1960s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[thirtyframesasecond]

I can often take or leave a lot of the British social realism of the 60s but the one film I could make an exception for is Karel Reisz's 'Morgan : a suitable case for treatment', a bizarre black comedy.

[Yojimbo]

Is 'This Sporting Life' considered part of the 'kitchen sink' set?
If it is, it will probably be my only candidate from among those ranks

[Mr Sausage]

But then isn't the theme probing the myth of 'intellectual distance', as the main character mulls things over instead of actually trying to dealing with real people in real trouble, instead retreating back into safe abstraction. Isn't that what links it to the idea of knowing but not doing anything about actions that you are involved in (though I agree this is a wider statement than just relating to Nazism)? Especially when you are in an environment that seems to tacitly support this by creating the circumstances in which such events can constantly occur (much as the local brothel does in other areas).

The 'hero' tries to keep an intellectual distance from events, in the world but not of it and watching casually while events escalate from animal torture to human bullying, to human torture. The aspect of the film that I find most interesting and disturbing is the way that he keeps allowing himself to go a little further seemingly to test himself and his moral framework and see how far things can be pushed before the line of human decency is violated. It illustrates nicely the political point of how given enough time small moves through the judicious application of coercion and/or charisma can inevitably push everything and everyone towards a more extreme position.

Yet in doing so our 'hero' missed the fundamental fact that he was damned from the very first moment he participated - that the line had passed him, and everyone else, by some time ago without him even being aware of it. Which makes his thin veneer of intellectual musing about the nature of violence and morality not just cruel in the way that it shield him from the tortures going on, but also completely pointless as a form of necessary research that could perhaps at a stretch have justified the allowing the experimentation to occur.

He's almost a classic Dostoevskian hero in that sense, though not quite as internally driven as characters from Doestoevsky - here he's more of the justification cog in the wider abuse machine, trying to find mitigation for the worst abuses of the system.

Maybe. Not in Musil's novel, because the ideas really are, genuinely, what the novel is about. Musil takes them seriously. So it's hard to know what to make of Törless' philosophical confusions in the movie since they use Musil's serious ideas. Beineberg or Reiting's (I can never remember which one) pseudo-intellectualism disguising the sexual thrill he gets from torture is meant to be one more contrast to the real investigative work that the contemplative Törless undertakes as part of his bildung. So Schlöndorff's movie, in your reading, turns Törless into an impotent intellectual who retreats to his ideas in order to avoid the horrors of real life, to preserve a fake innocence, really. That could very well be true (and would be a damning criticism of Musil's novel, which I've never seen anyone argue before). I am totally persuadable on that point. But it changes nothing for me. It still felt like I was watching an intellectual exercise on behalf of the film, or as knives put it, metaphors in the place of real problems. Törless, Beineberg, Reiting, and Basini feel like abstractions to me, playing schematic parts in a social metaphor. None of their thoughts, words, or actions seem to develop organically from who they are as people; rather, it feels the other way around. So all that is urgent and important in the situation is replaced with the film's own intellectualizing manner.

Or so I feel, anyway. There's no reason why other people have to feel the same.

I'm afraid I don't really buy the comparison to If..., which is more a howl of adolescent rage against the machine with Malcolm McDowell as the machine gun toting poster boy acting as the impudent but impotent individual acting out against the uncaring system.

It was just a surface-level comparison. They are two different movies about vaguely similar things, and I like If... a lot more. That's really all I was getting at.

[knives]

Sausage already said it perfectly, but even if you are right, and I do think you are right, that doesn't solve the various issues that I have with the structure of the film and how it plays with its themes. In fact my big problem is that the film damn's Torless' ineffectual nature and yet gives no reason why he should have done anything differently. He still would have been damned. The story is far too predetermined with all alternate choices ending to the same tune.

[antnield]

The talk of British social realism during this decade reminded of the little-seen short Paddy's in the Carsey. Fortunately you can watch the whole thing (just 15 minutes of your time) on the BFI website here.

