At the end of an amazing 3 year run, Alfred Hitchcock gives us his greatest masterpiece, in my opinion, the best horror movie ever created. Plus, Italy and France’s movie Renaissances are hitting their stride, featuring greats from Frederico Fellini and Jean Luc Godard.
Vincent Price and Edgar Allen Poe, a match made in heaven. Roger Corman directs this sinister tale of a creepy house, with creppier people inside, housing the creepiest secrets to grace the screen, at the time anyway.
An overdue Bollywood entry onto a top 10 list. This one is about a father and son at odds over who the son chooses to love, escalating into a war. Think Indian version of a Biblical epic, taking a famous historical story and throwing endless money at it leading to lavish sets and battle sequences with a couple elephants.
Apparently sex really came out in cinema in the 1960’s. One of Jean Luc Godard’s most famous films, Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as an aimless rich Parisian youth, who commits a crime, but is more interested in getting into Jean Seberg’s pants than worrying about getting arrested. It’s sorta lazy looking: a fascinating swing and sorta miss, sorta hit.
There are worst films to copy then Seven Samurai, one of the 20 greatest films ever made. The American remake takes place in the old West, where Eli Wallach’s bandit posse is terrorizing a small town, so the town hires Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and 4 other great Hollywood stars to defend it. It’s no Kurosawa masterpiece, but it’s hella fun and retains much of what made Samurai special.
Kirk Douglas is at is big movie star best in this big movie star biblical times epic, about a slave rebelling against the Roman Empire. It’s old school Hollywood awesome, with lavish sets and costumes, big battle sequences, and epic shots of ornate sets, an early sign Stanley Kubrick was really gonna be something special.
One of Italy’s great arthouse films, Michaelangelo Antonioni directs this European erotic thriller about the idle bougeois, who seek physical and societal pleasure to almost extreme ends until one day someone goes missing. The movie is not for the fidgety viewer, but it does have a lot of complicated feelings and thoughts about adult relationships shown over a canvas of gorgeous Italian scenery.
The Scopes Trial is one of the most famous in US history, setting a benchmark for Evolution against Creationism argument in law. Spencer Tracy is excellent playing the crusading lawyer arguing for science, using the Bible to turn the argument in his favor, as is Frederich March, unaware he’s arguing against the future.
Frederico Fellini’s masterpiece is an exercise is movie meta commentary on the epic scale. Fellini casts Marcello Mastroianni as his stand in, a columnist in modern Rome, filled with vanity and lust. This decadence bleeds in and out of the storytelling, blurring the lines between dream and reality that only greats like Fellini could make exciting and not just frustrating.
The great Billy Wilder’s satire on corporate hierarchy and getting ahead. Jack Lemmon is a working class man who rents an apartment he doesn’t use, letting his bosses cheat on their wives there. Things get tricky when Lemmon and his boss Fred MacMurray end up dating the same woman, Shirley MacLaine. It’s zany on the surface, but Wilder finds that deep meaning and sadness underneath.
Alfred Hitchcock follows up Vertigo and North By Northwest with one of the greatest films ever made, in my personal top 10 all time. Janet Leigh plays a thief who’s in over her head, and scared, rents a room at the Bates Motel, run by Norman Bates (the spectacular Anthony Perkins) and his mother, somewhere offscreen. The reason this movie’s so brilliant is because of the bold risktaking in the storytelling, with major plot choices happening halfway through that will shock viewers, which leads to even more sinister revelations later, culminating in the terrifying final shot of the movie.
