50 From 60: My Favorite Films From The 1960's

  Okay, so as anyone reading this page can obviously see, before we get to the more "serious" entries, the first half of this list will include a couple of micro-budgeted B-level movies. That's not to say I'm any kind of committed camp connoiseur or anything, but as someone who loves cinema that covers the full spectrum of the medium, there are a few "classics" of this kind in which I recognize the endearing qualities which help these few rise above the average level of crap they are usually regulated to, up to the level of iconic status of infamy that keeps them alive longer than anyone could foreseen, expected, or even wanted them to.



   If there ever was a motion picture that epitomized the idea a Christmas cult following, there would be very little argument from anyone that this is the one that resides at the very top of the North Pole.
 In their quest to "steal Christmas" with the use of dorky rayguns and cardboard robots, The Martians have not only landed on Earth, but also, they've landed a spot for themselves near the top of the naughty list.
  As a result, for this particular yuletide year, they'll end up getting a nice big ol' can of whoop-ass for Christmas from none other than Santa hisself.

  Despite sporting a stop-motion technique that came off as rather "rudimentary", even by the standards of the time, Rankin and Bass were probably the rock'n'roll TV animation studio for kids who, such as myself, grew up during 1970's.

  As I just mentioned above in the Mad Monster Party description box, as a kid growing up in the 70's, I watched a lot of stop-motion specials on TV. Another thing that I watched a lot of on television back in those days was kaiju.

  What can you expect, I read a lot of comic books, science fiction and pulp fiction novels. The closest thing we had back in those days before CGI to see giant monsters, rayguns and spaceships come to "life were cheap B-level sci-fi and Kaiju flix.

  And, yeah, while many of 'em I eventually grew out of, there are a couple here and there that have stuck deep within the cockles of my heart (that is how the expression goes, right?), mostly because of the happy childhood memeries I have associated with 'em.
  There was one particular creature features type of show that I used watch every saturday afternoon, about 1:00. I don't remember the name of it, but a regular on their kaiju rotation was this one, Frankenstein Conquers the World. 
  Now, to be honest, one of the reasons I liked it so muchas a kid was because, based on the name of this movie, it supposed to have some kind of connection to the legend of the Frankenstein Monster. According to the convoluted plot, somehow the heart of the monster  from the 1800's has been mysterious preserved and ends up in the body of a feral boy running secretly about the streets of 1960's Japan. As crazily randon as that is, is gets even weirder when it results in the boy getting some kind anti-radiation powers, grows to the size of a building and has the ability to generate new limbs if one is cut off.
If after reading that, you're thinking "wow", that is a proper reaction.
  Yeah, it's zany, goofy and doesn't make a whole lotta sense. Unless you're living in the 70's as an 8 yr. old kid. Then, no only does it make some loosely knit kinda set. it's pretty cool.
  So for me, it was cool.



  As an adult, it not just crazy, it's pretty insane. That the makers of this movie were able to string together that kind of a patchwork plot and be committed enough to build an entire full length feature around it (even if, as the visuals and eggects reflect, it was done on a shamefully  modest budget). But, that the kind of craziness isn't enough to dissolve those memories of me as a kid, hunked deep in the sofa, lazily wasting the afternoon away watching a giant "I Was A Teenage Frankenstein" doing battle a against Baragon, a fellow dweller of Godzilla's on the legendary Monster Island.

Okay, so I'm thinking that I should probably stop posting here because the more I type, the more outlandishly random the story of this movie sounds.  In the end, the best way to describe FCtW is "ya gotta see it ta believe it".
It's just so way out there that either you gotta be a hardcore fan of the manic manner of movie-makin' that Japan is notorious for, or ya gotta be an 8 yr. kid in the 70's. 
  Which I was.
  And which is why this offbeat adventure of Dr. Frankenstein's world  comquering legacy is on this list. 

  There's a reason that I have this movie back to back with Frankenstein Conquers the World. It's because this is a sequel to that film, altho not very many film viewers would be able to tell. Before it's release, this project went through several different title changes, all of 'em having the name Frankenstein in 'em. The producers finally settled on Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira, but that was title that they used for the world market outside of the United States. 
 Apparently, the plot a also went thru a  revison or two, which caused quite a bit of a continuity challenge, and in the end, the story barely stitched any of the events of Gargantuas to FCtW. And this was all during the stage when the script was still written in it's original language. It just plain gets totally lost in translation once it reaches the shores of it's more English speaking audiences. Many American kaijo fans had no idea that this was a Frankenstein flick since the working title for it's U.S. release is the more commonly known War of The Garguantuas.
  So, even after watching it on the same creatures features show that I mentioned in FCtW, as a kid, I has no idea that it was the follow-up to that first Kaiju Frankenstein feature, but I loved it just the same. Later on, as an adult who then found out on the internet that the two films were linked, I'm not sure if it enhanced the nolstagic connection I had to these two movies, but it did endear me more to how absolutely bonkers the approach that the makers of these type of movies are. 
  Look, I realize that ya really gotta have a taste for Kaiju and their particular brand of krazy kamp in order to enjoy cinema like this. If it ain't for you, it's kool. Nobody here's mad at ya.
  But if you do, well then, here, lemme open the door t to my wacky world of weird.
Just watch your big, floppy and rubbery step when you come in.

  I gotta be honest witchu guys... I grew up not being a big fan of Disney.
In a couple of my animated lists, I get into detail of why but here, I'll keep it simple. Don't get me wrong even as a kid, I could recognize the quality of artwork that they crafted onto each cell of their moving pictures.  But despite that aspect of their features, I still just found too many of 'em a bit corny and/or tame for my tastes. Especially with reruns of the old Bug Bunny, Droopy, and Popeye cartoons playing all the time, I developed a taste for animated flix that was more "edgy". And the fact that Disney's more family friendly cartooned movie pictures were just dominant didn't help to endear me to 'em.
That said, there were a few rare that I didn like watchin'.  And this one is an example of one of those few that I can admit to liking.
  This screen version of the classical Jungle Book had just enough of the "bare necessities" needed to barely make it on this list of 1960's favorites.

