Movies

John Wayne’s The Green Berets

As you probably know–those of you, that is, who have not been sleeping under a rock recently–there’s a new version of John Wayne’s Oscar-winning True Grit opening this week, here in 2010.  It’s directed by the Cohen Brothers, and stars Jeff Bridges as eye-patched Rooster Cogburn, and, like the 1969 original, is based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis.

In spite of my political leanings, I am an unrepentant John Wayne fan, and although True Grit is far from his greatest movie, or even the greatest “late-Wayne” movie (The Shootist takes that honor), it’s still enjoyable, especially when the (bad) child-actress protagonist is off-screen.  True Grit was a real western, and so were most (not all, unfortunately) of Wayne’s last movies; he died in 1979.

But in 1968, Wayne was not fighting any Far West personal vendettas; he was fighting the Commies in Vietnam.  John Wayne felt so strongly about filming the story of “The Green Berets” (based on a popular, violent 1965 book by Robin Moore, and Barry Sadler’s pop anthem of the same name, a huge hit from 1966) that he chose to produce, direct, and star in his version.  Wayne had been fuming for years about the leftward tilt of American opinion about the Vietnam War, and was determined to throw his enormous Hollywood resources into telling “the other side” of the story–the one about vicious, sub-human Vietcong, about the domino effect, about the need for America to be in Vietnam to save the world.

The movie (available for Instant Viewing on Netflix, by the way) begins delivering these messages in the first few minutes.  Skeptical newspaper reporter, played by the huge TV star (”The Fugitive”) David Janssen, along with dozens of other newsfolks and visitors, are taking a tour of the Special Forces (i.e., Greet Berets) base in Georgia.  At a demonstration of Beret capabilities, Janssen and others ask tough questions:  ”Why is the United States waging this ruthless war?”  and “Do you mean you do what you’re told to do, without any personal feelings or opinions?”  and “Terrible things happen in war; that doesn’t mean the South Vietnamese need us, or even want us.”  ”How do you know we should be fighting for this present government? They’ve had no free elections, no constitution. . . . There are a lot of people believe that this is simply a war between the Vietnamese people; it’s their war, let them handle it.”  And the answer from the Green Berets officer: “What’s involved here is Communist domination of the world.”

Janssen tells the men’s colonel:  ”Your brainwashed sergeant didn’t sell me . . . on the idea that we should be involved in Southeast Asia.”  Predictably, the journalist ends up going with Wayne’s bunch to Vietnam, and ends up seeing the light.   The truth, as revealed in the rest of the movie (filmed in Georgia), is about the animal-like viciousness of the Vietcong, their hideous traps and tortures and atrocities.  South Vietnamese people (played by a boatload of mixed-Asian actors, none of them actually Vietnamese) are innocent and timid and immensely grateful for the chocolate and health care provided by the Americans.  There’s a cute orphan-mascot subplot.   There are many scenes with helicopters (the U.S. military gave an enormous amount of free assistance to Wayne and his “Batjac” film company.)  There are borrowings from hardened-commando movies (The Dirty Dozen, released a year earlier), hopeless assault movies, clever caper movies, even a little musical number thrown in (a sexy Vietnamese singer in a nightclub).  There’s a little comedy (Jim Hutton as a wacky misfit, doomed to die a hideous death by the end), some gruesome struggles (with some odd neon-red blood), a bit of the Tet Offensive, and the chance to see two Asian-American actors better known for TV roles–Star Trek’s George Takei and Barney Miller’s Jack Soo (both Japanese) on the big screen.

For Vietnam-movie “completists,” The Green Berets is a must-see, because of its stridently conservative, “patriotic” point of view, and because of the all-consuming involvement of John Wayne (though he gives an oddly detached, if self-directed, walkthrough of a performance).  It’s also useful for historians of the 1960s because it was released on the 4th of July, 1968–just a few weeks before the two presidential nominating conventions, and dead-center in the single worst year for American casualties in the Vietnam War, the year that public opinion on the homefront was turning decisively away from support for the war.

