Film History of the 1960s Part 4

Literary-Based Films:

During the early to mid 1960s, Hollywood looked to literary works and the history books for many of its films. The studios were increasingly willing to pay for film rights to various novels and literary works. Examples of literary works translated to the screen in the 60s include:

• American International Pictures (AIP), with director Roger Corman, released a cycle of eight higher-budget, colorful widescreen films loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe tales, often with big-name actor Vincent Price, including The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)
• Richard Brooks' absorbing adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel Elmer Gantry (1960) - a tale of a 1920's huckster, phony evangelist on the Midwest circuit of revival meetings, a flamboyant role for which Burt Lancaster won a Best Actor Award
• Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) with Oscar-winning music , based upon Leon Uris' novel about the establishment of the independent state of Israel, with an unlikely blue-eyed Paul Newman as Jewish leader Ari Ben Canaan
• a dramatization of the actual Scopes 'monkey trial' courtroom battle about the teaching of evolution (between the legendary Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan), in the film's adaptation between defense attorney Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) and prosecutor Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) - based upon Jerome Lawrence's and Robert E. Lee's play Inherit the Wind (1960)
• A Raisin in the Sun (1961) - after its successful run as a Broadway play, was a ground-breaking work on race-relations by Lorraine Hansberry, during the early years of the civil rights movement, with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee
• Elia Kazan's direction of an adaptation of William Inge's psychosexual drama Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty (in his debut film) and Natalie Wood - a Depression-era Romeo and Juliet plot; it marked the first screenplay of playwright Inge
• MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, based on a true story of the British navy in the 1700s, was remade as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), with odd-accented Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as Captain Bligh
• Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963), adapted from Henry Morton Robinson's best-selling novel, following the life of a young Rome-educated American priest rising from a backwoods clergyman to Cardinal [the film was the first film in Panavision 70, a film process in which a 35 mm film was enlarged to 70 mm for wide-screen projection]
• writer-director Elia Kazan's own semi-autobiographical America, America (1963) about his Turkish-Greek uncle's immigrant experience
• John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964) - based on a Tennessee Williams play about an alcoholic former clergyman (Richard Burton) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) based on a Carson McCuller novel about a homosexual army officer (Marlon Brando) in the South
• Harold Robbin's steamy novel that was made into a garish saga of the career of a Howard Hughes-like millionaire/industrialist in The Carpetbaggers (1964) (actor Alan Ladd's last film)
• George Stevens' big-budget religious epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) was an adaptation of Fulton Oursler's best-selling book, with Max Von Sydow in the role of Jesus, Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate, David McCallum as Judas, and many other stars in the roles of additional New Testament characters
• the screen version of Robert Bolt's play in the superb, Oscar-winning period piece by director Fred Zinnemann, A Man For All Seasons (1966) - it portrayed the clash of ideals between the honorable Sir Thomas More (Oscar-winning Paul Scofield reprised his stage performance) and egocentric King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw)
• director/writer Richard Brooks' filming of Truman Capote's adapted screenplay of a notorious 1959 Kansas mass murder of the Clutter family in the stark black and white film In Cold Blood (1967), starring Robert Blake as one of the two killers
• Charly (1968), a TV adaptation of Daniel Keyes' story Flowers for Algernon (with a experimental lab mouse named Algernon), brought the title character (Cliff Robertson) a Best Actor Oscar for his role as someone with learning difficulties who temporarily became a genius
• director Frank Perry's oddly-intriguing The Swimmer (1968), an allegorical telling of a John Cheever short story (adapted by Eleanor Perry) about a swimming trunks-clad man (Burt Lancaster) who swims home through a suburban neighborhood
• James Goldman's literate screenplay for The Lion in Winter (1968), about a medieval power struggle between Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (Oscar-winning Katharine Hepburn) and Henry II of England (Peter O'Toole)
• Franco Zeffirelli's version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1968) starred two young teenaged actors (Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting) in the lead roles as the tragic "star-crossed" lovers of Verona

Two aging actors were both involved in Shakespearean roles in the mid-60s: Laurence Olivier in the lead role of Othello (1965) and Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight (1966) (also known as Falstaff), a seamless integration of five of Shakespeare's texts/plays. With French production, Welles also directed a black, expressionistic, noirish version of Franz Kafka's The Trial (1962) (or Le Proces).