  Here's a B-movie that was bought to my attention when I was having an online discussion about spider themed horrror movies. I gave it a watch on that recommendation despite the fact that I'm not really all that into that kind of low-brow cinema (with the exception of the kaiju films from Toho studios...I find the charm of their rubbery-feet mayhem too hard too resist). And TBH, while I really shouldn't have liked it, the truth is, I found the main character and his crazy campy antics somewhat endearing. Yeah, at the end of the day, it is a B-flick from South America (a continent that knows something about real life spider horrors), but somehow, the consistency of the story throughout the chapter of this franchise makes it something I find myself crawling towards to every once in while, and next thing y'know, I'm caught up in it's web of camp-infested fun. 



  This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is the second chapter in the trilogy about a character named Coffin Joe. He is a caretaker with a taste for murder and on a quest to find the "perfect woman" to help him sire what he deems as immortal prodigy. Kidnapping a group of females and putting them through a series of "fear" tests, he hopes that this will be a effective manner to filter out the ideal woman of his darkest dreams.
  All of which sets up for an interesting story for the day when the son asks his father exactly just how daddy met mommy.

  The only Barbara Streisand movie in any of my lists.
  Seriously.
  I promise.

    As any true fan of the kaiju can tell you, the true King of the Monsters was not so much Godzilla as it was Toho Studios, the movie production company that created many of these types of cryptid films that have made it into the classic line of the medium. For me personally, one of the things I liked most about the Toho daikaiju style was their ability to incorporate really cool and creative story-ideas into the middle of the rubbery cheese melee that was always running amok through the toy vehicles filled streets and cardboarded buildings of Nippon.
 Mothra is a really fine example of this. A giant iinsect that is linked telepathically to two tiny fairy-like beauties who act almost as familiars to the great dusty daikaiju. On top of that, Mothra is concieved almost as a Phoenix-like entity, in that every time it dies, it is soon resurrected as a giant egg, soon to hatch into it's larvae form which is almost as equally formidable as it's mature moth stage.
For me, it's the over-all mythological slant that accompanies this particular kaiju kreation that sets it apart from it's floppy-footed kounterparts and therefore makes it one of my more favorites of the entire  genre of B-listing beasties.

 

   Looking at this list, it becomes quite obvious that I'm a big fan of the whole daikaiju (often just shortened to kaiju) genre from Japan. It also becomes quite evident that, for me, the 1960's was pretty much the Golden Age of Godzilla and all the other Great Gargantuans who hailed from the infamous Monster Island.
 One of the reasons for this was that Tohos Studios, the movie production company responsible for bringing so many big, floppy rubber feet to life, understood what fans of these type of films wanted. And one of those things was crossovers that  featured one cryptid from one particular movie showing up in another. Sometimes it was just as a cameo, other times it was a team up, and other times it was just a full on city devastating brouhaha. 
 With a name like Destroy All Monsters, it doesn't take a nuclear scientist (the kind who tended to show up a lot in these films) that this particular installment is one of the latter. And not just a fight to the finish, but this was the battle royale of all battle royales. With cheese!
   As I just mentoned earlier, team ups and cameos were popular in these massive monster melees. But in DAM, this is the first time ever, that Godzilla, Minilla, Mothra, Rodan, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, Manda, Baragon, and Varan, were featured all together in one movie. Kicking radioactive rubbery tails and taking goofy kaiju style names.

  With Yellow Submarine, it looks like back when John, Paul, George and Ringo were strumming around and changing the pop music scene forever, they were also creating (well, maybe not so much "creating" as just lending their names... and the names of their songs) landmark animation cinema that proved to be quite the "acid" hit for both critics and audiences alike.  Thus demonstrating that this form of hand painted stylized entertainment didn't need to be just for the kiddies. 



 Riding the wave of the Fab Four's* new helmet-haired hippe "look", this animated adventure is about an underwater ride of psychodelica that was originally supposed to be geared towards kids of all ages. But let's be honest here... we all know that, even though some little ones may find some attraction to the funky lookin' Blue Meanies and all of the bright colors splashed all over almost every scene of this kaleidoscopic full length feature, the main viewers who are gonna be attracted to this sixties semi-surreal submersible are those who will grow up with an affinity towards "trips" of a more esoterically exotic nature.
  Yeah,
ya gotta love the sixties, man.



  *BTW, for those of the younger generation, when I, or just about anyone else, refer to to the Fab Four, we're talking about the Beatles. I know many of today's musical acts have had that nickname applied to them, but for my generation, the originators of that term is and always will be the boys from Liverpool.

  As I've mentioned in other entries, it was the spaghetti western that first got me interested in watching cowboys movies. Particularly, Sergio Leone's Dollar Trilogy, featuring Cling Eastwood as the "Man With No Name". Unfortunately, since it was that Man's "grey hat" attitude that I thought was the most interesting aspect of those movies, I was at first a little disappointed at the softness of Eastwood's character in this film. For a story called "Hang 'Em High", I think I was expecting  more of a Man With No Name type of gunslinger, who sought out justice with a much more gritty and dusty sense of vengeance. However, after I read an interview in which Clint stated that the reason he chose to do Hang 'Em was to move away from the archetype established by the Leone westerns, I gave this movie a rewatch and came out of it with a more reevaluated outlook. 
  Now I think I appreciate more what the intent of the storyline was and see that it's premise was to go opposite of the what spaghetti shootouts were going for.
  So while I still like the Italians versions when it comes to tales of the Wild, Wild West more, HEH, IMO, does a very capable job of balancing the dirty modern cowboy genre  with the classical slant that bought the genre to such a prominant status in the world of motion pictures in the first place.

  A trio of go-go dancers with no money but hooked on speed (the velocity, not the drug), go racing out into the desert, with intentions of no-good. After an act of murder and kidnapping, they look to add robbery to their list of crimes. However, little do they know that the cripped old geezer who is to be their next target in their little crime spree is just as  villainous than they are.
So then, who will win this battle between the bad "guys"?
(I mean, y'know... other than the viewers....)



   The king 'o' kleavage kamp, Russ Meyer, kreates one of his all-time klassics with a sexploitation skin flick that sports a name that is more of a sentence that it is a title... Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill!
  To be honest, I'm usually not a real big fan of exploitation films.
  But, after giving this a watch based of it's iconic reputation in the genre, when I first heard one of the crazy female characters in this story say the line "Honey, we don't like nothing soft. Everything we touch is hard",
I knew instantly that I wuz in love.

