And the Hitchcock run is over! After a transcendent 3 year run, and a series of international challengers, the master of suspense, and former international filmmaker himself, cedes his crown to 2 other amazing international directors by not making a film this year, ushering in one of the great foreign decades of filmmaking, led in this year by Japan and Sweden.
An old fashioned John Huston Western with some fresh blood. Clark Gable plays an aging cowboy taking up horrific jobs to survive with his partners Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift. In between them saunters Marilyn Monroe’s early stripper with a heart of gold, who tries to do things the right way angering the old codgers and causing division between them.
Godard takes on the musical. The French director likes to break a genre movie then remake it in his own image, which he does here with movie musicals. Anna Karina is delightful as the exotic dancer (with a heart of gold, obvi) who wants to have a baby, and will get one by any means necessary, including torpedoing relationships.
Before Lindsey Lohan, there was Hayley Mills, playing both twins in Disney’s movie about long lost sibilngs rebuilding their family. Mills is excellent, the technology is pretty solid for the time, and Brian Keith and (especially) Maureen O’Hara make the movie special by making us believe both why the parents split up by why they also got together in the first place.
Even in the dark days Disney pulls out animated winners every so often. This one teases us with the title from minute 1, giving the animators time to draw 101 different versions of a Dalmatian, which do look pretty great. But most importantly, this movie has a pantheon Disney Villian, the luxury coat wearing Cruella De Vil, drawing the ire of animal activists everywhere.
Not a lot of racial diversity in American filmmaking, so this one is a breath of fresh air for the time, showing a working family on the South Side of Chicago who suddenly comes into a little money. Titans of African American cinema like Ruby Dee and Claudia McNeil are excellent here, but the great Sidney Poitier is a force, showing that barely controlled anger he would become famous for over his acting career.
Big budgeted big story. Gregory Peck stars as a man leading a group of soldiers trapped on an island by Nazi’s trying to escape via boat. But to do that, they have to get past the big bad movie title. Peck gets top billing, but he’s the least interesting character, as David Niven, Anthony Quinn, and shockingly for the time, two women Irene Papas and Gia Scala make this movie mostly earn its long runtime.
Shakespeare moves to the Upper West Side in New York City. Taking Romeo and Juliet and applying it to the white/Puerto Rican gang wars, this movie musical is filmed to be important. The ruthless choreography looks sensational, the songs pop, and star crossed lovers is always a good starting point for a movie.
An early sign of Paul Newman’s decade of upcoming brilliance. Newman plays Fast Eddie Felsen, a pool shark obsessed with proving his awesomeness to all his opponents. After being humiliated by Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), Felsen does some deep introspection and tries to figure out how to best the man who beat him, at least in some other way maybe.
Spaghetti Westerns might never exist were it not for Akira Kurosawa’s great samurai film. Sergio Leone basically copied the plot of Yojimbo for A Fistful of Dollars: a wandering samurai (man with no name), enters a town sieged by rival gangs, and tries to best both of them with his skills, mental and physical. Toshiro Mifune is excellent as ever playing the enigmatic wanderer.
Before there was John Nash, there was Harriet Andersson’s Karin. One of Ingmar Bergman’s great films, this tense drama/thriller deals with a group of men trying to help their wife/daughter/sister from succumbing to her schizophrenia. Bergman digs deep into human psychology with this one, showing the effect of deep personal trauma and its reverberating affects on that person’s loved ones, and, most importantly, how to come back from the edge of despair, if possible.
