Sex Stars of 1970

The star as sex symbol is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ever thought twice about the movies. What's changed in 1970 has been the substitution of sex for symbols--and, concomitant with that, a singular paucity of new star names and faces. What film makers seem to want today are bodies--and so, apparently, do moviegoers. In hundreds of hard-core stag-film theaters across the United States, nameless males and females are demonstrating the arts and techniques of lovemaking in all its manifold variations; in many instances, even the pictures themselves lack titles. In perhaps 800 soft-core sexploitation houses, the actors have names of sorts--but few moviegoers ever bought a ticket for Meat Rack because it starred David Calder or Love Me Like I Do to catch a glimpse of curvy Dyanne Thorne. Even Russ Meyer's splendidly endowed heroines, such as Erica Gavin of Vixen, remain anonymous to most of their ardent admirers.

Hollywood, perennially in a state of financial crisis, is now faced with a sex crisis as well. In today's raunchy film market, mere titillation is hardly enough, and most studios, with an eye to self-preservation, have entered into outright competition with the sexploitation moviemakers. By and large, they have taken up the genre in much the same manner; with bigger budgets and more lavish sets, of course, but plenty of skin--and no names, please. The one exception to this exercise in self-mortification was Myra Breckinridge, a marriage of the majors with the sexploiters that provided, in the time-honored tradition, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. The film itself, borrowed from Gore Vidal's novel, is certainly blue enough. For something old, there is the venerable Mae West, still smoothing her hips as if she were seducing Gary Grant in She Done Him Wrong--but looking like nothing as much as a grandmother in heat. And for the something relatively new, Myra starred America's sexiest symbol of the moment, the loquacious Raquel Welch.

If, as Shakespeare observed, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them," Raquel Welch discovered a fourth course--she was managed to success by her second husband, former publicity agent Patrick Curtis. Well before her name was established, before she had even made a picture worth talking about, her strong, regular, oddly sensual features were blazing from the covers of innumerable magazines--actually, far more in Europe at first than in this country. The cumulative exposure, however, had the desired result, and soon Raquel was being cast as a glamor queen in film after film in which acting was not precisely of the essence: Fantastic Voyage, Flare-Up, 100 Rifles, Lady in Cement and Bandolero! While none of these caused any critics to turn cart wheels, their receipts were usually in the black, and whenever this happens, the studio heads decide that their unwarranted success must be due to the appeal of that new sex queen--whatever her name is.

In this instance, the name was Welch, and Raquel was determined that no one would forget it. Where once she was constantly available for magazine layouts, now she was the ubiquitous guest for late-night talk shows, speaking out against her producers, directors and co-stars in amazingly forthright fashion. She was even more frank about her private life and attitudes in a memorable Playboy Interview. She herself condemned "the whole sex-symbol thing" as "an anachronism" and decried the studios' handling of her as a valuable piece of merchandise rather than as an ambitious and talented young actress who would like a chance to act. But the critics seemed more intent on taking her apart than on summing her up. It was reported that her beautiful nose was the result of plastic improvement; that her birth date was as much as a decade earlier than the year she claimed (1942). And magazine articles rarely fail to mention that she is the mother of two growing children by a former marriage and that her present marriage bears more than a passing resemblance to a financial merger.

Hollywood has a ready explanation for the upsurge of the well-endowed but not particularly gifted Miss Welch. She appeared, so the theory goes, at precisely the right moment to fill an apparent vacuum caused by the death of Marilyn Monroe. But determination, not a deterministic theory, lies beneath the edifice of her success. "She's a very smart lady," says one veteran female publicist who knows her well. "She's not intellectual smart but clever smart, with an instinctive but keen intelligence. She set out deliberately to be a star. Knowing she had natural assets, she added to them and--let's face it--she does have looks and an animal magnetism. But that animal quality is not cruel nor, as Time implied, hostile to the male. She was also shrewd enough not to overstep her bounds, which is to say she made sure to go into films she knew would not overtax her abilities. Then, later, she was shrewd enough to complain about the junk she was forced to do." After which the same publicist added thoughtfully, "Her one mistake may have been going after and getting Myra Breckinridge."

As a male turned female, out to humiliate the ego of every virile man she encounters in Vidal's caustic Hollywood fantasy, this was for Raquel her opportunity to show the world what she could do as an actress. Unfortunately for her, she was given a director, Michael Sarne, who seemed equally bent on proving to the world how outrageous he could be. Raquel repeatedly refused to perform in scenes he had devised--and since the scenes that she did perform include the strapping on of a large dildo and the buggering of a rugged young acting student, the imagination boggles at what might have been demanded beyond that.

Also unfortunate, for Raquel, was the casting of Mae West as a talent agent whose special talent is men. Despite her attempt to placate Miss West with a costly floral offering on their first day together in the studio, Mae quickly let it be known that Myra was going to be her film. At the New York opening of the picture, over 10,000 fans were on hand for the biggest premiere in years. But the fans, it soon turned out, were there for Mae, that veteran campaigner for an earthier approach to sex on the screen. By contrast, Raquel's reception was appreciative but restrained. Nevertheless, game to the end, she continued to make the rounds of the talk shows, maintaining at least her public enthusiasm for a picture that, for once, literally every critic described as a disaster.

Where Raquel Welch has followed the time-honored prescription for stardom--10 percent inspiration, 90 percent perspiration--lovely Jacqueline Bisset is far more representative of the young new actresses who are moving up to the top star billings of today. For them, the prescription is "cool"; they do it with no sweat at all. Twenty-six this year--but still able to play late-teenager roles--she was born of an English-M.D. father and a Paris-bred mother. Her comfortable childhood was spent in Surrey and it was only when she went to school in London that she broke away from the influence of her well-bred family to take a fling at show business. After she broke in through photographic modeling, friends encouraged her to try the movies and, though the roles were small at first--she made her debut as a schoolgirl in Two for the Road and attracted attention as Giovanna Goodthighs in Casino Royale--she was clearly destined for bigger and better things.

