Sex Stars of 1969

How necessary are stars to the movies of today? That question, once considered self-evident, is being increasingly pondered by the higher echelons of Hollywood, where computers are sometimes employed to give read-outs on a picture's financial chances when buttressed by the more expensive star names. What has proved a puzzlement to both human and mechanical brains, however, is how often these days the supposedly dependable stars are failing to steer their vehicles into the black. Why pay Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, Marlon Brando, Rex Harrison and a good many other seemingly impregnable names their enormous salaries if the public no longer rushes to patronize their pictures? Even more disconcerting, from an executive point of view, is the public's increasing tendency to create its own stars. Who had ever heard of Dustin Hoffman before The Graduate, or of Jon Voight before Midnight Cowboy, or of Ali MacGraw before Goodbye, Columbus? And yet they emerged, without question, as the sex stars--even the superstars--of 1969.

What these new stars reflect, of course, is the new, youthful audience that is finding the movies its most relevant and congenial art form. Industry statistics, developed by the Motion Picture Association of America, have established that almost 50 percent of those in the habit of attending movies today are between the ages of 18 and 24, while something like 80 percent of those who see movies more than once a year are under 30. As communications experts tirelessly point out, this is a postliterate, visually oriented generation, so conditioned by having spent more of their immature hours in front of television sets than at their schoolbooks. This is also, it might be added, an aural generation. Records, radio, discothèques, folk and rock concerts have literally affected their ears--adversely, claim scientists who have measured distinctly harmful decibel levels at various rock sessions. And it is a drug generation, attuned to mind-bending visions that come from pot, LSD and other hallucinogens.

Where, for such a turned-on audience, are the stars of yesteryear? Where are the Cary Grants, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Doris Days, even the Rock Hudsons? They are precisely where you might expect them to be--still doing their thing of 20 or 30 years ago--but now on Monday Night at the Movies or The Late, Late Show. And, relaxed in a muzzy nostalgia before millions of small screens throughout the nation are those same hordes of aging fans who used to queue up for the same films when first they played the theaters. Only rarely now do they venture from their easy chairs to see a movie--and then, presumably, it's to catch the latest vehicle of such perdurable personalities as John Wayne or Katharine Hepburn. After which, no doubt, they hasten back to their TV sets and to a time when both they and their favorites were young and beautiful.

Obviously, these stars of the past have little to say to today's young people, even though they may still be active. Symptomatically, while kids are still pinning up posters of Marlon Brando, it is the 1954-model Brando of The Wild One, in leather--Brando as the prototype of the motorcycle-gang leader--rather than the puffier, more establishmentarian Brando of today. And while there is still a charisma about Humphrey Bogart, whose films remain in constant and successful revival some dozen years after his death, it is undoubtedly the bedrock integrity with which the Bogart character flouted authority and defied convention that has generated this admiration and identification. One is tempted, in fact, to find parallels in the current enthusiasm for old W. C. Fields movies: Both off screen and on, Fields epitomized the cop-hating, anti-establishment loner with a snarling disregard for either respectability or the respected.

Beyond these venerated relics, however, it would be difficult to single out the stars of another generation who have retained their appeal for youth. The fact is that youth today doesn't seek out stars; it seeks out movies--and, on occasion, makes stars of those fortunate enough to be appearing in them. In a sense, 17-year-old Olivia Hussey and 19-year-old Leonard Whiting have become stars since playing Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers in Franco Zeffirelli's production of Romeo and Juliet. But the point is that before then, no one had ever heard of them--not even Zeffirelli. Equally successful with young people in 1969 was Lindsay Anderson's If ...; in this case, so unknown was every member of the cast that all but one remained unknown even after the picture's acclaim. Indicative of this generation's indifference to star names (text continued on page 212) is the relatively cool reception accorded such top rock and folk-rock favorites as Bob Dylan, Sonny and Chér and Arlo Guthrie when they turned up on the screen during the past year. The kids were cheerfully willing to endure the discomforts of the damned to catch their record favorites in festivals at Monterey, Newport or Woodstock, New York, but they wanted them in their own setting and with the electricity of personal contact (and hyperamplified sound), not in the impersonal semidarkness of a moviehouse.

But if stars are out for this new audience, film is definitely in. What kind of film? A Fordham professor, the Reverend Anthony Schillaci, put his finger on it when he wrote a year ago, in the Saturday Review: "If we're looking for the young audience ... we will find they're on a trip, whether in a Yellow Submarine or on a Space Odyssey. A brief prayer muttered for Rosemary's Baby and they're careening down a dirt road with Bonnie and Clyde, the exhaust spitting banjo sounds, or sitting next to The Graduate as he races across the Bay Bridge after his love. The company they keep is fast; Belle de Jour, Petulia and Joanna are not exactly a sedentary crowd. Hyped up on large doses of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and Mission: Impossible, they are ready for anything that an evolving film idiom can throw on the screen. And what moves them must have the pace, novelty, style and spontaneity of a television commercial." Today's trend, as Schillaci went on to note, tends to leave story line and character development "strewn along the highway of film history like the corpses in Godard's Weekend. Young people turn to film for a time-space environment in which beautiful things happen to them."

Exemplifying this new trend is Stanley Kubrick's costly 2001: A Space Odyssey, which MGM executives freely admit was snatched from the jaws of disaster only when the young audiences discovered it. Oldsters complained of its meandering script; critics worried about its being all space hardware, with characters who were themselves little more than automatons. But the youngsters dug it; they knew what it was really about and delighted in its fantastic visual imagery. They did not come out talking about Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, however, the two intrepid spacemen of 2001; for them, the hero was Hal, the deranged computer. For them, the message and the medium were intertwined in one beautiful trip--a trip that many prolonged with pills or pot surreptitiously ingested in the balcony.

