After covering a category from my favorite year in cinema (2007) last week, this week I keep the good vibrations going by covering a category from what is probably my second favorite year in cinema, 1967. Being before my time, to say 1967 is my second favorite year in cinema may sound a bit peculiar and random, like it was drawn out of a hat in a raffle, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The late 1960's was an interesting time in the world of cinema, just as it was in almost everything else. The radical shift in culture opened up the medium to more experimentation, as well as the ability to go places and do things that the moral norms would not have allowed before. For instance, "The Graduate", one of my favorite films of all-time (which we will be discussing more about later in this article), tells the story of a young man having an affair with his neighbor's wife, a woman who is very much his senior. Not only does the film tell this sordid perverse tale of seduction and robbing from the cradle, it does so in a humorous manner, which makes the film the inimitable classic that it is, but would also have been too offensive to the sensitivities of the populace just a few years earlier. Previously, a story about such outrageous promiscuity would only be told in the utmost dour, melodramatic fashion ("Peyton's Place" anyone?), but being a new time and era, Mike Nichols and company were brazen enough to push the genre in new and exciting places (like Robert Altman would do for war films three years later with "M*A*S*H"). Another example from 1967 of the deconstruction of the old norms in favor of the establishment of new ground rules is the film "Bonnie and Clyde". The film caused and enormous stir for its (at the time) graphic depiction of violence. Formerly, while there was definitely a lot of violence in films' plots, when it got down to the real action, the violence was mostly implied or sanitized. "Bonnie and Clyde" took this trick and spun it, causing a ruckus in the short-run, but creating a whole new language of cinema and paving the way for countless films down the road (like almost every Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino film).
It's this sort of radical thinking about the conventional practices of cinema that endears 1967 to my heart (the only year with two films in my
Top 10). It also makes deciding between nominees very difficult, especially for this Best Actor category. It is a truly impressive lineup (probably one of the greatest single categories in Oscar history), with every nominee being a household name giving one of their signature performances. It truly is ridiculous the amount of talent displayed in this category. I don't say this often, but you have to give credit when credit is due, so to the Academy, big kudos for the Best Actor nominees of 1967. It may be your masterpiece. In fact, I don't really have any viable substitutes for any of the nominees. Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" I guess could be two possible candidates, but the movie was released in 1966 in some countries, so I'm not really sure of their eligibility for the year. The only other possible nomination-worthy performance that comes to mind is Lee Marvin in "The Dirty Dozen", which, had he been nominated over my fifth ranked performance in the category, would have been fine by me, but I wouldn't necessarily call it an improvement. Before I get into the rankings, I would like to stress one more time how difficult the process was this week. In particular, deciding between the top two performances was incredibly agonizing, as both performances rank up there with my all-time favorites. In the end, I made a decision for better or worse, because I don't believe in wimping out and doing a stupid "tie" like too many critics do on these sorts of lists. Just know that the difference in my mind between the first and second ranked performance is miniscule, microscopic, infinitesimal, as they both rapidly approach the limit point known as perfection.
