Success or Snub? In the Heat of the Night (40th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

To see part 1, click here.

You Only Live Twice Suite~John Barry - You Only Live Twice

        As mentioned in the previous entry, this installment I actually have a lot of detail on as there’s an entire book written upon it that acts as a paired making-of book between the 5 nominees for Best Picture. 1967 is an inflection point in Hollywood and film history as this is the year that the Hollywood New Wave began. Baby boomers had come of age, were the prime movie-watching demographic and the artistic tendencies of an entire generation were to be the most lucrative moviegoing audience for the next decade as Hollywood had been losing money so consistently for so many years they had no choice but to gamble on these up-and-coming filmmakers. You ask any film expert or lover worth a damn and they'll all universally agree that the 1970s (give or take a few years on either side) was the best decade for filmmaking that ever was and probably ever will be. Several groundbreaking, artistic films came out in 1967 that were such colossal hits that the Academy couldn’t ignore them. And, unlike previous avant-garde, artistic, counterculture movies, almost all of these were genuinely excellent films even to casual audiences.
        Normally we build up to the biggest nominees but, this time, we’re going to try a different tact. We’ll get into whether or not In the Heat of the Night was the truly best film of the year at the end but, first, let’s see who the Academy decided to run against it in the top 5 in the first place. One of the biggest landmarks, and the arguable first truly mainstream counterculture movie, was Bonnie and Clyde.

        Telling the tale of two of America’s most notorious bank robbers, Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), what made Bonnie and Clyde such a landmark wasn’t necessarily that this was a movie that revolved around gangsters but rather the attitude of those gangsters. The film is nowhere near the first movie to revolve around a villain for a main character but instead the movie invites you to ask if our protagonists are really all that villainous?
        Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Bonnie, Clyde and their gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells frequently rob banks and get into shootouts with the police but every authority figure that is shown in the film seems more concerned with beating them down into the proper place of society instead of helping out their fellow man. Bonnie and Clyde, meanwhile, just want to have a grand old time robbing banks and burning some rubber down the road. Considering where the youth of America was at the time, the film recontextualizes two notorious outlaws in American history and turns them into almost folk heroes, allowing the lawless youth to see themselves in their parents’ outlaws.
        Even ignoring the allegory that is presented, Bonnie and Clyde gives a much grittier and more realistic take on the classic gangster films of yore. For example, in classic movies (and, honestly, many post-New Wave movies), you never see characters struggle to find parking, have trouble finding change to make a phone call or have difficult relationship talks about being able to perform. In Bonnie and Clyde, we see Bonnie have to count out her change to place a call, there’s a scene where their sidekick C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) almost screws up a robbery because he can’t find a parking space and much of the movie depicts scenes of Bonnie and Clyde, as well as their fellow gang members, having pretty realistic conversations about love and intimacy.
        In terms of technicals, Bonnie and Clyde also broke some ground in that regard as well. Along with In the Heat of the Night, this pushed the aforementioned revolutionary night cinematography, allowing us to watch the inkiness of the hot Texas nights envelop our outlaws. More significantly, the film gained major controversy as well for the level of violence depicted. While there had been shootouts and deaths in previous gangster and Western films, the violence in Bonnie and Clyde feels a lot more real. For one thing, the movie is much grittier and less phony but, also, there’s usually a lot of blood as well. Before this, movie characters never bled either (maybe a trickle here or there). Here, hemoglobin is shed with pretty liberal measure, culminating in the infamously bloody finale which haunted audiences at the time.
        Needless to say, this movie definitely ruffled some feathers amongst older critics at the time and, more than any other movie on the list, really threw down the gauntlet between the old and the young. Bonnie and Clyde was direct, confrontational and was making a generational case of what freedom in America truly means in a country that seems to just want to control its youth. If freedom means robbing banks and defying authority then so be it then.
        Equally confrontational but less violently so was our second nominee, The Graduate.

        Compared to Bonnie and Clyde, this movie I think confronts more harsh truths about the Boomer generation and, in many ways, anyone who has ever come of age in suburban America. Young Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just graduated college and finds that his parents (William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson) and all of their friends are constantly giving him advice about this job, that job and the other job. Yet, through some well-chosen comic situations, we realize that Benjamin is not being given the advice that really matters in life which leads him to a series of poorly-thought-out decision-making as he decides to be a swinger, entering into a love triangle with his neighbor, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), and her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).
        Besides being downright hilarious in what a delightfully disturbed situation that our protagonist finds himself in, the fakeness and emptiness of suburbia is portrayed very well. Even as a full-grown adult I find that I identify a lot with Benjamin Braddock and, if you’ve grown up with this culture, you will too. His quest for love and companionship is either dismissed or treated as a joke by most of the adults in his life even though that’s clearly what he truly wants. Yet he doesn’t feel comfortable articulating that because, well, all of the adults in his life aren’t talking about it and he’s still just a dumb kid. The film strikes the right tone between hilarity and sadness as they show Braddock’s horniness being played for laughs but then the dismal music will come in to emphasize how lost he is. This brings us to the film’s famous soundtrack, which was written by folk rock duo, Simon and Garfunkel, whose infamous "Mrs. Robinson" refers to the film’s matron cougar and would become an anthem of the counterculture, but it’s "The Sound of Silence" that is the film’s leitmotif. There’s a few moments that seem almost screwball-esque but instead seem very depressing when they’re played out by Simon and Garfunkel’s dismal echo.
        Despite having been very timely in terms of its analysis of youth in its day, The Graduate remains a very timeless film and I think should be required viewing for anyone who is graduating high school, college or raising a child who is about to undergo these milestones. While Bonnie and Clyde and later counterculture movies such as Easy Rider (1969) seem to love its counterculture attitudes and say that it’s society who will destroy our lovable anti-heroes, The Graduate provides a more pensive take and acts as a warning to the youth of America. Throughout the whole movie, Benjamin is told to act like an adult and yet he still acts like a kid because he was never given the emotional tools to successfully navigate an adult relationship. While it’s played for laughs that this manifests itself as him banging his lonely middle-aged neighbor, the film doesn’t shy away from how this guy is just too fundamentally immature to handle a relationship.
        This comes to a head in one of the best, most famous and most haunting finales in cinematic history. The climax itself (when Benjamin gatecrashes Elaine’s wedding to another man) is another of those famous romantic-comedy moments that has been parodied often but many spoofs choose to ignore what happens afterwards. In a time when the youth of America thought that they were going to rule the world, The Graduate was showing them all that they would end up just like their parents. If you trace the ages of the baby boomers through the decades as they got older and older, you will see how the implosion of the 60s counterculture led into the nihilistic 70s which ended up in the conservative counterrevolution of the 80s. Thus, The Graduate ended up being clearly a very prescient film, predicting the destiny of an entire generation of Benjamin Braddocks.
        What makes this Oscar ceremony fun to write about is how diametrically opposed the nominees were in their topics. If The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde offered two different and equally optimistic and pessimistic takes on how the youth could be seen, In the Heat of the Night also had a doppelgänger in the fourth nominee for Best Picture, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

