The Best Hollywood Films of the 1960s

On the occasion of the criminally tardy Blu-ray release of 7 Women, I herewith offer my list of the ten greatest Hollywood films of the 1960s:

1. 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)
2. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
3. Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968)
4. Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, 1965)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
6. Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
7. The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968)
8. Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney, 1963)
9. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
10. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

I arrived at this top ten by asking a question on Facebook a few years ago:

"Hey fellow film dorks! Can you name an American feature-length narrative film from the 1960s better than any of these listed below? Caveats: 1. I want it as mainstream/Hollywood as possible. So no sexploitation, no avant-garde, no Russ Meyer, no indies, etc. 2. No other films by directors already listed. I know Hatari! and Marnie are great. 3. I’ll puke (and you’ll clean it up!) if you mention Best Picture Oscar winners or anything by Kubrick. 4. I hate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and no to The Graduate.

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn)
Bye Bye Birdie (Sidney)
The Hustler (Rossen)
In Harm’s Way (Preminger)
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis)
The Legend of Lylah Clare (Aldrich)
The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer)
Petulia (Lester)
Point Blank (Boorman)
Psycho (Hitchcock)
Red Line 7000 (Hawks)
Rosemary's Baby (Polanski)
7 Women (Ford)
Shock Corridor (Fuller)
Too Late Blues (Cassavetes)
Two Weeks in Another Town (Minnelli)"

The purpose was threefold: 1. to focus my viewing schedule 2. to discover if there were indeed any films greater than those I listed and 3. to gain the illusion that I was "done" with the Hollywood of the 1960s, a decade which seems to me (preposterously, I admit) manageable. Plenty of friends offered suggestions, all of which are below and most of which I managed to watch. Years later, I discovered only two titles to rank with the powerhouses listed above - The Boston Strangler and Midnight Cowboy, the latter of which I apparently saw far too young since it hit me much harder when I watched it again in 2022.

Given the arbitrary nature of years, decades, and even nations, it was silly for me to be a stickler for rules. But again, I longed for focus. So no Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968) or Paradise Alley (Hugo Haas, released in 1962, but shot in 1958). The 1960s were notorious for runaway productions, a phenomenon skewered by Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town which itself got skewered by the very system it critiqued. So is it a Hollywood film or a meta Hollywood film or more Hollywood than any film listed on this page for how it perfectly traces the death of classical cinema? Is Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) a Hollywood film or even American one? I wouldn't prevent anyone from top tenning it but I left it off my list. I would definitely find a spot for Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965) but in the end, I slotted it as a British film. 

To be clear, my top ten list would not comprise my list for the decade overall, not even close. For one, the avant-garde was really starting to whip up a storm in the 1960s; Andy Warhol's Drunk and Jack Chambers' The Hart of London are better films than anything above. For another, there's the rest of the world to manage which became downright torrential by 1960. And finally, there are beloved indies like Cassavetes' Faces, Juleen Compton's The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, and Andy Milligan's Seeds. Nevertheless, the ten Hollywood baubles I come here to praise are sources of endless renewable energy and curiosity.


All Fall Down
BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER
Billie!
Blast of Silence
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
The Boston Strangler
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Cape Fear
CAPRICE
CHARADE
THE CHASE
The Collector
COMANCHE STATION
Cool Hand Luke
DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
The Disorderly Orderly
Don’t Make Waves
DOWNHILL RACER
Elmer Gantry
Experiment in Terror
Gunn
The Haunting
HELL IS FOR HEROES
Hud
In Cold Blood
Inside Daisy Clover
The Killers
Kiss Me Stupid
Kitten with a Whip
Lonely Are the Brave
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
MADIGAN
The Magnificent Seven
Major Dundee
MARY POPPINS
The Masque of the Red Death
MEDIUM COOL
Mickey One
THE MISFITS
Mutiny on the Bounty
MY FAIR LADY
North to Alaska
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
ONE-EYED JACKS
The Party
THE PAWNBROKER
PLANET OF THE APES
The President's Analyst
PRETTY POISON
THE PROFESSIONALS
RACHEL, RACHEL
THE RAIN PEOPLE
Reflections in a Golden Eye
RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
ROME ADVENTURE
The Savage Innocents
Something Wild
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
THE SHOOTING
Strangers in the City
Support Your Local Sheriff
SUSAN SLADE
THE SWIMMER
Targets
TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE
That Cold Day in the Park
They Shoot Horses Don't They?
Two For the Road
WAIT UNTIL DARK
The Wild Bunch
Wild River
The World of Henry Orient
YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE

