‘Pictures’ looks at making of Oscar’s top films of 1967
“Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood”
by Mark Harris (Penguin Press, 490 pages, $27.95)
At first glance, the premise of “Pictures at a Revolution” – an in-depth look at the making of the five films nominated for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967 – seems to belie the promise of its title.
It’s difficult to see what “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Doctor Dolittle” have in common besides their Oscar nominations.
But as the book wends its way from a wild party at Jane Fonda’s Malibu beach house – where the Byrds played for an awkward assemblage of old and new Hollywood – to a tense 1968 Oscar ceremony the day after Martin Luther King’s funeral, at which the old and new guard faced off, this apparently arbitrary device begins to make sense.
“Something was dying and something was being created,” writes Mark Harris, the former managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, “but the transition between old and new is never elegant or seamless.”
Influenced by the work of such European filmmakers as Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni and Fellini, the creators of “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate” and, to a lesser extent, “In the Heat of the Night” paved the way for the director-driven films of the 1970s.
The self-conscious gangsters in “Bonnie and Clyde” took viewers on a wild ride through the dark side of the American dream that spoke to a nation embroiled in Vietnam.
“The Graduate” challenged hypocritical American sexual mores, not just in its story of an affair between a recent college graduate and a bored upper-middle-class housewife, but in the casting of Dustin Hoffman as a very un-WASPy romantic lead.
“In the Heat of the Night” shocked audiences when America’s most prominent black actor, Sidney Poitier, slapped a white man back – this at a time when racial tensions were boiling over.
Harris is at his best when he looks at the issue of race, something that few film critics have dared to examine with as much depth or perceptiveness.
Like Barack Obama, Poitier was hailed as a symbol of America’s racial enlightenment. He became the No. 1 box-office star of 1967, starring in “To Sir With Love” in addition to the two films covered here.
Yet he emerges as the book’s tragic hero. As the first black man to win a Academy Award for best actor and the only black star of his stature, he came under attack from all sides – criticized for being too outspoken on civil rights by some and attacked for being an Uncle Tom by others.
Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who co-starred with Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” are among the icons being overthrown by the revolution of the book’s title. But Harris’ demythologizing of the pair only serves to make them more human, and their battle against time to make one last film together before Tracy dies even more moving.
And it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Fox executive Richard Zanuck, who thought “Doctor Dolittle” was a sure thing at a time when big movie musicals were box-office bonanzas – or for the poor co-workers subjected to the bizarre drunken eccentricities of Rex Harrison and his wife, Rachel Roberts, who were even less predictable and difficult to control than the film’s animal stars.
“Pictures at a Revolution” revels in the complexity and humanity of its subjects. Unlike many cynical and disillusioned film critics, Harris hasn’t lost his love for the movies after seeing the man behind the curtain. In fact, he seems to love them even more.