The film was directed by John Fletcher, an unsung figure in the Free Cinema movement simply because he never went on to direct a feature. He did, however, work on almost all of the Free Cinema shorts in a whole variety of capacities, from cameraman to sound man. Paddy's in the Carsey nowadays plays out like the missing link between those shorts and Platts-Mills' Bronco Bullfrog. It has a documentary veneer that occasionally gives way to moments of improvisation. The results are quite rough, but fascinating all the same. Apparently Platts-Mills was present during some of the filming, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

[zedz]

The film was directed by John Fletcher, an unsung figure in the Free Cinema movement simply because he never went on to direct a feature.

Though About the White Bus runs about an hour - technically feature-length (and longer than The White Bus itself!)

[puxzkkx]

I could probably make a Top 50 of Japanese New Wave pics alone.

I just did a quick extraction from my last list and also-rans, added in things I'd seen since or had overlooked, and got to 51 'essential' (to me) Japanese films of the 60s without breathing hard. And there are a lot of presumably great films I haven't seen: most of Naruse and Hani's output, for example, a vast swathe of highly regarded documentary work, and so forth.

Do PM me that list, I've really been in the mood for classic Japanese film lately.

[swo17]

Better yet, share it with the rest of us! (Has it changed much from this?)

[zedz]

Hah! I'd completely forgotten that I'd already performed this stunt! From the list you linked to, I forgot a few titles (The Cage, The Pornographers (!!!), Sword of Doom) and left some others off intentionally to make room for films I liked better (Pigs and Battleships, The Sun's Burial, Yojimbo, The End of Summer).

New entries were (in vague order of importance):
Violence at Noon
The Affair
Fugitive from the Past
Eros Plus Massacre
Three Resurrected Drunkards
Akitsu Hot Springs
A.K.A. Serial Killer
Pleasures of the Flesh
Punishment Island
Patriotism
The Catch
Woman of the Lake

[puxzkkx]

If you haven't seen Yearning yet you really should!

I've been looking for some more nihilistic chambara in the vein of Sword of Doom, as well. Any suggestions?

And another question - Uchida's Miyamoto Musashi series worth watching? I've discovered him this year - very interesting director, but I'm always leery of series with tons of instalments.

[zedz]

Another hand-picked gem from the experimental film list:

Rat Life and Diet in North America (Joyce Wieland, 1968) – The Complete Works of Joyce Wieland (Canadian Filmmakers Distribution) – Wieland almost pioneered the YouTube cat video with her earlier short Catfood, a rather gorgeous meditation on her tabby meditating (and feasting) on various fish presented for its delectation, but this goes much, much further, constructing a dystopian political allegory by layering intertitles and on-screen texts onto footage of frolicking rats and evil / bemused cats. It’s a film that skewers its own time with a very light touch, the dissident rats eluding their feline captors, taking high tea with the bourgeois, hiding within American flags and ultimately (SPOILER?) fleeing to Canada where they can grow organic vegetables. Like most of Wieland’s 60s films, it’s informal and intimate, busy in a Mekas sort of way but much jazzier in its rhythms.

[Michael Kerpan]

I've really been in the mood for classic Japanese film lately.

I think it's been at least 3 months since I last saw an Asian film (new Johnnie To) -- but I do have some stuff on order.

[puxzkkx]

I am desperately seeking The Mad Fox/Love, Thy Name Be Sorrow by Tomu Uchida

[knives]

So I rented Morgan based on everyone's recommendation and if nothing else it really is the hugest evidence to David Warner's talent. Even by the standards of Kitchen Sink this character is a totally unlikable gasbag, but the joy and love Warner (and to a lesser extent Redgrave) put into this character and his relations I can't help but love him in spite of all of the truly horrible and grotesque things he does across the film. It isn't enough to totally make the film work, but it does a lot to add complexity where some self satisfied claptrap like Alfie can't. The bizarre little Richard Lester touches help out too making the world match to Morgan beautifully. Especially in the knob fight this seems true as the ignorant joy of Warner mixed with Redgrave's bouncing glee turns things away from the 'real' horror of the situation. It is in moments like that one which makes me think perhaps the film more so than the often credited This Sporting Life is the gunshot wound that killed kitchen sink. The one moment where the film truly becomes great though is in that fantastic fantasy climax which seems to reveal Reisz's Czech origins as we get a beautiful song of totalitarian imagery. It ever so slightly goes beyond my ability to phrase what makes his final descent so great, but it truly does seem to understand and appreciate the terror of the kitchen sink protagonist's mindset and how to reflect that back upon society.

