Pictures at a Revolution (53 page)

Those were about the last kind words that Arthur Jacobs's film received in the press. The reviews weren't scathing, but their yawning tone and the impression they conveyed of dullness and overkill was almost worse. “Children, shmildren,” snapped Archer Winsten in the
New York Post
. “Let them go by themselves if they like it so much. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't bored itchy.”
⁴⁶
Critics had few kind words for any element of the picture, even Harrison: Bosley Crowther predicted that audiences would be “considerably surprised and put off by [his] characterization. It has the inevitable casual air and tone of voice of Professor Higgins in
My Fair Lady
.”
⁴⁷
Faulting the “flaccid pop songs” and “special-effects monstrosities” (especially the giant pink sea snail about which Jacobs had worried so much),
Time
's reviewer remarked, “Somehow—with the frequent…exception of Walt Disney—Hollywood has never learned what so many children's book writers have known all along: size and a big budget are no substitutes for originality or charm.”
⁴⁸
The comparison was apt: The same week
Doctor Dolittle
opened brought the release of Disney's
The Jungle Book
, the last animated feature in which Walt Disney himself had had a hand, and there was no doubt about which picture critics, or children, preferred.
Dolittle
couldn't even skate past the Disney film on the issue of stereotyping: While some commentators on the left attacked
The Jungle Book
as an encoded story about the importance of keeping the races separated, with each in its own part of the “jungle,”
Dolittle
's episode involving what
Newsweek
called “dopey African tribesmen”
⁴⁹
was not greeted any more warmly. By the time
Dolittle
opened, word was also out about the long-forgotten racism in Hugh Lofting's then unrevised books: The chairman of the New York City Commission on Human Rights asked for them to be removed from a Harlem school library, calling them “not truthful as to race” and “disparaging about Negroes.”
⁵⁰

Faced with its worst nightmare, a movie that, in the words of one reviewer, was “neither light enough nor fantastic enough for children, and…neither sophisticated enough nor adult enough for their elders,”
⁵¹
Fox did what it could, but to little effect. Studio publicists touted the film's $91,000 first-week gross on a single screen in New York, although it was already clear that advance ticket sales were responsible for most of that and would dry up quickly. With no way to refute the U.S. reviews, the studio got
Los Angeles Times
columnist Joyce Haber, a sort of friend of the Hollywood court, to run an item saying that the notices in London had been the best for any American movie in ten years except for
Bonnie and Clyde
. (Haber must have missed Penelope Mortimer's
Dolittle
critique in the
London Observer
, in which she reported, “What a wretched, disconsolate Scrooge I must be…under different circumstances, I probably would have crept away in the interval.”) Even the $11 million invested in
Dolittle
product tie-ins was a disaster: “Merchandising has always been a problem for
Doctor Dolittle
,” says Christopher Lofting, “because you're trying to sell a stuffed animal that looks like a dog, not a character. Many of the manufacturers got seriously burned on that movie.”

Fox's decision to press forward with an Oscar campaign for
Doctor Dolittle
came partly because it had nothing else to push; the studio's other year-end release,
Valley of the Dolls
, was doing sensational business but had gotten reviews so spectacularly scornful that they made
Dolittle
's look kind, and the two most acclaimed performances in Fox's 1967 lineup, Paul Newman as a grim gunslinger in Martin Ritt's western
Hombre
and Audrey Hepburn as a disenchanted wife in Stanley Donen's romantic seriocomedy
Two for the Road
, had been overshadowed when Newman's
Cool Hand Luke
and Hepburn's
Wait Until Dark
(both from Warner Brothers) became bigger hits. In recent years, no studio had been shrewder than Fox at working the Academy; using the large portion of the voting membership that it employed, the studio had muscled its way to Best Picture nominations for one borderline-or-worse movie after another, from
The Longest Day
to
Cleopatra
to
The Sand Pebbles
. The studio had no choice but to try again. In January and February, Fox booked sixteen straight nights of free
Dolittle
screenings at its theater on the lot,
⁵²
and promised dinner and champagne to any voter who showed up.