   In the winter of 1965, the titular character of Charles Shultz's nationally distributed comic strip was bought to life with the television Holiday special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. With its perennial success, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving came along eight years later. In the decades that followed since, both of these programs have become part of the popular consciousness of most of the world. What has become forgotten is that ol' Chuck also had big screen success with a full feature length film which premiered four years in-between the specials, in movie cinemas everywhere. This little diddy about the Brownest of all the Charlie Browns in the world demonstrated how a bumbling boy blockhead still had the power to put asses in the seats, despite being a loser who never fails to fall for Lucy's never ending football gag. Not only was it fire on a critical level, but also, it made it to number one in box office receipts in it's second weekend of release, back in the month of December of 1969.

 Back in the 1930's and early 40's, during the fledging years of horror themed cinema, it was the power trio of Count Dracula, the Wolfman and the Frankenstein "fiend" (that's what they referred to the monster back then) that made the Universal Monsters so universal amoung movie-goers. However, by the late 40's and mid 50's, this was a trend that had pretty much fizzled out, and thus, it appeared as though this "Triumvirate of Terror" had pretty much lost all their  bankability at the box office.  That is, until Hammer Film Productions decided to take a crack at it. Located way across  the pond from Hollywood, and lookin' to make their own unique mark in a field that seemed more dead than the victims of the original "Unholy Three", they jumped at the chance of reinvigorating the "fangoria" of just a decade before. And with their distinctive brand of visceral storytelling and Gothic cinema, not only did Hammer hit it on the nail, but they also sparked up a lightning strike that forever forged their name into the history of horror and showed that the basic elements of the Universal Monsters, such as the curse of the werewolf, still had some serious bite to it.

   With the amount big budget franchise films that get released every year, sometimes it gets hard to believe that there was once a time before Computer Generated Imagery became the go-to and much more affordable process that the cinema world relied on in order to make fantastical beasts and creatures seem like they could actually be a part our physical reality. However, even though Hollywood back then did not have the computer graphics required to make the impossible seem possible, what they did have was Ray Harryhausen. Now, I know that back in the day, he wasn't the only one using stop motion methods to create on celluloid what was, in reality, was uncreatable. But it is pretty hard to find anyone who would argue against his position at the top of the mountain when it came to this particular painstaking technique of 3D animation. And while the filmography which boasted his creations is pretty extensensive (not to mention varied, considering how often it extended beyond the borders of the monster and adventure genre), it's no doubt that his most famous, and most endeared, fantasy flix are the ones based on the mythological monsters of ancient Greece and Rome.
   A loose retelling of the legendary Quest for the Golden Fleece, and an excellecent of example of Mr. Harryhausen's work when it was at it's peak, Jason and the Argonauts demonstrates why so many who grew up in the 60's and 70's have such fond memories of seeing movies in which creaturies and entities that they read about only in history class at school were now coming to life on the silver screen at the movie theater.

What is one to do when the sixties are coming to an end, and so is the decade of free love and drugging out for the respectful purpose of reaching a higher state of being?
Get on your Capt. America bike and make an intercontinental trip for a drug deal big enough to hopefully end up retired in Florida.
And long the way, ad-lib a few pontifications about the hopes, dreams and eventual hopelessness of the diminishing counterculture, maybe even pick up a football helmet wearing, square legal eagle to keep you company as you make a stop or two off the side of the road to take one last piss onto the vast barren lands of the establishment.

  Both Dustin Hoffman and director Mike Nichols made their debuts with this film, and what a set of debuts it was. The Graduate made shitloads of money at the box office and was met with overall critical success. I say "overall" because while it was mostly reviewed positively by many critics, there were some who not only hated it, but vehemently hated it. The negative reviews were so concentrated, that it didn't start to spill over as time went by, and as a result, it seemed that a decade later, reevaluation of the film was lowering the level at which this movie was regarded. I remember by the time I saw it, it had a reputation of only being a so-n-so flick.
Luckily, as more time went on, there has been quite a lot of reevaluation of the reevaluation, and now, not only is the Graduate considered a classic, but also as a steppin stone towards the "New Hollywood" that would emerge in the 1970's. 
  Me, personally, I always liked it from the first moment I watched it. IMO, Nichol's laid back direction, combined with the underneath the surface commentary of the script,  backed up with Dustin's everyman dazed and confused approach to the role, it all rolled up as a nice little window to the way the sensibilities of the 60's scene was groovin' its way into the Hollywood scene, man, not to mention, into the usually fixed formula of the romantic comedy, 

   Low budget works are no strangers to my lists, despite the fact that I'm not really that much into 'em as the typical campy B-movie aficionados. Even giving them the kind of slack required to match the size of hole in their pockets, I still think most of 'em are just plain crap. Personally, I think it starts with intent. Was the movie made based on utilizing principles such creativity or charm to make up for the lack of funds required, or was made just for the sake of cashing in quickly with little financial resources?

I'm sure that there's plenty of room for personal tastes when it comes to the boundaries of those questions, but for me, this is the decade that has the most of those kind of movies on it. 
Roger Corman is well known for running a series of studios that specialized in "cranking out crap", but with the amount that he did crank out continually, a few really good ones came out, just as a result of the laws og averages. An example of this is Targets, which I feature on this list and which is one of my all time top ten of the 60's. Another, although I don't hold anywhere near as high regard, but do regard nonetheless, is the original Little Shop of Horrors.
  Before Rick Moranis, Steve Martin and Bill Murray came in the mid80's to make The Little Shop Of Horrors a quaint and lovable comedy with big high falutin' stop-motion magictry ,there was this 1960 florist farce that relied on bare bones praticality to give their famished flytraps a little bite.

  For a long time, I used to think that I was the King of Sinful Sots.
  Then I saw this.
  And I realized that compared to this guy, I'm just a moldy purple spot
on the dead tomato splot that is his heart.
  You are the true rotter,
Mr. Grinch.



 The mid60's was a good time for Boris Karloff and his effect on the youngr generation. In 1968, as his career was coming to a close, he provided one of his best final roles as that of aging scare-king in a new world of more realistic horror in Targets. Peter Bogdanovich's directoral (and acting) debut, Boris's performance was an excellecent transistion from the old to the new style of making cinematic scare-fare, and simply put, one of my favorite flicks from this decade. 
And of course, two years earlier, Mr. Koloff provided the deep, easy chair narration to How The Grinch Stole Christmas. The televised adaption of Dr. Suess' contribution to the list of perennial Christmas Classics and the one Holiday Special that is such a part of my childhood that , despite being a television special, I can't help but to include on a list of movie faves.

