A “G” Rated World - Movies in 1962

Are movies a good way to understand the atmosphere of a period?  Can we get a feeling for what it was like to live in America fifty years ago by looking at the movies Americans watched?  Maybe.  It seems to me that it has to tell us something, so let’s give it a try.

1962 was really an amazing year for the movie industry.  The top box office earners, which seems to tell us the most about those Americans, were:

The Longest Day

 In Search of the Castaways

 Lawrence of Arabia

 How the West Was Won

 The Music Man

Two of these pictures – The Longest Day and How the West Was Won – are huge, sweeping movies with ensemble casts.  The Longest Day included John Wayne, Richard Burton, Red Buttons, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Eddie Albert, Christopher Lee, and many others.  How the West Was Won included John Wayne, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Henry Fonda, George Peppard, Debbie Reynolds, Jimmy Stewart, and Walter Brennan, to name only a few of its celebrities.  In many ways, Lawrence of Arabia (rated by many as the best movie of the year and among the best of all times) was just as sweeping as the first two.

 The Longest Day is, of course, about “D-Day” – the Allied invasion of France in World War II.  Those who fought on that day were in most cases still under 40.  They were just reaching their prime as family men (they were 99% men), business and civic leaders, elected officials, etc.  And they were notoriously reticent to discuss their fighting.  You have to wonder whether they were filling those theater seats, or whether it was their parents, children and friends, trying to understand a small part of what they had been through.  

 The Longest Day trailer

Hayley Mills

In Search of the Castaways, the Disney picture on the list, was a sea saga based on a Jules Verne story.  It featured Hayley Mills, one of the best known teenage actors of the 1960s.  The Music Man was one of those big, lush musicals based on Broadway productions that were common in the 1960s.  Some of the others from the decade included The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Mary Poppins, The Music Man, Funny Girl, Oliver!, Thoroughly Modern Millie, My Fair Lady, Bye Bye Birdie, Camelot, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Perhaps one of the most revealing facts about the early 1960s is that there was no need for a film rating system.  These top-grossing productions featured no sex or bad language, and the violence was not graphic.  The current rating system was not considered necessary until the major studios released films such as The Pawnbroker (1965), Blow-Up (1966), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which were among the first to feature nudity and profanity. 

We’ll come back to movies many times in this blog – there is so much more to explore and absorb.  I think the first lesson, however, is that in many ways, 1962 was a much simpler time.  It was a “G” rated world – at least on the surface.