American movies underwent a foreign invasion in 1966. Each of the top 5 films are either set in a foreign country, or directed by a director not born in the US. Maybe a year like this helped inspire people like Scorcese, Coppola, and Spielberg, still in film school, to elevate their games and make America #1 again in the movie world. Who knows? Either way, if you want a good intro to great foreign filmmaking, this is your year.
Michael Caine is one of those foreign invaders. He shows America what a 60s PG sex comedy looks like. Caine breaks the 4th wall and has a blast playing a man whore who slowly deals with the consequences of his floosie ways.
Miss Frizzle and the Magic School Bus owe a debt to this film, about a group of scientists shrunk to help remove a blood clot inside a dying scientist’s body. Dated today, this film was a marvel of its time, with great set design and art decoration.
John Frankenheimer’s trippy thriller is a great study of identity and sense of self. Rock Hudson is great as a man reborn in a new body, trying to figure out his new place in the world where this capability is available to everyone. It’s thoughtful, and also scary as hell as you plunge into Hudson’s paranoia.
Italian Director Michaelangelo Antonioni heads to London to make his biggest hit, and maybe his best film. David Hemmings plays a bored photographer of the glitz and glam of free love London. Bored and carefree, until that is, he thinks he photographs a murder. Vanessa Redgrave is also excellent in a movie that captures its time and place perfectly, while layering in a deeper study of obsession and impulsive behavior.
Yes, Liz and Dick’s popularity had something to do with this movie’s success, but Mike Nichols’s debut is much more than the paparazzi hype machine. Burton is a great actor in his own right, playing one half of a emotionally fraught married couple. Taylor, the other half, put on weight for the role and is simply mesmerizing here, winning an Oscar playing the volatile wife holding emotional secrets and scars.
It’s really hard to stand up for what you believe in in this film about English royals. Paul Scofield plays Thomas More, the religious leader who opposed Henry VIII’s (Robert Shaw) divorce to marry Anne Boelyn. This movie pretty bleakly shows the cost of such a moral stance, as More falls out of favor with people in power. Shaw is the star here though, magnetic and charming as young Henry.
The finale of the Sergio Leone (Italian)/Clint Eastwood trilogy is the best of the 3 films. Enrico Morricone’s legendary, immediately recognizable score helps a lot too, as 3 men (Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach), after fighting in epic Civil War battles, go in search of buried treasure, only to end up in a popular culture defining Mexican standoff.
And now were onto trippy ephemeral Swedish cinema. Ingmar Bergman really tries something daring with this drama about an actress (Liv Ullman, his muse) recovering from a mental breakdown, and the nurse (Bibi Andersson) taking care of her. What unfolds is a strange psychosexual drama that breaks the rules of storytelling. It’s gonna be too weird for some. For me? Bergman’s movie rule breaking is electrifying.
One of the great war films ever made, and criminally under seen in the US. This movie studies what it’s like to be occupied by another country (France occupying Algeria, in this case), and the guerrilla, and sometimes brutally extreme methods soldiers and revolutionaries go to achieve their freedom, lessons all great military minds should study and understand, and mainstream audiences can watch with excitement and terror in one fell swoop.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s (Russia) masterpiece. The epic is about the titular character, a painter/artist who lives a life of art and religion, sometimes pulling him in oppostie directions that the movie compels us to think about. Simultaneously, Tarkovsky gives us spectacular sequences of battle and rebellion that are eye popping in their beauty and nightmare alike. A template for how to make a great epic film.