   
  When Rosemary's Baby first hit the movie theaters, it did so with such a tsunamic wave that swept over the counter culture of its time that it bolted both its director and lead actress into the very top tier of stardom. However, but as a ironic metaphor of the flower power generation, both each  would eventually become famous for elements of their private life which had nothing to do with the motion picture industry.
  Mia Farrow was the new face of Hollywood, but would gain more fame for her relationships, particularly with the much older, and much more "fogey", Frank Sinatra, and then with her marriage to Woody Allen.
  And of course, Roman Polanski's name, which had just reachec world wide recognition, would become associated with the "Day that the 60's Died" when his very famous, and very pregnant, wife, screen star Sharon Tate, was murdered with a group of visiting friends, in Polanski's home while he was out overseas working on another film project. 
  It was a piece of history that seem to reflect and even emphasize the dark themes of Rosemary's Baby's premise, which was already solid piece of scare fare for the box office. On it's own, it proved to be quite the cinematic phenomena of it's time, and which served as a precursor films like The Omen and The Exorcist, and their impact on the world of horror movie genre. 

   A straightforward, entertaining thriller with Audrey Hepburn in a quite convincing performance as a blind woman, and Alan Arkin in a cool portrayal as a villianous beatnik.
  And even though both of these characters each has a role that is on opposite sides of each other (one is the protaganist trapped in her apartment while the other serves the role of the antagonist who's tryin' ta get in), each of 'em is an individual whose different intentions in serving the story, is basically, waiting until dark.

The Up Series is a continual set of documentary films that literally lasts a life time. Started in 1964, it documents a the lifespans of a select group of individuals, starting at the age of seven and constantly returning to their individual lives every seven years to update their progress in this journey that we all share.
The end result is a group of story-lines of real lives that cause the kind of deep reflection and introspection than can only come from being a spectator of human lives other than our own.

  A plot formula that rose to prominence among Asian cinema a decade earlier was the concept of a group of ragtag ronin style warriors for hire banding together for the sake of profit and eventually, for justice. Spurred on by the works of famed Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, this was a trend that, by the 1960's began to spill over to Hollywood's shoot 'em up genre, beginning with movies like The Magnificent Seven. 
The success of that ensemble cast filled cowboy adventure led to The Wild Bunch,  another western film influenced by the eastern theme of the Seven Samurai. This time, the band of bad boy bandits are led by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, as a group of past their prime cowboy warriors who live in a world that has left them behind. Out to make one last score, they blaze their way down to a Mexican stand-off type of situation, where it's the old take on the new as old skool six-shooters duel against the more modern and much more murderous machine gun.
And while it may seem that this stonewalled stalemate has it's "heroes", Pike & Co., severely out-numbered and over-powered, these members of the Wild Bunch were never ones to wear white hats, decide that if they're gonna go down, then they're gonna make sure that they take as down as many of the other guys with 'em as they can. In other words, with guns totally ablazin'.
A really cool, not to mention, a pretty violent-for-it's-time western/action flick.

  Hey, do you guys really wanna know what happened to Baby Jane?
  She went bat-sh#t crazy is what happpened.
  And TBH, it's a good thing that she did. Otherwise, we wouldn't have this psychological thriller about the sinister sibling rivarly between two senescent sister starlets.



 Even though movies had been around for many decades by the time of this film's release, with villainous women doing their best to catch up to the terrorizing antics their male counterparts, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? introduces one of the most iconic. And it's no coincidence that it does so by reviving the careers of two of the most iconic actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Two actresses who's decade long diva-centered rivalry is almost as iconic as they are.
Famously produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, his parent company, Warner Bros. Studios, wanted him to find something to do with the two aging drama queens who were box office draws actresses in their prime, but by the early 1960's, were bitter embattled rivals who would go each others throats if one of 'em just looked at the other wrong.
So Aldrich decided to use their animosity to his advantage and put 'em both in a movie in which one spends the whole time terrorizing the other. As a result, the story itself may have been fiction, but the emotional tension would not only ooze off the silver screen as real, but more importantly, as pretty damn scary. Scary enough to provied the studio with the biggest psychological thriller of the year, a successful box office haul, and even a couple noms at the Academy Awards.

  During a vast majority of the 50's and 60's, so much of science fiction based cinema was so goofy and campy and corny, that the genre pretty much had a reputation for one not to be taken very seriously at all. But every once in a whlel, one would come along that would show that sci-fi can still hold merit as a serious yet entertaining, and allegorical, work of the motion picture industry that can withstand not just the rigors of space, but more importantly here, the true test of time.
  Featuring one of the most surprise endings in film history (though, by this point in time, is it really that surprising anymore?), Planet of The Apes is the first chapter of the still-popular, long-standing Apes Franchise. It stars Charleton Heston as the leader of a small group of astronauts in the not so distant future, who take off into space in search of a planet similar to Earth, with kind of atmospheric conditions needed to help sustain humankind. The crew ends up crashing upon such a planet and quickly discover that at the top of the food chain are apes with human level intelligence. They also come to find that humans are the ones considered to be the more primative species of the planet, and therefore, are captured and caged as so.
  With the serious approach that the actors take towards this film, despite being a "monkey movie", combined with the dramatic yet satiric tone of the ape characters, along with the high levels of make-up and groundbreaking facial prosthethics of the time, PotA is superior science fiction cinema back during a time when making such films was no easy task.

        Probably the best thing that I like about this movie is that it is both a spongy mystery thriller and a creamy romantic comedy, in one.
In other words, I like to describe it sort of as a kind of a 60's cinematic Twinkie.



  A lightweight Hitchcockian stylish thriller featuring two of the decade's most iconic stars, the super-suave, ever-charming Cary Grant and the waifish, eternally beautiful Audrey Hepburn, Charade is a nice twisty turney  game of mystery with an entertainment factor that is a result of it's witty dialogue, the depth in it's deceivingly simple premise, and it's perfectly casted supporting cast (whose names carry almost as much star-powered audience attraction as the camera's two catchiest leads).
  When I mentioned the witty dialogue, there are probably certain film aficionados who considered this movie as leaning more towards either a romantic comedy or just a straight-up comedy because of the feathery lightness in attitude contained within the humorous parts of the script. But for my tastes, I feel that the mystery element that is the center of this plot, is dark enough (again, as I mentioned before, very Hitchcock-like) to make the experience of this story feel a bit heavier, and therefore, not limited to fit in just within the boundaries of those kinds of heart-based labels.

