my favorite movies of 1960:

(1) The Apartment

(2) Psycho

(3) Zazie dans le Métro

(4) The Time Machine

favorite of 1960:

The Apartment

(Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray. Directed by Billy Wilder.)

A movie about how you have to stand up for yourself.

The Apartment gets called a romantic comedy, and it is inspiring and energizing — but it also has a dark, dramatic side.

Ebert observed this about The Apartment and other Billy Wilder movies (in a review that largely gives away The Apartment’s plot):

the great Wilder pictures don’t play as period pieces but look us straight in the eye. … “The Apartment” is still tougher and more poignant than the material might have permitted. The valuable element in Wilder is his adult sensibility; his characters can’t take flight with formula plots, because they are weighted down with the trials and responsibilities of working for a living. In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in “The Apartment” they have to be reminded that they have anything else.

What’s the matter?

The mirror. It’s broken.

Yes, I know. I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel.

Stream The Apartment on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

 

2nd favorite of 1960:

Psycho

(Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, Martin Balsam. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.)

When I watch this Hitchcock movie, I like to imagine I’m seeing it in a theater back in 1960, because I long to do what’s no longer possible: to experience the full shock of how Psycho overturned audience’s expectations.

Stream Psycho on these sites.

 

3rd favorite of 1960:

Zazie dans le Métro

[French]

(Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret, Carla Marlier, Annie Fratellini, Vittorio Caprioli. Directed by Louis Malle.)

A young girl (Zazie, played by Catherine Demongeot in her debut) goes on a trip to Paris wanting nothing more than to ride the subway (le Métro), which is closed because of a strike. If that sounds like the premise of a sweet coming-of-age movie where the kid starts out with naively youthful notions and ends up learning some life lessons … then get ready to have your expectations shattered along with many wine bottles and other objects in this movie.

Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro makes so little sense that you feel compelled to find the sense in it. It’s so fantastically absurd that it makes us wonder if normal movies are any less absurd.

Pauline Kael observed:

Movies are said to be an international language, but sometimes a film that is popular in one country finds only a small audience in another. This anarchistic, impudent comedy (from Raymond Queneau’s novel), a great success in France in 1960, was hardly heard of in the United States. … To Americans, Zazie seemed to go too far — to be almost demonic in its inventiveness, like a joke that gets so complicated you can’t time your laughs comfortably.

Stream Zazie dans le Métro on the Criterion Channel (with bonus features). If you don’t subscribe, try a free 14-day trial.

4th favorite of 1960:

The Time Machine

(Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux, Alan Young. Directed by George Pal.)

Based on a novella by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine has inspired other time travel movies including Back to the Future (my favorite of 1985). The Back to the Future trilogy has even been called a “reimagining of [The Time Machine, both the book and the movie,] for the 1980s generation” — that’s according to an academic essay called ‘There’s Something Very Familiar About All This’: Time Machines, Cultural Tangents, and Mastering Time in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and the Back to the Future trilogy.

Well, the future’s already there. It’s irrevocable. It cannot be changed.

I wonder. Now that’s the most important question to which I hope to find an answer: Can man control his destiny? Can he change the shape of things to come?

In this scene, the time traveler (Rod Taylor) looks for answers about the distant future:

Stream The Time Machine on these sites.

UPDATE: A few days after I added The Time Machine as one of my favorite movies of 1960, the leading woman, Yvette Mimieux, died at age 80 on January 18, 2022. She had her breakthrough in this movie playing the poignant character of Weena, a member of the docile post-human race called Eloi.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.