Paradoxically, in 1969, star prices rose higher than ever. The $1,000,000-per-picture level established by Elizabeth Taylor a few years back has been breached time and again--currently by Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier and Steve McQueen, each of (text continued on page 217) whom now receives minimum guarantees of $1,250,000 against hefty percentages of the gross. Such escalation, however, has little to do with their actual box-office worth. In yet another twist of the trade, the past few years have seen giant conglomerates--Transamerica Corporation, Gulf & Western, Avco--move in on most of the major studios, while the television networks have been forming new filmmaking subsidiaries of their own. New capital for movie projects is now available, but always with an eye on the insatiable maw of television that lies just beyond the theatrical market. Names--star names particularly--are wanted and needed to put the stamp of importance on these new companies' product and to enhance its value in subsequent television deals. And since so many of the new executives planning film programs are relative neophytes, the stars have become not only a form of insurance for them but the one solid asset that they can offer a bank to get financing for their productions.

The top names, as a consequence, regardless of how well or how badly their recent films have performed at the box office, still find themselves very much in the driver's seat. Although the costly Elizabeth Taylor--Richard Burton co-starrer Boom! proved a bust for Universal. 20th Century-Fox didn't hesitate to meet her demands--$1,250,000 plus percentage--for The Only Game in Town, and they further obliged the lady by shooting the picture in Paris, even though the setting is Las Vegas. Fox was no less eager to pair her partner with Rex Harrison to play, somewhat improbably, the two bickering homosexuals in Staircase. Perhaps even more significantly, no sooner had Dustin Hoffman established himself as a name than his salary jumped from the $17,000 he was paid for The Graduate to $250,000 for Midnight Cowboy, then leaped again to an estimated $500,000 (with the prospect of millions more if the picture grosses according to expectations) for John & Mary, with Mia Farrow. Nor was the latter exactly underpaid for that film, even though her presence--and Elizabeth Taylor's--did nothing to save Secret Ceremony at the box office earlier in the year.

But while price is one of the determining factors in assessing the status of a star, it is by no means the only one. In the rule-of-thumb ratings used by the industry, Catherine Deneuve, the exquisite French beauty, stands higher today than, say, veteran Tony Curtis, even though she is being paid less (at this writing) than Curtis. But cool Catherine is presently hot and is actively being sought by every studio in town, while Curtis has had several box-office failures in a row--and even had to test for his (text continued on page 220) role in The Boston Strangler, a practice generally regarded as downright déclassé for any established star. Nevertheless, Curtis--along with such perhaps over-familiar faces as Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn--commands his high salary not only because he brings a solid, no-nonsense professionalism to his starring roles but because his presence (and theirs) in a picture confers upon it a certain prestige and importance, at least in the eyes of the production company.

So the paradox remains that, almost without exception, the top films of 1969 have been singularly starless. From such costly superproductions as Romeo and Juliet and 2001 to such relatively modest offbeat programers as If ..., Goodbye, Columbus, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Medium Cool, The Rain People, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and that wildly satiric fugitive from New York's underground, Putney Swope, the real hits of the year have tended to minimize performers except as they serve the story. Increasingly, the studios are looking upon the director, or the writer-director, as the real star, even as he is regarded in Europe; and they have extended an unprecedented freedom to such young, talented people as Francis Ford Coppola (The Rain People), Robert Thom (Angel, Angel, Down We Go), Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (Easy Rider) and Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) to make their own films in their own way. Older directors who seem to have gained the ear and eye of the new generation--Arthur Penn (Alice's Restaurant), Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point)--are also being permitted to function free of the normal big-studio safeguard of bolstering a costly production with even costlier names. If new stars arise from these pictures, then clearly they are that much ahead.

Although the importance of the star as a box-office attraction has demonstrably diminished during the past year, the importance of the star as a social phenomenon has, if anything, increased. He or she still remains a public figure of vast interest, admired and envied if not always respected. Newspaper columns continue to gossip about their activities, magazines to record their way of life and, in the instance of the tragic fate of Sharon Tate, of death. But if the divorce, the marriage or the murder of a film star can still make the headlines, it is their style of living that has attracted youthful fans to certain personalities. Both Catherine Deneuve and statuesque Vanessa Redgrave have made no secret of their unconventional private lives. Both of them are unwed mothers and given to frequent changes of partners--yet public knowledge of this seems, at the very least, to have enhanced their star status.

While the moviegoing public has always expected stars to live up to its image of them, perhaps the significant thing about the new breed of stars lies less in what these images reveal of the stars themselves than in what they tell us about their admirers. When young ladies nightly pelted Dustin Hoffman with roses during the run of his Broadway play, Jimmy Shine, it seemed to epitomize the passing of the matinee-idol type of hero. Physical beauty, be it the collar-ad good looks of a Robert Taylor or the rugged masculinity of a Clark Gable, hardly enters into it anymore. "Just an average neurotic" is the way Hoffman recently described himself to an interviewer, who, in turn, went on to describe Hoffman as "young, liberal, intellectual and basically pessimistic about the future." Certainly, these were the qualities that endeared him to the young people who thronged to see The Graduate. His pessimism was especially pronounced in Midnight Cowboy, in which--as ratty little Ratso Rizzo--he played a consumptive procurer who dies ingloriously in the last reel. Perhaps even more symptomatic of the times is his current role in John & Mary, in which he appears as a New York swinger who picks up Mia Farrow at a Manhattan singles bar, takes her to bed the same night and absent-mindedly forgets to ask her name until the end of the film. A serious actor, Hoffman is always concerned about the relevance of his roles to contemporary society.

