1950s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1954, 1956
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Two film adaptations of author George Orwell's cautionary novels, the UK's first animated feature film Animal Farm (1954) and director Michael Anderson's film noirish 1984 (1956), starring Edmond O'Brien, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave, were altered. It was revealed in the late 1990s that the CIA was partly responsible for modifying or softening Orwell's message in both films during the European post-war era, to make the tone of each film more overtly anti-Communist. Both works were changed to include more upbeat endings. [Ironically, the same distortions were made by MCA-Universal Studios for Terry Gilliam's version of Brazil (1985) - another film about a futuristic totalitarian society.]
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1955
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The Todd-AO widescreen process (with 65-mm (or 70-mm) wide film) was successfully introduced with director Fred Zinnemann's Oklahoma! It was also the first of the Rodgers & Hammerstein operettas, and it was the first Broadway show to integrate the music, songs and dances as an essential part of the story and character development.
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1955
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Tragically, James Dean -- the prototype of a rebellious adolescent -- was killed in a car accident at age 26, driving his new 550 Porsche Spyder. His car collided with a 1950 Ford at 5:45 p.m. at the intersection of Routes 466 and 41 near Cholame, California. He had appeared in only three films: East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Giant (1956) - released posthumously. Both of his Best Actor Oscar nominations — for East of Eden and Giant — were also given posthumously.
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1955
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Movie studios opened their vaults for television rentals and sales. RKO Radio Pictures sold its film library to TV. RKO's King Kong (1933) was first televised in the US in 1956.
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1955
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The first feature animation in CinemaScope, Walt Disney's Lady and the Tramp, was released in the US. It also marked Disney's first full-length cartoon based on an original story rather than an established classic.
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1955
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Disneyland opened its first theme park in a former orange grove in Anaheim, California at a cost of $17 million.
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1955
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Blackboard Jungle was the first film to feature a rock-'n'-roll song, "Rock-Around-The-Clock." (sung by Bill Haley and His Comets during the credits). It was the first major Hollywood film to use R&R on its soundtrack. It inspired the next year's popular R&R film, Rock Around the Clock (1956).
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1955
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United Artists withdrew from the Motion Pictures Association of American (previously named the MPPDA) when it refused to issue a Production Code seal to its controversial film about drug addiction, director Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra. The film's success helped to loosen restrictions on such films. The code was amended to permit portrayals of prostitution and abortion as well as light profanity (the use of the words 'hell' and 'damn').
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1955
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The International Confederation of Art House Cinemas (CICAE - Confédération Internationale des Cinémas D’Art et Essai) was founded in Wiesbaden, Germany, to promote the diversity and visibility of all types of cinema. [An art house is a theater dedicated to the exhibition of films for a specialized audience, either classic revivals or new releases, frequently foreign or independently produced domestic films.]
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1955
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The modest Best Picture-winning sleeper film Marty was the first award-winning film (awarded in 1956) to be adapted from a dramatic televised play broadcast earlier. It was also the second Best Picture Oscar-winning film to also win the top prize (known as the Golden Palm (Palme d'Or)) at Cannes, and the shortest Best Picture winner (at 91 minutes). The promotional campaign for the film was more expensive than the film itself ($400,000 vs. $343,000) -- a Hollywood first. Tactics included offering 16mm prints of the film for viewing by Academy members - the pioneering forerunner of sending out videotape (or DVD) screeners many years later.
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1955
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The first atonal score for a narrative, feature-length Hollywood commercial film was in Vincente Minnelli's and MGM's The Cobweb - Leonard Rosenman's avant-garde soundtrack was perfectly suited for the film's private psychiatric clinic setting.
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1955
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Indian director Satyajit Ray's first film, the low-budget, coming-of-age tale Pather Panchali (aka The Song of the Road, or The Lament of the Path), was the first of an "Apu Trilogy" followed by Aparajito (1956) (aka The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959) (aka The World of Apu); it realistically portrayed low-class poverty in India through the eyes of its adolescent protagonist Apu (Subir Banerjee). It was the first Indian film to receive major critical attention internationally.
