Hollywood: The Shock of Freedom in Films

By TIME staff Friday, Dec. 08, 1967

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    Comedy and tragedy are no longer separate masks; they have become interchangeable, just as heroes and villains are frequently indistinguishable. Movies still make moral points, but the points are rarely driven home in the heavy-hammered old way. And like some of the most provocative literature, the film now is apt to be amoral, casting a coolly neutral eye on life and death and on humanity's most perverse moods and modes.

    Proust Is Possible
    The New Cinema has been displayed on U.S. screens recently with astonishing variety and virtuosity. Michelangelo Antonioni parodied the modish artsiness of fashion photography to help create the swinging London mood of Blow-Up . Italy's Gillo Pontecorvo faithfully reproduced the grainy style of newsreel footage to restage The Battle of Algiers — a pictorially harrowing exposition of war as an extension of politics. Czech director Jiff Menzel leaped from tears to laughter in quick sequence to create the moody turmoil of Closely Watched Trains . The "undoable" film can now be done, as shown by the creditable and convincing movie versions of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . Even Proust is possible — if anyone wants to try.

    It remains to be seen whether the new thematic and technical freedom is a cause for unrestrained rejoicing; there is the obvious danger that it will be used excessively for the sake of gimmickry or shock. But the fact is that innovation is no longer the private preserve of the art houses but a characteristic of the main-line American movie. Two for the Road , otherwise an ordinary Audrey Hepburn vehicle, has as much back-and-forth juggling of chronology as any film made by Alain Resnais — not to mention a comic acidity about marital discord that is as candid as anything the Swedes have said. Even a conspicuous failure such as John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye bleeds color images through black-and-white in a startling extension of the camera's palette. U.S. movies are now treating once shocking themes with a maturity and candor unthinkable even five years ago: the life of drug addicts in Chappaqua , homosexuality in Reflections , racial hatred in In the Heat of the Night . And The Graduate , a new Mike Nichols film, is an alternately comic and graphic closeup of a 19-year-old boy whose sexual fantasies come terrifyingly true.

    No More Habit
    As in the days of Goldwyn and Mayer, the studio goal is to make money — but the customers are now willing to pay for a different product. "The main change has been in audience," argues Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount. "Today, people go to see a movie; they no longer go to the movies. We can't depend on habit anymore. We have to make 'I've got to see that' pictures."

    As the studio heads have discovered, there is not a single cinema audience today but several. There is — and perhaps always will be — an audience for banality and bathos. But a segment of the public wants the intellectually demanding, emotionally fulfilling kind of film exemplified by Bonnie and Clyde . By now, television has all but taken over Hollywood's former function of providing placebo entertainment. Movie attendance among the middle-aged is down; yet box-office receipts are up — partly because cinema has become the favorite art form of the young.

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