Six 1960s films

Select Boomers shall be delighted. But it's difficult not to read Hollywood films of the 1960s through a countercultural lens, even those released at the opposite end of the decade. So in the final scene of The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran (Shirley MacLaine) drop out of not quite society but rather, the corporate nine-to-five grind and leave Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) to his Don Draperesque lechery. As proto-hippies, they may go on to lose each other at Woodstock or, more likely, in the halls of MOMA, given Baxter's penchant for festooning his apartment with replicas of Picasso and Mondrian. But as the decade progresses, the tenor of the dropping out becomes more strident and intense, at least as it's played out in the films below.

There aren't many obvious connections between Baxter and Paul Newman as the title character in Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963). Lemmon feels of an older generation even though Newman is thirteen days his senior [sic]. But given the considerable swagger Hud exhibits in every scene, one might surmise that Baxter realizes his Hudness at the end of The Apartment when he finally gathers up enough fortitude to forsake an executive position in the hopes of saving his soul. 

What exactly Hud is swaggering over is open to interpretation, though. He rails against big government prompting Pauline Kael to conclude that for her, "Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater" (18).* But I took him for another proto-hippie because he rails against everything, a cousin to Marlon Brando's Johnny spouting "Whaddaya got?" in The Wild One a decade prior. On the precipice of dropping out, he could just as soon vote for no one as for LBJ or Goldwater. And to the extent that Ritt and screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. (adapting Larry McMurty's 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By) intended audiences to hiss at Hud as a materialistic brute and instead revere his morally upright father Homer (Melvyn Douglas), the film must be counted as largely a failure. As Kael notes, "it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy...Hud, the 'villain' of the piece, is less phony than Homer" (ibid.). But that doesn't mean the good liberals in the audience can't claim Hud as their own. This is what happens when filmmakers play with ideological fire - you showcase Oz at the risk of audiences wanting to remain there instead of returning to the sepia drabness of Kansas. James Wong Howe's unshowy, even skeletal photography assists in this endeavor, staying out of the way as we project whatever ideology onto Hud's attractive frame.

The most remarkable aspect of the lesser-known All Fall Down (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is that it's a dry run for Hud and all the more attractive for it. It's the far quirkier film with Brandon deWilde preprising [sic] his role as Lonnie, the nephew who looks up to but eventually rejects his uncle Hud. The Hud here is played by Warren Beatty as a young stud named Berry-Berry who escorts and discards a string a middle-aged women. His younger brother Clinton (deWilde) adores him. But Eva Marie Saint arrives on the scene and Clinton becomes repulsed at Berry-Berry's sadistic treatment of her. As with Patricia Neal's Oscar-winning role in Hud, Saint exists solely to enact a Freudian battle of wills and libidos between two male relatives. Still, Frankenheimer makes the thing digestible in the end by bedecking the Oedipal drama with odd trills and featuring a powerhouse performance by Angela Lansbury as a matriarch even more incestuous than the one she played for Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. 

Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) is the most rebellious film here in terms of form. Beatty as the title character spouts such Hudisms as "I gotta live the only way I'm at least free" and, indeed, he seems in perpetual search of something. But to give you an idea of the chaotic nature of the film, we never learn the character's real name. In flight from the Mafia which may or may not be after him, he gains a social security card stolen from a man named Miklos Wunejeva and he gets rechristened Mickey One. The film is all flight comprised of evanescent vignettes and confounding detours. Scenes of religious fervor, intense melodrama, and comedy both good and bad seem to drop in from other movies. They hook viewers in for two or three minutes and then baffle us by neglecting to connect to the subsequent scene. Written by Alan Surgal and edited by Aram Avakian (who would go on to direct his own chaos theorem with 1970's End of the Road), Mickey One reportedly baffled even Beatty himself who kept losing his footing with the project. In this, he's a stand in for the viewers themselves who wind up either exhilarated or annoyed by the tsunami Penn and company make of the narrative. Classical Hollywood types Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield are on board and they seem more game than Beatty with the swirl of emotional registers and story fragments, perhaps because they portray the purveyors of the paranoia that keeps Mickey in flop sweat and bandages. In the same year, Bob Dylan sang on "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?" and that same omen infuses Mickey One with an agitated energy that feels indelibly rock 'n' roll (jazz being a foregone conclusion given that Stan Getz scored much of the soundtrack).

If so far these reviews exemplify the proclivity of critics for making connections between any two disparate films, then Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964) shall be the fly in that particular ointment. It shares a vague sense of disaffection and soul desertion with the other films. James Franciscus plays the title hunk who moves from Kentucky to Manhattan and becomes a best-selling author. But soon, under the influence of various big-city sybarites, he compromises his integrity and must return to Kentucky to finds his true self. Overall, though, it shares little with the angsty titles here except insofar as it serves as their negative snapshot. The frequent book porn points to a majority far more silent than Hud (at least for now), the audiences who purchased the chunky tomes that would be adapted into the highest grossing films of the decade: Spartacus, Exodus, The Longest Day, The Carpetbaggers, Doctor Zhivago, and onward to Hawaii, The Sand Pebbles, Valley of the Dolls, etc., a list Herman Wouk hoped to join with his 783-page Youngbloood Hawke (1962). 

It would be simple to claim that these were the people who were repulsed by Hud or Berry-Berry, maybe even Baxter and the men Lonnie and Clinton became, and afraid of encountering them in the big bad recently deserted cities or, worse, fearful that they'd infiltrate the well-tended suburbs. Peter Bogdanovich was not one of those people. But with his 1968 directorial debut Targets, he adds fuel to the suspicion that Hud and his ilk wind up like the Charles Whitman stand-in Bobby Thompson (Tom O'Kelly, chilling in his blasé malevolence). There's an icy fatalism to this film that would have impressed Fritz Lang if not made him shudder. But no title of the 1960s did more to presage the resignation that permeated the New Hollywood (The Godfather, Chinatown, etc.) if not Boomer ideology overall, the sense that violent fragmentation, maybe even history itself, was a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about it. Bogdanovich essentially plays himself in the film, shushing Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself in the film, while he watches Karloff on TV in The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931) while intoning "All the good movies have been made." One must wonder how Bogdanovich managed to go on having a career in directing after such a doomy pronouncement (at the very least, he could've spared us 1975's At Long Last Love). But in this conception, cinema is not just dead but deadly. In the most brilliant moment of rhetoric in this term paper of a film, the movie screen literally becomes murderous - Bobby has positioned himself behind a drive-in screen and shoots through it with his rifle at the moviegoers in their cars and environs. 80-year-old Karloff manages to stop him with his cane and slaps him across the face as if Bobby were a mere petulant child. "Is that what I was afraid of?" asks after 90 minutes of mourning over how the world had become more violent and scary than any of his films. It seems like a message made for the Silent Majority who voted Nixon as their president that same year. But they didn't know the film existed. They were busy seeing Funny Girl and The Love Bug.

The Apartment: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

Hud: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

All Fall Down: A-minus

Mickey One: A

Youngblood Hawke: C+ (docked a notch so I'm not tempted to watch it a third time)

Targets: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

* Pauline Kael; "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood." Film Quarterly 1 July 1964; 17 (4): 15–23.