North to Alaska (Henry Hathaway, 1960)

I was convinced this was a near-masterpiece when I first saw it about twenty or so years ago. Today it reads as little more than a solid western, with John Wayne and Stewart Granger pawing at Capucine for 122 minutes and Ernie Kovacs waiting for a paycheck. But its value to me has increased in that it provides more ballast against an argument of Pauline Kael's, from her infamous 1963 essay "Circles and Squares," that has always bugged me: "Movie-going kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I've talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore" (15). It doesn't matter if she actually talked to kids about these films; she chose to center them as the prime audience for North to Alaska because the film does as well. It courts pre-teen boys with cartoon sound effects during fight scenes and an older-brother surrogate in Fabian who plays a horndog teenager competing with Wayne and Granger for Capucine. But it's the verb "knows" that annoys suggesting it is somehow preordained that North to Alaska is superior to Hatari! in entertainment value or art or even auteurist credentials. And with no further evidence about either film's value provided, the statement just sits there in all its crankiness. It feeds into Kael's own theory about entertainment, developed more diffusely throughout her writing but no less a theory than auteurism, as an unpretentious, often gritty/violent, male-oriented aesthetic register. That entertainment can take many other forms doesn't concern her, at least not in this essay. In short, I still prefer Hatari!; its discursive drift and lax attitude towards the three-act structure provide plenty of entertainment for me and perhaps for the millions of moviegoers who made it the #7 highest-grossing film of 1962 in America. 

Grade: B+

Dionne Warwick: The Windows of the World (Scepter, 1967)

At the time, purchasing this 33-minute LP would have been a no-brainer given the four Bacharach-David cuts now familiar to anyone who's owned one of Warwick's myriad 1960s collections - the heart-yanking and eccentrically structured (there's no middle eight!) title track and "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" (both A-plusses), "I Say a Little Prayer" (A), and "Another Night" (high A-minus). Then, in a preview of the early-aughts mashup vogue, there's a version of West Side Story's "Somewhere" sang over "Cool" with 11-pm gusto. Warwick takes the Bert Kaempfert/Milt Gabler chestnut "L-O-V-E" (presented with no dashes here) as a childlike, whispery sex kitten (!) before dropping into her normal register and then ending on a parodic yodel to compliment the jokey wah-wah trumpet. Either the wine was flowing heavily in the studio that day or all involved hated the song (or both). Then we have two movie songs - "What's Good About Goodbye" sung by Tony Martin in the camp classic Casbah (John Berry, 1948) starring Yvonne De Carlo and Dory/André Previn's "You're Gonna Hear From Me" from Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965), both shouted with more 11-pm gusto. And then there's filler. Grade assured by the four A-level classics and the aspirational travel agency cover photo. 

Grade: B+

Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968)

The problem with this one is easy - it's a Twilight Zone episode stretched drearily to feature length. Rod Serling wrote the original treatment and although the final screenplay passed through many hands, Planet of the Apes magnifies the worst characteristics of Serling's famed TV series, namely, a gotcha triteness skewered memorably in the Bad Twist End Theater skit from The Ben Stiller Show. For sure, the story would have more impact played out in a thirty-minute chunk or even a 90-minute one. Instead, it takes 25 minutes for Charlton Heston and company to encounter any potential antagonists, 30 minutes before the apes appear, and far too much time wasted on chases and traveling. As a good lefty in the mold of Drs. Cornelius and Zira, I applaud the critiques of racism (although, reportedly, the producers had no clue they were even in the film). But there's just not enough script here to warrant 112 minutes of screen time. Surprise: Heston's butt shots.

Grade: B-minus

That Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman, 1969)

I last saw this film over 30 years ago when I learned that Bruce LaBruce pegged it as an influence on his 1991 queercore classic No Skin Off My Ass and I adored it then. Today, it feels underbaked, perhaps a result of its divergence from the reportedly queerer 1965 Richard Miles novel on which it's based. Sandy Dennis plays Frances, a schoolmarmish woman in a raw, uninviting Vancouver who takes in a young man (Michael Burns) she spies shivering in the rain. Frances' social circle consists solely of people her late parents' age so she finds in the unnamed man a chance for a more brash and impetuous relationship. Thus begins a series of psychosexual games where Sandy and the young man trade off positions of dominance and submission. Altman shows him in various states of undress and Frances even zeroes in on his predilection for not wearing socks. But where Frances' longing for lust is finely etched, the young man remains a cipher, again perhaps due to an apparent dequeering of the novel. And when the games devolve into horror shtick, the lasting impression is of Altman giving up on the weightier implications of the story. In compensation, the improbably bizarre layout of Frances' apartment and László Kovács' fractal photography dazzle the eye when the mind turns to mush.