Both began to arrive with The Sweet Ride, in which Jacqueline made an impressive entrance by staggering out of the surf without the upper half of her bikini. It was while making this picture that she met a handsome and promising young actor, Michael Sarrazin. Both, according to an intimate, were afflicted with shyness at first. "I don't think he likes me," the smitten Jacqueline told a friend, "even though he drives me home every day." But one day they stopped for coffee and had a long, deep, confiding conversation. Now considerably less shy, at last report she and Sarrazin were sharing a (text continued on page 222) Sex Stars of 1970 (continued from page 211) house, living happily, privately and without benefit of clergy.

The Sweet Ride proved to be the turning point in Jacqueline's career, professionally as well as personally. Soon afterward, she was cast in Frank Sinatra's The Detective as a replacement for Mia Farrow when the Sinatras' marital ship hit stormy seas. After further appearances in Bullitt and The First Time, she advanced into the big time as one of the top names on the all-star passenger list of Universal's profitable Airport, playing a flight stewardess impregnated by pilot Dean Martin. More recently, she received solo star billing in The Grasshopper, the story of a flighty, headstrong girl who abandons a small town to taste the excitements of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In ever-increasing demand, Miss Bisset projects an alluring combination of beauty, breeding and cool intelligence, set off by a ripe sexuality and an underlying shyness that seems genuine. With all these assets, plus a talent for acting, she should go far--unless some day, for personal reasons, she should decide to scrawl her own version of finis across the skies of her career.

Another actress whose screen career received a strong booster shot in 1970 is beauteous Candice Bergen. Like Jacqueline Bisset, she suggests breeding and intelligence, plus an aloofness that amounts almost to inaccessibility. Perhaps this impervious cool, displayed in such films as The Sand Pebbles, The Magus, Live for Life and The Adventurers, was the underlying reason for her failure to kindle fires in male breasts. And critics uncharitably suggested that the woodenness of her performances furnished proof that she was not half sister, as she often claimed, but fullblood sibling to Charlie McCarthy, her ventriloquist father's popular dummy of the Thirties.

Unquestionably, her cameo features are the most perfect on the screen today, but she remained a remote Venus on a pedestal--until this year, in Getting Straight, when Venus turned into an Aphrodite. Not only was she cast opposite the effervescent Elliott Gould, the hottest male star of the year, but the picture had to do with student riots at a time when campus unrest was at its most fervent.

In Hollywood, however, even after Getting Straight, Candice is liked but not well liked. For one thing, she writes (she's also an accomplished photographer)--and often her typewriter seems dipped in acid. This makes people nervous. They also know that she can walk away from the movie business any time she chooses, and this makes them more than a little envious. But she's not walking. In 1970, Candice had two successful movies going for her--The Adventurers and Getting Straight. Proof that just one picture can swing the precarious scales of cinematic fame is to be found in the career of Jane Fonda. A year ago, it seemed that she, along with such former first ladies as Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor, stood high on the retirement list, ready to be pushed aside by newer, fresher competition. But just as 1969 was ending, Jane appeared in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and both she and her picture were notable successes. In fact, as the desperate, downbeat, eventually suicidal marathon dancer of the early Thirties, she gave perhaps the finest performance of her career. At least the New York Film Critics Circle thought so and awarded her its Best Actress prize. A betting favorite for the Academy Award as well, she was nosed out by Maggie Smith, at her prime in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Throughout the year, Jane continued to make news--and meaningful contact with the youth audience--by espousing a raft of causes, including American Indian rights, and taking to the platform to decry the war in Vietnam.

Similarly, dark-eyed Katharine Ross, although still basking in the afterglow of The Graduate, had been ill advised in her selection of vehicles until Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid turned up. For some reason, after The Graduate, she elected to take the Western route and was almost buried on the lone prairie--in Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here. Butch Cassidy's success restored some of her former eminence, although it did far more for co-stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford, in the title roles. Petite Genevieve Bujold, at 26 already an established star in Canada, quickly won the respect of a considerably wider audience (and of co-star Richard Burton) in Anne of the Thousand Days. A highly disciplined, highly stylized actress with an oddly piquant beauty, she has the potential to develop into an exciting sex star--if she gets the right roles.

The same may be said of another Canadian, the slim, misty-eyed Joanna Shimkus, currently visible--very much so--in The Virgin and the Gypsy. Based on D.H. Lawrence's last, unfinished novel, it tells of the sexual awakening of the virginal daughter of a stern, provincial English minister. A gypsy, played by the glowering Franco Nero, effectively releases the girl from her repressions, the quite literal climax coming during a flood caused by a dam break. "Actually," Joanna admitted to an interviewer while discussing this love scene, "that wasn't my body. I don't like doing nude scenes just to bring in more customers, although I did show my boobs once or twice."

There was no question about whose boobs were on view in Women in Love, another 1970 movie derived from the collected works of Lawrence, that early champion of sexual candor in the arts. In a memorable scene, when Oliver Reed calls on an attractive schoolteacher for comfort after the death of his father, the woman boldly, fiercely strips off her nightdress and offers herself to him. She was Glenda Jackson, a fiery redhead with the looks and emotional power of a youthful Katharine Hepburn. Miss Jackson first awakened interest as the murderous Charlotte Corday in both the stage and screen versions of Marat/Sade. She played a controversial Ophelia to David Warner's equally controversial Hamlet and had already reached her early 30s before making her first movie. "She has," wrote British critic Peter Evans, "the sort of face you once saw traveling first-class in the northern towns, a face worn like a pale battle scar from the old days of class warfare. There is sadness and hardness in it and all of the 33 years it has taken to build. Yet it is a face... so explicitly erotic it could almost be a diagram for an advanced sex-education class."

