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 The American cinema industry found itself in crisis in the
Sixties. Television had destroyed its old confidence and had
stolen its traditional audience. Television was cheap, accessible,
and quick to produce. Film making was comparatively slow and
cumbersome, and very expensive.
So Hollywood bounced back by spending ever more money. Ben-Hur
won 11 Oscars in 1960 and set the pattern for much of the decade.
Epics that followed included El Cid, Lawrence of Arabia
and Cleopatra.
More humbly, the British film industry kept
going with a series of anti-hero films (Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, Alfie), but
was shaken if not stirred when Bond came along.
Darryl F Zanuck gambled on recouping the losses he had suffered
over Cleopatra with profits he hoped to make with The
Sound Of Music. He won. Many believe Alfred Hitchcock lost his
touch but he certainly made his money with Psycho, The
Birds and Marnie.
Towards the end of the decade, Hollywood abandoned history and
entered new alien worlds with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet
of the Apes.
 A new wave of British film-making had begun with Look Back
In Anger (1959), followed by Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and This
Sporting Life (1963).
These raw working class drama's transformed British cinema. New
British stars emerged - Julie Christie in Darling (1965),
Michael Caine in Alfie (1966), Rita Tushingham (who reigned
supreme as the archetypal Sixties 'bird') and Sean Connery as the
immortal James Bond.
The first Bond film was Dr No (1962) and as the sixties
progressed, our appetite for all things James Bond-related
continued to flourish - As From Russia With Love (1963) and
Goldfinger (1964) were released, the Colgate Palmolive
company made plenty of cash marketing 007 grooming products for
men.
But with no new Bond film for 1966, Hollywood had to make do
with The Silencers (starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm), and
Our Man Flint, a stylish spy spoof starring James Coburn
(and reputedly Mike Myers' inspiration for Austin Powers).
The Carry On series of movies began in 1958 with Carry
On Sergeant and kept the British laughing for 28 films
(although by the time of Carry On Camping in 1968 the
formula of old jokes and sexual innuendo was looking rather
tired).
Meanwhile, if The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini marked
the last gasp of the Beach Movie genre, The Wild Angels was
the first of many low-budget films to exploit the "sex, drugs
and motorcycles" formula successfully.
In the film's most memorable sequence, Peter Fonda's bike gang
holds a raucous wake for deceased compadre Bruce Dern, whose last
words were "I just want to get high, man". The Wild
Angels also helped solidify Nancy Sinatra's standing as the
year's tough-cookie sex symbol, but even Nancy's boots were no
match for the fur bikini sported by Raquel Welch in One Million
Years BC; though dull in the extreme, the prehistoric cave
opera did plenty of box-office business thanks to Raquel's
considerable . . .er . . . charms.
The underground film sex symbol of the year had to be Edie
Sedgwick - the doe-eyed blonde whose performance enlivened Andy
Warhol's otherwise interminable Chelsea Girls, while the
two most popular musicals starred Julie Andrews - the
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Mary Poppins (1964) and The
Sound Of Music (1965).
This is by no means an attempt at an exhaustive listing of
movies from the 60s. It is a recollection of some of the movies
which are either personal favourites, or which are particularly
representative of the era (without necessarily being critically
acclaimed).
¤
La Dolce Vita (1960)
¤
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
¤ The Leather Boys
¤
The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960)
¤
Live A Little, Love A Little
¤
Lolita (1962)
¤ The Longest Day (1962) |
¤
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner
¤
Lord Love A Duck
¤
Lord Of The Flies (1963)
¤ The Love Bug (1968)
¤
The Love Factor (1969)
¤
The Loved One
¤
The Love-Ins |
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