        This one is another famous and great film although it’s admittedly a bit lesser than the first three. The movie revolves around a white socialite, Joey Drayton (Katharine Houghton), who falls in love with a black man, Dr. John Wade Prentice (Sidney Poitier), and she invites him to meet her parents, Matt (Spencer Tracy) and Christina (Katharine Hepburn), to ask for their blessing so they can get married. The parents are classic New Deal liberals who endorse the Civil Rights Movement though they obviously have their own biases and must confront them and put their money where their mouth is now that their daughter is asking to marry a black man.
        While Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was beloved by the Academy crowd, it was heavily criticized by African-American critics as another example of hackneyed tokenism akin to Lillies of the Field (1963) and the movie was very clearly written by a white man. The black doctor is so perfect of a catch for any girl that literally the only flaw for him is that he’s black which seems to try the commentary a bit (i.e. he’s so damned perfect that the odds of anyone bringing home someone like this, regardless of his skin color, is incredibly unlikely, unintentionally implying that if he wasn’t perfect, he wouldn’t be good enough to overcome the color of his skin). After a decade of “racial understanding” being reduced to films where a token black character increases empathy with others, it was becoming a bit trite to black audiences, especially compared to In the Heat of the Night where Poitier’s character raises a lot more Hell and it’s up to the white protagonist to take the first step forward. After this, black filmmakers would demand more and more, making movies for black audiences and by black directors.
        Decisively stating whether or not Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? is racist or not is well beyond my qualifications or understanding to say one way or another although I do think it takes more chances and is more nuanced than previous sanctimonious, crappy Academy frontrunners like Lillies of the Field. While it does have a bit of a Romeo and Juliet (1597)-esque set-up, the real hook of the movie is the parents analyzing their own behaviors and this is where the movie really shines.
      Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as Joey’s parents is some of the most perfect casting in cinematic history. The two actors had been carrying on an extramarital affair with each other for the better part of 20 years when they were cast in these roles, to the extent that they were basically married in all but name. Hepburn had to work hard to convince both Tracy and the producers to let Tracy play the father as he was on death’s door when the movie was being made. And I don’t mean this in that he died shortly after production ended but in that he could literally only work 4-hour days before his heart would give out. It’s a phenomenal pair of performances from a couple of old actors playing old people who are unsure of their place in a changing world. Furthermore, their dichotomy with Dr. Prentice’s parents (Roy E. Glenn Sr. and Beah Richards) in the third act is also masterful as they’re all very aware that they’ve spent their whole lives existing in completely different worlds and have probably only ever interacted with the other race in a rigid, polite manner. Yet, here they are having to talk about the frankness of relationships, entirely unsure if someone from a completely different world will be able to understand where they’re coming from.
        The climax of the film is a speech where Tracy’s character analyzes his own biases, the world around him and what love truly is, especially as an old man. Normally, this would seem a bit Oscar-baity but knowing Tracy’s real-life relationship with Hepburn makes the speech much more spine-tingling as you can tell from his smile that he and Matt Drayton are becoming one in the same and he’s speaking directly to his muse. It’s the type of final curtain call from this mortal realm that so many artists wish for but so rarely get. Tracy’s final bow from the silver screen is one of the most legendary pieces of acting in cinematic history and earned the actor a very rare posthumous nomination for Best Leading Actor. Some in the Hollywood crowd were appalled that he lost but, as good as he is, Steiger’s turn as the Southern police chief in In the Heat of the Night was still better.
        The key flaw with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, I think, isn’t that it handles racial commentary overtly poorly but rather that it falls back on some romantic-comedy tropes which does cheapen and distract from what should be challenging commentary. For all the discussion about a white girl marrying a black man, I think it gets lost in the mix that they’d be a very unhealthy couple even if they were the same race; in the movie, the two characters have been dating for only a few weeks when they decide to get married. Further, the daughter also clearly has a few screws loose as she surprises the parents with her boyfriend without telling them and also invites her boyfriend’s parents without telling him or her parents. You might say that it was a different time as people used to date for much shorter periods of time before getting married back then but this just reminds me of the finale of The Graduate which points out how unhealthy these sort of romantic relationships could be. If they had been dating for even just a few months, the commentary could’ve been that much stronger.
        (As a final point, one thing that struck me watching this movie was realizing just how much Sidney Poitier was always typecast. The scene where he introduces his girlfriend to his parents and comes off as very flustered is genuinely funny and shows that the guy had some real range as an actor that he so rarely got to demonstrate.)
        Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? might have had a better legacy had it come out earlier in the decade but is it a good movie? Yes it is. Could it have been better or more nuanced? Maybe but it still does more than I think many other films did before it and did push the envelope for racial understanding to popular audiences. Is it top 5 of the year? Also debatable but an argument can be made for its topicality so no real complaints here.
        Alright, so this is a pretty respectable and great line-up of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Damn great in fact. Sadly, they dropped the ball with the fifth nominee, Doctor Dolittle.

