A REFLECTION OF THE TIMES
Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ based on true events in 1967
Fifty years ago this summer, some of America’s biggest cities, including Milwaukee, exploded. While the movies of that long hot year, 1967, never showed those battles, they reflected a different, though often parallel, world in revolution. “Detroit,” opening in theaters nationwide Friday after a limited release last week, is a Hollywood rarity: It actually shows those battles up close and personal. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow — who won two Oscars for “The Hurt Locker” and was nominated for another for “Zero Dark Thirty” — “Detroit” sets out to re-create a very different war zone: the Motor City, and America, in 1967.
The core of the movie is based on a true event: Two nights after the riot began, members of the National Guard, Detroit police, the Michigan Stage police and a private security guard responded to a report of shots fired at the nearby Algiers Motel. When it was over, three unarmed men were shot to death and nine other people were severely beaten — and the first person arrested for the crimes was the security guard, who was AfricanAmerican (he’s played in the movie by John Boyega).
During the four days of rioting in Detroit, from July 23-26, 1967, 43 people were killed, more than 1,100 people were hurt and 7,000 arrested.
As with her movies set in the war on terror, Bigelow said in publicity material for the movie that she was determined to make “Detroit” as realistic as possible: “In this case, I wanted to place the viewer inside the Algiers Motel, so that they’re experiencing it in nearly real time.”
Screenwriter Mark Boal, who worked with Bigelow on both “Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” set out to connect those events 50 years ago with what is happening in American cities today.
“I’m not trying to be authoritarian and tell people how to feel, but anger is an appropriate response,” Boal said in an interview last week in the Los Angeles Times. “This is something meant to be grappled with.”
‘67 at the cinema
The year that the fires were raging in Detroit — and Newark, N.J., where six days of rioting left 26 dead, and Milwaukee, where four people were killed — Hollywood was also grappling with a world in revolution.
But the movies in 1967 — just like the movies in 2017 — aren’t an instant reflection of the world they’re in. Typical Hollywood productions are years in the making, so they can’t respond to events that happened the month or even the year before.
But when they hit theaters and people embrace them, that’s when you see which movies are the mirrors to the mind-set.
And many of the best and most important movies of 1967, some having 50th anniversary screenings this year, reflected their world in ways the filmmakers might not have anticipated.
In his book “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” film historian and columnist Mark Harris tells the stories of the making of the five 1967 movies nominated for the Oscar for best picture: “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Doctor Dolittle.”
All five, Harris noted, had been in the works for years, so they weren’t intentionally a reaction to the events of 1967. But the first four all touched a cultural nerve in ways that reverberated at the time and still do today (the fifth, “Doctor Dolittle,” was a big-budget disaster).
“Hollywood, which had held insistently to its own ways for so long, was suddenly moving forward, impelled by the demands of an audience that had, in 1967, made its wishes for a new world of American movies so clear that the studios had no choice but to submit to them,” Harris wrote.
Here’s a look at the 1967 that the movies offered on the big screen in 1967.
Why can’t we all just get along?
Despite its skittishness over directly addressing the civil unrest rocking American cities in the 1960s, Hollywood in 1967 managed to put race relations front and center in two of the biggest-grossing movies of the year — both starring Sidney Poitier.
Opening in New York on Aug. 2, 1967 — while Milwaukee was still under curfew, and just weeks after the rioting in Detroit and Newark — “In the Heat of the Night” starred Poitier as a Philadelphia homicide detective who, traveling through a small Southern town, is pulled into a murder investigation and has to work with the town’s racist police chief, played by Rod Steiger. The African-American detective’s savvy doesn’t sit well with the town’s white population, but his ability to get results wins the day — if not hearts and minds.
Based on a novel by John Ball, who grew up in Milwaukee, “In the Heat of the Night” won five Oscars, including best picture and best actor — for Steiger. Reviews at the time, Harris noted in “Pictures at a Revolution,” showed critics at least saw the movie as a reflection of that long hot summer; New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote of the movie that “in this juxtaposition of resentments between whites and blacks is vividly and forcefully illustrated one of the awful dilemmas of our times.”
Poitier’s other Oscarnominated movie that year put racial conflict in a different context. In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”, he plays a U.N. doctor who wants to marry the daughter of a pair of white, old-school liberals, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Stanley Kramer’s earnest drama was released a few months after the Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriage in Loving vs. Virginia; having Tracy, Hepburn Poitier on the same side didn’t hurt either.
Poitier, who also made the hit “To Sir, With Love,” that year, was one of the 10 top-grossing movie stars of 1967 — the first time a person of color made the annual list, which had been compiled by Quigley Publishing since 1932.
Don’t trust anyone over 30
While Hollywood was always eager to cater to younger audiences, the major movie studios had missed the mark trying to understand how different many kids in 1967 were from their parents.
“The Graduate,” the year’s highest-grossing non-Disney movie, showed the older generation didn’t have a clue about, well, anything that really mattered. As a young college graduate trying to sort out his life, Dustin Hoffman’s deadpan rejection of the world his parents push him toward is a revolution in the making, even if he doesn’t know where the bus he’s taking is headed.
Mike Nichols took home the Oscar for best director for “The Graduate,” the movie’s only win among seven nominations.
Don’t trust anyone in charge
Although the 1970s, with Watergate and the wind-down of the Vietnam War, are seen as the decade when Americans began losing respect for people in power, the seeds were already there by 1967, at least at the movies.
“Bonnie and Clyde,” starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the style-conscious 1930s bank robbers, made defying authority chic. Their demise, shot in groundbreaking slow-motion, reinforced that the establishment would go to any lengths to shut down young rebels (never mind that they were murderers themselves).
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow weren’t the only criminals to become box-office stars in 1967; Paul Newman’s nonconformist title character in “Cool Hand Luke,” Milwaukee native Tom Laughlin’s debut as mysterious ex-veteran Billy Jack taking on a biker gang and inert lawmen in “The Born Losers,” and Lee Marvin’s collection of soldier-convicts who succeed where the Army has failed in “The Dirty Dozen” stand up to authority — and sometimes even win.