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

the only thing i get out of all the president's men is that i'd rather be watching robards in a leone film!

strangelove seems like a good bet for #1.

hoffman i could take or leave. straw dogs has its moments, as does marathon man. the rest = very eh.

my guess at the top five:

01 The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
02 Dr Strangelove
03 Breathless
04 The Apartment
05 Band of Outsideres

2001 i loved when i was 14, but it's really pretty empty-headed in a lot of ways. the HAL scenes are great, but i think i prefer real antonioni to kubrick-doing-antonioni, really.

That's Kael I'm pretty sure, unless GM stole it.

Armond White:

"In 1962, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was too wildly improbable to believe—-and that's why its satirical story about a Korean War veteran being brainwashed into a political assassin was such scary fun. The 60s assassinations that followed made the movie seem eerily prescient, and many viewers mistook that coincidence to be proof that it was a great movie.

Truth is, the '62 film, adapted by impish screenwriter George Axelrod from Richard Condon's burlesque thriller novel, was more kitschy than profound. Today it looks like a pretty scar hiding the malaise of the 60s. Its naïve shock (concerning war fatigue, political subterfuge, incest) doesn't do justice to the real-life sorrow that had once seemed unimaginable."

I don't go along with AW's idea that the remake is better (save Liev Schreiber is an improvement on Laurence Harvey).

As films adapted from Condon novels go, I prefer Prizzi's Honor. (Now, if the film had made Eleanor a junkie like the book... JD, the novel's INSANE compared to the film. Read it.)

I really should've voted for at least one Jerry Lewis movie. Not that anyone else did, apparently.

"I remember first seeing it alone, when it came out in 1962, at the Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto, California, a Moorish wonderland of a movie house. The first thing I did when it was over was call my best friend and tell him he had to see it, too. We went the next night; as we left, I asked what he thought. "Greatest movie I ever saw," he said flatly, as if he didn't want to talk about it - and he didn't.

He said what he said stunned, with bitterness, as if he shouldn't have had to see this thing, as if what it told him was both true and false in a manner he would never be able to untangle, as if it was both incomprehensible and all too clear, as if the whole experience had been, somehow, a gift, the gift of art, and also unfair - and that was how I felt, too."

the rest here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,754309,00.html

that armond white excerpt almost reads like a parody of kael! "scary fun," "kitschy," and espec "many viewers mistook that coincidence to be proof that it was a great movie" (incredibly condescending!!)

i didn't bother with the remake, i'll check out the novel though.

Tom, you're not from the "it's funny cuz it's old" school, like the clowns at the Film Forum who laugh through the climax of Rififi, are you?

Manchurian works best as a nightmare comedy, as with the liberal senator getting shot right in the milk carton.

The deal with Janet Leigh was someone convinced her to walk around only in her underwear for 90% of the film.

If I was, I'd probably be a much bigger fan of Kubrick!

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B00005Q61O.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

12. The Apartment
Billy Wilder, 1960
POINTS: 270
VOTES: 15

COMMENTS:

“Good movie. Shirl = rowr. Unlikely ending: IRL she wd stick as best fwends and break his feckin heart as she twirled thru endless rubbish boyfs (21st-century update: girlfs), before she suddenly lost her looks'n'figure WACK at 41.

“ You know I'm right.”

-- mark s

“My favorite Christmas movie.”

--General Doinel

“The Apartment is a damn near perfect movie. Even the unlikely ending is unexpectedly touching. "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise..."

“It's easy to say "They don't make 'em like that anymore," but they didn't often make 'em like that even back then.”

-- Justyn Dillingham

11. Bonnie and Clyde
Arthur Penn, 1967
POINTS: 275
VOTES: 16

COMMENTS:

“Watching Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde puts me in a trance and turns me into a drooling, mouth-agape Homer Simpson.”

-- oops

“Bonnie & Clyde may be the funniest drama ever.”

