Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
The inexorable march of time proceeds for all of us, leading us into another decade. The 1960s saw a lot of new directions for cinema with films like Psycho (1960), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Wild Bunch (1969) each taking film in new directions. There were plenty of great films this decade and apart from the aforementioned three films, other films I considered but which didn’t make the final list are: La Dolce Vita (1960), The Innocents (1961), The Birds (1963), The Best Man (1964), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Oliver! (1968), and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). Now onto the final five.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Based on T.E. Lawrence’s autobiographical book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the film follows Lawrence into the deserts of the Middle East where he advises the Bedouin forces in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence, as portrayed by a superb Peter O’Toole, is a insolent and intelligent soldier sent on assignment in spite of his commanding officers reluctance to send him. While on this assignment, to the chagrin of his superiors, Lawrence helps the Arabs successfully launch surprise attacks, suffer mitigated defeats, and ultimately succeed in their fight for independence.
It’s easy to fixate on O’Toole’s bright, observant blue eyes, but that’s all part of the masterful photography Freddie A. Young employs when presenting the figure, often standing out starkly against the monotonous sandy landscape. That such a deserted landscape could feel at once both vibrant and desolate is a testament to his skill. CinemaScope likely made the experience even more spectacular on the big screen and director David Lean’s eye for composition and narrative minimalism helped guide this film towards its vaunted status as one of the all-time greats.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
From a broad spectacle to a claustrophobic thriller, The Manchurian Candidate is the kind of movie that works on any size screen as it works on both a narrative and performance level. The film stars Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra as American servicemen abducted during the Korean War and programmed as sleeper agents by a joint Russian-Chinese brainwashing program. Upon returning home, Sinatra begins to learn more about the techniques used by the Communist government that programmed him and Harvey. Harvey is mostly unaware of his status and continues to work in various capacities that bring him close to several targets whom he is intended to kill.
Angela Lansbury, who was nearly the same age as Harvey (she was only 3 years his senior), plays his mother, the wife of a prominent senator whose political future she is carefully plotting. Hers is one of the great supporting screen performances and is easily one of the best never to win an Oscar. It’s a spellbinding turn that was a departure from many of her earlier screen performances. Harvey and Sinatra are solid as are Janet Leigh as Harvey’s girlfriend, and James Gregory as the senator. If you can get to this film without learning its secrets, it will be a far more enjoyable watch, but even those who know the twists will surely be engaged nonetheless.
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
You’re going to be seeing Stanley Kubrick’s name a lot in these articles. Kubrick made few films, but nearly every one was a masterpiece. Besides the two this decade, the next three write-ups will also feature a Kubrick film. During the Cold War, espionage thrillers were commonplace and while the doomsday dramas hadn’t quite reached their peak, both were lampooned effectively in Kubrick’s lone comedy feature, the masterwork Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Starring Peter Sellers in his greatest role, well three roles. In them, he plays a babysitting general, a babysitting president, and a demented ex-Nazi scientist.
The plot revolves around a potential doomsday scenario wherein a paranoid general (Sterling Hayden) orders a nuclear strike on Russia while the Pentagon struggles to contain the threat and call off the attack for fear of mutually assured destruction. Kubrick made one of the most timely films of his career with this one. With the modern rise of the anti-vaxx movement and other conspiracy theories, the absurdity of the events in this film take on not just a comical tone, but a foreboding one for history is repeating itself, a history that this film certainly tried to quash with its satirical take on political machinations. It was also a film that helped redefine how such features could be told and just how absurd they could get and still be ridiculously funny.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Another film that Kubrick directed that helped redefine a genre, 2001: A Space Odyssey changed how complex and contemplative science fiction at the theater could be. It also adapted the kind of scope such films could achieve while still being engaging and entertaining. While the film lacks the kind of action schticks that make modern sci-fi blockbusters so popular, it doesn’t skimp on the mind blowing special effects on display, effects developed by Douglas Trumbull and brilliantly infused into the film by Kubrick (for which he won his only Oscar alongside Trumbull).
The story revolves around a strange black monolith that has appeared throughout human history, first on prehistoric earth, and then, for the events of the film, on one of Jupiter’s moons. Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood play astronauts on a voyage towards this moon on a mission to uncover the secrets of its mysterious existence. Along the way, the pair are faced with an increasingly hostile AI named HAL 9000 whose distrust of the humans leads it to the inexorable conclusion that it must kill them or risk being destroyed. The film can feel both open and claustrophobic, but the grandeur and vastness of space are evocatively depicted and even those who don’t respond to its bare bones, but thought-provoking narrative will surely appreciate its visual splendor.
Z (1969)
This French-Algerian co-production directed by Costa-Gavras was a political thriller that revolved around a thinly-veiled interpretation of the events that led to the assassination of democratically Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. While the Mediterranean state that’s referenced in the film is not identified by name, the events are based on a novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos. In the film, a political rally turns deadly amidst a concerted right-wing governmental effort to displace leftist enemies of the state and further exact control over the various levers of government, eliminating a threat to their success.
Jean-Louis Trintingnant stars as The Examining Magistrate who investigates the politicians death and uncovers the disturbing plot by the anticommunist government. This political/investigative thriller exposes corruption and the vile tactics used to maintain it in fascistic governments like that of Greece at the time. The cautionary tale warns viewers of what can happen when those who control the government have only their own interests at heart, not those of the populace. It paints the situation in black-and-white times, but encourages the audiences to look beyond the narrative for subtle changes in the politics around them and urges against allowing such forces to gain control in the future. The 1960s proved to be a decade filled with such efforts and, unsurprisingly, their forewarnings fell too quickly on deaf ears. Lessons that are becoming ever more important today as they were six decades ago.
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