circulation
in the United States they had successfully managed to limit when
they were powerful monopolies. By the mid-sixties, the work of Fellini,
Antonioni, Bergman, and Bunuel, as well as that of French New Wave
directors—which had previously been available in this country only in
specialized "art houses" in major urban centers, if at all—suddenly began
to appear regularly in first-run theaters all over America. By the seventies,
foreign films were as readily available as American ones, not just in cities
but even in many small towns.*
As the rigid structure of the studio system began to crumble, new talent
entered the film industry in the late fifties and early sixties, and, between
1960 and 1966, a number of young directors from television made films.
These included Irvin Kershner (b. 1923)—The Hoodlum Priest, 1961;
The Luck of Ginger Coffey, 1964; A Fine Madness, 1966; John Frankenheimer
(b. 1930)—The Manchurian Candidate, 1962; Seven Days in
May, 1964; The Train, 1965; Seconds, 1966; Sidney Lumet (b. 1924)—
12 Angry Men, 1957; Long Day's Journey into Night, 1962; Fail-Safe,
1964; The Hill, 1965; The Pawnbroker, 1965; The Group, 1966; Arthur
20.5-20.10 New directors from television demonstrate the influence of cinema
vérité and the French New Wave:
20.5-20.7 John Frankenheimer: 20.5
Seven Days in May (1964): demonstrators
clash in front of the White House;
20.6 The Train (1965): Burt Lancaster as
a reluctant French partisan; 20.7 Seconds
(1966): Rock Hudson on the brink of
deconstruction; cinematography by
James Wong Howe.
20.8 Sidney Lumet: The Pawnbroker
(1965): Rod Steiger in the title role.
*The availablity of foreign films in this country, however, has decreased in the past two
decades owing to several international recessions and the constantly rising domestic costs
of advertising, distribution, and dubbing.
922 · Hollywood, 1965-Present
20.9 Arthur Penn: Mickey One (1965): Alexandra Stewart and
Warren Beatty—"guilty of being innocent."
20.10 Sam Peckinpah: Major Dundee (1965): Charlton Heston
and Senta Berger in the director's mutilated post-Civil
War epic.
Penn (b. 1926)—The Miracle Worker, 1962; Mickey One, 1965; The
Chase, 1966; and Sam Peckinpah (1926-84)—Ride the High Country,
1962; Major Dundee, 1965. New cinematographers from the East Coast
also entered the film industry, including Conrad Hall (b. 1926), Haskell
Wexler (b. 1926), William Fraker (b. 1923), and the Hungarian émigrés
Laszlo Kovacs (b. 1933) and Vilmos Zsigmond (b. 1930). As these new
filmmakers, working with ever-increasing creative freedom and mobility,
assimilated the French and Italian innovations, a new kind of American
cinema was born for a new American audience.
This audience was composed of the first generation in history that had
grown up with the visually, if not intellectually, sophisticated medium of
television. Through hours of watching television as children and teenagers,
its members knew the language of cinema implicitly, and when
filmmakers like Frankenheimer, Lumet, Penn, and Peckinpah began to
move out of the studios in the mid- to late-sixties and to employ the New
Wave techniques of the French and Italian cinemas for the first time on
the American screen, this young audience liked what it saw. A phenomenal
increase in the number and quality of college and university film
study courses simultaneously enabled many members of the new audience
to understand what they saw as well as to enjoy it.* It is important
to realize that the values of the new audience, like its lifestyles, were
radically different from those of the old. For better or worse, it had a
generally permissive attitude toward such former cultural taboos as the
explicit representation of sex, violence, and death. Thus, when censorship
was completely abolished and replaced by a ratings system in
November 1968, the content of American cinema, as well as its form,
was revolutionized to permit the depiction of virtually everything under
* As the number of film studies courses continues to increase in the United States, more and
more of the country's educated citizens are achieving a state of what could be called cinema
or media literacy (Charles Eidsvik's useful term is "cineliteracy"—see his C/ne/ teracy;
Film Among the Arts [New York: Viking, 19781). By 1981, the American Film Institute's
Guide to College Courses in Film and Television listed nearly eight thousand courses in film
and television at over six hundred American colleges and universities, and the number
of schools that offer programs leading to a degree in one subject or both has continued
to grow.
The New American Cinema · 923
the sun, including graphic sex and violent death. That this liberalization
has created some disgusting abuses is inarguable, but it was necessary
before the American film could achieve full maturity of content. It is
difficult, for example, to imagine a director like Robert Altman (Nashville,
1975; Three Women, 1977) working at his best during the seventies
in the moral climate that produced The Sound of Music in 1965.
THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA
The Impact of Bonnie and Clyde
A new American cinema and a new American film audience announced
themselves emphatically with the release in 1967 of Arthur Penn's Bonnie
and Clyde. This film, which was universally attacked by the critics
when it opened in August, had by November become the most popular
film of the year.* It would subsequently receive ten Academy Award
nominations and win two awards (Best Cinematography: Burnett Guffey;
Best Supporting Actress: Estelle Parsons), win the New York Film
Critics' Award for Best Script (David Newman and Robert Benton), and
be named the Best Film of 1967 by many of the critics who had originally
panned it. Most triumphant of all, perhaps, Bonnie and Clyde is the only
film ever to have forced the public retraction of a critical opinion by Time
magazine, which dismissed the film in a summer issue and in its issue
of December 8, 1967, ran a long cover story on its virtues. Indeed, the
phenomenal success of Bonnie and Clyde caused many retractions on the
part of veteran film critics who, on first viewing, had mistaken it for a
conventional, if gratuitously bloody, gangster film. Bonnie and Clyde
was in fact a sophisticated blend of comedy, violence, romance, and—
symbolically, at least—politics, which borrowed freely from the techniques
of the French New Wave (it was originally to have been directed
by Truffaut and then Godard) and which perfectly captured the rebellious
spirit of
