Writing about Jacques Tati's Playtime, Philip Kemp argued that the film was about "how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line." An apt description of Playtime, which begins inside a suffocating world of boxy sterility, demolishes it in that glorious restaurant sequence, and ends with the poetic dance of cars in a roundabout, turning and whirling in a perfect, angle-free, line-free circle.
But Tati wasn’t alone! In one sense or another, all the great films of 1967 are about the curve triumphing over the line. Take Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel’s evisceration of high society’s superficial, hypocritical prudish rigidity, or Bonnie & Clyde, whose main characters gleefully ditch the straight and narrow for a life of chaotic abandon. And of course there’s The Graduate, whose young lovers thumb their noses at the linear path the world has set for them - only to realize, in the final moments, that the line is also comfortable and easy, and the curve is also discomfiting and scary. They pick the curve anyway, of course - just like the real-life kids of ‘67, who were busy challenging corrupt institutions, rules, norms, mores, and traditions left and right. (The resulting discomfort and malaise would drive many of those kids, sadly, back to the line in the end - though maybe Ben and Elaine made it. We’ll never know.)
To identify the Best Picture of 1967, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
When it comes to 1967, the film world’s favorite flick seems to be Playtime. In 2012, Sight & Sound ranked Playtime among the top 50 films ever made in its prestigious surveys of critics and directors. (Nice redemption for Tati, whose career never fully recovered after the movie initially flopped.) Only one other ‘67 film squeaked into the top 100, Jean-Pierre Melville’s noiry Le Samouraï - maybe the one great movie of the year that embraces the line over the curve, at least going by its love of detailed police procedure. (Not to mention the brim of Alain Delon’s hat.)
Beyond Sight & Sound, though, critics’ rankings tend to elevate The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde as the top two films of the year. No surprise there: The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde were the leading films of the New Hollywood movement, America’s response to the French New Wave, just beginning to bloom in '67 as the demise of the Hays Code (finally!) gave American directors the same artistic freedom the Europeans had enjoyed for years. On the critics’ lists we examined, The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde are both ranked among the top 50 films of all time by the American Film Institute and Entertainment Weekly, and among the top 100 by The Hollywood Reporter and the National Society of Film Critics.
Here’s a list of 1967 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Playtime (T42)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Playtime (T37), Le Samourai (T91)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): The Graduate (17), Bonnie & Clyde (42), In The Heat of the Night (75)
Leonard Maltin: The Graduate, Bonnie & Clyde
National Society of Film Critics: The Graduate, Bonnie & Clyde
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): The Graduate (28), Bonnie & Clyde (99)
BBC American (2015): The Graduate (55)
BBC Foreign (2018): Playtime (33), Belle de Jour (75)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Bonnie & Clyde (4), The Graduate (33)
An especially strong showing for Bonnie & Clyde with Entertainment Weekly, though between the two, The Graduate tends to get ranked higher. (The BBC, for instance, snubbed Bonnie & Clyde entirely.)
Beyond The Graduate, Bonnie & Clyde, and Playtime, a few other 1967 films get stray mentions. Le Samouraï, most notably, makes Sight & Sound’s top 100 - but then there’s 1967’s Oscar winner, In the Heat of the Night, cracking the AFI’s ranking, and Belle de Jour appearing in the BBC’s list of the best foreign-language films. (The BBC also recognized Playtime, the only other critics’ list we found that did so.)
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes nineteen films from 1967:
(49) Playtime
(178) Mouchette
(201) Belle de Jour
(202) Le Samouraï
(217) The Graduate
(231) Wavelength
(243) Bonnie & Clyde
(308) Terra em Transe
(314) Week-End
(372) The Young Girls of Rochefort
(414) Don't Look Back
(522) Point Blank
(582) Marketa Lazarová
(675) Titicut Follies
(758) The Firemen's Ball
(767) Portrait of Jason
(805) Cool Hand Luke
(840) The Producers
(893) Branded to Kill
(TSPDT lists The Producers as a 1968 film, but we’re counting it here. It could go either way: the film debuted in November of ‘67 but didn’t get wide release until the following March.)
New Hollywood may be emerging, but TSPDT still prefers the French: the top four films here are all from France, with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette alongside Playtime, Belle de Jour, and Le Samouraï. The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde, a bit surprisingly, trail slightly behind - with another early New Hollywood classic, Cool Hand Luke, much further back.