        20th Century Fox almost collapsed upon making the notorious box office bomb, Cleopatra (1963) and proceeded to gut almost every aspect of its company to stay afloat (studio baron Darryl F. Zanuck fired his own son and didn’t lose any sleep over it). They managed to save their bacon with the box office-smashing The Sound of Music (1965) and so figured that musicals were clearly the answer to their problems. Without any further insight as to the other parts of what made The Sound of Music a success (i.e. good story, likable characters, charm etc.) they greenlit a musical based off of the classic children novel series about an eccentric doctor (Rex Harrison) who can speak to animals. Somehow, Doctor Dolittle ended up being even more of a disaster than Cleopatra was, grossing only $9,000,000 on a budget of $17,000,000 (plus marketing expenses). To put this in perspective and explain why Hollywood so radically changed to embrace the Hollywood New Wave, the top 3 grossers of the year were the 3 we just listed.

• No. 3 was Bonnie and Clyde which grossed $20,000,000 on a budget of $2,500,000
• No. 2 was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? which grossed $25,500,000 on a budget of $4,000,000
• No. 1 was The Graduate which grossed $42,000,000 on a budget of only $3,000,000

        Unlike Cleopatra, which is at least tolerable to sit through, Doctor Dolittle is an utterly wretched film whose disaster of a production is the stuff of song and legends. Say what you want about the industrialized era of Hollywood filmmaking during the 30s but at least back then they were more restrained with wasting their money. Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg never did something so monumentally stupid as spending ungodly amounts of money training an entire zoo’s worth of animals (this is long before CGI was a thing) before shipping them off to shoot on-location in the UK a week before production was set to begin only to find out that UK laws prohibited the import of foreign animals without at least a month-long quarantine because they were too lazy/arrogant to look up import laws (the production had to scramble to buy another batch of animals and train them as well, doubling their animal budget). Also, the set flooded multiple times due to rains. And Rex Harrison, high on his own ego after My Fair Lady (1964), acted like an arrogant diva jackass to everyone on set, including making racist remarks to African heads of state who visited the set.
        And this isn’t one of those times where the Hellish production would be made worthwhile in the end. Doctor Dolittle is boring, stupid, overly-long, has mediocre songs and feels like a crappy live-action Disney movie without any of the charm and whimsy. It’s interesting because Doctor Dolittle remains a relatively iconic children’s work, though I honestly don’t know which one lives on in the mind of your average audience. I ask you dear reader, when I say Doctor Dolittle, do you think of the books, this movie, the 1998 remake starring Eddie Murphy (which is the best of these films though that’s not saying much) or the 2nd 2020 remake starring Robert Downey Jr. (which I have not seen but is by all accounts already being considered one of the worst movies of all time)?
        This is one of the most Godawful movies to ever be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and doesn’t deserve to even be mentioned in the same breath as In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? The only reason it was nominated was because it had turned into such a disaster that Zanuck campaigned for the Academy Awards to try to use the awards clout to desperately increase box office revenue. Especially in a year where there were so many films trying new things with the cinematic medium, it feels especially egregious that such a clichéd, crappy afterbirth from 20 years ago is somehow mentioned as being in the running for best movie.
        So, with this in mind, we’ll try something different for this awards ceremony. Most of the big awards had pretty deserved winners. To go down the main ones:

• Best Director went to Mike Nichols for The Graduate
• Best Leading Actor went to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night (as mentioned)
• Best Leading Actress went to Katharine Hepburn for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
• Best Supporting Actor went to George Kennedy for a movie we’ll discuss later
• Best Supporting Actress went to Estelle Parsons for Bonnie and Clyde (she plays the girlfriend of Clyde’s brother)
• Best Original Screenplay went to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
• Best Adapted Screenplay went to In the Heat of the Night
• Best Cinematography went to Bonnie and Clyde
• Best Editing went to In the Heat of the Night

        But 1967 had so many movies that broke so much ground that there has to be snubs somewhere. So let’s look at some of the other legendary nominots of cinematic history to show how the old guard would still hang on for dear life and what should have been nominated to the 5th slot of Best Picture instead of Doctor Dolittle.
        While Cinematography and Editing had their breakthroughs, most of the lion’s share of the technical awards were dominated by the musicals and there were quite a few this year. Almost none of them made money and were outgrossed by Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate in particular which is why Hollywood made such a gear change. While I’m not going to fall into the trap of attacking the Academy for endorsing musicals at the expense of dramas, where the confusion comes in is by how bad these musicals were and how good the dramas were. Almost all of these movies were certainly greenlit after the success of My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins (1964) (among others) and, due to how long these movies take to make, I don’t think anyone saw how much pop culture was going to change from 1964 to 1967.
        But did they all have to suck so bad? This demonstrates an age-old truism of Hollywood that goes back further than people think: the desperate cash-in that wants to ride off a popular movie’s coattails without actually understanding why it was successful.
        From Warner Bros., there was Camelot

