Sunday, August 22, 2021

BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE: Vol. 4 - 1960s

Image result for la notte

Another day, another decade of films. Are you tired yet? 

I am little worn out...but I will get through it!

Today, I will be discussing the Best Films of the 1960s.

I feel like this particular decade is utterly fascinating for what was going on in the world and how different society seemed to have changed by the time we reached the 70s.

As I stated with the 1950s, I still think that International Cinema dominated the 1960s while a lot of the films that seemed to come out of Hollywood in the early 60s seemed to still be trapped in some kind of conservative time warp...though we started to see glimpses of them finally breaking free from the decrepit, racist, and soulless Hays Code system which would finally cease by the mid 1960s and make way for the MPAA Rating System headed up by former LBJ colleague Jack Valenti.

We still have several films that I feel warrant a highlight even though I still list 10 below as Honorable Mentions...so due to the wealth of strong films, I am going to list 20 Honorable Mentions along with my top 10:

Honorable Mentions:

The Apartment (1960)

Breathless (1960)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

L'Avventura (1960)

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Yojimbo (1961)

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The Silence (1963)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Repulsion (1965)

A Man & A Woman (1966)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Bonnie & Clyde (1967)

The Producers (1967)

Faces (1968)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Z (1969)

_________________

#10 - The Shop on Main Street (1965) 

Directed by Jan Kadar & Elmar Klos

Image result for THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET

The concept of a "Holocaust" themed movie has become something of a cliche. If I were to say name a movie as such, you might opt for Schindler's List or The Pianist or Sophie's Choice, but one movie that seems to have been forgotten about and never gets a lot of discussion is the 1965 Czech film The Shop on Main Street.

Winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1966, The Shop on Main Street tells the story of a timid carpenter named Tono Brtko (Jozef Kroner) who is sent by his brother-in-law, a very prominent member of the local fascist/Nazi regime, to be a part of the cleaning up of a small village. His assignment is to take over the local haberdashery owned by an elderly and nearly deaf Jewish woman named Rozalia (Ida Kaminska in an Oscar nominated performance).

However, Brtko's friend Imrich (Martin Holly Sr.) is a fellow Slovak who is opposed to Aryanization and with his coaxing, Brtko manages to help Rozalia with her shop instead of trying to force her out.

I feel like it is better I stop here when discussing The Shop Around the Corner. It is a film that flirts with the idea of being a heartwarming story in a time of pure horror but it certainly doesn't avoid the idea of tragedy and, perhaps, a slight dose of karma.
_________________

#9 - The Graduate (1967) 

Directed by Mike Nichols

Image result for the graduate movie

A young theatre actor from New York was cast in a small film in which he was to play a German playwright who wrote a musical that sung the praises of Adolf Hitler....but then, Dustin Hoffman left The Producers because he managed to do what seemed by many to be impossible: he got cast as a romantic lead in Mike Nichols' sophomore outing The Graduate.

There was a period in my early teenage years where I saw a group of films that I feel were incredibly important in shaping my love of films to a deeper level and it led me to wanting to pursue a career that, at first, was more geared towards writing and directing but eventually turned to acting.

The Graduate was among those films and it helped me be more observant towards a film's screenplay and direction. 

You also cannot ignore the score for this film, which was provided by the duo of Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel. In the opening moments, you get "The Sound of Silence" which perfectly sets the tone of Benjamin Braddock's (Dustin Hoffman) mood for the majority of the film.

Benjamin's plight of being uncertain about his future is certainly something that is universal to both, but he finds himself in a rather precarious when he sleeps with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father's business partner. However, this secret affair gets thicker when the Robinson's daughter Elaine comes into play and Benjamin suddenly takes an interest in her.

The film's salty comedic tone is perfection and I also consider it a prime factor in the turning point of bolder films coming out of the Hollywood system.
_________________

#8 - Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Image result for dr. strangelove

Very few directors in history showed as much versatility in genre or had as strong a slate of films as Stanley Kubrick, who is quite easily my selection as the greatest director of the English language.