  Although known primarily as the most decorated Japanese director of all time, it should also be noted that Akira Kurosawa is also probably the biggest contributor to the spaghetti Western genre outside of Sergio Leone. Providing one inspiration after another to the six-shooting genre with the Italian slant, even to the extent that some of them extend passed the borders of Italy into the place that originated the cowboy movie in the first place, Hollywood.
  Based on the premise of a mysterious, nameless stranger wandering into a villiage that is being torn by the warring factions of  two powerful crime clans, Yojimbo is an ancient warrior's tale from the East that was so good that it influenced an Ol' West gunslinger from the West.  
As an answer to "The Man With No Name" type of Western films, Yojimbo is famously known as the inspiration of the Clint Eastwood classic "A Fistful of Dollars", which was basically a remake of this.
  That is just one of the main reasons why, whether someone is a neophyting newbie or a seasoned professional, as any dedicated cinephile would tell you, when it comes to  Kurosawa klassics, this is one of those must-sees for anyone who considers themself to be a serious student of cinema.

As over-obvious as this may seem to mention, the title of this play-turned-movie is a play on the phrase "Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf?". Which is about as big a hint as there can be without outright saying it, that this is a story about the ugly underside of the longterm effects of marital bliss.

 For anyone out there who's reminded of someone in their own family when viewing this movie (maybe, particularly during the holidays),

raise your hand. . Marriage can often be an institution in the same way an insane asylum, which makes Virginia Woolf the movie that finally said outloud what many of us in mired in matrimony were thinking. Now, while the possibility exists that two people committed to each other for life can result in a continual romantic journey, the truth is, getting married for the sake of love is still a relatively new concept. And there are a vast amount of humans who are learning the hard way that "living happily ever after" is an idea that premates romance films and novels a lot more than it does here in the real world. Thus making Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf the anti-romance flick that many couples can relate to, more than many of us  are willing to admit to. 

  A  film based on one of the most succesful stage plays of it's time (and which, in turn, was based on an even older stage play by one of the most famous, and most quoted, writers of all time... George Benard Shaw) and and one of the few musicals of this genre that I actually like. For my tastes, this lavish production of a rags-to-upper crust riches story is one that is enhanced by the presence of the eternally beautiful Lady Hepburn, in a role that has her speaking funny, singing but "not really", and wearing pygmalionly massive hats.



  Okay, so as anyone who looks at my lists can obviously see, I love talking about movies. From any time period and from any genre. However, despite this, I don't have too many friends who are really all that open-minded to watching musicals, especially old skool musicals with a reputation for being what it generally percieved as being definitive to the genre. Like My Fair Lady. However, if there was one musical that I would choose to try to convince them to watch in order to dispell whatever "negative" connotations have become associated with this form of golden age cinema, this is still the one that I would turn to. On the surface, it does seem like the kind that could easly turn them off, but I think the quality of the music, production, singing, acting and costumes, all gel into a whole that would make very apparent why this genre had a golden age to begin with.

  "Touchstone" is a word that comes up several times in this list. The explanation behind it is the 1960s cinema lies in between what is generally known as the "Golden Age of Hollywood" which ended roughly during in the 50's,and the age of "New Hollywood", which began in the 70's, as creative control of most films were now in the hands of directors instead of the old studio system.

  As a result, there were several films released during the decade that is the theme of this list that act as a bridge between those two eras, taking the concept and formulas of the Golden Age and advancing them to the next level either through the process of evolution or just completely demolishing the foundation.

  Bonnie and Clyde from 1967 does a little of both, probably leaning more towards demolishing than evolution. 

 Taking the gangster classic romance story between Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, and tearing down the classic and deconstructing the romance. 
This all starts with the cast, particularly the two lead roles. 
First, there's Warren Beatty, who was quickly becoming the epitome of the evolving edgy, new style "Hollywood hunk", which would reach it's peak with in the 70's with his roles in such films as Shampoo, Parallex View , and McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
And, of course, playin' the Bonnie to his Clyde, is Faye Dunaway, an up'n'coming starlet who was moving towards roles with more darkness and depth that you would expect from a female movie star with such classical facial lines of beauty. 
  The slow-rising of the success of B&C was demonstrative of the changing times in cinema and was considered a landmark in the use of sex and violence in movies, and which led to one of the most infamous and paradigm-shifting endings of all time.

  In a small town by the bay, the birds have all gone "psycho". Beyond a "shadow of a doubt", they seemed to be all worked up into a "frenzy" and are trying to "murder!" people. No one knows why, but there is a "suspicion" that they might be "spellbound" or experpiencing "vertigo", or maybe they're just tired of crashing into man-made objects like glass "rear windows", or a.... a ...oh, I dunno, a "lifeboat" or something....
  ah, screw it.... "I confess", trying to keep this schtick going by finding more ways to inject the title of any other Hitchcock film into this entry, I am probably the "wrong man" for the job (the fact that I'm now referencing his not so well known movies probably shows that now, I'm at the end of my "rope"....).



  All bad kidding aside, The Birds is the very first Hitchcock movie I ever watched.
Some of my earliest memories as a kid are those of how my dad used to pack our family into the wood panel-sided Buick station wagon and take us to the drive-in theatre where we were exposed to alot of those 1970's really bad campy"when animals attack" b-movies, like Food Of The Gods, Night Of The Leapus, Swarm, etc...
   Because I was too young just bad those movies, I really ended up developing quite the "distinguished taste" for that kind of incredibly goofy escapist fare with a lot of "cheese". So when many of these films transitioned from the silverscreen of the movie theatre to the late nite runs of creature feature type of TV shows, I coulddn't resist runing in. 
  Therefore, when I first caught a glimpse of this film on the tube, my initial reaction was "Coo-hoooolll!!!... Kinda like the movie 'Frogs!' Except with birds!"

"I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!!"

 

Besides sporting one of the most recognized impromptu lines in all movie history, and despite coming out of an era that was filled to the brim with decade defining films (The Graduate, Planet of the Apes, 2001, the Dollars Trilogy, and so on...), Midnight Cowboy is one of the few that became iconic as a transitional film from one era to the next. 
See, what a lot people forget is that Midnight Cowbuy was rated "X" at the time of it's release because of it's reference to homosexualiy. They thought back then that any youths who watched this film would be "influenced" by these references and therefore had whoever was in charge of stamping the ratings in movies mark this one with the same rating as that of a porno. Yeah, it seems rather tame by today's standards, but that's what the mindset that dominated those times.