Similarly, at a time when the national consciousness (and conscience) has zeroed in on the blacks, handsome Sidney Poitier--whom Pauline Kael once called "the Negro Gary Grant"--has been catapulted to the fore as one of the few authentic superstars of the day. His box-office record has been astonishing, particularly in view of the fact that his films are often second-rate. But, carefully selecting the roles he plays, he has kept himself very much in tune with the times. In For Love of Ivy, he played a cool, rich wheeler-dealer who uses his trucking firm as a front for a mobile gambling casino; and he swung, too, in bed, with the winsome Abbey Lincoln. Little more than a routine farce, the picture racked up a resounding financial return on its modest investment. In The Lost Man, Poitier undertook a Black Pantherish impersonation, changing his hair style and donning dark glasses to portray a man whose alienation turns him to violence--and to his white co-star, lovely Joanna Shimkus.

Despite the political implications of his role in The Lost Man, Poitier has often been dubbed "Super-Negro," or dismissed by his black contemporaries as a "white man's nigger." Closing in fast on Poitier's popularity, without being accused of selling out, is former football star Jim Brown--big, brawny and decidedly pugnacious, as his frequent scrapes with the Los Angeles Police Department serve to underline. Introduced into big-time showbiz as one of the dirtier of Robert Aldrich's Dirty Dozen, he boosted his box-office stock in 1969 with appearances in Ice Station Zebra, The Split, Riot and 100 Rifles. The last, while hardly a work of art, owed much of its appeal to its pairing of the emphatically masculine Brown with the spectacularly curvaceous Raquel Welch. Brown played a cavalryman turned policeman who heads for Mexico on a man hunt. While there, he meets a fierce Yaqui Indian guerrilla--Miss Welch--and it isn't long before the two of them are locked, steamily nude, in each other's arms. Despite this on-screen interracial mating, however, word leaked out from location that the two stars were not getting along as well on the set as they seemed to be in their bed scenes together. But the problem had to do with temperament rather than with prejudice. Brown remains very much his own man--which may account for his appeal to the ladies of all races.

Also his own man is Steve McQueen, who manages his private life with the same cool assurance that has won him such a following in his film roles. Quietly and without publicity, he has worked to rehabilitate errant youths (having once been one himself)--and, with an equal lack of fanfare, has built his Solar Company into one of the most potent independents in Hollywood. At this point, so anxious are the studios for his costly services that they will sign contracts permitting him to produce films in which he doesn't even appear, in exchange for his promise to star in a few others. It was McQueen's presence alone that made the flimsy Thomas Crown Affair a winner--McQueen and some teasing sex scenes with the magnetic Faye Dunaway. With Bullitt, however, he ran far ahead of the field. Although the film was only a cut above the average thriller, McQueen's easy naturalness, his combination of cool toughness and sensitivity gave a quality of realism and the suggestion of depth to what was essentially a story of cops and killers. Typically, McQueen had a falling out with Warner Bros./Seven Arts even before the film was completed over what he regarded as a certain chintziness on their part. To be sure, Bullitt had gone substantially over budget; but McQueen was canny enough to know that director Peter Yates had something good going for him and that the additional costs of the breath-taking San Francisco chase sequence would lend zest to the picture and consequently widen its appeal for youthful audiences. He tore up his very advantageous contract with Warners before the film had even been released and (continued on page 259)Sex Stars(continued from page 220) moved over to Cinema Center Films (a CBS subsidiary) to star in and coproduce a script based on William Faulkner's The Reivers.

But if a mass vote were taken today, probably the number-one superstar spot would go to Paul Newman. Once a beer-drinking college athlete who turned Thespian after being thrown off his college football team. Newman combines his handsome physical attributes with brains, business acumen and an uncanny ability to choose the kind of offbeat roles that best suit his nonconformist personality. He has become by far the most magnetic embodiment of the star as anti-hero (Hud, Harper, Cool Hand Luke, Winning) and, as such, fits neatly into the new audience mood. Nor is he merely out to cater to prevailing tastes. "The hero today is just a great con artist," he once told Digby Diehl of the Los Angeles Times. "Heroes may have beautiful faces, but the core of the matter is they are really dull, foul people, because they have no morals." Newman has more than morals; he has principles. He fought valiantly for the nomination of Senator Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 campaign and has blasted away at the war in Vietnam. And he had the courage to take the ultimate step that so many actors dream--and talk--about: With Rachel, Rachel, starring his wife, Joanne Woodward, he not only became a director but won the Best Direction award of the New York Film Critics for 1968. Characteristically, Newman stated during the ceremony that he valued this award far more than all his Academy nominations for acting.

Equally nonconformist is brash, boyish Warren Beatty, whose starring role in Bonnie and Clyde established him not only as an actor of stature but as a producer who knows a good script when he sees one. It was a picture that exerted a strong appeal for youthful audiences in particular, who tended to look upon the two protagonists as a couple of high-spirited, misunderstood kids who happened to have been born some 35 years too soon. On the crest of its popularity, Beatty could have gone anywhere. Instead, he dawdled--generally, in the company of Julie Christie. Time after time, he indicated interest in a project, then withdrew. Just recently, he went before the cameras again, co-starring with Elizabeth Taylor in The Only Game in Town; but the effect of this self-imposed hiatus upon his career cannot be appraised until the new film appears sometime in 1970.

Despite silvered mane and equine features, grizzled Lee Marvin has also managed to capture the imagination of the Pepsi generation, many of whom no doubt see in his up-front honesty, his proud independence of spirit, his cocksure self-assurance and his cool indifference to authority the hopeful projection of themselves when they attain a similar maturity. Indeed, until Hell in the Pacific (in which Marvin and Japan's Toshiro Mifune played the only two roles in the film), his box-office record had been impeccable--so much so that his managers took to claiming that he was the number-one superstar. For Paint Your Wagon, he shares top billing with up-and-coming Clint Eastwood; he has also taken over some of the production reins on the forthcoming Monte Walsh, for which he snagged the still-fascinating Jeanne Moreau as his co-star. Having rounded her 40th birthday, she was an appropriate choice for a hell-firing romance with the hardy, hard-drinking Marvin, who makes no secret of the fact that the lady he is living with is not his wife.

