Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

It amazes me “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was ever needed. But so goes American history. It opens with a 1960s pop song playing as a giddy couple make its way from an airport to the girl’s childhood home, where she will introduce him to Mom and Dad. The couple is mixed race, her white (Katharine Houghton) and him black (Sidney Poitier). The taxi driver smirks. The parents (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey) are open liberals, but just how so? We find out in one long evening. Yes, it’s coy now, post-Loving vs. Virginia, but not too easy. Poitier’s fiancé puts a burden to the parents: Accept me and our whirlwind romance now or I call it off. Can anyone demand that? His doctor character is such a saint, it near smothers debate. The screenwriters intently did this to fully play the race card, but does it serve character? What if he were a reporter at Tracey’s old man’s paper? The dialogue is still sharp and Tracey –- then dying of cancer -- is powerful. Hepburn, too. Her crying is contagious. A-

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Roman Polanski’s gothic “Rosemary’s Baby” is the greatest paranoid horror film, wildly spinning on marriage and expectant mommy-hood with a massive dash of brimstone, and satanic milkshakes. It sets a scene inside a telephone booth in which nothing happens but a phone call and still drives the panic needle to 666. That’s insanely genius filmmaking, from God and/or hell. Based on Ira Levin’s novel and Polanski’s American writing/directing debut, “Baby” follows waif/ housewife Rosemary (Mia Farrow, perfect) as she moves into a castle-like NYC apartment with fledgling actor hubby (John Cassevettes, just slightly creepy). The couple instantly befriends the eccentric old folks (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) next door. Soon Guy is a hit and Rosemary is pregnant. Enter, Satan. Polanski is a shit, but he knows heart-crashing shock is found in the mundane -– the daffy, smiling old lady serving a tasty homemade snack. Best WTF-just-happened-? cliffhanger ending ever. The neighbors terrify me no end: My Philly childhood eccentric, elderly neighbors fed me odd concoctions and drinks 24/7. I sweat bullets now, “All of them witches!?!” Who the hell will ever know, eh? One of my Top 25. A+

In Cold Blood (1967)

No film can top or even equal Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” one of the greatest American nonfiction books ever printed. Yet in 1967, a film of “Cold” rattled America’s nerves with unprecedented harshness and profanity.

Writer/director Richard Brooks, using stark black and white cinematography, lays out an almost journalistic take on the massacre of a Kansas farm family by two low-level crooks (Robert Blake is Perry Smith, and Scott Wilson is Richard Hickcock). We follow the killers, the family and the police, with some vibrant editing as the actual shootings are put toward the end.

The movie is wildly faithful to the book except in one key area – Capote’s self-involved writer has been replaced by a crusty old alpha-male reporter. A homophobic slap against Capote? I don’t think so. As demonstrated in more recent films (“Capote”), the very short guy was larger than life. No, this film works. This needs a reporter to melt into the walls, not bang over the camera. This is about a senseless crime committed by two lost guys, who can just as easily give a ride to a stranded grandpa and a young boy on the road.

The performances are amazing, the judgments harsh all around, with violence that still shocks despite being off screen. A

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

What a banner year 1967 was for film, “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Graduate,” and “In the Heat of the Night.” But “Bonnie and Clyde” tops them all. If you’re older than 13, you know the story: Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) rob banks, shoot, kill, and die in a hail of bullets. In this Arthur Penn-directed tale, the couple stumbles into their life of crime, botching their first robberies at a shuttered bank and a grocery, with family (including a frantic sister-in-law played by Estelle Parsons) close by. The first murder is almost accidental, the others come easier. Penn dishes out the dark humor in droves, always with an edge of violence that still shocks with its exploded body parts and proximity. Beatty and Dunaway themselves explode as the original gangster couple with heaps of personal issues, faults and an unending hunger for stability during a financial depression that provides none. I could rave about Gene Hackman as an elder brother Barrow, but it’s Denver Pyle (yes, Uncle Jesse!) who burns brightly as a lawman with a raging psychotic lust for murder, barely masked by his quest for justice. A+