Grade: B+ (upper a notch in deference to my younger self)

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967); 11.22.63 (Hulu, 2016); Parkland (Peter Landesman, 2013)

SPOILERS

Point Blank is the quintessential JFK-assassination-hangover film. During a robbery on Alcatraz of a crime/business syndicate known as The Organization, Walker (Lee Marvin) is ambushed and left for dead by his heist partner Reese (John Vernon). Upon regaining consciousness, he spends the rest of the film trying to recover $93,000, his half of the heist, with a doggedness worthy of Jim Garrison (he utters "$93,000" so often that it takes on the contours of a conspiracy theorist's mantra - "magic bullet" or "grassy knoll"). That requires him to navigate The Organization's hall of mirrors and Boorman, along with Phillip H. Lathrop's dazed cinematography, dumbfounds with his portrait of an unknowable, rhizomatic ecosystem - penthouses across from penthouses, rooms within rooms within rooms, mirrors that are doors, heel clicks and soul screams (courtesy of Stu Gardner) and intercom announcements that disorient with their ability to transgress space, characters who intone robotic business speak, and, of course, snipers in disparate locales. Walker himself is a cipher. He has no known first name. But that's okay - in a mildly feminist twist, his paramour Chris (Angie Dickinson) has no known last name. And as a measure of his extreme indifference to anything unrelated to his $93,000, he thanks the gay men (Ron Walters and George Strattan) he holds hostage as a ruse to divert the attention of the phalanx of suits guarding Reese.

Walker runs through several important functionaries in this Organization with no success. If he could just find the top man who "runs things," then he can retrieve his money. But no discernible hierarchy exists; once Walker thinks he's found the highest executive, there's always someone higher and more mysterious. Nowhere is this baffling reality more redolent than in the scene in which Walker confronts Brewster (Carroll O'Connor). Nope, he's not the top man either and he's almost petulant about all the trouble Walker has caused: "You threaten a financial structure like this for $93,000?" As an officer in The Organization, he explains corporations to Walker. They deal in millions but never in cash; Brewster himself has only $11 in his pocket. But both remain as obstinate as toddlers. Even though he feels it's pointless, Brewster takes him to see Fairfax (Keenan Wynn) who shoots Brewster dead and assures Walker that Brewster "was the last one." Finally, Walker has found the top man. But wait - isn't this Yost, the man he partnered with in the beginning of the film to find Reese and his $93,000? Then who he is really? Walker doesn't know and recedes into the shadows like a sniper. Yost/Fairfax drops off the money and leaves. But Walker doesn't retrieve it; he doesn't even emerge from the shadows. The film ends with a long shot of Alcatraz and Boorman strands us with one of cinema's most searing portrayals of the indifference of capital and all its byzantine organizations. 

Based on a typically bloated Stephen King novel, 11.22.63 has an intriguing premise. Jake Epping (James Franco) must travel back to 1960 and gear up to prevent the assassination of JFK. But King's 849-page novel means that it must be translated into a eight-episode miniseries with far too many time-wasting diversions and preposterous coincidences. Fascinating when it sticks to the assassination plot. But someone get this man an editor!

Parkland falls somewhere in between. Based on Vincent Bugliosi's Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it runs a tight 93 minutes even though Bugliosi's book is over 1,600 pages long! With an attractive cast including Zac Efron as Dr. Charles James "Jim" Carrico, Jeremy Strong as Lee Harvey Oswald (perfect training for Kendall Roy in Succession), and Jimmie Dale Gilmore as Reverend Saunders, Parkland comes off as a little more than a Wiki page. But as a minute-to-minute recreation of 11/22/63, its merciful briskness lends it a great deal more utility than the average Oscar prestige pic.

