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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1962 |
 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 | |
| More than 700 foreign-language films were released in US theaters during 1962. | |
| The 7th and final "Road to..." film (starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour) was released -- The Road to Hong Kong (1962). It was the last of seven escapist 'Road pictures' (beginning in 1940 with The Road to Singapore). The first six were produced by Paramount, the 7th by United Artists. | |
| King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) was the first Godzilla (and Kong Kong) film shot in color and in wide-screen. It revealed Godzilla's true color: charcoal gray. And the film was less a horror film than a schlocky comedy-horror film. | |
| In the first week of June of 1962, Marilyn Monroe was fired by 20th Century Fox by her repeated absences from her latest film, Something's Got to Give (1962), 32 days into production. Lee Remick was hired to replace her, but when co-star Dean Martin learned that Monroe was fired, he threatened to walk off the set, and she was re-hired. | |
| 36 year old sex symbol Marilyn Monroe was discovered dead (August 5) in the Los Angeles area in her Mexican style bungalow (in Brentwood) of an apparent drug overdose, a death the coroner ruled as "a probable suicide." She was in the midst of filming with director George Cukor in Something's Got To Give (1962). Speculations arose over her associations with President John F. Kennedy and his brother. | |
| Dr. No (1962) debuted in the UK in October, 1962, and in May, 1963 in the US. The action/spy film inaugurated the successful, long-running, and highly profitable James Bond series of action films based upon Ian Fleming's works, with its first Agent 007 -- unknown actor Sean Connery. Ursula Andress also starred as Honey Ryder, the first iconic Bond girl. Before Connery's breakthrough 1962 role as agent 007 that brought him to international attention, he had floundered since 1957 in minor film and TV roles, notably as a romantic lead in the Disney live-action Leprechaun film Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959). Other lead James Bond characters included George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig. Two non-canonical Bond films were Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983). | |
| The controversial production of Lolita (1962), the first of Kubrick's films produced independently in England, was marked by a long casting search for the proper 'Lolita', the appointment of Vladimir Nabokov to write the screenplay for his own lengthy novel, Kubrick's rewriting (with co-producer James B. Harris) of Nabokov's unacceptable versions of the script, and the threat of censorship and denial of a Seal of Approval from the film industry's production code. | |
| Both an on-screen and off-screen feud occurred between the two major stars of director Robert Aldrich's black comedy What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) - Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. There were stories of how both actresses with a life-long hatred for each other, caused each other physical and mental pain on the set as they portrayed sibling rivals. | |
| Marvel Comics published the Amazing Fantasy # 15 issue in August of 1962. The issue featured the first appearance of Spider-Man. It would be 40 years until director Sam Raimi's record-breaking blockbuster Spider-Man (2002) - derived from the original source material (and from 52 episodes in the 1967-1970 Saturday morning cartoon series on ABC). | |
| The Hulk debuted in Marvel's The Incredible Hulk comic in May of 1962. The green Hulk, another Marvel Comics figure created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, was a character named Dr. Bruce Banner. He was accidentally irradiated by gamma radiation from a test bombing, and transformed into the Incredible Hulk when angry or excited. The popular TV series The Incredible Hulk (from 1977-1982), introduced the Hulk character, first personified by Bill Bixby (and Lou Ferrigno). The first Hulk feature film was director Ang Lee's visually-striking and creative live-action remake The Hulk (2003). | |
| Universal was purchased by talent agency MCA. | |
| The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was one of the first major Hollywood films to depict martial arts (or karate) in a key fight sequence (between Frank Sinatra and Henry Silva), over a decade before the Kung Fu craze of the 1970s (i.e., Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973)). | |
| After producing independent films for six years (mostly in Europe), former Fox studio VP Darryl Zanuck took over financially-troubled 20th Century Fox (at the time of the making of the expensive flop Cleopatra (1963)). He replaced outgoing Spyros Skouras (who had served a 20-year term as executive head). | |
| During the filming of the notorious and troubled Cleopatra (1963), in April of 1962, Pope John XXIII issued a denouncement of the rumored illicit affair between its two main stars, then-married Elizabeth Taylor (to singer Eddie Fisher) and future husband Richard Burton (as Marc Antony), then-married to long-suffering wife Sybil. Taylor was accused of "erotic vagrancy" by the Vatican. The two wouldn't marry until 1964 - after their respective divorces were complete. | |
| Virtually unknown, blue-eyed, Irish Shakespearean stage actor Peter O'Toole, in his first starring role, appeared in director David Lean's Super Panavision 70mm widescreen epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in the title role. The much-anticipated, nearly four-hour long film (without any female speaking roles) featured a star-studded cast. | |
| Otto Preminger's controversial Advise & Consent (1962), based upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1959 novel of the same name, was released, after receiving a seal of approval from the Production Code. Preminger had deliberately challenged censorship restrictions of the Production Code with the film, in its intriguing story about a Senate confirmation hearing (regarding a presidential appointment for Secretary of State) in which married committee chairman, US Senator from Utah Brigham Anderson (Don Murray) was being blackmailed during voting over a youthful wartime homosexual affair that had taken place in Hawaii. | |
| Government regulations forced studios out of the talent agency business. | |
| Patty Duke won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962). She was the first minor (under age 18) to win a competitive Oscar. | |
| The multi-directed Western epic How the West Was Won (1962) was the first non-documentary Cinerama film. It was also one of the last to use the old three-camera technique, that produced visible lines between the three panels. | |
| Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. It captured the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for the 1962-63 season, and was adapted for the screen as a famous and shocking black comedy, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) by director Mike Nichols. Based upon Edward Albee's scandalous play, Ernest Lehman's screenplay left the dialogue of the play virtually intact. | |
| Marlon Brando was paid $1.25 million for his role in MGM's flop Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) as Fletcher Christian. It was a record sum - he was the first actor to break the $1 million threshold. | |
| Versatile Hungarian-American director Michael Curtiz died at the age of 75. His film career spanned nearly half a century, from films he made in his native country beginning in 1912, to his first Hollywood films in the late 1920s, to his last film - the John Wayne western The Comancheros (1961). Although he was nominated four times for Best Director, he won the Academy Award only once, for Casablanca (1942). Six of his films were nominated for Best Picture, with only one win: Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn, Four Daughters (1938), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Casablanca (1942) (win), and Mildred Pierce (1945). He directed two stars to their own Academy Awards: James Cagney as Best Actor in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Joan Crawford as Best Actress in Mildred Pierce (1945). |
