The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

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…




(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, Agnès 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 Buñuel, 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.




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.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

What's the ruling on partial lists?

I've got several definites for my ballot already, but just in case life gets in the way of coming up with 25 I genuinely like.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

I'm looking forward to this! I love 1960s films so it will be great fun watching and making a list. There's many, many fine films from the 60s.

Congrats Daniel:) I'm sure this will be fun.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

Sounds good! I'd like to participate, but feel like I need to watch many more 60's films if I want to make a legitimate list...

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

This is gonna be so dope.

Good question. I can't remember the ruling on the previous decades list, but I think I'll probably take your ruling with accepting partial lists closer the deadline (after May 30th).

Yup, that's the idea. We've got five months this time, so plenty of time to discover new films. Be sure to use this thread for recommendations and discussions about films. Over the next few months it will be filled with helpful posts for those who want to be involved :)

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

The deadline for entries is June 30th, 2015. That's five months.

That's a good amount of time to watch movies. One thing...a couple weeks before the deadline can you please bump the thread and make post reminding us the deadline is coming? I hate to miss it. Maybe even Yoda will tag a reminder to the top of the board as the deadline approaches.

Don't worry about that, there will be plenty of reminders. I will imagine the thread will stay active up until then anyway, with people recommending and discussing films. I'll be sending out private messages to members to remind them to send in a list too, and Yoda will probably add a tag along the top of the forum too, as he normally does :)

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

Oh yeah, definitely. As we get closer to the deadline there'll be very visible reminders, just like with the last couple of lists.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

For those needing viewing suggestions, here's a link to a thread I made several months back, before it was decided to do the animation countdown first.

Recommend Me Some Films from the 1960s

Lots of good stuff in there.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

Here's the official ruling on partial lists that I'll add to the first post:

Partial lists will be accepted after May 30th, however, the amount of films included will dictate the amount of points each film receives. The maximum points you can give will be the amount of films on your list. For example, if you submitted a list of ten films, your #1 film would receive ten points, your #2 would receive 9 points, and so on.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

Most Popular Feature Films Released 1960 to 1969 at IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/search/title/?re...e_type=feature

Over 25,000 films from the 60s. You can sort by:
A-Z | User Rating | Num Votes | US Box Office | Runtime | Year | US Release Date

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

It begins...

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

How can someone not come up with 25 great films for the best decade in the history of cinema.

Yeah that's definitely good! Now thinking about it I have seen a decent amount of 60's, but still got a few obvious ones I can't believe I haven't watched yet. I've only seen the last hour of Lawrence of Arabia, and still haven't gotten around to Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Spartacus and so on.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

Very excited for this. Now Daniel, I noticed 2001, Psycho, and Lawrence were all in your banner. You shouldn't be giving away clues of what is doing well in the voting. Mark this day down, I predict those films will be in the top 10 because Daniel put them in the banner.:D

Because it's not a decade I've done a lot of exploring in yet and because sometimes life gets in the way. I don't think it'll be a problem this time (I really struggled with the 70s list due to my grandmother getting sick and passing away), but you never know. I'll have to find my preliminary list, but I think I have something like 13 definites already, which is a much better start than I had for the 70s.

:up:

Also, great opening post, Daniel! Can't wait to delve into the '60s.

Re: The MoFo Top 100 of the Sixties
 

Does anybody have a massive master list of recommendations? I already have some on my radar, but my radar's scope needs increasing.

Good luck with the countdown, Daniel. Don't mess it up. :p