Point Blank: A+

11.22.63: B-minus

Parkland: B+

Six 1960s films

Select Boomers shall be delighted. But it's difficult not to read Hollywood films of the 1960s through a countercultural lens, even those released at the opposite end of the decade. So in the final scene of The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran (Shirley MacLaine) drop out of not quite society but rather, the corporate nine-to-five grind and leave Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) to his Don Draperesque lechery. As proto-hippies, they may go on to lose each other at Woodstock or, more likely, in the halls of MOMA, given Baxter's penchant for festooning his apartment with replicas of Picasso and Mondrian. But as the decade progresses, the tenor of the dropping out becomes more strident and intense, at least as it's played out in the films below.

There aren't many obvious connections between Baxter and Paul Newman as the title character in Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963). Lemmon feels of an older generation even though Newman is thirteen days his senior [sic]. But given the considerable swagger Hud exhibits in every scene, one might surmise that Baxter realizes his Hudness at the end of The Apartment when he finally gathers up enough fortitude to forsake an executive position in the hopes of saving his soul. 

What exactly Hud is swaggering over is open to interpretation, though. He rails against big government prompting Pauline Kael to conclude that for her, "Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater" (18).* But I took him for another proto-hippie because he rails against everything, a cousin to Marlon Brando's Johnny spouting "Whaddaya got?" in The Wild One a decade prior. On the precipice of dropping out, he could just as soon vote for no one as for LBJ or Goldwater. And to the extent that Ritt and screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. (adapting Larry McMurty's 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By) intended audiences to hiss at Hud as a materialistic brute and instead revere his morally upright father Homer (Melvyn Douglas), the film must be counted as largely a failure. As Kael notes, "it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy...Hud, the 'villain' of the piece, is less phony than Homer" (ibid.). But that doesn't mean the good liberals in the audience can't claim Hud as their own. This is what happens when filmmakers play with ideological fire - you showcase Oz at the risk of audiences wanting to remain there instead of returning to the sepia drabness of Kansas. James Wong Howe's unshowy, even skeletal photography assists in this endeavor, staying out of the way as we project whatever ideology onto Hud's attractive frame.

The most remarkable aspect of the lesser-known All Fall Down (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is that it's a dry run for Hud and all the more attractive for it. It's the far quirkier film with Brandon deWilde preprising [sic] his role as Lonnie, the nephew who looks up to but eventually rejects his uncle Hud. The Hud here is played by Warren Beatty as a young stud named Berry-Berry who escorts and discards a string a middle-aged women. His younger brother Clinton (deWilde) adores him. But Eva Marie Saint arrives on the scene and Clinton becomes repulsed at Berry-Berry's sadistic treatment of her. As with Patricia Neal's Oscar-winning role in Hud, Saint exists solely to enact a Freudian battle of wills and libidos between two male relatives. Still, Frankenheimer makes the thing digestible in the end by bedecking the Oedipal drama with odd trills and featuring a powerhouse performance by Angela Lansbury as a matriarch even more incestuous than the one she played for Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. 

Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) is the most rebellious film here in terms of form. Beatty as the title character spouts such Hudisms as "I gotta live the only way I'm at least free" and, indeed, he seems in perpetual search of something. But to give you an idea of the chaotic nature of the film, we never learn the character's real name. In flight from the Mafia which may or may not be after him, he gains a social security card stolen from a man named Miklos Wunejeva and he gets rechristened Mickey One. The film is all flight comprised of evanescent vignettes and confounding detours. Scenes of religious fervor, intense melodrama, and comedy both good and bad seem to drop in from other movies. They hook viewers in for two or three minutes and then baffle us by neglecting to connect to the subsequent scene. Written by Alan Surgal and edited by Aram Avakian (who would go on to direct his own chaos theorem with 1970's End of the Road), Mickey One reportedly baffled even Beatty himself who kept losing his footing with the project. In this, he's a stand in for the viewers themselves who wind up either exhilarated or annoyed by the tsunami Penn and company make of the narrative. Classical Hollywood types Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield are on board and they seem more game than Beatty with the swirl of emotional registers and story fragments, perhaps because they portray the purveyors of the paranoia that keeps Mickey in flop sweat and bandages. In the same year, Bob Dylan sang on "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?" and that same omen infuses Mickey One with an agitated energy that feels indelibly rock 'n' roll (jazz being a foregone conclusion given that Stan Getz scored much of the soundtrack).