War Films:

Sink the Bismarck! (1960) told the story of the deadly German battleship that was sunk with a single shot by the British Royal Navy's HMS Hood. In Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Spencer Tracy presided over Nazi war crime trials in Germany to bring justice to those guilty of crimes against humanity during the war. The Longest Day (1962), a tale about the events of June 6, 1944 told from both the Allied and German points of view, featured nearly 50 international stars.

Cool, anti-hero 60s star Steve McQueen appeared in Don Siegel's WW II action drama Hell Is For Heroes (1962) about a group of Americans defending a foxhole. After his earlier work in 1960 with producer/director John Sturges, Steve McQueen was re-teamed to make the critically-acclaimed and box-office champ The Great Escape (1963), a classic WWII German POW camp escape tale (based on a true story) with an all-star group of Allied prisoners (American, Canadian, and British) - with McQueen's memorable attempt at freedom on a soaring motorbike.

During the years when the conflict in Vietnam was building up, McQueen gave a compelling, Oscar-nominated performance as a sailor aboard a gunboat (with young newcomer Candice Bergen) on the Yangtze River in China during the 1920s in Robert Wise's The Sand Pebbles (1966), the director's first film since his success with The Sound of Music (1965). The action drama provided an interesting commentary on American imperialism (and the concurrent US role in Vietnam). When tragically dying in the film's climax, the heroic McQueen asked: "What the hell happened?" - reflecting the era's confusion about its policies (See more on Steve McQueen below.)

The UK's historical war epic Zulu (1964) documented how the British at Rorke's Drift were outnumbered by Zulu tribesmen in 1879 Africa. Frank Sinatra (as Colonel 'Von' Ryan) led an escape of POWs held in WWII Italy by seizing a German train in Von Ryan's Express (1965). A popular, farcical Cold War movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) provided a comical and satirical perspective, with its tale of a stranded Soviet submarine on the coast of New England with a crew led by Theodore Bikel and Alan Arkin.

Robert Aldrich's nihilistic and macho-man The Dirty Dozen (1967) was an enormously-successful hit in the 60s - a non-stop action World War II thriller with the exciting tale of an impossible suicidal mission against the Nazis by a group of death-row convicts (including John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas as Maggot, Donald Sutherland, Charles Bronson, and ex-football star Jim Brown) - all led by tough-talking Lee Marvin. And John Wayne's portrayal as leader of elite US Army's Special Forces in the simplistic, stereotyped The Green Berets (1968) [co-directed by Wayne], patriotically bucked the era's anti-Vietnam war sentiments with heavy-handed propaganda and pro-Vietnam views. It was the only big-budget Hollywood feature film specifically about the Vietnam War that was made during the war - and it was both hawkish and pro-intervention.

Landmark Films and Stars of the 60s:

60s movie star Paul Newman's most famous screen role was as anti-hero pool-player Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961), an adult drama and character study of an emotionally-empty two-bit hustler who challenged legendary pool player Minnesota Fats (superbly played by Jackie Gleason). Other memorable films during Newman's best acting period included Martin Ritt's Texas-based drama Hud (1963), Jack Smight's detective film Harper (1966), and Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke (1967), with Newman as Lucas Jackson - a rebellious Southern chain-gang prisoner and symbolic Christ-figure, noted for an egg-eating contest and the line of dialogue: "What we have here is failure to communicate." As many others stars would do, Newman took a stab at directing and cast his wife Joanne Woodward as a spinsterish schoolteacher in his feature film directorial debut Rachel, Rachel (1968).

