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For those who believe the dumbing down of American movies is a recent and unprecedented phenomenon, a reeducation is in order. During the period 1961 to 1967, the American movie industry largely abandoned serious themes and so-called message pictures, the kinds of prestige films that, while usually not blockbusters, lent a patina of nobility to a business otherwise reputed to be crass. Examples abound of Hollywood's rejection of the downbeat and the downcast in favor of the inane. Musicals, whose heyday is generally considered the early 1950s, won three of the five Best Picture awards from 1961 to 1965, if the Oscars are any guide. Among established directors, Billy Wilder switched gears from the mordancy of The Apartment (1960) to the vulgarity of Irma La Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), and the Mad magazine-level satire of One Two Three (1961) and The Fortune Cookie (1966). Elia Kazan, whose thoughtful filmmaking set the standard for the 1950s, entered the '60s with a glorified teen flick, Splendor in the Grass. Fred Zinneman, one of the '50s most serious and prolific craftsmen, saw his output dwindle to one films between 1961 and 1965. Blake Edwards postponed his retooling for a couple of years, doing Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961 and Days of Wine and Roses in 1963. But by 1964 he was lost in the lucrative wilderness of The Pink Panther and in 1965 circus-mastered The Great Race. Even Stanley Kramer, whose name was synonymous with earnest, messagey movies, joined the party with 1963's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. And other, elder craftsmen like William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Ford were no longer even accommodated, the whole notion of a sensible sensibility being supplanted by something wilder.
Established actors were just as prone to the new irrelevance. Paul Newman, one of the few who might have withstood the trend, turned up in such unlikely fare as A New Kind of Love and What a Way to Go! Kirk Douglas wearied of the heroic and starred in the lone comedy of his prime, For Love or Money, for which he is not well remembered. Tony Curtis, after finally having earned respect as an actor with Sweet Smell of Success and The Defiant Ones, coasted through trifles like Goodbye, Charlie, Boeing Boeing, The Great Race, and Not with My Wife You Don't. Sidney Poitier was the lone black actor of any renown, but even his vehicles during this period — The Long Ships, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Bedford Incident — were oblivious to issues of color. He never had a female counterpart of comparable stature. Of female stars, Elizabeth Taylor helped the spectacle cycle breathe its last with Cleopatra (1963), then largely sat out the orgy. Audrey Hepburn maintained her popularity, but in undemanding tinsel like Paris When It Sizzles and My Fair Lady. In fact, the most popular female star of the time was Julie Andrews, a graduate not of RADA but of the musical stage.
This was the era when Hollywood tumbled into bed with Doris Day, James
Garner, Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, and other breezy specialists
in pseudosophisticated boudoir farce. The titles alone express the period's
infatuation with sex and money, ranging from the coy (Move Over Darling,
Send Me No Flowers, and Do Not Disturb, all Doris Day vehicles)
to the lewd (Who's Got the Action?, Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?, What
a Way to Go!, all featuring Dean Martin) to the vulgar (That Touch of
Mink, I'd Rather Be Rich, The Yellow Rolls Royce). Performers who came
into favor were veterans of variety shows and sitcoms: Robert Goulet, Andy
Williams, Tony Randall, and Bobby Darin all savored fleeting screen stardom
during this period. The particular skills of the lightweight, the obnoxious,
and the ham were suddenly in demand. Jerry Lewis and The Three Stooges
enjoyed an inexplicable heyday. Terry-Thomas turned up everywhere. Pamela
Tiffin made of air-headedness a viable method of acting.
While the quality of movies (one hesitates to call them films) of this era varied with the talent involved, many shared certain characteristics. For one, the star-studded cast. Films such as the 1960 Pepe (a failed attempt to endear the Mexican comic Cantinflas to American audiences), How the West Was Won (1962), The Longest Day (1963), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Is Paris Burning? (1965), A Guide for the Married Man (1967) and Casino Royale (1967) among them cameo'd virtually every SAG member then in good standing. J. Lee Thompson's What a Way to Go! (1965), while not equaling these others in terms of casting breadth, exceeded them in depth, featuring Shirley MacLaine and an unprecedented roster of marquee males — Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, and Gene Kelly — with two veteran TV stars, Dick Van Dyke and Bob Cummings, thrown in for the measure of overkill then seemingly required by the production code.
A glacial, gaudy Shirley MacLaine
and grinning fop
Gene Kelly summarize
the '60s in What a Way to Go!
What a Way to Go is emblematic of the period's excesses.* In the screenplay by the able Comden and Green, Ms. MacLaine's Louisa May is the product of a deprived childhood, and a skeptical convert to the homily that "money is the root of all evil." Yet each time she marries a man of similar circumstances and outlook, she inadvertently alters his fortune. And each time the husband's mounting greed brings on a sensational accidental death. She accumulates the wealth of her various deceaseds and then meets Robert Mitchum's Rod Anderson, a tycoon infinitely wealthier than she. Here, rather than spur her husband on to riches, she encourages him to divest and return to the simple life he betrays a longing for in his dreams (asleep, he utters — no pun intended — the name "Melissa," who turns out to be a dairy cow). But this plan backfires, literally, when Anderson is put into orbit, having mistaken the bull, Melrose, for Melissa at milking time. Bereft, Louisa returns to her home town, there finding true love at last in the person of Dean Martin's Leonard Crawley, erstwhile millionaire playboy whose advances Louisa had once spurned but who is now a humble farmer.
Although it seems to possess all the prerequisites for successful camp (i.e., a game cast, knowing screenwriters, and, in J. Lee Thompson, a director with no pretensions to high art), like most comedies of the period it falls stunningly flat, a victim in this case of an apparently limitless bankroll (the movie even parodies its own extravagance in a montage of "Lush Budget" features in which Louisa May stars at Mr. Anderson's adoring expense), and a script that substitute high-volume hysteria for good gags. To be fair, What a Way to Go! does have its moments, largely thanks to the charm of its male leads. Van Dyke comes on like Rob Petrie on a caffeine high. Dean Martin is breezily repulsive (he is at one point portrayed as, and by, a lizard). Paul Newman for once seems to be enjoying himself. Even Robert Mitchum betrays a glint of mischievousness from beneath his mudflap eyelids. And Kelly is ever the trooper, even in the face of inferior material.
NEXT: An obsession with marriage
NOTE
* Excess was carried even to many of the titles: Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew From London to Paris in 24 Hours and 11 Minutes appeared in 1965 and 1963, respectively. Interrogative and "How to" titles were also oddly prevalent: Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, What's So Bad About Feeling Good?, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life, How to Murder Your Wife, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, How the West Was Won, etc.
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