These movie ads ran in 5.29.63 edition of the N.Y. Times. What do they say about the state of that twilight era when JFK had a bit less than six months to live? That things were gradually transitioning out of the stodgy, conformist, straightlaced ’50s attitudes (the “Jane Fonda dies from having sex with Peter Finch” film, Hud’s barbed-wire soul, the predation of Hitchcock’s seagulls and black ravens, John Huston and Montgomery Clift‘s sexually subversive Freud) but that a basic ’50s psychology was still calling the shots.

The ’60s elation (the upswing, the changeover, “things are happening”) lasted for six years in this country — beginning on 11.22.63 or more accurately with the arrival of the Beatles in February ’64, and ending with the 12.6.69 Altamont festival. If you want a stricter definition a la Terry Valentine, it happened in “’66 and early ’67…that’s all it was.” Hollywood didn’t even understand what was happening until everyone saw Blowup (which opened stateside on 12.18.66), and even then they were slow to react. Essentially the ’60s were close to over by the time Hollywood began to make youthquake films, although special credit is due to Theodore J. Flicker‘s The President’s Analyst, which opened on 12.21.67.