1970's

1970’s – Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry – movies started getting very violent.  Network (Faye Dunaway) played studio executive, powerful character.  Watergate, ending the war, Nixon -   the country was still in upheaval about the state of its affairs.  An outspoken feminist, Jane Fonda was the most dominant and important actress of the 1970’s to play powerful female roles.

1971 – Jane Fonda wins an Academy Award for Best Actress for the movie Klute, where she plays a prostitute.

1972 – Liza Minnelli won best actress for Cabaret which not only featured a prominently powerful female star, but had lots of homosexuality.

1972 - Diane Keaton starred alongside Al Pacino in The Godfather, simultaneously making really funny movies with her boyfriend at the time, Woody Allen.

1978 - Jane Fonda starred alongside John Voight in Coming Home – both Fonda and Voight won academy awards for best actor/acress.  This is one of the first movies that a woman has an orgasm in, alongside a tender, lovemaking scene.

1975 – One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest featured Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who was a cold tyrant and battleaxe nurse who has Randal McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) lobotomized.  Mc Murphy’s permanent damage renders him a vegetable, but before the surgery, he was able to mess up Nurse Ratched’s vocal cords, requiring her to often resort to writing notes to communicate.  Thus, he diminished her control over the other patients.

M*A*S*H  the movie premiered – it featured lots of nudity and sex scenes.  Sally Kellerman played Houlihan.

Taxi Driver – Jodi Foster (who was only 13 at the time),  played a 12-year old prostitute, nominated for an academy award for it.

1978 – Jane Fonda wins Best Actress for the movie Coming Home.  Throughout her career, Fonda made a drastic transformation from celebrity kid to a serious actress.

1978 – Meryl Streep won an academy award for best actress for the movie Deer Hunter and the movie  won best picture.

1979 – Meryl Streep won an academy award for best supporting actress in Kramer vs Kramer, a movie that reflected a cultural shift that had occurred during the 1970’s, when ideas about motherhood were changing.  The film was widely praised for the way it gave equal weight and importance to both Joanna (Meryl Streep) and Teddy’s (Dustin Hoffman) points of view.

1979 – Sigourney Weaver played strong warrior style fighter in the movie Alien

1970 – William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band – First film to show gay men as a friendly community of people, but it also shows the other side: “vindictive queens”.  As a result of this film and others like it, a “gay liberation” begins both onscreen and offscreen.

1972 – Bob Fosse’s Cabaret seen as first film to officially “celebrate homosexuality”. 

1975 – Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village is one of the first films to feature homosexuals in a supporting role.

1960's

1960’s – Hayes code over – everyone started cussing and taking their clothes off. Women were liberated – still secretaries making crap!!

1960’s – International stars Bridgette Bardot and Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Vanessa Redgrave gained popularity

1960 – Pronounced dead at one point because of her benign brain tumor during the production of Butterfield Eight, Elizabeth Taylor won an academy award for best actress for playing a prostitute in love with a married man.

1962 – Joan Crawford filmed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with her arch-rival Bette Davis.  By now, their feud was well known.  No one is certain how the quarrel got started, but one time Miss Davis said of Joan “she’s slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”  In return, Joan said “I don’t hate Davis, even though the press wants me to.  I resent her.  I don’t see how she built a career out of a set of mannerisms, instead of real acting ability.  Take away the pop eyes, the cigarette, and those funny clipped words and what have you got?  She’s phony, but I guess the public really likes that.”

1963 -  Women were much more liberated as the country went crazy after the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.  Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1,000,000 as Cleopatra in the movie Cleopatra.   She was the first woman in film history to make a million dollars.  The producers just called her up and asked her how much she wanted and she told him them a million dollars and they gave it to her!  Taylor set the stage for powerful women.

1966 – Elizabeth Taylor won another academy award for best actress in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1967 – Faye Dunaway made her TV debut before landing the lead role of female bank robber in Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty.  It was this film which catapulted her to stardom.  Dunaway is only one of the four actresses to win both Academy Awards for best actress and the Razzie Award for worst actress.

1967 – The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman.  This movie was very controversial.  Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is trapped into an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who just so happens to be the wife of his father’s business partner.  He then finds himself falling in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine.  Mrs. Robinson is portrayed as a powerfully manipulating horny woman in this movie, a far cry from the innocent virginal Lillian Gish at the beginning of the century.

1968 – Jane Fonda plays a highly sexualized and powerful woman in the movie Barbarella, a space action-adventure story.

1969 – Midnight Cowboy was released.  This movie had lots of implied sexual scenes, including a male rape scene.  Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) and his sickly friend Joe Buck (John Voight) are male prostitutes trying to survive in New York City.  Ratso finally gets hooked up for sex with a rich woman named Cass (played by Sylva Miles) and she rescues him from the horrors of the streets.  This woman also has much more power and money than the two prostitutes.