[the preacher]

Spotlight!

Not sure if you have heard of the MacMahonists (Mourlet, Lourcelles, Rissient, Tavernier, some of the most interesting film critics ever). Vittorio Cottafavi was a favorite of the MacMahonists... and they were ridiculed by lots of "serious" colleagues for praising a director of peplums.

In fact Cottafavi directed the pinnacle of the genre: Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules and the Captive Women)

In this film Hercules and Androclus, king of Thebes, set out on a journey to deal with a powerful threat to the very survival of Greece. When the ship is wrecked, Hercules finds himself washed up on Atlantis, a hidden island of rocks, caves, and desert, led by the evil queen Antinea...

Cottafavi and Tessari (co-writer here, then director of the wonderful "Arrivano i titani") give us an adroit mixture of comedy, action, thrills and romance. Best of all is the dynamic and attractive (colorful) design: A magnificent set for the palace of Atlantis, deep and mysterious hallways, a team of white horses flying through subterranean tunnels (!!), and a wholly identical super-race revealed from beneath their equally identical armoured visors.

Unfortunately, DVD releases are far from being perfect. Beware especially of the English dubbed versions with non-original aspect ratio, altered soundtrack and alternative editing.

[Lighthouse]

Cottafavi's peplums are always visually imaginative.

[knives]

A Patch of Blue
I'm going to have to think hard about this one, but I think this may be the second most effective Poitier film I've seen (after Ritt's amazing Paris Blues which I hope gets a few votes this round). The main question for me and what separates it from say the Kramer films is the lead heroine. I don't know if her literally blind naivety hurts or helps the film's message as she is able to hold, but not understand, her families prejudices while at the same time being unable to express them. There's a few steps to being a racist person that she literally cannot meet at least in the setting of the film. This actually brings about my favorite aspect of the film where the racism isn't made by some dumb and drooling idiots intending maliciousness as is often the case during this period, but is a casual aspect of society that nobody really thinks of merely acting on. Poitier and his brother are the only ones conscious of the status quo really and that makes sense since they're the ones directly effected by it. Shelley Winters is shown to be a pretty terrible person, but her acts of racism are entirely incidental and unrelated to the story. She's not racist because she's a terrible, nor vice versa. This gets highlighted very well with the father who is sketched very positively early on, but is given a scene midway which in an act entirely about subtext (he never sees Poitier though suspense is drawn from that maybe) where even this good man could hold such a terrible personality trait.

In many ways the film reminds me of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, but without most of the problems (and what problems remain are just questions which lead to a greater examination of the situation). Instead it has an almost Spike Lee level of complexity missing only in that it is written from the point of view of the white character still (this is where I think Martin Ritt has the upper hand as his film treats both characters with equal points of view). That makes Poitier remain a rather passive character with all of the evolution being on the part of Selina. I really do wish Poitier had more agency than to just fall in love with her and teach her to take her life into her own control. Even Annie Sullivan had a more active life away from her blind protege. That's such a common problem for the era though that I'm more than willing to forgive it for what it does well (the aforementioned Spike Lee complexity of nuances). The nuances from the black POV comes mainly from Poitier's brother who has the role of speaking hard truths (without coming across as obnoxious and hateful as is often the case in these sorts of films). It stings when he tells Poitier to let whitey deal with his own. It is comes across actually as a truth when mixed with the first part of the conversation highlighting how even the lowest class white person has a greater opportunity than the highest class black (the brother is said to be a doctor of some sort).

