REVEALED: THE ILX TOP 100 FILMS OF THE 1960s IN CINERAMA!

I guess calling it "The Lousy Escape" would put people off.

Anyway, Good Luck!

Eurovision factor is high here. Here's a list of 32 films that I (not admittedly a cinemaphile) would be surprised to not see in the top 100 films of the 1960s:

2001: A Space Odyssey, A Hard Day's Night, A Taste of Honey, Battle of Algiers, Belle de Jour, Bonnie and Clyde, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Zhivago, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, In Cold Blood, In The Heat of the Night, Irma La Douce, Jules and Jim, Last Year At Marienbad, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, Night of The Living Dead, Once Upon A Time In the West, Persona, Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, Sanjuro, Satyricon, The Apartment, The Graduate, 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly', The Magnificent Seven, The Producers, The Wild Bunch, West Side Story, Yojimbo

Even considering that I've probably overrated some because I've never seen them, but they're pretty famous (Dr. Zhivago?, the Poitiers? The Graduate?), there's still more than 25 there.

And I've probably missed some foreign-language contenders in the rest, too:

A Man and A Woman, A Touch Of Zen, A Thousand Clowns, Accatone, Alfie, An Actor's Revenge, Bad Girls Go To Hell, Band of Outsiders /bande a part, Blackmail Is My Life, Blast of Silence, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Boccaccio 70, Burn!/Queimada!, Carry On up the Khyber, Charulata, Chronicle of a Summer, Classes Tous Risques, Closely Observed Trains, Coming Apart, Confessions Of A Psycho Cat, Confessions Of An Opium Eater, Cruel Story of Youth, David Holzman's Diary, Days of Wine and Roses, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards, Diary of a Chambermaid, Divorce Italian Style, El Cid, El Dorado, Faces, Fail-Safe, Fantastic Voyage, Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, From Russia With Love, Gamlet/Hamlet, Gate of Flesh, Gertrud, Hatari!, Head, Heaven and Earth Magic, High School, Ho!, How I Won The War, Hud, I'll Never Forget Whatisname, Il Grand Silenzio, Il Posto/The Sound of Trumpets, Inherit the Wind, Invocation of My Demon Brother, Juliet of the Spirits, Kwaidan, La Commare Seca, L'Eclisse, Le Petit Soldat, Life Upside Down / La Vie a L'Envers, Lola, Loves of a Blonde, Marat/Sade, Marnie, Medium Cool, Modesty Blaise, Mondo Trasho, Monterey Pop, Mothlight, Mudhoney, My Night at Maud's, Never on Sunday, Oliver!, Pale Flower, Peep Show, Petulia, Pigs and Battleships, Prelude, Pretty Poison, Psych-Out, Purple Noon/Plein Soliel, Putney Swope, Quatermass & The Pit, Red Angel, Red Beard, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Ride the High Country, Ruined Map, Samurai Rebellion, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Seconds, Seppuku/Harakiri, Shame, Signs of Life, Simon del Desierto, Skidoo, Splendor in the Grass, Stolen Kisses/Baisers Volées, Story of a Prostitute, Sword Of Doom, Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One, Take the Money and Run, Targets, Teorema, The Bed Sitting Room, The Bellboy, The Bride Wore Black, The Chelsea Girls, The Dirty Dozen, The Disorderly Orderly, The Errand Boy, The Face Of Another, The Flicker, The Gospel According to St Matthew, The Hustler, The Knack...And How To Get It, The Ladies' Man, The Manchurian Candidate,
The Naked Kiss, The Nutty Professor, The Patsy, The Pawnbroker, The Pornographers, The President's Analyst, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The Sand Pebbles, The Servant, The Shooting, The Shop On Main Street, The Silence, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Sundowners, The Swimmer, The Trip, The Virgin Spring, The War Game, The Wild Angels, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Three on a Couch, To Sir with Love, Tokyo Olympiad, Tom Tom the Piper's Son, Tony Rome, Triumph Over Violence/Ordinary Facism, Two For The Road, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Viridiana, Viva Las Vegas, Vivre Sa Vie/My Life To Live, Wait Until Dark, Wavelength, What's Up Tiger Lilly?, "Whatever Happened To Aunt Alice?", When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Winter Light, Witchfinder General/The Conquer Worm, Young Torless, Youth of the Beast

Forecast: Fun.