An interesting side point: the “New Hollywood” is often styled as America’s version of the French New Wave, and of course the French New Wave is associated strongly with auteur theory and the centrality of the director. But with these early New Hollywood films, it’s the actors who take precedence in our minds. We’re more likely to associate The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft than Mike Nichols; Bonnie & Clyde is attached to Beatty and Dunaway more than Arthur Penn; and Cool Hand Luke is definitely Paul Newman’s movie. (Do you even remember who directed it? Stuart Rosenberg, whose second-best known film is The Amityville Horror.)
Is this just a coincidence, or a characteristic of the New Hollywood as a whole? Down the line, it’ll vary from film to film and director to director: Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid is an actors’ film (Redford and Newman over George Roy Hill), but Jaws and Star Wars are directors’ films (Spielberg over Scheider, Lucas over Hamill). How about The Godfather, though? Or Indiana Jones? That’s a tougher call.
General Audiences
But which films from 1967 do general audiences still watch?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger than average and more likely male, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1967, according to IMDB (as of June 27, 2022):
The Graduate (270,554 votes)
The Jungle Book (179,821)
Cool Hand Luke (175,201)
Bonnie & Clyde (111,839)
You Only Live Twice (108,487)
In the Heat of the Night (75,517)
The Dirty Dozen (72,469)
The Producers (55,684)
Le Samouraï (50,872)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (44,960)
Belle de Jour is in 11th place, just a few hundred votes out of the top ten. Playtime is a bit further back, in 16th place with (tragically!) only about half the votes of Belle de Jour.
The Graduate’s the clear winner here, nearly 100,000 votes ahead of any other movie. According to IMDB, The Graduate is the eighth-most viewed film of the 60s, and the only 1967 film that cracks the decade’s top 20. Less love for Bonnie & Clyde, which even trails Cool Hand Luke by a wide margin, but it still manages to make the top four.
Further back, strong showings for Le Samouraï and Belle de Jour, both among the ten most-viewed foreign-language films of the decade. Of course it was also a banner year for Sidney Poitier, who stars in two of the ten most-viewed films of 1967, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
But perhaps the most impressive showing of all: The Jungle Book! With nearly 180,000 votes, it is - at least according to IMDB - the most-viewed Disney film between Snow White and The Little Mermaid, beating out such classics as Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, 101 Dalmatians, and even Mary Poppins. Forget about your worries and your strife. (Hey Disney: Animal Kingdom could probably use a Jungle Book ride.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1967 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
Bonnie & Clyde (8) 172
The Graduate (4) 164
Belle de Jour (4) 143
Playtime (5) 105
Le Samouraï (1) 98
Week-End 79
Mouchette 63
The Producers 58
In Cold Blood 56
In the Heat of the Night 53
Cool Hand Luke 40
Point Blank 40
The Dirty Dozen 39
The Jungle Book 27
You Only Live Twice 19
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1) 10
Spider Baby 9
Branded to Kill 7
The Fireman's Ball 6
La Chinoise 5
How I Won the War 5
Two For The Road 5
Bedazzled 4
The Fearless Vampire Killers 3
Titicut Follies 3
Accident 2
To Sir, With Love 1
Wait Until Dark 1
Our panelists are divided on their top choice, but nearly all agree that it’s either Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Playtime, or Belle de Jour.
Thanks to eight first-place votes, Bonnie & Clyde edges out The Graduate in a nailbiter for the top spot. After those two New Hollywood classics, it’s France all the way down, with Belle de Jour, Playtime, Le Samouraï, Week-End, and Mouchette taking spots three through seven. (There's a big gap between fifth-place Le Samouraï and sixth-place Week-End, which will make our lives easy in a minute when we’re picking five Best Picture nominees.)
I’d say more, but there aren’t any big surprises here: we might have expected better showings for Cool Hand Luke or The Producers, but it was not to be. We’ll see Paul Newman again in two years when Butch Cassidy comes along, but Mel Brooks will have to wait seven years for his Young Frankenstein/Blazing Saddles doubleheader in ‘74. (See, Cool Hand Luke is an actors’ movie and The Producers is a directors’ movie. Not sure how it works.)
