my favorite movies of 1961:
(1) West Side Story
(4) Cash on Demand
favorite of 1961:
(Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, Russ Tamblyn. Directed by Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins.)
My favorite musical. The real stars of West Side Story are Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics, respectively. The movie is great but flawed, as Ebert explains in this review.
Stream West Side Story on Amazon Prime (leaving after June 2024), Tubi (free with ads), the Roku Channel (free with ads), or these sites.
2nd favorite of 1961:
Through a Glass Darkly [Swedish: Såsom i en Spegel] (Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow. Directed by Ingmar Bergman.)
This Bergman movie takes place entirely on a remote island and has only four characters, all family members. It was the beginning of Bergman’s “silence of God” trilogy: three movies that don’t share any characters but all “examine the necessity of religion and question the promise of faith.” This video talks about the trilogy with a focus on Through a Glass Darkly:
Another video analyzing the movie (from Learning About Movies, a YouTube channel by Dr. Josh Matthews):
The only woman in Through a Glass Darkly struggles with a mental illness which isn’t specified, but Harriet Andersson prepared for the role by consulting with a psychiatric nurse on schizophrenia. The movie culminates in her intense experience of God in a shocking form.
Harriet Andersson, who was in several Bergman movies (including my top choice for 1953 and one of my choices for 1955), is one of my favorite living actresses. I like how she’s both consistent and inconsistent. She’s consistently excellent. But she’s inconsistent in that from one movie to the next, she truly seems like a different person. She doesn’t fall back on playing the same character from an earlier movie, the way many actors do to please audiences. She takes risks and keeps surprising us.
Stream Through a Glass Darkly on the Criterion Channel (with bonus features) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free 14-day trial. If you want to own the whole trilogy, you could buy the Criterion blu-ray set in the Barnes & Noble 50% off sale every July and November (and Amazon might lower some prices at those times in response). Or get it as part of Criterion’s set of 39 Bergman movies (I own that set — a great deal at less than $4 per blu-ray).
3rd favorite of 1961:
Breakfast at Tiffany’s(Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Mickey Rooney. Directed by Blake Edwards.)
This movie has plenty of flaws, from the leading man’s blandly inoffensive performance … to Mickey Rooney’s crudely offensive ethnic caricature of a Japanese landlord … to the meandering plot. So I was unsure whether to include it. But as I said in the “rules” for this list: “whenever I found it hard to choose between two movies, I asked myself: which one would I be more enthusiastic about rewatching more times in the future?” Despite its shortcomings, Breakfast at Tiffany’s succeeds at one thing: making us fall in love with Audrey Hepburn, and that’s reason enough to watch it again and again.
Stream Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Amazon Prime or these sites.
4th favorite of 1961:
(Peter Cushing, André Morell, Richard Vernon. Directed by Quentin Lawrence.)
Entirely set in a bank in a small town, this British psychological thriller reminds me of Rope (one of my favorite movies of 1948) and Dog Day Afternoon (one of my favorites of 1975).
It’s also reminiscent of Obsession (one of my faves of 1949), with the villain who slowly and elaborately torments his victim … in an elegantly British way.
The victim, played by Peter Cushing, who you’ve seen in Star Wars (1977), is the cold and severe head of the bank branch. We first see him admonishing an employee for keeping too many personal photos on her desk. Then he threatens to fire another employee, played by Richard Vernon, who would go on to play the man who sits down in a train car with the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (my favorite movie of 1964).
Vernon’s character is named Pearson, and his name might get us wondering if anyone in this movie is seeing the real “person” in front of them. Pearson thinks he knows what kind of person he’s dealing with when a man going by Colonel Gore Hepburn (André Morell) shows up at the bank to do a surprise inspection of their security measures. As you can see in the video above, a pivotal moment happens early in the movie when the inspector scolds Pearson for leading him directly to the bank manager without doing anything to make sure he isn’t a robber. Pearson defends his oversight by telling the inspector: “You don’t look like a gunman.”
“You don’t look like a gunman.” It’s a revealing response: Pearson assumes the man couldn’t be up to anything nefarious because … well … just look at him! We go through life assuming we can get a read on people by looking at them on the surface, but this movie questions that.
Stream Cash on Demand on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.
Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.
A few weeks ago I emailed a comment on this sequence to whom, what we would have called in the old days on the South Side of Chicago, your "ma." She suggested that I should post here. My original comment was that I wasn't very familiar, if at all, with the 20's silents you started out with, but was very familiar with the ones starting around 1930.
ReplyDeleteHaven't caught up with everything since, but I'll start here. I haven't thought about the best movies of 1961 or even looked yet at your alternative choices. Without as yet commenting on your choices or the rest of the movie, "America" is a truly outstanding number.
WERS broadcasting from Emerson College has a program on Saturdays and Sundays called "Standing Room Only" that is devoted to numbers from Broadway Musicals. One thing I have learned from there is that, in the original Broadway score, the America number was originally done by an all-female cast. The change to doing the number from the female cast to the male cast was absolutely brilliant, in terms of contrasting the women's experience vs. the men's experience of the move from PR to New York.
--gpm