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25. The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965
POINTS: 191
VOTES: 10

COMMENTS:

"The Battle Of Algiers"

24. Vivre Sa Vie/My Life To Live
Jean-Luc Godard, 1962
POINTS: 192
VOTES: 9
#1’s: 2

COMMENTS:

“My Life to Live is my favorite. It's a good place to start since i started there and i love Godard. i'm no expert on him tho.”

-- ryan

“I’m not one to cry (or even get seriously emotional) when watching films. But there are at least two or three parts of this movie that just kill me. In particular, Nana’s interrogation by the police. Words fail me. It’s a fucking masterpiece.”

--General Doinel

23. The Hustler
Robert Rossen, 1961
POINTS: 198
VOTES: 9
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS?

22. Persona
Ingmar Bergman, 1966
POINTS: 201
VOTES: 9
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS:

“Home to two of the greatest monologues in screen history: Alma’s remembrance of the boys and the beach, and the segment about Elisabet’s child (which was so good Bergman uses it twice)”

--General Doinel

“I love the weird stuff: the prologue, the credit sequence, the frame that burns up.”

--Phil Dellio

21. Night of The Living Dead
Dean Lachiusa & George A. Romero, 1968
POINTS: 210
VOTES: 10

COMMENTS?

Charade (1963)

"I think Cary Grant gets a bad rap a lot of the time. My girlfriend thinks he’s got no edge but I say you got to look beyond his David Dickinson perma-tan. OK, so this film may not exactly prove what I’m talking about here in spades (North By Northwest shows Grant at his best) but Cary isn’t exactly a sap in this picture and him and Audrey look fucking great
together. It’s got some great comedy moments in there, to set off the suspense and some cute snappy dialogue. All in all, great fun, well paced and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy."

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

"This movie will probably pick up like a gadzillion votes (if anybody can be fucked to vote) but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad picture. On the contrary, surely this is the THE best buddy movie, although Newman and Redford provide themselves with some stiff competition with the Sting. Actually, I prefer the Sting. Still, this is nice piece, with a thoughtful melancholic edge that runs throughout. The famous bike scene is something that sticks in
the memory, as is the blaze of glory ending."

Goldfinger (1964)

"The best Bond bar none. It’s all about Connery, but hey, everybody knows that. But you also get some of the most quotable Bond lines in this one with Ernst Goldfinger hamming it up like any self-respecting Bond baddie should. You have to love Oddjob too – a hat that takes the heads off statues. I want one."

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20. The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah, 1969
POINTS: 214
VOTES: 11

COMMENTS:

“"The Wild Bunch" is one of my favorite films--the Bunch might not be totally admirable, but I find much to admire about them, as SP wants us to. They're certainly more admirable than anyone else in the film, except Robert Ryan.”
-- es hurt

“The Wild Bunch, which is maybe my favorite film of all time.”

-- Gear!

19. Belle De Jour
Luis Bunuel, 1967
POINTS: 239
VOTES: 12

COMMENTS:

“Belle du Jour is excellent but the sheer omnipresence of it in film study and, yeah, the "shock value" of parts of the story line are incredibly tame by today's standards...it kind of becomes like a reference point more than it is a film; it's hard not to be uninteresting (comparatively) with that to live up to.”

-- Ally

“i dunno, i think belle de jour is still sort of shocking”

-- Amateur(ist)

“i fucking love her sunglasses in belle.”

-- kacka thompson

18. The Producers
Mel Brooks, 1968
POINTS: 240
VOTES: 13

COMMENTS:

“I don’t know what it is with this movie but sometimes it can make me laugh
till it hurts and other times, I find it tremendously sad and melancholic.
Whatever, I always absolutely love Mars’ German playwright Liebkind; the
epitome of the comedy movie Nazi: “I am the author. You are the audience. I
outrank you!””

--FIVE-EIGHT

17. Jules and Jim
Francois Truffaut, 1962
POINTS: 241
VOTES: 13

COMMENTS?

16. Yojimbo
Akira Kurosawa, 1961
POINTS: 244
VOTES: 10
#1’s: 1

“Yojimbo - I prefer this over "A Fistful of Dollars" (although, no good lines like, "My mule don't like people laughing") - another solid Kurosawa.”

