Pictures at a Revolution (58 page)

 

After
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
,
Stanley Kramer
made six more movies before retiring. None were financial or critical successes. (The first of them, 1969's
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
, was the last screenplay written by
William Rose
, who died in 1987.) “Stanley would get an idea for something contemporary,” says his longtime associate Marshall Schlom, “but by the time it would get to the screen, it was old news.”
¹¹
But the immense financial success of
Dinner
allowed Kramer to weather his failures; his share of the film's profits, which he received incrementally through the 1970s, totaled more than $4 million.
¹²
Kramer died in 2001 at the age of eighty-seven. Since 2002, the Producers Guild of America has given an annual award in his name, administered by his widow, Karen, to a producer “whose work illuminates provocative social issues.” Among the winners have been
Good Night, and Good Luck, Hotel Rwanda
, and
An Inconvenient Truth
.

 

Katharine Houghton
made a handful of films after
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, but “the movie showed me,” she says, “that Hollywood was just not my calling, that the movies were not where it was gonna be for me, and that I should go back into the theater.”
¹³
She continues to work as an actress and playwright.

 

Leslie Bricusse
tried his hand at a movie musical one last time with 1970's
Scrooge
. The film was to star
Rex Harrison,
but two weeks before production was to begin, Harrison dropped out, citing illness. He was replaced by Albert Finney.

 

Richard Fleischer
directed twenty-two more movies after
Doctor Dolittle
, none of them family musicals. He died in 2006 at age eighty-nine.

 

Unhappy with
his new assignment at
The New York Times
,
Bosley Crowther
officially retired from the paper in September 1968 to take a consulting job with Columbia Pictures, but he continued to write about movies, publishing several books of criticism in which he revisited old films. In 1977, he returned to
Bonnie and Clyde
. In his reconsideration of the movie, he called it “clever and effective,” admitted that Beatty and Dunaway brought “interesting and affecting emotional range” to their roles, and wrote that he now appreciated Arthur Penn's calibration of lightheartedness and bloody violence, which made the movie's climax “shattering and sad.”
Bonnie and Clyde
, he concluded, was “a landmark…. No film turned out in the 1960s was more clever in registering the amoral restlessness of youth in those years.”
¹⁴
Crowther died in 1981.

 

After
Doctor Dolittle
,
Arthur Jacobs's
career as a producer was saved by the huge popularity of
Planet of the Apes.
The film spawned four sequels, all of which he produced. In May 1968, soon after the Academy Awards, Jacobs married his girlfriend, Natalie Trundy; he found small roles for her in all of the
Apes
sequels. Jacobs never lost his enthusiasm for movie musicals. Undeterred by the failure of
Doctor Dolittle
and
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
, he went on to produce popular children's musicals based on
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
in the early 1970s. In 1973, while working on the latter film, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was fifty-one.

 

Shortly after
the 1968 Academy Awards,
Sidney Poitier
was named the biggest box office star in America in a national poll of theater owners, the first time a black actor had ever held the top spot. He was, he told an interviewer, “totally free—owned by no man or woman.”
¹⁵
It didn't matter; as Poitier himself had predicted, his days as a movie star were over. In the face of increasingly brutal and public attacks—“Even George Wallace would like that nigger,” said H. Rap Brown after seeing
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
¹⁶
—Poitier retreated, by degrees, from the very public life that he had led. He gave fewer interviews, he spent less time in the United States, and while he continued to make movies for several more years (including two in which he reprised his role as Virgil Tibbs) before a twelve-year retirement from screen acting that began in 1977, none of them had the cultural or popular impact of the three films he made in 1967.

Poitier rarely spoke in detail of the pain he felt at being jeered as a symbol of accommodation to white America. Stanley Kramer urged him to keep working, to try not to think about the insults, to stay focused.
¹⁷
As ever, Poitier kept his own counsel. A couple of years after their rift, he and Harry Belafonte repaired their friendship; in 1972, Poitier stepped behind the camera for the first time to direct Belafonte in
Buck and the Preacher
. He went on to direct eight more movies.

In 1967, shortly before the release of
In the Heat of the Night
, Poitier told a reporter that he had always tried to “make a positive contribution to the image of Negro people in America” with the roles he had chosen. “I guess I was born out of joint with the times,” he said. “I have not made my peace with the times—they are still out of kilter. But I have made my peace with myself.”
¹⁸

1967 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEES AND WINNERS

B
EST
P
ICTURE

Bonnie and Clyde
, produced by Warren Beatty

Doctor Dolittle
, produced by Arthur P. Jacobs

The Graduate
, produced by Lawrence Turman

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
, produced by Stanley Kramer

In the Heat of the Night
, produced by Walter Mirisch

B
EST
D
IRECTOR

Richard Brooks,
In Cold Blood

Norman Jewison,
In the Heat of the Night

Stanley Kramer,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Mike Nichols,
The Graduate

Arthur Penn,
Bonnie and Clyde

B
EST
A
CTOR:

Warren Beatty,
Bonnie and Clyde

Dustin Hoffman,
The Graduate

Paul Newman,
Cool Hand Luke

Rod Steiger,
In the Heat of the Night

Spencer Tracy,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

B
EST
A
CTRESS

Anne Bancroft,
The Graduate

Faye Dunaway,
Bonnie and Clyde

Edith Evans,
The Whisperers

Audrey Hepburn,
Wait Until Dark

Katharine Hepburn,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

B
EST
S
UPPORTING
A
CTOR

John Cassavetes,
The Dirty Dozen

Gene Hackman,
Bonnie and Clyde

Cecil Kellaway,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

George Kennedy,
Cool Hand Luke

Michael J. Pollard,
Bonnie and Clyde

B
EST
S
UPPORTING
A
CTRESS

Carol Channing,
Thoroughly Modern Millie

Mildred Natwick,
Barefoot in the Park

Estelle Parsons,
Bonnie and Clyde

Beah Richards,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Katharine Ross,
The Graduate

B
EST
S
CREENPLAY
W
RITTEN
D
IRECTLY FOR THE
S
CREEN

Bonnie and Clyde
, by David Newman and Robert Benton

Divorce American Style
, by Norman Lear, story by Robert Kaufman

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, by William Rose

La Guerre Est Finie
, by Jorge Semprún

Two for the Road
, by Frederic Raphael

B
EST
S
CREENPLAY
B
ASED ON
M
ATERIAL FROM
A
NOTHER
M
EDIUM

Cool Hand Luke
, by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson

The Graduate
, by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry

In Cold Blood
, by Richard Brooks

In the Heat of the Night
, by Stirling Silliphant

Ulysses
, by Joseph Strick and Fred Haines

B
EST
C
INEMATOGRAPHY

Burnett Guffey,
Bonnie and Clyde

Conrad Hall,
In Cold Blood

Richard H. Kline,
Camelot

Robert Surtees,
Doctor Dolittle

Robert Surtees,
The Graduate

B
EST
A
RT
D
IRECTION/
S
ET
D
ECORATION

John Truscott and Edward Carrere (art direction); John W. Brown (set decoration),
Camelot

Mario Chiari, Jack Martin Smith, and Ed Graves (art direction); Walter M. Scott and Stuart A. Reiss (set decoration),
Doctor Dolittle

Robert Clatworthy (art direction), Frank Tuttle (set decoration),
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Renzo Mongiardino, John DeCuir, Elven Webb, and Giuseppe Mariani (art direction); Dario Simoni and Luigi Gervasi (set decoration),
The Taming of the Shrew

Alexander Golitzen and George C. Webb (art direction); Howard Bristol (set decoration),
Thoroughly Modern Millie

B
EST
C
OSTUME
D
ESIGN

Theadora Van Runkle,
Bonnie and Clyde

John Truscott,
Camelot

Bill Thomas,
The Happiest Millionaire

Irene Sharaff and Danilo Donati,
The Taming of the Shrew

Jean Louis,
Thoroughly Modern Millie

B
EST
F
ILM
E
DITING

Frank P. Keller,
Beach Red

Michael Luciano,
The Dirty Dozen

Samuel E. Beetley and Marjorie Fowler,
Doctor Dolittle

Robert C. Jones,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Hal Ashby,
In the Heat of the Night

B
EST
S
OUND

Camelot

The Dirty Dozen

Doctor Dolittle

In the Heat of the Night

Thoroughly Modern Millie

B
EST
O
RIGINAL
S
ONG

“The Eyes of Love,” music by Quincy Jones, lyrics by Bob Russell,
Banning

“The Look of Love”, music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David,
Casino Royale

“Talk to the Animals,” by Leslie Bricusse,
Doctor Dolittle

“The Bare Necessities,” by Terry Gilkyson,
The Jungle Book

“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn,
Thoroughly Modern Millie

B
EST
O
RIGINAL
S
CORE

Lalo Schifrin,
Cool Hand Luke

Leslie Bricusse,
Doctor Dolittle

Richard Rodney Bennett,
Far from the Madding Crowd

Quincy Jones,
In Cold Blood

Elmer Bernstein,
Thoroughly Modern Millie

B
EST
S
CORING—
A
DAPTATION OR
T
REATMENT

Alfred Newman and Ken Darby,
Camelot

Lionel Newman and Alexander Courage,
Doctor Dolittle

DeVol,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

André Previn and Joseph Gershenson,
Thoroughly Modern Millie

John Williams,
Valley of the Dolls

B
EST
S
PECIAL
V
ISUAL
E
FFECTS

L. B. Abbott,
Doctor Dolittle

Howard A. Anderson Jr. and Albert Whitlock,
Tobruk

B
EST
S
OUND
E
FFECTS

John Poyner,
The Dirty Dozen

James A. Richard,
In the Heat of the Night

B
EST
F
OREIGN
L
ANGUAGE
F
ILM

Closely Watched Trains

El Amor Brujo

I Even Met Happy Gypsies

Live for Life

Portrait of Chieko

B
EST
A
NIMATED
S
HORT

The Box

Hypothese Beta

What on Earth!

B
EST
L
IVE-
A
CTION
S
HORT

Paddle to the Sea

A Place to Stand

Sky over Holland

Stop, Look and Listen

B
EST
D
OCUMENTARY
F
EATURE

The Anderson Platoon

Festival

Harvest

A King's Story

A Time for Burning

B
EST
D
OCUMENTARY
S
HORT

Monument to the Dream

A Place to Stand

The Redwoods

See You At The Pillar

While I Run This Race

I
RVING
G. T
HALBERG
M
EMORIAL
A
WARD

Alfred Hitchcock

J
EAN
H
ERSHOLT
H
UMANITARIAN
A
WARD

Gregory Peck

H
ONORARY AWARD

Arthur Freed