If so far these reviews exemplify the proclivity of critics for making connections between any two disparate films, then Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964) shall be the fly in that particular ointment. It shares a vague sense of disaffection and soul desertion with the other films. James Franciscus plays the title hunk who moves from Kentucky to Manhattan and becomes a best-selling author. But soon, under the influence of various big-city sybarites, he compromises his integrity and must return to Kentucky to finds his true self. Overall, though, it shares little with the angsty titles here except insofar as it serves as their negative snapshot. The frequent book porn points to a majority far more silent than Hud (at least for now), the audiences who purchased the chunky tomes that would be adapted into the highest grossing films of the decade: Spartacus, Exodus, The Longest Day, The Carpetbaggers, Doctor Zhivago, and onward to Hawaii, The Sand Pebbles, Valley of the Dolls, etc., a list Herman Wouk hoped to join with his 783-page Youngbloood Hawke (1962). 

It would be simple to claim that these were the people who were repulsed by Hud or Berry-Berry, maybe even Baxter and the men Lonnie and Clinton became, and afraid of encountering them in the big bad recently deserted cities or, worse, fearful that they'd infiltrate the well-tended suburbs. Peter Bogdanovich was not one of those people. But with his 1968 directorial debut Targets, he adds fuel to the suspicion that Hud and his ilk wind up like the Charles Whitman stand-in Bobby Thompson (Tom O'Kelly, chilling in his blasé malevolence). There's an icy fatalism to this film that would have impressed Fritz Lang if not made him shudder. But no title of the 1960s did more to presage the resignation that permeated the New Hollywood (The Godfather, Chinatown, etc.) if not Boomer ideology overall, the sense that violent fragmentation, maybe even history itself, was a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about it. Bogdanovich essentially plays himself in the film, shushing Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself in the film, while he watches Karloff on TV in The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931) while intoning "All the good movies have been made." One must wonder how Bogdanovich managed to go on having a career in directing after such a doomy pronouncement (at the very least, he could've spared us 1975's At Long Last Love). But in this conception, cinema is not just dead but deadly. In the most brilliant moment of rhetoric in this term paper of a film, the movie screen literally becomes murderous - Bobby has positioned himself behind a drive-in screen and shoots through it with his rifle at the moviegoers in their cars and environs. 80-year-old Karloff manages to stop him with his cane and slaps him across the face as if Bobby were a mere petulant child. "Is that what I was afraid of?" asks after 90 minutes of mourning over how the world had become more violent and scary than any of his films. It seems like a message made for the Silent Majority who voted Nixon as their president that same year. But they didn't know the film existed. They were busy seeing Funny Girl and The Love Bug.

The Apartment: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

Hud: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

All Fall Down: A-minus

Mickey One: A

Youngblood Hawke: C+ (docked a notch so I'm not tempted to watch it a third time)

Targets: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

* Pauline Kael; "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood." Film Quarterly 1 July 1964; 17 (4): 15–23.

 

Caprice (Frank Tashlin, 1967)

Doris Day nominated Caprice as one of her worst films. Leonard Maltin agreed, awarding it a BOMB: "Terrible vehicle for Doris as industrial spy plunged into international intrigue with fellow agent Harris. Muddled, unfunny, straining to be 'mod.'" And okay, the last third, where the screenwriters try to wrap up the spy nonsense, is indeed muddled. But if "straining to be mod" results in such fabulous costumes, objets (a vase holding hairspray that prevents your locks from ever getting wet), sets (check out the gloriously preposterous interior of a private plane below, almost as silly as the one in Airport '77), kooky opening credits, and a meta moment in which Day goes to see a film called Caprice starring Doris Day, then mod on by! And several set pieces are hilarious and rowdy. This may be Day's most physical role of her career. As per Tashlin's cartoon-reared dictates, Day flops around on the screen like a fashion-plate Daffy Duck, falling from balconies and hanging from porch beams. Funniest scene: when Day foils a surveillance attempt by gnawing on potato chips.

Incidentally, I came across a Rate Your Music entry that lists all of Maltin's BOMBs from his various guides. Quite useful for party planners and film programmers.

Grade: A-minus

Gunn (Blake Edwards, 1967)

Known at least on the poster as Gunn...Number One! in the hopes of kicking off a franchise that never happened, this feature-length update of Blake Edwards' Peter Gunn television show feels at times like Edwards' attempt to keep up with avant-garde cinema. Before even a minute has passed, we're treated to a spatially, visually, and narratively incoherent image - a shiny half circle into which a distorted pair of eyes enters. Later, Edwards will introduce a scene with a zoom in to a red line painted on the far end of the room. What, was Paul Sharits making him jealous? 