Robert Mitchum had one of his most menacing roles as vengeful ex-con Max Cady, who terrorized the Bowden family led by prosecuting lawyer Gregory Peck who had sent him to prison, in Cape Fear (1962). The noirish thriller ended with a tense climax on a houseboat. (The film was remade by Martin Scorsese as Cape Fear (1991), with Robert DeNiro in the lead role as the threatening ex-criminal.)

Anti-hero Steve McQueen also exemplified the ultimate in "cool" - as a young poker player in Norman Jewison's The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and as a vengeful young half-breed in Henry Hathaway's Nevada Smith (1966). Producer/director Norman Jewison's expensive, slick caper romance/thriller The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) (remade in 1999) overdid the artsy split-screen technique and other fancy photography (from Haskell Wexler), but featured Steve McQueen in the charming title role. In addition, he participated in one of the most exciting, extraordinary car chases in film history (with McQueen driving a Shelby Mustang 350GT chasing a Dodge Charger R/T through San Francisco) in Peter Yates' action-film Bullitt (1968) with music by Lalo Schifrin. His role as an unorthodox police lieutenant inspired other maverick cop-detective films. It was one of the first Hollywood films shot entirely on location.

Another big 60's star, Audrey Hepburn, starred in one of her best-loved, off-beat roles as sophisticated Manhattan party girl Holly Golightly in the stylish adaptation of Truman Capote's story Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) with an Oscar-winning score (including the popular Oscar-winning "Moon River") by Henry Mancini. In the Hitchcock-like murder-mystery / romantic-thriller Charade (1963), the popular actress was pursued throughout Paris by bad guys and the suave Cary Grant (assuming three aliases) - plus there were early appearances by Walter Matthau, George Kennedy and James Coburn. And she played a blind girl terrorized by a psychopathic killer (Alan Arkin) looking for heroin in the scary thriller Wait Until Dark (1967).

Esteemed black actor Sidney Poitier was the first African-American to win an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as a warm-hearted, unemployed construction worker who helped nuns build a chapel in Lilies of the Field (1963). A Patch of Blue (1965) boldly featured a kissing scene between a compassionate, well-educated black man (Sidney Poitier) and a lower-class blind white woman (Elizabeth Hartman). In just one momentous year - 1967 - the successful Poitier went on to make further hits, and appeared in the few films of the decade that portrayed racial tensions:

• To Sir, With Love (1967), with Poitier as a teacher in an inner-city school in London's tough East End; also with the title hit song by Lulu
• director Norman Jewison's Best Picture winning murder mystery In the Heat of the Night (1967), with Poitier as a Philadelphia detective named Virgil Tibbs who clashed with a bigoted Mississippi sheriff (Oscar-winning Rod Steiger) in a prejudiced, Southern redneck town; noted for the line of dialogue: "They call me Mister Tibbs!"
• Stanley Kramer's old fashioned, semi-contrived Hollywood film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), about the controversial subject of inter-racial romance between a black medical doctor (Poitier) and his fiancee Katharine Houghton (the actual niece of Oscar-winning Katharine Hepburn), the daughter of Hepburn and Tracy in the film; Hepburn was playing opposite Spencer Tracy (for the ninth and final time)

Hollywood's first teen 'beach party' or high-profile surfing film, with numerous sequels and imitators for the youth market, was the first in a series of romantic comedy films from Columbia Pictures. They featured a petite, teenaged girl, tomboyish surfer and A student named Francie Lawrence (nicknamed Gidget or "girl midget"), first played by Sandra Dee. The pert, squeaky-clean young blonde actress was one of the top 10 box office attractions from 1960 to 1961, and the 'Gidget' role was the one she would become most identified with. [She was also referenced in a song in the rock musical Grease (1978) -- "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, Lousy with Virginity"]:

• Gidget (1959), with Sandra Dee as 'Gidget', James Darren (as Moondoggie), and Cliff Robertson as Kahuna, Malibu's resident surf bum
• Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) with Deborah Walley as Gidget
• Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) with Cindy Carol (as Gidget) and James Darren
• Gidget, a spin-off TV series from 1965-66 with Sally Field
• Gidget Grows Up (1969), a made-for-TV movie, with Karen Valentine as Gidget
• Gidget Gets Married (1972), a made-for-TV movie, with Monie Ellis as Gidget