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It’s probably been a while since you’ve given a thought to Coronet.  This small-format magazine–it was meant as a cheaper, smaller spinoff of its parent, Esquire, which seems incongruous today–was published from 1936 to 1971.  It was a digest, like Reader’s but supposedly hipper.

This issue sports one of 1968’s most popular cover girls, Debbie Reynolds.  Ever since the Cleopatra/Liz-and-Dick/Eddie-and-Debbie brouhaha, this perky actress (was she ever NOT described as “perky”?) was always in the public eye.  In the aforementioned scandal, she came out looking pretty good– the put-upon, jilted good girl vs. the predatory, house-wrecking temptress.  And it didn’t hurt that she was blonde, attractive in a wholesome mid-American way, and actually quite talented.

Debbie’s face–if it wasn’t going to exactly launch a thousand ships–was going to sell a lot of magazines.  So here, in Coronet, is a little puff piece about her latest movie, a mild sex farce with James Garner called How Sweet it Is.  In just a few pages of this tiny magazine, there are 12 photos of Debbie in various states of undress– the theme being that this movie marked a daring departure from her more innocent days.

The rest of the issue has an almost predictable lineup of stories:  the how-are-we-going-to-get-out-of-Vietnam article (this one by Irving Kristol); an article about the “new Negro” on TV in the fall (Diahann Carroll as Julia); an article about “our kids” (protesting college students) and how they are being pushed too hard (by pushy parents); an article about the new fad of jogging; and a story about the wit and humor of presidential candidates (”hilarious stories about American politics”).   Another sign of the times:  a full-page ad for L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, the Bible for Scientologists.  (”Here you will find an easy route to follow which will lead you to TOTAL FREEDOM!”)   1968 was the year that Scientology took off — its “Freedom” magazine was published for the first time– and it will be worth revisiting them in a future post.

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Rachel, Rachel, starring Joanne Woodward and directed by Paul Newman

Another one of the best movies of 1968, and I’m just now catching up with it (thanks again to Turner Classic Movies).  Rachel, Rachel, released exactly 42 years ago on August 26, 1968, was one of the nominees for the Best Picture Oscar in 1969 (nominated with Funny Girl, Lion in Winter, and Romeo and Juliet, and the year’s winner, Oliver!. Notice, by the way, that the mind-blowing 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t make the cut, although its director, Stanley Kubrick,  received a nomination.)

Rachel, Rachel is a quiet, small character study, a hybrid of an “art movie” and a mainstream “star” picture.  Rachel Cameron is a New England spinster, age 35, who feels life passing her by, rapidly.  ”Nothing’s real, nothing is now,” she confesses to her friend Calla.  ”If somebody pinched me, I wouldn’t even hurt.  I’ve only got one life.  I say to myself, maybe next time, this or that comes around, I’ll grab it, but nothing ever comes around, does it?”  She falls for (and has sex with) an old high school chum, who of course turns out to be a cad who dumps her when she gets too close.   There are things about Rachel, Rachel that mark it as a “contemporary” (1960s) movie–a lesbian subplot (Rachel’s fellow teacher, played by Estelle Parsons, comes on to her); some flashes of fantasizing by Rachel (she has lurid flashbacks to her childhood–she’s the daughter of the town undertaker–and she imagines overdosing her overbearing mother); a short dream sequence; a surprising scene of a somewhat countercultural religious awakening; and what must have seemed at the time to be some fairly explicit sex scenes.

The movie attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the press for one key reason:  its producer and director, Paul Newman (left off the list of Best Director nominees that year).  At age 43, Newman was one the biggest Hollywood stars of 1968, the blue-eyed heartthrob who commanded the Sixties box office with Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Hustler, Sweet Bird of Youth, Exodus and other less memorable flicks.   Rachel, Rachel was his first directorial effort, and this — far more than the picture itself or its star, Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward– was The Story for numerous magazine and newspaper articles, beginning months before the film’s release.