But the fact that Cowboy was able to be made and then released, despite it's same sex themes, particularly set against the seedy backdrop that was Times Square area during the end of the flower power era,  combined with it's win for Best Picture at the Academy Awards despite its rating of X, is a good demonstration of how, along with the rest of society, when it came to the world of cinema, the times, they were definitely a'changin'.  

   At the start of the  new millenium, in the year 2000 a remake of Fail Safe was aired on television as a live broadcast (something that had not been done since 1960. Starring George Clooney, Richard Dreyfuss and Noah Wyle, I thought it was a very good program. Good enough that it made seek out the original version from 1964.  This one, directed by the late, great Sydney Lumet, and starring Peter Fonda, Walter Matthau and Larry hagman, I found this original versions just as much of an intense, isolated and suspenseful political-psychological thriller as the more modern one. I think it's  an excellent example of a minimalistic style that is used to very good effect, to build layer upon layer of tension and desperation even within a group of people whose primary jobs is not only to prepare for such cataclysmic situations, but for the ultimate cataclymic situation.

 Back during the Second World War, there was a fictional island called Navarone, which, fictionally, was virtually imprenatrable. And as result, a fictional team of specialized Allied commandos hadda be put together in order to fictionally sneak onto the island, and somehow put the guns outta commission. Otherwise, the Axis powers might end up winning the war. I mean, y'know.... fictionally. 



  Quentin Tarantino once stated that Inglourious Basterds was based on the sub-genre of "bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission" war films that were particularly popular during the timeframe of this list.
In my opinion, the Guns Of Navarone is one of the most obvious, and for me, one of the best. For alot of the same reasons that I stated in my entry for the Dirty Dozen.

  Back in 1964, A Fistful of Dollars introduced one of the most iconic shoot 'em up characters  in cinema, The Man With No Name. In this story, he returns, but now, he comes with a name, ("Manco"....?). However, despite knowing what to call him, he is still a gunslinging man of mystery, who, after teaming up with a partner (Col. Mortimer), this time around, he is out for more than just a fistful of dollars.
 


 This follow-up to the first Dollars movie is has become yet another staple to the genre, and is an excellent example of demonstrating that, when it comes to starring in Westerns, Clint Eastwood has begun to develop a taste for cowboy chronicles with a more Oriental flavor, but piled high with spaghetti and meatballs.
 By this point in his cattlerustling career, his previous excursions across trails of the wild, wild West had already been blazed by six-shooters shot before him. However, this is the series that made Eastwood a name synonymous with the genre.
 From here on end, even tho not all of Clint's westerns, were great, IMO, none of 'em were bad. The roughly cut visage of his face in a Stetson hat and a Mexican style poncho was one of those iconic images that for me, personally, will always be a fundamental part of the spaghetti western, moreso than other contemporaries such as Bronson or Van Cleef.

 Call me simple, but when it comes to starting my day off right, I would prefer breakfast at MikkyDee's much more than at Tiffany's. Those Sausage McMuffins wit' Egg sandwiches, surely, they be nought but the very food of the gods themselves.



 As this list demonstrates, no actress dominated the silver screen in theaters during the 1960's, particularly when romance was involved, than the legendary, sleek, and then-uber-fashionable Audrey Hepburn. Ironically thougfh, she didn't make all that many films. It's just that of the ones that she did, many of 'em have become memorable fixtures in the list of classic cinema. And of all the titles in her semi-limited filmography, I'd have to say that Breakfast at Tiffany's is my favorite. I mean, sure, Marilyn Monroe would have been perfect for the role of Holly Golightly, Mickey Rooney's role is still blatantly racist as hell, and some of the underlying edge to Truman Capote's novella gets lost in the transition from book to celluloid. But, the end-result of this production still created Audrey's most iconic look, gave her an Academy Award winning song in the beautifully Macini-spun Moon River, and put her in a role that took her out of the syrupy sweet persona that she was getting typecast in when it came to that specific genre. Personally, whenever I watch Breakfast, it is one of the films from that era that captures the distinctive kind of magic that the decade had to offer.

 During the "untamed" times of the Ol' West, a small town in the desert plains just south of the American/Mexican border is plagued by the warring factions of two prominant families of smugglers. One day, a man with no name rides in, and decides to take part in the shoot 'em up shenanigans.  Not for the noble reasons of seeing justice served or anything like that. But more, for the self-serving sake of a fistful of dollars.



 Although his gun will have traveled to the Ol' West many times before, this is the first time when Clint rides his horse into it via a more Italian route.
 Fueled with the advent of the spaghetti westerns, the icon of the cowboy figure had already started to evolve into a more complex role, that of the quiet lone wolf who's only personal traits were marked by the mystery of his identity and by the grit of his character.
  Thus began this particular sub-genre within a genre, which eventually would lead to A Fistful Of Dollers, then to A Few Dollars More, and even more later on, to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, all culminating into a memorable Dollars trilogy, each of which would take on a non-American take on a classic American icon.
  And even though these new incarnations of the archetypical gunslinging good guy were not initially regarded very well within the hallowed halls of Hollywood, they were leaving a mark in a genre that needed some new blood. Even if that blood was the result of a bullet spewn body. 

  How do you take the boring landscape of a desert that is virtually made up of miles and miles of sand dunes as far as the eye can see, and turn it into something that causes the kind of awe and excitement that puts asses in movie theater seats? 
  Throw in cadres of soldiers battling it out on a vast background that is captured by the spherical lenses of the new filming technology of "Sony Panavision", add in a role-defining performance by an actor who is considered the greatest of his generation (Peter O'Toole), place next to him two other greatest of their generations (Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif), plop on a well executed "based-of-a-true-story" type of script, sprinkle in a few well placed "liberties" within the plot (y'know... for the sake creating exciting drama and all-out action), then wrap it all up with the kind of production budget that is worth every grain of sand seen on the expanded screen, and what we end up with is a spot near the top of many "greatest movies of all time" lists. 