When Vanessa Redgrave turned down the role of Gudrun, Lawrence's symbol of the rebellious "new" woman of 50 years ago, it gave Miss Jackson her big opportunity, and she made the most of it. Ken Russell, who directed her in Women in Love, immediately tapped her for his next project--a film about Tchaikovsky, in which she appears as the unhappy composer's mad, nymphomaniac wife. And the renowned John Schle-singer, director of Midnight Cowboy, made bloody sure to grab her for his upcoming Bloody Sunday. Glenda Jackson is definitely on her way.

Yet another actress to make it big on the strength of a single film in 1970 is blonde, buxom Sally Kellerman. As Hot Lips Houlihan, the horny but strait-laced head nurse of M.A.S.H., one of the few hit comedies of the year, the voluptuous Miss Kellerman was suddenly catapulted to world-wide fame. By her own account, Sally is neither a comedienne nor a siren. A product of Hollywood, she attended Hollywood High and ate her sandwiches across the street at the same soda fountain where, as legend has it, Lana Turner was discovered. Sally wasn't so lucky. Like many other girls bitten by starring ambitions, she enrolled in acting classes, took whatever part-time jobs were available and eventually got occasional bits on television. She also dated a lot. ("I've gone with many guys," she once admitted, "but I won't tell their names, because they're all famous and married.") She then went through two years of analysis, developed a singing voice and was cast by David Merrick in his Broadway musical Breakfast at Tiffany's, a flop of truly (continued on page 304) Sex Stars of 1970 (continued from page 222) majestic proportions. Linked by the columnists with Merrick for a time--not true, she says--she eventually contacted Robert Altman in desperation for a role in his upcoming M.A.S.H. He took one look, murmured "Hot Lips"--and forthwith rewrote and enlarged the role for Sally's special talents. The rest is box-office history. Miss Kellerman's leggy, brazen good looks will soon be seen again in another Altman effort, Brewster McCloud's Flying Machine.

This past year, however, was hardly a vintage one for many another of Hollywood's aging young lovelies. Faye Duna-way, who seemed to be on the very threshold of a dazzling career, reportedly had a hotter romance with Marcello Mastroianni off screen than anything visible on screen in the old-fashioned A Place for Lovers, in which she played a high-fashion woman who has her last romantic fling while wasting away from cancer. Faye was no less long-suffering, and possibly even more dreary, as a party to The Arrangement, the pretentiously boring adaptation that Elia Kazan made of his own novel. Small wonder that she was eager to put herself once more in the capable hands of Arthur Penn (who directed her in Bonnie and Clyde), even though her role in his Little Big Man is billed as merely a "guest appearance." She plays, however, the central role as a mixed-up, drug-taking, frigid model in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, directed by her former fiancé, Jerry Schatzberg. Since neither of these films is in release as of this writing, there is no way of knowing how--or if--they will brighten Faye's dimming luster.

Also losing her dazzle in 1970 was Mia Farrow, that curious mélange of innocence and sophistication--a little like a youthful nun determined to make the scene. At the start of the year, paired with Dustin Hoffman in John and Mary, directed by the gifted Peter Yates, her star seemed secure. And her role, that of a Manhattan swinger who swings promptly into bed with Hoffman without even asking his name after a casual pickup at a fashionable singles bar, seemed made to order, since Mary, like Mia, is Mod, intelligent, unconventional and just a little ley. There was also a bit of nudity--a side-angle shot of Mia as she darts from bed to bath (although, in a strange burst of propriety, Mia later wrote a letter to Time, explaining that someone more daring than she had actually supplied the body). The film failed to live up to its promise, however, and Mia remained off screen the rest of the year. But it wasn't precisely a matter of out of sight, out of mind. As the vastly pregnant traveling companion of composer-conductor André Prcvin, she continued to attract considerable attention--particularly after she presented him with twin boys. Previn's second marriage has since been dissolved, and the long-awaited Previn-Farrow nuptials finally took place in September. Regardless of their marital status, both profess to be proud and happy over their latest acquisitions. Whatever this interlude may have done to enhance Mia's reputation as an unconventional young lady, her extended absence from the screen after a relative flop has done nothing to advance her career--if she cares.

Another who seemed to be having career problems was one of last year's most promising newcomers, the wide-eyed Leigh Taylor-Young. Graduating from TV's Peyton Place to appear as the brownie-baking hippie of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, she won considerable attention and then bounced badly in Warner Bros.' The Big Bounce, a film she made with her husband, Ryan O'Neal. But Leigh revealed her attractive body repeatedly and enthusiastically in The Big Bounce and this may have had something to do with Paramount's casting her in that lavish misadventure called The Adventurers. Based on Harold Robbins' best seller, the script called for her to strip to the buff for an unintentionally comic seduction scene with Bekim Fehmiu, Yugoslavia's inadequate answer to Valentino. Leigh announced to the press soon after its release that henceforth, she would make it a condition of her contracts that nudity was out. Undeterred, the studios cast her in two subsequent films, Buttercup Chain and The Horsemen. It remains to be seen how her new contractual stipulation will affect her audience appeal.

More curious yet is the status of Stella Stevens, possessor of one of the sexiest figures in Hollywood and burdened with no reluctance whatever to reveal it whenever the script--or a Playboy pictorial--makes it expedient to do so. This year, as the lusty, goodhearted prostitute who shares Jason Robards' digs in The Ballad of Cable Hogue, she was as eyecatching--even eye-popping--as ever, especially when taking an alfresco bath in a rain barrel that barely came up to her navel. And under Sam Pekinpah's expert direction, she demonstrated once again an acting ability that many a less abundantly endowed star might well envy. But whether through lack of the right roles or because of some deeper lack in her own screen personality, she has failed to develop that extra dimension that can turn a sexpot into a sex goddess.

In previous years, the female foreign contingent could generally be relied on to add spice to the moviegoer's menu, but thus far, 1970 has proved to be an exception. For a time, it seemed that France's Catherine Deneuve would emerge as the reigning queen of the European cinema, particularly after her electric, enigmatic performance in Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour, in which, for once, the color cameras did full justice to her exquisite skin tones. Although she had seemed distinctly ill at ease in an earlier, English-language version of Mayerling, sponsored by MGM, CBS Cinema Center, nevertheless, brought her Stateside to co-star with Jack Lemmon in a rather leaden comedy, The April Fools. When she returned on screen earlier this year--opposite the durable Jean-Paul Belmondo--in The Mississippi Mermaid, a lackluster suspense picture directed in France by the esteemed Francois Truf-faut, the public couldn't have cared less.