Even beyond this though the level of cinematic storytelling is fantastic. Robert Burks is just as good as he was with Marnie though communicating a different sort of romance. Often Poitier is standing about Selina giving a subversive air to the proceedings though it seems mainly intended to show the roles they've given to one another. This also lends a greater power to their scenes of intimacy as they are framed of equal height in those scenes showing perfectly the best possible outcome of their situation. The widescreen too is fantastically utilized. The family is structured to be very separate throughout with them sharing the frame making worse their relationship than had a traditional (and academy framed type) leave them in separate frames strategy been used. They're always on the edge of the frames talking away from each other (for example near the end of the film Shelley Winters is pushed to the background talking to the foreground while Elizabeth Hartman as Selina stands in the other corner of the frame foreground talking to the side never facing one another). This is wonderfully contrasted with the scenes with Poitier which has a more traditional framing of conversations with them facing one another looking at each other. taking up the whole frame. There's no white space here where even at their most distanced body parts overlap. There is an exception to this in the final scene which more resembles the framing of the family scenes (though still closer). Ever so subtly I suspect this works to inform the viewer of the upcoming sadness even if the viewer has not actively been looking at the framing. They may not be alone, but they'll never be allowed together (or so Poitier thinks). Selina's optimism fortunately turned out to be more accurate in the long term or so I think, but the film in its final powerful image disagrees.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Everything I've seen since the list started up again:

One on Top of the Other, Lucio Fulci, 1969
This mod-giallo offers little except a listless series of plot twists and turns, barely held together by well photographed but touristy helicopter shots following the lead's car through all of the most over-photographed sites in San Francisco. Two scenes show some life, the first an exquisitely silly and sleazy striptease, and the second the penultimate sequence, shot on location in Folsom Prison's gas chamber. The rest is warmed over Hitchcock (specifically Rebecca and Vertigo) with extra skin.

Dry Lake, Shinoda Masahiro, 1960
Shinoda's first film, One-Way Ticket to Love (also 1960), was a beautifully designed but dramatically familiar foray into the Sun Tribe genre. His second, Dry Lake (AKA Youth in Fury), is a masterpiece. This is a film mind-bogglingly ahead of its time, of its genre, and of its peers. Even Oshima's early "trilogy" seems tepid in comparison to the searingly vicious, angry and anarchic portrait of Japanese youth presented here. Shinoda's belligerently "anti-Sochiku" Sochiku film, scripted by first-time screenwriter and future avant-garde director Shuji Terayuma, has an immediate, preternatural grasp on the issues that will obsess the New Wave directors throughout the sixties and seventies and presents them in forms as lucid and poetic as any of its antecedents. The political is as inextricable from the personal here as in any later work by Oshima or Wakamatsu, and already the sexual act has moved past being mere titillation and cinematic commodity and become an event capable of tearing apart (or rebuilding) the social fabric. Shinichiro Mikami's dictator obsessed university student and sometime activist would be a repellent protagonist were it not for his leather jacketed cool and for the fact that he's a necessary product of the society he lives in. Surrounded by men and women driven exclusively by avarice and the will to petty personal revenges, he runs blindly after some kind of revolution, even a violent one, anything that will change what is to all appearances an unredeemable world. His other half, played with incredible sensitivity and poise by future Shinoda regular and wife Shima Iwashita, is a young woman whose family is being systematically destroyed by political scandal and the machinations of an effortlessly unsettling Diet member Yunosuke Ito. Gorgeous color and scope are saturated and stretched to their fullest potential by Shinoda's inventive and energetic compositions, and an early Takemitsu score, though not nearly as stupendous as his later work for Shinoda, is plenty of fun. Absolutely essential Japanese New Wave, and my first Spotlight. It's streaming on Hulu-plus in HD, and I urge everyone to see it as soon as possible.

Our Marriage, Shinoda Masahiro, 1961
After Dry Lake's manic, color drenched pop, the slower pace and low contrast black and white of Our Marriage at first seemed like a bizarre about face, but by the end of it's short running time I realized that the two films are necessary companions to each other. Rather than the educated, elite urban middle class depicted in Dry Lake, Our Marriage focuses on the working poor of heavy industry. Its politics lie a little deeper under the surface, but not much. A sexual drama still lies at the heart, and still has implications that reach far past the limited scope of the action.