an adaptation of King Arthur’s (Nicholas Beauvy as a kid, Richard Harris as an adult) court that has probably the worst King Arthur in cinematic history and contains comically tone-deaf singers.
        From the Walt Disney Company, there was The Happiest Millionaire

which does have enjoyable musical numbers but whenever they’re not playing, the rest is a complete bore of watching happy rich people pat themselves on the back for how great their lives are.
        And from Universal, there was Thoroughly Modern Millie

a throwback to the Roaring 20s (after the 1920s nostalgia trend had already come and gone) with a darker sense of humor. This is the best musical of this bunch and could’ve actually been a really good movie if it was only 100 minutes long instead of 151 minutes.
        The length of all these films is what ruins them. None of these had to be 3 hours long but the producers just thought that audiences wanted length, even if it meant artificially stretching out stories well past their breaking point. While Hollywood would still make musicals on and off for the next decade, the collective failure of these 4 movies sounded a death knell that would take the genre a generation to recover from. While both Camelot and Thoroughly Modern Millie would crack the top 10 grossers of the year, they still underperformed far below the studio’s expectations.
        Disney did have two more musicals made for their kids’ audiences that were mercifully shorter although they, again, fail to impress. On the live-action side was The Gnome-Mobile

a forgotten, bad yet also somewhat enjoyably bizarre film that details a family (all of whom should’ve been nominated for Oscars for their sheer ability to convincingly commit to such a stupid bit) searching for gnomes in the California Redwood Forest. On the animated side, and more famous, is The Jungle Book

which revolves around a young boy named Mowgli (Bruce Reitherman) who was raised by wolves in the jungle and must escape it before he’s devoured by the man-hating tiger, Shere Khan (George Sanders).
        It bears mentioning at this point that Walt Disney passed away of lung cancer in December 1966 and his personality cult-esque way of managing his corporation sent it into a creative and fiscal death spiral from which it wouldn’t recover for 20 years. The Jungle Book is known for being the last movie that he worked on at the time of his death and, armed with this knowledge, you can definitely see it. The whole movie feels unfinished. The animation department must have been one of the first things to have been gutted when the company was crunching costs because the animation style looks very sketchy and undone. This is hard to describe but look at the backgrounds in The Jungle Book (which takes place in the jungle which should be a beautiful and luscious environment) and see how sketchy and half-finished they look compared to the beautiful tapestry-like backgrounds of Sleeping Beauty (1959) where you can see each root and knot on every single tree. And that came out years before this.
        This sort of sketchy and recycled animation would become the norm at the company and lead to what fans of the company colloquially call the Disney Slump. Whereas older films were meant for the whole family, and at a time when most movies were getting darker and exploring new horizons, Disney films for most of the 70s and 80s would be aiming almost exclusively for kids and continue to have these sketchy, unfinished background work and recycled character models. This laziness and cheapness would degenerate further and further until you eventually get to Robin Hood (1973) whose opening credits occur on a completely blank background.
        Even ignoring the animation, The Jungle Book is one of the first movies I think of that I loved as a kid and was unimpressed with rewatching as an adult. It’s widely considered a nostalgic classic but, again, if you watch it as an adult, you really notice the sloppiness. And it’s not just the animation either. The plot is very meandering, long scenes are spent with characters agreeing to help the protagonist only to be never seen again and I couldn’t even really tell you what the lesson was at the end. On the flip side, though, it has some great voice acting, a generally likable cast of characters (particularly the villain) and the music is the Sherman Brothers at some of their absolute best. Every song in this movie is very catchy and memorable and I’d venture to say probably the best soundtrack of this line-up of musicals.
        (In case you’re wondering, the winner for Best Original Song was “Talk to the Animals” from Doctor Dolittle. Here’s a link to the soundtrack to The Jungle Book. I’ll let you be the judge to decide whether or not this was a deserved victory.)
        Going down the list of other movies in 1967, Sidney Poitier continued his trend of “black man interacting with racist white people” trifecta this year in the schoolyard drama, To Sir, with love.

        In this movie, he’s a teacher named Mr. Thackeray who gets hired at an inner-city school full of white hooligans who make his life Hell. Coming off of In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, this is a far worse film as the movie starts off kinda gritty but devolves into the type of terrible movie where all it takes is a few well-placed speeches to get the children (some of whom look older than their teacher) to believe in themselves and become better. Even by the standards of this terrible sub-genre, To Sir, with love is especially audience-insulting because it starts off with a fairly interesting subject matter. Yet, this was the movie (not In the Heat of the Night) that led to Poitier winning a Golden Globe and also launched the career of the singer, Lulu, who plays one of the students and sings the title song.
        Within a month’s release of To Sir, with love, was another teacher-and-student drama, Up the Down Staircase.

