The 1960s

[zen007]

An interesting decade 60s for:

• 6 great Bond films
• Some of the best works from Hitchcock (Psycho), Kubrick (Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, & 2001), Bergman (Persona), Lean (Lawrence of Arabia & Dr. Zhivago), etc.
• Musicals (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Sound of Music, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, etc.), Comedies (Pink Panther series), European films (Purple Noon, L'Avventura, 81/2, various French New Wave films), Westerns (Dollar Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, etc.), Asian films (Mughal-e-Azam, Yojimbo, Kwaidan, etc.), ... , ..., ...

A lot was happening in the 60s in most parts of the world including the last hurrah of many of the big names of Hollywood's Golden Age and the impact of the French New Wave.

How would you rate the 60s? The most important decade for films (in terms of films that set standards/trends)? The best decade for films (in terms of quality of films)? The favorite decade for films (in terms of popular films)?

[Dragon78]

TV shows(Addams Family, Dragnet, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, etc.)

[steel_breeze]

Ah zen007, I love your passion for and knowledge of great cinema; always happy when I come across one of your threads! I'm a huge fan of the entire sweep of film history, and have pretentiously curated my Top Tier Blu-ray/UHD/DVD collection in chronological order to represent every era of this amazing art-form... from Lumiere Bros shorts in 1895 up through every significant movement and decade of American and International cinema.

So suffice to say... I absolutely LOVE the 60s for all the reasons you've named; particularly the French New Wave and the Leone westerns. But I'll use that excellent era as a springboard to veer off on a tangent (literally a tangent; connecting to your thread at a common point of intersection) and assert that my own favorite era of cinema is 1967 through 1982; roughly The Graduate through Blade Runner. This era -- solidly rooted in the late 60's -- includes all my favorite directors working at the very height of their powers:

[Show spoiler]Kubrick (2001), Altman (M*A*S*H), Bertolucci (The Conformist), Bogdanovitch (Last Picture Show), Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude), Coppola (Godfather I & 2, Apocalypse Now), Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark), John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Thing), Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Lucas (Star Wars), Malick (Days of Heaven), Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner), Fosse (All That Jazz), plus countless classics like Five Easy Pieces, All The Presidents' Men, Network, and Reds.

It's practically a desert-island disc list, for me. And of course it never could've happened without the 60s and the French New Wave... which couldn't have happened without Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Ford... so I love how the roots of inspiration go back and back and back.

[Rzzzz]

The 60's gave me my favorite film of all time...

[Show spoiler]It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World

My favorite Hitchcock film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Vincent Price film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Raquel film...

[Show spoiler]

Annette and the beach party films...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite live action Disney film....

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Lee Marvin film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Bette Davis film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Joan Crawford film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Steve McQueen film....

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Bond film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Ray Harryhausen film...

[Show spoiler]

My favorite Bert I. Gordon film...

[Show spoiler]

And most of all, my favorite John Wayne film....

[merlinjones]

My favorite films of the 1960s (almost too many to remember):

West Side Story
Pollyanna
Swiss Family Robinson
The Absent-Minded Professor
The Parent Trap
Babes in Toyland
The Three Lives of Thomasina
Mary Poppins
That Darn Cat!
The Sound of Music
Lawrence of Arabia
Beach Blanket Bingo
Pajama Party
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Batman
The Love Bug
The Graduate
Bonnie and Clyde
Village of the Damned
Village of the Giants
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
How the West Was Won
My Fair Lady
Psycho
The Birds
The Moon-Spinners
Summer Magic
Blackbeard's Ghost
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
The Loved One
Breakfast at Tiffanys
Whistle Down the Wind
Hud
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Jungle Book
The Sword in the Stone
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Cleopatra
The Trouble With Angels
Ride the Wild Surf
Straightjacket
Dr. No
Goldfinger
From Russia With Love
Thunderball
The Incredible Mr.Limpet
I Could Go on Singing
A Boy Named Charlie Brown
Yellow Submarine
A Hard Day's Night
Help
Head
Munster Go Home
Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow
The TAMI Show
The Misfits
Mad Monster Party
The Manchurian Candidate
In Search of the Castaways
Muscle Beach Party
Bikini Beach
The Monkey's Uncle
Escapade in Florence
Planet of the Apes
Wild in the Streets
The Producers
Bedazzled

TV specials:
Rudloph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
A Charlie Brown Christmas
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
You're in Love Charlie Brown
Charlie Brown's All-Stars
Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

[zen007]

Originally Posted by steel_breeze

Ah zen007, I love your passion for and knowledge of great cinema; always happy when I come across one of your threads! I'm a huge fan of the entire sweep of film history, and have pretentiously curated my Top Tier Blu-ray/UHD/DVD collection in chronological order to represent every era of this amazing art-form... from Lumiere Bros shorts in 1895 up through every significant movement and decade of American and International cinema.

So suffice to say... I absolutely LOVE the 60s for all the reasons you've named; particularly the French New Wave and the Leone westerns. But I'll use that excellent era as a springboard to veer off on a tangent (literally a tangent; connecting to your thread at a common point of intersection) and assert that my own favorite era of cinema is 1967 through 1982; roughly The Graduate through Blade Runner. This era -- solidly rooted in the late 60's -- includes all my favorite directors working at the very height of their powers:

[Show spoiler]Kubrick (2001), Altman (M*A*S*H), Bertolucci (The Conformist), Bogdanovitch (Last Picture Show), Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude), Coppola (Godfather I & 2, Apocalypse Now), Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark), John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Thing), Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Lucas (Star Wars), Malick (Days of Heaven), Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner), Fosse (All That Jazz), plus countless classics like Five Easy Pieces, All The Presidents' Men, Network, and Reds.