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD!

The stylistic perversity threatens to overwhelm the story (apparently a rehash of the first Peter Gunn episode) but unfortunately, the story wins especially at the climax when Gunn (Craig Stevens) rehashes the entire crime scheme to the secret villain Daisy Jane (Marion Marshall). Marshall gets a special credit billed as M.T. Marshall presumably because Daisy Jane turns out to be a man in river gambler madam drag. Gunn rips off her wig and Daisy engages him in a death battle, taking her place among the dozens of murderous drag queens in Hollywood history. It's remarkable Vito Russo missed an opportunity to dump on this aspect of the film in his essential The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981) even though 2023 viewers might approach the scene with more nuance (or more vitriol). 

Still, it's a visual treat throughout and Edwards puts Gunn through a series of odd paces - pelted with racquetballs or ensconced in a photo booth while receiving some key information from an informant. And there's plenty of star wattage to help the 94-minute episode go down. Opera diva Helen Traubel plays a saucy proprietor of a nightclub. Laura Devon sings a few torchy numbers. Ed Asner plays Ed Asner. Screenplay co-written by William Peter Blatty. Music by Henry Mancini and, to represent those kooky kids of the day, the Gordian Knot. Good show.

Note: No, of course I didn't see a pristine print of the thing. But I doubt any print would place it above Edwards' next film, The Party (1968). 

Grade: A-minus

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Midnight Cowboy stands as one of the great phantasmagorias of 1960s Hollywood cinema. Visually and sonically, the film astonishes. It matters not a whit that Schlesinger interrupts the narrative with moments of short-shelf-life psychedelia (rapid editing, telephoto-flattened images, blue-and-white flashbacks, dazzling superimpositions) or that he puts them in the service of skin-deep critiques of consumerism or NYC savagery. They form little de facto avant-garde films that generate surges of jittery, intense excitement. And the music only heightens the effect. Listen to the record-scratch rhythms that overamp the sweetness in John Barry's "Florida Fantasy" or the eternally returning Nilsson version of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" that drains the song of hope with each go around. Everything nags at you evoking both the energy and danger of city living. 

Then there are the myriad indigestible trills: a mother and son playing with a plastic rat in a diner; a bowl of matches behind a curiosity cabinet/color wheel; kids fishing off a bridge in Florida; radio voices linked miles away to the talking heads who own them; dozens of extras afforded a closeup. Rampant homophobia too, more an ugly part of the landscape than assurance that Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) enjoy a properly heterosexual bromance. In short, Schlesinger has expended a great deal of effort to fashion a complex outer and inner life for two (and more!) characters whom society would much rather sweep into a sewer. It's such a rich, surprising film that I might even claim it's the closest Hollywood ever got to Ulysses in deeming less-than-ordinary lives worthy of the highest art.

Grade: A

The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969)

I wish Coppola took his desire to make an Antonioni-style art film all the way to a deflated ending. Instead, he indulged in the most final and banal ending imaginable with the death of a major character. Still, it's not as if loose ends are tied up for Shirley Knight's disgruntled wife/expectant mother on the run. And overall, The Rain People tells an alarmingly loose tale even for its time. The narrative drift can be summarized in the scene where James Caan's pastured football hero waits at a bus station not for any buses but because that's where people wait. No one here knows what they want and the mercurial behavior and lengthy, nerve-wracked conversations keep this road movie charged up. Knight, Caan, and Robert Duvall are all actorly to the nth but somehow not showy, called upon as they are to "appear as ordinary as Coppola's turnpike, motel room, green hills."* Fresher than The Godfather if only by virtue of still being so little seen. 

Grade: A-minus

* Ethan Mordden: Medium Cool - The Movies of the 1960s, p. 258. 

Phil Spector (1939-2021)

You could hear Phil Spector's psychoses in his music, for better or worse. They resulted in more bombastic dreck than many 1960s hangers-on will ever admit (witness the freakish overrating of the Back to Mono box set). But they were also responsible for a solid hour or so of indelible music. His masterpiece remains The Crystals' "He's a Rebel," an end product of obsessive assholism. Listen to it as you remember Lana Clarkson and keep in mind the indignities inflicted upon Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector, Carol Connors, etc. And if you require an analysis of the relationship between Spector's murderous rage and his Wall of Sound, check out Vikram Jayanti's The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector (2009), one of the finest music documentaries I've ever seen.