Cineliteracy: What You Need to Know about 1969 as a Movie Year
My Oscar Book:
Research in progress, June 18, 2025
Top-Grossing Films (U.S.)
Rank Title Distributor Domestic rentals
1 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 20th Century Fox $29,200,000
2 The Love Bug Buena Vista $21,000,000
3 Midnight Cowboy United Artists $20,500,000
4 Easy Rider Columbia $16,900,000
5 Hello, Dolly! 20th Century Fox $15,000,000
6 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice Columbia $14,600,000
7 Paint Your Wagon Paramount $14,500,000
8 True Grit $14,300,000
9 Cactus Flower Columbia $11,900,000
10 Goodbye, Columbus Paramount $10,500,000
Events
January 14 – Louis F. Polk Jr. becomes president and CEO of MGM
February 23 – Madhubala dies due to congenital heart disease, at age 36.
June 22 –
American singer and actress Judy Garland dies at age 47 of accidental barbiturate overdose in London.
July 8 – Kinney National Services Inc. acquire all of the assets of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.
July 13 – Al Pacino’s film debut (Me, Natalie).
Summer – Last year for prize giving at the Venice Film Fest until it is revived in 1980. From 1969 to 1979, the festival is non-competitive.
August 8 – Kirk Kerkorian buys 24% of MGM, thus the biggest shareholder.
August 9 – Tate murders: Sharon Tate, 26, pregnant actress, model and Roman Polanski’s wife, is murdered by Charles Manson’s “Family” at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, aside three friends and unrelated man.
August 29 – The Color of Pomegranates, a landmark in film history
September 20 – Injun Trouble was released, the final entry of Merrie Melodies before Warner-Seven Arts Animation was shut down.
November 10 – Elvis Presley’s film career ends with release of Change of Habit.
Awards
42nd Academy Awards April 7, 1970
Best Film: Midnight Cowboy
Best Actor John Wayne, True Grit
Best Actress: Maggie Smith, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Best Supporting Actor Gig Young, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Best Supporting Actress Goldie Hawn, Cactus Flower
Best Screenplay, Adapted Waldo Salt, Midnight Cowboy
Best Screenplay, Original William Goldman, Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid
Best Original Score Burt Bacharach
Best Foreign Language Film Z N/A Z
Palme d’Or (Cannes Film Fest): If…., directed by Lindsay Anderson, UK
Golden Bear (Berlin Film Fest): Rani Radovi (Early Works), Želimir Žilnik, Yugoslavia
Short Film Series
Looney Tunes (1930–1969)
Merrie Melodies (1931–1969)
Cool Cat (1967—1969)
Merlin the Magic Mouse (1967—1969)
The Pink Panther (1963–1969, 1971–1977, 1978–1980)
The Inspector (1965-1969)
The Ant and the Aardvark (1969–1971)
Roland and Rattfink (1968–1971)
Tijuana Toads (1969–1972)
Woody Woodpecker (1941–1949, 1951–1972)
Chilly Willy (1955–1972)
The Beary Family (1962–1972)
Births
Deaths
January 1 – Barton MacLane, 66, American actor, Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
January 27 – Charles Winninger, 84, US actor, Destry Rides Again, The Sun Shines Bright
February 2 – Boris Karloff, 81, English actor, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Raven
February 5 – Thelma Ritter, 66, US actress, Rear Window, All About Eve
February 9 – Gabby Hayes, 83, US actor, The Man from Utah, In Old Oklahoma
February 11 – James Lanphier, 48, US actor, The Pink Panther, The Party
February 19 – Madge Blake, 69, US actress, The Long, Long Trailer, Batman
February 23 – Madhubala, 36, Indian actress, Mahal, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, Mughal-E-Azam
February 27 – John Boles, 73, American actor, Frankenstein, Stella Dallas
March 18 – Barbara Bates, 43, American actress, The Caddy, All About Eve
March 19 – Lola Braccini, 79, Italian actress, My Little One, What a Distinguished Family
March 25 – Alan Mowbray, 72, British actor, Terror by Night, My Darling Clementine
April 2 – Fortunio Bonanova, 74, Spanish actor, Citizen Kane, An Affair to Remember
April 23 – Krzysztof Komeda, 37, Polish composer, Rosemary’s Baby, The Fearless Vampire Killers
May 3 – Karl Freund, 69, Czech-American cinematographer and director, Metropolis, The Mummy, Key Largo
May 27