T
he opening of
The Graduate
on December 20, the day after
Doctor Dolittle
, was not a banner moment in American film criticism. Pauline Kael called Nichols's technique a “bad joke” and compared it to a “television commercial.”
¹
Time
magazine dismissed the movie as “alarmingly derivative and…secondhand” and called its director “a victim of the sophomore jinx.”
²
And John Simon seethed at its “oversimplification, overelaboration, inconsistency, eclecticism, obviousness, pretentiousness…and sketchiness” as well as its “rock bottom” music.
³
But the movie's opening did allow Bosley Crowther to finish his duties at
The New York Times
with genuine enthusiasm and open-mindedness. “Suddenly, when the…prospects of an Oscar-worthy long shot coming through get progressively more dim,” he wrote in his farewell piece for the paper, “there sweeps ahead a film that is not only one of the best of the year, but also one of the best seriocomic social satires we've had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them.” Benjamin Braddock, he went on, “is developed so wistfully and winningly by Dustin Hoffman, an amazing new young star, that it makes you feel a little tearful and choked-up while it is making you laugh yourself raw…. The overall picture has the quality of a very extensive and revealing social scan.”
⁴

However, even critics who loved
The Graduate
couldn't agree on exactly what was being revealed. “This is no mean picture whether taken as entertainment or as a social statement,” wrote Archer Winsten in the
New York Post
. “It demonstrates a youth movement that can be cheered or jeered, enjoyed or criticized. The point is that Nichols has come through with something distinctly new under the movie sun.”
⁵
But what?
Variety
's reviewer called the picture “excellent” but felt that “Hoffman's achievements in school are not credible in light of his basic shyness.”
⁶
And the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures came up with a pained endorsement of the movie by claiming that “the bedroom scene where Ben tries to talk with his mistress” is “perhaps the best statement on film about how joyless a thing an affair can be,” adding, “There is no mistaking the point.”
⁷

Younger reviewers, unsurprisingly, didn't think that was the point at all and didn't have to twist themselves into knots to find redemption in the movie. Twenty-five-year-old Roger Ebert, who had just won the top reviewing job at the
Chicago Sun-Times
, saw Benjamin as a hapless hero lost in “a ferociously stupid upper-middle-class California suburb. He would like the chance to sit around and think about his future for several months. You know—think?” He called
The Graduate
“the funniest American comedy of the year…because it has a point of view. That is to say, it is against something.”
⁸

What many of
The Graduate
's naysayers felt the movie was against was
them
—their standards, their notion of what a well-made picture should be, their ability to control a cultural conversation that they suddenly felt was slipping out of their grasp. Hollis Alpert wrote in
Saturday Review
that when older audiences went to see
The Graduate
, “it was almost as though they felt themselves personally attacked.”
⁹
In
Life
magazine, Richard Schickel, who was then all of thirty-three, fretted that the movie might be the latest symptom of the “battle cry, ‘Never trust anyone over thirty,'” and wrote of his alarm at the “growing tendency among my fellow fuds to ingratiate themselves with their adolescent critics by agreeing with them.”
¹⁰
A tone of contempt and anger united many of
The Graduate
's negative reviews, possibly because the film's release marked the first time in many years that so many American moviegoers had felt the direct sting of a generational insult. David Brinkley, writing in
Ladies' Home Journal
, called the movie “frantic nonsense” but admitted that he had had a “heated argument” with his college-age son and his friends, who “thought
The Graduate
was absolutely the best movie they ever saw…they liked it because it said about the parents and others what they would have said about us if they had made the movie—that we are self-centered and materialistic, that we are licentious and deeply hypocritical about it, that we try to make them into walking advertisements for our own affluence.”
¹¹

