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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1967 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s |
| Event and Significance | |
| The first "spaghetti western," Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964, It.), opened in the United States, starring Clint Eastwood as the "man with no name." It was the first screen collaboration between Leone and Eastwood. (The western had earlier premiered in 1964 in Florence, Italy.) | |
| During the production of director Robert Aldrich's gritty action-war film The Dirty Dozen (1967), Telly Savalas filled the role of Archer Maggott, replacing Jack Palance who had rejected the role due to its racist overtones. | |
| The rock musical Hair about the sexual revolution and the hippie lifestyle premiered off-Broadway in October of 1967 for a limited engagement, and the following spring opened on Broadway. The use of profanity, drugs, its anti-war stance (with draft resistance) and a highly-tauted full-frontal nude scene caused some controversy. A feature film came over a decade later, Milos Forman's Hair (1979). | |
| Director Arthur Penn's biodrama Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was promoted with the slogan for its violent anti-heroes: "They're young. They're in love. They kill people." The anti-establishment, violent film, originally criticized at the time of its release, was aimed at youth audiences by its American auteur and producer/star Warren Beatty. This innovative, revisionist film redefined and romanticized the crime/gangster genre and the depiction of screen violence forever. | |
| Mike Nichols became the first director to earn $1,000,000 for a single picture - for The Graduate (1967). The influential and groundbreaking film was a biting satire/comedy about the shifting, social and sexual mores of the 1960s. It starred 29 year-old stage actor Dustin Hoffman in his film debut as a recent 21 year-old nebbish, East Coast college graduate who found himself alienated and adrift. Hoffman's career began on stage, and then he appeared in a number of TV series, but real recognition came with his role as Benjamin Braddock in his second feature film. He became a solid actor who often chose difficult and challenging roles, in such films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Lenny (1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Tootsie (1982), and Rain Man (1988). | |
| Director/producer Roger Corman's visually-surrealistic The Trip (1967) (with a screenplay by actor Jack Nicholson), an American International Pictures (AIP) film, was the first Hollywood film to show the effects of taking psychedelic drugs (LSD). It was the ultimate late 1960s exploitation hippie film, with star Peter Fonda. | |
| Jack Warner, co-creator of Warner Bros., sold his remaining interest in the company to a Canadian corporation called Seven Arts Ltd. for $84 million. The company became known as Warner-Seven Arts. | |
| New Line Cinema was formed, marking its niche with the release of films such as Reefer Madness (1936), sexy foreign-language films such as Immoral Tales (1974) and Stay As You Are (1978), and director John Waters' Pink Flamingo (1972) and Polyester (1981). | |
| The American Film Institute (AFI) was founded as an independent, non-profit organization with its headquarters in Los Angeles, CA, with an original mission to "preserve the legacy of America's film heritage." It has gone on to "provide leadership in screen education" and to recognize and celebrate "excellence in the art of film, television, and digital media." It created both interest in film - and controversy - for its AFI 100 Years...100 Series, a 10 year series from 1998 to 2008 consisting of lists of ranked films in various categories. | |
| African-American actor Sidney Poitier became the first black actor to have his hand and footprints immortalized at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California. It was the year of Poitier's three most successful films, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), To Sir, With Love (1967), and In the Heat of the Night (1967). | |
| Only a few weeks after completing Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack at the age of 67. It was the last of nine films in which Tracy and Katharine Hepburn starred together, stretching from Woman of the Year (1942) to 1967, a period of 25 years. | |
| After suffering many years from ill-health and bi-polar depression, British actress Vivien Leigh died at the age of 53 from the effects of tuberculosis. Her two most legendary roles won her two Best Actress Academy Awards: as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939), and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Her marriage to Laurence Olivier in 1940 led to both joy and difficulty due to her chronic illnesses, and they eventually divorced in 1960. | |
| In the Heat of the Night (1967) was the first film in the detective story genre to be honored as Best Picture by Academy voters. It was also the first Best Picture Oscar winner to be adapted into a regular prime-time television series, in 1988, with Carroll O'Connor as Sheriff Bill Gillespie and Howard Rollins as Virgil Tibbs. | |
| Sony introduced a portable (but bulky), expensive, out-of-studio, black-and-white video camera system (or video tape recorder - VTR) called the PortaPak -- it inaugurated the modern era of video. | |
| Writer/director Charlie Chaplin directed his final film, the romantic comedy The Countess from Hong Kong (1967), starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, which was released in the UK in January 1967, and in the US in March 1967. It ended up a major flop. [His previous film was a full decade earlier, A King in New York (1957).] It was the first of his films to be funded by a major studio (Universal Pictures). It was Chaplin's first and sole color (and widescreen) film, and only one of two films during his entire career in which he did not also play a major starring role. A brief cameo in the film as an unnamed, elderly steward marked his final screen appearance. | |
| Two UK films were released in this year - both noted for the first use of the four-letter word 'f--k': director Michael Winner's film I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name (1967) and Ulysses (1967). | |
| Jacqueline Susann's 1966 trashy novel Valley of the Dolls about habitual and self-destructive drug and alcohol abuse was adapted for the screen as Valley of the Dolls (1967), with stars Barbara Parkins (as Anne), Patty Duke (as Neely), and Sharon Tate (as Jennifer). The cautionary tale of rags-to-riches and back again instantly became a cult classic although was critically-assailed by film reviewers. It was re-released in 1969 following the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, and was made into a TV movie in 1981, starring Catherine Hicks, Lisa Hartman, and Veronica Hamel. | |
| The first major (commercially-released) US studio film to include the word 's--t' in its dialogue was writer/director Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967). It was also said a year later in Boom! (1968, UK) (spoken by actress Elizabeth Taylor as Flora 'Sissy' Goforth: "S--t on your mother!" Note: Taylor was the first actress to say 's--t' in a major motion picture). | |
| French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's chaotic and apocalyptic experimental film Weekend (1967, Fr.) told about a weekend car trip involving a massive traffic jam symbolizing the collapse of the modern consumeristic society, including one of the longest dolly shots in cinematic history. | |
| 34 year-old sexy and buxom screen star Jayne Mansfield, one of the leading 1950s sex symbols, was killed in a horrific car crash in Louisiana. Although she suffered major head trauma, there were also numerous rumors of her decapitation, all untrue, due to photographs of her wig (or scalp) at the accident site. | |
| The national average ticket price for theatre admission was $1.22, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO). |
