What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1972

The Year: 1972
What the Nominees Were: Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants, The Godfather, Sounder
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: John Huston’s Fat City was a late masterpiece.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Godfather

How Hard Was the Decision: Surprisingly hard. Everybody knows that The Godfather is one of the most worthy winners in Oscars history, but I have even more affection for Cabaret, which would have won most other years in the 70s if I could only move it. I was tempted to take this Oscar away but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Coppola and Mario Puzo, based on Puzo’s novel
Stars: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton

The Story: Mafia don Vito Corleone refuses to take up drug dealing, which ignites a mob war. His son Santino aka Sonny gets shot up at a toll booth. His law-abiding son Michael gets drawn in and volunteers to assassinate a rival boss and a chief of police, then gets exiled to Sicily. Michael comes home to take over the family entirely from Vito, who dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandson. Michael finally orders the assassination of all of the family’s enemies.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Actor for Brando and Adapted Screenplay. Caan, Duvall and Pacino were all nominated against each other for Supporting Actor and all lost. It also lost Director (to Bob Fosse for Cabaret), Costume Design, Editing and Sound. Nino Rota was nominated for Best Score, but then it was decided that he had borrowed from a previous score and the nomination was revoked.
How It Won: The critics loved it and it was a big hit with audiences, too. The movie became a phenomenon, and thus a shoo-in (but Fosse’s director win means that the Academy also knew that Cabaret was great.)

Why It Won:

1. Universal wanted a cheapo quickie, so they hired Corman-vet Coppola, but Coppola had a vision. He hadn’t yet distinguished himself as a director, but after he was hired for this movie he won an Oscar for writing Patton, and he clearly decided that a mafia film could rival that one in scope: Longer running time, more epic sweep, more to say about the nature of America. Both movies begin with a fixed camera as a man gives a long speech about believing in America, but this one (delivered by the wronged undertaker Bonasera) is more devastating.
   
2. Coppola had a secret weapon: Casting director Andrea Eastman. Pacino, Duvall, Caan and Keaton, had all made a few film appearances that hadn’t set the world on fire. Eastman saw in them the potential for greatness, when put together in the right combination.
3. If the studio had had its way, the movie might have starred Kirk Douglas as Vito and Dustin Hoffman as Michael. Two great actors, but they would have been horrible in these roles. Coppola and Eastman insisted on Italians playing the Italian characters, and that authenticity is crucial.  
   
4. The production design is perhaps the greatest of all time. This truly feels like the ‘40s. But, to its credit, it doesn’t look like a movie shot in the ‘40s at all, not only because it’s in color, but because cinematographer Gordon “Prince of Darkness” Willis creates sumptuous blacks that look like nothing seen onscreen before. This feels like real life. (And I love all the incongruous background noises in many scenes, creating a startlingly realistic soundscape as well.)
   
5. This is certainly the most violent movie we’ve looked at, and it’s kind of hard to take for that reason, but you have to hand it to the movie for coming up with so many unique and shocking ways to kill men (or just leave a severed horse head in their beds.)
   
6. There are 13 deleted scenes on the DVD. As is frequently the case with great movies, many of them add interesting elements, but you can see how they were cut for pacing. There’s just one that I really miss, where Vito expresses contempt for Michael’s medals after the wedding and Michael is just as contemptuous back to him.  This is key for setting up the gradual transformation of their feelings about each other, but it happened in the middle of a storyline that had to go. The art of filmmaking is as much about what comes out as about what stays in.

Ah, 1972: Tragically premature prediction...

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Big Trouble in Little China, with Kate Milford!

Acclaimed children’s author Kate Milford joins us to talk about one of her favorite movies, John Carpenter’s cult classic Big Trouble in Little China. Will she be able to win us over to its charms?

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1971

The Year: 1971
What the Nominees Were: A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, Nicholas and Alexandra
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: I can understand how they overlooked Harold and Maude, but how could they ignore the greatness of McCabe and Mrs. Miller??

