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Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan

2022; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2022.0002

1548-9922

Douglas J. Long,

Cinema and Media Studies

Reviewed by: Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan Douglas Long Stephen Farber & Michael McClellan, Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020, 252 pages, ISBN 978-1-9788-0882-9 The subtitle of Cinema ’62, by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan, trumpets that 1962 was “The Greatest Year at the Movies.” The authors began extolling that year’s cinematic attributes in 2002, when Farber wrote a New York Times article that coincided with McClellan’s retrospective of 1962 films at Landmark Cinemas in Los Angeles. The “greatest” claim challenges the often-cited “greatest” year of 1939, which serves as a motif throughout the book, often as a comparative point to illustrate change. The studio system that defined 1939 cinema was in collapse by 1962. The Production Code that dominated content in 1939 was repeatedly breached in the latter year. Foreign films, which received little U.S. release in 1939, got wide play in 1962 when art houses flourished. Black and white film, the primary format in 1939, had its final year of dominance in 1962, the last time there were more monochrome movies than color. In addition to this comparison of “best” years, Cinema ‘62 is a fascinating look into the way filmmaking from that year intersected with social and political strains, both within and outside of the film industry. They summarize, “The American movies produced and released in 1962 reflect the youthful, optimistic spirit of the Kennedy administration” [209]. They also discuss the films in terms of current events, including advances in civil rights and John Glenn’s orbiting of the earth during the U.S. space race with the Soviet Union. The book is not organized by chronology or genre, but rather by innovations. Chapters focus on “New American Auteurs” (including Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah), turnover from Classic Hollywood to new filmmakers and actors (prior to the “New Hollywood” that began at the end of the 1960s), the proliferations of psychological themes and screen adaptations, the shift to color films, the focus on formerly taboo subjects, and the effect of the Kennedy era’s “New Frontier” on the film world. The “New Frontier” chapter includes an extended discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird, placing it firmly within the Civil Rights Era, a year when Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for protesting segregation, President Kennedy sent the National Guard to ensure that black student James Meredith could attend the University of Mississippi, and movie theatres in the South were desegregated. The Cold War era was the focus of the year’s most biting satire, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, with McCarthyism and assassination among its elements. The authors note that the film was pulled from distribution for more than two decades after the Kennedy assassination. Significantly, the book first explores foreign films released in the U.S. that year, some of which were made in 1960 & ’61. They call 1962 the “year of the art house,” when cities throughout the U.S. featured first-run showings of classics including Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, Polanski’s debut, Knife in the Water, Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Renais’ Last Year at Marienbad, and two Antonioni classics, La Notte and L’Eclisse. Pietro Germi’s comedy Divorce, Italian Style, won the screenplay Oscar and its star, Marcello Mastroianni, was the first Best Actor nominee for a foreign-language performance; earlier in 1962, Sophia Loren won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in the Italian film Two Women (1961). The frank sexuality of these films, which were not constrained by the Production Code, accounts for part of their success in the U.S. The authors assert that not only did foreign cinema find success in the U.S., but it affected American filmmaking. This was particularly true of the French New Wave, represented not only in French films, including Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Shoot the Piano Player (made two [End Page 56] years earlier, but released in the U.S. in 1962) and Agnes Varda’s breakthrough Chloe from 5 to 7, but also British films such as Tony Richardson’s A...