A similar series of four, surprise-hit, romantic comedies debuted in the late 50s with a charming Debbie Reynolds (followed by Sandra Dee again) as a young, backwoods country girl named Tammy Tarleton:

• Tammy and the Bachelor (1957) with the hit song Tammy (Oscar-nominated as Best Song)
• Tammy, Tell Me True (1961) - with Sandra Dee and John Gavin
• Tammy and the Doctor (1963) - with Sandra Dee and Peter Fonda
• Tammy and the Millionaire (1967) - with Debbie Watson
• Tammy, a spin-off TV series from 1965-66 with Debbie Watson

Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello Beach Party Films:

The low-budget, exploitative, and successful film company - American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956, released their first "beach" film (mostly to drive-in theatres) - the musical comedy Beach Party (1963). It starred popular 24 year-old singer Frankie Avalon, now-buxom 21 year-old ex-Disney Mickey Mouse Club Mousketeer Annette Funicello (as Dolores or "Dee Dee" in later films), Robert Cummings, and Dorothy Malone. [Ironically, both Avalon and Funicello were from Philadelphia, not sandy-beached S. California!] AIP realized the lucrative buying power of this new demographic group and advertised the fluffy film alluringly: "It's what happens when 10,000 kids meet on 5,000 beach blankets." However, wholesome star Annette Funicello - still under contract to Disney, was legally forced to not appear in a bikini, and to express repressive sexual attitudes, although she wore a non-revealing two-piece suit!

William Asher was the primary originator of the extremely popular and profitable series and the director of most of these films. These beach movies were unique because they added pop music (almost presented as rock videos) to the fantasy 'beach party' theme. Other films in the four year, seven-film "beach party" continuing series of mostly sexless, antiseptic, and well-groomed antics of beachgoers (on a perpetual summer vacation) were:

• Muscle Beach Party (1964) - about a 'turf' clash between bodybuilders and beach surfers
• Bikini Beach (1964) - AIP's biggest grossing film ever; included Boris Karloff in an uncredited cameo role; advertised as: "It's where the girls are BARE-ING, the guys are DAR-ING, and the surf's RARE-ING to GO-GO-GO"
• Pajama Party (1964) (aka The Maid and the Martian), d. Don Weis; with the action moved from the beach to an indoors slumber party; with roles by old-time stars Buster Keaton, Dorothy Lamour and Elsa Lanchester, and with Disney star Tommy Kirk (of The Hardy Boys) as a poor substitute for Frankie Avalon
• Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) - the classic 'beach party' film, with Avalon (now 26 years old!, and in his last and major starring role in the 'Beach Party' films) who caused Funicello (as Dee Dee) to try sky-diving when he went to rescue kidnapped pop singer Sugar Kane (Linda Evans) from biker Eric Von Zipper's (Harvey Lembeck) gang, and small roles by Hollywood icon Buster Keaton (as a lecherous beachcomber) and Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson
• How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) - with a cast including Buster Keaton as witch doctor Bwana, Dwayne Hickman (from TV's Dobie Gillis), Mickey Rooney, and a cameo by Elizabeth Montgomery (from TV's Bewitched)
• Ski Party (1965), d. Alan Rafkin, an aborted attempt at a spin-off with new characters and locales, featuring Frankie Avalon, Dwayne Hickman, Deborah Walley, and a cameo by Annette Funicello
• The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), d. Don Weis, with Deborah Walley and Aron Kinkaid in the lead roles, and Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in minor roles
• Back to the Beach (1987) - released over 20 years later - a comedy spoof-parody (and celebration) with Funicello and Avalon as executive producers and stars as a married couple (Frankie, the Big Kahuna and Annette) living in Ohio who head to California for a visit; featured appearances by 1950s and 1960s TV stars in bit parts (some uncredited) including Tony Dow, Jerry Mathers and Barbara Billingsley (from Leave It to Beaver), Bob Denver as a bartender (spoofing his title role in Gilligan's Island) with various humorous lines, such as: "I was on an island for years with a guy who could take two coconuts and some string and make a nuclear reactor. But he couldn't fix a three-foot hole in a boat") and Alan Hale Jr. from Gilligan's Island as his buddy, Don Adams (from Get Smart) as the Harbor Master, and Edd "Kookie" Byrnes (from 77 Sunset Strip) as a valet; Connie Stevens starred as Miss Lip Gloss of 1962 and Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) performed a virtuoso version of 'Surfin' Bird'

