The Way We Were

...It is not their fault that the medium’s moment of primacy has long since passed, supplanted in the public imagination by long-form television like The Sopranos and The Wire...

...The movie was the perfect expression of the youth worship that typifi ed the 1960s, with its soulless and corrupt middleaged bourgeois offering nothing but spiritual death to their soulful and pure kids...

...Its humor was deadpan, its tone cool, its protagonist depressed...

...The kicker of a sketch-comedy moment near the fi lm’s beginning—“plastics”— became one of the most famous punchlines in movie history...

...In the Heat of the Night would take the Oscar that year, in what was perhaps the fi rst Academy Award balloting in which liberal self-congratulation played a notable role...

...Pictures at a Revolution chronicles the making of the fi ve Oscar-nominated fi lms of 1967...

...It was Kael who made the most compelling case for the movies as the premier cultural message board— not because they followed in the formal footsteps of plays or novels or paintings, and not because they had a unifi ed author and a unifi ed vision, but because they were exciting and vivid and fresh and entirely new...

...He hated Bonnie and Clyde for what he thought was its nihilism and ugliness, and wrote several pieces denouncing it...

...What was particularly signifi cant about The Graduate was the sense that director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry had caught lightning in a bottle by capturing their audience’s mood of disgruntled alienation...

...At the same time, newspapers across the country are ridding themselves of in-house critics as a cost-cutting measure and using cheap stringers or wire service copy instead...

...As Harris recounts, Bonnie and Clyde was slow to catch on, in part because of Crowther’s attacks, but catch on it did...

...The Graduate offered a remarkable example of how quickly an American movie could become the stuff of legend...

...But perhaps even more sobering, movies just don’t seem to matter as much...

...Based on a far less interesting novel of the same name, The Graduate was a demonstration of how movies had supplanted novels when it came to offering young cultural consumers a taste of The Way We Live Now...

...Kael was the inspiration for the critics who fi nd themselves on the chopping block today...

...In the Heat of the Night featured Poitier as a tough Philadelphia police detective who ends up investigating a murder in a Mississippi town — and who, in one of the great fantasy-fulfi llment moments in all of American cinema, answers a demeaning slap across the face from a racist businessman with a slap right back...

...Bonnie and Clyde proved to be the most infl uential of the fi ve fi lms, since it was the fi rst mainstream movie with graphic depictions of violence—and since it offered a portrait of the United States in which the authorities were more bloodthirsty and psychotic than the criminals...

...And yet from the moment moviegoers cast eyes on it, The Graduate became a dominating subject in the American cultural conversation...

...In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Poitier was saintly and without blemish as a Harvard-educated doctor engaged to marry the white daughter of a liberal San Francisco family...

...The result was that its star and producer, Warren Beatty, became the King of New Hollywood, and Bosley Crowther was cashiered by the New York Times...

...Crowther’s place as the dean of American fi lm criticism was soon fi lled by Pauline Kael, who was hired that same year by the New Yorker in part because of an essay she had published in the New Republic in praise of Bonnie and Clyde...

...The leading movie critic for the three decades preceding its release was Bosley Crowther of the New York Times...

...Mark Harris has just written a juicy book called Pictures at a Revolution about the precise moment when the old Hollywood dream machine gave way to the young directors, producers, and writers who wanted to make provocative and challenging fi lms rather than glossy studio pablum —which happened to be the same moment that the new breed of movie critics took over from the fuddyduddies who sniffed at the medium’s radical possibilities...

...One of them was entirely negligible —the elephantine musical version of Doctor Dolittle, which nobody on earth liked but for which the employees of 20th Century Fox dutifully voted on their Academy Award ballots...

...The average working movie critic came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when fi lm seemed to be the most urgent of art forms...

...The other four nominees were far more interesting...

...Watch The Graduate today and, if you’re like me, you want Sidney Poitier to come out of the pool and slap Dustin Hoffman across the face for being such an ungrateful, petulant white boy...

...Two of them refl ected Hollywood’s growing outspokenness on race, with Sidney Poitier the pivotal fi gure...

...So much for the way we lived, circa 1967...

...But it was the fi nal two nominees—The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde—that really marked the transition from the old to the new...

...The job has gotten far more diffi cult in the past 15 years, because vastly more movies are being made and released—for example, 150 fi lms received a theatrical release in New York City in 1985, whereas last year there were more than 400...

...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...