7,714 Movies, and Counting

Strikingly, the first two or three pages (the early and mid-'50s) are riddled with the names of Roman epics and tales of medieval chivalry ("Demetrius and the Gladiators," "Quo Vadis," "The Black Shield of Falworth," "Knights of the Round Table," "Ivanhoe," "Robin Hood," etc.). It was as if our dominant empire, flush with postwar confidence, saw itself reflected in gigantic epics about great empires past. The history may have been ridiculously romanticized, the sets overlit, the exposed flesh maximized, the movies an excuse to show off the new widescreen technologies (CinemaScope, VistaVision), but the popularity of these movies reveals an era when we could be assumed to be interested in history, and not just our own.

By page five I've reached 1958. My printing shifts from all caps to lowercase, and everything else seems to change, too, as adolescence sets in. My 200th entry is the Faulkner-inspired "The Long, Hot Summer" (Excellent), with sexy troublemaker Paul Newman sniffing around schoolmarm Joanne Woodward. It's a harbinger of Hollywood's obsession with the hothouse South. My list suddenly reeks of hormones, humidity and Freudian subtexts: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Sound and the Fury" "Summer and Smoke," "Suddenly, Last Summer"—tales of impotence and cannibalism, randy spinsters and repressed homosexuality. You can't underestimate how much the fever dreams of Tennessee Williams and William Inge (1961's "Splendor in the Grass") colored our views of the grown-up, carnal world. Is there a woman of my generation who didn't identify with sex-starved Natalie Wood in "Splendor," which seemed to say that you would go crazy if you had sex and even crazier if you didn't? In the hit parade of great late-'50s themes, sexual repression was near the top. (And herein were planted the seeds that would sprout, 10 years later, in the "summer of love.") For a teenager, the hot-button movie of '59 was "Blue Denim," with tortured Carol Lynley and Brandon De Wilde confronting the perils of teen pregnancy and backroom abortions. This was scary, titillating stuff.

In 1958 I fell under the hypnotic spell of Hitchcock's "Vertigo," got a virtuous lump in my throat watching the racial morality tale "The Defiant Ones," rushed out to buy the stirring soundtrack to the Western "The Big Country" and decided that George Stevens—who had made my favorite, "Giant"—was my idea of a great director: my father took me to a revival of Stevens's "A Place in the Sun," which featured the greatest screen kiss (between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift) in Hollywood history. OK, so I wasn't exactly a typical teen moviegoer. I was a very serious young fellow.

But Hollywood could teach us baby boomers only so much. In the early '60s, my high-school years, I discovered foreign films. "The 400 Blows" and "Jules and Jim" were revelations, expanding my view of what movies, and life, could be: why did reality seem so much more real in European movies? They moved to a different rhythm: fresher, sexier, more adult. Forget Stevens, Truffaut was my new main man. I dragged all my baffled friends to repeated viewings of Alain Resnais's "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" (I said I was serious), and would ride the bus for an hour to get to the Vista theater, where Satyajit Ray's "The World of Apu" or an Ingmar Bergman movie would be playing. Was anybody cooler than Jean-Paul Belmondo in "Breathless"? We knew we were supposed to decry the emptiness of those jaded jet-setters in "La Dolce Vita," but damn, that decadence looked mighty tasty.

Looking over my list from my high-school and college years I'm astonished by how few of the movies were mainstream Hollywood fare. Only a few studio movies could rival the audacity of the overseas films: the chillingly subversive "The Manchurian Candidate," Kubrick's "Lolita" and his apocalyptically hilarious "Dr. Strangelove," a brazen affront to the cold-war status quo. We were a generation in need of new role models, and suddenly in the mid-'60s they arrived—imported from England. Enter the Beatles, long-haired, cocky and exuberantly dismissive of all things establishment. The rock-and-roll tempo and improvised charm of "A Hard Day's Night" seemed to render Hollywood musicals hopelessly obsolete. The new sybaritic Eden was swinging London ("The Knack"), center of all things hip. British cosmopolitanism was the ideal: Sean Connery's martini-sipping James Bond was the action hero of choice, Peter Sellers the high priest of low comedy, heartbreaking Julie Christie ("Darling") the very model of mod. The "Angry Young Men" English movies—"Room at the Top," "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning," "This Sporting Life," "A Taste of Honey," then movies like "Morgan" and "The Servant" and "Accident"—were ostensibly (if you were a Brit) about class, but for many of us American kids they offered the first taste of the rebellious spirit that was about to transform the country.

Any story about boomers and their movies has to pivot on two titles from 1967: "The Graduate" and "Bonnie and Clyde." These were Hollywood productions from filmmakers, Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn, who were consciously channeling European modes (the screenwriters of "Bonnie and Clyde" had written it with Truffaut in mind). The generational wars, fueled by rage about Vietnam, had commenced ("Don't trust anyone over 30!" being one of the more inane proclamations), and you could read the fault lines in Hollywood. Just look at the five movies up for the best-picture Oscar of '67. The Penn and the Nichols, watershed movies whose styles and attitudes pointed toward the future, were up against "Dr. Dolittle" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which seemed to hail from another era. The winner was a kind of Solomonic compromise between the old guard and the new: "In the Heat of the Night."