The aging Jeanne Moreau, with her haunted eyes and tormented mouth, was now appearing primarily in character roles, and Brigitte Bardot was finally forsaking her sex image for the more decorous (if singularly inappropriate) role of a nun in Les Novices. It began to look last year as if the alluring Anouk Aimée was about to come into her own--particularly after the success of A Man and a Woman made not only her face but her name internationally familiar. Unfortunately for her, she, too, came to America and failed to conquer. Her title role as the enigmatic Justine, a cinematic telescoping of the four novels comprising Lawrence Durrell's famed Alexandria Quartet, turned out to be a less than impressive debut, primarily since no one on either side of the camera seemed to have the foggiest notion of what it was all supposed to be about. Even Italy, with a seemingly endless supply of ragazzi with fetching faces and forms, failed to turn up any new winners in 1970.

The fate of established stars was almost as bleak. Julie Andrews, the hottest thing in Hollywood after Mary Poppins, began heating up her own pellucid image--and losing money for the studios--in such films as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Star! and, this year, Darling Lili. The last alone, directed by her husband, Blake Edwards, is expected to give Paramount a $20,000,000 bath.

Virtually epitomizing the stars' lost glimmer was 20th Century-Fox's The Only Game in Town, adapted by Frank Gilroy from his none-too-successful Broadway play and directed by the venerable George Stevens. Apparently, the film got off the ground only because Elizabeth Taylor, still beholden to Stevens for making an actress out of her in A Place in the Sun, agreed to star in it--for $1,000,000. Nobody seemed to question the fact that Liz, rapidly approaching 40 and looking every minute of it, might be slightly mature (and more than slightly overweight) for a Las Vegas chorine. Predictably, the public stayed away in droves. For Fox, its costly and temperamental box-office insurance not withstanding. The Only Game in Town was a $7,000,000 bust.

The same holds true, although perhaps less rigorously, for the grip of the top male stars. Liz's better half, Richard Burton, along with Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and the indestructible John Wayne are still names to be reckoned with; but, with the possible exception of Wayne, the vehicle is now at least as important as the star. Hudson, for example, even when linked with Julie Andrews, was unable to stem the tide of disaster in Darling Lili. While that bomb was in the making, Burton was working with no less a star than Rex Harrison on Staircase, the story of two aging homosexual barbers; this error in judgment cost Fox another $6,000,000. Both Douglas and Lancaster, it is said in Hollywood these days, are unbankable for any picture budgeted at more than $2,000,000.

Luckily for the film companies, this is a movie-oriented generation and, as everybody knows by now, its youthful members provide the dominant audiences for movies today. But they couldn't care less about stars, no matter how expensive they may be. What they want is relevance--relevance of theme, subject matter, story and, no less important, relevance in the people who appear in these films. If John Wayne continues to speak to the older, silent majority, it is the likes of Peter Fonda, Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight who seem to have caught the eye of today's visually oriented filmgoers. And while the key to tapping the potential of this audience (demonstrated so astoundingly by the success last year of Easy Rider) has not yet been completely decoded, at least there is a dawning awareness in the studios that it's no longer the stars who make their pictures a box-office smash but the box-office hits that make stars of the actors who are in them.

In fact, one might say almost categorically that the most outstanding successes of the past few years have been not only starless but wholly unanticipated. Who had ever heard of Dustin Hoffman before The Graduate? Of Jon Voight before Midnight Cowboy? Of Elliott Gould before Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, M.A.S.H. and Getting Straight? To be sure, both Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper--and, for that matter, Jack Nicholson--had already achieved a kind of underground fame among the young devotees of motorcycle movies, well before they came together on Easy Rider. But who among the studio heads could be expected to know this? Certainly, not the executives at American-International, who had actually produced many of the bike films but turned down the Easy Rider package because Fonda and Hopper demanded creative control.

Perhaps the one notable exception to this convenient rule of thumb is Robert Redford, whose screen career had been edging along in conventional manner until he burst forth as Paul Newman's co-star in the sensationally successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, followed almost immediately by his expert performances as the laconic ski champ in Downhill Racer and as the resourceful, relentless but sympathetic sheriff in Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here. One of the year's two most important and impressive male stars--the other is Elliott Gould--Redford is already being touted for Academy honors for his role in Little Fauss and Big Halsey, in which he plays a scruffy motorcycle rider bumming his way across the country. Life proclaimed about its cover subject, "He's the hottest thing in films just now." In the same issue, critic Richard Schickel wrote: "Some people think he stands a fair chance of becoming one of those rare stars who sums up, all by himself, the spirit of his time--as Brando did for the Fifties, as no one quite did for the Sixties."

No one doubts that Redford is one of the finest actors of his generation, even though he began slowly, with only ten films in as many years. Part of this was due to his own selectivity; he has always been something of a rebel. After graduation from Van Nuys High School in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles in 1955, he went to Europe at 18 in pursuit of la vie de bohème. In New York a year later, having decided to become an art director, he enrolled at the prestigious Pratt Institute. Desiring also some knowledge of the theater, he took an acting course at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his instructors were almost instantly aware that they had a student of star quality.

Stage and television work, including lead roles in Sunday in New York and Barefoot in the Park, were quickly followed by film roles in This Property is Condemned, Inside Daisy Clover and The Chase--all flops. Although Redford's acting ability and versatility were apparent, Hollywood began to consider him something of a Jonah. He scored a hit, however, in the film version of Barefoot in the Park, repeating the role he had created on the stage, and the studios began to regard Redford, with his trim, WASP-ish good looks, as eminently suited to play what he termed "downtown, buttondown, Ivy League lawyer characters." This was hardly an image that he favored, and he proved exceedingly skittish about improving his star status.