Shamisen and Motorcycle, Shinoda Masahiro, 1961
AKA Love Old and New. Shinoda is one of the few directors constitutionally incapable of producing a dull camera movement or lazy composition, so even when his films center on more conventional subjects, they're tremendously pleasurable to watch and invested with degrees of nuance that a lesser visual stylist would be incapable of. One can also play the game of watching him experiment with set-ups and shots that will appear with fuller force and conviction in more personal later works like Pale Flower. However, this melodrama has considerable merit of its own, not least for Miyuki Kuwano's quietly forceful performance, making this the first of Shinoda's many great female centered dramas, which eventually reached their apotheosis in 1977's Ballad of Orin. I cried three times.

A Quiet Place in the Country, Elio Petri, 1968
This delightfully discombobulated modsploitation/giallo/haunted house hybrid, penned by regular Antonioni screenwriter Tonino Guerra, often plays like a compilation of outtakes from the master's films, presumably thrown to the cutting room floor for their outlandishness, obviousness, or silliness. Which means that it's great, ennui-ridden fun, complete with Vanessa Redgrave, insufferable parties, mysterious disappearances, and a be-camera-d David Hemmings lookalike. An amazing dream sequence and the awkward clash of consumer gadgetry and rural horror make the whole production spellbinding; just don't try to get any lasting intellectual satisfactions from the voguish posturings of the plot. Also: why don't they make dishwashers with see-through windows anymore? They're great!

9.29: Three Resurrected Drunkards, Ôshima Nagisa, 1968
This has got to be one of the stranger projects of the sixties. Oshima, who hadn't made a narratively straightforward, easily digestible film in years, is paired with psych-pop trio The Folk Crusaders, and expected to deliver an innocuous bit of teenager targeted fluff. Of course, nothing of the sort occurs. Instead, the Sochiku releases Three Resurrected Drunkards ("The Drunkards" was a popular nickname for the Crusaders), a zen-absurdist tragedy with a blistering exegesis of Korean-Japanese relations and the causes and operations of the Vietnam War at its heart. It's also one of Oshima's most audacious explorations of identity. The scenario asks the uniformed heroes to make fun of their band's own branding, and their precarious position in a hostile seaside town seemingly overrun by Korean immigrants forces them to make so many costume changes (to Korean soldier, student, or even transvestite) that they've been thoroughly brainwashed by the film's end(s). Their pursuit by at least a dozen belligerent Japanese townspeople, all played by Taiji Tonoyama, takes them through a post-industrial landscape wiped of tangible markers of national identity, but plagued with virulent racism nonetheless. However, for all of Oshima-ness, the film is also fascinating for its relationship to its British and American models, specifically Richard Lester's Beatles vehicle Help!. I'm an enormous fan of Help, and expect it will place fairly high in my rankings, so I'm not surprised that Oshima had sympathy for its gleeful aesthetic anarchism. Even the frightening opening scenes of Drunkards, with the three pop stars frolicking on the beach and ape execution imagery taken from the newspapers of the time, are to be found in nearly the exact same form in Lester's film, where John, Paul and George continually threaten poor Ringo with mimed shots, stabs and slashings of their own. Insouciant pop stars may be the ideal (if unwitting) messengers for radical politics, if Help!, Drunkards, or Godard's Masculin femenin One Plus One are any indication.
One more note: The frontman of the Folk Crusaders, Kazuhiko Kato, was actually a brilliant musician who later went on to form one of the most important Japanese acts of the seventies, Sadistic Mika Band, and to record a series of solo records that include a personal favorite of mine, 1979's Papa Hemingway. Here's a beautiful track where he has backing from the entirety of the great Yellow Magic Orchestra, (including another Oshima star and soundtrack recorder, Ryuichi Sakamoto!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j142OvT9dk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[TMDaines]

Here's a couple of IMDb lists for easy checking:

The results of the last 1960s poll here
1960s films that made the Sight and Sound 2012 list
1960s films that the TSPDT 2012 list
1960s films that made the Doubling the Canon 2012 list
1960s films that made the Deutsche Kinematheksverbund list
1960s films that made the Italian "One hundred films and one country" list

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

FerdinandGriffon, I'm watching Shinoda's 60s films as well. I'll post my thoughts once I'm done. Even though we're not on the same page so far, I can appreciate your admiration of his early films, especially Dry Lake. Also, I'm in complete agreement about the cinematography and his compositions. I've yet to see a Shinoda film that completely wasted my time, though I thought Love Old and New was close (sorry!).

