Hollywood: The Shock of Freedom in Films

By TIME staff Friday, Dec. 08, 1967

    • (8 of 10)

    Nymphet-Mania
    One reason for some of the harsh reviews may have been that the critics were too aware of the movie's American origin. The homegrown skill displayed in Bonnie and Clyde may seem strange to Americans; it is no surprise to Europeans. To an extent, the American film was discovered by the French, who see things in U.S. movies no one else saw before. The directors who created France's New Wave openly imitated such films from the American past as the westerns of John Ford, the adventure flicks of Howard Hawks, and B-level gangster fray-for-alls of the '30s, like Scarface . French critics who have seen Bonnie and Clyde praised it enthusiastically — an American movie that started out as a film for a French director whose best works were echoes of American movies.

    In both conception and execution, Bonnie and Clyde is a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend. An early example of this was Birth of a Nation , which still stands alone; it gave American cinema an epic sense of the nation's history. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was another watershed film, with its stunning use of deep-focus photography and its merciless character analysis of that special U.S. phenomenon, the self-made mogul. John Ford's Stagecoach brought the western up from the dwarfed adolescence of cowboy-and-Injun adventures to the maturity and stature of a legend. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain proved again the ingenuity of U.S. moviemakers to bring fresh style to the format of musical comedy, which, like jazz, remains an authentically American art form.

    Even during the past decade, when the creative impulse in film has seemed to be the province of European directors, Hollywood has turned out movies that at least in retrospect, have the qualities of classics. Hitchcock's Psycho inaugurated America's cinema of cruelty, with a demonic amalgam of bloodshed and violence that was not equaled until Bonnie and Clyde . Stanley Kubrick's Lolita treated the forbidden subject of nymphet-mania with cool humor; his Dr. Strangelove demonstrated that the biliousness of black comedy was as American as the H-bomb. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was a flawed murder drama that explored the mind of a brainwashed assassin with psychological depth and technical brilliance.

    Open Checkbooks
    In the wake of Bonnie and Clyde , there is an almost euphoric sense in Hollywood that more such movies can and will be made. The reason is that since mid-1966, the studios have opened doors and checkbooks to innovation-minded producers and directors with a largess unseen since Biograph moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 1910.

    3. 1
    4. 2
    5. 3
    6. 4
    7. 5
    8. 6
    9. 7
    10. 8
    11. 9
    12. 10