   This is definitely an example of a movie that "grew" on me. 
I first watched it when I was a kid. Well, actually, being that I was a kid, I only watched parts of it, not all it.  And as obvious it is to mentioned, I disliked it. I didn't think it was funny at all. But again... I was a kid.
However, the stigma that I carried about it stayed with me. All the way until I became an adult. 
  But then when the internet came along (yep.... I'm that old), the first thing that I began to do when I first joined the cyber-fad and began "loggin' on", was to go onto movie discussion sites (there were a lot of 'em back then) and, of course, discuss movies with fellow aficionadoes from all over the world. Whenever the subject of this movie came up, I began reading the various reasons of why Strangelove was considered such a gamechanging classic. And while at first, those reasons weren't enough to make me like it, at least not enough to include it into any of my favorites lists. But slowing, as time went, my appreciation for the sueprsharp writing and the multi-talents of the movie's star, comedic actor Peter Wellers. On top of that, overall, my ever-growing love for Stanley Kubrick's distinct sense of direction and production was being thrown into the mix.
Then came one day when I was surfing thru the channels on my TV (again, yep.... I'm that old), as I got to Turner Classic Movies, it was announced that the upcoming feature would  be Dr. Strangelove. And not only did I put down the remote, but now, I was actually excited about seeing this film. The accumulation of respect and appreciation may have been slow, but without me realizing it, this had become a piece of 1960's cinema that I wanted to watch repeatedly. 
  That's was when I finally and truly realized that when it comes to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb, as a politicallly satired bit of black comedy...



  ....I luvs me some Bomb.  

Take one secret suicidal mission, put it in the European front, just ahead of the D-Day invasion,
add a healthy dose of gritty action and violence,
then toss in a dirty dozen of criminal recruits that include bad-asses the likes of Lee Marvin, Teddy Savales, Jim Brown, and Charles Bronson,
and there you have it.
A World War II movie that effectively blends the down to earth grittiness of the genre with the high escapist thrills of even those best films that also happen to fall under the category of action-adventure.



  I emphasize the description of action-adventure because further down the list there is another war movie that is more closely associated with the event of D-Day, called The Longest Day. and while that film takes a more non-fictional look and thus more realistic look at that important day from the Second World War, the Dirty Dozen is one of those more fantasy based "men on a mission" type of tales that were common back in the day. Therefore, the intent here is more on providing entertainment more of escapsit nature than it is on any kind of actual historical depiction. Something that, outside of a director/screenwriter like Quentin Tarantino, we don't see much coming outta Hollywood these days and was reflective of what was standard back when the Dozen was released.

  Targets is easily one of my favorite films from the 60's and as a result, one of the ones from that era that I still watch often. It's central theme of the transition of the horror genre's focus going from fantasy monsters to the grim reality of disturbed humans as the basis of striking fear into the hearts of movie viewers is one that will, well, strike fear into the heart of a movie viewer of any decade, past or modern.

  Demonstrating that being chased, caught or ripped at by some kind made-up feature creature is no where near as frightful as the real  potential risk of potentially being on the receiving end of a weapon of a gunman with a chip on his shoulder and an itch on his trigger finger. 

  Casting Boris Karloff as the lead may have seemed ironic at the time the movie was made, but comes off as a perfect choice when seen with the perspective of today. Written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who's talents were still fledging at the time, and produced by a studio known more for cranking out crap than creating quality, Targets hits the bullseye when it comes to shifting a genre forward from one generation to the next.

 Based on the non-fiction book, The Great Escape, 
The Great Escape the movie is a fictionalized version of an event that actually occurred when a group of British prisoners of war attempted to escape from a German "stalag luft" during the second World War. 
When you look at many of the war films of this decade (The Longest Day, Dirty Dozen, Guns of Navarone, etc.), it seems like having an all star cast of the most popular actors of the day was the formula that was most commonly used to sell this kind of cinema (although, many of the western flix of this same period of time look like they also enjoyed using this as a method of putting asses in theater seats.... The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch for example). 
 I'm a big fan of the prison escapes genre because I think there have been quite a number that are really, really good (Escape From Alcatraz, Cell 211, The Escapist, and of course, the Shawshank Redemption are just some examples...) and I gotta say, this is one easily one of my faves (topped only by Cool Hand Luke, which I mention on this list leter on...). 
  Having Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough would have been enough charisma to fuel this "epic war suspense adventure film". But when you add in the likes of Charles Bronson, James Colburn, Donald Pleasance, and Gordon Jackson, and combine them with a plot full of ingenuity and unbreakable spirits behind barb wire fenced barriers, it's no wonder that, despite being a war movie, the escape is not only fun to watch along with the thrilling way the resourcefulness of the planl starts to unravel, but in the end, it's just simply great.

 The Magnificent Seven is tale of the Ol' West that is most well known for being inspired by a tale of the ancient East, Akira Kurosawa's legendary 1954 classic, Seven Samurai.
When it comes to seven gunfighters, it takes a village to get them to band together. And when they do, they are magnificent.

But for me, what I'll always remember this movie for is being one of the first ones that finally turned me onto the Western genre (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was another such film, which I mention in it's entry on this list). The generation of kids before me were often stereotyped as big fans of the cowboy figure, often dressing up as them for things like  Halloween and/or birthday parties. However, by the time of my generation, they were staring to become passe, and for me personally, even as a kid, I found most Western themed flicks as dumb, corney and just plain boring. But that's because many of the Westerns that I was exposed to were the old, poor films from the 40's and 50's that were being continually rerun on the television.
Fortunately, as time passed, the genre began to mature and evolve. As I already mention in other gunslinging entries on this list, as a result, some of the films became more grittier, down to Earth, and most importantly for my tastes, not so "black and white". I've stated the different aspects of how some of these types o Westerns changed my attitude towards the genre, but as far as The Magnificent Seven, the reason was because when I first watched it as a kid, I simply thought it

was cool.

  A ragtag band of groovy gunhands for hire led by two of the coolest actors of the decade, it's premise of the cowboy code goin' the way of the samurai was sorta like a comic book story come to life on the silver screen. Apparently, this was a viewing experience that was not just limited to me. I recently read an article that claimed that The Magnificent Seven is the second most shown film in U.S. television history (The Wizard of Oz comes in first).
  And when you think about it, that's pretty darn tootin'.