        In this film, it’s a white woman named Ms. Barrett (Sandy Dennis) who takes a job at an inner city school in Harlem where a bunch of students (almost all of them black or Latino and who were played by actual teenagers) make her life Hell. Compared to To Sir, with love; as well as other overly-sentimental and vomit-inducing teaching films like Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939… and 1969); this is a much, much better film. Not only is this sort of situation far more likely to happen in real life but it doesn’t shy away from the tragedies of this situation. Not every student can be saved, no matter how hard you try, but that just makes it matter all the more for the ones you can. The movie obviously takes the tact of our protagonist growing into becoming a teacher but they avoid most of the clichés of this genre as she encounters hopeless case after hopeless case.
        I’m honestly surprised Up the Down Staircase didn’t catch on because it’s a very good movie. Some of the commentary is genuinely timeless and the race isn’t thrown into your face or even ever acknowledged but always constantly exists as an echo. All of the teachers are white and the majority of their students are not. They don’t do some of the over-the-top action scenes like in Blackboard Jungle but there are threats of violence and the camera always shows how our diminutive protagonist is towered over by her students, many of whom hit on her. The characters are memorable, the set design is grim but colorful and yet it’s not all bleak, always reminding you that some students’ lives can be made better by a good teacher. It’s kind of a tragedy that this movie never caught on as I think it was overshadowed by To Sir, with love because of the sheer star power of Poitier and Lulu. Which is a damn shame because this is a far better film and deserved to have more of a reputation. Definitely a snub, but considering how the rest of society ignored it, an understandable one.
        The film that most of the Hollywood establishment thought was going to round out the top 5, as it was nominated for the Best Director Oscar but not Best Picture, was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

        A pioneer in the true crime genre, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (yes, the journalist’s name is part of the title) is based off of a true story where two ex-convicts, Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and Dick Hickok (Scott Wilson), murdered a family and then went on the run. The movie takes kind of an interesting set-up as the film opens with them on the run and lets you hang out with the two for most of the movie before flashing back to the actual murder scene for the climax of the film. Said murder was pretty disturbing to watch for its day and gives some good cognitive dissonance after spending most of the movie with Smith and Hickok.
        Admittedly, the movie was also subject to some Oscar campaigning as Truman Capote personally pushed the movie forward as being the first film adapted off of a real crime. This is not even remotely true, although the movie was shot in the same house where the murders took place which… I’ll leave you to interpret the ethics of that. While it’s a decent movie, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood pales in stark comparison to Bonnie and Clyde. Dunaway and Beatty in that movie are so electrifying and charismatic and the sheer fun they have makes you question your own morals while Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is fairly “what you see is what you get” and the two leads, while good, aren’t especially memorable. There’s a reason why Bonnie and Clyde continues to live on in film legend but Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is fairly forgotten.
        (Truman Capote himself apparently had a few pithy and passive-aggressive remarks when the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Oscar, indicating his taking offense at being snubbed. Personally, this is the kind of thing where I can explain why I personally really detest these awards. Admittedly I am projecting modern morals onto 60s sensibilities here as it’s only recently that we have seriously started debating the ethics of cinema profiting off of the death of innocent people. But even back then, being upset that you don’t get a glittery little reward for writing a book about innocent people getting murdered seems like very poor taste.)
        A much better movie that was still snubbed was this year’s Bond outing, You Only Live Twice.

        Sean Connery’s final appearance as James Bond before retiring to greener pastures (only for them to get him to return to the series a film later… and again 6 films later after that), You Only Live Twice has Bond faking his death to ward off his enemies before traveling to Japan to uncover a hidden conspiracy that’s sabotaging American and Russian spacecraft, causing both superpowers to threaten World War III. Similar to Connery’s other Bond adventures, this is one of the most definitive and iconic action movies ever with two key film icons coming out of this. The first is the main villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance), the scarred mastermind who strokes a white Persian cat, remains perpetually off-screen and had been built up for several movies before this. The other is the army of ninjas that ultimately help Bond save the day (this is way less stupid and more awesome than it sounds, I assure you), bringing the ancient archetype of ninjas back into popularity in both American and Japan.
       You Only Live Twice was No. 7 on the list of highest-grossing movies of the year, making a solid $18,000,000, although it was the first Bond movie to not outgross its predecessor and the series, while never tanking, never quite reached the heights of the early 60s until much later. It does seem like it got washed away due to a combination of the New Wave and also the over-saturation of spy movies in the market. (One of these knock-offs was a parody Bond film named after the first book, Casino Royale,

which many fans of the franchise like to debate whether or not it deserves to be considered a true Bond film. For the record, it is not. It’s just a screwball comedy with the name Bond in the title… and a very, very bad one at that.)
        Critics at the time also considered You Only Live Twice inferior to the previous 4 films due to the focus on gadgets and longer action scenes at the expense of espionage. Compared to many later, goofier Bond movies, this criticism seems more than a little archaic as You Only Live Twice still has a lot of investigative aspects and none of the gadgets are too ridiculous. With enough time removed and more context added, You Only Live Twice is now often regarded as one of the series’ best films.
        I won’t becry it for not being nominated for Best Picture due to the strength of the other movies here (although Lord knows it’s better and more influential than Doctor Dolittle) though I will becry the Academy’s ignoring it in the technical categories. Nancy Sinatra’s opening theme is one of the most haunting and beautiful Bond songs. And the cinematography is incredible. The way this movie is shot just makes Japan look like such a gorgeous country and makes you want to go there. The movie also deserves kudos for being one of the first American/British films to portray Asian characters and Japanese culture in a positive light. Bond’s main ally in Japan, Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba, voice dubbed by Robert Rietty), is every bit as badass as he is and the Bond girl, Kissy (Mie Hama, voice dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl), is probably the first woman in the franchise who refuses to put up with his charm without being evil. Plus the movie shows off a lot of Japanese culture without exoticizing it (too much) while fluidly bringing these traditions into the story.
        Compared to how dreadful the musicals were this year, the spy adventures should have deserved their time to shine in the technical awards. After 6 years of this genre breaking records, the fact that the Academy never noticed them, especially the genre’s flagship franchise, shows how they constantly choose to snobbishly deride certain genres in preference of others. Somehow musicals were the ones that deserve your respect even if they’re generally Godawful. Seriously, I would challenge you to sit through the first half-hours of Doctor Dolittle and You Only Live Twice and see which one you would actually want to finish afterwards.
        Still, in a year where the counterculture was going mainstream, Bond did seem like he just kept doing his own thing. If they were going to choose an action movie that seemed to encompass this counterculture, then maybe they should have nominated The Dirty Dozen.

        Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin) is an army officer who has been assigned what is essentially a suicide mission to neutralize a meeting of high-ranking Nazis during World War II. Realizing that this is a mission that will likely kill almost everyone in the group, him and his officers come up with a plan. They headhunt numerous soldiers who are serving time in prison and offer them a pardon if they agree to undertake the mission. From there, half of the movie is just Reisman training this dozen of malcontents (who are so ill-behaved that Reisman takes away their wash kits as punishment, hence the title) to whip them into disciplined commandos while the back half is the actual raid on the chateau where the Nazis are meeting.
        At first glance, The Dirty Dozen seems to be another WWII shootout picture in the vein of The Great Escape (1963) or Battle of the Bulge (1965). Once again, though, it ended up being a high-grosser and audience darling because of the attitudes of our demented heroes. While previous war movies would feature low-ranking officers who are well-behaved and disciplined and yearn for the chance to prove themselves, the titular Dirty Dozen are a bunch of rowdy jerks who like to fight over every little thing and yet will still stick up for justice when the time comes. This the first movie to encompass the sort of “slobs vs snobs” dynamic that was present in many 70s and 80s films as audiences loved watching the Dirty Dozen show up the much snootier and more rigid army Colonel (Robert Ryan) that wants to shut them down.
        This seems to fit right at home as the war genre’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde, as we get to watch protagonists who refuse to play by the rules become heroes. Strangely, this one didn’t seem to garner as much controversy as Bonnie and Clyde (although some did complain about the violence which… no shit, it’s a damn war movie). I think it’s because the Dirty Dozen are still ostensibly heroes and a few of these society’s rejects actually end up failing to measure up, which adds contrast to the ones who actually do. Probably also, they do end up conforming on some level by the end. Regardless of why, this was still a huge hit, being the rare movie at the time that seemed the cross the generational divide, entertaining both the older generation that wanted some war movie nostalgia (which is probably helped that this is the most realistic depiction of pre-boot camp marines in a movie up to this point) and the younger generation who liked seeing rabble-rousers as the heroes.
        If there was one movie about the generational divide that was truly snubbed, however, then that would have to be Cool Hand Luke.

        Similar to how Bonnie and Clyde reinvented the gangster picture for the boomer generation and The Graduate did the same as a romantic-comedy, Cool Hand Luke completely reinvented the prison movie. The prison movie is an interesting sub-genre of films as previous films usually revolved around clearly evil men or characters falsely accused of a crime they didn’t commit. Here, Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) gets in trouble with the law for tearing the heads off of parking meters while on a drunken bender. A crime, to be sure, but in the grand scheme of things, not an especially bad one and something that could be easily made up for with some community service.
        Instead, Luke goes to prison, working on a road crew and subjected to the brutal abuse of the warden known only as the Captain (Strother Martin). Over the course of the movie, Luke ends up gaining the respect and friendship of several of the other prisoners, particularly the much taller and more intimidating Dragline Slidell (George Kennedy, who won the aforementioned Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) who looks up to Luke in awe. Luke, while a friendly and funny guy with that winning Paul Newman smile, remains a relative enigma to the audience and Dragline, always managing to keep his head up and able to plant his tongue in his cheek no matter how bad things get.
        In this way, Cool Hand Luke would serve as an influential template for almost all future prison movies, both thematically and plot-wise. Later movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) would all have similar themes of using prison as an allegory for the oppressiveness of life and having a hero who somehow figures out how to set off these shackles and refuse to let the system break them. Yet, this hero will always be a degree removed from the audience as instead the true protagonist and audience surrogate is the hero's best friend who is much closer to being broken by the system but through the hero's inspiration, they learn to rediscover their inner strength. While these movies have similar tropes, they are all unique and remain very beloved and Cool Hand Luke is no different in this regard, showing how tropes don’t necessarily have to be a bad thing throughout the years so long as you can re-adapt and breathe new life into them.
        Going back to Cool Hand Luke, I think this is one of the best allegories for the Vietnam War and the President Johnson years. Luke earns the Captain’s ire by repeatedly trying to escape from prison (with his methods being increasingly fun to watch). Yet the movie goes to pains to show how benign this action is. Luke never hurts anybody, didn’t even hurt anybody for his initial crime and the desire to be free from jail is an incredibly human and understandable response. The Captain’s reaction?

 

God, the hypocrisy of that line is so good.
        Cool Hand Luke was inarguably one of the best movies of 1967 and the Hollywood New Wave and had no business being snubbed for the Oscar for Best Picture. While it received a few other nominations and awards; and I would hate to be forced to decide between Paul Newman, Rod Steiger and Spencer Tracey for the Best Leading Actor award; Cool Hand Luke inexcusably did not make the cut for the top 5.
        But before we can complain and analyze this decision in earnest, we have one more important piece of film history to get through. The other feature presentation of the snubs here was the American release of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, which consisted of the films Por Un Pogno di Dollari (Eng.: A Fistful of Dollars)

Per Qualche Dollaro in Piú (Eng.: For A Few Dollars More)

and the masterpiece of the three, Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (Eng.: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

