Searching For New Frontiers offers film students and general readers a survey of popular movies of the 1960s. The author explores the most important modes of filmmaking in times that were at once hopeful, exhilarating, and daunting. The text combines discussion of American social and political history and Hollywood industry changes with analysis of some of the era’s most expressive movies.
The book covers significant genres and evolving thematic trends, highlighting a variety of movies that confronted the era’s major social issues. It notes the stylistic confluence and exchanges between three forms: the traditional studio movie based on the combination of stars and genres, low-budget exploitation movies, and the international art cinema. As the author reveals, this complex period of American filmmaking was neither random nor the product of unique talents working in a vacuum. The filmmakers met head-on with an evolving American social conscience to create a Hollywood cinema of an era defined by events such as the Vietnam War, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the moon landing.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Changing Times 1
Part I Postwar Hollywood and a Changing America 13
1 Hollywood, Hitchcock, and the Postwar Era 15
“The Vital Center” … Cannot Hold 17
Postwar Film Production and Exhibition 21
New Looks at Mothers, Genres, and Style 26
2 Domestic Relations, 1953–1967: Bachelor Pads,
Nervous Dads, and Marriages on the Rocks 39
Bachelor Pads 41
Nervous Dads (and Moms) 58
Marriages on the Rocks 66
Welcoming The Graduate 71
3 Negotiating the Civil Rights Movement: Message Movies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the Rise of Sidney Poitier 83
It’s a Sin 85
An American Story 94
Poitier, ’67 99
Part II The New Hollywood, Vietnam, and the Schism 111
Weekend 113
4 Art Cinema and CounterÂ]Culture: Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, Blow Up, Bonnie and Clyde, and General Ripper Exceeds His Authority 118
Meet the Beatles (and the New European Cinema) 125
Quiet Enigma in Swinging London 129
“We Rob Banks” 137
Coda: “Battleship Potemkin Calling the Searchers” 146
5 Nowhere to Run: One-Eyed Jacks, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, A Fistful of Dollars, and The Wild Bunch 153
The Frontier Myth and the Classical Western 155
California – or Maybe Oregon 158
“Who Was Tom Doniphon?” 162
No Name, Sudden Impact 169
“Those Days Are Closing Fast” 175
Destroying and Saving the Village 181
6 The War: From The Longest Day to The Green Berets 191
“The Good War” Refought and Rethought 192
Unconventional Warfare 201
Art of War 208
The Only War We’ve Got 211
7 Far Out:2001: A Space Odyssey and Easy Rider 225
Beyond the Infinite 226
Marketing and Reception 237
From Hell’s Angels to Easy Riders 239
They Blew It, But … 248
Afterword 259
Bibliography 265
Index 275
