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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1967 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| The first "spaghetti western" to receive international attention and a major release, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964, It.) opened in the United States in mid-January 1967. (The western had earlier premiered in mid-September, 1964 in Florence, Italy.) It starred Clint Eastwood in his first leading role in a film - as the "man with no name," and it was the first screen collaboration between Leone and both Eastwood and the composer Ennio Morricone. The western was considered a remake of the classic Japanese film Yojimbo (1961, Jp.). | |
| Director Robert Aldrich’s highly-popular gritty, macho war pic The Dirty Dozen (1967) was built on an anti-Establishment premise that rapists, murderers, and sadistic misfits could be trained to be kill-crazy, "dirty" commandos for a suicidal mission behind enemy lines against the Nazis. The nihilistic film was released during the summer of ’67 — coinciding with a series of race riots in numerous American cities, and increasing protests against the Vietnam War. Reviewers labeled the film as irresponsible, unrestrained, and revolting since it appeared to celebrate war and erase the line between "good guys" and "bad guys," particularly in the finale: a mass death scene in which an underground bunker filled with German generals and innocent civilians was blown up with a combination of live grenades and gasoline. During the production of the film, Telly Savalas filled the role of Archer Maggott, replacing Jack Palance who had rejected the role due to its racist overtones. | |
| The Jungle Book (1967) was released - it was the last animated feature supervised and personally overseen by Walt Disney. | |
| The rock musical Hair about the sexual revolution and the hippie lifestyle premiered off-Broadway in October of 1967 for a limited engagement, and the following spring opened on Broadway. The use of profanity, drugs, its anti-war stance (with draft resistance) and a highly-tauted full-frontal nude scene caused some controversy. A feature film came over a decade later, Milos Forman's Hair (1979). | |
| Director Arthur Penn's innovative, revisionist landmark biodrama Bonnie and Clyde (1967) redefined and romanticized the gangster genre, not to mention on-screen depictions of violence. It was widely denounced by reviewers for glamorizing its attractive, Depression-era, violent anti-hero killers (portrayed by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty): "They're young. They're in love. They kill people." The anti-establishment, defiant and violent film, originally criticized at the time of its release, was aimed at youth audiences by its American auteur and producer/star Warren Beatty. The movie culminated in a graphically shocking, bullet-ridden ambush often referred to as a slow-motion "ballet of death." If the initial reactions of the critics were negative, the reassessments shortly thereafter were highly glowing, including: critical acclaim, a Time Magazine cover story, a re-release with advertising that stressed its artistic merit, a huge box-office take, and ten Academy Award nominations. | |
| Luis Bunuel's ground-breaking first color film was Belle de Jour (1967, Fr.) (aka Beauty of the Day). It told about repressed sexuality in the perverted fantasies of bored upper-class, blonde Parisian newlywed housewife Sévérine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) who became a part-time prostitute in a high-class brothel. | |
| Director Stuart Rosenberg's moving character study Cool Hand Luke (1967) told of a non-conformist, uncooperative, anti-hero loner, "Cool Hand" Luke (Paul Newman) who bullheadedly resisted authority and the Establishment. The film's theme was about the outsider-protagonist (jailed for cutting off the heads of parking meters) who transformed the occupants of a Southern chain gang institution and tragically sacrificed himself at the end. Its most famous line was pronounced by prison boss (Strother Martin) to Luke: "What we've got here is failure to communicate." | |
| Mike Nichols became the first director to earn $1,000,000 for a single picture - for The Graduate (1967). The influential and groundbreaking film was a biting satire/comedy about the shifting, social and sexual mores of the 1960s. It starred 29 year-old stage actor Dustin Hoffman in his film debut as a recent 21 year-old nebbish, East Coast college graduate who found himself alienated and adrift. Hoffman's career began on stage, and then he appeared in a number of TV series, but real recognition came with his role as Benjamin Braddock in his second feature film. He became a solid actor who often chose difficult and challenging roles, in such films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Lenny (1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Tootsie (1982), and Rain Man (1988). | |