Jeffrey Hunter, 42, US actor, The Searchers, King of Kings
June 8 – Robert Taylor, 57, US actor, Quo Vadis, Camille, Bataan, Ivanhoe
June 10 – Frank Lawton, 64, English actor, A Night to Remember, The Devil-Doll
June 13 – Martita Hunt, 70, Argentine-English actress, Becket, Great Expectations
June 19 – Natalie Talmadge, 73, American silent screen actress, Our Hospitality, Intolerance
June 20 – Rudolf Schwarzkogler, 29, Austrian experimental filmmaker, Satisfaction
June 22 – Judy Garland, 47, American actress and singer, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, A Star Is Born[7]
June 23 – Stanley Andrews, 77, American actor, West of Wyoming, Across the Badlands, Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders
July 5 – Lambert Hillyer, 75, American director, Dracula’s Daughter, Batman
July 5 – Leo McCarey, 72, US director, Affair to Remember, Going My Way
July 7 – Erskine Sanford, 83, American actor, Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons
July 13 – Bess Meredyth, 79, US screenwriter, The Unsuspected, Charlie Chan at the Opera
July 15 – Peter van Eyck, 57, Polish actor, The Wages of Fear, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
July 17 – Harry Benham, 85, American actor, Nicholas Nickleby
July 18 – Barbara Pepper, 54, US actress, The Rogues Tavern, Kiss Me, Stupid
July 26
Andrés Soler, 70, Mexican actor, A Day with the Devil, The Great Madcap,
Raymond Walburn, 81, American actor, High, Wide, and Handsome, Third Finger, Left Hand
August 1 – Donald Keith, 65, American actor, The Plastic Age, Parisian Love
August 9 – Sharon Tate, 26, American actress, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Valley of the Dolls
August 14 – Sigrid Gurie, 58, American actress, Algiers, The Adventures of Marco Polo
August 15 – William Goetz, 66, American producer, studio executive, Sayonara, Les Misérables
August 18 – Mildred Davis, 68, American actress, Safety Last!, Grandma’s Boy
August 26 – Martin Miller, 69, Czech actor, 55 Days at Peking, The Pink Panther
September 14 – James Anderson, 48, US actor, To Kill a Mockingbird, Take the Money and Run
September 19 – Rex Ingram, 73, American actor, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Thief of Bagdad
October 8 – Eduardo Ciannelli, 81, Italian actor, Gunga Din, Strange Cargo
October 12 – Sonja Henie, 57, Norwegian actress, former Olympic ice skater, Sun Valley Serenade, One in a Million
November 5 – Lloyd Corrigan, 69, American actor, Son of Paleface, The Thin Man Goes Home
November 8 – Dave O’Brien, 57, American actor, Captain Midnight, Brand of the Devil
December 3 – Ruth White, 55, American actress, To Kill a Mockingbird, No Way to Treat a Lady
December 7 – Eric Portman, 68, British actor, Canterbury Tale, Bedford Incident
Ilse Steppat, 52, German actress, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Josef von Sternberg, 73, Austrian director, The Blue Angel, Macao
Film debuts
Bernard Alane – Hibernatus
Adam Arkin – The Monitors
Amitabh Bachchan – Saat Hindustani
Bob Balaban – Midnight Cowboy
Bonnie Bedelia – The Gypsy Moths
Ed Begley Jr. – The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
Paul Benjamin – Midnight Cowboy
Kate Burton – Anne of the Thousand Days
Bernie Casey – Guns of the Magnificent Seven
Jill Clayburgh – The Wedding Party
James Cosmo – Battle of Britain
Bruce Davison – Last Summer
Lesley-Anne Down – The Smashing Bird I Used to Know
Carmen Filpi – Wild Gypsies
Bridget Fonda – Easy Rider
Leif Garrett – Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Melanie Griffith – Smith!
George Harris – The Gladiators
Anjelica Huston – A Walk with Love and Death
Raul Julia – Stiletto
Paul Koslo – House of Zodiac
K.P.A.C Lalitha – Kootu Kudumbam
George Lazenby – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Joanna Lumley – Some Girls Do
Robert F. Lyons – Pendulum
Miriam Margoyles – A Nice Girl Like Me
Ian McKellen – A Touch of Love
Charles Napier – Cherry, Harry & Raquel!
Ryan O’Neal – The Big Bounce
Al Pacino – Me, Natalie
Ron Rifkin – The Devil’s 8
Sydne Rome – Some Girls Do
John Savage – The Master Beater
Jane Seymour – Oh! What a Lovely War
Sylvester Stallone – The Square Root
Oliver Tobias – Arthur? Arthur!
