Favorite Films By Decade: the 1960s

Mar 10

My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

We’ve already covered the 1940s and the 1950s and continue today with the 1960s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

Let the arguments continue. . . .

1960s:

“Nothing But A Man” (1964) . . .

Like other progressive New York teens of our generation, I first got involved in the Civil Rights Movement in high school during the early- and mid-1960s, working with Friends of SNCC and the Harlem chapter of CORE. No contemporary film better exposed the racism of the times and the struggle of working-class African Americans seeking equality and social justice than this independently made drama. Ivan Dixon stars as a member of an all-Black crew of laborers repairing railroad tracks throughout the South. After he falls in love with a minister’s daughter and teacher (jazz singer Abbey Lincoln) who works in a segregated school in a small Alabama town, he takes a new job in a lumber mill, but gets into trouble for telling his fellow Black workers to “stick together.” Dixon gives an exceptionally powerful performance as a proud man trying to deal with the constant bigotry and prejudice he faces.

Hollywood wasn’t interested in such stories, and there were virtually no contemporary Black producers and directors with the financial means to make a film such as this. “Nothing But A Man” was made on a limited budget by two white, Jewish New Yorkers, Michael Roemer (a refugee from Nazi Germany as a child) and Robert M. Young. The latter had previously made the Peabody Award-winning documentary “Sit-in,” about the student-led movement to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee, for NBC. For this film, Roemer directed, co-wrote and co-produced with Young, who also served as the cinematographer. Before embarking on “Nothing But A Man,”Roemer and Young consulted with leaders and activists in the Movement and conducted extensive research. This remarkable, pathbreaking film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1994.

Close behind:

“Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964):

Only a gifted director like Stanley Kubrick, working with an actor, Peter Sellers, who could believably and hilariously play three distinct characters, could take a story about the perils of an inadvertent nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and make it as a side-splittingly outrageous satire of the Cold War.

“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964):

Richard Lester’s fast-paced film about the Beatles and Beatlemania showed John, Paul, George and Ringo to be as clever and inventive as their music, and clearly demonstrated why this band from Liverpool could appeal to young people worldwide.

“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962):

John Frankenheimer’s suspenseful and politically charged thriller, starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey, Janet Leigh and the extraordinary Angela Lansbury, was made in the wake of the Korean War and Joe McCarthy’s Congressional reign of terror.

“Dont [sic] Look Back” (1967):

Documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker’s fascinating fly-on-the-wall examination of Bob Dylan on his solo, acoustic tour of England in early 1965 reveals the enormous talent, defensiveness and occasional nastiness of his subject, who was on the cusp of going electric.

“West Side Story” (1961):

I’ve loved musical theater since I was a kid, and no musical can match “Tonight,” “Maria,” “Somewhere,” “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love,” “America,” “I Feel Pretty” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

But how could he leave out “The Americanization of Emily,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Judgment at Nuremberg,” “The Producers” and “Tom Jones”?

Coming next week: The 1970s

Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, after previously serving as an editor for the Daily Californian, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine, Mother Jones and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about Film and TV History in a weekly columfn about DVDs that was syndicated by the McClatchy and Scripps Howard news services. Since 2003 he has co-chaired a summer film program at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society in Putnam Valley, NY. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.

Bruce Dancis

Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, where he also wrote a syndicated column about DVDs. During a long career in journalism, he served as an editor at the Daily Californian, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mother Jones, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about politics, history, movies and rock music for these publications, as well as for Rolling Stone’s Record, In These Times, Guitar Player, Keyboard, the East Bay Voice and San Francisco magazine. In the late ‘60s, he was the lead singer in the Ithaca, New York-based rock band Titanic, and was the editor of the SDS-affiliated magazine, The First Issue. He is the author of Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War (Cornell University Press, 2014) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.