In this article in Saturday Evening Post in February 1968, when the movie was being filmed and was then called A Jest of God, reporter Jane Wilson gets the obvious fact about Newman out of the way quickly:  “In person he is so astonishingly handsome that it is impossible not to stare at him, and everybody does, all the time–men, women, children.”  Newman is reported to be “tired of playing superstar, feeling ‘burned out’ as an actor.”    In an October story in LIFE, Newman said about Rachel, Rachel:  ”I wanted to prove to Hollywood that you can make a motion picture about basic, simple people without violence and a band of Indians scalping settlers.”  (Newman shared this cover with his wife, but he had already been on LIFE’s cover once in 1968–for a May article about Hollywood stars getting involved in the political campaigns, mostly for McCarthy and Kennedy.)

Although Joanne Woodward still lives in Connecticut, Paul Newman died in 2008–a fact one would not be able to glean from websites for “Newman’s Own” food products.  Paul and daughter Nell Newman (who appeared in this movie as young Rachel) still grace the packaging of a line of organic foods.  He may have become a “brand,” but he’s still better looking than Orville Redenbacher.

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Petulia is one of those archetypal 1960s films that had completely passed me by for more than 40 years.  In contemporary roundups of 1968’s films and trends, it was invariably included with the most distinctive and “with-it” movies of the moment, along with Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, The Graduate, and Bullitt.  Petulia recently showed up on Turner Classic Movies on a Julie Christie night, and I’m happy to say I’ve now caught up with it, if only (or mostly) for historical reasons.

Petulia was directed by Richard Lester, whose calling cards by 1968 were impressive:  the two great, wacky movies with the Beatles–A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Though American by birth, Lester had British credentials (and citizenship)–a bonus in the U.S. film world of the 1960s and early 1970s, so dominated by British talent, especially when it came to collecting Oscar nominations.   After some years of America looking to England for countercultural inspiration (you know:  Beatles, Stones, Carnaby Street, Twiggy and all that), by the late 1960s, America– especially San Francisco and California– was providing global benchmarks for hipness.  And to dispel any doubts about Petulia’s countercultural bona fides, Lester threw in micro-performances by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, and even some groovy colored-oil-and-light show effects.

Petulia was based on a 1966 novel, Me and the Arch Kook Petulia, by John Haase, a fulltime Los Angeles dentist and parttime novelist.  ”Kook” and “kooky” are words that show up a lot in the movie.  ”Kook” –Beatnik slang from the 1950s, meaning an eccentric or strange character– may have already been sliding out of popular usage by 1968,  another reason that Petulia seems a little dated.   Petulia, played by ravishingly beautiful, 26-year-old Julie Christie, is hardly a flower-waving hippie–she’s an exceptionally rich San Francisco socialite.  As the movie opens, she’s recently married to a “naval architect” (read:  sailboat enthusiast and playboy) played by Richard Chamberlain, a little older than Christie but almost as beautiful, cast against type as a spoiled and violently abusive husband.  Petulia decides early on to have an affair with George C. Scott’s character, Dr. Archie Bollen, after seeing his heroic action in saving the life of a Mexican boy who had somehow become part of Petulia’s family.  That part of the plot is told in flashbacks and flash-forwards, and it’s all a little confusing.

Of special note is the score by John Barry, which reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant work for Alfred Hitchcock, and the cinematography by Nicholas Roeg, who would later direct such memorable movies as Don’t Look Now and Walkabout.  There’s a bright, jangly texture to Petulia, and a wonderful use of colorful locations in the San Francisco Bay Area (the requisite cable cars, swanky apartments, Alcatraz, and glamorous parties).

Film critic Jay Carr has an excellent article on this quirky (kooky?) movie on the TCM website, where he concludes:

“Petulia was a brave film for Lester to have made, and braver still for its matching of a jagged style to a jagged story. True to its essential melancholy, it never succumbed to popular and clichéd takes on the ‘60s. The result is that it’s one of the few films about the ‘60s still worth seeing.”

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Night of the Living Dead

I recently discovered that you can watch Night of the Living Dead– invariably described as a “cult classic” — online.  It’s one of the many free films you can get to through OpenCulture.com.