Redford's cussedness was even more apparent when he dropped out of Paramount's Blue at the last moment, forcing the studio to cast Terence Stamp in that ill-fated Western. While being sued by the company, he argued Charles Bluh-dorn, its president, into backing what he did want to do: the realistic study of an overambitious skier in Downhill Racer. The concatenation of these, along with Butch Cassidy and Willie Boy, all of which appeared at virtually the same time, served to bring Redford's talent into full focus. Wrote a critic in the now-defunct Entertainment World: "His is a competitive, amused and intuitive presence which is constantly fascinating to watch. The audience knows that he is thinking in a film--a glance, a cocking of the head, a biting of the lip all show the wheels of motivation pushing the character to a certain action--but at the same time, the audience can never entirely possess all his thoughts. There is the constant surprise of the unexpected. Redford doesn't do it the easy way, although it looks effortless."

Along with Redford, the most talented phoenix to rise from the ashes of the star system in 1970 was the protean Elliott Gould. Curiously enough, less than two years ago, Gould was better known--if known at all--as the tall, shaggy husband of Barbra Streisand. The two met while they were playing leading roles in the Broadway musical production I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Actually, Elliott was the star of the show, but it was Barbra who ran off with all the kudos. Elliott ran off with Barbra. While her career skyrocketed, he meandered from one ill-starred stage venture to another. His movie career began with a feature part in The Night They Raided Minsky's; the critics didn't even notice him. But this was a role he had been playing all his life.

Born in Brooklyn in 1938 as Elliott Goldstein, Gould spent his childhood, as he puts it, "being nice to my parents." Perhaps it was this quality of an ingratiating nebbish that first endeared him to audiences in Bob & Carol. There is also a certain unruly, small-boy charm about Gould, a youthful rebelliousness, that surfaced when he played Trapper John, the seemingly callous surgeon of M.A.S.H. But the Groucho Marx leer and the air of total cynicism had to be later acquisitions, perhaps the products of his years as an off- and on-Broadway unknown. Or his years with Barbra.

In any case, his intensity and value as an actor, not to mention as a brilliant satirist, were firmly established in Getting Straight, in which he played an ex-activist graduate student caught up in a campus rebellion. "He is now regarded," wrote one critic, "as one of the few young men in Hollywood today who can make it happen, whose willingness to appear in a screenplay assures its production." There is no question that Gould will make a lot happen in the next few years. At this point, Gould has three more pictures in various stages of completion: I Love My Wife, Move and Jules Feiffer's Little Murders, and all promise to be of more than ordinary interest. On Little Murders, he is his own producer, and he had no qualms about putting himself in the directorial hands of another actor, Alan Arkin--perhaps in the interest of making a point about actors who turn to directing. Part of Gould's plan, too, is one day to make the switch himself from acting to directing.

Another of the young men in films who can "make it happen" today is lanky Peter Fonda, the increasingly famous son of a famous father. After a spate of motorcycle films, he has become, at the age of 30, a virtual subculture hero. More than that, he is becoming also something of a spokesman and moralist for an entire drug-oriented generation. Symbolizing an almost mystical, anti-materialistic search for a freedom that he himself is inclined to believe is illusory, he is also a sturdy foe of the traditional Hollywood-studio methods of production.

After the success of Easy Rider, which he produced and co-authored as well as co-starred in, he could have had his choice of lucrative positions on virtually every studio's payroll. Instead, determined to pursue his independent way, he accepted the backing of Universal for his new production, The Hired Hand, which he is both directing and starring in, but shooting entirely on location, as he had done with Easy Rider. To keep the budget within bounds, Fonda is taking only a minuscule salary for starring in the picture and a small fee for his directorial involvement.

Meanwhile, also for Universal, Fonda's former partner (and now co-litigant), Dennis Hopper, is manfully editing his way through some 38 hours of film that he shot in Peru. When finally assembled, sometime next year, it will be titled The Last Movie, starring and directed by Hopper from his own script, and will have cost about $1,000,000--or about three times the cost of Easy Rider. Hopper, whose screen career extends back to Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, seemed at one point the likeliest replacement for his friend James Dean; his own ardently nonconformist views and attitudes, however, rendered him virtually unemployable in Hollywood--even though he was married to the beautiful daughter of producer Leland Hayward. A talented painter, Hopper apprenticed himself for a time in Andy Warhol's New York "Factory" and returned to Hollywood with a passion for film making rather than film acting. Chance meetings with Fonda on the American-International bike films led to their joint concoction of Easy Rider--and the rest might be history, were it not for Hopper's unmellowed anti-establishmentarianism. An insider who saw the rushes of The Last Movie reported a speech in which, in tight close-up. Hopper shouts, "Up Hollywood's gig-gie with a rotating pineapple!" Unless the film is terribly successful, its title may be all too prophetic. But such is Hollywood's need to reach the youth market that it will support even an anti-Hollywood film if the price is right--and there would seem to be a good chance for a dollar at the end of this particular rainbow.

Jon Voight, too, was in an enviable position after Midnight Cowboy, in which he gave a virtuoso performance as a young Texan on the make in New York. To the despair of his agents, he refused several six-figure offers after its success, preferring instead the relatively small role of Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, because it gave him the chance to work with Mike Nichols and on the adaptation of a novel that he--like most of his generation--particularly admired. For his current film, The Revolutionary, based on Hans Koningsberger's novel, Voight literally made this chancy, low-budget production possible by agreeing to play in it.