[knives]

Director's Guide Part 2

Yasujiro Ozu
Late Autumn (1960)--R1 Criterion/ R2 BFI
The End of Summer (1961)--R1 Criterion
An Autumn Afternoon (1962)--R1 Criterion/ R2 BFI

Possibly the worst part of the decade (already highlighted by Rossen) is that much of the old guard died just as they were breaking shocking new ground and while quiet Ozu might not be the most obvious mover and shaker in this fashion these last three films show that he was still decades ahead of everyone else with each film showing off a little different experimentation. Late Autumn might just be the most quiet film of his career. A gender bent retelling of Late Spring (because of course) this is probably his most heavily structured in appearance film of the decade and really at one with what he was doing during much of the '50s. The relationships are strong and what you expect from Ozu, but the film sticks out like a sore thumb in style compared to the next two. The End of Summer changes things up greatly in just about every term sometimes in intangible ways. Mimicking its fun and loose protagonist the film, ironically considering reality, has a playful visual style that toys with what we expect out of Ozu while keeping the now standard beats of the unmoving camera and placement. It's in the editing that he is teasing and laughing. This becomes even more clear with what is sadly his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, which is just near a perfect film with even the common problems of Ozu like overextended third acts diminished completely. It's hard to talk about Ozu's films in individual terms since he had such a tight evolution, but somehow these three still manage very distinct personalities.

Stanley Kubrick
Spartacus (1960)--R1 Universal (Bluray DNRed excessively)
Lolita (1962)--R1 Warners
Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)--R1 Columbia
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)--R1 Warners

Kubrick earns his Hollywood wings with Spartacus, but that doesn't make it a particularly good film. Even by the low standards of Swords and Sandals flicks the film is only above average in the scenes with Laughton, Ustinov, and Olivier. The main work with out title character is laborious and stilted only coming to life for the few seconds Kubrick lets his Ophuls obsession take hold. Speaking of Lolita functions as one last hurrah to the master before Kubrick decided to make his own grammar. The film is okay with lovely camerawork and some of the best performances out of James Mason and Sue Lyon. Even Shelley Winters manages to do a lot of great things with her pigeonheld part. That said things never come together as much more than a very talented young man working. Part of that is just the difficulty in bringing the source material to the screen even with Nabakov's help. The one area I will be controversial in is that I find Peter Sellers much loved Quilty performances to be pretty poor and not up to his usual snuff. Though it did cause some of the best moments in his next film so who am I to complain. I certainly understand the complaints of Dr. Strangelove being too broad and Kubrick's sense of comedy is juvenile, but works on the backdrop to such a horrible possibility. Even there he brings a gorgeous look to things changing slightly the style he had been developing into this wacky experimental films 101 type thing. That gets pushed even further with 2001 the closest Kubrick ever got to an original project which is a bit too talkative for a non-essay film, but makes up for that with its glorious montages. Some of the middle section setting things up like with Dr. Floyd seems counter intuitive to the film, but ultimately things work out.

Billy Wilder
The Fortune Cookie (1966)--R1 MGM
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)--R1 MGM
Irma la Douce (1963)--R1 MGM
One, Two, Three (1961)--R1 MGM
The Apartment (1960)--R1 MGM

