1969

Midnight Cowboy
Waldo Salt
Midnight Cowboy (1969) is an ultra-realistic, adult film (shot on location) with sordid, downbeat and serious content, from British director John Schlesinger, who had previously directed the widely-acclaimed Darling (1965) - with a Best Actress win for Julie Christie.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid
William Goldman
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is the likeably entertaining, charming and amusing comedy/drama of the friendship and camaraderie shared between the two handsome and humorous buddy leads - legendary, turn-of-the-century Western outlaws and their "Hole in the Wall" gang. Historical antecedents for the two daring "Robin Hood" outlaws actually existed, two notorious figures who were sadly anachronistic for their turn-of-the-century times:

• "Butch Cassidy" (outlaw Robert Leroy Parker)
• "The Sundance Kid" (outlaw Harry Longbaugh)

1968

The Lion In Winter
James Goldman

The Producers
Mel Brooks

1967

In The Heat Of The Night
Stirling Silliphant
In the Heat of the Night (1967) is a tense whodunit detective story thriller that is set in the little town of Sparta, Mississippi during a hot summer, with an innovative score by Quincy Jones. Norman Jewison masterfully directed this murder melodrama from a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant that was based on the novel by John Ball. The film's posters proclaimed: "They got a murder on their hands. They don't know what to do with it."

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
William Rose

1966

A Man For All Seasons
Robert Bolt

A Man And A Woman
Claude Lelouch & Pierre Uytterhoeven

1965

Doctor Zhivago
Robert Bolt

Darling
Frederic Raphael

1964

Becket
Edward Anhalt

Father Goose
S. H. Barnett, Peter Stone & Frank Tarloff

1963

Tom Jones
John Osborne

How The West Was Won
James R. Webb

1962

To Kill A Mockingbird
Horton Foote

Divorce - Italian Style
Ennio de Concini, Alfredo Giannetti & Pietro Germi

1961

Judgment At Nuremberg
Abby Mann

Splendor In The Grass
William Inge
Splendor in the Grass (1961) is another of director Elia Kazan's dramatic, hyperbolic films with daring and controversial content for its times - sexual repression and neurosis. The intriguing, over-wrought film is a tragic, coming-of-age melodrama from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Inge's original screenplay - it was Inge's first story written directly for the screen and he received a nomination (and the film's sole Oscar) for the Best Original Story and Screenplay for his work (one of the film's two Academy Award nominations).

1960

Elmer Gantry
Richard Brooks
Elmer Gantry (1960) is an entertaining melodrama with memorable performances. It is the controversial telling of Sinclair Lewis' novel regarding the charismatically engaging, but scandalous Midwestern salesman turned preacher in the 1920s.

The Apartment
Billy Wilder & I. A. L. Diamond
The Apartment (1960) is producer/director Billy Wilder's bittersweet, heart-rending tragi-comedy/drama of a compliant insurance clerk (Lemmon) who secretly lends out his apartment to other company executives for adulterous sexual affairs and liaisons. The plot thickens when the clerk realizes that his building's elevator operator (MacLaine) is being taken for trysts by his married boss (MacMurray) to his apartment. The sophisticated yet cynical film of the early 60s is a bleak assessment of corporate America, big business and capitalism, success, and the work ethic, when a lowly but ambitious accountant enables his climb up the corporate ladder by ingratiating himself to his superiors - he literally prostitutes his own standards and moral integrity and allows himself to be exploited...