What Did Win: The French Connection
How It’s Aged: It’s one of the best movies ever made. A crackerjack action-thriller but also a profound meditation on good and evil. I desperately wish I could let this movie keep its Oscar. But…

What Should’ve Won: Harold and Maude
How Hard Was the Decision: An almost impossible choice between The French Connection, Fiddler on the Roof, The Last Picture Show, and Harold and Maude, all of which I dearly love. But I had to go with my personal favorite of the year, and maybe all-time, Harold and Maude. Ultimately, when deciding between movies, my test is always, “did it make me laugh and cry” and this movie always makes me laugh out loud and cry like a baby.

Director: Hal Ashby
Writer: Colin Higgins
Stars: But Cort and Ruth Gordon

The Story: A holocaust survivor teaches a morbid young man how to love life, then commits suicide herself, devastating him.

Any Nominations or Wins: Cort and Gordon were both nominated for Golden Globes in the comedy categories, but neither won, and it got no attention from the Oscars at all.

Why It Didn’t Win: Initial reviews were poor (Rex Reed called it “a sick, demented little movie”) and box office was poor before it developed a cult, so it didn’t have a chance.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The original cut was three hours and producer Charles B. Mulvehill says in the Criterion commentary that you wanted to strangle the characters for being so uplifting for so long. The final cut is 91 minutes without cutting any scenes out, just cutting everyone down (especially good advice from Maude) and it’s a marvel of speed. Every storyline has three quick scenes, all intercut together: Three funerals with Maude, three therapy scenes, three visits with Uncle Victor, three computer dates set up by his mother, intercut brilliantly, each scene starting late and ending early on a question that is answered by a smash-cut. This is one of the all-time best screenplays.
   
2. The Graduate’s use of Simon and Garfunkel songs was great, and Midnight Cowboy’s over-reliance on one Harry Nilsson song was less so, but this movie surpasses them both in its inspiring use of Cat Stevens’ catalogue. Stevens points out in a special feature that he was worried because “this is a comedy and my music is quite serious” but that’s what makes it work. There’s a lot of profundity in the music that doesn’t have to be in the script.
3. For 1970 I considered Ashby’s brilliant first film The Landlord and I’ll be considering more 1970s films of his as we go along (the 80s are not to be spoken of). He looked like a hippie (that’s him standing between Harold and Maude) but he was in his 40s and a lapsed Mormon, so he had a unique perspective on the counterculture. This is the best “hippie” movie of the era, but Maude (as the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Old-Woman) is an odd vehicle for those values.
   
4. Suicide comedy is inherently distasteful, but this movie takes the topic very seriously while still milking it for fun. Somehow, it works. It’s revealed in the commentary that Ashby’s father committed suicide when Ashby was 12 and he discovered the body, so he was bringing a lot of pain to the movie, and yet each scene where Harold’s mother finds him seemingly dead is freshly hilarious. I love that it’s never made clear how Harold is surviving all of these suicide attempts (we can imagine a way for each one, but the movie gives no clues) until his third date when the date decides to join him in his mock-attempt, but quickly checks to make sure it’s a collapsible knife.
   
5. When Harold catches a glimpse of Maude’s holocaust tattoo, he realizes that, no matter how much we might think we know and love someone, it’s possible to be totally unaware of the depth of their hidden pain. That realization is at the heart of literature, and living in general.
   
6. The acting on Ruth Gordon’s face when she tells Harold she’s taken the pills, still trying to be upbeat, is a master class in complexity. She had won an Oscar a few years before for Rosemary’s Baby (and been nominated before for her screenwriting) but c’mon, if this isn’t an Oscar performance what is? (It’s only on second watch that we realize to our shock that she’s been saying all movie long that she’s going to commit suicide at the end of the week, but tossing off the lines in a way that we don’t take seriously, nor does Harold.)
   
7. When Hollywood makes movies about older-women relationships, it always casts a woman who is barely older than the man, if not younger (Anne Bancroft in The Graduate was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman, and the leg on the poster was that of an even younger woman). This movie, to put it mildly, does not do that, to its enormous credit. Now this is an age gap.