One strength of such unorthodox stars as Redford, Fonda, Hopper and Voight is their intelligence. They pick scripts that are meaningful to them, material that they hope will be no less meaningful to their contemporaries. Where necessary, they are quite willing to put their money where their mouth is, preferring relevant roles to fat salaries. This same intelligence, however, can also hamper their careers, because most of them are too bright to take seriously the long-range publicity campaigns on which careers have traditionally been based. Their private lives, they feel, should be their own. Voight has been particularly strenuous in his opposition to personal appearances and interviews. "His first instinct," says his most recent girlfriend, Jennifer Salt (who appears with him in The Revolutionary), "was to reject publicity violently and completely. He is just now beginning to figure out how to handle it." Voight, who is 31, comes from a middle-class Catholic family. Raised in Yonkers, New York, he was a promising schoolboy golfer (his father was a pro), but he gave that up in favor of a dramatic career, majoring in drama at Catholic University.

Voight may resemble, as Peter Evans described him in Cosmopolitan, "a half-bungled mutation of Muscle Beach hero and country bumpkin," but, like Robert Redford, he was thoroughly prepared and ready by the time he was tapped for stardom. He had played off-Broadway and on, receiving excellent notices, studied long and hard with acting coach Sanford Meisner and, to those who should know, he was a polished, seasoned actor when John Schlesinger chose him for Midnight Cowboy. After that, he was in a position to do his own picking. In The Revolutionary, wearing granny specs and a greasy raincoat, he portrays a knobby, overintellectualizing student radical in an unnamed country. At work now on The All-American Boy, Voight consciously sought to prevent any hardening of his image by switching from intellectual to boxer. Author of the new script is Charles Eastman, regarded by many as Hollywood's most gifted screenwriter; typically, because Voight is in it, Eastman was granted the opportunity to direct. As Jennifer Salt says to him in The Revolutionary, "It's nice that people like you are around."

Also nice to have around is Dustin Hoffman, another actor who has achieved the eminence to have movies financed on the strength of his name alone. In fact, it is currently being put to such use on the production of the improbably titled Who Is Harry Keller-man, and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, written by Herb Gardner and being directed by Ulu Grosbard, who are also its producers. Like his former co-star, Hoffman loathes all forms of personal publicity and goes out of his way to avoid it. Ironically, earlier this year, he was forced into the headlines when the house adjoining his Greenwich Village apartment was accidentally blown apart by a group of rabid young radicals, three of whom perished in the explosion. In the ensuing news columns, Dustin came close to upstaging the event itself.

Although Hoffman is adored by a multitude of teeny-boppers, he prefers to think of himself as a character actor rather than as a sex symbol. In John and Mary, he probably came as close as he ever will to playing a romantic lead. As the young, self-sufficient bachelor who casually brings a girl to his pad, then can't quite get rid of her, Hoffman exhibited all the twitches, hesitations and underlying shyness that had already endeared him to so many in The Graduate. Even so, the film enjoyed only a middling success--nothing like the amazing grosses on Midnight Cowboy, in which he played the scruffy, gimpy Ratso Rizzo.

For his newest film, Little Big Man, due at the end of the year, Hoffman chose a role that was even more definitely a character part. And what a character! As Jack Crabb, a half-Indian, he plays the sole survivor of Custer's fabled last stand. Directed by the renowned Arthur Penu, the story is told in flashbacks, during the course of which the 32-year-old Hoffman ages from 16 to 121. While, sight unseen, it's not easy to discern what bearing the events of 100 years ago might have on the contemporary scene, the presence of both Penn and Hoffman on the production suggests that Little Big Man, somehow, will have--that word again--relevance.

Like Hoffman--and also like Elliott Gould, with whom he was paired in M.A.S.H.--Donald Sutherland is an actor first, a comedian second and a sex star to anyone who chooses to think of him that way. Apparently, the number is growing, for in a market literally glutted with expert character actors, Sutherland's popularity continues to soar, leading one to suspect that it is not solely for his expertise. Born in Canada 35 years ago, he made his reputation in England--generally as an interesting subvillain in low-budget adventure films. He moved into the big time as one of the dirtier of Robert Aldrich's Dirty Dozen and scored even more heavily (with those who saw it) as a saintly, aristocratic aesthete dying of a rare disease in Joanna. It was as Hawkeye Pierce, however, the irreverent and bawdy anti-hero of M.A.S.H., that Sutherland first revealed his comedic talents to a wide audience, followed quickly by his bearded, freakish Oddball in Kelly's Heroes and a dual role--one a peasant, one an aristocrat at the time of the French Revolution--in the farcically funny Start the Revolution Without Me.

At the moment, Sutherland is working on Alex in Wonderland, playing a film maker worried about the effects of success on his personal life; it's written and directed by Paul Muzursky and Larry Tucker, the team responsible for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. He has also co-starred (again) with Elliott Gould in Little Murders; has signed to work with another activist, fiery Jane Fonda, on a picture called Klute; and hopes one day soon to do a film with the brilliant director of The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo.

Not that the freedom of a major star these days to pick his own scripts, as Sutherland does, is any guarantee of excellence. Of all the young actors in Hollywood, certainly no one is more eagerly pelted with new scripts than Warren Beatty. He has looks, he has talent and he is definitely bankable. Yet, since Bonnie and Clyde turned him into a multimillionaire, he has made only one picture--and that one, The Only Game in Town, was hardly the happiest of choices; and among the scripts he turned down were Bob & Carol, Getting Straight and Butch Cassidy. Warren, however, may well have been distracted by the heady company of Julie Christie. It's no secret that for the past two years, they've been a constant pair; nor is it probably sheer coincidence that during this same period, Miss Christie has also been turning down scripts. And it's certainly no coincidence that both are next scheduled to appear together in The Presbyterian Church Wager, under the direction of Robert Altman. Relevance, Beatty appears to feel, isn't everything; togetherness is important, too.

Paul Newman, on the other hand, is one of the few male stars who continue to have an unerring instinct about what is right for them. His only picture in recent years that failed to ignite at the box office was The Secret War of Harry Frigg, and that was one over which he had no control. From Hud and The Hustler through Cool Hand Luke and Winning to Butch Cassidy, Newman has displayed a keen understanding of the specifics that have made him, at 45, perhaps Hollywood's most durable superstar. As critic Renata Adler once described his on-screen character, "He has always been tough, quiet, not insensitive, with that mannerism originated by Brando of seeming constantly, casually aware of his mouth, as though he were speaking with tobacco or a Lifesaver in it." Intelligent, aware, intuitive, he remains happily married to his wife of many years, the equally intelligent, aware and intuitive Joanne Woodward. Of obvious sexual appeal to female audiences--and, it has been said, to some of his female co-stars--he has shown no inclination for involvements with anyone but Joanne. "I have steak at home," he said in a Playboy Interview, "Why should I go out for a hamburger?"