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1956
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Federico Fellini's Italian film La Strada, released in 1954, was the winner of the first official Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film -- awarded in 1956. Before this, there had only been a Special Academy Award (from 1947-1949) and an Honorary Academy Award (from 1950-1955) for Best Foreign Film.
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1956
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After making 16 movies together, the Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin film duo broke up, after the comedy/musical Hollywood or Bust.
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1956
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The beautifully-elegant actress Grace Kelly, "Hollywood's Fairy Tale Princess", married Prince Rainier III of Monaco. After appearing in such films as High Noon (1952) opposite Gary Cooper, John Ford's Mogambo (1953) opposite Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, films for Alfred Hitchcock (as his icy cool blonde) including Dial M For Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955), her Best Actress-winning The Country Girl (1954), and High Society (1956), Kelly retired from film-making.
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1956
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The film industry forbade racial epithets in films, but began to permit references to abortion, drugs, kidnapping, and prostitution under certain circumstances.
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1956
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Two science-fiction classics: Forbidden Planet and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, were released.
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1956
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Legendary producer/director Cecil B. DeMille remade his own 1923 silent epic, The Ten Commandments -- it was his last film, and his first and sole widescreen feature film. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, and provided actor Edward G. Robinson with a comeback role after he was unfairly blacklisted in the 1950s.
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1956
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Rock Around the Clock featured disc jockey Alan Freed and the group Bill Haley and His Comets (singing the title song) and many others (such as the Platters and Freddy Bell and The Bell Boys). It was the first film entirely dedicated to rock 'n' roll.
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1956
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Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy was one of the first key films dealing with teenage homosexuality.
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1956
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Elvis Presley's first film, Love Me Tender, was released, followed by Jailhouse Rock the next year. Elvis Presley also made an appearance on the TV variety show "The Ed Sullivan Show".
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1956
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The Wizard of Oz (1939) was first televised on CBS-TV on November 3rd -- an event that would become an annual holiday season event. It was the first feature-length film broadcast on TV.
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1956
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The first practical videotape recorder (VTR) was developed by the AMPEX Corporation in 1951. The first commercially-feasible ones (with 2 inch tape reels) were sold for $50,000 in 1956. Videotape became a staple of TV productions.
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1956
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Short on cash (like many Hollywood studios), Warner Bros. agreed to sell film rights to almost 800 feature films and 1,800 shorts to the Lansing Foundation.
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1956
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For the controversial film Baby Doll, the longest billboard ever made was placed in Times Square (NYC), displaying an image of star Carroll Baker (as Baby Doll) lying in a crib, in a sundress, and sucking her thumb.
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1956
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Le Monde du Silence/The Silent World (1956, Fr.), a nature documentary co-directed by Jacques Yves-Cousteau and Louis Malle, was the Palme d'Or winner - the first documentary to win this award. It also was the first film to use underwater cinematography to show the ocean depths in color.
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1957
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The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' bylaws denied eligibility for Oscar nominations or consideration to anyone who admitted Communist Party membership or refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
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1957
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Roger Vadim's ...And God Created Woman was released in the US (heavily censored), starring international French starlet and pouty sex kitten nymphet Brigitte Bardot, ushering in a new level of sexuality into films.
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1957
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The Caribbean romance film Island in the Sun was noted as groundbreaking in the late 50s for its two inter-racial romances. There was hugging and kissing in the inter-racial romance between local West Indian dime store clerk Margot Seaton (Dorothy Dandridge) and the governor's white aide David Archer (John Justin); the film was notable for being the first Hollywood film with an inter-racial screen kiss; in another parallel romance, however, there was only the holding of hands (reflecting a double standard regarding the black male) between Joan Fontaine as socialite Mavis Norman and Harry Belafonte as politically-ambitious black union official David Boyeur.
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1957
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The high-grossing teenage-oriented horror film and cult classic from the exploitation studio American-International, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, starred Michael Landon in a dual role. This rock and roll horror film (the first?) made popular the term "I Was A Teenage...".