--mj

From “Funniest scene in non-comedy” thread
“Yojimbo -- when Mifune wakes up after getting a beatdown, he asks where he is.

Guard #1: "The brewery---"
Guard #2 [slaps #1]: "Quiet! [to Mifune] At the gates of Hell."”

-- Leee

Hey! I remember neither making that post, nor seeing that scene!

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15. Once Upon A Time In The West
Sergio Leone, 1968
POINTS: 246
VOTES: 12
#1’s: 3

COMMENTS:

“Once Upon A Time In The West particularly is full of gorgeous and memorable scenes and shots, I think. I once went out with a woman who was named Leone because her father loved Sergio's films so much.”

-- Martin Skidmore

“There's that line that Jason Robards say to Claudia Cardinale's character, which starts off sort of funny and a split second later because of Leone's camera movement, the Morricone music, and her expression is is unbearably touching:

Cheyenne: You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the biggest whore in Alameda and the finest woman that ever lived.

“The final shot of OUATITW is remarkable on many, many levels. Primarily how in one camera move Leone shows the modern world ushering the old world out.”

-- Gear!

“Actually the best film ever committed to celluloid.

“Anyone with half a spark of life in them should be able to recognise that like the most impressive, inspirational creative articulations, One Upon A Time In The West rewards repeated viewings, rigorous intellectual scrutiny and technical appraisal with startling accomplishment, unmistakable presence, multifaceted interpretive dimension and of course, electrifying entertainment.

“The film is an opus. A sprawling paean to the genre and at the same time an exhilarating annihilation of the conventions it pays such reverent homage to. This film killed the Western, but in so doing, emerged as the greatest articulation of the form yet conceived.

“A brooding, haunting trip into the grimy world of the West, Leone sets a quartet of charismatic players against each other, in a desolate, unforgiving environment where half-hidden motives and cruel instinct clash head-on with human fragility and noble endeavour. Weaknesses are exploited and rampant greed rules; and against the backdrop of a railroad marching inexorably across the desert, so the protagonists ride roughshod over anybody who stands in the way of their ambitions; be they revenge, wealth,
lust, or fulfilment of fantasy. And yet when the dust settles, the cost of their collective ambition proves ultimately destructive, fatal even, their efforts squashed under the irresistible juggernaut of ‘Progress’, as the completion of the railroad heralds a new era or even greater greed and ambition. Perhaps a metaphor for the cyclical cannibalism of Western Capitalism, no one in this film takes any discernable satisfaction from the
realisation of their dreams, though the viewer is left exulted through the magnificent process of this discovery.

“Much is made of Morriocone’s score, and for my money it’s his most impressive – his core themes (one for each of the four central characters) meet and mingle throughout the piece, heightening the climaxes to the realm of ecstasy and lending the lulls a peculiar urgency and uneasiness. The thought the composer put into his work is frightening – the
unforgettable tone of Bronson’s Harmonica motif is the sound the instrument would make if you were to breath in and out through it without moving up and down the
scale (like say, if it was rammed in your mouth when your hands were tied behind your back, or if, like Frank, it was placed in your mouth after you had just taken a slug to the chest). It’s detail like this that makes Once Upon A Time In The West such a complete picture. The fact that Leone played the score to the actors on set as he filmed, can only have helped add to the strange aura the piece projects.

“The look and feel of this film is nothing short of majestic, encompassing an eerie, desolate, lunar-like landscape (like the very souls of the characters themselves, the landscape is for the most part a husky shell). In this world, law has no meaning, rules do not apply, morality is corrupt and not even money can buy you everything; the director is at pains to convince the viewer that anything is possible in his vision of the West, and the
familiar codes of the Western are systematically obliterated.

“The grime and dust practically slips off the screen, the intense detail of stubble and sweat puts the viewer right next to the players, the dialogue is both stilted and sparing, dramatic and at times incongruently comic; for stylistically, Leone is no realist. He takes his depictions one step further into the realms of mannerism, which means Once Upon A Time In The West truly lives up to its epic storybook title. The acute angles, elongated
shadows and monochromatic flat colours all add to the feeling of
otherworldliness and uneasiness that permeates the whole (a compositional technique Leone surely purloined from the Italian metaphysical painter De Chirico.
Seriously, next time you stand in front of a de Chirico, check it out – you’ll see what I mean).

