, song-driven style set it apart from the more fairy-tale-like Disney features before it.
The film shows that traditional family entertainment still drew large audiences in a year when headlines were dominated by war and unrest. A parent in 1967 could take children to the cinema without worrying about the new frankness elsewhere on the screen.
Sidney Poitier’s remarkable year
Three of the year’s best-known films starred Sidney Poitier. To Sir, with Love, released in June, followed a Black teacher in a rough London school, and its title song, sung by Lulu, was a major hit. In the Heat of the Night followed in the autumn, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in December. Together they made Poitier one of the most commercially important performers of the year.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is notable because it dealt with an interracial engagement in a film aimed at a mainstream audience, only months after the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia struck down state bans on interracial marriage. Its success suggests that a large part of the public was willing to see the subject treated openly, even if the film’s approach seems cautious to modern viewers.
Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate
Bonnie and Clyde opened in August 1967 to mixed reviews and a slow start, then grew into a hit as critics and audiences reconsidered it. It was one of the clearest examples of a film finding its audience by word of mouth. The Graduate opened in late December 1967 and earned the bulk of its fortune in 1968, eventually becoming one of the decade’s most successful films. Both were aimed at young adults, who by now made up a larger share of the ticket-buying public.
What the year reveals
The year’s hits point to three overlapping audiences. Older and family audiences supported traditional entertainment such as The Jungle Book and big-budget war and spy films. A younger audience, shaped by the counterculture, found its voice in Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. And a socially concerned mainstream audience was ready for dramas about race.
This split is part of why historians describe the late 1960s as a time when New Hollywood emerged alongside the older studio system rather than replacing it overnight. Television, meanwhile, was pulling away part of the older audience; the shift to color television in the home made staying in more appealing.
Studios kept making expensive films that did not repay their cost, and the industry was not especially healthy. The success of a handful of hits, including a few cheaper films with youth appeal, helped convince studios to take more risks in the following years.