Adjustments to television had been made, but the studio era was on its last legs. So was the system of self-imposed censorship that had been in place since the early ’30s. That a novel as scandalous as “Lolita’’ could be filmed, as Stanley Kubrick did that year, would have been previously unthinkable.
Even more telling evidence of change could be found in the most acclaimed picture of the year. “Lawrence of Arabia’’ won seven Academy Awards (including best picture) and produced an exciting new star, Peter O’Toole. David Lean’s film was an epic, a biopic, a war movie, a costume picture, even a bit of a western (think of the camels as horses). It was all those things - but with a dash of something darker. Viewers didn’t have to be very sophisticated to detect the masochism in T.E. Lawrence - Jose Ferrer sure did - or the homoeroticism in O’Toole’s performance.
The studios and their self-censorship had also kept a lid on the politics of American film. Two of the most notable releases of 1962 - one reassuringly tidy and still cherished, the other deeply subversive and still disconcerting - show the extent to which things had begun to change.
“To Kill a Mockingbird’’ boasted unimpeachable credentials: based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, safely set in the past, starring Gregory Peck at his most impeccably Gregory Peckish. Even if its self-congratulation and complacency make “The Help’’ look radical by comparison, “Mockingbird’’ showed a willingness to confront Southern racism directly as no previous studio release had. Conversely, there was hardly anything direct about “The Manchurian Candidate.’’ That may be one reason it’s worn so well. What seemed like outrageous satire when the film opened, in October 1962, would look eerily premonitory 13 months later, after the Kennedy assassination. Among its other boasts, 1962 can take credit for the paranoid thriller.