The director of this famously low-budget horror movie– the famous low budget being about $114,000– was George Romero.  For the recent special section of the New York Times on the 2010 summer movie season, Romero was asked to write about his favorite summer movie.  Now 70 and still making “Dead” movies (the sixth is set for US release on May 28, 2010), Romero chose the movie he and his buddies had made in 1968:

Summer, to me, means “drive-in.” I grew up in the Bronx. There was only one drive-in that was anywhere close, the Whitestone, out there near the bridge of the same name. I loved going there, usually taken by my Uncle Monroe, who was the only guy in the family with enough money to have bought a car.

So, a few years later, I go off to college in Pittsburgh. At that time, in the ’50s, don’t ask me why, Pittsburgh had maybe more drive-ins than any American city except Los Angeles. I used to go a lot. Always in the Plymouth that belonged to my buddy Rudy. I would sit in the front seat, munch-ing popcorn that cost way too much, while Rudy, in the back, sought validation as a male by doing smoochies with whatever girlfriend he was squeezing at the time.

I never saw a wonderful film at a drive-in (usually, they showed garbage, or scratched-up prints of movies you’d seen weeks ago downtown). Then, one day in 1968, some friends and I drove out to the Ardmore. It was showing a not-so-wonderful film that those same friends had helped me make: Night of the Living Dead. We couldn’t believe we had made a flick that was actually being distributed by a legitimate company. We couldn’t believe that it was actually playing locally. So we popped the corks out of a few jugs of Ripple and sat and watched, God’s truth, basically to convince ourselves that we weren’t dreaming.

I didn’t get any smoochies in the back seat of Karl Hardman’s Lincoln that night, but I felt 100 percent validated. And so I honestly have to say that my favorite summer movie was one that was made by me.

Romero’s memory may be a little faulty:  Night of the Living Dead wasn’t released until October 1, 1968, so it could not have been a “summer” movie that year.  Still, it fits one model of what a summer movie should be, or at least what they used to be: cheap and scary, good for the drive-ins.  George and his friends probably didn’t imagine that one day their little shocker would be called “the defining moment in modern horror cinema.”  Or that the film would be studied by film scholars and historians for its nightmarish reflection of the violence and social upheavals of the 1960s.  Or that it would one day (in 1999, actually) be selected for preservation by the Library of Congress as part of its National Film Registry of films that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Watch it now.  And watch out.

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A new breed of gay plays–and the 1968 ancestor

A front-page article in the New York Times on February 23, 2010, offered an analysis of “a new breed” of plays with gay themes, plays that present “gay characters in love stories, replacing the topical and political messages” of the 1980s and 1990s, and placing “the everyday concerns of Americans in a gay context.”  http://nyti.ms/cRU0MH Timely, I thought, since I was just about to add a post to “Covering 1968″ about Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band–the granddaddy of all gay plays–which was first produced on the New York stage at Theatre Four on West 55th Street on April 14, 1968.

The Boys in the Band, cover, first edition, 1968

1968 becomes 2010

I’ve never seen the play or the 1970 movie version (directed by William Friedkin, who would direct The French Connection the following year), but I had just read the play for the first time.  I was going to write about how funny and smart it was, but also how incredibly dated it seemed, how it evoked as many cringes as laughs, and how I could not imagine it being revived in this day and age.  Wrong:  the very next day in the Times was a review (http://nyti.ms/b8pkEw) of a new production, staged in an actual penthouse apartment in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood (which, in 1968, was probably not called “Chelsea” and was certainly not fashionable or as gay as it is today).

Gay, off-Broadway, and a smash hit

The original off-Broadway production of The Boys in the Band was an undisputed hit, playing just over 1,000 performances before closing on September 6, 1970.  It was a period that encompassed the event known simply as “Stonewall”–the June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village and the subsequent nights of rioting, nearly universally recognized as the birth of the gay rights movement.   In retrospect, the period of triumph and celebration and some measure of acceptance that followed in the wake of Stonewall–an “era” that was in part symbolized by the success of this play in New York–was tragically brief.  By the early 1980s the gay male community was beginning to be engulfed by the horrors of the AIDS epidemic–which would eventually claim five of the original cast of The Boys in the Band.