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1957
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The famed Universal monster Frankenstein appeared for the first time in color, in UK Hammer Studio's version The Curse of Frankenstein directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, and Christopher Lee as the Monster. This film marked the advent of a long cycle of the studio's stylistic gothic horror films for the next few decades, with Lee also playing the famed Dracula vampire, as in Fisher's Horror of Dracula (1958) the next year.
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1957
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Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's allegorical and influential classic art film The Seventh Seal (aka Det Sjunde Inseglet, Swe.), told of a symbolic chess game between black-robed Death (the Grim Reaper) and a 14th century knight (Max von Sydow) -- a treatise on God's existence and on life and death.
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1958
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The number of drive-in theaters in the U.S. peaked near 5,000. The mania for horror and science-fiction films also peaked in the late 50s.
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1958
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Following the success of Best Picture-winning Around the World in 80 Days (1956), producer Michael Todd (the third husband of Elizabeth Taylor) and co-developer of the Todd A-O sound system, was killed in a plane crash near Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 22, 1958. Taylor went on to 'steal' married actor Eddie Fisher (Todd's best friend) away from Debbie Reynolds. Following a quickie divorce, Fisher married Taylor the same day - May 12, 1959.
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1958
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The naturalistic, documentary-like cinéma verite (Fr.) technique (also called "direct cinema" (US) or "free cinema" (UK), and literally meaning 'film truth') began to spontaneously flourish in the late 50s and early 60s. It was characterized by the use of non-actors, hand-held cameras, on-location shoots, and non-intrusive filming techniques.
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1958
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Two of the more notable, low-budget alien-invasion and aberrant monster films were released: The Blob (with Steve McQueen in his first starring role) and The Fly.
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1958
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Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece of obsession, Vertigo, misunderstood and panned by critics when first released, used the 'smash-zoom' (track out and zoom in simultaneously) visual effect to simulate vertigo in the main protagonist (James Stewart).
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1958
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Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, with its incredible and breathtaking, three-minute, uninterrupted crane tracking shot under the opening credits, was the last of the film noirs in the classic period.
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1958
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The Cohn brothers (Harry and Jack), in control of Columbia Pictures since the 20s, were posthumously succeeded by Abe Schneider and Leo Jaffe. (Columbia had three successful Best Pictures in the 50s: From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).)
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1958
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This year was marked with more Hollywood scandal for actress Lana Turner, known for her highly publicized affairs with men like Howard Hughes, Tyrone Power and Frank Sinatra. A small-time gangster named Johnny Stompanato was fatally stabbed with a butcher knife by Turner's 14 year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane during an incident of abuse in their home in Beverly Hills. During the inquest (filmed for TV), she nearly collapsed on the stand during dramatic testimony. The killing was declared a justifiable homicide by the coroner's jury. The scandal actually jump-started Turner's career, with her most successful film ever, Imitation of Life (1959).
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1958
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The Decks Ran Red, MGM's sea-faring suspense drama, featured the first inter-racial screen kiss, between Stuart Whitman (as crew member Leroy Martin) and Dorothy Dandridge (as the cook's flirtatious wife Mahia). See Tamango (1959) in the following year for a repeat of this milestone.
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1958
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Polish director Andrzej Wajda's wartime drama Ashes and Diamonds (aka Popiol i Diament, Pol.), the third in a trilogy of films, appealed to Polish youth. It was an anti-war film about resistance members in post-war Poland who were ordered to assassinate a Communist leader.
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1959
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The French "New Wave" (La Nouvelle Vague) movement (dubbed with the term in 1959) was marked by the works of forerunner Roger Vadim, and by the release of Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) (aka Bitter Reunion), followed shortly by Francois Truffaut's feature film debut The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (A Bout de Souffle). These inexpensive films were typified by the use of the jump cut, the hand-held camera, natural lighting, non-linear storytelling, on-location shootings, and loose, improvised direction and editing. Other French "New Wave" releases in the same year included Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus, Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins, and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. The innovative film movement would last until the mid-1960s and remain an important influence on later film-making (i.e., the works of John Cassavetes, Quentin Tarantino, and others).
