American Cinema’s Sixties Crack-Up

Nervous breakdowns, shock treatments, killing sprees, brainwashing, political assassinations—in the 1960s, disturbing themes began popping up everywhere in American cinema. These scenes of psychic strife are the focus of a new Criterion Channel collection, Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Is Mind. Curated by filmmaker Nicolas Saada (Taj Mahal) and veteran scholar and programmer Richard Peña, the selection proposes an intriguing set of connections between the psychosis playing out on-screen, the chaotic state of the film industry, and the era’s turbulent politics. The 1960s were the decade that the declining Hollywood studio system began to fracture beyond repair, as well as a time of seismic change in American life. Long held back by the Production Code and the Blacklist, American filmmakers were now free to break taboos, play with cinematic form, and put sexuality, violence, and subversive politics on-screen. It’s no wonder that various films of the period seem to converge on an image of the United States as a massive mental ward. I spoke to Saada and Peña to discuss this transitional moment in film history, which they consider an underacknowledged link between old Hollywood and the so-called New American Cinema of the ’70s.

How did the idea for this series come about?: Nicolas Saada: It was just an intuition that I’d had for years about watching these movies from the ’60s and thinking they were connected through various themes. And then when I mentioned this to Richard, he said, “actually, what you describe makes sense.” These movies are not only a transition from the old Hollywood to the New Hollywood. They’re really stating something about what was going on in the U.S. at this moment, on different levels. And they expressed something in a very rash, original, different way. And they come from both sides: from the studio system, which is kind of collapsing, and from an emerging independent cinema, which is going to be the next thing. This moment of American cinema was not considered as interesting because of all the attention that was brought to European cinema during the ’60s. And then it was also overlooked because of the attention toward the American cinema of the ’70s. So I was wondering, where does that stand? In the history of art, there’s a transition between the late Renaissance and the baroque, and it’s mannerism. But there’s no discussion of that moment of American cinema.

And I like to group these films into this idea of a “crack-up.” It’s not really a “school,” but it’s definitely a moment, something that binds these films together. It makes even more sense when you watch the fantastic teaser on the Criterion Channel: it’s striking.

How would you characterize what was happening in the studio system in this decade?: Richard Peña: American cinema, beginning in 1946, began losing its audience because of several reasons: television, suburbanization, more foreign competition—up until about 1964, at which point the audience plateaued. So people often think of the ’50s as the last great studio decade, which in a sense it was. But as Nicolas was just saying, until you get to the generation of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, which is the late ’60s, there’s a black hole. The studio system is dying, and the new American cinema has not yet emerged. But in fact, if you look into that black hole, there were a lot of interesting things going on. As a film historian, I’ve always had a kind of horror for black holes—when there are areas in film history that, for whatever reason, we don’t talk about—so I immediately want to learn what was going on there.

There were actually years when the American film industry as a whole was losing money. And with that came a certain license. Nobody had any answers. So if someone came in and they had some bold idea, they were told, “okay, try it,” and that really allowed all kinds of creative things to happen in this period. They would try something for a couple of films and then it would disappear.

What were some of the themes you saw emerging in common among these films?: Saada: A lot of the movies of this period address the idea of mental illness. There’s a sort of mental collapsing showing up in different ways, in both the themes and the style. A lot of the main characters are completely broken. They’re completely lost.

Peña: I would focus what Nicolas just said: it’s a kind of madness that’s defined through masculinity. I think it’s almost become a cliché to talk about film noir as tales of challenged masculinity. By the ’60s, the challenge is full grown, and it’s no longer just in film noir. It’s become a general way of looking at men in American society. It’s a logical extension of things that had begun in the ’40s and that I think grew more intense as we got into the ’60s.

Saada: These films also give space to very strong performances by actresses. Of course, there is the “battlefield film” between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). But also the dismantling of masculinity shifts the balance of power toward women characters: Angela Lansbury and Janet Leigh in The Manchurian Candidate (1962); [the title character in] Lilith (1964), who slowly pulls Warren Beatty into her realm; Viveca Lindfors as the cunning psychiatrist in Brainstorm (1965); Ruby Dee in Uptight (1968). There is a “strong woman/weak man” dynamic in many of these films.