| The fifth James Bond film premiered: You Only Live Twice (1967) - it was the first Bond film to be released during the summer, and the first Bond film to be shot almost entirely in Asia. Also, it was the first Bond film with a plot that was significantly different from its source material, Ian Fleming's 1964 novel of the same name, with an original screenplay by noted writer Roald Dahl (the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and James and the Giant Peach). It had to contend with a rival, unofficial James Bond film, Columbia's big-budget 007 spoof comedy Casino Royale (1967), with David Niven. | |
| Director/producer Roger Corman's visually-surrealistic The Trip (1967) (with a screenplay by actor Jack Nicholson), an American International Pictures (AIP) film, was the first Hollywood film to show the effects of taking psychedelic drugs (LSD). It was the ultimate late 1960s exploitation hippie film, with star Peter Fonda. | |
| Warners' with director Joshua Logan presented the musical screen version of Lerner and Loewe's Broadway hit as Camelot (1967), lavishly funded at $13-15 million (and unprofitable with box-office of only $30 million). It had been adapted from the Arthurian legendary tales in T.H. White's 1958 novel The Once and Future King. Richard Harris as King Arthur co-starred opposite Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Guenevere and Franco Nero as rival Sir Lancelot in a love triangle, along with the Knights of the Round Table. It was criticized for its innovative use of color filters, 150 minutes length, sloppy continuity-editing, over-use of close-ups, and tacky sets and costumes. | |
| American writer Elmore Leonard's novel "Hombre," published in 1961, was the author's first novel adapted to film - the revisionist western was Hombre (1967), starring Paul Newman as Apache-raised John Russell. | |
| Jack Warner, co-creator of Warner Bros., sold his remaining interest in the company to a Canadian corporation called Seven Arts Ltd. for $84 million. The company became known as Warner-Seven Arts. | |
| New Line Cinema was formed, marking its niche with the release of films such as Reefer Madness (1936, re-released in 1973), sexy foreign-language films such as the anthology film Immoral Tales (1974, Fr.) and Stay As You Are (1978, It./Sp.) (with Nastassja Kinski and Marcello Mastroianni), the romantic comedy Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978, Fr.) - the first New Line film to win an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film), director John Waters' Pink Flamingo (1972) and Polyester (1981), the sci-fi horror film Xtro (1982, UK), and its first commercially-successful franchise beginning with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). | |
| The American Film Institute (AFI) was founded as an independent, non-profit organization with its headquarters in Los Angeles, CA, with an original mission to "preserve the legacy of America's film heritage." It has gone on to "provide leadership in screen education" and to recognize and celebrate "excellence in the art of film, television, and digital media." It created both interest in film - and controversy - for its AFI 100 Years...100 Series, a 10 year series from 1998 to 2008 consisting of lists of ranked films in various categories. | |
| African-American actor Sidney Poitier became the first black actor to have his hand and footprints immortalized at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California. It was the year of Poitier's three most successful films, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), To Sir, With Love (1967), and In the Heat of the Night (1967). | |
| Only a few weeks after completing Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack at the age of 67. It was the last of nine films in which Tracy and Katharine Hepburn starred together, stretching from Woman of the Year (1942) to 1967, a period of 25 years. | |
| After suffering many years from ill-health and bi-polar depression, British actress Vivien Leigh died at the age of 53 from the effects of tuberculosis. Her two most legendary roles won her two Best Actress Academy Awards: as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939), and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Her marriage to Laurence Olivier in 1940 led to both joy and difficulty due to her chronic illnesses, and they eventually divorced in 1960. | |
