The 1961 Mini-List

[swo17]

As a reminder, today is your last chance to vote for 1961. I'll post results after I wake up Monday morning

[TMDaines]

OK, I will resubmit tomorrow before you wake.

[TMDaines]

Cheers, resubmitted.

[swo17]

The 1961 List



##. Film (Director) points/votes(top 5 placements, aka likely votes in decade list)/highest ranking

01. L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais) 320/14(13)/1(x5)
02. The Innocents (Jack Clayton) 239/12(5)/1
03. Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman) 214/11(7)/1(x3)
04. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel) 213/11(4)/1
05. La notte (Michelangelo Antonioni) 199/10(6)/1(x3)
06. The Hustler (Robert Rossen) 191/12(2)/2(x2)
07. Yōjimbō (Akira Kurosawa) 183/10(4)/1
08. Léon Morin, prêtre (Jean-Pierre Melville) 168/9(4)/2(x3)
09. Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller) 131/9/7(x2)
10. Lola (Jacques Demy) 127/8(1)/3
11. Une femme est une femme (Jean-Luc Godard) 123/6(3)/3
12. Il posto (Ermanno Olmi) 122/7(2)/3(x2)
13. Victim (Basil Dearden) 116/7(3)/1
14. Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family (Yasujirō Ozu) 105/6(1)/4
15. Ce soir ou jamais (Michel Deville) 100/5(2)/2
16. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage) 99/5(3)/4(x2)
17. Divorzio all'italiana (Pietro Germi) 95/5(3)/1
(tie) One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando) 95/5(2)/2
19. Taste of Fear (Seth Holt) 93/6(2)/3
20. Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini) 87/6(1)/5
21. A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson) 85/5/6(x2)
22. Pigs and Battleships (Shōhei Imamura) 84/6(1)/3
23. One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder) 82/6(1)/1
24. Fuego en Castilla (José Val del Omar) 81/4(3)/2
25. Paris nous appartient (Jacques Rivette) 79/5(3)/1
26. Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz) 69/4(1)/2
27. Plácido (Luis García Berlanga) 67/3(2)/2
28. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis) 64/3(2)/2
(tie) West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins) 64/5(1)/5
30. Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan) 63/4(1)/2
31. The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman) 62/5(1)/5
32. Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards) 58/3(1)/5
33. Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence) 57/4/8
34. Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer) 56/3(1)/4
(tie) Chronique d'un été (Paris 1960) (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin) 56/5/8
36. Blast of Silence (Allen Baron) 54/4/7
37. Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner) 42/2(1)/3
(tie) The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest) 42/2(2)/5(x2)
39. Allures (Jordan Belson) 40/3/9
(tie) Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol) 40/4/13
41. Les Mauvais Coups (François Leterrier) 39/3(1)/5
(tie) The Devil's Trap (František Vláčil) 39/3/9
43. La ragazza con la valigia (Valerio Zurlini) 37/2(1)/1
44. L'assassino (Elio Petri) 36/2(1)/5
45. The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson) 35/2(1)/2
46. Acariño galaico (de barro) (José Val del Omar) 34/2(1)/4
(tie) Le vergini di Roma (Vittorio Cottafavi et al.) 34/2/6
(tie) A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie) 34/2/7
49. The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher) 33/2/9
50. Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann) 29/3/15

ALSO-RANS

Paris Blues (Martin Ritt) 26/2/10
Two Rode Together (John Ford) 26/3/10
Homicidal (William Castle) 25/2/8
Barabbas (Richard Fleischer) 24/2/8
The Misfits (John Huston) 24/2/13
The Song of the Grey Pigeon (Stanislav Barabáš) 23/2/7
The Last Sunset (Robert Aldrich) 22/2/9
Viva l'Italia (Roberto Rossellini) 22/2/15(x2)
Lisa and the Other Woman (Dinos Dimopoulos) 19/2/12
Come September (Robert Mulligan) 18/2/11

Une histoire d'eau (Jean-Luc Godard & François Truffaut) 16/2/12
A Wife Confesses (Yasuzō Masumura) 7/2/20

