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INTRODUCTION
Ladies, Gentlemen, and Sexy Celebrity, allow me to present to you the latest official Movie Forums list…
The MoFo Top 100 Films of the Sixties.
When I first joined this forum, you lot were half way through your first ever list, the Millenium Countdown. I watched as the final few films were revealed, but being a new and fairly uninvolved member of the forum I never paid much attention to what was going on. I then got the opportunity to participate in the Nineties countdown, which was a fantastic experience as by then I was a regular poster and comfortable member of the forum, I had lots of fun taking part from the first minute to the last. Since then it seems that the forums have been absolutely obsessed by countdowns, Harry Lime’s dedication to the list meant that these were to become ‘MoFo traditions’, something to be proud to host and take part in.
I have taken part in every official countdown since, and it has been a real pleasure to be part of them all, and I know I speak on behalf of everyone else when I say that the hosts did a great job. I was tempted to throw my hat in the ring earlier on for hosting, seeing as I provided the spreadsheet for Harry Lime’s countdown and it has been used successfully since, but looking back I am glad I did not, and that I was able to take part in the suspense surrounding the different countdowns. Last year I finally felt comfortable with potentially taking a different role, seeing the countdown from a different perspective, and with the support of my fellow MoFos I kind of just grabbed a role that was there to be taken. I am still not entirely sure what to expect over the next year with this, I feel huge pressure to pull off something great thanks to the former hosts’ great work, and I hope I can do that for you guys. So I will stop rambling about myself, and get to the stuff that you actually want to read…
THE FILMS
(A huge thanks goes to Mark who contributed and helped me complete this section)
The Sixties saw plenty of new filmmakers emerge, with new ideas and styles of filmmaking. With the 'Old Hollywood' system losing money, the decade turned to a wave of younger, fresher filmmakers, inspired by the artistic successes in other countries around the world. European art films saw old Hollywood conventions transformed into something new, old genre styles and tropes, were combined with new storytelling techniques, politics, language and sex, bringing about movements such as the "French New Wave", the "Commedia all'italiana", the "Spaghetti Western" and Japanese Cinema, as well as the British and Czechoslovakian New Waves.
Young filmmakers could now make the films they wanted to make. The French New Wave saw an influx of new and exciting filmmakers that are now regarded as some of the most influential and important of all time, such as: Jean-Luc Godard, Francious Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Agnčs Varda, Jacques Demy, Louis Malle, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Divorce, Italian Style launched a new wave of Italian cinema that saw different branches with notable directors from the country including Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica and perhaps most importantly for America, Michelangelo Antonioni, with Blow-Up, an artistic film infusing elements of sex and politics. Then you had directors such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci who directed a new style of Westerns, cheaply produced works that focused less on plot but more on style, shot in Italy and Spain and dubbed over in English language.
In Japan, Yasujirō Ozu made his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, Kurosawa directed the Samurai film that would inspire A Fistful of Dollars, Yojimbo, and then there were other artistic directors creating masterpieces such as When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse), Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara) and Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi). With other important directors including: Nagisa Oshima, Kaneto Shindo, Masahiro Shinoda, Susumu Hani, Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura and cult hero Seijun Suzukii
Germany rebuilt their cinema from the ground up with such iconoclastic filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta. There was an amazing amount of adventurous creativity and evolution coming from this group and their political attacks on ripe German targets and social commentary.
With freedom and liberation being key themes of the era, the Czechoslovakian films largely focused on these themes. Miloš Forman directed the cult classic The Firemen’s Ball and would later become a successful director abroad with his Eighties epic Amadeus. Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, and Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ The Shop on Main Street both picked up Academy awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
Social Realism was also a major theme in the British works of the decade with films such as A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, If… and Kes from directors Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and Ken Loach. Tony Richardson also directed the Oscar winning Tom Jones. American expatriate Richard Lester created one of the most well-known, anarchic and successful British films, A Hard Day’s Night, where he basically invented the music video and turned the Beatles into the new Marx Bros.
All these new waves of cinema began to influence the works of new American directors, particularly towards the end of the decade, where it carried over into the Seventies. Films such as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn) and Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg) had stories that focussed on anti-heroes that were now ‘cool’. Mike Nichols gave us Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? a biting dark film focussing on the dark side of human nature in a broken relationship, as well as The Graduate which focussed on the coming of age story of a young man. Midnight Cowboy tackled themes of homosexuality and the struggle for survival in America, and become the first (and currently, only) X-rated film to win Best Picture. Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper) perhaps the most famous or definitive film of the decade that is often recognised for launching the Seventies era, was a liberal road film like no other, a fascinating mix of drugs and violence. 1969 also saw the release of two classic Westerns in Sam Peckinpah’s blood filled The Wild Bunch and George Roy Hill’s buddy film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
All these fantastic films and I haven’t even mentioned some of our favourite directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polanski and David Lean, who created what are recognised as some of their best works during the decade: Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Persona, Rosemary’s Baby and Lawrence of Arabia. Then there's Billy Wilder, Mel Brooks, John Frankenheimer, Michael Powell, Luis Buńuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, George A. Romero, Sidney Lumet, Fred Zinnemann, Jean-Pierre Melville, Sam Fuller, John Huston and many, many others that I haven't mentioned!
With hundreds of fantastic films and directors to explore, the Sixties list should be a fantastic opportunity for us as film watchers to discover new favourites and create a great list together.
The members of Movie Forums marvel over the Sixties thread
THE RULES
Once again, the same rules as always (pretty much copied and paste… well, it works):
- Submit your ranked list of twenty-five titles, numbered 1-25 with no ties, to me via a private message with the title "[Your Username] - MoFo ‘60s List".
- Once your list has been submitted you can not make any changes to it, so think wisely and check your list before sending it.
- Films will be awarded points as follows: 25 points for 1st place, 24 points for 2nd place, 23 for 3rd and so on, all the way down to 1 point for your 25th placed film.
- Partial lists (less than 25 films) will be accepted after May 30th.
- New members can send in a list as soon as they've been a member here for one month. This measure is taken so that the list isn't jerry-rigged by people who have been here for a week, and then disappear.
- Films that are part of a series must be submitted as separate films.
- Any film listed as 1960-69 on IMDb is eligible for our list.
- For more obscure films, or films that share titles with others, please link to the IMDB page of the film to make it easier for me to avoid mistakes.
- Anyone who reveals their list before the countdown has ended will be disqualified.
- The deadline for entries is Midnight PST - June 30th, 2015. That's five months. Plenty of time to review favorites, discover new ones, and order a list.
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Last edited by Daniel M; 06-29-15 at 10:29 AM.
I'm sure this will be fun.