Those college kids—the ones who filled the theater where Andrew Greeley watched the movie and who “had absolutely no trouble throwing themselves into the story and laughed loudly at lines their parents would not have caught”
¹²
—turned out to be a far more potent force than any friend or foe of
The Graduate
anticipated.
Variety
's initial prediction of “hot b.o. in the young market”
¹³
proved true, but it was easy for the studios, all of which had rejected the script out of hand, to rationalize its success at first: Kids were home from their campuses for Christmas break and needed something to see. But in January, when they went back to school,
The Graduate
really took off. An industry report at the beginning of 1968 revealed that 48 percent of all movie tickets in America were now being sold to filmgoers under the age of twenty-four;
¹⁴
in other words, the first wave of the baby boom generation had grown up. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they had been kids and teenagers, and their tastes had reshaped pop music. But when it came to movies, the industry's biggest hits—cheerful musicals and family-friendly epics—had been, by and large, the films their parents had chosen for them.

Movies from
A Hard Day's Night
to
The Wild Angels
to Francis Coppola's
You're a Big Boy Now
had played with the idea already, but
The Graduate
was the first true blockbuster of the sixties to exploit the fracture—the “generation gap,” in the endlessly repeated term of the moment—between those kids and their parents. Its impact was felt even in the White House, where Lynda Bird Johnson, the president's twenty-three-year-old daughter, had a furious fight with her father after she learned that her husband, Charles Robb, was bound for Vietnam; she consoled herself, sobbing, through a screening of the film.
¹⁵
As
The Graduate
grew at the box office, first becoming the number two movie in the country and then number one, where it stayed for months, its success shattered a long-standing Hollywood studio business model. Warner Brothers and United Artists both announced that they were rethinking their entire development slates and marketing tactics with an eye toward courting younger audiences and hiring younger filmmakers;
¹⁶
other studios quickly followed their example. “We must hypothesize…that there are at least two huge American audiences,” wrote Alpert about the movie. “One made up of the seventeens to the twenty-fives, the other over thirty-five…one wonders which is the more mature.”
¹⁷

On December 28, fifteen members of the New York Film Critics Circle gathered to vote on their thirty-third annual prizes, marking the unofficial start of the 1968 awards season. The best-foot-forward, values-driven taste of Crowther, its chairman, had dominated the group for decades, and its membership did not yet overlap with that of the newer National Society of Film Critics; although the two groups would have many members in common in later years, in 1967 only
Newsweek
's Joseph Morgenstern belonged to both. At the meeting, Crowther argued passionately against awarding Best Picture to
Bonnie and Clyde
and prevailed, but only by a hair. Initially,
Bonnie and Clyde
led the voting but lacked the two-thirds majority then required for a first-round win; by the sixth ballot, the New York critics chose
In the Heat of the Night
for Best Picture.
¹⁸
The group voted to give a special prize to Crowther for his years of service to the
Times
, but it came with a bitter pill: He'd have to watch David Newman and Robert Benton collect the Best Screenplay prize. Nichols was named Best Director for
The Graduate
, and Rod Steiger won the Best Actor award for
In the Heat of the Night
. Best Actress went to seventy-nine-year-old Edith Evans for her delicate performance as a London pensioner barely scraping by and tormented by loneliness and senility in
The Whisperers
, a black-and-white character study that had come and gone quietly earlier in the year.