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1959
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The chariot race sequence in director William Wyler's Best Picture-winning, wide-screen Technicolor epic blockbuster Ben-Hur set the standard for all subsequent action sequences. It was the first film to win eleven Oscars (it lost only in the Screenplay category), breaking the record of 8 Oscar wins originally set by Gone With the Wind (1939) and 9 Oscar wins set a year earlier by Gigi (1958). The spectacle of the film was designed to lure audiences away from their televisions.
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1959
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The comic team of The Three Stooges made their last (180th) film, Sappy Bullfighters.
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1959
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Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty, shot in Technirama, was the second animated feature shot in widescreen, and the most expensive animated film to date (at $6 million).
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1959
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50s B-horror film director and impresario schlockmeister William Castle created the Percepto format for The Tingler. It consisted of installing small electric motors under the theatre seats and shocking viewers with a mini-jolt of buzzing vibration when Vincent Price appeared on screen or when blood-curdling screams were desired.
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1959
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Aroma-Rama, an experimental, short-lived scenting system developed by inventor Charles Weiss, was introduced to add over 50 scents to Carlo Lizzani's Italian documentary film about Red China titled Behind the Great Wall (narrated by Chet Huntley), by filtering 'Oriental' aromas into the auditorium through the air-conditioning system. The following year, a competing process was called Smell-O-Vision.
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1959
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Tamango, Hal Roach's film about a slave ship voyage en route to Cuba from Africa, was noted as having the second inter-racial screen kiss, between slave ship Captain John Reiker (Curt Jurgens) and his slave mistress/concubine Aiche (Dorothy Dandridge). The film was initially banned due to its inter-racial romance.
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1959
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In October of this year, violet-eyed, buxom Elizabeth Taylor made history when she secured a contract with 20th Century Fox in October 1959 to star in Cleopatra (1963) - she simultaneously became the highest-paid performer in the history of Hollywood at $1 million, the first Hollywood star to receive the monumental sum for a single picture.
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1960s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1960
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The master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock's psychological horror-thriller film Psycho terrified audiences. It served as the "mother" of all modern horror suspense films, featuring Bernard Herrmann's famous and memorable score with shrieking, harpie-like piercing violins, and the notorious shower scene. It was the first American film ever to show a toilet flushing on screen.
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1960
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Alfred Hitchcock received his fifth and last nomination as Best Director for Psycho (1960). His four previous nominations (all losses) were for Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), and Rear Window (1954).
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1960
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Michael Powell's disastrous Peeping Tom, a UK film about a voyeuristic photographer and sadistic serial murderer, was so vilified at the time of its release that it nearly destroyed Powell's career. However, critics, archivists, and other film enthusiasts, notably Martin Scorsese, have championed the film since then.
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1960
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The talented scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, received full credit for writing the screenplays for Preminger's Exodus and Kubrick's Spartacus, thus becoming the first blacklisted writer to receive screen credit. In 1960, Trumbo was finally reinstated in the Writers Guild of America. This official recognition effectively brought an end to the HUAC 'blacklist era'. (After his blacklisting, he wrote 30 scripts under pseudonyms, such as the co-written Gun Crazy (1949) with the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, and Roman Holiday (1953) under the name Ian McLellan Hunter (he was properly credited and given a posthumous Oscar for the latter in 1992). He also won the Best Writing: Original Story Oscar for The Brave One (1956), written under the front name of Robert Rich. He wasn't presented with his award until May of 1975, almost 20 years later.)
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1960
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31 year-old Stanley Kubrick was brought in to salvage the epic costume drama Spartacus (originally directed by Anthony Mann) -- a highly-successful production by star Kirk Douglas. It was auteur Kubrick's sole work for hire - he was able to avoid Hollywood almost completely afterwards, and began to direct movies on his own.
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1960
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The first feature film released in Panavision was Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960). The film was also the last B/W film to win the Best Picture Academy Award Oscar until Schindler's List (1993).
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1960
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Gimmicky Smell-O-Vision, developed by Mike Todd, Jr., son of the famed showman, piped odors or scents (through a "scent vent") to each seat in a theatre auditorium. Scent of Mystery (aka Holiday in Spain) was the only film made in Smell-O-Vision. (Over twenty years later, cult director John Waters paid homage to Smell-O-Vision with scratch-and-sniff "Odorama" cards for his classic film Polyester (1981).)
