New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s

Chapter 3. Dustin Hoffman: As Artistic as Possible

55 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 3 Dustin Hoffman As Artistic as Possible DANIEL SMITH-ROWSEY For its first forty-six years, Time, America’s newsweekly of record, invariably presented cover illustrations of important people or events. The very first Time cover photograph, dated 7 February 1969, featured not a world leader, astronaut, or international conflict, but Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow: “The Young Actors: Stars and Anti-Stars.” The article talked about how their recent movies have spun “a new myth of lost innocence, of the individual against the wicked system.” And the magazine aligned the meaning of the actors with the meanings of the films: The new young actors themselves represent the death of many movie myths—among them, the one of the movie star. The big press build up, the house in Beverly Hills baroque, the ostentation and the seven-picture commitment are giving way to a stubborn kind of performer who is as suspicious of the Hollywood system as a student rebel is of the university trustees. Time explained that “anti-stars” like Hoffman were in fact a response to recent changes in the culture: As comedy grew steadily blacker and as audiences grew steadily younger, hipper and more draftable, the old concepts began to erode. The invulnerables like Peck and Holden and Wayne seemed lost in a country full of people whose destinies were not in their own hands. The nation of cities needed new images, and suddenly Hoffman became an archetype. (Stefan Kanfer, Jay Cocks, and Carey Winfrey, “The Moonchild and the Fifth Beatle,” Time, 7 February 1969, 51) America’s discontent now had a genuine Hollywood face, a star image. In July of the same year, the cover of Life trumpeted: “Dusty and the Duke: A Choice of Heroes.” At the peak of a summer of bitter Vietnam discontent , Woodstock, and a manned trip to the moon, Life chose to compare Dustin Hoffman and John Wayne, then appearing onscreen in Midnight Cowboy and True Grit, respectively. Throughout the article, Wayne is the “heman ,” Hoffman the “everyman.” Wayne’s image is “strong, decisive, moral, and nearly always a winner.” Hoffman’s “characters . . . are conspicuously short on these traditional qualities. His people are uncertain, alienated, complex, and, by any familiar standard, losers.” Wayne’s Old Hollywood performance wisdom—“I don’t act, I react”—gets aired near a caption that reads: “Every role Dustin Hoffman has played so far has been unique.” In direct contrast to Wayne, Hoffman reveals that he’s still seeing an analyst, that it’s not “particularly courageous for an actor to speak out politically” as he (Hoffman) had about Eugene McCarthy, and that an actor shouldn’t do at fifty what he did at thirty. Wayne blames irresponsible professors for current student unrest, while Hoffman says, “The youth outburst in this country is a good thing. The kids are angry because the American leaders have made mistakes and refuse to admit it” (Ralph Graves, Life, 11 July 1969, 3). Again and again during the 1960s, and unlike today, journalists referred to a younger generation with new values; here, Life positioned Hoffman as an innovative, incorruptible avatar. (This Wayne-Hoffman competition arguably continued until that year’s Oscars, where Wayne’s performance beat Hoffman’s, but Hoffman’s film won Best Picture.) For contemporary mainstream sources, Dustin Hoffman represented the 1960s’ break from the past. Hoffman symbolized both radical transformation and a certain familiarity, both of which the studio system was quick to incorporate. Marsha Kinder suggested as much when she wrote that films of “the new American humanistic realism”—she named only The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969), and Five Easy Pieces (1970)—“render suspect their own ‘revolutionary’ perspectives by 56 DANIEL SMITH-ROWSEY easing back into the values they appear to be questioning” partly because “the value of several of them depends largely upon performances, such as Dustin Hoffman’s in Midnight Cowboy” (Kinder 221). Kinder suggests that star performance transforms, or obviates, any sort of true challenge to the system, like the more avant-garde films she details. This essay examines contemporary media sources to determine how Hoffman was understood and contextualized during the 1960s, particularly in the discourse surrounding his two major films of the period, The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman was not simply a great actor whose talent would have assured his stardom at any time in the twentieth century. Hoffman’s star image...