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.