ORPHANS

Film (Director) highest ranking

All in a Night's Work (Joseph Anthony) 10
Banditi a Orgosolo (Vittorio De Seta) 7
Barravento (Glauber Rocha) 9
Birth Certificate (Stanisław Różewicz) 24
Bitter End of a Sweet Night (Kijū Yoshida) 7
Blazes (Robert Breer) 9
Il brigante (Renato Castellani) 17
Brutalität in Stein (Alexander Kluge & Peter Schamoni) 17
The Children's Hour (William Wyler) 12
El Cid (Anthony Mann) 3
The Coachman (Kang Dae-jin) 4
Death + Transfiguration (Jim Davis) 15
Les Dents du singe (René Laloux) 14
Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Vittorio Cottafavi) 2
The Errand Boy (Jerry Lewis) 13
Los hermanos Del Hierro (Ismael Rodríguez) 23
Mothra (Ishirō Honda) 25
My Mother and Her Guest (Shin Sang-ok) 14
The Night Before Christmas (Alexander Rou) 16
Night Tide (Curtis Harrington) 17
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (Clyde Geronimi et al.) 1
Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra) 22
Rabindranath Tagore (Satyajit Ray) 18
La ragazza in vetrina (Luciano Emmer) 3
Something Wild (Jack Garfein) 11
Summer and Smoke (Peter Glenville) 18
The Terror of the Tongs (Anthony Bushell) 25
Two Half-Times in Hell (Zoltán Fábri) 21
Un coeur gros comme ça (François Reichenbach) 19
Uproar in Heaven (Wan Laiming) 21
Ursus (Carlo Campogalliani) 19
Vanina Vanini (Roberto Rossellini) 18
Una vita difficile (Dino Risi) 5
Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes) 12

20 lists submitted

[Pavel]

I sadly forgot to vote on this one, but that's fine since I didn't manage to watch enough films to make a satisfying list. Only difference I would've probably made is bump up Wilder's One, Two, Three

[domino harvey]

Thanks swo! Will never, ever understand the Innocents fandom, and it is utter madness that it's above Bergman. Anways. Here's my list:

01 Through a Glass, Darkly
02 Last Year at Marienbad
03 Une femme est une femme
04 the Ladies Man
05 Ce soir ou jamais
06 Amazons of Rome
07 West Side Story
08 the Hustler
09 the Last Sunset
10 Les mauvais coups
11 Come September
12 Lisa and the Other Woman
13 Taste of Fear
14 La ragazza con la valigia
15 Lover Come Back
16 Paris Blues
17 Splendor in the Grass
18 Summer and Smoke
19 Un coeur gros comme ca
20 Barabbas

Only submitted a top 20 so I wasn't voting for anything below 4/5 stars. Need to revisit Bunuel and Melville's films so I didn't list them as I couldn't remember how much I liked them

[therewillbeblus]

Much appreciated, swo! My list was compiled haphazardly last-minute, especially the top ten outside of the clear-best #1 spot

1. Paris nous appartient (Jacques Rivette)
2. Ce soir ou jamais (Michel Deville)
3. One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando)
4. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage)
5. L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais)
6. Pigs and Battleships (Shōhei Imamura)
7. Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
8. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis)
9. Une femme est une femme (Jean-Luc Godard)
10. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel)
11. The Innocents (Jack Clayton)
12. Le vergini di Roma (Vittorio Cottafavi et al.)
13. Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller)
14. Taste of Fear (Seth Holt)
15. West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins)
16. The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
17. Two Rode Together (John Ford)
18. Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann)
19. Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol)
20. A Wife Confesses (Yasuzō Masumura)
21. The Last Sunset (Robert Aldrich)
22. Blast of Silence (Allen Baron)
23. Come September (Robert Mulligan)
24. Les Mauvais Coups (François Leterrier)
25. The Terror of the Tongs (Anthony Bushell)

[Matt]

Homicidal was an orphan? I was sure I voted for it and placed it higher than 19. But if I didn’t, oops and oh well. Solid list of films here!

[Rayon Vert]

That's me with Homicidal at 19! Felt on solid enough ground with a list of 20, but really the top 8 are a cut above for me:

1. Through a Glass Darkly
2. One-Eyed Jacks
3. El Cid
4. Taste of Fear
5. The Day the Earth Caught Fire
6. Léon Morin, prêtre
7. Underworld U.S.A.
8. Divorce, Italian Style

I don't get The Innocents either, but even less so La Notte - the Antonioni films from 60 to 66 all rank very highly for me, but that one really feels overwrought.

[DarkImbecile]

Good looking list! Thanks, swo

1. Through a Glass Darkly
2. La notte
3. The Innocents
4. L'Année dernière à Marienbad
5. Yōjimbō
6. Léon Morin, prêtre
7. Victim
8. Viridiana
9. Lola
10. One-Eyed Jacks

[therewillbeblus]

It's funny, when I woke up I wished I had placed both One-Eyed Jacks and Through a Glass Darkly slightly higher- meaning we'd have the former in the same slot, RV. I also really appreciate the high placement of Taste of Fear!

