Category Archives: 1960s

1960 was a great year for the French Nouvelle Vague. Breathless was Jean Luc Godard’s first film – a  pastiche of the film policier.

The film features Jean-Paul Belmondo as a small time thief and Jean Seberg as an American journalist in Paris. Belmondo steals a car shoots and kills a motorcycle cop who pulls him over. He goes on the run, meeting an old American flame,Jean Seberg, in Paris where they re-ignite their previous affair

Breathless is true filmgoers film. The fugitives see Westbound (1959), a B-western in which the director Jean-Pierre Melville (the father of the French New Wave) appears as a writer being interviewed. Godard himself plays the informer who tips off Belmondo to the police.

Breathless is a ferociously jump-cut homage to the classic film noir genre & American B movies. A simple plot which explores existential themes of the morality of crime, loneliness and tragic romance.

Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) . 1960 . Jean-Luc Godard

Reviewed by Carolyn Richardson

Number one film not to watch if expecting (followed into a close second by Alien) this horror classic still has the power to instil a certain shiver down the spine – but I would cautiously say that is largely due to the strength of its subject matter more than anything else. I like the way the narrative progresses, I also love the creeping camerawork and the dripping sense of doom. But I somehow felt let down by the ending. For a time I thought Polanski was taking us down the ‘is-it-real-or-all-in-her-head’ route, an ambiguity which really works for this sort of narrative (see The Innocents). But once Rosemary makes it to the house next door to discover the Satanic truth that she has always guessed, the perpetuators of her horror are not really that scary. Their worst aspect is their fashion sense. In sum; good, but Wicker Man does community-horror better.

Rosemary’s Baby . 1968 . Roman Polanski

Reviewed by Screen150

The Apartment is my favourite film. It is sad and funny and true. It is Kundera; it is Vonnegut; it is Updike. It is full of excellent character comedy. It does love and sex and neuroses better than Annie Hall. It has a fantastic Gershwin-esque score. None of these are the reasons why it is my favourite film though. I love The Apartment for one scene, or more accurately for one part of one scene.

There is a moment, after Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik has attempted suicide by overdose in his living room, when the hero of the piece, CC Baxter, stands for a moment in the doorway of his bathroom. With a folded brow he then reaches into the counter cupboard, picks out his safety razor, removes the blades and puts them into his pocket. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the perfect
sentence.

Screen 1: Cuts

The Apartment . 1960 . Billy Wilder

Favourite film, Matthew Hull

Rent yourself out and write a piece for Matt’s new site for cultural criticism: http://itsgettingworse.com/

The two greatest films of all time are Westerns with a woman in the lead role. First came Nicholas Ray’s marvellous Johnny Guitar. Then there was Leone’s masterpiece.

Once Upon a Time in The West is in no rush. People pause. They ponder. They watch. A fly crawls across Jack Elam’s face for the best part of two minutes. It takes two and a half hours to tell the slightest of stories and you will spend every second of them in awe. Cinema gets no better than this.

Every shot is perfection. Every scene, every colour, every detail, every sound, is beautifully weighted. Morricone’s score is the greatest ever recorded. Every word of the preposterous script sings like poetry. Because it is poetry.

The film cost $3 million. That is the price of one Avatar’s shiny blue eyelash. It will cost you £4.79 on Amazon. That is the price of perfection.

Screen1 : Cinema

Once Upon a Time in The West . 1968 . Sergio Leone

Favourite Film, Benjamin Judge

Let Ben spin you more tales at www.benjaminjudge.com/

A horror film for people with commitment issues.
 
The film opens with a drawing based on a Zen garden, with images of men and women instead of rocks.  The lines of sand flow around the people, they enclose them, but their presence gives shape to the whole.
 
There are three main characters; a man, a woman, and the sand.
 
The man is a pompous, arrogant academic, who’s kidnapped by villagers as a replacement husband for the recently widowed woman.
 
The woman is the complete opposite of the man; uneducated, humble, and hard working.  She’s his captor but he’s her oppressor.
 
The sand is the bad guy.  The man is imprisoned by it as the woman lives at the bottom of a pit.  The man and the woman must spend all their waking hours fighting it, or it will swallow them.  But their efforts are futile, it will eventually bury them.

Screen 1: Sandy

Woman of the Dunes . 1964 . Hiroshi Teshigahara

Reviewed by John Andrew Hutchison

Wide blue eyes under a wide blue sky

A cage with no roof holds a flightless bird

An unpolished gem, rough and dirt-ridden from being prolonged conforming

Even your mother knows you weren’t for teaching, learning or toeing the line

Yet people see something in you, your smile, your keen ear, your take on things

Rules are there to be broken

So you break rules and end up in jail

You break the inmates’ rules, and you end up as their totem

You break the captain’s rules and you end up in shackles

You wrestle with God, you struggle with friends, anything to get you through life

Under the all seeing Man with No Eyes whose aim is true

The sightless devil against the blue eyed angel

As the committee watch on, sometimes vultures, sometimes a chorus line

You wild, beautiful thing, sometimes nothing can beat a real cool hand

Cool Hand Luke . 1967 . Stuart Rosenberg

Reviewed by Aaron Gow

It’s been a short held desire of mine to be able to tow all my life’s belongings behind me in a used, but empty, coffin. To be so devoid of possessions that they’ll fit in a box that is a similar size and shape to yourself seems like a nice footprint with which to live on. However, I feel life may be too modern for me to achieve this. I can’t imagine hurrying across a busy road dodging the traffic; dragging a large wooden container down avenues would slow your speed considerably. Also, negotiating speed bumps would be a pain, cattle grids a nuisance and cobbled side streets don’t bear thinking about. I guess Django had it about right. The Wild West lacked tarmac roads so the mud made a perfect surface on which to slide a casket along and with your trusty steed could take over when you tired.

Django . 1966 . Sergio Corbucci

reviewed by Aaron Gow

Everyone knows that if you want to look intellectual and a bit aloof, you need to restrict your cinematic choices to stylish black and white French films of a certain era. Eric Rohmer-directed My Night With Maud (in previous incarnations, My Night At Maud’s) fits all bills, and plenty more besides.

Thirtysomething Catholic bachelor Jean-Louis is new to Clermont-Ferrand when he bumps into old schoolfriend and Marxist lecturer Vidal, who introduces him to free-thinking free-spirited Maud. The trio embark on a rollercoaster philosophical discussion about religion, love and, er, math, and when a blizzard sets in, everything changes for Jean-Louis.

Maud is quite taken by him, but he remains cold to her advances as he’s got his eye on a beautiful stranger he spotted in church, presuming her pure as the snow now lying all around. But is she? And how will he engineer another meeting? And what about Maud?

Ma Nuit Chez Maud . 1969 . Eric Rohmer

reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon

Phew!  What a scorcher!

It’s a hot British film from the Cold War.  And, being British, it’s about the weather and tabloid journalism.

The plot is comparable to On The Beach, a disaster caused by the superpowers messing around with atomic weapons.  But there’s a distinct Quatermass feel to this film, and that’s no coincidence.  Val Guest had previously directed Hammer’s big screen adaptations of the TV series.

Janet Munro’s character delivers a prophetic speech on the dangers of alcohol.  There’s a wooden performance from a real life Daily Express editor.  And, keep an eye out for Michael Caine, who plays a policeman at a barricade.

A modern movie would use warm colours to illustrate heat, but this director only had monochrome.  So, apart from playing about with the tint at the start and end, he opts for excessive perspiration to ramp up the thermostat.

It’s a very sweaty film.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire . 1961 . Val Guest

reviewed by John Andrew Hutchison