Both of the Newmans are serious, down-to-earth professionals, but they also feel that their responsibility to society doesn't end there. Currently, Miss Woodward is the TV voice of Planned Parenthood, while Newman has never hesitated to take the stump when a cause--such as the Presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy--rouses him. Though frequently encouraged, however, he has consistently refused to run for public office himself. "Not qualified," he explains. "I've built up a certain amount of power and respect as a professional actor, and to move into a profession where I would have little respect, power and background--that's not for me." The power and respect Newman has gained as an actor were considerably enhanced last year when, in his debut as a director, he guided Miss Woodward to an Oscar nomination for Rachel, Rachel. For his leading lady in his current starring vehicle, W.U.S.A., he chose the same Miss Woodward. As he puts it, why fool around with hamburger?

Also continuing to command power and respect in Hollywood is Steve McQueen, who, in this year's The Reivers, a mellow adaptation of the William Faulkner novel, added a humorous, appealing warmth to his cool image. Meanwhile, a self-avowed sports-car nut, he has also been eating up the tracks, setting lap records at Holtville and Phoenix and achieving a first in prototype (with co-driver Peter Revson) at Sebring last March with a three-liter Porsche 908. At the time, his foot was still in a cast after having been broken in six places as the result of an accident in a 100-mile motorcycle race. What could be more natural than for his own company, Solar Productions, to put into the works The 24 Hours of Le Mans, with McQueen himself both starring and driving? No small part of the budget on the film, which will be released sometime next year, was allocated to star insurance.

During a year when film-industry unemployment rose to 80 percent, when anyone with some extra capital could buy himself a studio or two, when several of Hollywood's major stars decamped to television, Clint Eastwood stood out as a sterling exception to the general rout. What made his holdout all the more remarkable was that he was a star cast in the traditional Hollywood mold--as tall as Gary Cooper, as laconic as Gregory Peck, as fast with a gun as John Wayne. The admiration for this type, apparently, still persists in the American mythos. When Eastwood deviated from it in Paint Your Wagon, not only sharing a ménage à trois with Jean Seberg and Lee Marvin but even bursting into song, he was a bit more Westwood than Eastwood. The picture did not do well. In such subsequent productions as Kelly's Heroes and Two Mules for Sister Sara, however, he has been able to revert to type, with gun ever at the ready. Now a fully established institution, Eastwood has his own production company and is independent enough to turn down an offer of $1,000,000 to appear in someone else's picture. When a man can do that, he's not only tall but big.

Until this year, the top echelons of stardom have normally been generously supplemented by contingents of talented and attractive Europeans. As we've noted, this no longer held true for female stars; it was even less true for the males. Of course, Peter O'Toole is still very much in demand by producers and Michael Caine seems as busy as ever. But the former did little to advance his career as a Scotsman in love with his sister (Susannah York) in the British-made Brotherly Love and the latter made even less impact in Robert Aldrich's fumbling and old-fashioned Too Late the Hero. Michael York, the impressive Tybalt of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, showed promise again as the Machiavellian houseboy who insinuates himself into Angela Lansbury's good graces (and bed) in Something for Everyone, although the role was hardly calculated to enhance his sex appeal.

Rock idol Mick Jagger, the peripatetic lead singer of the Rolling Stones, has now starred in three pictures--Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, made in France; Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly, filmed in Australia; and, most recently, a far-out British movie, Performance, in which he appears, appropriately enough, as a stoned and sinister former rock star. Apparently, rock stars can sell records but not pictures. For all his popularity--even notoriety--Jagger has failed as yet to create an attractive or convincing screen character. Of the Britons, only Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, the co-stars of Women in Love, emerged with their reputations unblemished--and, in the case of Reed, considerably enhanced.

A nephew of the famous director Sir Carol Reed, Oliver debuted in films as a monster in a low-budget horror film, The Curse of the Werewolf. A subsequent association with director Michael Winner allowed Reed to look and act more himself in such films as The Girl Getters, The Jokers and I'll Never Forget What's 'Isname. Despite the possibility of confusion, nobody forgot "what's 'isname" after Oliver!; although Reed didn't play the title role, he made a memorable Bill Sikes. But it remained for Women in Love, in which he portrayed the proud, headstrong scion of a colliery owner, to reveal the true extent of his talent--and, in a nude, fire-lit wrestling scene with Bates, his full physical stature as well.

On the Continent, the image of Italy's Marcello Mastroianni, after the disastrous Place for Lovers and Leo the Last, was distinctly on the decline. It would not be precisely true to say that his place is being taken by the extraordinarily versatile Jean-Louis Trintignant, for even after his dashing performance as the race-car driver in A Man and a Woman, he is still (correctly) considered more actor than sex star. Nevertheless, after no less than 40 films in perhaps a dozen years, Trintignant is unquestionably the most sought-after man in European cinema today. Despite the success of A Man and a Woman, however, few identified him when, earlier this year, he played the investigating attorney in Z. "No woman has ever turned around in the street to look at me," he once remarked in an interview. "That," said Costa-Gavras, his director in Z, "is because you are the man in the street."

Meanwhile, social changes at home have brought into prominence a whole new group of actors and actresses, several of whom are already displaying star quality. Until a few years ago, whenever Hollywood needed a black for a major role, it had no recourse but to call on the personable, talented Sidney Poitier. After all, who else was there? During the past two years, however, the interest in black issues has so accelerated that the estimable Sidney would have to work round the clock every week of the year just to keep pace--something that, with his present eminence, he has no intention of doing. In 1970, he maintained his position by appearing in "They Call Me Mister Tibbs!," a disappointing continuation of the detective role he originated in In the Heat of the Night, and Brother John, a somewhat mystical account of a man who can foresee death.