[swo17]

I had a harder time narrowing this one down than I did 1960. I really wanted to include some "big" films like West Side Story and The Ladies Man, for instance, but didn't want to get rid of anything else:

01 L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais)
02 Léon Morin, prêtre (Jean-Pierre Melville)
03 Fuego en Castilla (José Val del Omar)
04 Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage)
05 Les Mauvais Coups (François Leterrier)
06 Ce soir ou jamais (Michel Deville)
07 Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner)
08 Pigs and Battleships (Shōhei Imamura)
09 Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
10 Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
11 Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence)
12 Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes)
13 Yōjimbō (Akira Kurosawa)
14 Taste of Fear (Seth Holt)
15 Death + Transfiguration (Jim Davis)
16 Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz)
17 The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
18 Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol)
19 Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller)
20 The Devil's Trap (František Vláčil)
21 Lisa and the Other Woman (Dinos Dimopoulos)
22 The Song of the Grey Pigeon (Stanislav Barabáš)
23 The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman)
24 Victim (Basil Dearden)
25 One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder)

[Matt]

I don't get The Innocents either, but even less so La Notte - the Antonioni films from 60 to 66 all rank very highly for me, but that one really feels overwrought.

I get why people don’t get The Innocents, but for me it pushes several buttons: widescreen black and white with thoughtful use of the full frame, children haunted by trauma, a brittle Deborah Kerr performance, Michael Redgrave being aloof, a Georges Auric score, ghosts/haunted houses, a woman’s questioned sanity, a few people in a vast house/remote location, and more. But the #1 factor is that I still, after so many viewings, get chills when Peter Quint suddenly looms into the fogged-up window.

La Notte is, for me, all about the hard-edged architecture of Milan in the opening scenes and then the scenes with Mastroianni and Vitti being bored at the party. I think Jeanne Moreau is miscast or under-directed or just generally disengaged, so it’s the least of Antonioni’s “trilogy” for me, but the great moments are pretty darn great.

I did intend to vote for Homicidal at #8 but inadvertently left the spot blank! I love a gender switcheroo and a fright break.

I should probably also have included Cosmic Ray as seeing the Three Screen Ray version several years ago is one of the best film-viewing experiences of my life. Another oops.

And while I love Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly is one of my least-liked films of his. I think it’s so emotionally intense and sex-obsessed that it kind of tips over into camp for me. Yet his next film, Winter Light might be my favorite.

[therewillbeblus]

I get why people don’t get The Innocents, but for me it pushes several buttons: widescreen black and white with thoughtful use of the full frame, children haunted by trauma, a brittle Deborah Kerr performance, Michael Redgrave being aloof, a Georges Auric score, ghosts/haunted houses, a woman’s questioned sanity, a few people in a vast house/remote location, and more. But the #1 factor is that I still, after so many viewings, get chills when Peter Quint suddenly looms into the fogged-up window.

Well said. I've never adored the movie quite as much as most of its fans, but it's a great mood piece with expertly-brewed dread closing in from all sides. Also, as someone who typically enjoys deliberately-enigmatic finales, this is the rare 'question-mark' ending that continues to disturb me greatly every viewing, and even thinking about it now. The way everything unfolds demands to be considered with urgency rather than left nebulous, but also withholds all via the unexpected mortality, forcing that urgency to be left unfulfilled. One of the best gut-punches the movies have given us.

[alacal2]

Apologies from me for not submitting a list but I got diverted at the last moment an then promptly forgot! Glad to see the support for Victim which I found to be surprisingly un-preachy and modern. Dearden manages to expertly balance the genre elements without sacrificing those interpersonal elememts. I’m still struggling with Antonioni whose Fims I tend to admire rather than like.

[Red Screamer]

I didn’t get a chance to participate as much as I would have liked this time around and consequently my list only stretches to 16. My favorite first time viewing was both of Val del Omar shorts, with Two Rode Together and Barabbas following close behind. The Errand Boy is my beloved orphan. Shout out to whoever put Viva L’Italia in the exact same slot as me, a strangely beguiling film with a long-take zoom style a decade ahead of its time, though Rossellini has a different reason for using it than Altman et al.

Thanks to domino, Barabbas was the real surprise of this project for me, from its aggressively nasty beginning—Barabbas “comes back from the dead” only to immediately get drunk and then rape his now-Christian exgirlfriend while you can see Christ getting crucified through the windows of their house—to its audacious, symbolic final moment in which Barabbas gets crucified along with a hundred Christians and his last words form a haunting parody of Christ’s “It is finished”: “It is Barabbas.” In between, the film is a supremely lonely Biblical epic in which everything goes wrong. Barabbas is given a dozen chances to make the right decision, to turn his life around, and he always makes the wrong one. He’s a practical, material man of action disturbed by the abstract ideals of Christianity and frustrated by the fact that he doesn’t get it even when he tries to, a moving portrait of an average person’s limitations in the shadow of true greatness as well as, since the film offers traces of this secular angle too, someone left behind by vast ideological and historical change. The film slips into a trancey expressionism for Barabbas’ spiritual encounters and somehow it almost always works. Not to mention that the peripheral view of Christ’s passion we get here was apparently shot during an actual solar eclipse! I enjoyed Dan Sallitt’s typically lucid breakdown of the film.