After fairly good to great efforts with The Killing, Spartacus, and Lolita, Kubrick teamed up with famed satirical writer Terry Southern to write the definitive black comedy ever made: Dr. Strangelove...and with it, I feel like Kubrick finally reached the beginning of the true peak of his long but relatively scarce career.

Released during the heights of the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove dares to make fun of the concept of nuclear war...and yet, it works.

The sleek black-and-white cinematography adds to the film's tone in a lot of ways. It implies that the film is dealing with a serious issue but instead, the film becomes a "mostly" marvelous exercise in comedy by restraint, but the performances by George C. Scott and particularly the three distinct characters played by Peter Sellers are simply fantastic. Scott was robbed of a nomination and win while Sellars lost to Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady which isn't a bad performance (it is certainly a classic in the Broadway canon) but it doesn't hold a candle to what Sellars accomplished.

And yes, the classic line of "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" is so genius that it's wit is almost borderline groan-worthy.

And lastly, the ending with Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" serenading the chaos that is ensuing is a prime example of cheeky contrast in tone.

___________________

#7 - La Notte (1961)

Directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni

Image result for la notte

I feel like Michelangelo Antonioni is another one of those filmmakers who is sort of on the cusp of being far less remembered in comparison to some of his contemporaries, particularly Federico Fellini. However, Antonioni gave us a pretty solid slate of movies in the 60s; his Blow Up is a film that almost made my honorable mentions list and there was a time where his L'avventura was actually on my top 10 list. 

Within the past year upon revisiting La Notte, I think it might take the title for his best work by a slim margin.

La Notte tells the story of a couple going through a difficult time in their marriage: Giovani (Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau). Giovanni and Lidia visit the hospital of a dying friend named Tommaso (Bernhard Wicki) and despite his ailment, they all drink champagne to celebrate the release of Giovanni's latest novel, which translates to The Season.

However, Tommaso's pain becomes too severe which causes Lidia to leave the room and to wait outside the hospital. Once Giovanni leaves his friend, he is accosted by a sick younger woman who tries to seduce him. He agrees to do it until nurses interrupt them. Once he returns to Lidia and go to return home, he realizes Lidia is already onto him after he tries to pass off the encounter as "sleazy" and thus sets off the disintegration of a marriage over the course of a single day.

La Notte is paced to perfection. Antonioni always had a knack for allowing his stories to flow in rather subtle manner and before you would even realize what was happening, the character beats have drastically moved forward which lead to a truly remarkable ending.

One of the more underrated gems from the more glitzy style of Italian cinema that proceeded the Neorealist movement.

__________________

#6 - High & Low (1963)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Image result for high and low

The legendary Kurosawa was not only capable of doing films about samurais fighting in fields and in the 1960s, he gave us one of his more modern and sleeker efforts with High & Low. 

Kurosawa staple Toshiro Mifune is back as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy business executive who is currently struggling to gain control of his new company National Shoes. He is at odds with many of his board who feel that his more unfaithful tendencies to the consumer are coming to play by him suggesting the focus on making lower quality shoes and selling them at a lower price to focus on impulse buyers.

He is particularly stressed because in order to push the plan over, he has mortgaged everything he owns and he needs to make this work.....

And then, just like karmic good timing, Gondo discovers that his young son has been kidnapped for ransom.

But....soon after, there is a rather delicious twist that only adds to the strain of Gondo's plight.

High & Low has managed to find a lot more adoration in recent years and has even become a top 10 staple on the top 250 narrative features list on the movie app Letterboxd. I admire the film a great deal because it was a change of pace for Kurosawa at that time and it still holds up remarkably well today.

_________________

#5 - Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Image result for woman in the dunes

Staying with Japan for a moment, we are now going to shed a light on a filmmaker who is sadly not as well remembered along the same lines of Kurosawa or Yosujiro Ozu. 