The beach party films from AIP were cheaply ripped off and imitated in the mid-60s by director Maury Dexter's Surf Party (1964) with heartthrob singer Bobby Vinton, and Wild on the Beach (1965) (aka Beach House Party) featuring an appearance by Sonny and Cher (in their film debut), and by Paramount's and director Lenni Weinrib's Beach Ball (1965) with the tagline: "Those surf ridin', skin divin', sky jumpin', drag racin', beach bashin' boys and their bikini beauties... in a blast of a beach brawl!" starring Ed "Kookie" Byrnes and featuring an appearance by Motown's Supremes, and the spy-comedy beach movie Out of Sight (1966). Director Don Taylor's Ride the Wild Surf (1964) starred Fabian, Shelley Fabares, Barbara Eden and Tab Hunter in a Hawaiian surf setting, and The Beach Boys singing group and pop star Lesley Gore appeared in William Witney's The Girls on the Beach (1965) set in S. California. Many of the teen-related beach movies included performances by pop bands of the time.

Cross-Over Singing Stars: Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard

MGM contracted with pelvic-thrusting Elvis "the King" Presley, for his debut film Love Me Tender (1956), although he was soon inducted into the Army in 1958. There were over a dozen Elvis Presley films released for youth audiences by 1964, including:

• Loving You (1957)
• Jailhouse Rock (1957)
• King Creole (1958)
• G.I. Blues (1960)
• Flaming Star (1960)
• Wild in the Country (1961)
• Blue Hawaii (1961) - with Angela Lansbury as Elvis' mother!, and the hit song: "Can't Help Falling in Love"
• Follow That Dream (1962)
• Kid Galahad (1962)
• Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962)
• It Happened at the World's Fair (1963)
• Fun in Acapulco (1963)
• Kissin' Cousins (1964)
• Viva Las Vegas (1964) - the King's biggest box-office hit, opposite Ann-Margret
• Roustabout (1964)

In only two days, producer/director Roger Corman, who began his career in 1954 with ultra-cheap black-and-white exploitation movies, shot the low-budget cult classic black comedy about a killer plant - The Little Shop of Horrors (1961), with Jack Nicholson in one of his earliest roles as a masochistic dental patient.

By the mid-60s, American International Pictures (AIP) began to return to its permissive, sexually-liberated roots with youth-oriented, counter-cultural films such as Roger Corman's definitive biker film The Wild Angels (1966) (co-written and edited by Peter Bogdanovich) with Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, the leader of a violent leather-clad biker gang. Corman's quintessential LSD film The Trip (1967) (scripted by Jack Nicholson) told about the hallucinogenic, psychedelic tripping (visualized with special effects) of a television commercial director (Peter Fonda) in Los Angeles, and his drug dealer guide (Dennis Hopper) - the film was a precursor to the classic hit Easy Rider (1969).

And sexploitation, soft-porn director Russ Meyer, known as "King of the Nudies" and "King Leer," created one of his adult-cinema classics that was considered hard-core for its day: Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1962) - with action, violence, nudity, and humor. Later in the decade, he directed the outrageous Vixen (1968). Meyer's X-rated cult sexploitation film about a female rock group was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) - a major studio release. It featured a screenplay co-written by inexperienced screenwriter Roger Ebert (film critic) and Meyer himself. In all, throughout the 60s and 70s, Meyer produced, directed, financed, wrote, edited, and shot 23 of these 'semi-pornographic' tantalizing 'skin-flicks' (with descriptive titles) featuring big-breasted women.