1001 films you must see before you die- Part IX: 1965-1969

One of Conner's dazzling found-footage assemblies, REPORT anticipates Stone's JFK by twenty-four years. While not as sheerly astounding as Conner's A MOVIE (the real inspiration for such Stonean Cuisin-Art as NATURAL BORN KILLERS), this mix of JFK-assassination audio, Jack Ruby stock footage, and plentiful pitch blackness is plenty weird, and is sure to chill the blood of high-school history-class kids encountering it in some highbrow museum somewhere.

Paul Newman is the blue-eyed "savage," a white man raised by the Indians who rejects so-called civilized society for his spiritual family, in Elmore Leonard's take on Stagecoach. It's not exactly Grand Hotel on wheels. The hypocrites, crooks, and racists Newman travels with cast him out of their polite company in the coach, then turn to him for salvation when outlaws hold up the stage and hunt them through the desert. It's hard to "like" Newman's cold, hard survivor, but you can't help but respect his cunning and his unsentimental directness. Fredric March is sweaty with corruption as a crooked Indian agent, and Richard Boone smiles his deadly charm as a lusty bad man. While this 1966 Western wears its social politics on its dusty sleeves, director Martin Ritt tempers the revisionist moral of the tale with a stripped-down ruthlessness befitting the rugged, unforgiving landscape.

A young Paris housewife, Séverine, grows bored with her stable husband. When she learns of the presence of a high-class brothel in her neighborhood, she quietly goes to work there--but only during the day, until five o'clock in the afternoon. This sublime 1967 film is one of the latter-day masterpieces of the Spanish-born director Luis Buñuel, whose career forms one of the greatest and boldest arcs in cinema. By the time of Belle de jour, Buñuel had become almost completely deadpan in his style, which not only leaves the motivation of Séverine a mystery (despite a few flashbacks to degradations of her youth), but also casts the entire plot in doubt. An old surrealist from the 1920s (when his first classic, Un chien andalou, was made in collaboration with Salvador Dali), Buñuel suggests that what we see may be real, or simply Séverine's imagination. Because he was the least pretentious of directors, Buñuel keeps his material playful, wicked, yet cutting. As Séverine, the impossibly lovely Catherine Deneuve uses her cool demeanor to great effect--she never breaks her deadpan, either. In 1995, after having been out of official circulation for years, Belle de Jour was re-released in America and became an unexpected art-house hit.

The French director Jacques Demy scored a worldwide hit in 1964 with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a bittersweet candy-colored romance in which all the dialogue was set to music. Equally enchanting is the musical that reunited Demy with the star and composer of Umbrellas, Catherine Deneuve and Michel Legrand. The film is The Young Girls of Rochefort, an effervescent concoction about traveling players and dreamy-headed demoiselles in a seaside town. Deneuve and her real-life sister, Françoise Dorléac (who died in a car accident not long after the movie was made), play twins who fantasize about life in Paris. But before they leave town, they are distracted by the weekend fair and its colorful singers and dancers. They're also destined to meet an American composer--gloriously, it's Gene Kelly, carrying the aura of classic MGM musicals in his lighter-than-air wake. He was 55 at the time, but much younger in movie years. (Another American, George Chakiris, also dances his way through the film.) Legrand's music isn't as powerful as his Cherbourg score, and some of the choreography would fit right into an Austin Powers discotheque sequence. And the costumes--well, the excesses of '60s mod designs have not aged well. Yet the crazy hairstyles and vinyl boots fit right into the film's sense of gleeful fun. There is a sunny, daffy spirit to this movie that becomes positively infectious. It deserves to be better known. (Try to catch a widescreen version, if possible.)


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Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored, apathetic heart of the bourgeoisie is never far from acting out its most homicidal fantasies.

Alain Delon is the coolest killer to hit the screen, a film noir loner for the modern era, in Jean-Pierre Melville's austere 1967 French crime classic. Delon's impassive hit man, Jef Costello, is the ultimate professional in an alienated world of glass and metal. On his latest contract, however, he lets a witness live--a charming jazz pianist, Valerie (Cathy Rosier), who neglects to identify him in the police lineup. When Costello survives an assassination attempt by his employers, he carefully plots his next moves as cops and criminals close in and he prepares for one last job. Melville meticulously details every move by Costello and the police in fascinating wordless sequences, from Costello's preparations for his first hit to the cops' exhaustive efforts to tail Jef as he lines up his last; and his measured pace creates an otherworldly ambiance, an uneasy calm on the verge of shattering. Costello remains a cipher, a zen killer whose façade begins to crack as the world seems to be collapsing in on him, exposing the wound-up psyche hidden behind his blank face. Melville rethinks film noir in modern terms, as an existential crime drama in soft, somber color and sleek images (courtesy of cinematographer extraordinaire Henri Decaë). Le Samouraï inspired two pseudo-remakes, Walter Hill's Driver and John Woo's Killer, but neither film comes close to the compelling austerity and meticulous detail of Melville's cult masterpiece.

Paul Newman gives one of the defining performances of his career, and cemented his place as a beautiful-rebel screen icon playing the stubbornly tough and independent title character in Cool Hand Luke. And before he became familiar as a sidekick in 1970s disaster movies (Earthquake and the Airport movies), George Kennedy won an Oscar for playing Dragline, the brutal chain-gang boss who tries to beat loner Luke's cool out of him. It's a classic rebel-against-the-repressive-institution story in the line of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or The Shawshank Redemption. Certain moments have become classics--particularly the hardboiled egg-eating contest, and the immortal line (drooled by Strother Martin, as a sadistic redneck prison officer), "What we have here is a failure to communicate." And don't forget, Luke is also the source of the oft-quoted driving ditty, "I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus, right here on the dashboard of my car..." He is cool, all right.

Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and assisted by Angie Dickinson, as he desperately searches for someone, anyone, who can just give him his money. But if Walker is an extreme incarnation of the revenge-driven noir antihero, the modern syndicate has been transformed into a world of paper jungles and corporate businessmen, an alienating concept to the two-fisted, gun-wielding gangster. Boorman creates a hard, austere look for the film and fragments the story with flashes of painful memory, grafting the New Wave onto old genres with confidence and style. Haunting and brutal, Point Blank remains one of the most distinctive crime thrillers ever made.

Wavelength is a short, forty-five minute film that made the reputation of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema, it was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967. It was released in May 1967, and is an example of what film theorist P. Adams Sitney describes as "structural film."
Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three "character" scenes. Snow's intent for the film was "a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas," he said of the 45-minute-long zoom that incorporates in its time frame four human events, including a man's death. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release.

Miklós Janscó takes the romance out of Russia's Revolutionary struggle in this simultaneously beautiful and brutal look at the civil war following the Bolshevik coup of 1918. Set in a remote region of Central Russia in 1919, The Red and the White follows the shifting balance of power around an abandoned monastery. The anti-Bolshevik White Army has embarked on a campaign to completely eradicate the area of Red Army soldiers, and scores of Hungarians, former Bolshevik prisoners thrust into battle, are caught in the middle. The graceful camerawork and lush, lovely landscape captured in stunning black-and-white widescreen stand in sharp contrast to the abrupt on-the-spot executions and sadistic cat-and-mouse games of the White Army, hiding behind a mask of politeness and civility as they line up their next row of victims. But Janscó's portrayal of the Bolsheviks, while decidedly more heroic, isn't much more sympathetic. The dreamlike poetry of Janscó's cinema and the surreal atmosphere of doom carries the film in place of a strong story or a central set of characters, but there is no mistaking his sympathies for the victims of the struggle--peasants and prisoners and civilians caught between collision of two armies, systematically stripped of their dignity and their lives as the battle rages around them like an evocation of hell on Earth. It's a brave stance for a Hungarian filmmaker working on Soviet soil in 1968 and it makes for a powerful film.

Mikolás (Frantisek Velecký) and his brother Adam (Ivan Palúch) rob travellers for their tyrranical father Kozlík (Josef Kemr). During one of their "jobs" they end up with a young German hostage whose father escapes to return news of the kidnapping and robbery to the King. Kozlik prepares for the wrath of the King, and sends Mikolás to pressure his neighbour Lazar (Michal Kozuch) to join him in war. Persuasion fails, and in vengeance Mikolás abducts Lazar's daughter Marketa (Magda Vásáryová), just as she was about to join a convent. The King, meantime, dispatches an army and the religious Lazar will be called upon to join hands against Kozlik. Stripped-down, surreal, and relentlessly grimy account of the shift from Paganism to Christianity.

A classic 1967 Disney animated film that's loosely based on Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, Jungle Book tells the story of a young boy Mowgli who was raised by animals in the jungle. When tiger Shere Khan threatens to return to their part of the jungle, the other animals decide that Mowgli must return to the man village in order to ensure his safety. Panther Bagheera has difficulty convincing Mowgli to follow him to the man village and recruits the help of a big lovable bear Baloo. Mowgli's journey is one of wit, song, and many surprises. A timeless film populated by strong characters bursting with personality, great music like "Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You," and inspiring animation by Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and other master animators, Jungle Book captivates audiences of all ages.

A milestone of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman's first color film The Firemen's Ball (Horí, má panenko) is both a dazzling comedy and a provocative political satire. A hilarious saga of good intentions confounded, the story chronicles a firemen's ball where nothing goes right-from a beauty pageant whose reluctant participants embarrass the organizers to a lottery from which nearly all the prizes are pilfered. Presumed to be a commentary on the floundering Czech leadership, the film was "banned forever" in Czechoslovakia following the Russian invasion and prompted Forman's move to America.

In the hypothetical Latin-American country of Eldorado, the idealistic and anarchist poet and journalist Paulo Martins (Jardel Filho) fights against the populist governor, Felipe Vieira (José Lewgoy), and the conservative president Porfirio Diaz (Paulo Autran), supported by revolutionary forces. Paulo is depressed, since the two corrupt politicians were his former friends and have been elected with his moral support.
If the reader has had the opportunity of reading Machiavelli's "The Prince", he or she will see how the behavior of politicians remains unchanged along the centuries. However, keeping in mind that this is a 1967 movie, and Brazil was under a tough military dictatorship, this movie is a milestone in the history of Brazilian New Cinema. Glauber Rocha was very braze, discussing forbidden themes such as fight of classes, manipulation of the submissive masses by the elites, corruption in politician, anarchism, campaign promises not kept after the elections, economical power of foreign groups (or countries) in Latin American countries and coup d'état. In 1967, "Terra em Transe" was awarded with "Great Prize" in the Locarno Festival (Switzerland); "Luis Buñuel Prize" in Cannes Festival; "Federation of International Critics Prize" in Cannes Festival; and Best Movie of the Year in the Air France Prize, among other prizes.