The DVD Report #38

Last week we took a look back at the Oscars of 25, 50 and 75 years ago. This week, with the release of the 40th Anniversary Edition of In the Heat of the Night and the forthcoming release of the 40th Anniversary Edition of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, it is a good time to look back at the 1967 Oscars.

Postponed for two days because of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it’s fitting that major Oscars that year went to two films focusing on race relations. In the Heat of the Night is generally remembered as an engrossing murder mystery but not the trailblazing social drama it was, while Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is generally dismissed as a lightweight, almost naïve, comedy. Yet both were major eye-openers in their day.

The key scene in Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night, directed by Oscar-nominated Norman Jewison,is the one in which Sidney Poitier as a black detective from up North (Philadelphia, Pa. to be exact) visits the home of one of the landed gentry of Sparta, Mississippi during the course of a murder investigation. Poitier says something that offends the old gentleman who then slaps him across the face. Poitier’s response is not to turn the other cheek, but to slap the old gentleman back. When the old gentleman, played by Larry Gates, asks redneck sheriff Rod Steiger what he’s going to do about it, Steiger shrugs it off with an “I don’t know” causing the old man to weep. It’s a stunning scene that had it happened in real life might have caused the Poitier character to have been shot on the spot. It was that moment in which the black man, standing tall and proud, announced to the world that there was no turning back, opening the door for many other black leading men.

Poitier had another pivotal moment in the nominated Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, directed by nominee Stanley Kramer,in which he tells his father, played by Roy Glenn, “you think of yourself as a black man, I think of myself as a man.”

Despite Poitier’s strong presence in both films, it’s the performances of other actors that won the awards that year. Steiger, bringing nuances to the bigoted redneck sheriff one wouldn’t have thought possible, easily won the Best Actor Oscar and Katharine Hepburn, nominated for the tenth time, finally won her second Oscar after 34 years for playing her first ordinary housewife in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Two-time Oscar winner Spencer Tracy won his ninth and final nomination posthumously for playing Poitier’s prospective father-in-law in Dinner, and Cecil Kellaway and Beah Richards won supporting nods, he as a kindly clergyman, she as Poitier’s dignified mother.

Though not the first film to deal with interracial romance, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was the first boasting a cast of the magnitude of Tracy, Poitier and Hepburn. It wasn’t the romance between Poitier and Katharine Houghton, Hepburn’s real-life niece, which was central to the film, but the reaction of her parents played by Hepburn and Tracy. There is real poignancy in Tracy’s last speech and those were real tears welling up in Hepburn’s eyes as she quietly listens to what he has to say.

Despite the immediacy of In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the films most people associate with the year were two other Oscar nominees: Bonnie and Clyde, due in an upgraded Special Edition DVD in Marchand The Graduate, the 40th Anniversary edition of which was released last year.

The violence that permeated Bonnie and Clyde was so new to American cinema at the time that several critics who panned it as being too violent were forced to take a second look after the public embraced it, reversing their earlier opinions. One of the rare films to receive five acting nominations, it won one for Supporting Actress Estelle Parsons as the duplicitous Blanche, married to Clyde Barrow’s brother, Buck. Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker, Gene Hackman as Buck and Michael J. Pollard as gang member C.W. Moss were the other nominees. Among the film’s other nominations were those for director Arthur Penn, and Theodora Van Runkel for her much-copied costumes. The film won a second Oscar for its cinematography. Its reputation as the most violent film ever made by a Hollywood studio was eclipsed by The Wild Bunch just two years later.

Breaking ground in a different area, Best Director winner Mike Nichols’ The Graduate ushered in the era of well known contemporary music playing in the background. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”, which was written for the film, was only heard in snippets, the full song released on a later album, but the rest of the score including “Scarborough Fair” and “The Sound of Silence” was already well established. It acts as a soothing backdrop to the tale of a bored teenager seduced by the wife of his father’s partner. Dustin Hoffman, in his first major screen role, and Anne Bancroft in her what has become her most famous role, were ideally cast as Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson. They, as well as Katharine Ross as Bancroft’s daughter and Hoffman’s true love, were nominated for their performances.

The fifth nominee was the critical and commercial dud, Doctor Dolittle, shockingly nominated over Richard Brooks’ acclaimed film of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Twentieth Century-Fox, still struggling despite the overwhelming success of The Sound of Music just two years earlier, put all its resources into promoting Dolittle, based on the classic children’s stories, including urging studio employees to vote for it in various Oscar categories. The film won an astounding eight nominations, all seven others in technical categories. It won two, for Special Effects and Best Song for the catchy “Talk to the Animals”.

Brooks’ faithful transcription of Capote’s best known work won just four nominations, but they were important ones – two were for Brooks (for Best Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay), one for Conrad Hall’s cinematography, and one for Quincy Jones’ evocative score. Jones, whose even more memorable score of In the Heat of the Night oddly failed to win him a second nomination for Best Score, did receive one for the song “The Eyes of Love” from the long-forgotten Banning.

Joining Steiger, Tracy, Beatty and Hoffman in the best actor race was Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, a sort of 1960s version of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang that coined the phrase “what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”.

If Steiger’s win had been expected, Hepburn’s came as a surprise. Clearly given the award out of sentiment, it was arguably the weakest role of the twelve for which she would eventually be nominated and the weakest of the group in which she was found herself. Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman in peril in Wait Until Dark and the aforementioned Bancroft and Dunaway all had heir supporters, but the front-runner was generally considered to be Dame Edith Evans as a lonely old lady suffering from paranoia in The Whisperers. She had won every award under the sun that year up to, but alas, not including the Oscar. Two years later she would play a supporting role in Hepburn’s widely panned The Madwoman of Chailllot and received universal acclaim for her performance with many reviewers saying the film might have been half way decent had she, and not Hepburn, played the lead.

The Supporting Actor award went to George Kennedy as one of Newman’s fellow prisoners in Cool Hand Luke. Joining him, Hackman, Pollard and Kellaway in the race was John Cassavetes as a killing machine in the high adventure war film, The Dirty Dozen.

Parsons’ competition for supporting actress, in addition to Ross and Richards, included Carol Channing as a 1920s flapper in the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie and Mildred Natwick, hilarious as the muddled mother of the bride in Barefoot in the Park.

I recommend another look at some of these films this week, especially the much improved transfer of the 40th Anniversary Edition of In the Heat of the Night with reminiscences from director Norman Jewison, director of photography Haskell Wexler, composer Quincy Jones and producer Walter Mirisch.

If that’s not enough to keep you entertained, you might want to consider the work of one of the year’s honorary award winners, actor Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird), director Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho) or producer Arthur Freed (The Band Wagon).

-Peter J. Patrick (January 22, 2008)