Ah, 1971: For the man that has everything...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1970

The Year: 1970

What the Nominees Were: Airport, Five Easy Pieces, Love Story, MASH, Patton
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Little Big Man is a little problematic but mostly excellent. In Europe there was The Conformist, The Red Circle and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

What Did Win: Patton
How It’s Aged: I rewatched it, and it’s a brilliantly made movie, but Nixon infamously screened the movie twice before deciding to secretly and illegally expand the Vietnam war into Cambodia, lest America finally lose a war. And I can easily see how it pushed him in that direction. Pauline Kael nailed it when she said “The Patton shown here appears to be deliberately planned as a Rorschach test. He is what people who believe in military values can see as the true military hero—the red-blooded American who loves to fight and whose crude talk is straight talk. He is also what people who despise militarism can see as the worst kind of red-blooded American mystical maniac who believes in fighting; for them, Patton can be the symbolic proof of the madness of the whole military complex. And the picture plays him both ways—crazy and great.” For willingly and knowingly inspiring jingoistic madness, I have to take away this movie’s Oscar.

What Should’ve Won: The Ballad of Cable Hogue
How Hard Was the Decision: Tremendously hard. As opposed to 1971, when I will have to make an almost impossible choice between five masterpieces, 1970 had very slim pickings indeed. First I was tempted to stay with Patton, before dismissing it for the reasons listed above. Then I rewatched MASH for the first time in 35 years and Hoooo-boy has that movie aged badly (These countercultural cut-ups are “sticking it to The Man”, by which I mean that what they’re actually doing is treating women like crap.) So I was stuck. Should I go with Five Easy Pieces, which does at least bother to look askance at its hero’s mistreatment of women? Should I invoke the Parasite Rule yet again and go with The Conformist or Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion? (Undoubtedly the best two movies of the year, but I couldn’t convince myself either could win an Oscar.) Then the answer hit me like a bolt out of the blue. This is certainly an unconventional pick, but it’s a great movie, and gets the award for being the best non-problematic movie of 1970.

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Writers: John Crawford and Edmund Penney
Stars: Jason Robards, Stella Stevens, David Warner, Strother Martin, Slim Pickins, L. Q. Jones

The Story: A laid-back outlaw is abandoned by his no-good buddies in the middle of the desert. Wandering until he’s on the verge of death, he finally finds water, right where the stagecoach companies happen to need a watering hole. Teaming up with a randy preacher and big-hearted sex worker, he follows an arc that mirrors the rise and fall of American capitalism, (all while pursuing the world’s laziest quest for revenge.).

Any Nominations or Wins: Nothing
Why It Didn’t Win: It was unconventional, but so were other nominees in 1970. But this one, unlike those, was a big old flop, and that still eliminated most movies from consideration.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is a “blank check movie.” Peckinpah had a huge hit with The Wild Bunch, and Hollywood presumably wanted more of the same, but he wanted something gentler. He had earned himself a blank check and he was going to cash it. The only thing the two movies have in common is that they’re both about the death of the Old West, for both good and ill.
2. In his rare chances like A Thousand Clowns and this, Robards proved himself to be a great leading man, but Hollywood only caught up to his kind of characters when he was already getting a little old. If America had embraced his brand of shambling cynicism ten years earlier, he would have been one of our biggest stars. He's absolutely magnetic here.
3. After finding water on public land, Robards buys it cheap and then shoots dead anyone who won't give him ten cents to drink it. Business is usually portrayed as a malevolent evil or an abstract good, but this movie shows it to be no different from any other institution: something we create to serve us until we wind up serving it. As Thoreau said "We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us," a truth that Robards finally realizes a little too late. His ambition drives his society forward until he slows down just enough for it to run him over.
4. Even in the "free love" early '70s, there was a stark divide between the actresses who engaged in naked shenanigans and those who got taken seriously. Stevens was a former playboy bunny who got lots of "go-go girl" roles but didn't get anything serious until Peckinpah saw something great in her. The worst crime of this movie's lack of success was that not enough people saw what should have been a breakthrough performance. This is one of the sweetest on-screen love stories you'll ever see.
5. Like other movies I’ve promoted over the years, including Blast of Silence and Brother From Another Planet, this is a modestly-budgeted movie that isn't ashamed to extrapolate one small journey into a grander parable about the stages of man. It's surprising to see something this funny and laid back quietly accrue so much meaning. It sneaks up on you.

