The 1965 Mini-List

[domino harvey]

The Money Trap
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059460/
(neo noir loved by Sarris)

God knows why. A strong contender for worst film of 1965, I'm assuming/hoping you haven't actually seen it. Elke Sommer is so horrible in this that I'm not convinced a mannequin in her likeness couldn't do a more agreeable job

[swo17]

Swo, can you please add the East is Red, Othello, and the Restless Ones?

Added, thanks

[yoshimori]

If you haven't seen the Franju-Cocteau-Riva Thomas movie, please do check out this little pastiche, someone's 60-second teaser for what I think is one of the couple most thrilling films of 1965. Doesn't do the film justice, of course, but points in the right direction.

[domino harvey]

I’m afraid I don’t share your enthusiasm. Here were my thoughts from the War List Project

Thomas l'imposteur (Georges Franju 1965) Franju recasts Emamanuelle Riva from Thérèse Desqueyroux, the greatest film ever made about depression, into a different kind of depressing experience. Riva is sidelined by the narrative and mostly wasted as a princess who gets involved in the efforts of the first World War largely due to her crush on a young solider with a powerful name. While I fail to see what in Jean Cocteau’s source material won it such respect other than the name on the jacket, Fabrice Rouleau as the titular solider does his best to be completely miscast and ineffective in a role that demands an actor capable of carrying the film. Uh, no, not here. Outside of a memorable set piece involving a flashlight, there’s little of the visual wit Franju at his best is associated with, and the film, while never actively bad, isn’t actively good either. A disappointment.

[domino harvey]

A High Wind in Jamaica (Alexander Mackendrick)
For the first fifteen minutes or so of this, which resembles a third-rate Swiss Family Robinson backlot kids’ adventure, I was (as is often the case) perplexed at what in this material found favor with the Cahiers crew and readers, both of which named it one of the best films of the year. But then our collection of England-bound school children are not so much kidnapped as rearranged onto a pirate ship and suddenly we get a frequently strange and often unnerving experience that refuses to play it safe. Those longing for the sense of danger in children’s entertainment of the 80s will love this, as the film takes it far beyond any comfort zone you might expect. Anthony Quinn gives one of his best performances as the privateer captain, who is not quite a good guy but amongst his men (including an opportunistic James Coburn) he’s the best the kids can do for an advocate. While I saw a lot of comments here and elsewhere calling this film fun, there is a constant and pervasive sexual threat to much of the action involving the children that pushes this beyond any perceived typical audience for a kid-driven seafaring adventure— and perhaps that is precisely the kind of “Who exactly is the audience for this?” instability that these French cineastes responded so strongly towards. However, as the great child actress playing the main figurehead of the children says at one point, “I don’t know. Adults don’t tell you anything.” Ultimately, for me, the wonderfully unexpected but logical final fifteen minutes or so, with its stops and starts and elisions and realistic, offhand details is what ultimately elevates this to something special-- this film culminates in a series of itches that are by design not fully scratched, and I was impressed by its bravura. Recommended. [P]

Compartiment tueurs (Costa-Gavras)
A strangulation in a crowded sleeping car leads to the remaining witnesses, played by a Who’s Who of French cinema, being offed for an hour and a half in this hyperactive Agatha Christie-esque policier. Almost every big name French star of the period you can think of is in this, including the core cast of Costa-Gavras’ later Z (and just when you think the film missed a trick by not including him, my man Dominque Zardi shows up in the last ten minutes!). I didn’t care for the film’s handheld black and white ‘Scope kinetics, and frankly I found the “mystery” fairly uninteresting for most of the running time, but I have to give props where they’re due: I’ve seen enough mysteries like this to have some respect for when they successfully fool me as to whodunnit. I also enjoyed the climactic showdown involving a phone booth, which ramps up the tension before turning into a stylish if familiar car chase, culminating in an act of gun violence that I can truthfully say I’ve never seen before. This movie’s a mess, but given the cast list and its popular entertainment roots, I’m shocked it doesn’t have an English-friendly release.