The Apartment is sort of like the ten armed man. A freak you always hear about, but never expect to see especially in your own backyard yet here it is. To the best of my knowledge nobody dislikes this film even if there are some people who don't love it. Wilder simply, and in a simple manner, gathers a perfect mix of his cynicism and need to be Hollywood friendly into a hilarious heart breaking pot. He's probably never been better and this sort of Hollywood film making hasn't been either to the extant I'd say it is the reason Hollywood needed that '70s shift. There's no other place but down and Wilder certainly experiences the same shift with One, Two, Three which seems to be a love it or hate it affair of which I stand strongly on the hate side of this unfunny, self absorbed, overly bloated mess of a film. It pretty much gets by exclusively by not being Kiss Me, Stupid one of the low points of cinema. It is such an incompetently made unfunny abortion of a film with Novak's worst performance. Irma la Douce, the icing stuck between these moldy loaves almost comes across as great just due to the association. It still suffers slightly from the television style direction and broad characterization, but the chemistry and sweetness between Lemmon and MacLaine is of such quality to push things to that level of enjoyable if not great. I'm tempted to say likewise of the last film of the decade, The Fortune Cookie, which really only has actor chemistry to offer. Despite that though I find a need to defend the movie because it creates an enjoyable atmosphere.

Richard Lester
The Bed Sitting Room (1969)--R2 BFI
Petulia (1968)--R1 Warners
How I Won the War (1967)--R2 MGM
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)--R1 MGM
Help! (1965)--R1 Capital Records
The Knack ...and How to Get It (1965)--R1 MGM
A Hard Day's Night (1964)--R1 Miramax/ R1 Alliance
The Mouse on the Moon (1963)--R1 MGM
It's Trad, Dad! (1962)--R1 Sony (DVD-R only)
The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960)---R2 BFI (the Lacey Rituals)

The combination of of British humour and (American) Richard Lester is probably the greatest thing of all time so it's no surprise that he got jumpstarted as a major player in the film industry due to that definitive creators of British comedy the Goons. Lester would work with them a few times this decade, but never more so than his oscar nominated short The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film a film co-directed by Sellers and in a collage of odd instances featuring just about everyone. Nearly all of his jobs this decade were born out of the reception to this film, but before that could yield any results Lester got hired for one of the strangest music rock revues of the decade. Produced by legendary horror company Amicus It's Trad, Dad! succeeds mostly because of Lester's comedy based use of cinematic techniques and the delightful mix of musicians. It might not make you reassess the medium, but it is worth more than as an artifact. Sellers again gets Lester a job for his first traditional feature The Mouse on the Moon an okay sequel to an okay Sellers film. It comes across as the most generic of his films with nothing unique to his style, but is still enjoyable overall. A Hard Day's Night is where things get put into high gear with the Beetles placed in a surreal mockumentary that manages to illuminate on their personal lumps perfectly. Lester is the master of getting an extremely human reaction out of very silly and nonexistent characters and he exaggerates each Beetle by one aspect while making their relationships stunningly complex.

The Knack ...and How to Get It and Help! do much the same thing expanding on weird stylish ticks and even in the case of the later manipulating colour in an interesting way. The second Beetle film is a tad too childish even if it is still pretty good and daring, but the former deals with a number of adult issues in the context of a child's mind so as to illuminate them better (and fitting them into a comedic context). Lester gets a poor choice of judgement in with his adaptation of Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Rather stupidly Lester aims for realism, the one thing he could never do, removing most of the songs and keeping a straightforward shooting style that should ruin the film. Things succeed mostly due to the wonderful story at the center of things and the genius casting that spreads throughout (including a cameo by none other than Buster Keaton in one of his last roles). it's a fun film, but another one that doesn't reach beyond that. I suppose I don't need to explain the political mind of the times so the context of supposed Lawrence of Arabia parody (with music sampled even) How I Won the War doesn't need explanation especially since it bites right down at the jugular laughing all the way. As the casting of John Lennon indicates this candy coated protest rests comfortably with Head and Three Resurrected Drunkards as a one man war against the man made all the more shocking and violent by its commercial skin. Petulia contains a lot of that anger and furious color even if it often times comes across as a more cynical Darling. He ratchets up the unreality though in opposition to the Sondheim adaptation and to much better results. Finally we get a reutrn to the Goon and dadaism with The Bed Sitting Room an imperfect adaptation which is made all the better by being so sloppy. It's a very strong way to end the decade even if by design it isn't his best.

[zedz]

Another essential experimental film available on DVD:

Speak (John Latham, 1962) – John Latham Films 1960-1971 (Lux) – ‘Artist’s Film’ is a term that seems to have greater currency in Britain than in many other places, and Latham’s film work seems like the perfect example, as they seem to be very clearly extensions of his work as a painter, sculptor and installation artist rather than part of a wider filmic tradition. Though there is, of course, nothing new under the sun and Latham can hardly avoid being a part of that tradition and having multiple points of similarity with other filmmakers.