Ah, 1970:

New Episode of A Good Story Well Told on Tremors with Benjamin Zelkowicz!

Author and animator Benjamin Zelkowicz joins us to share his love of the 1990 Kevin Bacon creature-feature Tremors, and the three of us have a good old time mining it for story insights.  Check it out:

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1969

The Year: 1969
What the Nominees Were: Anne of a Thousand Days; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Hello, Dolly!; Midnight Cowboy; Z
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It was an excellent year for American film. Five alternate nominees could have been Alice’s Restaurant, Medium Cool, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, The Wild Bunch and They Shoot Horses Don’t They? In addition to Z (which got nominated!), My Night at Maud’s was great overseas.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Midnight Cowboy
How Hard Was the Decision: Sort of hard. I was also drawn to The Wild Bunch and Z. Of course, the big knock against Midnight Cowboy is that it seems like the sort of movie that could never win an Oscar, but somehow it did win, and who am I to disagree with this daring pick?

Director: John Schlesinger
Writer: Waldo Salt, based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy
Stars: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Brenda Vaccaro, Sylvia Miles 

The Story: Texas stud Joe Buck moves to Manhattan to become a gigolo, but instead becomes a homeless bum, befriending a consumptive scrounger named Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo. When Ratso is nearing death, they try to escape to Florida but arrive too late.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: In addition to Picture, it won Director and Adapted Screenplay. It lost twice for Actor (Hoffman and Voigt were pitted against each other, but both got shot down by John Wayne), Supporting Actress for Miles, and Editing.

How It Won: Hollywood could only suppress the youthquake for so long. Academy president Gregory Peck had been aggressively recruiting younger Academy members for years, and here they finally asserted their power, anointing an X-rated and utterly scuzzy film. Wayne would make fun of the New Hollywood at the ceremony, “I’m an American movie actor. I work with my clothes on. I have to. Horses are rough on your legs and your elsewheres.” But Wayne’s win aside, things were changing fast.

Why It Won:

1. The bond between Joe and Ratso is one of the most intense ever put on screen, not exactly gay but not not-gay either. Joe never stops razzing Ratso (including calling him Ratso) until the moment of his death, only to discover then that this was the only love he has ever known (and probably will ever know.)
   
2. The blacklist was well and truly over by now, allowing ex-communists like Salt to write with impunity, and bring the wounds of that time along with them. Ratso is constantly afraid that Joe is going to turn him in (Salt himself was named by the friend who had been best man at his wedding.)
3. Joe is often consumed by nightmarish flashes of his traumatic Texas past, but Salt points out in the Criterion documentary, “There was no flashback that took place in the past. Every flashback took place in that moment in his head. A flashback is only valid if it’s a flash-present.” This is a good way to write flashbacks, and can be seen in many of the British New Wave films that launched directors like Schlesinger. Because the flashbacks are so brief, we never get a full picture of Joe’s traumas, but we get enough.
   
4. Voight, as he became more villainous in his offscreen life, was consigned to villain roles in later life (and has a lot of fun with them) but he was astounding in his brief period as a leading man, bringing an intense empathy to his characters (the kind that he himself would later lack.)
5. When I moved to NYC from the south, I found that there were four stages of being acclimatized: First, being confused when people don’t say excuse me, then realizing that they’re actually offended when you say it to them, then you stop saying it, then finally you start taking offense when others say it to you. Like me, Joe realizes around that point that he has to get out. (I ended up moving there and away three times)
   

Ah, 1969:

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1968

The Year: 1968
What the Nominees Were: Funny Girl; The Lion in Winter; Oliver!; Rachel, Rachel; Romeo and Juliet
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: 2001 and Planet of the Apes in America. Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, Bergman’s Shame and Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West overseas.