No less sought after, although for other reasons, is the dark, liquid-eyed, exotically romantic Omar Sharif, who was seen in five major roles in 1969. In Funny Girl, he played cardsharp Nicky Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice; he was Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, co-starring with Catherine Deneuve; and then he went outdoors for Carl Foreman's blockbuster Western, Mackenna's Gold, playing a greedy gold prospector who seeks to outwit Apaches, the U. S. Cavalry and, most difficult of all, U. S. Marshal Gregory Peck. Less successful are his current ventures, Che!, based on the career of the ill-fated Cuban revolutionary; and The Appointment, a bittersweet romance filmed in Italy with Anouk Aimée. Although old-fashioned love stories are hardly the thing of the moment, Sharif's services will not go begging as a result. He is probably the only actor in Hollywood with the melting gaze, flashing teeth--and star stature--to be eligible for such roles. No one but a paid publicist would call him a second Valentino, but what other Latin lovers are around?

On the distaff side, the competition in 1969 has seemingly all but eliminated from the top rank of sex stars such erstwhile dazzlers as Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda and Julie Christie. While as names they may still be big, it is clear that they are fading in terms of generating anticipation and excitement for contemporary audiences. Whether it was solely their choice of vehicles (as in the case of Liz Taylor's string of fiascos) or a matter of the bloom having left the peach (as with Kim Novak and Brigitte Bardot), the decline and fall was dizzying. In the case of Miss Christie, who zoomed to the fore in Darling and consolidated her position as the kookie Petulia early in 1968, the lapse is probably due to the infrequency of her appearances. Apart from In Search of Gregory, which is due for imminent release, she has busied herself primarily with Warren Beatty.

Still in the circle of the big ones, however, remains blonde, fashionable Faye Dunaway--even though, after her Bonnie and Clyde debut, her roles were less than impressive in The Extraordinary Seaman and The Thomas Crown Affair. The films were hardly impressive, either, although Miss Dunaway continued to look ravishing in all of them. Of her acting expertise, there was little doubt; not only had she arrived in Hollywood fully trained and trailing a string of critical raves for her off-Broadway performance in Hogan's Goat, she even managed to survive her dowdy role in Otto Preminger's inept Hurry Sundown. What will happen to her after her current film, A Place for Lovers, however, is anybody's guess. One of the more soporific love stories of our time, it is a woeful tale about an American beauty (doomed to die of leukemia) who shacks up in Italy with a man (Marcello Mastroianni) more than willing to solace her romantically and sexually during her remaining months. Again, she looks stunning, and she takes full advantage of whatever opportunities the script provides to build a credible role. But as much as she must have hated to leave Italy and the offscreen attentions of her handsome co-star, Faye was certainly well advised to return to Arthur Penn (the director of Bonnie and Clyde) for Little Big Man, opposite Dustin Hoffman. The combination is more than promising.

Also more than promising is the news that Raquel Welch, who has been rising swiftly, despite a series of appalling roles in such gaudy action films as Fathom, Bandolero! and 100 Rifles, is now at work on Myra Breckinridge--in company with such oddly assorted co-stars as John Huston, film critic Rex Reed and the immortal Mae West (her first film in 26 years). Raquel's well-publicized love scenes in 100 Rifles served to consolidate her position as one of the hottest and biggest of today's female stars. Physically a feast for the eyes, she is also one of the few who can be considered an authentic and direct descendant of the older-style sex queens exemplified by Miss West. Unfortunately, she has been hampered up to now by the fact that her acting range has been limited to one expression--sultry; but few of her roles, and few of her fans, have demanded anything more. Miss Welch, however, is very serious about herself and her career. Aware that being merely a sex symbol is insufficient equipment for competition in the fast-changing world of the new cinema, she has given notice that she intends to prove herself as an actress--and, toward that end, not only has become far more finicky in her selection of roles but has formed her own production company (with her husband and manager, Patrick Curtis) to control her future. Between her determination and her figure, Raquel Welch will probably be around for quite a few years.

Meanwhile, the curious vogue for Mia Farrow continues. Rosemary's Baby--and her celebrated relationship with Frank Sinatra, which ranged swiftly through courtship to marriage to divorce--took her to the highest rung. If the diminutive Miss Farrow is decidedly unsexy in type, measurements and looks, she nevertheless seems to correspond to new audience preferences for young women whose virginal appearance belies their free-living, free-loving life pattern; Mia plays just such a girl in John & Mary, due for release at year's end. Highly intelligent, highly strung, a frenetic member of Hollywood's jet set, she had proved too much for Sinatra to handle. The question remains, can she learn to handle herself?

With Julie Christie relatively inactive for the time being, her near look-alike, Susannah York, rose up in 1969 to challenge her position as England's leading sexport. Blonde and blue-eyed Miss York, although still in her 20s, has been around a long time. (She made her film debut in 1960, at the age of 18, in Tunes of Glory.) Dependably equipped as an actress, equally at home in zany contemporary comedy (Duffy) and period drama (A Man for All Seasons and, currently, Oh! What a Lovely War), she earned her greatest fame earlier this year when she shucked all restraint--and most of her clothing--in The Killing of Sister George. As the youthful kept girlfriend of a middle-aged dyke actress, she provided one of the erotic high spots of 1969 when she allowed herself to be seduced by an older woman who found her charms irresistible. In the key scene, Susannah is manually manipulated by Coral Browne, whose lips then descend hungrily upon the girl's bared and straining breast. Not only was Miss York's orgasmic seizure unmistakable but director Robert Aldrich made sure to catch the moment in a remarkably detailed close-up. When later asked about the experience on a Hollywood talk show, Miss York rather primly replied, "But it was all part of the character!"

