Critics Club III: Film of the Year 1960

[Neon Ignition]

New year means the next stage can begin but... instead we're going to make like Huery Lewis and the News and go Back in Time!
Yes, we're expanding the scope of Critics Club III and casting our eye to those swinging 60's with...

1960




Discuss your memories and thoughts of the films of 1960

[Atticus]

My two favourites are Psycho and The Apartment ... both controversial at the time. Easy to understand with Psycho. Shocking and ground breaking. And brilliant! Even the trailer is genius:

[Dogg Thang]

How old do you think we are?!

I have seen very few of these and only ticked two. My top - Village of the Damned. I can't remember when I first saw this, probably on Channel 4 at 1 in the morning in my late teens and the film captivated me. The atmosphere is incredible. It's a very simple film and that's to its credit, I think. And it's creepy. The kids are great in it and it really gets across that very difficult situation - that they're your kids but also clearly not. If they were just bad evil kids that popped up out of nowhere, it would be an easy thing, but the movie gets across the grey areas in often quite subtle ways. John Carpenter made a decent remake in the 90s and leaning hard into that was one of the only things he really added but, actually, it wasn't needed. It was there in the original film but just never highlighted or turned into a plot point.

I have the movie on DVD along with its lesser sequel, Children of the Damned. And I still give it a rewatch every few years.

[vanpeebles]

The League of Gentlemen is one of the finest British films ever made. Just brilliant. I think it's out on blu ray this month too.

https://networkonair.com/coming-soon/3063-league-of-gentlemen-the-blu-ray-

[Neon Ignition]

The film I most remember from this list is The Time Machine, I remember watching that one as a kid and though it's the weakest part of the film these guys always stick in my mind strong

[Neon Ignition]

Also: I won't be doing a run for the 1950's etc but I think at some point I'll do a curated greatest hits run for iconic films in the earlier days of cinema that are still liked today so those decades don't go unrepresented.

[vanpeebles]

Morlocks!

[QualityChimp]

Morlocks are the descendants of people who voted for Brexit.

[wakka]

I LOVE The Time Machine. I remember watching that as a kid on TV and it really stuck with me, too. I've seen it a few times since and it's a fun film. The book gets really weird with it, he goes much further into the future, beyond the time of the Morlocks, until the Earth is just one big ocean with a weird sea monster floating ominously off in the distance.

Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't yet gotten around to reading that 120 year old book yet I guess.

I've not seen the vast majority of these but there's a load of good stuff here - Spartacus, Psycho, The Apartment (love this one), Magnificent Seven. All films that are still extremely credible watches 60 years on.

[QualityChimp]

The thing that threw me was that loads of these titles have been used more recently!

Jurassic Park: The Lost World was in 1960?! Oh, wait!

Had to revote because I thought The Time Machine was later, so a different version.
It's because Pyscho and Village of the Damned are B&W, so seem older.

The Time Machine is great. Those colours are still really vibrant.
I love it when George finally starts using it and the sequence is really engaging as he slowly speeds time up at first, watching a snail whizzing around, then the sun spinning around the Earth, then seasons passing and finally something terrible happens in the far future.
I loved how they used animation to show the flowers wilting.

The time machine itself is pretty iconic, featuring in media like Gremlins, Quantum Leap and The big Bang Theory.

The Gremlins cameo is brilliant because if you watch carefully, it's gone!




The Village of the Damned is also a corker you can still watch today (probably more than the John Carpenter remake, sadly).
Those kids are damn creepy, without needing dark lights, monster or jump scares.
The finale is really tense where the teacher is trying to outwit the Midwich Cuckoos.

Random bonus: Escape from Midwich Valley live (wait for the drop at 3:14 )

->Open Spoiler<-

Psycho is amazing in so many ways.
Hitchcock was a genius. I love how you don't see the knife going in, but it's still being analysed years later.
Having the big marquee star get got so early was a really brave move.
You can find loads of dissections of it, but it's so clever, how it manipulates the audience with editing, perspective and direction.