Searching “196” in the TSPDT poll gives 174 1960s worthy films. Polls aren’t everything, I’d argue a movie that you love with a much more limited appeal is what’s really great about movies, but I’ll grant this represents a lot of people that watch a lot of movies.
I can get about half of them…
To Kill a Mockingbird
Charade
Wait Until Dark
Failsafe
The Miracle Worker
The Apartment
Cape Fear
The Odd Couple
To Sir, With Love
A Shot in the Dark
Dr. Strangelove
Psycho
The Birds
When I look through my list of my 100 favorite movies, I find that seven of them were made in the 1960’s:
Army of Shadows (1969, France/Italy, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)
Dr. Strangelove (1964, U.K., dir. Stanley Kubrick)
La Jetée (1962, France, dir. Chris Marker)
Psycho (1960, U.S., dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Ride the High Country (1962, U.S., dir. Sam Peckinpah)
2001 (1968, U.K., dir. Stanley Kubrick)
The Wild Bunch (1969, U.S., dir. Sam Peckinpah)
In no particular order:
Lawrence of Arabia
The Great Escape
Bonnie and Clyde
Days of Wine and Roses
Kelly’s Heroes
Bullitt
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
The Time Machine
Planet of the Apes
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Charade
Elmer Gantry
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Becket
The Train
The Dirty Dozen
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
The Italian Job
Gambit
Cool Hand Luke
Fitzwilly
Two for the Road
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Once Upon a Time in the West
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
I would add:
Spartacus (1960)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
::looks around::
Nobody’s mentioned The Producers yet? Sure, it deserved the Oscar it won for its script; the script, by itself, was terrific. But learning what Gene Wilder can do with a terrific script? That’s magic, lemmetellya. (Granted, everything hinges on hitting it out of the park with the show-within-a-show; but they do that, too.)
Good catch. I think I’ll put in His Days Are Numbered (1962) as the replacement. Thanks.
Kelly’s Heroes: I love this movie, but it was 1970. Otherwise it would have been in my list.
Fitzwilly: I forgot this one, I would take it over Dr. No
I figured that out earlier while working on my 1970s list. I’ll swap in Women in Love, the Oliver Reed movie from 1969.
Pretty much what I would have picked, but take out Yellow Submarine and replace it with A Hard Day’s Night (1964 IIRC).
And wasn’t The Lion In Winter released in 1968?
Yes, 1968 is correct.
I wanted to include a Beatles movie and I know how important A Hard Day’s Night was at the time but I realized I have enjoyed Yellow Submarine a lot more often over the years and from 3 different point of views. Child, guy in his early 20s and father of little kids. A Hard Day’s Night was really good once, but not as much on re-watching.