Self-loathing as a way of life

“The “boys” of the play’s title are nine men, their names and ages and descriptions listed in the front of the play’s text (e.g., “Michael, thirty, average face, smartly groomed,” “Larry, twenty-nine, extremely handsome”), gathered in Michael’s fashionable New York apartment for a birthday party.  One of the guests is black, one is notably more outrageous and campy than the others (and gets most of the laugh lines), one is a “too pretty” street hustler (a “midnight Cowboy”) whose services have been bought as a birthday present; and one is ostensibly straight–Michael’s college roommate, Alan.  Except for Alan, the guests are described by Michael as “the same old tired fairies you’ve seen around since day one.”  The evening proceeds in ways that were familiar to anyone who had seen Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) — lacerating, at times vicious humor, fueled by plenty of alcohol.  The language is mildly profane and scatological (mild in today’s terms, at least), and the many sexual references are couched in snarky innuendo.  At least two of the characters launch into speeches in which they “blame” their domineering, smothering mothers for making them gay.  The bitchy zingers fly fast and furious, but the ultimate impression one is left with is one where self-loathing seems to be a way of life. In the play’s most quoted line: “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

A funhouse hall of mirrors

From Times theater critic Ben Brantley’s review of the 2010 production:  ”The feelings of entrapment enforce a sense of unhappy men trapped in personas that are either lies or exaggerations of qualities they may possess but also hold in contempt. They are also trapped, it seems, in a masochistic funhouse hall of mirrors in which they serve as one another’s unflattering, distorting reflections….  Audiences expecting a frolicsome the-way-we-were evening are advised to stay home. This time the boys of ‘Boys’ demand that you feel their pain.”

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Name one thing you know about Bullitt

Mention Bullitt to anyone who knows even just a little about movies, and I bet within 10 seconds the words “car chase” will be uttered.  And indeed, the car chase in this quintessentially 1968 film–vaulting through the (unusually quiet) streets of San Francisco and out into the northern California hills–is in some ways the granddaddy of them all.  Actually, the chase– police detective Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) in a now-iconic green “fastback” Mustang pursuing a couple of shotgun-shooting bad guys in a Dodge Charger– was inspired by a chase in Robbery, the previous film directed by Bullitt’s director, Peter Yates.  (This fact comes from Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies in his intro to Bullitt a few nights ago.)

The Bullitt car chase is, however, anything but derivative or tame.  Anyone who saw this movie when it first came out remembers being blown away by the stomach-churning drops and turns of the chase, which starts about an hour in and goes on for nearly 10 minutes.  There is not a word of dialogue, and the jazz score is only there at the beginning–otherwise, it’s all screeching tires and revving motors.   Amazingly, even on television the chase still works on a gut-punch level.

More than just a car chase.

But Bullitt is a lot more than just a car chase, classic though it is.  Saturday Review in its year-end 1968 issue, put Steve McQueen at dead center of its cover-story photo montage of “The NOW Movie” (see earlier post in Covering 1968).  It’s not exactly an “art film”–it’s still essentially a police procedural–but something about its affect and daring makes it feel different, edgy, smart. (Yates is British, after all, part of England’s astoundingly inventive 1960s film scene).  Take the credit sequence–so dark it’s nearly black-and-white, with some groovy graphics matched by some cool jazz–lots of horns and brushed cymbals–by Lalo Schifrin. Shattering glass, gunplay and screaming car action start right away.   The camera does a lot of tracking, and not just of moving vehicles; everything seems to be in motion, jittery.  There’s an extended, Hitchcockian chase — on foot– across an airport runway filled with taxiing jets. An emergency room surgeon is African American. Frank Bullitt has that cool disregard for the rules that came to be a standard trope of movie cops. As he says to the unctuous, corrupt politican played by Robert Vaughan, in what became the movie’s most-quoted lines:  ”You believe what you want. You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.”   The movie ends abruptly, wordlessly, ambiguously.