Hiroshi Teshigahara was a key factor in the Japanese New Wave that really hit in the 50s and 60s, plus he has the distinction of being the first director of Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award. 

This was for Woman in the Dunes, a film that has such a stark and avant-garde approach that it is simply remarkable that the Directing branch even gave it a nomination at that time...although the directing and writing branches have shown glimmers of hope as such for the last 60 years...

Well...except with how little they still honor directors of color or women. Hell, we just got only our second woman (of Chinese descent at that) winning the award this past year.

Woman in the Dunes revolves around Niki Junpei (Eiji Okada), an entomologist who accidentally misses the last bus back to Tokyo while he was on a search for insects. He is quickly discovered by local villagers who insist that he stay for the night before returning to Tokyo the next morning...but instead, he is held captive by the villagers and encounters a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who recently lost her husband and sun in the sand dunes nearby (they are still buried in there).

Junpei ends up becoming the widow's lover and is forced to work with her to dig up sand which the villagers sell to cement manufacturers. As much as Junpei doesn't want to participate, it is the only way he can retrieve food and water. The villagers also seem to take an interest in the sexual escapades of the both Junpei and the widow as well which certainly still feels a bit much for a film that might've come out of Hollywood in 1964.

Woman in the Dunes is a movie that I do admire highly and I certainly think it is fantastic though I place it in this slot more for its amazing direction and cinematography and the chances it takes. I might admire some of the films that are lower from an entertainment standpoint but I feel like this is still a film that deserves far more attention. 

_________________

#4 - Psycho (1960)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Image result for psycho norman bates

Hitchcock had given us many classic films throughout the mid 30s up through the 50s, but it was with his low-budget 1960 suspense thriller that he changed the game in a lot of ways. 

Psycho is a major exception to my statement that Hollywood was relatively docile in the early 60s. 

I also am aware that Psycho will be only one of a few films listed on this and the Honorable Mentions list that is probably most known and has been seen so I probably don't need to discuss the plot much.

Instead, I want to discuss the nature of the film's structure and its direction.

This is a movie of two different worlds: the Marion Crane world & the Norman Bates world...and even watching the film today, it is remarkable at how the shift off the storyline occurs. I would say that it is the ultimate example of a "Macguffin" storyline in which we may get a misdirect into how we suspect something is going to happen, but instead we focus onto something else.

The performance of Anthony Perkins is legendary and it is rather unfortunate that he suffered from immense typecasting after this. It is such a sly and sinister yet charming portrayal and that was a genius move on Hitchcock's part to take that the part from being more in line with its inspiration in the novel (the middle aged and slovenly serial killer Ed Gein) and turning him into a handsome and shy figure who could garner audience sympathy.

Psycho is another film that played a crucial role in my movie-going craze in my early teenage years and to this day, I think it is an absolutely monumental achievement from Hitchcock.

______________

#3 - 8 1/2 (1963)

Directed by Federico Fellini

Image result for marcello mastroianni 8 1/2 glasses

It is kind of crazy that aside from a single Honorable Mention in the 1950s and in the 60s as well along with a couple of cursory mentions, we are just now getting to singling out a film by Federico Fellini. 

I am kind of amazed that is the case, but I guess it also just goes to show how it can be difficult to compare and discuss great films when there are so many stellar filmmakers out there, particularly some of the auteurs that were working at the same time as Fellini.

8 1/2 is a movie that was titled because that is how many films had made up to that point. In some ways, but that isn't to say the film is necessarily autobiographical. Unlike his film counterpart Guido Anselmi, was intensely devoted to his wife, actress Giulietta Masina (whom he did the films La Strada & Nights of Cabiria. Also at that time, Fellini was held in high regard and hadn't truly suffered from any kind of significant flops...though Fellini would reach a more desolate period in the 70s post Amarcord.

So yes, Guido Anselmi is a film director who is currently on the out-and-out with his film quality output plus he is juggling his struggling relationship with his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee), his mistress Carla (Sandra Milo), and his acting muse and former mistress Claudia (Claudia Cardinale). 

