Hollywood hysteria: the 60s movies that showed a time of madness

In assembling a slate of films, a programming team or other curatorial body will often be made to answer the question of why now, what relevance old art has to the current moment. In the case of the Criterion Channel’s new series Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind, a sampling of arthouse hysteria from across the 60s, the argument all but makes itself. These bursts of celluloid madness come from a not-so-remote time when governmental credibility had hit an all-time low and the culture-war rift yawned wider than ever; when the disillusionment of a mistreated youth generation exploded into student protests against an overseas war colored by unsavory political imperatives; when ascendant minority groups demanded rights and dignity in the face of high-boil prejudice; when a terrified old guard felt that everything they could once take for granted had been upended and replaced by unfamiliar, strange, anti-authoritarian new normals. Calamity was in the air. Surely, somehow, we can find it in ourselves to relate.

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The 16 fever dreams of delusion, brainwashing, public violence and other forms of deviant psychology – all with expressionistic, delirious aesthetics to match – offer variations on the theme of anxiety, a many-tendriled morass of unease oriented most centrally around the shifting balance of power. John Frankenheimer’s sci-fi classic Seconds (a crucial influence on Mad Men, which stands as a post-facto parallel curriculum to this one) sees the conflict as age-based, through the parable of a working stiff who reinvents himself with a strapping full-body transplant and insinuates himself among the countercultural enclave out west. But like so many white-collar malcontents hitting reset on their lives with a new home and younger wife, the suburban clock-puncher torpedoing his marriage in Faces being another, he finds that the same existential dissatisfactions follow him no matter where he goes. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? charts an equally bleak path forking out from middle-aged malaise, the choice not to divorce curdling into rafter-shaking enmity between a couple that gives human form to the deterioration of Family Values.

After every high comes a proportionate crash; just as we’re living in the hangover from Obama’s heady vows of hope and change, the 60s can be understood as an equal and opposite reaction to the hollow, broken promises of postwar prosperity. The image of the smiley-faced nuclear unit, complete with white picket fence and barking Fido, had lost all credibility with a movement that viewed this composed normalcy as a great lie. The cult favorite Pretty Poison warps this mythmaking tendency into a twisted parody, as screwloose ex-con Anthony Perkins draws 17-year-old sexpot Tuesday Weld into a demented romance turned spree that rejects all the niceties of placid smalltown living with a hail of gunfire. If hippie flashpoint Bonnie and Clyde blew a hole in the wholesome trope of young lovers set against a society that won’t accept their love, the blackly comic Pretty Poison emptied the clip with gales of manic laughter, Weld’s bloodthirsty teenybopper reserving a few rounds for her own mother.

This sense of resentment burned even hotter and more righteously in Black progressives, faced with a choice between the draft and certain doom overseas in Vietnam, or racism and systemic discrimination at home. Jules Dassin’s Uptight searches for another way via revolution, only to hit a dead end; a cadre of radical militants is undone by the betrayal of a Judas, the precarity of their cause reflected in the fallout from the Martin Luther King Jr assassination splayed across the background. One scene flanked by funhouse mirrors (a recurring visual motif in Criterion’s series, the simplest way to visually represent a distorted interior state) confronts a handful of white poverty tourists, a position Dassin hoped to avoid by giving fair consideration to policies many saw as extreme at the time. Gathering these films puts that school of thought in conversation with the softened humanism of Pressure Point, in which prison psychiatrist Sidney Poitier must subdue his personal objections to treat Nazi sympathizer Bobby Darin. Hubert Cornfield’s elegant yet blinkered morality play calls on us to shun absolutism for aisle-crossing, and loses a degree of perspective in noble pursuit of unity.

The general mood of cataclysm channeled by Hollywood also filtered into it, a business in the midst of an identity crisis as it wriggled between the classical era and the auteur-driven new order. Targets and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? deliver competing eulogies for the heyday of Tinseltown; the first stages a shootout in a movie theater to symbolize the hokey artifice of yore giving way to the horrifying new realities of mass gun ownership, while the second sticks a pair of moldering former stars in a tomb of a Los Angeles mansion to continue Sunset Boulevard’s mutating of silent film style into harsh grotesquerie. In the same respect that the time-honored narratives of American dreaming had begun to ring false as societal bad checks bounced all over, our most cherished fictions likewise became harder to believe in.

The activated-sleeper conceit of The Manchurian Candidate (a film that, for all its many merits, most importantly features Frank Sinatra doing kung fu) posits that psychosis lies dormant within all of us, waiting to be stoked by bad-faith actions of the state. B-picture par excellence Shock Corridor agrees that the average mind teeters much closer to the brink of madness than we realize, ever-ready to retreat into a cocoon of confused detachment when pushed to a breaking point. During the 60s, upheaval of global proportions destabilized every facet of daily life, a development that freed masterpieces from formal guardrails and set the stage for the film medium’s most fruitful decade ever. Whether the industrial conditions enabling such a boom exist today is a separate conversation – time will tell, though these days, the internet offers an easier valve for the release of collective pent-up animus – but as an integral piece of America’s national character, the insanity is eternal.