Nudity, of course, has now become an accepted part of a female star's cinematic duties; and among those who have not shirked their responsibility to reveal themselves in the buff at least once in virtually every picture is the most beautiful of the new crop of stars: French-born Catherine Deneuve. But even though she left little to the imagination as a part-time prostitute in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour, it was still her face that was her fortune. In fact, she was given a fortune to appear opposite Jack Lemmon in the Hollywood-made April Fools, a pairing that proved less than congenial. She quickly returned to her native soil for François Truffaut's sex-charged The Mississipi Mermaid (with Jean-Paul Belmondo) and soon showed an offscreen preference for her justly famed director's company. By then, she was free of David Bailey, the British photographer she had married after refusing to marry Roger Vadim, the father of her son. Very much her own woman, Mlle. Deneuve keeps to a small circle of intimates, guards her private life from the public eye as much as she can and, when she deigns to talk to a reporter, is apt to claim, "I really care nothing for being a 'film star.'"

It was the fashionable thing to do during the year, and no one epitomized this new attitude better than Vanessa Redgrave, Sir Michael's willowy, patrician daughter. Having left her husband, director Tony Richardson (with grounds for the divorce kindly supplied by Jeanne Moreau, who allowed herself to be named the corespondent), she soon took up with the handsome Italian singer and actor Franco Nero, who had played Lancelot to her Guenevere in Camelot. Upon becoming pregnant, she baldly announced that he was, indeed, the father of her child but that she had not the slightest intention of marrying him. She was already visibly enlarged when she seated herself at the Academy Award ceremonies last April; her work in The Loves of Isadora--in which she flitted about nude for one of the love scenes and, like Isadora Duncan herself, bared her breasts during one of the dance sequences--had qualified her for an Oscar nomination. She didn't win, but the television cameras lingered upon her beatific expression as she sat with her hands folded over her obviously protuberant belly. No doubt the anti-establishmentarian Miss Redgrave would not have had it otherwise. And a whole new generation of star gazers applauded not only her artistry but her honesty.

Caught in the shift of star rankings in 1969 were many who, a year or two earlier, would certainly have been as important as any of those mentioned above. For some, however, the year saw a paling of their previously established image--as with Michael Caine, who walked through both The Magus and The Italian Job with scarcely a change of his arrogant, deadpan expression. Sean Connery deserted entirely his former image, that of the insouciant and sack-oriented James Bond, for what he hoped were meatier roles--notably, in Martin Ritt's impressive production of The Molly Maguires--while newcomer George Lazenby took over the Bond role. In A Place for Lovers, Italy's top male sex star, Marcello Mastroianni, had the misfortune to run afoul of some of the year's most uninspired screenwriting and direction. James Coburn, whose career had been careening forward, abruptly ground to a halt--though perhaps only temporarily--when his two most recent entries, Duffy and Hard Contract, failed to impress his fans. They seem to have been willing enough to accept the notion that Coburn might be a cold killer, as he was in Hard Contract, but not that he could find sexual satisfaction only with prostitutes. And Cliff Robertson, whose Academy Award for last year's Charly signaled his arrival as one of the most capable of the screen's leading men, spent most of 1969 out in the Pacific working on a picture whose release is still some months in the offing.

With so many of the leaders faltering, producers inevitably looked for new faces to fill the gaps. Nor was it merely a matter of finding new faces to play the same old roles. Film styles and genres were changing so rapidly that yesterday's hero could easily become tomorrow's underdog--or, as the career of Clint Eastwood neatly suggests, vice versa. Mired for seven years in the bush league of television with the Rawhide series, Eastwood spent seven weeks in Spain making a blood-spattered parody of a Western prophetically titled A Fistful of Dollars. This off-the-cuff epic proved an immediate blockbuster in Italy and the United States, and Clint was tapped for two almost equally successful follow-ups, after which the tall, rugged, laconic El Cigarillo (as the Italian public dubbed him because of the thin black cigars he habitually dangled from his tight lips) was drafted by the major studios back home. The building process included starring him in an actionful Western with a New York setting (Coogan's Bluff), then co-starring him with such well-established and prestigious players as Richard Burton (Where Eagles Dare), Lee Marvin (Paint Your Wagon) and Shirley MacLaine (Two Mules for Sister Sara). So rapidly did he advance that temperament trouble was said to have developed during the making of the last when Universal decided to give him top billing over Miss MacLaine. Eastwood's steadily mounting popularity would seem to come less from his ability to read a line, which is negligible, than from the cool, unflinching manner with which he faces the dangers that Gary Cooper always handled so admirably in the past--that, and the incredible amounts of punishment he seems stoically able to absorb in each of his pictures.

But Eastwood is cut from an older mold, and Hollywood's prime quest in 1969 has been to turn up young actors capable of expressing the morals and mystiques espoused by multitudes of today's teenagers--young stars who might provide the element of identification that would win the new audience to their movies. The leading candidate of the year is tall, purposeful Peter Fonda, old Henry's talented son. Overlooked for a time by the major studios, young Fonda was set on the road to his present eminence by appearing in a brace of American International "programers" beamed straight at the teenage market. As the star of The Wild Angels, made by low-budget specialist Roger Corman, Fonda played the leader of a vicious, antisocial motorcycle gang whose members displayed an enormous fondness for alcohol, pot and gang rape. Although their elders were appalled, the teenagers lapped it up--and not merely for its violence, as has been so often suggested: Beneath its often crude surface, The Wild Angels portrayed a group bound together by emotional rather than political or economic ties--a rapport that corresponds to the kind of generational solidarity one finds both on and off the campus today. In any case, Fonda, still in his mid-20s, was immediately accorded something of the stature of mythic hero.