Beverly Todd – The Lost Man
Brenda Vaccaro – Where It’s At
Christopher Walken – Me and My Brother
M. Emmet Walsh – Midnight Cowboy
Frank Welker – The Trouble with Girls
Ray Wise – Dare the Devil
TV as Source of Movie Stars
The most distinctive attribute of the decade’s big stars is that many of them have come from television, where they were groomed and polished their craft. We are not talking about one or two TV stars that made it big in Hollywood.
Thus is a group of performers who, singly or jointly, have come to dominate American film comedy of the 1980s. As alumni of the Second City revue companies or NBC’s Saturday Night Live, they wrote, produced, and starred (in different capacities and different combinations) such popular films as Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, and National Lampoon’s Animal House and its variants.
Is may be premature to celebrate the togetherness of film and TV, mediums that were once in direct competition with each other Gone are the days when the two cultural media used to be “natural enemies.” Unlike radio, which was always considered a legitimate avenue for screen actors to pursue before or during their screen careers, television was regarded a threat to the very existence of film.
As late as the 1950s, there was a good deal of resentment and suspicion of the new, increasingly popular, medium. Hollywood’s studios feared so much the competition from television that they prohibited their stars from appearing on the small screen. For example, Clark Gable’s MGM contract stipulated that he would appear in television productions only if they became a substantial part of the business (i.e as advertisement for his big screen work). Gable’s lengthy screen career was marked by only two TV appearances, both in the late l950s: the first when he presented an Academy Award, and the second, when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Bogart
Humphrey Bogart also avoided television, regarding it suspiciously as a threat to his livelihood as a movie actor. He subsequently made only one big television appearance, in l955, recreating his previous stage and film role as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest.
Cagney
As late as 1969, Jimmy Cagney shocked the television industry, when he refused a lucrative offer for a ten-second commercial. Committed to screen acting, it was a matter of principle to him, no matter how much money he was going to earn.
For better or for worse, this suspicion forced television to develop its own stars: Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Bill Cosby and, of course, the performers of Saturday Night Live. The transition from TV to film stardom is not always smooth and not always possible. Mary Tyler Moore and Shelley Long are still struggling to find the right vehicles.
It took several years for Tom Selleck to have made the transition from Magnum P.I. to a bankable screen star. However, Three Men and a Baby (l987) showed that with the right vehicle, he and Tad Danson, another popular TV star (Cheers), could attract moviegoers. While only thirteen of the l00 top-grossing movies have lacked bankable movie stars, at least half of them were directed and or produced by a star filmmaker, Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg and his entertainment empire are their own stars, dominating the shape and form of such starless blockbusters as E.T., Poltergeist, Gremlins, The Goonies, and the technologically wonderful Who Framed Roger Rabit. Bob Hoskins is a talented British actor, but it’s doubtful whether viewers flocked to see the film because of his performance.
The blockbusters that lacked A-list directors or star-performers have been high-concept films. Behind the success of each one of them stands a hip factor, an original idea, a technological innovation, a spoof of previously made films. For example, the l980 comedy Airplane was a zany spoof of the Airport disaster movies. Fast-paced, with a nonstop string of gags, Airplane had three directors, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, who collaborated again in “Ruthless People” (1986).
Written and directed by Bob Clark, the starless Porky’s (1982) was another bawdy, raucous comedy. Set in the Eisenhower era, its rude humor was specifically designed for teen-aged audiences, who made it the fifth most popular film of the year. Porky’s also has the distinction of being the only blockbuster to have opened in the winter (March). Most of the hits have been released in the two high-seasons of filmgoing, during the summer or Christmas.
The success of Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985), but not its sequel, depended less on its narrative and protagonists (played by distinguished stage or screen actors), than the format and visual style of a Sci-fi comedy, in the best tradition of the Lucas-Spielberg movies. Cocoon was marked by an adolescent sensibility, being a tale of elderly people’s need for rejuvenation, told from the point of view of young people.
1980s: Eddie Murphy, Spielberg
The two figures who have put their stamp on the American commercial cinema of the 1980s, Eddie Murphy as a performer and Spielberg as filmmaker.
Murphy: The Golden Child, Harlem Nights, ego trips or self-promoted star-vehicles; Murphy’s name appears 5 times in the credits of Harlem Nights.
Blockbusters and Movie Stardom
The vast majority of blockbusters have featured movie stars, one of the few consistent attributes of commercial American cinema from its beginnings.
Stardom as system, created and fabricated by the movie moguls, may no longer exists, but individual stars (and their agents) have been powerful. The old studios, as we knew them, may be dead, but big movie stars are well and alive in Hollywood.