In his first couple of films, Latham’s intricate canvases / assemblages are exploited as animation machines, and it takes a while for him to find his feet. His first attempt, Unclassified Material is conceptually rough and technically sloppy. A career animator would surely dismiss this as a camera test or rough draft. Second time around, with Unedited Material from the Star, Latham constructed a much more complex ‘canvas’ / animation table and orchestrated its infinite possibilities masterfully. In what must be an emblematic moment for the recognition of film as an art, the Tate Gallery purchased the canvas but had no interest in the actual artwork the thing was designed to facilitate!

Speak has the same relationship to its more tentative, sloppier (but still dynamic) precursor, Talk Mr Bard, as Unedited does to Unclassified, and it’s the Latham film that most relentlessly and hyperactively explores the full potential of the medium. Who would have thought you could create a film this dense, kinetic and violent with little more than a bunch of cut-out coloured circles? The result is a psychedelic, Sharits-like assault, years before psychedelia (or Sharits) was in the air. You know those films that come with a ‘contains stroboscopic imagery’ warning for epileptics? Well, this is a film that even non-epileptics should approach with caution. You may feel the need to lie down in a dark room afterwards.

Further to the psychedelic connection: in 1967 Pink Floyd apparently recorded a soundtrack for this film which Latham rejected (for being insufficiently aggressive, I expect!) in favour of the present grinding, throbbing industrial accompaniment, which perfectly reinforces the sensation of somebody drilling into your brain and rerouting your synapses. Latham created this noisetrack by ripping into piles of books with a circular saw – thereby providing a very nifty line of continuity to his earlier films.

[domino harvey]

What the devil, Petulia is a masterpiece

[knives]

I don't disagree, it is certainly the best film of this type I've seen, but some of the experimentation doesn't make for a cohesive whole. That's not to say that lack of cohesion is bad. In fact it improves the film enormously reflecting Christie's brain perfectly. It was entirely arbitrary for me not to red it.

[swo17]

It's always been overshadowed by Dr. Strangelove (same plot but done seriously, came out later the same year) but Lumet's Fail-Safe is a fantastic film in its own right. The film presents a doomsday scenario that comes about just as a demonstration is being made of the functionality of the U.S.'s nuclear defense system. Notably, just about everyone handles the situation about as coolly and professionally as can be expected, but none of this matters in the face of an unforeseen mechanical error, and, most crucially, the philosophical and political mindsets that allowed U.S./Soviet relations to degenerate to this level. The paranoia between countries works to great effect here, as even the most sincere effort to correct an "innocent" mistake is repeatedly suspected of being "a trick," putting both sides even more on their guard, and working together to resolve what could otherwise be a simple misunderstanding means sharing secrets of your own vulnerabilities with your sworn enemy, negating the years of work put into building these defense systems in the first place.

The film is exceptionally well acted and edited, wringing all the tension possible out of what is essentially a stage play consisting largely of people talking on phones or staring at screens. And regarding the latter, the film gets a lot of mileage out of the psychological disconnect between the triangles and land masses on a radar map and the aircraft, people, and communities that they represent, with reactions to the moving blips ranging from stunned horror to taking it in like a video game/sporting event or, most disturbingly, gleefully comparing the blips' performance to previous simulations of doomsday scenarios. On that note, Walter Matthau is an astounding intellectual villain in this (basically taking the position that a technical glitch has finally given the U.S. the nerve to do what it should have done years ago), made all the more frightening because characters like him seem to be at least as prevalent today as they were fifty years ago. There is a small amount of speechifying in the film (perhaps less than you'd expect) but what little there is feels genuinely earned and well placed within the narrative. There is also a kind of lame disclaimer at the very end of the film (forced there by the U.S. government) to the effect that don't worry, the U.S. government would never let any of this actually happen in real life, though as I recall, the fictional U.S. government in the film claimed the exact same thing...