The MoFo Top 100 of the 60s: Countdown

Yeah, there's no body mutilation in it

I would have never thought The Graduate would be higher than Arabia.

Off the top of my head I can only name Cobpyth as a fellow young lover of it, but I know there's much more. Then there's the "old guard" that love it too, Mark gives it four and a half stars.

You people are always leaving me out in everything.

You want to be the young people or the old guard?

Of course The Graduate is gonna be high on this list! Shame on you, those who didn't think so!

Tell Sexy Celebrity we're waiting for his top six prediction.

22. La collectionneuse
I like this much more than the Rohmer film that did make it, My Night at Mauds

Wait a minute -- Daniel M???

As in my son, Daniel Michaels? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?! You never told me you were a member here! Shame on you!

War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1967)
This is a true rarity: a film which tells a gargantuan story, based on a nation's most-popular/important novel, which expands the envelope of cinema on several levels. As enormous as much of the film is, it never strays too far from the story of its three central characters: Natasha (Lyudmila Savelyeva), a young, highly-emotional girl who feels strongly for her first love; Prince Andrei (Vyacheslav Tikhonov) who proposes to her but reneges when she acts foolishly; and Pierre (director Bondarchuk), her married cousin, who has always loved her and wishes to correct a mistake. The film is mind-boggling and a totally-personal triumph for the director. The battle scenes have probably never been equaled, and the camerawork is creatively-luxuriant and bends to the stories' necessities. It truly is among the most spectacular films ever made, but Bondarchuk can even turn a simple scene into an emotional apocalypse through subtle photography, sound design and music. In fact, there are so many folk songs sung by many of the characters that it occasionally seems to be a haunting musical. This film may well be vastly underrated by me, but if you get a chance to watch it, try to see the Russian DVD (Ruscico); the rest of those on the market greatly reduce its power.

Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966)
Star-making performance by Michael Caine as the womanizing Alfie is just the topper of a truly awesome film, overflowing with memorable situations, dialogue and characters. Caine talks to the camera and it has never worked better before or since. Director Lewis Gilbert was a veteran, but he seems to be caught up in some interesting filmmaking techniques inspired by the Swingin' Sixties which all add to the humor and pathos of this sparkling adaptation of Bill Naughton's play. Alfie's putdowns of females in general are both hateful and hilarious, but just as happened to Archie Bunker in the 1970s, he is exposed for what he is. Oops! I almost forgot the cool Sonny Rollins jazz score.

The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965)
Lumet's powerful treatise on how memory keeps alive the Holocaust within the dead soul of pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger in one of cinema's greatest performances) even while he's living in the heart of Harlem where almost all the people are bought and sold in the marketplace by pimps and gangsters in a universe not that different from a concentration camp. Nazerman believes he's above all the ugliness he surrounds himself with because he just doesn't care, yet things at work and outside of it keep bringing him back to the past where he lost his beautiful wife and two children during WWII. He takes on an apprentice (the wonderful Jaime Sanchez) and tries to teach him how to learn a career but Nazerman's ghosts rear their heads and cause him to turn on the young man with horrible, yet perhaps, soul-saving results. The supporting cast is highly-unusual and terrific (Brock Peters, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Thelma Oliver, Reni Santoni, Raymond St. Jacques, Baruch Lumet, Warren Finnerty, and the mind-blowing Juano Hernandez). The Pawnbroker is a truly unique film which is still powerful today, not only on a human level but as an American piece of cinema which borrows some editing techniques from Alain Resnais and makes them connect with the viewer in an incredibly visceral way, almost as a precursor to the brilliant editing found four years later in Midnight Cowboy.

One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder, 1961)
Machine-gun-paced Cold War comedy covers just about everything one could think of, not just what was happening in the divided city of Berlin at the time. James Cagney is a marvel as a Coca-Cola executive who has to "babysit" his boss's teenage daughter (Pamela Tiffin) and gets several headaches when she marries a young "Bolshevik" (Horst Buchholz) from East Berlin. The young woman's family is also on the way to Berlin to pick up their daughter, so Cagney has little time to straighten things out. There is also the usual high quota of sex jokes from scripters I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder and a smart musical score which incorporates Khatchaturyan's "Sabre Dance". It's almost impossible to describe how fast the dialogue flies by as everyone speaks as quickly as possible and the plot twists come at such a frantic pace. Don't expect to go to the kitchen or the bathroom with the movie playing because you'll miss about 20 visual or verbal jokes a minute. Of course, the better-versed you are in the world history and popular culture of 1961, the more fun you'll have watching this terrific comedy, but it's also a great way to learn some of those things in between all the laughs.