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1960
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The decline of Italian Neo-Realism was evidenced by director Federico Fellini's epic film La Dolce Vita and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura.
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1960
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Exploitation producer/director Roger Corman directed the original version of the low-budget horror comedy The Little Shop of Horrors, featuring an early appearance by actor Jack Nicholson. The cult film, a satire of the teen horror exploitation film, was later created in differing versions, including a big-budget off-Broadway rock musical in 1982 (and subsequently a Broadway production), director Frank Oz's expensive musical comedy remake Little Shop of Horrors (1986) (with an Oscar-nominated song: "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space"), and a Saturday morning cartoon series called Little Shop in 1991.
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1960
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Although the tradition of embedding 5-pointed pink stars in the sidewalk ("the Hollywood Walk of Fame") along Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street was established by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, it wasn't until February 9, 1960 that the first star was awarded to actress Joanne Woodward.
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1960
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Low-budget showman William Castle (known as "The King of Ballyhoo") released his first "Illusion-O" feature film, 13 Ghosts - audience members were given red-and-blue colored 'ghost-viewers' in order to see the ghosts on-screen in the haunted house.
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1961
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The Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, Germany was closed during the production of Billy Wilder's Cold War comedy One, Two, Three (1961), forcing the studio to build a replica on a sound stage. The closing of the Gate was the precursor to the construction of the Berlin Wall -- and led to the film's famous opening lines, delivered in voice-over: "On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs #44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we're dealing with - REAL SHIFTY!"
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1961
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Sophia Loren was the first foreign-language performer to win the Best Actress prize for Two Women (1960) - in a film that was not in English. She currently remains the only actress to win an acting Oscar in a foreign-language film.
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1961
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Alain Resnais' enigmatic, puzzling, hallucinatory, and dream-like Last Year at Marienbad (aka L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, Fr.), was a film that explored the themes of time, truth and memory. It was one of the first films in a strong wave of post-war European art movies in the early 1960s.
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1961
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The 1957 Broadway hit West Side Story was adapted for the big screen, receiving eleven Academy Award nominations and winning all but one - Best Adapted Screenplay. Its achievement as a ten Oscar winner was only surpassed by three other films (each with eleven Oscars): Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Its many Oscars included wins for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris), Best Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno), and Best Director (co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). The Best Director Oscar marked the first time that awards went to co-directors, and Robbins was the only Best Director Oscar winner to win for the only film he ever directed.
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1961
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Audrey Hepburn starred as NYC socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Henry Mancini won two Oscars (Best Score and Best Song - Moon River) and four Grammy Awards for his musical score.
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1961
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TWA exhibited the first in-flight feature film on a regularly-scheduled commercial airline. It was MGM's By Love Possessed, starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., shown on TWA flights from New York to Los Angeles.
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1961
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The film How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), the first wide-screen CinemaScope Hollywood comedy, was the first film to be aired on the weekly NBC series Saturday Night at the Movies - in September of 1961.
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1961
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Method actor and maverick auteur film-maker John Cassavetes' low-budget, black and white, non-Hollywood studio film Shadows, was his first directorial effort - deliberately created as a contrast to Hollywood's studio system. The self-financed, self-distributed cinema verite film (initially shot in 1957) with a jazzy score was a story about an inter-racial couple. It was first publically screened in 1958, but then withdrawn, reshot in 1959, and then re-released - first to European audiences and then to US audiences in 1961. Shot on 16-mm film and using a non-professional cast and crew, the improvisational film symbolized the emergence of the New American Cinema movement, and inspired the growth of underground films and other independent ("indie") and personal works.
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1961
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The daringly courageous, landmark UK film, Victim, a noirish thriller starring leading man Dirk Bogarde, was the first important British film with a non-judgmental homosexual theme - a major turning point. It was the first English-language film to use the word "homosexual." Without prejudicial stereotypes, its message was tolerance at a time when homosexuality was considered a crime in the UK and US. [Six years later, the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 finally decriminalized homosexuality between consenting adults over the age of 21 (with a number of exceptions) in the UK.] As it pushed the boundaries of permissiveness, it was denied a 'seal of approval' from the MPAA for its US release in 1962.
