What “blockbuster” meant in 1967
The word “blockbuster” is now attached to enormous franchise releases, and that is not quite what the year 1967 offered. Spectacular films did exist, and big studios still hoped for a huge hit, but several of the pictures remembered most today were made on modest budgets and looked, at first, like risks. Their importance lies as much in what they said about the audience as in their ticket sales.
Behind this was a business under pressure. Television had been taking viewers for years, and the old studio system, in which a handful of companies produced, distributed and showed most films, was weakening. Executives were uncertain what the public wanted. A rising share of cinema-goers were young, and many of them wanted stories that felt closer to their own lives.
Bonnie and Clyde
Released in the United States in August 1967 and directed by Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde starred Warren Beatty, who also produced it, and Faye Dunaway as the Depression-era bank robbers. It mixed comedy, romance and sudden, graphic violence, most notably in its slow-motion ending. Some critics condemned it as irresponsible; the New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther was among the hostile voices. Others defended it, and a number of writers revised their opinions after seeing it again, partly as audiences responded to it. The debate over how much violence a film could show was one marker of how the old limits were slipping. Estelle Parsons won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in it.
In the Heat of the Night and Cool Hand Luke
Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, also released in 1967, followed a Black Philadelphia detective, played by Sidney Poitier, who is held in a small Mississippi town and then forced to cooperate with its white police chief, played by Rod Steiger. It won Best Picture at the ceremony held in 1968, with Steiger taking Best Actor. Poitier’s character, Virgil Tibbs, is remembered for a famous slap exchange with a wealthy landowner. Cool Hand Luke, with Paul Newman as a prisoner on a Southern chain gang who will not conform, appeared in the autumn and fitted the growing appetite for rebels who refuse to be broken.
The Graduate
The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols, opened in December 1967. It starred Dustin Hoffman, then little known, as a young man adrift after university who begins an affair with an older married woman, played by Anne Bancroft. Its songs by Simon & Garfunkel helped to make the film feel like part of the current pop scene. Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director for it. The film’s wry treatment of parental expectation, suburban comfort and an uncertain future is often described as an early statement of the generation gap, although the character himself has no clear alternative to offer. It performed very strongly at the box office in the months after its release.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, also released in December, is the best-known interracial marriage film of the period. Sidney Poitier played a successful doctor who plans to marry a young white woman, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played her parents. Tracy died in June 1967, shortly after filming ended, which added to the film’s emotional weight. Hepburn won Best Actress. The picture arrived only months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state bans on interracial marriage, and the timing helped it to find an audience. Later critics have often found it gentle and cautious, since the couple is presented as nearly flawless, but at the time it was a major mainstream film on a subject Hollywood had mostly avoided. In one remarkable year, Poitier also starred in To Sir, with Love, a British film about a teacher in a London school.
Spectacle, spies and family films
Not every popular film was about social change. The war film The Dirty Dozen did very good business in the summer, and the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice also appeared that year, as did the spoof Casino Royale. Disney’s animated The Jungle Book was released in October, and the musical Doctor Dolittle, a large and costly production, arrived in December and was not the success its backers hoped for. These films are a reminder that the industry was still producing conventional entertainment alongside its experiments.
A changing industry
The more daring American films of 1967 are often grouped under the label New Hollywood, a term usually applied to a wave of directors and writers who gained influence in the late 1960s and 1970s. Alongside them, the underground film movement operated entirely outside the studios. The long-standing Production Code, which had governed content for decades, was losing its force, and the industry replaced it with a ratings system in 1968.
Taken together, the films of 1967 show a business unsettled and curious. Violent, funny, anxious and hopeful pictures all found audiences, and none of them fit the old formula. That uncertainty opened a door for filmmakers who would shape the following decade.