American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations

1962: Movies and Deterioration

1962 Movies and Deterioration ERIC SCHAEFER By any measure it was a dreadful year. In the United States and abroad, events seemed to be marked by a steady spiral of deterioration . Certainly, there was some positive news. New Frontier optimism began to see results in the heavens as John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in February. After a number of frustrating postponements , Glenn’s flight “put the U.S. back in the space race with a vengeance, and gave the morale of the U.S. and the entire free world a huge and badly needed boost” (“New Ocean” 11). And AT&T’s Telstar became the first commercial communications satellite to be launched in July. However, for those who cast their gaze toward more earthly matters, events were troubling. In April the United States resumed atmospheric nuclear testing. The following month the stock market convulsed through its worst week since 1950. The U.S. Supreme Court decided, to the chagrin of many Americans, that prayer in public school conflicted with the First Amendment guarantee of the separation of church and state, and June saw the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issue the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto that signaled the start of the student protest movement. Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl, a significant milestone of second wave feminism, and for some yet another step down the road to perdition because it told single women to find ful- fillment in careers and that premarital sex was all right. In Silent Spring, which arrived in bookstores in September, Rachel Carson wrote, “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death” (15). Carson ominously chronicled the decaying quality of the air and water and in doing so gave birth to the modern environmental movement. Other books of the year included Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, both of which offer negative views of the body politic. Racial integration received serious setbacks that were marked by increased violence throughout the South. 67 The United States was drawn more deeply into the conflict in Vietnam, a move that Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield questioned, making him the first political leader to express doubts about America’s Vietnam policy. Most significant, already strained relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly degenerated as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded in the autumn. The globe braced for a third world war and the possibility of an atomic apocalypse. In mid-October American U-2 spy planes compiled photographic evidence that indicated the Soviets were preparing to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, less than one hundred miles from U.S. soil. Although some hawks pushed President Kennedy toward direct confrontation, on 22 October he went on television to announce that the socialist island nation was being “quarantined” with a naval blockade to stop further shipments of Soviet missiles. On 25 October the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, displayed photographs of the missile sites in a tense emergency session of the Security Council. As Soviet ships neared the blockade on 27 October, an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot. The following day a headline in the New York Times anxiously queried, “Will There Be War? The Question the World Is Asking.” The United States was making preparations to bomb the Cuban sites when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev suddenly backed down, offering to dismantle the missiles in exchange for a promise that the Americans would not invade Cuba. Kennedy agreed and also quietly acquiesced to the Soviet demand that a small number of American missiles in Turkey be removed. The immediate crisis was over, yet as historian Walter LaFeber observes, “The aftershocks of the neartragedy rippled on. The possible horrors of nuclear war overhung the lifetime of the generation that lived through those days of October 1962” (228). Deterioration seemed to plague the American motion picture industry as well. It may be an overstatement to call this the worst year in American film history, but by any measure it was a dreadful one. Box office receipts hit their lowest point since the start of World War II, coming in at a miserly $903 million. Weekly movie attendance continued its drop, with 25 million buying tickets every week...