[swo17]

I've moved The Flicker to 1966. IMDb seems to be the only place that calls it 1965, and without actually citing any screenings

[knives]

The Mackendrick might actually be my favorite kids film along with his Sammy Going South. These films are just honest to about about their kids.

[therewillbeblus]

I'll throw some more weight behind A High Wind in Jamaica, which I had coincidentally taken out of the library along with RV's recs prior to its discussion here- good timing! The whole film is quite strong, but particularly the narrative bookends. The riveting opening act literally has its central family spill into different milieus, thrown around by a higher power against their own will. And then there's the last act, which is absolutely perverse in its blunt presentation of relativist justice and insinuations of hierarchical value placements pertaining to the versatile abuses of children.

I read an implicit argument that the socially acceptable and legal forms of abuse (here represented by adults in prominent positions preying on children's lack of cognitive skills and emotional processing abilities to manipulate them into supporting the dominant adult's motive) can be even more traumatizing, and incur long-term consequences of guilt and shame that may last a lifetime. There’s a transitional throughline that takes the entire narrative to take shape and earn its impact: from macro-humbling with God weathering a storm rendering people impotent at the start, to mezzo-disabling examples populating the middle of the film regarding social politics via the contention between groups on the ship, to the eventual micro-focused powerlessness of a pared-down hot-seat situation destroying lives on a painfully intimate scale. The eventual destiny of coerced exploitation by way of isolation arrives from a staggering, fatalistic progression that greatly moved and disturbed me at once.

This is one of those films where revisits should only detail its merits, knowing where it’s headed and appreciating how it gets there. Can anybody vouch for the German blu? I watched this on the U.S. DVD but I'm definitely interested in picking it up unless there are any blistering transfer or AR issues

[Rayon Vert]

I got the French blu after watching the dvd, which seemed fine to me.

[therewillbeblus]

Okay, I'm only seeing the German blu available online, so hopefully it's the same as the French disc

I Saw What You Did (Castle 1965). (1st viewing) A couple of teenage girls get their kicks making prank calls while their parents are away for the evening, but get more than they bargained for when they raise the suspicion and ire of a murderer. After the disappointing Night Walker, this was surprisingly good. Simple premise but very well-done. Castle did a number of comedy horrors but even with the kids here taking central place and the cute music at the beginning and end, this is in no way a comedy and doesn’t hold back much with the horror. The young actresses, especially Andi Garrett as Libby, draw you in with their performances and the quite wicked nature of their fun. John Ireland is effectively scary as the pissed-off victim of the pranks, and of course there’s Joan Crawford in the mix, but there are definitely some surprising events that are part of the fun.

I really liked this as well, though it's the deliberate and elastic temporal space granted to the two coquettish female principals that makes this film feel unique in its route of narrative engagement. Ireland and Crawford are fine, but the parts don't ask the two actors for much they haven't already demonstrated many times over, as they're tasked to respond with varying degrees of histrionics to frenzied stimulation. It's the two young women who escape into their roles and make us feel like we're a third (or fourth, whenever the child is around) party at their secret sleepover participating in the devious fun, or during the subsequent adventures with a fantastically eclipsed sense of danger.

The playful technique Castle employs during the opening phone call sets the stage for how he'll manipulate his omniscient valve over the players, expanding and suppressing information, zooming in and out, provoking and eliding his vehicles via narrative and film grammar. It's by this audience-only transparent metric that Castle invites us spectators into a pattern of having our cake and eating it too, gorging the pleasures of binding and unbinding from eclectic surrogate experiences in mini-vacations- whether we're naively committing half-measures to gain power over adults and/or liberate our agency from their confines, vitalized at the prospect of engaging in risky behavior in sexually-charged waking dreams, feeling impending danger in fight/flight reactivity to being outed, or distressed at the confusion over the elisions in our schemas, thereby reinforcing alienation and prompting misguided fury.