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1961
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Marilyn Monroe's last completed film, before her death in 1962, was director John Huston's anti-western The Misfits (1961) -- it was also the last film of screen icon Clark Gable.
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1962
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More than 700 foreign-language films were released in US theaters during 1962.
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1962
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36 year old sex symbol Marilyn Monroe died (August 5) in the Los Angeles area (Brentwood) in a Mexican style bungalow of an apparent drug overdose. She was in the midst of filming with director George Cukor in Something's Got To Give (1962). Speculations arose over her associations with President John F. Kennedy and his brother.
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1962
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Dr. No inaugurated the successful, long-running, and highly profitable James Bond series of action films based upon Ian Fleming's works, with its first Agent 007 -- unknown actor Sean Connery. Other lead characters included George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig. Two non-canonical Bond films were Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983).
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1962
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The controversial production of Lolita, the first of Kubrick's films produced independently in England, was marked by a long casting search for the proper 'Lolita', the appointment of Vladimir Nabokov to write the screenplay for his own lengthy novel, Kubrick's rewriting (with co-producer James B. Harris) of Nabokov's unacceptable versions of the script, and the threat of censorship and denial of a Seal of Approval from the film industry's production code.
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1962
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Universal was purchased by talent agency MCA.
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1962
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Government regulations forced studios out of the talent agency business.
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1962
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The multi-directed Western epic How the West Was Won was the first non-documentary Cinerama film. It was also one of the last to use the old three-camera technique, that produced visible lines between the three panels.
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1962
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Marlon Brando was paid $1.25 million for his role in MGM's flop Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) as Fletcher Christian. It was a record sum - he was the first actor to break the $1 million threshold.
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1963
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Sidney Poitier won the Best Actor Academy Award (awarded in 1964) for Lilies of the Field, thereby becoming the first African-American to win this award. This was the only instance in the 20th century that this award was given to an African-American.
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1963
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Director Shirley Clarke's mainstream, fictional feature crime film The Cool World, a cinema verite-style examination of the rise of the Black Power movement and street gangs among African-Americans in the inner-city, was the first commercial film venture to be shot on location in Harlem. It was also the first feature film produced by documentarian Frederick Wiseman.
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1963
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The most expensive film ever made (in terms of real costs adjusted for inflation) -- and one of the biggest flops in film history -- opened: Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. Negative publicity was generated by the off-screen extra-marital affair conducted between major stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (as Julius Caesar) (married to Eddie Fisher and Sybil Burton respectively) - in the long run, it was beneficial for the film's bottom line, since it became the most expensive film made-to-date. The stars' off-screen indiscretions helped (although they were criticized on moral grounds), but it took many years for the film to recoup its enormous costs.
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1963
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Elizabeth Taylor was the first female star (or actress) to be paid a record $1 million for a film, for her lead role in the legendary epic film Cleopatra (1963).
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1963
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Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, an epic comedy with a lengthy running time (originally 175 minutes) and a huge cast (present day comedians and cameos from many big-name legendary stars from the past), was the first big-budget, all-star comedy extravaganza.
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1963
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Ampex, which had developed the world's first practical videotape recorder in 1956 for TV studios, began to offer its first consumer version of a videotape recorder, sold through the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue for $30,000 - a non consumer-friendly price.
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1963
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Friz Freleng (and David DePatie) created the cool, bluesy 'The Pink Panther' animation with a pink feline character for the opening credits of The Pink Panther.
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1963
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The low-budget, exploitative, and successful film company - American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1956, released their first "beach" film (mostly to drive-in theatres), the first of a 'beach movie' cycle of films - the musical comedy Beach Party. It was designed to appeal to the lucrative teen market, and was the first of a number of films to star popular singer Frankie Avalon and grown-up ex-Disney Mickey Mouse Club Mousketeer Annette Funicello (as Dolores or "DeeDee" in later films).
