Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance

Representing Rough Rebels

D. Smith-Rowsey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137310385
• eBook ISBN: 9781137310392
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation took over the leading roles in Hollywood films. These untraditional-looking young men were promoted and understood as alienated and ironic everymen, and exerted a powerful, and until now unexplored, influence over a movement often considered the richest in Hollywood's history.

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How to Represent a Rough Rebel

There is a book to be written on the importance of ugly men in cinema.

Anthony Lane, 2007¹

Introduction

For its first 46 years, Time, America’s newsweekly of record, invariably featured illustrations of important people or events on its cover. The very first Time cover photograph, dated February 7, 1969, featured not a world leader, astronaut, or international conflict, but Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow, appearing in suggestive close-up and adorned by a headline that read “The Young Actors: Stars and Anti-Stars.” The article, written by Stefan Kanfer, Jay Cocks, and Carey Winfrey, positioned Hoffman and Farrow as nothing less than Hollywood’s best response to the counterculture. It read:

The Graduate and Rosemary’s Baby spin a new myth of lost innocence, of the individual against the wicked system. The new young actors themselves represent the death of many movie myths—among them, the one of the movie star. The big press buildup, the house in Beverly Hills baroque, the ostentation and the seven-picture commitment are giving way to a stubborn kind of performer who is as suspicious of the Hollywood system as a student rebel is of the university trustees.

The article quoted Hoffman: “Art has never been for the masses, but now people seem to see what’s good. The least I can do is try to make what I do as artistic as possible.” The article eventually associated even this kind of “anti-star” with artifice:

The anti-star attitude itself threatens to become a new pose or convention in which the Hollywood swimming pool is replaced by the interesting East Side pad, the Valley ranch by a Martha’s Vineyard retreat, the antic table-hopping by frantic political activism.

This was a partial reference to Hoffman’s campaigning for Eugene McCarthy; when more leftist candidates were available, Hoffman had taken Mr. McCarthy’s daughter to the Oscars as his date (for his nomination for The Graduate (1967)), and had stumped for Mr. McCarthy on college campuses, urging students to “Get Clean For Gene.” Time was particularly interested in Hoffman as a representative of a new sort of male movie star both offscreen and on:

As comedy grew steadily blacker and as audiences grew steadily younger, hipper and more draftable, the old concepts began to erode. The invulnerables like Peck and Holden and Wayne seemed lost in a country full of people whose destinies were not in their own hands. The nation of cities needed new images, and suddenly Hoffman became an archetype.²

If Time was right that we needed new “images,” who or what were the others? What exactly did Hoffman’s “archetype” represent? And what effect did his type have on cinema and American culture more generally?

In this book, I argue that male “anti-stars” of the late 1960s and early 1970s exerted deterministic power over the most transformative cinema of the time. They were more than just actors in films; on magazine covers and in popular discourse, they were positioned, promoted, and received as Hollywood’s best possible response to the young educated adults who ostensibly “did not trust anyone over thirty.” (The fact that these men were at least thirty years old is only the first of their interesting contradictions.) By close textual analysis of nine representative films made and released in a crucible period, I show how the performative styles of the most popular star-actors signified an absurdist, ironic alienation as well as the exclusion of women. By sampling the critical reception of the time, I show how these star-actors’ discursive constructs were understood and contextualized. Overall, I show that the star-actors functioned as privileged symbols for navigating the contradictory modes of resistance and traditionalism inherent in the films and the wider discourse.

Many books about cinema, and many non-fiction books that mention films, refer to motion pictures by their name, year, and director—for example, “The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971).” This is only the initial way that directors are privileged as singular, determinative artists of films. My book aims to show star-actors’ precise influence on films, partly as a corrective supplement to director-centered auteur theory, and partly to better understand the crucial nature of the actors’ contribution. How can we really understand cinema without more careful consideration of the power and effects of its star-actors?

For each time the press quotes a film’s director, then and now, the film’s star-actor is perhaps quoted ten times as often. But the “anti-star” quotes of the late 1960s were different from their predecessors: in the 1950s, Marlon Brando almost never mentioned Elia Kazan, James Stewart was not on record about Alfred Hitchcock, and so on. In contrast, the Rough Rebels often extolled their directors. They confirmed the power of the director and of themselves for having the agency and taste to choose the right directors. When Dustin Hoffman was asked why he chose to star in Little Big Man (1970), he said, “You go for a director, of course.”³ This particular “of course” was almost unheard of in the classical era. It is also true that the “anti-stars” moved quickly into independent producer alliances, and that Jack Nicholson even directed a film in this period (Drive, He Said (1971)). But far more often, these new stars presented themselves as stars and equal partners with the director on a film, as when Look wrote “Hoffman and [director Arthur] Penn turn Hollywood upside-down”⁴ or when Nicholson described the working process on the Mike Nichols-directed Carnal Knowledge as “Let’s run it by Nick and Nick.”⁵

Steve Neale points out that the first wave of so-called American auteurs is generally understood not to be late-1960s innovators like Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, but instead the young men that became famous directors in the 1970s, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.⁶ If this is true, it seems more than a coincidence that thirty-year-old(ish) everyman “anti-stars,” promoted as counterculture heroes, narrowly preceded these thirty-year-old(ish) everyman directors in the public discourse. It is more likely that the young actors’ creative and discursive triumphs gave rhetorical license to those of the young directors.

Paul McDonald identifies “the greatest gaps in research” regarding “what happened to the Hollywood star system after the breakdown of the vertically integrated studios.” The problem he identifies is, “In the absence of such research, it is not clear, for example, what differences may have existed in the organisation of the star system between the 1960s and 1970s, and how those periods compare to Hollywood stardom in the 1990s.”⁷ Responding to McDonald, this book addresses a relatively unexplored region in film studies, one that examines star-actors’ roles (in both senses) in representing the style and themes of a relatively contained cinematic period.