These latter perspectives occupied by the Crawford/Ireland drama are tastefully restricted, with Crawford's prominent billing surely a cheap joke cashing in on a popular thriller's strategy earlier in the decade. A lesser filmmaker may have milked their arcs for longer than welcome, but Castle understands the limitations of their material's activity and appropriately diverts his attention with economic precision back onto the three-dimensional possibilities of the girls' escapades. It's that magnetizing attraction to their positions in reference to the disinterest in the villains' problems that makes this function more like an insulated The Goonies, championing its spirit of wonder (and wondrous naivete) as priority over an equalizing suspense of cat-and-mouse games. The bookended punchline and jubilant score at the finish even mirrors the beginning's carefree solipsism, and its execution is perversely jarring following a traumatic event and earned reaction of pathos.. Oh to be a kid again and shrug off drastic consequences this easily to return to egocentric paradise! The whole 'ignorant games spawning collateral misunderstandings' has been done many times over and often result in productions more exhausting than enthralling, but despite being humbly pitched as no more self-important than a programmatic B-movie, this version feels exciting and novel and was a delight from beginning to end.

[domino harvey]

Hail! Mafia. (Raoul Levy)
A fascinatingly incompetent amateur piece of noir scuzz with Henry Silva (liberally borrowing his karate chops at one point from this year's Mr Moto film) and Jack Klugman (!) as a pair of mafia hitmen who are sent to France to wipe out Eddie Constantine. Levy seems to have found a niche in making French films with predominately English casts (he also directed, unseen by me, Montgomery Clift’s last film), but nothing was lost in translation here that isn’t apparent on the screen: this is embarrassingly poorly made. Like, bottom end of the 80s slasher-level. No idea how Levy got so many fairly well-known actors to appear in this (A dubbed Michael Lonsdale's even in it, in a role that is literally pointless), but I imagine seeing the final result would have curbed any nascent career momentum afterwards even if he hadn't died in the following year.

I tre volti (Michelangelo Antonioni / Mauro Bolognini / Franco Indovina)
Three segments starring gossip magnet and former Queen of Iran (!) Soraya. Like nearly all portmanteau films, this is terrible. Unlike most portmanteau films, however, this begins with a 35 minute Antonioni short that serves as the missing link between Il deserto rosso and Blow-Up. Sadly, it’s not very good, though as an ASMR YouTube video it would probably be serviceable. The middle segment with Richard Harris (guess he stayed in Italy?) is typical male ego “Writer can’t write” garbage. The final portion of the film, scripted by and starring Alberto Sordi, at least has a funny idea: Sordi plays a corporate-sponsored gigolo who serves as a public-facing “Latin Lover” for rich visitors to Italy to be photographed with and gossiped about. A good concept, but the short isn’t filmed like a comedy and when jokes do get attempted, they die, slowly.

Le gentleman de Cocody (Christian-Jaque)
An obvious cash-in on L’homme de Rio’s success (with more than a little Bond/OSS 117 thrown in), this well-made fluff is undeniably the beneficiary of incredibly low expectations going in. Jean Marais is a womanizing diplomat who finds himself embroiled in dueling criminal factions hunting for missing cartel diamonds (???), but this is not the kind of film one watches for the plot. Filmed on location in the Ivory Coast, the movie is snappy, exceedingly well-paced and punchy and Marais (in the midst of his Fantomas mode) displays the proper amount of “I’m just cashing a paycheck” ambivalence and aloof coolness. Climaxes with an endless sequence of Marais and Liselotte Pulver being dragged through the air under a helicopter over the entire African shoreline, seemingly. [P]

[therewillbeblus]

Swo, can you add Hajime Satô's The Ghost of the Hunchback (aka House of Terrors, the official export title and the one used for the upcoming Mondo Macabro release)? Though I've only found it available via the Italian version titled Satan's Pit (or per your rules of romance languages, under the title Il pozzo di satana)..

Anyways, regardless of how it's linguistically deciphered for the purposes of voting in the project, I was bowled over by this stylistically acerbic J-horror ripoff of The Haunting. Its visual expressionism, eclectic score, inspired set design, terrifying experimental shot choices, etc. all craft involving suspense and unnerving horror sensations (something I'm generally immune to- what a treat!), and it seemed like every scene cultivated a blend of well-shaped introductory character and narrative elements bent by irregular yet propulsive forward momentum and genuinely hair-raising tonal stimulation. A lock for my list, and I imagine many members here will be charmed by its wavelength of relentlessly unpredictable disturbances using all forms the medium offers when the Mondo Macabro disc hits the streets.