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1963
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The first theater originally designed (by inventor Stanley Durwood of American Multi-Cinema, now AMC Theatres) as a multiplex (a multi-screen movie theatre) opened in the Ward Parkway shopping center in Kansas City - it was called Parkway Twin (for its two screens). Megaplex screens (with up to 24 screens) and stadium-style seating would become additional features.
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1963
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Buxom, platinum blonde sex goddess/siren Jayne Mansfield appeared naked (breasts and buttocks) in the unrated sex farce Promises! Promises! (1963). Mansfield became the first mainstream actress to appear nude in an American feature sound film. (The honor would have been held by Marilyn Monroe in Something's Gotta Give (1962), but she died during production.) The original version was banned in many cities (including Cleveland) and substituted with an edited version. The provocative film was heavily publicized in Playboy's June 1963 issue, with pictures to prove it, that led to the magazine's publisher Hugh Hefner being charged with obscenity (and later acquitted) -- the only time in his life.
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1964
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The first feature-length made-for-TV movie, an action film titled See How They Run and starring John Forsythe and Senta Berger, was broadcast on NBC-TV for its world premiere. It was the first broadcast of Project 120, an innovative deal between Universal and NBC.
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1964
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Michelangelo Antonioni's and cinematographer Carlo DiPalma's visually-impressive French-Italian co-production Red Desert made spectacular use of the recently-perfected telephoto lens, to create a shallow depth-of-field. It was also Antonioni's first film in color, used in extreme and expressive ways.
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1964
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The mockumentary A Hard Day's Night, the first Beatles film, premiered.
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1964
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Sony began marketing the first reel-to-reel (video tape recorder) VTR designed specifically for home use in 1964 -- however, widescale consumer use of video tape recorders didn't really take off until the mid-1970s.
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1964
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Director Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, satirical, provocative black comedy/fantasy regarding doomsday and Cold War politics was released, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The landmark film - the first commercially-successful political satire about nuclear war, was a cynically-objective, Monty Python-esque, humorous, biting response to the apocalyptic fears of the 1950s.
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1964
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Goldfinger (1964), the third James Bond film in the long-running series, was the first James Bond film to receive an Academy Awards Oscar - Best Sound Effects Editing. It was also the first Bond film to receive an Academy Awards nomination.
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1964
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Ronald Reagan's last feature film appearance was in director Don Siegel's post-noir crime thriller The Killers in which he played 'heavy' or bad-guy crime boss Jack Browning - the first time he had ever played a villain.
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1965
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The film version of the Broadway musical The Sound of Music premiered. At the time of its release, it surpassed Gone With the Wind (1939) as the number one box office hit of all time. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it came away with five major wins including Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Wise).
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1965
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Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker became the first major Hollywood film to daringly and boldly feature a sequence of partial nudity (the bared breasts of Thelma Oliver), essential to the plot. However, it received the infamous "condemned" rating from the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency.
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1965
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A small-time TV comedy writer Woody Allen wrote his first feature length screenplay for director Richard Donner's unexpectedly-successful sex farce What's New Pussycat?, with Allen in his first major screen role. Because the writer/star disliked the film, he would proceed to his directorial debut for What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), a satire/spoof of quickly-made, badly-dubbed, exploitative, Japanese spy films, made in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
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1965
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Blonde teen star and the original Gidget character - Sandra Dee - was the last major star still under exclusive contract to a studio (Universal).
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1965
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Director John Lamb's nudist film, The Raw Ones, that extolled the virtues of a naturist lifestyle, was the first to openly show genitalia -- now allowed after a 1963 legal decision that ruled such displays of private parts were not obscene. This was an essential linkpin between the non-genital 'nudie-cutie' films of the late 50s, and the hard-core porn films of the 70s.
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1965
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The first Oscar-winning performance for a short, backside nude scene was for Julie Christie's portrayal of Diana Scott - an ambitious, vain, irresponsible, ruthless, promiscuous, and selfish hip, mini-skirted London model who tempted a serious-minded married journalist (Dirk Bogarde), and then tired and became a decadent, international celebrity/swinger, and finally ended up living a meaningless life as a disillusioned, bored wife of an Italian prince in Darling.
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