30 favorite non-French movies, 1955-1964

Extremely normie opinions about sex jokes, deep focus, and man's inhumanity to man

First, a disclaimer that my movie-watching has always been haphazard compared to my spreadsheet-oriented music-listening, and I don’t claim to have watched, let alone re-watched, everything important. I’m pretty sure The Night of the Hunter and Douglas Sirk should be on here, but the former I haven’t seen in decades, while the latter only showed up on the Criterion Channel this week and I was busy finishing off The Apu Trilogy after twenty years. Second, the list; yes, it’s in order—a lot of order. Links if they’re on Criterion or in one case Internet Archive, otherwise, unless you’re in one of the ~4 American cities with a functioning rep scene, it’s probably best to track down a DVD/Blu-Ray:

1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

2. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)

3. L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)

4. The Apu Trilogy (Satyajit Ray)

5. The Apartment (Billy Wilder)

6. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti)

7. Hud (Martin Ritt)

8. A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester)

9. An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujirō Ozu)

10. The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad)

11. Charade (Stanley Donen)

12. Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith)

13. Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa)

14. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)

15. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks)

16. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)

17. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa)

18. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick)

19. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)

20. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer)

21. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel)

22. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda)

23. A Shot in the Dark (Blake Edwards)

24. Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

25. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)

26. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)

27. The Searchers (John Ford)

28. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse)

29. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Stanley Kramer)

30. To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan)

Parameters: Fifteen minute minimum so I don’t have to work out how What’s Opera, Doc? compares to all of these. One per auteur, with two exceptions. Hitchcock is, in my extremely normie opinion, the finest director of the period, and even with two entries, omitting Psycho causes me some pain (if your list isn’t slightly painful to you, it’s too long.) Wilder is not the second-best director of the period, but my two choices are great enough and different enough, whereas including further Kurosawas, while great enough, would provide little additional insight.

This is my favorite film ten-year period—rivaled by the 2000s, and that mainly because that was when I went to the movies the most—controversially, since it’s associated with a certain bloat (“White Elephant Art”, per Farber) and pretentiousness (“Strained Seriousness”, per Sarris.) These are fair complaints, to which I might add too many movies about interior decoration. Still, any aesthete worth their salt makes exceptions, and my numbers 29 and 30 in particular are meant to make claims that occasionally more is more, and that in this day and age possessing a moral seriousness seems a quaint thing to complain about. As for interior decorating, well, there’s a lot of pregnant-with-meaning furniture in a lot of the movies on my list.

The first reason I love this era is the French New Wave, but I already posted about that during Lockdown Summer. Hence the non-French stipulation, which does mean that Mon Oncle falls through the cracks, but you can throw it in about two-thirds down if you want.

All the French New Wave on the Criterion Channel, 1958-64

The period saw classical Hollywood cinema fall into a fairly comfortable death spiral. Iconoclasts like Welles aside, the great directors and male actors of the studio era were not only able to find employment, they were often able to work on big budget , career-capping personal projects, and to employ technicians who were by now highly skilled. Admittedly it was a rough time for American actresses: blowing off the Hays Code for more risqué rhythms meant that as screens got wider, roles for women got narrower. If Patricia Neal in Hud eventually found the approach the New Hollywood would adopt, Marilyn Monroe’s cheesecake parody seems all the more perspicacious as a bridging measure at this remove.

Perhaps the era’s most consequential trend was the blossoming of a true world cinema. Decreasing costs meant that it became much more feasible for filmmakers outside of the richest countries, not to mention weirdos able to get hold of a 16mm camera, to make movies with concerns beyond the strictly commercial, whether this meant star directors like Buñuel globetrotting for production budgets or Eastern Bloc film school alumni chipping away at socialist realist conventions. The two shortest entries on my list are the most forward-looking. Flaming Creatures achieves a freedom in libidinous expression that almost no one has been horny enough to match. The House Is Black, the only film on the list by a woman, implies there are entire worlds excluded by the cinema up to this point, and that all of these worlds have their poetries. For the remainder of the twentieth century, it would be a major task of the movies to express them.