[therewillbeblus]

I had every intention of watching Barabbas (it was the only film I rented specifically for this project), but my lib's DVD started skipping just after the opening credits, so apologies for not contributing to its placement. If I chose to revisit The Errand Boy (or Demy's Lola, or Splendor in the Grass, etc.) it could've easily placed towards the end for me. I don't think Terror of the Tongs is a 'better' film, it's just the one whose sly merits were fresher in my memory

[knives]

Those aren’t zooms in the Rossellini. I’m not sure if the tech existed yet, but even when it did he was opposed to it and refused to use them.

[swo17]

I remember liking Barabbas but couldn't bring myself to re-watch it on DVD with the Imprint Blu-ray coming so soon

[Red Screamer]

Those aren’t zooms in the Rossellini. I’m not sure if the tech existed yet, but even when it did he was opposed to it and refused to use them.

Have you seen the film? Zooms are used in just about every scene, for everything from obvious, grand shifts in scale to subtle reframings. Tag Gallagher's video essay on the Arrow release mentions the specific lens used for the film and reveals that Rosellini actually controlled its zoom function himself via remote control.

[knives]

They’re dollies he’s controlling via the remote. Gallagher explains as much on the extras for Louis 14th. Rossellini was opposed to the zoom lens.

[Red Screamer]

That might be true for that film, I haven't seen it, but it's clearly not for this one. I'm no Rossellini expert but a cursory Google search also shows many results about his use of zooms in other films so I'm not sure where your idea is coming from.

[knives]

Those shots were accomplished without zoom lens. Again this is explained in the extras to the criterion of The Taking of Power. In the commentary this is gone into in depth during a meal sequence shot by Rossellini’s son who was unable to get the shot according to his father’s methods and snuck a zoom out into the film.

In additional research it turns out I did misremember it as a dolly shot, but it is a mechanical lens instead which functions similarly to a zoom, but is a different process.

[Red Screamer]

I don’t want to keep derailing the thread, but a shot where the screen space is compressed or expanded through a change in focal length is a "zoom" regardless of how the lens was manufactured. What else would you call those shots? You’re arguing that Rossellini was so opposed to the zoom lens that instead he used a lens that creates the same effect, so much so in fact that the man himself couldn’t tell the difference when his crew switched one out for the other?

Here are two Rossellini scholars on his zooms. Gallagher is writing about the later historical films but provides some useful info. I found the Brunette passage here.

In the historical films, scenes are not lit for effect, but rather for clarity of the essential (in Italian meaning also “simple”) image. In keeping with his desire to perfect the reproductive capabilities of cinema, Rossellini’s researches into optics have enabled him to perfect a remarkably smooth 25–250mm zoom lens. Most zoom lenses have the disadvantages of distorting perspective and producing less sharp images. Accordingly filmmakers often prefer to move the entire camera rather than to zoom. The remarkable quality of Rossellini’s zoom lens is that, when used carefully it preserves perspective and sharpness. His camera, one might say, becomes the eye of history, as dry as that of a purportedly objective history book, and yet an eye seeing images that have an actuality which verges on the deliriously exciting.

The zoom, though by now a fixed part of Rossellini's technique, is used quite sparingly in Viva l'Italia!, compared with both Vanina Vanini, Rossellini's next film, and Era notte a Roma, and the constant use of the zoom in those films to reframe and tighten is missing here. When the zoom is used, it seems disguised; thus, standard Rossellini camera movements back through a crowd listening to a speech or watching some spectacle are here so subtle that it is even difficult to tell definitively, especially in interiors, whether they are zooms or simple dollies. The zoom is sometimes used thematically, as well—for example, to suggest the oneness of men and their landscape. Even in scenes of the troops resting, the perspectival flattening of the long zoom lens seems to inscribe the men ever more totally into the surrounding hills and valleys. Before one important battle, the camera lyrically plays over various "domestic" scenes in Garibaldi's camp. Then, in the same shot, it picks up the enemy on a distant ridge, and, in an extremely subtle zoom that is almost completely masked by an accompanying pan, moves in closer, thus suggesting the coming physical encounter by first enacting it visually and spatially. Similarly, Garibaldi's deep connection with the people is demonstrated by the zoom lens. When Naples has fallen, for example, the camera shows us a huge, celebrating crowd from behind; then, as Garibaldi's words are heard, the camera seems to seek him out, the zoom finally finding him in the midst of giving a speech from a balcony. Since the long shot of the crowd and the final tight shot on Garibaldi are both part of the same plan-séquence, the equation between him and the people is forcefully made.

I'm not going to keep going back and forth with you since I'm sure it's not all that entertaining to read.

[therewillbeblus]

For what it's worth, I find this all super interesting