The image was reinforced a year later when Corman starred him again, this time in The Trip, the study of a young man, successful in his career as a director of TV commercials, who suddenly decides to freak out for an exploratory journey through the hallucinatory world of LSD. Once again, the sense of a heightened verisimilitude, the awareness that not only the director but his entire cast was covering the drug scene without moralizing or shaking cautionary fingers--not to mention the visual excitements of the trip itself--made the film completely appealing to the youth audience and further consolidated Fonda's status as a spokesman and leader. And this year, in collaboration with an actor friend, Dennis Hopper (see On the Scene, page 250), Fonda wrote, produced and starred in Easy Rider, a film about two young cyclists who hedonistically explore a good part of the country in their search for a mystical freedom. Relaxing with pot as they wheel along, dropping off here at a farmhouse, there at a free-living commune, they eventually reach New Orleans, where they share an LSD adventure with two prostitutes and ultimately are shot down by a pair of red-necks who object to their unconventional garb and hairdos.

A kind of Pilgrim's Progress through contemporary America, Easy Rider not only captured a prize as best first picture at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring but, accompanied by almost unanimously good notices, has stood high on the box-office charts ever since its midsummer release. Success of this kind is the sort of thing that Hollywood understands best, and the chances are that both Fonda and Hopper (who directed the film) will have further opportunities to make pictures in their own way. It is characteristic of Fonda--and of many of the new young people who are hooked on film--that when American International agreed to finance Easy Rider only if the studio had final say on what went into it, Fonda carried his project to Columbia, which offered him less money but complete control. As nonconformist in his personal life as he appears on the screen (he was, in fact, once busted for possession of marijuana), this extremely articulate young man seems in many ways to sum up the idealism, the sensitivity and the social indignation of today's hippies, dropouts and protest marchers.

With the new emphasis on attracting young audiences, another youthful actor. Christopher Jones, has found himself very much in demand. One of his assets, of course, is his striking resemblance to James Dean. Raised in an orphanage, Jones would periodically run away, until, at the age of 18, he found a home in the Army; he emerged two years later with the unlikely ambition to become a psychiatrist. In the hope of working his way through medical school. Jones went to New York, where he developed, instead, a taste for the theater, studied with the famed Lee Strasberg and eventually married his teacher's daughter, actress Susan Strasberg. The union lasted long enough for him to father her child. Meanwhile, Jones found a few television parts and appeared with Susan in the Franco Zeffirelli stage version of Camille--although he was fired just prior to its Broadway opening. But Hollywood was already beckoning, and he starred in 20th Century-Fox' ill-fated TV series, The Legend of Jesse James; it was a somewhat less than auspicious beginning.

Youth-oriented American International soon found a more suitable showcase for Jones' talents, casting him as the millionaire rock-'n'-roll singer in Wild in the Streets whose vast under-25 following elects him President of the United States, with devastating results. Jones consolidated his following with this same group as a swinging sophomore in AI's Three in the Attic, where he was locked in a girls' dorm and forced to make round-the-clock love to three insatiable coeds. Immediately, he was cast with Pia Degermark--the gorgeous Swedish star of Elvira Madigan--in two films: The Looking-Glass War and the Italian-made Brief Season. With hardly a break in his busy schedule, Jones was then tapped by the prestigious David Lean for his new film, Ryan's Daughter. Since all of these are, at this writing, scheduled for imminent release, it is more than likely that Jones will emerge as one of the major stars of 1970.

Another strong contender for stardom is Jon Voight, who burst upon the film scene in Midnight Cowboy after his previous picture, Out of It, was withheld from release by United Artists to take advantage of what they felt would be a more dazzling debut. A product of Yonkers and the son of a golf pro, the tall, blond actor began his stage career while attending Catholic high schools and universities in Westchester. He first won critical acclaim in an off-Broadway production of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, which his future co-star Dustin Hoffman helped direct. And his role in the on-Broadway production of That Summer--That Fall brought him awards, even though the play itself was a flop. For most of the world, however, he was still an unknown when John Schlesinger cast him in Midnight Cowboy as swaggering Joe Buck, the young Texan who heads for New York with the aim of selling his sexual prowess to what he assumes to be hordes of love-starved, rich young women. The male hustler was itself something of a novelty on the American screen; and while Joe ultimately proved to be a flop in his chosen profession, audiences were deeply moved by his and Hoffman's sometimes funny, sometimes pathetic but always virtuoso performances. And even though Voight's Joe Buck proved less than virile in the clutch of the one customer willing to pay for his services, and also submitted to a homosexual act in the balcony of a sleazy moviehouse, female members of the vast audiences for Midnight Cowboy promptly elected this strapping six-footer with the slow smile to the ranks of potent new sex stars. Voight is currently in England working on The Revolutionary, accompanied both off camera and on by Jennifer Salt, who was seen briefly as Annie in Midnight Cowboy.

Nothing, of course, is riskier than to venture a career prediction on the basis of a single film, and perhaps no one bears this out more clearly than Dustin Hoffman's lovely co-star in his earlier success, The Graduate--the enchanting and capable Katharine Ross. In The Graduate, she was every college boy's dream of the ideal mate--not too easy, not too aloof, a bit alienated but still accessible, a Berkeley girl with a Wellesley façade. Her other appearances in such Universal efforts as Games and Willie Boy, however, failed to capitalize on this image, although she remained a first-rate actress in both films. Interest in her appeared to be waning until she had the good fortune to be cast in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, playing opposite Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Miss Ross has at least one moment in the film that could revive her career. A seemingly prim schoolteacher out West, she returns from her classroom to her lonely little cottage and begins to divest herself of her hot teacher's garb. Suddenly, she notices the deadly Sundance Kid sitting, gun in hand, beadily watching her. He brandishes his gun, beckoning her to continue the disrobing. She does, slowly at first, then more and more lasciviously, until she finally abandons all modesty and rushes into the outlaw's arms. The kicker is that she has been his paramour all along and had merely been playing his erotic game.

