Hollywood taboos, and a breakthrough of social consciousness

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in "Bonnie and Clyde," one of the trailblazing films released in 1967. (warner bros.)

Pictures at a Revolution:
Five Movies and the Birth
of the New Hollywood
By Mark Harris
Penguin, 490 pp., illustrated, $27.95

"And the nominees are . . . 'Bonnie and Clyde,' 'Doctor Dolittle,' 'The Graduate,' 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,' 'In the Heat of the Night' . . . " As Julie Andrews announced the titles of the five contenders for 1967's best picture Academy Award, one thing was resoundingly clear to everyone assembled in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 10, 1968: Hollywood was at war with itself.

Four of the five nominated films were being hailed as audacious trailblazers, tackling such taboo subjects as interracial marriage and bigotry and shocking audiences with unblushing images of sexuality and graphic violence. Only the lumbering, overblown musical fantasy "Doctor Dolittle" seemed stubbornly entrenched in an antiquated style that was about as up to the minute as the Victrola. The individual fates of the five films and the repercussive ripple effects they created within the industry are exhaustively explored in "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood," by Mark Harris.

The author painstakingly reconstructs the bumpy gestation of each picture and reveals how daunting it was for the new breed of socially conscious filmmaker to explore incendiary issues in an industry that was perfectly content churning out family-friendly crowd-pleasers like "The Sound of Music."

While studio mogul Jack Warner dismissed "Bonnie and Clyde" as "the rise and fall of two rats," star Warren Beatty pounced on the property, hopeful that its countercultural aura would not only resuscitate his flagging career but bring a more daring, European aesthetic to American movie screens. It proved to be an uphill battle all the way, from finding a suitable director - both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard passed - to Bosley Crowther's notoriously short-sighted New York Times review that lambasted the gritty drama as "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick."

Already an Oscar-winning African-American icon, Sidney Poitier starred in two of 1967's groundbreaking releases, Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night." In the former, Poitier shared the screen with Katharine Hepburn and an ailing Spencer Tracy, and as Harris notes, "The film couldn't simply be about a nice white couple welcoming a nice black son-in-law; it had to be about the screen's most romantic duo symbolically opening their arms to its biggest black star." After "Dinner" 's saintly doctor, Poitier next portrayed "Night" 's more believable Virgil Tibbs, a detective from Harlem who collides head-on with Rod Steiger's redneck cop. The rampant racism depicted on screen was on a par with the appalling prejudice Poitier and the other black performers encountered while on location in Dyersburg, Tenn.

Perhaps better than any other film of the '60s, "The Graduate" symbolized the fierce generational war between the smugly corrupt establishment and the idealism of youth. The battle between Anne Bancroft's morally bankrupt Mrs. Robinson and Dustin Hoffman's soul-searching Benjamin Braddock neatly summarizes Harris's theme. The author presents an image of over-the-hill Hollywood as though it were some bored housewife, intent on seducing the young underdog but finding herself ultimately overthrown in favor of newer, nobler passions.

Previous books have covered Hollywood's high-profile identity crisis, most notably Ethan Mordden's 1990 study, "Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s." But in concentrating on only five titles, Harris brings the entire cinematic era into sharper focus and even finds the perfect metaphor to sum everything up: Jane Fonda's Fourth of July party in 1965. Studio-system veterans like Darryl Zanuck, Lauren Bacall, and Henry Fonda attended but refrained from mingling with such youthful iconoclasts as Beatty, Dennis Hopper, and Andy Warhol. At one point, as the Byrds began to jam, an exasperated Fonda turned to his son, Peter. As though speaking on behalf of his entire generation, the elder Fonda crankily demanded, "Can't you get them to tone it down?"

"Pictures at a Revolution" is a superb achievement, and one can only hope that some aspiring, wild-eyed auteur reads it and storms the studio gates.

Mark Griffin is the author of a forthcoming biography of director Vincente Minnelli.