A few days later, the eleven members of the National Society of Film Critics—“the anti-Crowther gang,” as Andrew Sarris called them—convened in New York, where most of them lived, to vote on their second annual awards. It was not a sweet-tempered meeting of colleagues, and the movie that most divided the room was, predictably,
Bonnie and Clyde
. Critics either loved it—Kael, Morgenstern, and
Esquire
's Wilfrid Sheed all chose it as the year's best picture—or left it off their ballots altogether. Sarris was just about to publish his landmark auteurist guide to directors,
The American Cinema
, which would become a defining work for a generation of dedicated moviegoers (or, in a coinage the press had just started to use, “film buffs”).
¹⁹
He filled out his ballot with works by two of the directors whom he was about to install as members of what he called “the Pantheon”—Jean Renoir (whose 1932 comedy,
Boudu Saved from Drowning
, he counted as a new movie, since it had gotten its first New York release in February) and Howard Hawks, whose
El Dorado
Kael had derided as “exhausted,” “tired,” and a “studio job.”
²⁰
Sarris's picks were, in part, a way of thumbing his nose at his rival, now starting her new life at
The New Yorker
. “It's strange that we should have been pitted against each other that way so often,” he says, “but I really didn't like her.”
²¹

In the end,
Bonnie and Clyde
came in second: The winner of the group's Best Picture and Best Director awards was Ingmar Bergman's
Persona
,
²²
which had opened early in the year and drawn virtually no audience, even by the standards of foreign-language films, but had excited tremendous admiration. The praise crested with a long and influential essay by Susan Sontag in
Sight and Sound
in which she declared the film Bergman's masterpiece, somewhat mysteriously attacked its treatment by American critics (which had been almost entirely positive) as “paltry,” and explained that their attempts to explain the movie in narrative terms were futile since it existed in a realm “beyond psychology.”
²³
Much of the awe for Bergman's film was mixed with a degree of befuddlement—“After seeing
Persona
twice, I still cannot be sure that I understand it,”
²⁴
wrote John Simon, who nonetheless gave it his Best Picture vote—but the support for
Persona
was also a way of reaffirming the primacy of Europe in world cinema from a group that wasn't quite ready to recognize the first stirrings of a new American aesthetic.
^*

The National Society's
Bonnie and Clyde
partisans got the movie prizes for Best Screenplay and for Gene Hackman's supporting performance, and the group gave
In the Heat of the Night
awards for Steiger and for Haskell Wexler's cinematography. Although they awarded nothing to
The Graduate
, the film was very much on their minds. The group met to conduct its voting in the East Side apartment of Hollis Alpert, an ardent supporter of
The Graduate
who gave it his votes for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress. Alpert's living room overlooked “the Block”—the street that housed the four Third Avenue theaters that were then among the most desirable in Manhattan. Joe Levine had succeeded in booking
The Graduate
into one of them, the Coronet. At one point, the critics took a break from bickering and balloting and stared out the window at the street below. The line of young, shaggy moviegoers was endless, snaking around itself again and again. “It wasn't lost on us,” said Sarris. “The line looked different from other lines. It felt quite symbolic.”
²⁵

 

The Academy Awards
race was hardly a gentleman's game in the 1960s. If campaigning was less costly and public than in more recent years, it wasn't due to a sense of decorum as much as to the fact that the Academy itself was half the size it is today, much more heavily populated with rank-and-file studio employees, and thus easier to manipulate and control. Oscar prognostication was not yet a blood sport; each year, the movies that would be the subject of campaigns were selected by their studios and then essentially dictated to selected gossip columnists and writers from
Variety, The Hollywood Reporter
, and the
Los Angeles Times
, the only major publications that then took much notice of the nominating process. In due course, the papers would print dutifully unsourced reports on what pictures “people” were citing as contenders. In the middle of January,
Variety
ran a piece breathlessly calling the 1968 Academy Awards contest “the closest in years,” citing a dozen contenders for Best Picture nominations.
²⁶
But in reality, the contest for nominations was hardly extraordinary: Critics' awards and “ten best” lists had already made it clear that
In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde
, and
The Graduate
were all headed for Best Picture nominations, and given Stanley Kramer's Oscar pedigree and the big business the film was doing,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
was a likely nominee as well. “The Academy was conservative then, and demographically, it leaned on the upwards side even more then than it does now,” says Dick Zanuck. “It was not what you would call youth-oriented.”
²⁷