FEED YOUR HEAD: FILMS FROM 1967
Fri 8/11 – Sat 9/2 @MFA
With the notable, if somewhat dubious, exception of THE TRIP, Roger Corman’s classic contribution to the cinema of crass, corny psychsploitation (on which he collaborated with Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper, who would get it right the next time), the films the MFA has rounded up to commemorate the Summer of Love’s 50th anniversary have little, if any, connection to the hippie counterculture that gripped the nation’s imagination in 1967. Although the era was awash in avant-garde head-fuckery (think Anger, Brakhage, Snow, inter alia), the focus here is on mainstream films consensually regarded as iconic, covering a wide range of styles and subject matter, from Mike Nichols’ literary, proto-New Hollywood THE GRADUATE and the snapshot of interracial relations provided by Stanley Kramer’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, through war (THE DIRTY DOZEN), Bond (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE), murder (IN COLD BLOOD), Disney (THE JUNGLE BOOK), anti-conformism (COOL HAND LUKE), and even the tawdry, glorious melodrama disgorged by VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. The real outlier, and only non-English language selection, is Jean-Pierre Melville’s LE SAMOURAÏ, an ice-cold cocktail of Gallic noir starring the imperially blank Alain Delon as a man chasing rabbits across chessboards, starving his head.
—Matthew Martens
Image: IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) dir. Norman Jewison – screens 8/11 & 8/18