--General Doinel

10. Midnight Cowboy
John Schlesinger, 1969
POINTS: 278
VOTES: 14
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS:

“The Best movie starring Dustin Hoffman

“midnight cowboy and sunday bloody sunday are two movies that best explain sex to me, the ambiguity and tenderness and emotional complications that blossom into commitment and love.

“cowboy won the oscar, which must have been the time and place, cause it was so radical and isolating that it would seem to be out of place during that gladhaddening.”

-- anthonyeaston

Ally, it's not the FF's fault they have nitwits in the audience. Their programming is good, they show stuff (esp the premieres) you often can't see anywhere else.

Janet L was underwear-clad in Manchurian? is she a double agent or not (at least Demme addressed this).

9. Rosemary’s Baby
Roman Polanski, 1968
VOTES: 16
POINTS: 282
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS?

Also, Mia's short do: ME-YOW!

John Cassavetes' character = just another ambitious NY actor

Right. Which answers yet another question: What's in it for the husband?

and no, it's no one's fault but the nitwits that nitwits exist. That doesn't mean I'm going to willingly go to a place that makes me sit with them for hours!

8. The Graduate
Mike Nichols, 1967
POINTS: 287
VOTES: 14

COMMENTS:

“Just saw it for the first time last night (yeah, yeah, I know...last night..I never owned a TV either okay?)
But seriously, the last 20 minutes of this film are absolutely fucking classic--esp. the love crazed Dustin Hoffman wedding breakup cross-wielding-bride-stealing scene.

“I am tempted to say rebel w/out caause=50s as The Graduate =60's.”

-- turner

“the ending is classic of course, but it's the overwhelming mood of .... nothing .... that i love.”

-- paul barclay

“The Graduate is one of my favourite ever films, yes. Just beautiful, and unbearably affecting re: becoming an adult, despite Benjamin's situation bearing little resemblance to my own post-graduation. I don't like the end so much as the beginning, and that section where he is having the affair with Mrs Robinson, lazing around the swimming pool and doing little else.”

-- Nick

“i used to think this film was a bit overrated, but i watched it again for the first time in 5 years this morning and i don't know what i was thinking: it's pretty much perfect. dustin hoffman's performance is hilarious from start to finish.

"do you want a wood hanger or a wire hanger? they have both."

-- J.D.

7. Band of Outsiders/Bande A Part
Jean-Luc Godard, 1964
POINTS: 321
VOTES: 15
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS:

“i watched band of outsiders again last night, the end of that movie always makes me inexplicably happy. the last line of the narration is one of my favorite moments in all of cinema.”

-- J.D.

“A languid, sad, exuberant film. At one point one of its protagonists "wonders if the world is becoming a dream or a dream is becoming the world," which soundslike a parody of French art movie speak - and on one level, it might be, but it's also a suitable epitaph for a man more in love with cinema than the real world.”

--Justyn Dillingham

6. The Manchurian Candidate
John Frankenheimer, 1962
POINTS: 341
VOTES: 14
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS:
“Famously withdrawn after the JFK assassination made it seem a little too relevant, The Manchurian Candidate is, on one level, a wild satire of American paranoia -in places it's even funny. But the humor sucks you in and sets you up to get knocked out: you think you're watching one kind of film, and suddenly you're watching another. By the conclusion, you've landed in what might be the darkest American movie ever made -and then it's over. Case closed, as Gerald Posner would say.”

--Justyn Dillingham

“How good is the Sinatra-Leigh meeting on the train?

“Very, very good. Its strange awkwardness is appealing (and I also liked the fact that I immediately assuming Leigh was part of the plot, and that ultimately nearly everyone was -- even if not true, it is hopefully something the film is trying to encourage you to do, ie trust not one person). I also liked the fact that though I had a guess at the end I didn't have the whole thing figured out.