| In the Heat of the Night (1967) was the first film in the detective-mystery story genre to be honored as Best Picture by Academy voters. It was also the first Best Picture Oscar winner to be adapted into a regular prime-time television series, in 1988, with Carroll O'Connor as Sheriff Bill Gillespie and Howard Rollins as Virgil Tibbs. | |
| The Academy Awards for films made in 1967 were given out in the spring of 1968 - and coincidentally, the two major Oscar-winning films dealt with racial prejudice: In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). The awards-ceremony for 1968 was postponed due to the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. | |
| Sony introduced a portable (but bulky), expensive, out-of-studio, black-and-white video camera system (or video tape recorder - VTR) called the PortaPak -- it inaugurated the modern era of video. | |
| Writer/director Charlie Chaplin directed his final film, the romantic comedy The Countess from Hong Kong (1967), starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, which was released in the UK in January 1967, and in the US in March 1967. It ended up a major flop. [Note: His previous film was a full decade earlier, A King in New York (1957).] It was the first of his films to be funded by a major studio (Universal Pictures). It was Chaplin's first and sole color (and widescreen) film, and only one of two films during his entire career in which he did not also play a major starring role. A brief cameo in the film as an unnamed, elderly steward marked his final screen appearance. | |
| Two UK films were released in this year - both noted for the first use of the four-letter word 'f--k': director Michael Winner's film I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name (1967) and Ulysses (1967). | |
| Jacqueline Susann's 1966 trashy novel Valley of the Dolls about habitual and self-destructive drug and alcohol abuse was adapted for the screen as Valley of the Dolls (1967), with stars Barbara Parkins (as Anne), Patty Duke (as Neely), and Sharon Tate (as Jennifer). The cautionary tale of rags-to-riches and back again instantly became a cult classic although was critically-assailed by film reviewers. It was re-released in 1969 following the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, and was made into a TV movie in 1981, starring Catherine Hicks, Lisa Hartman, and Veronica Hamel. | |
| The Godzilla film Son of Godzilla (1967) was made to be more children-friendly. The monster was less menacing and more fatherly, particularly toward newborn offspring Minilla (or mini-Godzilla) (aka Minira, or "Little Man" Machan) - the future "King of Monsters." | |
| The first major (commercially-released) US studio film to include the word 's--t' (or 'bulls--t') in its dialogue was writer/director Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967). It was also said a year later in Boom! (1968, UK) (spoken by actress Elizabeth Taylor as Flora 'Sissy' Goforth: "S--t on your mother!" [Note: Taylor was the first actress to say 's--t' in a major motion picture).] And it was also spoken in Bullitt (1968). | |
| French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's chaotic and apocalyptic experimental film Weekend (1967, Fr.) told about a weekend car trip involving a massive traffic jam symbolizing the collapse of the modern consumeristic society, including one of the longest dolly shots in cinematic history. | |
| A true-life tragedy was the subject of director Bo Widerberg's Elvira Madigan (1967, Swe.), about the idyllic countryside affair of a Danish tightrope artist Elvira Madigan (aka Hedvig Jensen) (Pia Dogermark in her film debut) and a married Swedish army officer, Lt. Sixten Sparre (Thommy Berggren). The beautifully-filmed melodrama, accentuated by Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, ended with their suicides. | |
| 34 year-old sexy and buxom screen star Jayne Mansfield, one of the leading 1950s sex symbols ("a curvaceous 40-22-35"), was killed in a horrific car crash in Louisiana (on Interstate 90 while on her way to New Orleans) when her Buick Electra 225 rammed into the back of a semi-truck spraying for mosquitos. Although she suffered major head trauma, there were also numerous rumors of her decapitation, all untrue, due to photographs of her wig (or scalp) at the accident site. Two others died in the crash - her chauffeur and her boyfriend lawyer Samuel Brody. Mansfield's three children (with ex-husband Mickey Hargitay) were in the back seat and survived: 8 year-old Mickey, 6 year-old Zoltan and 3 year-old Marie, or Mariska. Mansfield had made a name for herself with appearances in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957). | |
| The national average ticket price for theatre admission was $1.22, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO). |
