1964 is one of the front runners for best movie year of the 1960s. Helped by a strong contingent of foreign films, we also get pinnacle films from franchises like the Bond and Pink Panther Films, Elvis, and the Liverpool Mop Tops. The top 5 is pretty strong, but in all this is a pretty great top to bottom year, especially if you like great, unforgettable music.
Elvis obviously will have you at the titular, legendary song. But this is the movie version of a fun hang, as Elvis seeks the romance of the sexy, great Ann Margaret, while giving us an early glimpse of all the entertainment value Vegas has to offer: car chases, water skiing, cabaret shows, pool parties, etc.
The Best Picture winner is a delight of a musical, easy to do when George Cukor is directing. Also making it easier is the effervescent Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney girl thrust into the pompous vanity of high society by Rex Harrison’s douchey professor. It’s dated as hell, but thanks to Hepburn its rarely boring, and set back British impersonations for decades.
Umbrellas just look better if Catherine Deneuve is holding them. However, Jacques Demy tries something daring with this film: put it to song, but the words are normal conversation. At times, yes, it’s pretentious, however, scenes of drama and humor get elevated to poetry when executed well. Gotta love the ambition of the French New Wave.
Sidney Lumet sure doesn’t trust authority figures. Here, he envisions a worst case Cold War Scenario: a faulty defense system instructs pilots to bomb Moscow, forcing the Defense Department to scramble quickly to try and stop them despite the “direct” order.
The pinnacle of the Sean Connery James Bond run. It’s in this film that the franchise discovered the formula: use crazy gadgets, cool cars, and several puns/jokes at the expense of the bad guys, plus hire a great actor (Gert Frobe) to play the ice cold villain. Connery is good as ever, but despite the demeaning name Pussy Galore, Honor Blackman is also impressive here, using more than just her assets to prove her mettle, or, as Bond might say, she puts the ass in asskicking.
America’s rip off, er, reinvention of Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese samurai films come to America via the Italian Spaghetti Western. Sergio Leone and Enrico Morricone shows us Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, a lone gunman who enters a town fought over by two rival gangs, hoping to outwith both of them for his own end. Back to the Future fans will remember the famous ending of this film.
Hitler was a big arts fan. So naturally, he’s gonna try to steal some of it. John Frankenheimer crafts this exciting as hell thriller out of it, about a railway operator (Burt Lancaster) who gets recruited to stop the German army from taking the priceless works of art back to the motherland. The story is beautifully constructed to show the lengths resistance fighters will go to preserve pieces of their culture from being taken from them, as well as the price of that kind of sacrifice on everyone, especially the always interesting Jeanne Moreau’s hotel owner. But this movie will make your jaw drop with its epically scoped action setpieces revolving around bombing trains from the air.
Beatlemania was afoot everywhere at this point in World History. So a Beatles’s movie was inevitable, and could have been phoned in. Instead, we get this brilliant, meta, joyful ode to being young and famous from John, Paul, George, and Ringo, featuring probably one of the great soundtracks in movie history.
This musical isn’t even legendary: it’s a rite of passage for every child, period. Julie Andrews is perfect in every way as the magical maid from heaven, or the wherever the wind was blowing in London, teaching life lessons to the stressed out Banks children via music and love. Dick Van Dyke is also a delight, dancing and singing into everyone’s hearts. Movie magic at its finest.
My favorite Stanley Kubrick film is the perfect satire. Mocking the power obsessed government and military leaders, Kubrick layers on the lunacy and nonsense to poke potent, brilliant fun at how on a razor’s edge the world is, by putting powers in the hands of the unprepared, and unwilling to argue in a war room.