What Did Win: Oliver! (That’s their exclamation point, not mine)
How It’s Aged: Terribly. Oddly chipper given the downbeat subject matter, this is the movie people are referring to when they say they just don’t believe that people would break out into song in musicals.

What Should’ve Won: 2001: A Space Odyssey
How Hard Was the Decision: The Lion in Winter is great, but c’mon, everybody agrees that 2001 is one of the all-time great films, and it’s often cited as a baffling Oscar snub.

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Stars: Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood

The Story: At the dawn of Man, a monolith appears to some ape-men and suddenly they can make weapons from bones. In 1999, astronauts find another monolith buried on the moon. In 2001, they have followed a signal from that monolith to another orbiting Jupiter. After dealing with a pesky malfunctioning AI named HAL 9000, astronaut Dave Bowman has a freak-out at Jupiter.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Best Special Visual Effects, but lost Director, Original Screenplay and Art Direction.
Why It Didn’t Win: Famously, at a Hollywood screening, Rock Hudson stood up halfway through and walked out, grumbling “What is this bullshit? Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” Hollywood just wasn’t ready for this. It also doesn’t help that it didn’t make a lot of money at first (until stoners started coming back to watch it every day.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The term “art-movie” got tossed around a lot from the 60s to the 90s, but this is one of the only movies I’ve seen that genuinely feels like a piece of capital-“A”-Art. Maybe more art than movie, in fact. It’s long, it’s glacially slow, and it has very little dialogue (The first 25 and last 25 minutes have no words). You have to be willing to toss aside many of your expectations of what cinema is or should be and just let this movie overwhelm you with its enormity.
   
2. Andrew Sarris famously panned the movie and then was told to see it again stoned, which he did and issued a revised review saying it was great. I’ve never done drugs, so perhaps I’ve never fully appreciated this film, but the visuals alone are enough to make you feel like you’re tripping on something. The way-out final twenty minutes only makes any sense if you open your mind as far as it will go (zonked out or not) at which it becomes very beautiful and profound.
   
3. It cannot be overstated how shocking and monumental Douglas Trumbull’s astronaut special effects were in this movie. In our era of CGI, nothing impresses us anymore, but if you can get into a 1968 headspace, you will just keep saying, while your jaw is on the floor, how did they get that shot?? Everything just feels so real, which, given the subject matter, is extraordinary. This is outer space. We are living in the future.
   
4. In Dr. Strangelove, both America’s bomber plan and the Soviets’ doomsday weapon were designed to deploy even when nobody wanted them to, because the human element had been intentionally stripped out of the system. This movie takes the theme of dehumanization to the next level. The AI, which is touchy, sensitive, and ultimately homicidal, has the only real humanity in this movie. The astronaut that kills it is the real machine, not even reacting when HAL kills his co-pilot. When Kubrick looked at our space program, he wasn’t afraid of the aliens we might encounter, he was afraid of John Glenn’s terrifying lack of affect.
   
5. The sequel 2010, not made by Kubrick, is all about American-Soviet relationships, but of course there was no Soviet Union by 2010. This movie never mentions other countries so it’s aged better than that one, but the one thing that badly dates the movie is that women are strictly stewardesses. Even Planet of the Apes had a woman in the crew (who they kill off right away) Perhaps Kubrick didn’t want to imply that anything might have gotten better in his chilly vision of the future.

Ah, 1968: I grew up on Swanson and I can taste every one of these.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1967

The Year: 1967
What the Nominees Were: Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Scorsese burst on the scene with his student film turned feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door? More great American films: The Dirty Dozen, Two for the Road, Cool Hand Luke and In Cold Blood. In Europe: Belle Du Jour, Weekend, and The Fireman’s Ball.

What Did Win: In the Heat of the Night
How It’s Aged: Beautifully. One of the greatest crime films of all time. Poitier burns up the screen, delivering the slap that shook the world. I love this film. But…

What Should’ve Won: The Graduate
How Hard Was the Decision: An almost impossible choice between In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke and Two for the Road, which are five of my favorite films. If any of those five had been released in 1965 or 1966 I would have given them those years.