The look of 1968

Of course, one of the pleasures of movies set in the here-and-now of 1968 is being able reimagine that world:  If a gangster needs to make a call, he asks the cabbie to pull over at a pay phone.  Everyone in the boarding line at a very crowded airport is dressed up–men in suits and ties, women in dresses, hats, and stockings. “High-tech” police equipment–shown in close detail–is a copy-transmitting machine that’s hooked up to a phone receiver.  There’s still an Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco–it was torn down in 1991–and there are still airlines named PanAm and TWA.  Bullitt heats up his instant coffee with a little immersion heating coil.   ER nurses wear crisp little hats.  (Oddly, however, there’s little or no drinking or cigarette smoking–it’s not Mad Men.)

Violence as a way of life

But it’s not just the amusing period details that tell us this is 1968:  There is a lot of violence in Bullitt–not street violence, or racial violence–but it’s still intensely public.  There’s always a crowd witnessing the violence or the victims, and the director pans across the craning necks, the milling around, the murmuring.   And late in the movie, after Bullitt’s girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) sees Bullittt dealing with a gruesome murder scene, she confronts him with some harsh words, and suddenly Bullitt starts to seem like less like the maverick anti-hero and something closer to the Everyman of 1968:  ”With you, living with violence is a way of life, living with violence and death.  How can you be part of it, without becoming more and more callous?  What will happen to us in time?”  Bullitt’s answer:  ”Time starts now.”

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1968:  When movies mattered

In 1968 I considered myself an aficionado of movies–and that particular foreign word was one that I was no doubt tossing around.   That was the year, in fact, that I declared to my dorm mates at college that “movie critic” was my life’s ambition.  (I got shot down pretty fast, but that psychological wounding is another story.)  By the mid-1960s, I had become one of those millions of Young People who were discovering the illicit pleasures of watching foreign films–Jules and Jim, Blow-Up, Darling, 8-1/2, a slew of depressing Bergman movies–as well as the new, cutting-edge American movies that were also learning from foreign film.   We were beginning to understand movies as art forms, as vehicles of personal and cultural expression that really mattered.  Or, to put it another way, as another means of defining ourselves as outside of the mainstream, as we were also doing with language, dress, and music.

The NOW Movie

I remember, too, that I was a subscriber to Saturday Review in 1968. It was like a badge of middle-brow sophistication.  Reading it made me (teenager in the boondocks) feel in-touch, East Coast, informed—cultured, if only vicariously.   And so it is a particular pleasure to rediscover this issue of SR from the end of the year, with a huge section on “The NOW Movie.”  With photos (not very many, and not very good– remember, this was not a vulgar magazine) and pedigreed articles about what the editors clearly saw as the year’s seismic shifts in the world of moviedom.

Who are the NOW people in the movies?

The Op-arty cover hints at who is “NOW” in the movies:  Godard (the horn-rims on the left); Kubrick (beard on the lower right); Dustin Hoffman (twice); Dunaway and Beatty; Mia Farrow; Rod Steiger (Oscar-winner in 1968, but not his co-star Sidney Poitier); Christopher Jones (lower right; he starred in the cult classic Wild in the Streets that year); the youthful stars (upper right) of Romeo and Juliet.   (By the way, that’s not Julie Christie in the center; it’s Joanna Shimkus, a hot actress at this moment, who later married Poitier.)

Where are the young audiences? “On a trip”

Film professor Anthony Schillaci sets the tone straight off in his piece, “Film as Environment”:  ”The better we understand how young people view film, the more we have to revise our notion of what film is. Whether the favored director is ‘young’ like Richard Lester, Roman Polanski, and Arthur Penn, or ‘old’ like Kubrick, Fellini, and Bunuel, he must be a practicing cinema anarchist to catch the eye of the young.  If we’re looking for a young audience . . . we will find they are on a trip, whether in a Yellow Submarine or on a Space Odyssey . . . careening down a dirt road with Bonnie and Clyde or sitting next to The Graduate as he races across the Bay Bridge.  Hyped up on large doses of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and Mission Impossible, they are ready for anything that an evolving film idiom can throw on the screen.  And what moves them must have the pace, novelty, style, and spontaneity of a television commercial.”