“Turning to the narrative framework of the piece, Leone’s film contradicts
and twists the rules of the game right from the outset; The film opens with
the gunning down of three well known actors from the history of the
Western in what is the longest opening sequence in cinema history (originally
Leone planned to use Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach for this memorable
opening sequence, reprising their roles from the director’s previous film, The Good,
The Bad and The Ugly and so symbolising some kind of perverse closure).
Elsewhere, Leone underlines his intention to confound, in presenting to
the viewer the blue eyed hero of the bygone Western era Henry Fonda as a
stone-cold crystal-eyed, child murderer. In many other aspects, Once Upon A
Time In The West reworks the conventions of the genre and explodes the
expectations of the viewer; the most benevolent, comical character doesn’t
make it out of the story alive, while the beautiful woman at the heart of
the film, could either be metaphorically taking everyone for a ride, or
a stand as a symbol for the victims of ubiquitous masculine brutality and
ambition (in the film, even when the despicable Frank forces himself on
her, there are elements at work which hint that perhaps he is also being
played here). These are all examples of how each character in the film shifts
and skews with the slowly unfolding and twisting perspective that Leone
offers the viewer.

“Like the narrative (where good and evil merge into one moral entity),
the characters themselves defy expectation; and when they shoot each other
on screen, effectively they are blowing holes in the traditions and history
that Leone studied so meticulously before embarking on his greatest project.
The fact that the film is packed with countless references and symbols
culled from the cinematic history of the Western is perhaps added proof
that Leone intended to bury the genre with his picture.

“But there is still more to Leone’s piece than self-reference and movie making motifs. If you root deeper into the fabric of Leone’s movie, you may imagine, and with a not inconsiderable degree of plausibility, that it is loaded up with social metaphor and cultural resonance. This is a movie that can be taken any number of ways; that can be pushed beyond the point of snapping of many such other lauded cinematic achievements. Ambition, Greed, Revenge, Love, Lust, Progress; these are some of the universal key
themes that the viewer may flesh out from the bones of Leone’s complex and often subtle plot. Leone presents to the viewer a vision whereupon Old and New worlds collide at a crossroads, and the driving forces of acquisition and wish-fulfilment collapse in futility, bringing down with them a maelstrom of death and destruction. The fact that he sets the Western on a burning pyre through the process, merely confirms Once Upon A Time In The West’s place in the pantheon of great cinema.’

--FIVE-EIGHT

14. Lawrence of Arabia
David Lean, 1962
POINTS: 248
VOTES: 13

COMMENTS?

-- a spectator bird

Yeah, who would say they all die at the end?!

sorry, i didn't mean "all" as every last dude in the movie, but "all" as in all the people who die. argh. go see it anyone who hasn't.

Butch Cassidy: NO BACHARACH POP IN CIRCA 1900 PERIOD FILMS, PLEEZ

13. A Hard Day’s Night
Richard Lester, 1964
POINTS: 268
VOTES: 13

COMMENTS:

(from “100 big dance numbers” thread) “99. When The Beatles Go To The Nightclub In A Hard Day's Night and Ringo Freaks Out On The Dancefloor”

-- Fritz Wollner

‘It occurs to me that the best plotless film I can think of is "A Hard Day's Night." (Well, virtually plotless. "Ringo goes out wandering for a while and then comes back" is as close as it gets.)”

-- Douglas

2001
A Taste of Honey
Bonnie & Clyde
Breathless
Dr. Strangelove

In Cold Blood
Irma La Douce
Last Year in Marienbad
Midnight Cowboy
Psycho

Rosemary's Baby
Satryicon
The Apartment
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
West Side Story

Is there an obvious three on that list that won't appear in the top 100 at all?

(You've picked three that I put in more or less because I associate an aura of general appreciation with the names - I've never actually seen them, so I can't go "No way!")

Ayways, from you list I'd guess West side story won't make it (or rather I wish it didn't). Same with A taste of honey, it won't make it. Dunno for the 3rd one.

BTW, didn't anybody vote for Jungle book?

i don't think these are locks (from least likely to place to most):

A Taste of Honey
Irma La Douce
In Cold Blood
Satryicon
West Side Story
Last Year in Marienbad

the rest, for better (breathless, the good, the bad, and the ugly) or worse (2001, rosemary's baby), are probably sure things.