Guido takes Luisa to a luxurious spa to try to unwind but instead they get swamped by reporters, Carla shows up hoping to get some time with Guido, his producer is hounding him for more ideas, and then Claudia is seemingly wanting to rekindle their affair only for him to choose to perhaps let her go.

Guido is also suffering from memories of his past, particularly his mother whom he greatly disappointed as a child when he sought out a prostitute to learn about women.

8 1/2 becomes a Freudian wet dream in how a relationship with your mother and other women from your family growing up can have a deep hold on your psyche. 

This is easily Fellini's masterwork and I truly think it is a great character study. 

_______________

#2 - Persona (1966)

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Image result for persona ingmar bergman

When I discussed Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries in my 1950s post, I mentioned there were two other films that would be among the contention of Bergman's masterwork. We will be coming up on the third one in the 70s but I think Persona is a very special case among that trio because it continued to show the immense growth of Bergman as a filmmaker in terms of the stories he wanted to tell and how he envisioned them for the screen.

Persona falls under the psychological horror genre and contains performances by Liv Ullman and particularly Bibi Andersson that are among the best ever captured on screen.

Andersson plays Alma, a nurse who is taking care of a well-renowned staged actress named Elisabet (Ullman) who has suddenly gone mute. The pair move to a fairly secluded cottage where Alma begins caring for Elisabet as a full-time job but as time goes on, Alma finds herself overly obsessed with Elisabet and she starts to wonder if Elisabet is somehow part of her own psyche,

Persona is one of those movies that has been analyzed and critiqued to death by critics and historians and then some...and you can see why when you view the film. It takes a lot of bold creative chances and the story itself is incredibly potent in the material it gives Andersson and Ullman.

I suppose this is what happens when a filmmaker like Bergman writes a film while he is suffering from Pneumonia in a hospital....and that feverish structure led to inspire such filmmakers as Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Woody Allen among others.
________________

#1 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Image result for 2001 a space odyssey

Yeah, yeah, I know....how typical.

2001 is not a movie you can say you enjoy for the dialogue...and it goes without saying that the film has a reputation for being rather droll and sluggish. However, 2001 was a colossal achievement for cinema and it took a filmmaker with the obsession for perfection to pull it off: the brilliant Stanley Kubrick.

I recently revisited the film last year having not seen it for about a decade and it was only my third viewing overall. It still amazes me at the visuals that Kubrick was able to pull off in 1968 and while they may not necessarily hold up by today's standards, it is still very impressive and groundbreaking. 

Without the efforts of Kubrick, who knows how that would've shaped future films such as the Star Wars series or any kind of film that relies on realistic special effects.

I am not even sure I can properly discuss the plot of 2001. You start with the Dawn of Man but then you end up in space where we encounter a mission to recover the meaning of a mysterious object that is buried beneath the lunar surface. In order to aid the mission, they have a high-tech computer called the HAL 9000 (which is believed to be a cheeky stab by Kubrick to IBM as each letter is one letter removed from IBM). 

2001 is not going to be the easiest watch of your life but I do find it to be a very rewarding experience that is perhaps among the most important films to have ever been made. 

As cliche or as melodramatic as this might sound, I kind of feel better knowing that 2001 actually exists.

Thank you, Kubrick...you mad genius.

________________

IN CONCLUSION:

Another essay/list down and 5 more to go!

I know I promised I would try to do a post a day until the project was finished but I am going to be facing some difficulties with the 1970s for multiple reasons. 

1) A splitting headache may prevent from doing additional work on that post today.

2) I also have work tomorrow-Thursday so I am not sure much time I will have to focus on the posts.

3) The 1970s have so many classic films that I honestly don't know I am going to limit myself...even if I were to list 20 Honorable Mentions.

But at any rate, I hope you enjoyed reading and maybe you will be compelled to check out some of these films. 

I'll be back soon!

No comments:

Post a Comment