“Falling Stars”

Another contributor, critic Hollis Alpert, chronicles the phenomenon of “Falling Stars”:  ”The signs are all too apparent that the star system, on which the film industry once rose to its financial and mass-appeal glories, is crumbling, if not already defunct.”  He cites the steady failures of once-bankable stars like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor; the success of neophytes Hoffman, Beatty, Dunaway, and Farrow; and the fact that director Kubrick gave one of the major roles in 2001 to a “non-human,” HAL, the computer.  He sees an trend in which “the film itself becomes a star, becomes the attracting force for the public.”

In today’s movie landscape–littered with bloated high-gloss Oscar-bait, “surefire” biopix, inane romantic comedies, numbing special-effects orgies, and teen gross-out flicks–it’s easy to get a little nostalgic about the excitement and sheer hopefulness that the movies of the late 60s and early 70s engendered.

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Movie mags: the more things change, the more they stay the same

Movie magazines–filled with gossip, pictures, and ads–have been around just about as long as the movies themselves. (Photoplay and Motion Picture each began publication–amazingly–in 1911, and both continued for nearly 70 more years.)  The formula remained virtually unchanged for decades: “behind-the-scenes” backlot stories; gossip columns; candid shots of movie stars at parties and at home; relentless reportage on marriages, divorces, and love affairs.  My guess is that they were most popular when the movies themselves most intensely commanded the public’s leisure hours, that is, Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” between about 1920 and 1945 or so.  When TV came along in the late 1940s, the magazines were forced to accommodate whole new boatloads of “stars.”  This particular rag may be called Movie Mirror, but look who’s on the cover in 1968:  America’s sweethearts, the squeaky-clean Lennon Sisters singing group from television’s wildly popular Lawrence Welk Show.   (This was a big year for the Lennons, who were now mostly grown-up Mommies, as evidenced in this cover photo.  1968 was the year they left the show to start work on a variety series of their own.)

Liz and Dick and Eddie and Debbie and Jackie and Mia and Frank and…..

In the 1960s, there were several public “stars” who were mainstays for the gossip rags:  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds; Elvis; Jackie Kennedy.  Liz Taylor was a nearly monthly fixture on movie-mag covers beginning about 1950; First Lady Jackie Kennedy–”America’s Newest Star”–began appearing on the cover of Photoplay in 1962.  They remained in the public eye for what seems, in retrospect, to be close to forever.  With the exception of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, it’s hard to think of stars today who have quite that endurance.  The half-life of the gossip-worthy tabloid figure has shortened considerably.  One cannot imagine, for example, that five years from now that the tabloids–or their more “upscale” equivalents, such as People–will be paying much attention to Jon and Kate Gosselin.   And movie magazines themselves, for that matter, have all but disappeared, replaced by the ever-popular tabloids and by People and US Weekly and other rags following not just movie stars, but socialites, millionaires, reality-TV and talk-show stars, and endless personalities who are famous for being famous– you know who I mean.

“Do you want a dream figure?”

So here, in January 1968’s Movie Mirror are the usual suspects:  paparazzi photos of Liz and Dick on vacation with boatloads (literally) of their kids; Eddie Fisher (cuckolded former husband of Liz, looking a little worse for wear) and his current celebrity girlfriend, songstress Connie Stevens; Jackie Kennedy, romantically linked with the titled, hyphenated British diplomat David Ormsby-Gore; Elvis tiffing with wife Priscilla; Mia Farrow, unhappily married to Frank Sinatra, and heading off to India to see the Mararishi Mahesh Yogi (”What personal demons pursue her halfway around the world to a Shangri-La?”).  And the usual ads, overwhelmingly aimed at women, mostly for products promising personal transformation: girdles (”Compreso-Belt”); push-up bras, wigs, diet aids, teeth and skin whiteners, acne creams, varicose vein removers, and alcoholism cures.

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