“It doesn't QUITE flow as a successful film through and through but a lot of it is sheer context. Marcus in the link provided above gives a bit of that sense of the difference then and now, while things like the brainwashing set just seem utterly out of place, a Ken Adam design wrenched from a Bond movie and redressed. In some ways, though, perhaps the brainwashing is (to borrow a term) a plot Macguffin, something needed in order to make/let everything else happen -- not something someone wants a la Hitchcock, but a narrative device without which etc. And to be fair that was Condon's creation rather than Frankenheimer and Axelrod's. Suspend disbelief just enough and it works...and I did like many of the subtle details as well that I picked up, the brief one-sided phone conversation in Spanish, the nod to the ACLU, and so forth.”

-- Ned Raggett

“at first i pretty much disliked it, but its slowly growing on me as i realize how bizarre portions of it are, even outside of the dream sequence. but what does bizarre-ness matter on its own? im beginning to think of it more and more as a satire of mccarthy's worst nightmare, shown as silly and bizarre as that nightmare would be. the dreams themselves are pretty hokey and overthetop, as are any portions involving soviets or chinese?’

-- tom cleveland

“The Manchurian Candidate is a great film - original, daring for its time, blackly funny and quite scary. Plus it has the first martial arts fight scene in any American movie (I think). Which involves Frank Sinatra. So in a way it is responsible for Steven Segal & Jean Claude Van Damme. But I won't hold that against it....”

-- David Nolan

5. Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960
POINTS: 349
VOTES: 16

COMMENTS:

“Godard’s greatest non-Karina film is one of those BIG ICONIC WORLD-CHANGING MASTERPIECES OF THE CINEMATIC FORM, that is actual as great, entertaining, and fun as the reputation suggests. In fact, it’s better.”

--General Doinel

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, 1968
POINTS: 359
VOTES: 17
#1’s: 1

COMMENTS:

“My Mum worked as a production accounts assistant on 2001 and actually walked around the spinny space hub thing. Very expensive to build - she says tutting. She also said that Kubrick was nowhere near as nuts as Patrick 'Mad As A Hatter' MacGooghan, if that is in any way salacious.”

-- Pete

"2001" is godlike, but you have to accept that it's not like other films.”

&

“I don't think "2001" goes over the heads of people who don't like it. I used to be one of those people. But around the time he died it got shown on TV, I started watching it, and I got sucked in. It's not like other films in that it's really really really slow. Some people like that, other (inferior) people don't.’

-- The Dirty Vicar

3. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Sergio Leone, 1966
POINTS: 456
VOTES: 21

COMMENTS:

“I once saw a very very early matinee of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (with ice cream and everything) and I have rarely ever been so truly truly happy.”

-- @d@ml

“The Good, The Bad & The Ugly may be my all-time favorite movie, the more I think about it.”

-- El Diablo Robotico

“I just acquired the new double disc DVD of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Amazing! I planned on watching one hour of it tonight so I could do something else later, but I watched all 179 minutes of it. Fucking beautiful.’

&

“The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly gets better with each viewing. And what is often forgotten is that it contains one of cinema's more inexplicably haunting depictions of war. Aside from the battle between a couple of liquored-up armies fighting over a useless bridge, the war is nothing but retreating armies, dead bodies, military cemeteries, and prisoner-of-war camps.

“What I didn't know was that Leone was actually depicting a very real part of the Civil War that took place in New Mexico. I always assumed that he was creating a surreal version of the war. Perhaps the scope of what occurred was implicitly larger in Leone's fiction, but it's based in truth.”

-- Gear!

“The title sequence is for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is one of my favorite things ever (the rest of the movie is up there too!).”

-- Spencer Chow

“Leone is the master filmmaker. This is the dress rehearsal to his magnum opus. Therefore, it can’t fail to be anything less than utter, utter genius. A beautifully wrought musing on Conflict, Friendship and Greed – the three central protagonists are cinema gold but Wallach’s Tuco steals the show the moment he screams “You’re the son a thousand fathers… all of them bastards like you.””

--FIVE-EIGHT