It's practically a desert-island disc list, for me. And of course it never could've happened without the 60s and the French New Wave... which couldn't have happened without Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Ford... so I love how the roots of inspiration go back and back and back.

Thanks! … Wow that expansive collection with titles going back to 1895 is a movie lover’s delight! … That is a great desert island list!

[Levon]

Cool Hand Luke.

[CinemaScope]

My favourite film decade. I was born in 1950, so the 60s were my teen years & I virtually lived in the cinema. Too many films to mention really, comedy, spy, epic, western, & so many more. From The Alamo (1960) to The Wild Bunch (1969). Just ten from 1963:

Jason & The Argonauts
Tom Jones
The Great Escape
From Russia With Love
It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World
8 1/2
Charade
The Haunting
Hud
Cleopatra.

[dkelly26666]

Lots of great ones, that decade.

I loved all the 'New Waves' that were happening all around the world.

The French: Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Varda
The Italian: Pasolini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bellocchio
The German: Wenders, Herzog, Schlondorff, Fassbinder
The Japanese: Oshima, Shinoda, Kobayashi

There was Swinging 60s London, which gave us Caine, Connery, Stamp, et al. and kitchen sink dramas by Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger as well as visionaries like Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg... (Don't forget The Beatles!)

And finally, there was the New Hollywood being born:

The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, 2001, Rosemary's Baby, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider

The dawn of Woody Allen and Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola

'Night of the Living Dead'

Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood" and "Andrei Rublev".
Bergman's "The Virgin Spring", "Through a Glass Darkly", "Winter Light", "The Silence", "Persona", "Hour of the Wolf", "Shame", and "The Passion of Anna".
Kubrick's "Spartacus", "Lolita", and "Dr. Strangelove" (plus, again, "2001").
Fellini: La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, Toby Dammit, Satyricon.

In 1967, a young film critic attending the Chicago International Film Festival named Roger Ebert goes ga-ga and writes a glowing review for a young filmmaker's student thesis film, which had premiered at the festival. Ebert writes, "I have no reservations whatsoever in calling this a turning point in the history of American cinema." Some people thought he was exaggerating a bit. The student film-turned-feature was "Who's That Knocking at My Door?", starring a young, unknown actor named Harvey Keitel, making his film debut. The young, unknown filmmaker was Martin Scorsese. Ebert called it.

Luis Bunuel: Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de Jour, The Milky Way

Hitchcock gave us the masterpiece, "Psycho", as well as "The Birds", "Torn Curtain", and "Topaz".

Lots of fun mainstream fare, too, like Disney movies ('Mary Poppins'!) and lots of Elvis and John Wayne pictures.

Some of the last, grand, old school musicals.

Mel Brooks came along with "The Producers", and the likes of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor came down the line.

TV gave us the immortal, "The Andy Griffith Show".

I could go on and on for days.......

[Dragon78]

Animated TV shows(Jana of The Jungle, Jonny Quest, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Top Cat, etc.)

[Batmon77]

Originally Posted by Dragon78

TV shows(Addams Family, Dragnet, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, etc.)

70's kid with TV being 60's heavy with syndication.
The popular stuff died off by the late 80's.

[Jorvic]

The 1960s in film saw the release of two of my all-time favourite epics: El Cid and Zulu.

That makes it a great decade just for those two films. But there are also other great long films from then – The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare.

So I tend to think of the 60s as a great decade for either very long or epic films – Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia to mention two more.

[zen007]

Classic war-action films:

Guns of Navarone (1961)
The Great Eacape (1963)
Von Ryan’s Express (1965)
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Where Eagles Dare (1968)

[Deadend45]

I would rate the 60s 60 out of 60.

[Deadend45]

Since a lot of the usa 60s tv shows were shot on film they look a hell of lot better then 90s and 2Ks tv shows which were mostly shot on video.

[Member-638096]

The sixties was sort of a rebirth for cinema. If I had to rate it I'd give it an easy 5 stars, and here is why (utilizing my favorite films from the decade as a few examples):

You got two of Hitchcock's pivotal movies in his career which to this day have tremendous pop culture staying power: The Birds (1963) and Psycho (1960).

Personally my favorite decade for the western, where we got the likes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (while I'm not a huge John Wayne fan I AM a fan of James Stewart and just seeing them interact on screen was brilliant along with Vera Miles). Also we got an update on the cowboy trope with more "grittier" depictions in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy and Bronson in Once Upon A Time in the West, with Bronson and Eastwood's performances only HOPING to be matched (just an opinion/observation, please don't shoot the messenger). Also Sam Peckinpah's debut with the Wild Bunch

We also got Yojimbo/Sanjuro, which showcased the immense philosophical power of the samurai film with the duo of Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa. (Just the dialogue outside the inn when Mifune is talking to the gang is pure poetry in Yojimbo before the face off.)

A couple more honorable mentions as I don't want to make this a Star Wars intro is Guns of Navarone, Planet of the Apes, Bullitt, Lonely Are the Brave, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and Spartacus.

[50strat54]

Originally Posted by Rzzzz

The 60's gave me my favorite film of all time...
And most of all, my favorite John Wayne film....

Oh YEAH...I absolutely love this movie and saw it in the theater when it came out. My favorite John Wayne film and I absolutely hated the Coen Bros remake!

That’s the classic scene but my favorite is Wayne jumping a four rail fence and the look on Kim Darby’s face.