        In the mid-1960s, Italy started a trend of movies called (by Americans) spaghetti Westerns, where Italy would put their own spin on the Western genre. Similar to the British spy films, this genre would be a huge blockbuster trend in Italy that quickly collapsed beneath its weight; fully one-third of all Italian films released in 1968 were spaghetti Westerns. The Dollars trilogy was the most famous, iconic and groundbreaking of this genre. The films are really only a trilogy in the sense that they were all directed by Sergio Leone and starred Clint Eastwood in his breakout role; there is no throughline or story beats that connect the films (although Leone and the producers did confirm that Eastwood’s character is the same person in each movie, dubbing him as the Man With No Name in the trilogy’s press junkets).
        The first film, A Fistful of Dollars (originally released in Italy in 1964), is about an American drifter named Joe (Eastwood’s character) who arrives in a frontier town where the townspeople are being oppressed by two feuding gangs led by the outlaw, Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volonté), and the corrupt sheriff, John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy). Taking pity on the townsfolk, Joe offers his services to both gangs, secretly planning to play them against each other. In case this sounds familiar, that’s because this is the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), who filed a lawsuit against Sergio Leone, accusing him of plagiarism.
        For A Few Dollars More (1965) is at least an original and more straightforward plot. A bounty hunter named Manco (Eastwood) reluctantly joins forces with an older bounty hunter named Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) to hunt down an evil outlaw named El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté). The two seldom get along and have pretty larger-than-life personalities, helping to pioneer the concept of the buddy cop movie. Both movies were released in the States in early 1967 to drum up hype for America’s December release of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). In this one, Blondie (Eastwood) and two other gunslingers, the wicked Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) and the twitchy Tuco Ramirez (Eli Wallach), learn of buried treasure in a cemetery somewhere in the desert and form a series of uneasy alliances and betrayals in their journeys to get there.
        We discussed this in our review of Yojimbo but Westerns for the most of the John Wayne and John Ford era tended to revolve around the vistas with honest sheriffs taking on outlaws or Indians. Spaghetti westerns, by contrast, were far more stylized with creative camera shots, close-ups and usages of music to give them a movie-fied setting. For example, in one scene in A Fistful of Dollars, Joe defeats a thug by crushing him with a wine barrel. An earlier Western would show this scene from probably a long shot with a dummy of some kind. Here, we see a multi-cut edit where we follow the POV of the barrel falling down onto the poor sucker’s head. There are many scenes like this throughout all three movies that are just cool to watch though the lion’s share of them are in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with Leone demonstrating a journeyman director’s ability to learn and improve upon his style with each passing movie.
        The other thing that these movies really pushed forward, however, even further than Yojimbo, is the usage of music to tell the story. Ennio Morricone’s score is famous for being some of the best and most famous movie music of all time and Leone demonstrates an interesting experiment in filmmaking by mixing the images and songs in a way to tell the story without dialogue. For example, in For A Few Dollars More, there’s a leitmotif that is shared between Colonel Mortimer and El Indio, informing us of their past together long before it’s ever verbalized. Or in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when they finally arrive at the cemetery and the legendary music track “The Ecstasy of Gold” informs the audience that they are finally at the end of the long journey they have been on. Most famous is the climactic shootout from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Our three leads face off against each other, sizing each other up, knowing that shooting one of the other men will leave them wide open to getting killed by the third unless they’re really quick on the trigger. It’s about five minutes of three guys just staring at each other and yet it’s probably the most iconic, epic and heart-pounding duel in Western history.
        Even ignoring the style, these are also very fun action movies with very fun characters. Eastwood would succeed John Wayne as being one of the most famous Western icons of all time (though, unlike Wayne, Eastwood is an actually great actor) and Westerns would become more typically movie-fied beyond just being about your typical cowboy and Indian rustlers with static shots of the horizon. Many of the extras no longer look like Hollywood bit parts but instead look like many of the filthy and rugged people who probably occupied the Wild West.
        Similar to all of the other movies on this installment, the Dollars trilogy got into hot water with older conservative critics, complaining how it demythologized the West and viewed it as Italy trying to dictate American mythology. This is pretty strange to imagine considering how moviefied this trilogy is but, if you compare them to John Wayne movies, you can see what they mean. There’s a constant theme of betrayal in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (and, to a lesser extent, the other two films) as every character is constantly in it for themselves and betrays their partner at the first lucrative chance to do so. Instead of the collectivism espoused in movies like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963), the heroes only seem to go after the bad guys because there’s a monetary reward. Honestly, Clint Eastwood’s Blondie only ever seems to get the “good” moniker because he plays with a kitten in one scene and isn’t as overtly sadistic as the other two; his primary goal in the movie is still to kill people and make money.
        The fact that these movies weren’t instantly lauded is a pretty clear-cut case of pretentious cultural xenophobia. Spaghetti Western was actually originally used as a derisive term to try to write off these movies as not being good enough Westerns because they weren’t made by Americans. And yet these movies are so steeped in their Wild West atmosphere that, if you didn’t know they came from Italy, you honestly would have no idea. While they made tons of money, many critics, both old-school and new, tried to look for any reason to excoriate them. And the Academy was no different.
        This is yet another ridiculous snub. Even if you don’t think the story is great, Sergio Leone’s mastery of his craft in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly reaches damn near Hitchcock levels in the art of filmmaking. There's scenes in all of these movies that seem to drag on way longer than should be allowed but he manages to keep your complete attention the whole time. The only reason why this movie wasn’t nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Original Score is elitism and racism, plain and simple.
        So, yes, as you can see, 1967 was one Hell of a great year for movies that showed the inflection point of old Hollywood and new. We can rightfully castigate the Academy for continuing to try to lean on the musicals when this was the year where the genre was killed all at once but, in terms of the top 5 nominees for Best Picture, 4 of them are pretty respectable choices and 3 of them are often considered some of the greatest movies ever made. As nice as it would have been to have swapped out Doctor Dolittle for Cool Hand Luke or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, let’s get back to the heart of this matter.
        Between Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Graduate, which was truly the best? Well, this is a stupid question as they’re all excellent, they all broke ground and they all had their thumb to the pulse of America at the time. That having been said, there were more political reasons why In the Heat of the Night won. And this time, they were the type of politics that actually matter.
        These Academy Awards were originally slated to occur on April 8th, 1968. That morning, civil rights icon, Martin Luther King Jr., was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. After a threatened boycott by black and liberal members, the Academy Awards were postponed to two days later. During those intervening days, race riots shook the country as Rev.-Dr. King’s dreams of racial harmony seemed to be on the brink of being destroyed forever.
        In this atmosphere where it seemed like all Hell was breaking loose in America, a film tackling the race issue seemed very appropriate. (Granted, given how voting works, it’s likely that the winner was already decided before King was killed but I’m assuming that any stragglers on the day of would have been swayed.) Rod Steiger, upon winning the Academy Award for Best Actor, made a speech honoring the martyred King and his dream of racial harmony. This is the first time that an acting award winner would use the Academy Awards as a venue to endorse some sort of political message and it left an impression on audiences and Academy members alike. Going forward, this would be par for the course though I'm not entirely sure that that's a good thing. Over the years, this trend would degenerate until we reach the modern-day interpretation of the Oscars where we watch millionaires lecture the public about their carbon footprint whilst wearing a gown made in a Vietnamese sweatshop in a venue with a power grid-straining amount of lights and glitz after having flown there in their private jet. But, back in 1967, Steiger’s speech was a pretty significant and important gesture. (By contrast, the emcee of the ceremony, Bob Hope, made some pretty tasteless jokes complaining about how the ceremony was delayed.)
        Considering how race and the destiny of American liberalism seemed to be the big political topic of this year, yes, this seems like an appropriate victory. In the Heat of the Night is definitely much grittier and shows more of the worst of humanity than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? In addition, it also still has a law-and-order message, showing an important middle ground of how African-Americans can still be law-enforcing citizens which was a concept that presidential candidates George Wallace and (to an admittedly lesser but still significant extent) Richard Nixon seemed eager to paint as being impossible. And, as mentioned, it did experiment with new filming styles and cinematic tropes with its night cinematography.
        This was a year where choosing one single winner as the “best” is ultimately quite stupid. This is one of the best and most important years for movies ever. How the Hell do you exactly distinguish a movie like In the Heat of the Night from Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate (not to mention the others listed here) and walk away declaring one as “the best?” All got their thumb to the pulse of the generation, all asked questions about contemporary society and all pushed the medium forward.
        Despite these being great movies, the outsized value we place on this show is shown on vivid display right here as there’s no reason why a popularity contest of the rich and famous should carry so much weight. Poor Sidney Poitier especially got the short end of the stick here. As mentioned, he unfairly got painted as an Uncle Tom after these ceremonies came out since black audiences caught on to the fact that he was always typecast in the same role as the one token black guy. This isn’t his fault but it made it easy for producers to write him off when black critics complained about him because clearly his “integration” wasn’t doing enough. Because they also saw that he didn’t win any Oscars for his movies this year, they took the wrong lesson and assumed that nobody wanted to see this guy ever again. Despite having made three high-grossers in one year, Poitier’s career went on the backburner and never recovered after this (although some of that might also have been a self-inflicted retirement; look up some of the stuff said about this man back then, it was awful).
        But, in the end, is In the Heat of the Night the best movie of 1967? Debatably. Was it one of them? Inarguably. So by their own parameters, this is a good choice. Calling In the Heat of the Night the best movie of 1967 was a…


SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1967:

• Bedazzled (dir. Stanley Donen)
• Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg)
• El Ángel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) (dir. Luis Buñuel)
• Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (dir. Stanley Kramer)
• In the Heat of the Night (dir. Norman Jewison)
• Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) (dir. Sergio Leone)
• Per Qualche Dollar in Piú (For A Few Dollars More) (dir. Sergio Leone)
• Por Un Pogno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) (dir. Sergio Leone)
• The Dirty Dozen (dir. Robert Aldrich)
• The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols)
• The Night of the Generals (dir. Anatole Litvak)
• Up the Down Staircase (dir. Robert Mulligan)
• You Only Live Twice (dir. Lewis Gilbert)

Favorite Heroes:

• Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) (The Graduate)
• Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) (In the Heat of the Night) 
• Grau (Omar Sharif) (The Night of the Generals) 
• James Bond (Sean Connery) (You Only Live Twice)
• Joe/Manco/Blondie/The Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood) (The Dollars trilogy)
• Luke Wilson (Paul Newman) (Cool Hand Luke)
• Matt Drayton (Spencer Tracy) (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?)
• Ms. Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis) (Up the Down Staircase) 
• Officer Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) (In the Heat of the Night) 
• Signor Petruchio da Verona (Richard Burton) (The Taming of the Shrew) 

Favorite Villains: 

• Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) (Bonnie and Clyde)
• El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) (Per Qualche Dollaro in Piú (For A Few Dollars More))
• Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance) (You Only Live Twice)
• George Spiggot/The Devil (Peter Cook) (Bedazzled)
• Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) (The Graduate) 
• Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volonté) (Por Un Pogno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars))
• Sergeant Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly))
• Shere Khan (George Sanders, singing voice dubbed by Bill Lee) (The Jungle Book)
• The Captain (Strother Martin) (Cool Hand Luke) 
• Tuco Ramirez (Eli Wallach) (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)) 

 

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