The battle lines were drawn at the 1969 Oscars between the Old Guard, represented by Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! and the Young Turks, represented by Midnight Cowboy and Z, with the middle-of-the-road Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seen as the likely compromise winner. So much for compromise!
In the end this was really about good movies vs. bad. Midnight Cowboy and Z were good movies, Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! were not, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, while it had its moments, wasnโt really all that good either.
Released in May when adult films could still be summertime box-office hits, the X-rated Midnight Cowboy proved to be an unqualified success. The rating, which was later changed to R, didnโt have the connotations such a rating would have just a few years later. Audiences of the day were intelligent enough to distinguish between a classily made film and pornography.
John Schlesingerโs film from James Leo Herlihyโs novel solidified the reputation of Dustin Hoffman as one of the great actors of his generation. The naรฏve, clean-cut Benjamin of The Graduate was suddenly the grizzled, old-before-his-time, con artist, Ratzo Rizzo, living off the kindness of strangers. The transformation was startling, the performance flawless. No less so was the performance of Jon Voight as Joe Buck, the Texas stud come to the big city to make it as a male prostitute. Equally impressive was the filmโs third star, the seedy de-glamorized New York of Schlesingerโs vision. John Barryโs haunting score also added immeasurably to the look and feel of the film which received seven Oscar nominations and won three for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.
Costa-Gavrasโ political thriller, Z, which won the New York Film Critics Award as Best Film of the year was the first foreign language film nominated for Best Picture since 1938โs Grand Illusion. Based on the true story of the cover-up of the assignation of a left-leaning doctor, a beloved former Greek Olympian, the film which starred Yves Montand, Irene Papas and Jean-Louis Trintignant, unfolds as a suspense filled mystery. The directorโs pulsating rat-a-tat-tat style is perfectly underscored by Mikis Theodorakisโ music, written under house arrest by the composer, who was a political prisoner of the right-wing Greek government and smuggled out to the director.
Nominated for five Oscars, it won for Best Foreign Film and Best Editing.
The middlebrow Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, directed by George Roy Hill, is remembered as the first film collaboration of Paul Newman and fast rising new star Robert Redford. It is also remembered for the Oscar winning song, โRaindrops Keep Falling on My Headโ and its iconic โdid-they-or-didnโt-theyโ ending. Nominated for seven Oscars, it won four, which in addition to its win for Best Song, included Best Score, Cinematography and Best Original Screenplay.
A huge stage success, Jerry Hermanโs Hello, Dolly! was a film that could have been the career highlight of any number of middle-aged to elderly actresses had they been given the title role, but instead Fox went for the big contemporary name โ Barbra Streisand, who, magnificent singing voice aside, was way too young and inexperienced to pull off the role of a middle-aged widowed matchmaker. Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Marianne McAndrew, Tommy Tune and others provided more authenticity of the material, but neither they nor the film itself were helped by Gene Kellyโs tepid direction. Nevertheless the film was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, for Art Direction, Sound and Scoring of a Musical.
Universal pulled out all the stops to promote Anne of the Thousand Days, a tired looking film of a 1946 Broadway play that attempted to appeal to the same audiences as Becket and A Man for All Seasons. The problem was that those films were taken from later, more literate and absorbing plays. The simplistic and obvious Anne, which told the same story as A Man for All Seasons from a different perspective, was made about twenty years too late. Its ten nominations included acting nods for Richard Burton as Henry VIII and Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn, but its only win was for its costumes.
Among the films Oscar liked, in addition to its Best Picture nominees, were They Shoot Horses, Donโt They?; True Grit; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; The Sterile Cuckoo; Sweet Charity; Aliceโs Restaurant; Last Summer; Easy Rider; Cactus Flower; Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; The Wild Bunch and The Damned,but not Oh! What a Lovely War; if…. or Medium Cool.
Scoring an impressive nine Oscar nominations, Best Director nominee Sydney Pollackโs depression era drama, They Shoot Horses, Donโt They?,won a Supporting Actor nod for veteran character actor Gig Young as a repulsive marathon dance emcee. Jane Fonda and Susannah York were nominated for their performances as competitors in the grueling dance competition, and Michael Sarrazin, Red Buttons, Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedelia turned in memorable performances as other burned out dancers.
John Wayne won the second Oscar nomination and first and only Oscar of his long career as one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn in the rousing first film version of Charles Portisโ True Grit, directed by Henry Hathaway. Elmer Bernsteinโs score accounted for the filmโs only other nomination.
The fifth Best Actor nominee, along with Wayne, Hoffman, Voight and Burton, was Peter OโToole in the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the original version ofwhich won Robert Donat an Oscar thirty years earlier. Leslie Bricusseโs Oscar nominated score is as lovely as it is lively, as are the performances of Petula Clark as Mrs. Chipping and Sian Phillips as her musical comedy star friend.
The opposite of the beloved Mr. Chips, Maggie Smithโs self-deluded Scottish girlsโ school teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, directed b Ronald Neame,was the surprise winner of the Best Actress Oscar over Horsesโ Jane Fonda and The Sterile Cuckooโs Liza Minnelli. The two second generation stars were widely believed to have canceled each other out, but that theory does not do justice to Smithโs magnificent performance which deserved to win on its own merits.
Heralded as the โbest musical of the 70sโ before the 60s were even over, Bob Fosseโs film version of the Broadway musical, Sweet Charity was all but forgotten by yearโs end, but the Shirley MacLaine starrer did manage to nab three technical nominations.
Restless youth was represented by Arthur Pennโs Aliceโs Restaurant, based on Arlo Guthrieโs best-selling record, which won the director his third nomination; Frank Perryโs Last Summer, which brought a Supporting Actress nomination to newcomer Catherine Burns as a lonely fat girl who is raped by the boys she admires and Dennis Hopperโs road movie, Easy Rider, which brought a Supporting Actor nomination and instant stardom to Jack Nicholson as a pot smoking lawyer.
Another player who became an instant star this year was Goldie Hawn, who won the Supporting Actress Oscar for Gene Saksโ film of the Broadway hit comedy, Cactus Flower,in which she was part of an unlikely triangle that included Walter Mattahu and Ingrid Bergman.
Hawnโs toughest competition was thought to be Dyan Cannon in Paul Mazurskyโs wife-swapping comedy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice with Natalie Wood, Robert Culp and Supporting Actor nominee Elliott Gould as her husband.
Best Original Screenplay nominations went to two of the yearโs most controversial films, Sam Peckinpahโs violent western, The Wild Bunch and Luchino Viscontiโs operatic look at the rise of Nazi Gemany, The Damned, both of which should have received recognition in other categories. The Wild Bunch was nominated for Jerry Fieldingโs score but nothing else, while The Damned couldnโt even muster a nomination for Helmut Bergerโs one-of-a-kind portrayal of a corrupt cross-dressing pedophile who winds up seducing his own mother.
At least those two highly acclaimed films ended up with something. Shame on the Academy for ignoring the yearโs best musical and best anti-war film, Richard Attenboroughโs Oh! What a Lovely War; the yearโs best youth-oriental film, Lindsay Andersonโs ode to anarchism, Ifโฆ and Haskell Wexlerโs near-documentary look at the bloody Chicago streets outside the 1968 Democratic Presidential Convention, Medium Cool.
All films mentioned except The Sterile Cuckoo and Last Summer have been released on DVD in the U.S.
The weekโs new DVD releases include the teen comedy, Easy A,and the thirty years later sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
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