After an absence from the screen of many years, Harry Belafonte gave up his concertizing long enough to produce and co-star (with Zero Mostel) in The Angel Levine. But it remains to be seen whether movie audiences will welcome him back. Muscular Jim Brown moved a few notches ahead this year with his performances in tick... tick... tick..., The Grasshopper and a big adventure movie, El Condor, although off-screen brawls with women and the Los Angeles police have not enhanced his personal reputation.

Making rapid strides to overtake not only Brown but even Poitier himself is the tall, elegant Raymond St. Jacques. Born James Arthur Johnson in Hartford, Connecticut, he moved as a child to New Haven, where his mother worked as a domestic. A brilliant student, Raymond inclined at first toward social work, but caught the acting bug while appearing in several Yale Drama School productions. He appeared in a number of plays, both off-Broadway and on, played the inevitable small character parts for television and began attracting attention through somewhat larger roles in the movies. But it was his silky performance as a sinister Haitian police captain in The Comedians, which co-starred the Burtons, that first suggested to critics his full potential as star material. That potential has now been realized in one of the surprise hits of 1970, Cotton Comes to Harlem. In that film, teamed with Godfrey Cambridge, St. Jacques registered strongly as a hard, dedicated, intelligent detective fighting corruption in Harlem.

Nor did Cotton harm the zooming career of handsome Calvin Lockhart, even though, playing an unscrupulous black preacher, he epitomized the corruption that St. Jacques was fighting. In Joanna, his portrayal of a sleek, highflying gangster with a well-feathered nest of birds established him immediately as a newcomer to be watched. The initial impression was enhanced by his strong performance as an outraged schoolteacher caught up in the black-white rumbles of Halls of Anger, in which he received star billing. Lockhart is personable in much the same way as Sidney Poitier, and with acting ability to match. Given the proper selection of roles, he may well emerge as a major sex star within the coming year.

The upswing in films with and about blacks has also produced a promising new crop of talented and attractive black actresses. Despite a sexy nude scene in If He Hollers Let Him Go, Barbara Mc-Nair--Mrs. Tibbs in Poitiers latest movie--is rapidly becoming the Greer Garson of the genre, the patient, understanding wife who stays home and worries while her husband does battle with the world. Lithe, leggy Judy Pace attracted considerable attention last year as one of the coeds who kept Christopher Jones on a round-the-clock sexual alert in Three in the Attic; this year, she earned smiles and appreciative whistles as the girl who gives (and shows) just short of her all in Cotton Comes to Harlem as the seducer of a white cop. Pert Janet MacLachlan scored solidly as Calvin Lockhart's sexy, and willing, girlfriend in Halls of Anger and Diana Sands, recognized since Raisin in the Sun as one of the finest young actresses in the New York theater, gave a glowing performance as the easy-living, tenderhearted tenant impregnated by The Landlord.

Perhaps the strongest argument that black is beautiful, however, is advanced by Lola Falana, who blistered the screen in The Liberation of L.B. Jones. Lola was raised in Philadelphia and wandered around New York as an occasional night-club singer until Sammy Davis Jr. made her his lead ingénue in Golden Boy. The show's prolonged run, plus a number of television guest shots, polished her star quality so that now she is frequently to be found singing for her supper at such prestigious places as The Sands in Las Vegas and Deauville in Miami Beach. Since her compelling film debut, it's safe to say that what Lola wants, Lola gets.

Just as the increase in black films has opened the industry to new black faces, so the pronounced trend toward youth-oriented pictures in the past year has brought to the screen a veritable horde of fresh, youthful ones. Christopher Jones, who led the brigade last year, has been temporarily hidden from view while off in Ireland, co-starring with Robert Mitchum in the production of David Lean's $10,000,000 epic Ryan's Daughter, which should be hitting the screens just about the time you read this. Topside at the moment is blond, blue-eyed Beau Bridges, the son of actor Lloyd Bridges. At 29, he has already starred in three pictures--Gaily, Gaily, The Landlord and an Australian Western, Return of the Boomerang.

Young Bruce Davison got off to a strong start in The Strawberry Statement, as did Wendell Burton in The Sterile Cuckoo, and Wes Stern was appealing enough in The First Time to warrant a second look in American-International's Up in the Cellar. "Broadway Joe" Namath, the bad boy of pro football, projected a pleasing, photogenic personality in a small role in Norwood, displaying the ease and assurance of a young Dean Martin. He was promptly tapped by producers Allan Carr and Roger Smith to co-star with Smith's wife, the vivacious Ann-Margret. in C.C. and Company. The story of a motorcycle bum's cross-country adventures, the film includes the year's best-publicized nude love scene.

If the debuts of Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point were less than auspicious, there is no reason to suppose that their budding careers have been abruptly terminated. The accent is still very much on youth, as attested by the continuing employment of Barbara Hershey, the dark-haired find of last year's Last Summer. From a smallish role in The Liberation of L.B. Jones, she has advanced to the lead of The Baby Maker, in which she agrees to provide a baby for a childless couple. Among other young ladies who seem destined to stay around for a while are starry-eyed Kim Darby, the delightful Margot Kidder (Gaily, Gaily and Quackser Fortune) and, in perhaps the most impressive debut of the year, Carrie Snodgress, in Diary of a Mad Housewife, a film that has also launched the talented Frank Langella.

It may be too early to think of any of these young people as sex stars, much less as sex symbols. But they are new and fresh and thus testify to the experimental outlook of today's producers and directors, most of whom are forsaking their former reliance on established names in favor of a search for the talented newcomers who will make sense to the young audience that is currently propping up the box office. It is a truism of the industry that the studios don't make the stars--the audience does. That largely youthful audience is being given the opportunity, at last, to choose the stars who reflect their own image of themselves.