If Butch Cassidy restores to Katharine Ross the eminence she deserves, she will nevertheless find herself in active competition with several other glamorous young actresses who bowed in engagingly during the past year. Leading the pack at the moment is soft-spoken. British-born Jacqueline Bisset, whose erect bearing and superb figure began attracting attention even when her name was still buried toward the bottom of the credit sheets. She was seen briefly in Casino Royale as the aptly titled Giovanna Goodthighs, and again as a hitchhiking schoolgirl in Two for the Road. in which Audrey Hepburn and A bert Finney shared the limelight. But 20th Century-Fox (which had released the latter film) was alert enough to put the shapely brunette under contract, and soon she was to be seen in The Sweet Ride, wading ashore at Malibu, the upper part of her bikini missing. Understandably, all eyes turned in her direction. When another Fox film, The Detective, starring Frank Sinatra, suddenly found itself minus Mia Farrow (as their stormy marriage headed for the rocks), Jacqueline took her place, and her career began to move. In Bullitt, she played the acquiescent landscape architect who seems to spend all of her off-hours in Steve McQueen's bed; and in The First Time, mistaken for a prostitute by a trio of teenagers eager for their first sexual experience, she graciously assists one of the boys in his initiation rites. Currently one of a planeload of topflight stars in Airport, Universal's major release for this coming spring, Miss Bisset seems to combine just the right amounts of sweetness and sensuality to appeal to audiences today.

Several years younger, and a great deal more self-consciously swinging than Jacqueline Bisset, is a doe-eyed, chestnut-haired, lissome lady, pretentiously yclept Leigh Taylor-Young. Most of America knows her best as Mia Farrow's replacement in the late Peyton Place television series; but she also registered strongly as the provocatively under-dressed hippie who baked those beatific brownies for Peter Sellers in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! After that, she waved away several offers in order to make a film with her husband, Ryan O'Neal, whom she had met on Peyton Place. Although the resultant Big Bounce was hardly one of the best films of 1969, it was certainly one of the sexiest and nudest ever to come from any major studio in Hollywood, with most of the nudity provided by the curvaceous Leigh--as when she tantalizes O'Neal into becoming her slave by posing lasciviously atop a marble graveyard slab. This touch of necrophilic erotica did nothing to prevent The Big Bounce from bouncing badly; and those betting on her attaining the heady altitudes of stardom will have to wait to see how she fares in such upcoming pictures as The Adventurers (see Playboy's exclusive uncoverage on page 231) and The Buttercup Chain. If, perchance, she doesn't make it, there will be some fine equipment going to waste; for no one seems better qualified not merely to play but to personify those sexily eccentric girls of the turned-on generation.

Another dreamy and delicious young star for whom the chances look excellent is Joanna Shimkus, a product of Halifax, Nova Scotia, circa 1943. Of half-Irish, half-Lithuanian parentage, Joanna started a modeling career in Canada, then moved to Paris, where she became one of Europe's highest-paid fashion models. Soon turning to movies, she appeared in two French films (she is bilingual) and made her English-speaking debut as Elizabeth Taylor's mousy secretary in Boom! It took the French-made Zita, however, to establish her firmly not only with the art-house crowd and the critics but with plain, garden-variety voyeurs; for in that film, she had a fantasy lovemaking sequence that revealed her in all her loveliness. Moving to Hollywood, she most recently co-starred as Sidney Poitier's white girlfriend in The Lost Man--a role that both seemed inclined to continue playing, if the gossips are to be trusted, long after the cameras stopped turning.

Curiously enough, while this country provided most of the emergent male stars of the past year, the pattern was different in the case of females. As usual, England turned out its quota of twinkling starlets with star potential: the pert Susan Hampshire, the cute and cuddly Barbara Ferris, the dramatically capable Carol White, the nymphetic Pamela Franklin (the brazen little schoolgirl who posed nude for artist Robert Stephens in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and the madcap Judy Geeson (who shared the marital discords of Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom in Three into Two Won't Go). Meanwhile, England also launched a star of first magnitude in flaming-haired Maggie Smith. Too long relegated to subordinate or character roles (as in her delightful delineation of Peter Ustinov's Cockney wife in Hot Millions), the statuesque Miss Smith uncorked her dramatic abilities in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, then promptly demonstrated her versatility with a show-stopping cameo as a singer in Oh! What a Lovely War. All of these luverly ladies have bright futures, and in 1970, we should see a good deal more of them.

Sweden, always a dependable source for delectable female dishes (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, et al.), again came through with Britt Ekland, who at first remained under the shadow of her then-husband, Peter Sellers. After showing a gift for comedy in After the Fox, she revealed considerably more of what Sellers had seen in her in The Night They Raided Minsky's, in which she was, ostensibly, the first girl to strip in Broadway burlesque. In Stiletto, with Alex Cord, she played a member of the jet set--as she apparently is in real life--and tangled erotically with a top Mafia figure. Fetching in quite a different way is her Swedish compatriot, Elvira Madigan's Pia Degermark, who continues to make pictures while professing to be reluctant about becoming a star. Well born, a dancing and skiing companion of the young Swedish Crown Prince Carl Gustaf, she has stated that curiosity overcame reluctance when she was offered the role of the ill-fated Elvira by director Bo Widerberg. "I thought he was crazy to ask me," she later confessed. "He said it was my eyes ... something about my eyes." Critic John Gruen made it clearer: "Pia Degermark's eyes are incredible," he glowed. "They are of an intense sapphire-blue in which some brilliant magical light has found residence. These eyes, with their long, long lashes, are set in a face of rarest delicacy in which the structure of the cheekbones, nose, lips and chin shape the image of youth, innocence and vulnerability." One who has gazed long and deep into those eyes, as mentioned earlier, is Christopher Jones, with whom she appears in both The Looking-Glass War and Brief Season. A romance developed between them. How long it--or her career--will last, there is no conjecturing. Will she remain a screen star? "I like it right now," she allows. "Tomorrow I might not like it."

