1960s

Films from the 1960s

Breathless (1960)

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In the early 1960s, a movie — like this week’s Breathless — that pushed the boundaries and aesthetics of cinema had a much easier time breaking through.

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Breathless (1960)

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With the availability of high-quality filmmaking technology — think 4K cameras (or mobile phones), digital audio recorders, small but bright LED lights, fast computers with editing software — you’d think that anyone with a modest amount of talent, skill, and interest would be making movies. Maybe they are and the market is just too saturated and they are sidetracked with YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Tik-Tok, and such.

It’s a good thing director Jean-Luc Godard faced a different media environment.

From the opening dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the low-end studio that churned out low-budget films of action and adventure, to constant references throughout Breathless (a young woman hawking Cahiers du Cinéma on the street, movie stills of Humphrey Bogart, cinema visits, the cameo by Jean-Pierre Melville and mention of Bob Montagné, and the multiple iris shots), Godard’s love of the movies is obvious.

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Woman in the Dunes

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Watching this week’s movie pick leaves you feeling as if you need a shower to wash off all the gritty sand and the mundane existence clinging to every pore of your sweaty body.

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Woman in the Dunes

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Woman in the Dunes keeps you scrambling to understand what’s going on.

For the first 30 minutes or so, I thought director Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s Woman in the Dunes involved a Town With a Dark Secret. I expected something along the lines of The Wicker Man or Get Out. It was more than that.

School teacher Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) goes to the dunes in search of a new species of beetle, hoping to make a name for himself in the field of entomology. However, after missing the last bus home, he accepts an offer from villagers to stay the night at the home of a woman (Kyôko Kishida) at the bottom of a sand pit. The next morning, he discovers that he’s been trapped and is expected to shovel sand in exchange for rations.

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Charade (1963)

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Charade is the perfect movie for a relaxing evening. Stir up a cocktail, settle into your comfy seat, and be swept away on a romantic adventure in Paris. And who better to join you there than Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and rubber-faced Walter Matthau.

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"Charade" (1963)

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It’s not the least bit realistic (particularly James Coburn‘s accent). But who cares?

The cast (aside from that accent) is strong; the photography is lush, both in the studio and on location in Paris; and the story moves along briskly, with just enough mystery to keep you guessing.

I know it sounds cliche, but I’ll say it anyway: They don’t make movies like this anymore.

Just before watching Charade, I had finished up what you might consider a present-day equivalent: Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. But Bodyguard (like its shorter-named predecessor) is violent, vulgar, and vastly over-the-top, with action from start to finish.

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Shoot the Piano Player

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French New Wave films are an area that I’ve woefully overlooked.

While I’ve seen a handful — La Jetée, Bob le Flambeur, Alphaville, and (thanks to film club) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — I haven’t seen the essential movies.

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Shoot the Piano Player

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(Curiously, one list of New Wave films included François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the movie, but don’t consider it New Wave.)

So much has been written about the New Wave and Shoot the Piano Player that it doesn’t make sense to rehash things. But a few thoughts came to mind while watching the movie and an accompanying interview with Truffaut from 1965.

During the chase at the end of the movie, one of the gangsters, Momo (played by Claude Mansard), twirls his pistol before firing a fatal shot. It’s incongruous with the seriousness of the scene.

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Z

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Costa-Gavras’ 1969 movie Z opens with a twist on the standard disclaimer: “Any similarity to real persons and events is not coincidental. It is INTENTIONAL.”

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Z (1969)

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A quick search of Wikipedia turns up the story behind the film. Greek anti-war activist Grigoris Lambrakis was assassinated by two far-right extremists in 1963, as detailed in the 1967 novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos. The event is apparently pretty much what is depicted in the film.

Costa-Gavras is best known here for his 1982 Academy Award-winning film Missing (starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek). Like Z and most of Costa-Gavras’ other films, it’s a political story involving the search for a missing journalist amid a coup d’état in Chile.

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A Raisin in the Sun

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I hadn’t seen A Raisin in the Sun in decades, probably not since the 1970s or early ’80s, until we rewatched it in the film club.

A Raisin in the Sun started out as a stage play. All of the major cast members from the original Broadway production starred in the film adaptation, save for Stephen Perry who plays the young son, Travis.

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A Raisin in the Sun

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Maybe adaptation isn’t the right word.

Watching the movie is like watching a stage play rather than a film. That extends to the acting and the makeup.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great film; it just has some technical flaws.

A Raisin in the Sun, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play, focuses on the Youngers, a multi-generational Black family, living in a south Chicago tenement, who are dealing with the death of a father and a $10,000 insurance payout.

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Kwaidan

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Had it not been our film club pick, I probably wouldn’t have watched Kwaidan. But, boy, am I glad I did — what a beautiful movie.

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Kwaidan

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The 1965 Japanese film, which takes its title from Lafcadio Hearn’s 1904 book, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, falls more into the genre of ghost stories than horror.

The movie credits open in a near-silence, periodically and startlingly broken by percussive instruments. (Warning: Don’t turn up the volume thinking it’s just a very quiet soundtrack.)

Wikipedia mentions that the film’s director, Masaki Kobayashi, went over budget and had to sell his house to complete the film. Well, you can certainly see where the money went. The sets, which appear to be entirely build on a soundstage, are lavish with intricate detail that shows up well in the pristine print streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Take the setting for the first of four stories, “The Black Hair.” As the segment opens, the home of a swordsman and his wife has seen better days, as has their marriage. He leaves his wife to find fame and fortune. As the story unfolds, the house crumbles under his feet just as his life crumbles before his eyes. The textures of both sights and sounds in the final scene are as sumptuous as they are chilling.

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