1969 – Jane Fonda wins an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (dance marathon-people trying to win money in dance competition, Fonda wants him to shoot her in the head and put her out of her misery like a horse because she couldn’t dance in the competition anymore).

Barefoot in the Park – girly, newlywed.  Barbarella (sexualized woman).  In the 70’s she made movies like Klut (played prostitute), Julia (played Lillian Hellman) radical woman who went to medical school in the 30’s and got involved with the Nazis.

1961 – Basil Dearden’s Victim, a British film which features the first homosexual male protagonist, a lawyer who fights for gay rights. 

1961 – William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour filmed and released in an effort to subvert the Hays Code and the Legion of Decency and compete with foreign films, which regularly explores sexuality. 

1962 - Otto Preminger’s film Advise and Consent, which features a character being blackmailed for having a homosexual past

1962 - Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side as first film to feature homosexuality as not shameful, which films up to this point mostly had, and the result was a generation of gays and lesbians who felt even more ashamed because of what they saw in films.  Lesbian filmmaker Jan Oxenberg says, "These images magnify the sadness, the hatred of us, the prediction that we will not find love."  Additionally in films such as Dracula’s Daughter, Caged, Rebecca, and The Children’s Hour, sexually-ambiguous characters died at the end.  Films will start to veer away from this pattern.

MESSAGE BOARD :-)

Greetings, Ladies!

I updated my posts about women all the way until 1945 - I color coded it in pink for women.  Do you guys want to color code yours?

1890's:

1896 – Footage of two men dancing together at Thomas Edison’s studio.

FYI - Info about homosexuality in film here and throughout blog taken from:

http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/celluloid/misc/history.html

http://www.imdb.com

1900's:

 

1909 – Mary Pickford appeared for her first screen test for the movie Pippa Passes, with Biograph company director D.W. Griffith.  Even though she didn’t get the part, he was immediately taken with her because of her virtuous face and charming curls.  From that point on, Pickford appeared in fifty-one films – almost one each week!  She was cast in roles such as: scrubwoman, secretary, and woman of any nationality.  Throughout the 1910’s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world.  Her appeal was summed up two years later in the February 1916 issue of Photoplay magazine as “luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity.”  Pickford’s closest female box office rival at this time was thirty-one year old Marguerite Clark.  Marguerite also had a whimsical/girlish charm to which audiences responded.

1910's:

 

1914 – July 28^th – World War I begins

1915 – The Birth of a Nation debuted.  African Americans are prohibited from being in the film, and are portrayed as horny, ignorant monkeys by white actors in black face.  Actors’ faces, especially Walter Long who plays Gus, the renegade negro, are purposely exaggerated to have big eyes and big lips and their some of their butts look like they’re stuffed.  Gus’s face and actions are especially exaggerated to highlight the animalistic qualities that D.W.Griffiths saw the African Americans having at that time. The women in this movie are portrayed as virginal, innocent, and sweet – not a far cry from the Victorian “angel of the house.”  The three central female characters of this movie, Lillian Gish as Elsie Stoneman, Mae Marsh as Flora Cameron, and Miriam Cooper as Margaret Cameron all exemplify these qualities. 

Also in 1915, the first femme fatale (French for deadly woman), movie debuted.  Theda Bara starred as a vampire who uses her charms to seduce and corrupt a moral Wall Street lawyer in A Fool There Was.  This film was considered controversial for its risqué intertitle cards as “Kiss me, my fool!”

1918 – November 11^th – World War I ends

1910s – Homosexual behaviors such as same sex dancing partners (The Florida Enchantment) and effeminate men in macho cowboy films (Wanderer of the West and The Soilers) seen as humorous.

1916 – Charlie Chaplin’s Behind the Screen – Chaplin plays a stagehand who falls in love with a female assistant who poses as a male (other characters believe Chaplin’s character is homosexual). 

1920's:

 

1920 – As a result of World War I, the new female archetype of the shop girl emerges.  The movie Underground features two men, an electrician named Bert (played by Cyril McLagan), Bill an underground porter (played by Brian Aherne), and the shop girl who they both fall in love with named Nell (played by Elissa Landi).  Landi was an Italian born actress who was rumored to be a descendant of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and was famous for her aristocratic bearing. 

1929 – Harry Beaumont’s The Broadway Melody – The convention of using effeminate males for humor has become acceptable.  Gay screenwriters express mixed feelings:

Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen: "There were sissies, and they were never addressed as homosexuals. It was a convention that was totally accepted. They were perceived as homosexuals just subliminally. This was a subject that was not discussed, privately. Certainly not publicly."

Screenwriter Arthur Laurents: "[Homosexuals] were a cliché... like Steppin Fetchit for the blacks."

Actor/Screenwriter Harvey Fierstein: "I like the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah, but... I'd rather have negative than nothing. That's just my own particular view -- and also cause I am a sissy!"

1927 – William Wellman’s Wings – First film to win Academy Award – shows two men kissing on the lips in celebration of victory.