[Rayon Vert]

Can anybody vouch for the German blu? I watched this on the U.S. DVD but I'm definitely interested in picking it up unless there are any blistering transfer or AR issues

Here's a short review and a caps-a-holic comparison with the US dvd. It fits with my impression of what I saw on the French blu ray, and they came out within weeks of each other, so it's probably the same master. There's a supplement about the "restoration" of the film for blu ray on the French disc but I don't remember it (if I watched it). Decent at best, but almost a jewel compared with the awful dvd (man was that thing dark)!

[swo17]

House of Terrors

Added

[TMDaines]

Pretty sure Watkins’ The War Game was shown in 1966 for the first time.

[swo17]

Apparently it was made in 1965 for BBC TV and scheduled to air 6 Oct 1965 but then deemed unfit for broadcast. It first screened in theaters, on 13 Apr 1966 per Wikipedia but 1 Nov 1965 per a DVD Beaver review (is this referencing something in the BFI booklet? I don't have it on me at the moment). The BFI release calls it a 1965 film. As with other censored/suppressed works, I'd be inclined to assign it to the year in which its makers initially intended its release, regardless of which of those theatrical release dates is correct.

[DarkImbecile]

Some first-time viewings:

Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa) — I've tended to prefer Kurosawa's works when they're exploring a darker and more critical view of humanity, but of his warmer humanist films I've seen, this might be my favorite. The episodic nature of the stories allows for Kurosawa to adroitly skip from genre to genre — horror, melodrama, romance, action — even as he steadily lays the foundation for the ethical awakening of Yūzō Kayama's Dr. Yasumoto. Toshiro Mifune's portrayal of stoic moral clarity is as strong as one would expect, but it's Kayama's ability to provide a compelling counterpoint of immaturity, growth, and enlightenment opposite Mifune's steady certainty that makes the film work dramatically. Similarly, the gradual revelations of Terumi Niki's performance as Otoyo — a young girl rescued by the clinic who slowly discovers her own capacity for compassion and service — work in parallel with those of Yasumoto's character to highlight the cascading effects of treating people as if they matter, even when they don't believe they do. Roughly on par with High and Low as my favorite of Kurosawa's 1960s films.

Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellochio) — I've had a bit of an odd journey in terms of evaluating this film: while unpleasant to watch for both subject matter and filmmaking choices, its toxic stew of familial hatreds, class privilege, and frailties mental and physical has lingered stubbornly for the last few weeks, enough so that I think I have to reluctantly recommend the film with plentiful caveats.

Lou Castel's debut as Alessandro is definitely one of the elements that repelled me at first, wavering on the line between portraying an unstable, irritating character and just giving a maddening performance. One of several epileptic siblings living with their blind mother in a rural villa, Alessandro fantasizes about killing the ailing members of his family, ostensibly to free his healthy older brother from the burden of caring for them — though it becomes clear his motivations are less straightforward as the film progresses. Like a cross-Atlantic precursor to some of Harmony Korine's more provocative work, Fists in the Pocket is deceptively simple and aggressively exasperating, with the lead performance, the editing, the sound design, and the jumps in perspective keeping viewers unsettled and anxious, sometimes pointlessly and sometimes to meaningful ends.

As my initial irritation with the characters and some of the techniques Bellochio uses to tell this story (largely in the first half) has faded, the parts of this film that are effective — particularly Paola Pitagora as Giulia and how that character's relationship with Alessandro evolves over the course of the film — have crept to the forefront. I don't think the film is as easily rejected as I would have liked it to be immediately after it ended, and I'll probably have to investigate some of Bellochio's other work to see if there's even more here to draw out than I've reluctantly done.

Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Ōshima) — What an absolutely diamond-perfect premise: Katsuo Nakamura's Atsushi is blackmailed under threat of prison and/or murder into safekeeping millions of yen for a corrupt businessman, but in a heartbroken spiral after the girl of his dreams marries someone else — even after he's killed a man to protect her — he decides to spend all the money in a year-long hedonistic rampage (none of which is a spoiler, by the way, because it's all established in the first 10 minutes!). If the film itself doesn't quite live up to the promise of that setup or earn its bleakly ironic ending, Nagisa Ōshima still provides some strikingly hallucinatory imagery, editing, and sound design that get us into Atsushi's particular headspace of sexual obsession, guilt, paranoia, and self-destructive 'nice guy' entitlement. A little too uneven and intermittently draggy to be great, but more than intriguing enough to be worth the brisk runtime.

The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde) — Cornel Wilde's survivalist action film has enough going for it that I see why it has its admirers: the widescreen cinematography shows off the South African locations handsomely enough, some of the survivalist adventure sequences work well, and there's just enough of a veneer of white innocence gifted to Wilde's safari guide that you don't immediately root for him to be encased in mud and baked on a spit like you might for some of the other European characters.

That said, it takes some pretty striking cognitive dissonance to have the only European character in the last two-thirds of the film be the one rescuing an African child from the black slavers raiding her village. And to then have the triumphant finale feature the hero reaching a colonialist outpost so an occupying army can gun down the natives chasing him, only to have the lone surviving tribesman give him an acknowledgement of respect for having escaped... it's all a bit too much historical and cultural weight for such a slight film to bear. Even the attempts to equate man's savagery to man to the animal kingdom's feral fight for survival on the African plains with sometimes awkwardly inserted nature footage fall flat; it's a sometimes very handsome film with an empty head.

[BrianB]

Could we please add Jacso’s Jelenlet (Presence) to the list?

[swo17]

Added

[Rayon Vert]

The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde) — Cornel Wilde's survivalist action film has enough going for it that I see why it has its admirers: the widescreen cinematography shows off the South African locations handsomely enough, some of the survivalist adventure sequences work well, and there's just enough of a veneer of white innocence gifted to Wilde's safari guide that you don't immediately root for him to be encased in mud and baked on a spit like you might for some of the other European characters.

That said, it takes some pretty striking cognitive dissonance to have the only European character in the last two-thirds of the film be the one rescuing an African child from the black slavers raiding her village. And to then have the triumphant finale feature the hero reaching a colonialist outpost so an occupying army can gun down the natives chasing him, only to have the lone surviving tribesman give him an acknowledgement of respect for having escaped... it's all a bit too much historical and cultural weight for such a slight film to bear. Even the attempts to equate man's savagery to man to the animal kingdom's feral fight for survival on the African plains with sometimes awkwardly inserted nature footage fall flat; it's a sometimes very handsome film with an empty head.

If you've seen this through owning the Criterion disc, I'd recommend listening to the commentary. Unfortunately I don't remember it well enough to provide relevant details here, but I remember that it revealed a lot more complexity to the film specifically in relation to the racism/colonialism angles you're bringing out here. It definitely made the film out to be something other than "an empty head". (Plus it's Stephen Prince, in my book the best dvd/blu-ray commentator ever?)

[DarkImbecile]

If you've seen this through owning the Criterion disc, I'd recommend listening to the commentary. Unfortunately I don't remember it well enough to provide relevant details here, but I remember that it revealed a lot more complexity to the film specifically in relation to the racism/colonialism angles you're bringing out here. It definitely made the film out to be something other than "an empty head". (Plus it's Stephen Prince, in my book the best dvd/blu-ray commentator ever?)

That’s intriguing, because my immediate reaction to what I perceived as the whitewashing of Wilde’s character and his place in the colonial hierarchy was so strong that perhaps I wasn’t as open to (or even looking for) nuance as I could have been. Might not get to it before this list closes, but consider your suggestion noted.

[domino harvey]

Casanona ’70 (Mario Monicelli)
What threatens to be a two hour one joke movie about Marcello Mastroianni’s impotency then evolves into a second, equally-unfunny joke about how he can only get off if there’s an element of danger to his sexual trysts. Excruciating “comedy” wherein the only point of interest was me thinking, “Boy, this cuck husband in the final vignette sure looks like Marco Ferreri” and then discovering afterward that it was in fact him.