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
No difficulty this year: there have been five obvious choices almost from the start. Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate are locks; so is Playtime, despite its less-than-stellar showing with general audiences, and the same goes for Belle de Jour and Le Samouraï. These are our panelists’ top five; they’re all among the top seven with critics; and except for Playtime, they all perform well with general audiences too.
So our five Best Picture nominees for 1967 are:
BELLE DE JOUR BONNIE AND CLYDE THE GRADUATE PLAYTIME LE SAMOURAÏ
This is nomination number four for Luis Buñuel and nomination number two for Jacques Tati, but our other three directors (Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, and Jean-Pierre Melville) are first-time nominees. (For the record, the most recent director to win a Moonlight on their first nomination was François Truffaut, in 1959 for The 400 Blows.)
And if - in the New Hollywood style - we want to focus on actors: Le Samouraï is Alain Delon’s second nomination (joining The Leopard), and Belle de Jour marks Catherine Deneuve’s third nomination in the last four years (joining Repulsion and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). As with our directors, though, the most noteworthy entries here are the newbies: just between Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, this is our first encounter with Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, Dustin Hoffman, and Anne Bancroft - and Richard Dreyfuss, if you count his walk-on role in The Graduate.
These are clearly our top five, but what’s number six? In the Heat of the Night is the only other film we found that made a critics’ “best” list. The other two films in TSPDT’s top seven were Mouchette and the avant-garde Wavelength. The Jungle Book and Cool Hand Luke get the most love from general audiences. Godard’s Week-End is the runner-up with our panelists. And The Producers plays fairly well across the board. Of those, Cool Hand Luke probably has the best claim to the runner-up spot - it’s critically acclaimed and still a favorite with today’s moviegoers - but you could potentially make a case for Mouchette or The Producers too.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This is New Hollywood’s year: Playtime may be tops with TSPDT, but Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate are clearly the leaders across the board. They’re the most cited films on critics’ “best” lists; they’re the runaway top two with our expert panel; and of our five nominees, they’re easily the two most-watched films with today’s moviegoers.
It’s one or the other - so which is it? Tough call, but there’s a definite winner: Bonnie & Clyde may have a narrow lead with our panelists, but The Graduate has the edge with film critics and it’s clearly the favorite with general audiences. Plastics takes the gold.
And so: congratulations to The Graduate, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1967!
Interestingly, Mike Nichols - born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky - is just the second German-born director to win a Moonlight. The other? Ernst Lubitsch. (Josef von Sternberg and Fritz Lang were both Viennese; Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz, and Emeric Pressburger were all born in Hungary.)
On the flip side, Luis Buñuel becomes just the second director to earn four Moonlight nominations without a win; the other was Alfred Hitchcock, who finally broke through on his fifth nomination. (Hitch got his first four nominations in a six-year stretch, from 1935 to 1940; Buñuel’s nods have come in 1930, 1950, 1961, and now 1967.) If we went back and did the 1920s, Buñuel might already have a win for Un Chien Andalou in 1929 - though he'd have stiff competition that year too, from Man with a Movie Camera.
One other interesting note about The Graduate's win: while the film is highly acclaimed, it only ranks fifth for the year on They Shoot Pictures' critical aggregate. Only one other film has won the Moonlight despite finishing outside TSPDT's top four for the year: Yojimbo, which was seventh in 1961. (In fact, in the 38 years we've covered so far, only six films have won the Moonlight despite finishing outside TSPDT's top two.)
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1968, and it’s a heckuva lineup:
FACES
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
ROSEMARY’S BABY
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Let’s all go back to 1968 and tell the people these were the five films that best stood the test of time!
2001 is Stanley Kubrick’s third nomination; he’s also the only director here with a previous Moonlight win, for Dr. Strangelove in 1964. Sergio Leone gets his second nomination for Once Upon A Time in the West, after 1966’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; he’s got a thing for long titles as well as long shots. Rosemary’s Baby is Roman Polanski’s second nod; we also nominated him for Repulsion in ‘65. And since we’ve been focusing on actors, Once Upon a Time in the West is nomination number five for Henry Fonda - though like Buñuel, he still has yet to be part of a winning film. (Jezebel, The Grapes of Wrath, The Lady Eve, and 12 Angry Men are his other four.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1967? Who should win the Moonlight for 1968? Join our community and weigh in!
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