This is the film nerd year. Several of the great arthouse directors released awesome films, especially the foreign superpowered directors like Fellini, Kurosawa, Godard, and Bergman. Try as James Bond and John Sturges might, it’s just not their year this year…or is it?
Sidney Poitier got a well deserved Oscar playing Homer Smith, the angel appearing to an Arizona convent. Horribly aging politics aside, this is a well meaner of a movie, using Poitier’s charm and dignity off the rigid but ultimately sweet nuns.
Not quite camp yet, this Bond film is shockingly tense. The action is still pretty fun, and Connery does throw in a quip here and there. But the malleable Robert Shaw’s chilling presence as a ruthless assassin sets the tone for a more tense, satisfying bond outing.
Even later Hitchcock can be excellent like this scare fest. The Master of Suspense feels like he made this one on a dare, where someone pointed at a robin or seagull and said, make a movie abou them scary, and Hitchcock done and did it, with a chilling unnerving ending waiting for you.
Jean Luc-Godard likes to make things personal. So much so, he might have popularized the meta movie, telling a story about an assistant director struggling to make an American produced film. Brigitte Bardot is obviously beautiful, but Godard extracts all of her acting talent here too, as a woman who’s marriage is slowly falling apart.
The movie sells itself as a comedy caper, and it delivers like a great Hitchcock thriller. Cary Grant had his times with one Hepburn; in this farce he teams Audrey Hepburn to bring on the laughs, thrills, and kisses. You’ll swoon and scare alike along the Seine and the Champs Elysees.
William Golding’s perceptive novel gets a great big screen adaptation. A plane crashes, stranding 30 teenage boys on the island, where they have to build a society in order to survive their new surroundings.
With American films mired in gunfire and war, Ingmar Bergman decided to throw a little sex into the mix. Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom play sisters in the throws of carnal desire. Their travels lead to examinations of a life built around pleasure, and not just men and women; this is an early pioneer of same sex relationships.
If Jean Luc Godard made his meta movie this year, he got nothing on Frederico Fellini. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a frustrated director with a block in his head about what to make next. Fellini then takes us on a trip down the creative mind, where at some point reality and fantasy get blurred together in sometimes fun sometimes harmful ways. If you want to direct a movie, this is a must see.
Akira Kurosawa takes a break from samuraiing and heads to modern Japan bringing alone one of his muses Toshiro Mifune. Mifune plays a rich man who’s wealth makes him the target for a kidnapping. Kurosawa puts his spin on the crime thriller here, making half the movie a story about the wealth gap, and the other half a detailed, intense police procedural trying to bring a kidnapper to justice.
Surrounded by this foreign film prison, John Sturges breaks free with this American action classic. Simple but effective premise: Allied POWs try to break free from their prison camp. Steve McQueen leads the intimidating cast of Hollywood acting talent, while the story goes in unexpected directions, creating a thrilling final act with one of the great motorcycle sequences in movie history.