John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! (J Lee Thompson)
Richard Crenna’s undercover football coach notorious for his poor sense of direction accidentally crash lands his spy-plane in the fictional land of Fawzia, headed by Peter Ustinov’s king. Also present in this orientalist fantasia: incognito spinster photojournalist Shirley MacLaine, who is snuck into the king’s harem by Telly Savalas. Also along for the ride, some of cinema’s best “That guy”s: Fred Clark, Jim Backus, and Harry Morgan. Hard to lose with a cast that great, a pro like Thompson behind the camera, and a screenplay by the author of the Exorcist, right? Oh, no. This movie is so astonishingly bad that only a collective of talented people could ever possibly have failed this hard. Every single actor is terrible in this, with particular “praise” for Ustinov and MacLaine’s deeeeepppppllllyyyyyyy annoying perfs. Ustinov, who spoke multiple languages in real life, decides it would be funnier to just spout off gibberish as Arabic while crossing his eyes… for the entire fucking movie. MacLaine, who is the victim of this film’s deep hatred of women (don’t worry, it also hates Jews AND Arabs, so well done on covering all the angles), is too game at masochistically subjecting herself to the hilarity of constantly being threatened with rape (at one point rubbing herself with garlic and blacking out her teeth like a denizen from Dogpatch to fend off Ustinov's attentions)— and she also sings the unbearable theme song! As is often the case, if there’s a film with this many stars in it but you’ve never heard of it, there’s probably a reason. And so I must apologize to the Money Trap and Le faux pas— this is, by a wide margin, the worst film of 1965... and maybe the 60s overall.

Par un beau matin d'été (Jacques Deray)
Jean-Paul Belmondo and associates kidnap rich heiress Geraldine Chaplin in this James Hadley Chase adaptation. I know Chase is wildly popular in France, but based on what we get here, this is a remarkably stupid plot and was probably doomed from the outset if it is in anyway faithful to the source novel. Belmondo’s shift from obnoxious asshole shaking down tourists by setting up his sister as bait for blackmail to being the only kidnapper trying to protect Chaplin is unconvincing, as are most if not all of the plot machinations surrounding this change.

Pleins feux sur Stanislas (Jean-Charles Dudrumet)
Not even the opportunity to practice Zardi Spotting could save this mess about a famous retired spy who is pulled back into a new mystery. I just praised Jean Marais in Le gentleman de Cocody for doing everything he fails to do here— this is true “Just rolled onto the set, where do I stand” acting.

Quand passent les faisans (Edouard Molinaro)
A modestly amusing set-up never quite pays off in this tale of a duo of small time conmen (Jean Lefebrvre and Bernard Blier) joining up with a more experienced third, Paul Meurisse, to fleece Michel Serrault’s idiotic billionaire. Like seemingly all con artist movies, this hinges on there being a “hidden” additional con at the end, only this one is so obvious that it really dampens the alleged superiority of Meurisse’s character for falling for it. And yet, I can’t deny that while I didn’t laugh once, I did find this entertaining and engaging, even as it starts hitting more familiar discordant notes while nearing the finish line. [P]

Young Cassidy (Jack Cardiff)
The confusing credits of this (“A John Ford Film… directed by Jack Cardiff”) seem to portend ill tidings, but I mildly enjoyed this elastic biography of Sean O’Casey, playwright of the Plough and the Stars, even if the grand claims to O’Casey’s eternal relevancy by Michael Redgrave as WB Yeats in the finale was obviously a swing and a miss these days, when O’Casey’s legacy has not persevered as promised. Uber-tan Rod Taylor is somehow fine as an irishman, and Julie Christie, with second billing, is in this for all of three minutes. Some cautious flirtations with testing the boundaries of on-screen violence here as well, but not to the extent that it’s any more than a footnote.

[swo17]

As a reminder, you all have until end of the day to suggest changes to the list of eligible titles in the first post of this thread

[domino harvey]

I’m putting in some last minute viewings… when exactly is the end of the day?

[swo17]

I want to be able to create the poll at like 9am Eastern tomorrow morning