In 1972, Marsha Kinder wrote that films of what she called “the new American humanistic realism”—she named only The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and Five Easy Pieces—“render suspect their own ‘revolutionary’ perspectives by easing back into the values they appear to be questioning” partly because “the value of several of them depends largely upon performances, such as Dustin Hoffman’s in Midnight Cowboy, Jack Nicholson’s … in Easy Rider, and, to some extent, Nicholson’s in Five Easy Pieces.”⁸ For Kinder, this was sufficient as a one-off observation to set up her analysis of what she saw as more challenging films. However, I suggest that categorical statements like hers warrant a great deal more unpacking.

To this end, I closely examine films featuring three star-actors—Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Elliott Gould—who moved from Academy Award-nominated supporting roles to newsweekly magazine covers and leading roles during this period. By all measures, they were central to film culture and even American culture at this time. I have chosen their representative films based on box-office success and Oscar nominations. I have seen no history of the “New Hollywood”—I prefer the more distinctive term “Hollywood Renaissance”—that does not include at least one (and usually many more) of the films and directors examined here. If part of my work is to complicate received history, these projects are a good place to start. All of these films were promoted as expanding the general possibilities of cinema, including but not limited to being the “first” to break some kind of taboo, usually regarding sex, violence, and/or profanity.

The following films are closely analyzed herein:

Midnight Cowboy (1969), directed by John Schlesinger—featuring Dustin Hoffman

Little Big Man (1970), directed by Arthur Penn—starring Dustin Hoffman

Straw Dogs (1971), directed by Sam Peckinpah—starring Dustin Hoffman

Easy Rider (1969), directed by Dennis Hopper—featuring Jack Nicholson

Five Easy Pieces (1970), directed by Bob Rafelson—starring Jack Nicholson

Carnal Knowledge (1971), directed by Mike Nichols—starring Jack Nicholson

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), directed by Paul Mazursky—featuring Elliott Gould

M*A*S*H (1970), directed by Robert Altman—starring Elliott Gould

Beröringen (The Touch) (1971), directed by Ingmar Bergman—starring Elliott Gould

Why only 1969 to 1971? Why nine films, three in each year, three by each actor? What does this schematic approach demonstrate that other approaches might not have? First, the period beginning in 1968 (when these films went into production) and ending in 1971 was a crucible time for both Hollywood and American culture more generally—the words “seismic shift” would not be hyperbole. From 1968 to 1971, social unrest, protests against the Vietnam War, and the counterculture surged (or perhaps raged) and peaked. In response, the mainstream press interviewed—and as often as not, anointed—every “symbol” of young discontented adults it could find. Almost coincidentally, the studios were in their worst-ever financial straits, the rating system had just been overhauled, and Kodak had recently perfected the dull tones of much color (minimizing the previous “brightening” effect of color that had made it seem garish for serious dramas). As often noted by film historians, the general spirit of experimentation led to the validation of entire new genres, such as blaxploitation, mainstream pornography, road movies, and disaster movies.

The first Nixon administration was thus a period of unique fluctuation and maximal opportunity for filmmakers, establishing standards for succeeding decades. (The only other four-year period of comparable change in America and its film industry would probably be 1928–31, and in fact there are interesting parallels between the very polarized public perceptions of early-1930s gangsters and late-1960s countercultural rebels.) However, historians, in their rush to celebrate the young auteur directors of the period, rarely mention the change in onscreen personnel. Dennis Bingham provides a welcome corrective to this when he writes:

A massive generational turnover, the likes of which had not been seen since the coming of sound, took place in only a few years—roughly 1967–71. It gave these “New Hollywood” actors opportunities for lasting power as producers, directors, or actors as auteurs. They displaced a generational cohort that, in the youth wave and the collapse of the mass-audience blockbuster, lost the bankability many of them had owned for two decades or more. Among these were Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn, Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, William Holden, Jack Lemmon, Marlon Brando, and James Stewart.⁹

Bingham suggests that new dramas were hardly going to star Bob Hope and Doris Day; new faces were needed to assure young audiences that someone was speaking for and to them.

Why three films for each of three actors? I suggest not merely that Dustin Hoffman had a determinative influence on a crucial transition period of American cinema; actors like him did. This focus is justified through the neglect of close analysis in most histories of the period and the need to limit my sample. Too many more films and star-actors would have been belaboring the point; fewer star-actors would have been a more narrow, subjective argument. Robert Sklar writes in City Boys about a type that was apparent “in a number of movie performers of the 1930s and 1940s” but he chose to focus on James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield “because of their diversity and because of their similarity (and, to be sure, personal preference).”¹⁰ Echoing Sklar, I can say that I also might have chosen other subjects, like Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Gene Wilder, Richard Benjamin, Bruce Dern, Donald Sutherland, or Alan Arkin. Any of the men on that list, along with my subjects, could be considered Rough Rebels. (As a side note, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and Steve McQueen were Rebels, but were not quite as rough. It speaks to the Rough Rebels’ ascendance that in 1970—a year after the smash hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—Robert Redford starred in zero films and Elliott Gould starred in four. Warren Beatty went through a similar [brief] eclipse, only to reappear in full beard in 1971 in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In other words, at their peak, Rough Rebels were actually preferred over more traditionally handsome leading men. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 How to Represent a Rough Rebel
• 2 Dustin Hoffman: The Artistic Star
• 3 Jack Nicholson: The Realistic Romantic
• 4 Elliott Gould: The Urban Don Quixote
• 5 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index