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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1965 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| The film version of the Broadway musical The Sound of Music (1965) premiered. At the time of its release, it surpassed Gone With the Wind (1939) as the number one box office hit of all time. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it came away with five major wins including Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Wise). | |
| Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) became the first major mainstream Hollywood film to daringly and boldly feature a sequence of partial nudity (the bared breasts of Thelma Oliver), essential to the plot. However, it received the infamous "condemned" rating from the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency. | |
| David Lean's wide-screen Dr. Zhivago (1965), one of the biggest blockbusters of all time (and the second most profitable film for MGM at the time, after Gone With the Wind (1939)), was not shown in Russia until 1994. The majority of the film was shot in Spain, not the USSR, and there were few, if any, Russian actors or even actors of Russian heritage. The film's major drawing point was the incredible popularity of Maurice Jarre's romantic "Lara's Theme" (the winner of the Oscar for Best Original Score). It was the first film to win five Golden Globe Awards (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Screenplay, and Original Score). Of its ten Oscar nominations, it also won five Academy Awards (Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, and Original Score). | |
| A small-time TV comedy writer Woody Allen wrote his first feature length screenplay for director Richard Donner's unexpectedly-successful sex farce What's New Pussycat? (1965), with Allen in his first major screen role. Because the writer/star disliked the film, he would proceed to his directorial debut for What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), a satire/spoof of quickly-made, badly-dubbed, exploitative, Japanese spy films, made in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000. | |
| Blonde teen star and the original Gidget character - Sandra Dee - was the last major star still under exclusive contract to a studio (Universal). | |
| The fourth James Bond film, Thunderball (1965), had the highest domestic box-office earnings of the Bond films (to date) - when adjusted for inflation. Its domestic unadjusted gross of $63.6 million was $600 million when adjusted. Goldfinger (1964) was a distant second with $51 million (and $531.7 million adjusted). | |
| Legendary producer David O. Selznick died of heart failure at the age of 63. During his long career as producer, he had won the Best Picture Oscar twice, for Gone With the Wind (1939) and for British director Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). Earlier, as head of production at RKO Studios, he had worked on King Kong (1933). He formed his own independent studio, Selznick International Pictures in 1935, and served as a "one-man" film industry. He was also responsible for producing King Vidor's Technicolored western, Duel in the Sun (1946), during which he engaged in an extra-marital affair with its star Jennifer Jones - they both divorced their spouses and married each other in 1949. | |
| Director John Lamb's nudist film, The Raw Ones (1965), that extolled the virtues of a naturist lifestyle, was the first to openly show genitalia -- now allowed after a 1963 legal decision that ruled such displays of private parts were not obscene. This was an essential linkpin between the non-genital 'nudie-cutie' films of the late 50s, and the hard-core porn films of the 70s. | |
| Shelley Winters became the first actress to win two Oscars in the category of Best Supporting Actress, with her win for A Patch of Blue (1965) - presented in 1966. She was the only actress to be twice honored in the "supporting" category, a record that she held until 1994 when Dianne Wiest won her second "supporting" award. | |
| The musical Man of La Mancha opened in New York City on November 22, 1965. Seven years later, Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren starred in the musical version of the Don Quixote play, Man of La Mancha (1972) directed by Arthur Hiller. | |
| British actress Julie Christie's Oscar-winning portrayal of Diana Scott in director John Schlesinger's Darling (1965) marked her rise to stardom. Her portrayal of an ambitious, vain, irresponsible, ruthless, promiscuous, and selfish hip, mini-skirted London model included a scene in which she appeared briefly nude, viewed from the backside. It was the first Oscar-winning performance with a nude scene for an actress. In the film, she tempted a serious-minded married journalist (Dirk Bogarde), and then tired and became a decadent, international celebrity/swinger, and finally ended up living a meaningless life as a disillusioned, bored wife of an Italian prince. | |
| US comic actor Stan Laurel, the taller/thinner one of the Laurel and Hardy team, died at the age of 74 from a heart attack. His long film career spanned from silents to the sound era, a period of 34 years from his first film, the short two-reel comedy Nuts in May (1917) (without Oliver Hardy when he was known as Stan Jefferson), to the duo's final film together, Atoll K (1951, Fr./It.) (aka Utopia). | |
| Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965, UK) has the dubious honor of having the longest film title (85 characters) of any film nominated for an Oscar. It lost its nomination for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen. The beginning and ending sequences also marked the final feature film appearances for comic actor Red Skelton. |