Director: Mike Nichols
Writers: Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb
Stars: Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross

The Story: Aimless college graduate Benjamin Braddock falls into an affair with the older woman next door, then begins to date her daughter as well. Finally, he chooses the daughter, steals her away from her wedding to another man, and they ride the bus off into the sunset.

Any Nominations or Wins: Nichols won for Director, but the film lost everything else: Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay and Cinematography
Why It Didn’t Win: There’s an excellent book on what went down this year called “Pictures at a Revolution” by Mark Harris. Basically, old people wanted Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or Dr. Dolittle, young people wanted The Graduate or Bonnie and Clyde, and In the Heat of the Night was the neutral middle ground where the two sides could meet.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. I cannot recommend highly enough the Criterion Collection commentary track by Nichols and (of all people) Steven Soderbergh. They both keep pointing out how often Benjamin is shot through glass, plastic, water, or some combination of the three, driving home the theme of sensory deprivation. “Plastics” isn’t just a money-making recommendation, it’s everywhere. Nichols says “I believe in those schemes, but they’re best when nobody notices. You make yourself happy, and most people are just watching the story.”
   
2. This is the ultimate example of the key rule of casting: Cast them for how they feel, not how they would actually look. Benjamin is supposed to be the handsome track star the moms can’t keep their hands off of. It was an ideal part for Robert Redford, and Nichols was friends with Redford, having directed him on Broadway in “Barefoot in the Park”, so Nichols felt him out for the part, asking him, “Have you ever struck out with a girl?” Redford answered, “What do you mean?” So he didn’t get the part. Nichols says on the commentary that he said to himself, “I need a loser who was really more. I need someone who is the way we all felt starting in life, starting with women, who felt like behind a permanent eight-ball.” That was Hoffman and he’s brilliant in this miscast role (He was also 30!)
3. Nichols got his start in stand-up comedy with Elaine May (who would also go on to be a great film director), and he re-uses their bits here, such as when Ben goes in for a kiss with a smoking Mrs. Robinson, so she puts up with it but releases her smoke when he’s done. Nichols says of his time with May: “We weren’t making fun of people, we were making fun of ourselves, and people would say, ‘I know someone just like that,’ and we were saying ‘That’s me.’” A good attitude for any writer to take.
   
4. Nichols was listening to Simon and Garfunkel albums every morning to get himself in the right headspace to direct, before he finally said to himself “Schmuck, you’re listening to the score to your movie! How’d it take you so long?” Nobody ever scored a movie to pre-existing pop music before. It’s overdone today of course, but it’s electrifying here.
5. Famously, Nichols forgot to call cut during the final shot, and instead just dumbly kept the camera rolling as the elation gradually slipped off their faces, replaced by uncertainty. In reality it was just uncertainty about what Nichols wanted them to do. They weren’t acting at all, but of course, that’s often when the best acting occurs. (Soderbergh says, “If you don’t have this, the movie’s like a sham”)
   
6. Modern young audiences have more problems with the film than 1967 filmgoers did, because they can see that Ben is actually a pretty awful person. It’s one of the great mysteries in American History: How did the hippie generation end up giving Reagan a 49 state victory as soon as they were old enough to take the reins of power? You can see the seeds of it in this movie. Benjamin rebels against societal norms, and he’s certainly right to call out the moral hypocrisy of the ruling class, but he’s not actually a good person in any sense. And I think that’s part of the brilliance of the film. We are exhilarated by his rebellion (swinging a cross to batter his way out of a church) but the film also subtly indicts him, and all the “Me Generation” awfulness to come.
7. The movie is one of the three subjects in a wonderful Michael Arndt video on Insanely Great Endings. Arndt points out that it’s so brilliant to have Ben stop the wedding too late, instead of just in time, because it’s more rebellious this way. By all means go watch the video.

Ah, 1967: You have no choice, so choose to have no choice before we choose for you!