One who makes no bones about being a more-than-willing member of the contemporary sex-star set is Catherine Spaak, who also possesses a formidable background. Her father is the famous screenwriter Charles Spaak (Grand Illusion is only one of his notable writing credits); and her uncle is Paul-Henri Spaak, former Secretary General of NATO. Of Belgian birth, the willowy Catherine speaks both French and Italian like a native. Though she has appeared in several American and numerous French films, it is in the Italian cinema that she has been most frequently exposed, although never more fully than in this year's The Libertine--in which, as a young but far from grieving widow, she eagerly explores the variegated pleasures and perversions that her late husband had failed to teach her. Slim and cool. Miss Spaak purveys an image of the wholly modern, totally provocative, completely emancipated young woman of today.

Since Denmark, as is well known, has few hang-ups about sex, it's hardly surprising that it has provided a fitting embodiment of its love-and-let-love attitude in the person of Anna Karina, who is fast becoming an international star. The child of a handsome sailor and an unwary teenaged mother in Copenhagen, the shapely Hanne Karin Bayer (as she was then known) could hardly walk down a street from the time she was 14 without being discovered time and again for modeling or filmwork. It happened in Copenhagen; and it happened when, still in her teens, she moved to Paris to strike out on her own. As a model, she became known as the Elle girl (the French equivalent of the American Vogue), and her special gamin beauty was regarded as typifying the new French face. No matter that she was actually Danish.

A young French film critic who had seen her in a TV bubble-bath commercial sent her a telegram; he was thinking of making a movie. "Take your clothes off," he instructed her when she appeared for an interview. She refused, and thus didn't get the lead in a picture called Breathless, directed by that same movie critic, Jean-Luc Godard. But Godard remembered her--so well, in fact, that he cabled her to come and appear in Le Petit Soldat, which he was filming in Switzerland. Mlle. Karina went, fell in love with him, married him and, after some temperamental episodes and some rumored infidelity, divorced him. While still continuing to play in most of Godard's films (her most recent being Made in U.S.A.), she moved on to Hollywood for The Magus and Justine, then to England for Laughter in the Dark. Not about to marry again in a hurry, she had a French male roommate for a time, then a rumored fling with Michael Caine during the filming of The Magus. After that, she went back and married her roommate. "It's important to have someone to go back to," she told a reporter. With that kind of French-Danish attitude toward affairs of the heart, Mlle. Karina obviously has her own notions about what constitutes a love goddess on the contemporary scene.

Equally emancipated, and equally alluring, is Anouk Aimée, who emerged as an international star in A Man and a Woman, directed by Claude Lelouch. On the strength of her work in that film, she received the inevitable summons to Hollywood, although her first American film, MGM's The Appointment, was shot in Italy. A romance soon developed between the cool Anouk and her intense co-star, Omar Sharif; when his career took him back to Los Angeles, she followed, working with her gifted countryman, Jacques Demy, on The Model Shop. In it, the patrician-featured Anouk seemed somewhat ill at ease as a lady who poses willingly for any amateur lens-man with a letch and $20. She was, however, more at home in George Cukor's sumptuous version of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, retitled simply Justine. Justly famed as a "woman's director," Cukor played to the hilt her innate sexuality as a former prostitute married to one of Egypt's most powerful financiers, who exploits her charms to aid the Jewish underground in its fight against the British in the mid-Thirties--including one sequence in which she shucks her clothes and dashes nude into the surf to win a young Englishman over to her cause. Now in her late 30s, Mlle. Aimée is probably too old ever to achieve front-rank stardom, but she is a consummate actress, and it is to be hoped that she will long continue to grace American films with her special brand of womanly sophistication.

It is back to this country that we must travel to find the year's most-talked-about new star, the seraphic brunette who played in Goodbye, Columbus what The New York Times termed the "Class A, Number One, American Bitch." It was characteristic of fluctuating movie-star fortunes that it would be a total unknown who would most intrigue the increasingly restless movie public. Her name is Ali MacGraw, a Wellesley graduate (class of 1960) and an art-history major. She had a postcollege marriage and divorce. She modeled for a couple of years and worked as a photographer's stylist. She thought about acting, even took some acting classes with New York's highly regarded Wynn Handman; but no one found her particularly talented. An agent became interested in her, however, and asked her to try out for several movies. Nothing. Then the agent heard about a movie called Goodbye, Columbus, and had her audition for the role of Brenda Patimkin, a somewhat liberated "Jewish princess" from Westchester, who has a summer affair with a poor but intellectual library assistant.

As everyone knows by this time, Ali was perfect for the role. After all, what better dream image for a Jewish suburban family--or, for that matter, for any middle-class family--could there be than a daughter who is, in fact, a Wellesley WASP? When the movie appeared, it was an instantaneous hit, and Ali drew most of the raves. Audiences still howl when Brenda is asked at a Jewish wedding how she has been spending her summer. "Growing a penis," she replies. With this single film. Ali MacGraw has become the heroine of that new wave of college girls who know not only the score but all the four-letter words, and who don't hesitate to use them.

Is Ali MacGraw a one-picture star? It's a hard question to answer in these swiftly changing film times. But any year that comes up with an Ali MacGraw has to be a good year; and perhaps what bodes best for next year and the year after that is that directors--now becoming stars of the cinema in their own right--are being given the freedom to cast according to their character conceptions, rather than marquee value. Ali MacGraw, Dustin Hoffman, Peter Fonda, Christopher Jones, Jon Voight represent the new look in sex stars; and they demonstrate loud and clear that young people with the look of today and the talent to back it up are in abundant supply. All it takes is film makers who are willing to look around with open minds and open eyes.