  The first example of the lightning captured in a bottle that is the Newman/Redford combo. For a split second in time, it seemed like the motion picture making machine realized that it had a fabulous fruitful formula by pairing together two of Hollywood's biggest stars at time into one movie. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the first successful (very successful) attempt at it, and four years later, the big wigs of the motion picture industry would repeat this highly prosperous venture with The Sting.
 Both made money at the box office and both are stilled considered classics in their respective genres. Yet, despite all this commercial and critical success, it was a combination that never occurred again. Which, IMO, is really too bad because I think both BCatSK and Sting have unique, distinguishing appeal, some of which results from the Paul and "Bob" partnership  (although, let's not kid ourselves... the fact that both projects were produced with the kind of intregral quality we would like to see in just about any film that we watch does its fair share in the longevity of these movies). Despite each story having a different set of characters, the gravity between the two achtypical handsome hunks of their generation, bought about the kind of onscreen charm between chums that spills out of the screen no matter how long each of these films age.  The portrayal of both set of characters is pprominent in terms of friendship, but more particularly in this film, the buddy cowboy chemistry is very palpable between the two roles of Butch Cassidy and the rustlin' robber relationship that he has with his fellow outlaw, Harry Longabaugh A.K.A. the Sundance Kid.



 The direction, screenplay, music and just over-all tone of this outlaws on the run in the Ol' West oddysey was really different for the period that this movie initially came out in, and for me, makes it a really unique gunslinger moving picture show that is both lotsa of fun and fatefully tragic at the same time.
  When it comes to the "modern" westerns, not only is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid one of my favorites ever, but as a kid who really wasn't into the whole cowboy genre, it was one that first ones that showed me that there were a few westerns out there that went beyond what was usually expected from the same ol' boring standard shoot 'em ups.

  Psycho is Alfred Hitchcock's best work.
  Okay, okay, while that's something that's debatable amongst cinephiles of classic movies, as far as I'm concerned, it is. And I say that not simply because it's probably his most famous flick, or because the shower scene featuring Janet Leigh is one of the most famous scenes not just in horror history, but in terms of all cinema. Wheneever I read or hear the story of how this movie was made, it's seems like that things like shooting it in basic black and white and in the short amount of time that Hitch did, plus the fact that it was done on almost shoestring budget (he used the production crew of his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents to shoot the whole thing) after the pretty penny it cost to do his previous film, the full color iconic thriller, North By Northwest, it's almost as if he was forcing himself to rely completely on pure instincts to make Psycho. And as tany rue atrtist knows, instinct's are a creative person's best friend.  
  TBH, as corny as it sounds, every time I watch this movie, I can always feel the director's passion for it practically jump off the screen. AH's honed ability to build up tension with every available angle and resource that comes from using a camera is turned up to eleven h ere, the characters are displayed with full backgrounds into their personalities in a short amount of time, the scenes are set to lead audiences full on into the one direction they wholeheartedly expect, only to be jolted into a complete different one unexpectedly, therefore creating the kind of "mistrust" movie makers love to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. Even the main character's fate halfway thru the running time, as I mentioned before, is one the most well known in that annals of moving pictures.



  I think that there's reason why this film is regarded as a touchstone in gritty style fear and that anyone who watches this for the first time will likely find many scenes in it that are instantly recognizable as part of the cinematic visual "lexicon". the
With Psycho, Sir Alfred left one of his most personal imprints in the medium he loved, with an energy that still reverberates to this day. Heck (SPOILER ALERT!), even the final shot of Norman Bates' visage as he telepathically talks to the viewer is still one of the best creepy endings on film, and unlike more modern horror icons, was done without the use of heavy make-up effects or a scary mask. It was simply a trait that the character inherently got from his "mother". 

 How cool is Cool Hand Luke? He's so cool that he could only be portrayed by one of the coolest actors ever, Paul Newman during his prime. 
 For my own personal tastes, CHL is just a well construction production from one end to the other and just another example of why the 1960's was so chockful of cinematic classics that still hold up firmly to this day.
  Throughout the history of Hollywood and its cousins throughout the world, prison flicks have been one the best ways to metaphorically convey the authoritan power structure that tend to accumulate into the framework of functioning societies, and how those powers often tend to warp into gridworks that seek more to control it's populace than it does to support them.  We've seen this analogy used time and time again as the basis of many works of incarcerated themed cinema. Escape From Alcatraz, The Shawshank Redemption, Cell 211, The Escapist, Scum, even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But, IMO, none have captured this scenario better than Luke.
  Having the story set in the early 50's, the Cool Hand in question is a war hero of the then recent WW2, struggling to exist during a time that was supposed to be the Golden Age of wealth and growth for the America and it's citizens. After being sentenced for a minor crime, his treatment behind the rusty, aged and sweat soaked bars of a southern prison in which any act against the rigidly enforced rules, even by someone who fought for the American Way, will not be tolerated in the slightest.  Analogically layered, one on top of the other, it adds up into some of the most anti-establishment metaphors you could expect from an anti-establishment movie.

        In early October back in 1962, an "on-the battlefront" war epic debutted in movie theater screens all across the country. Featuring an all-star-cast-of-it's-time line-up that makes up a really long list of actors that are featured in this really long movie about a really long day near the end of a really long war.



  As a full feature film whose premise was the depiction of one the most important events of the Second World War (the D-Day Landings in Normandy), The Longest Day is a prime example of the high quality of movies that were at the forefront of the unglorified depictions of battlezone confrontations that were making their way onto the big silver screen during the era of cinema when, at the same time, the glorified John Wayne type of motion pictures were beginning to make their exit.

  Every monster theme has it's genre defining classic.
  And of course, this is is the one for the zombie genre.
  When it comes to the undead who walk, there probably isn't a man, woman or child out there who hasn't heard of Night of the Living Dead. Made coincidentally enough, during the closing years of an era of social unrest, this tale of cryptic cadaveristic unrest could almost be considered the "Blair Witch Project" of it's time. Not only did it employ a very documentary style of realism in it's filming that was later further advanced by the shaky camera genre of recent years, but also, it was made on a budget of microscopical proportions, and then became a era-defining phenomenom that was reflected in it's grave-covered groundbreaking box office return. 
  While there were films about carniverous corpses before this one, it was the first time that the depiction of shambling zombies was utilized as something truly frightening. Because, let's be honest here... even though everyone likes to make fun of the fact that they're easy to escape, the truth is, if any of us were to be truly confronted by a husk of rotting flesh that stood upright, just the idea that we were actually witnessing one of the "living dead" would be enough to make us sh#t out our own skeletons.
  Or at least, scare us to a point of not being able to think as straight as one would like during such a globe spanning situation in which the entirety of human society is collapsing.
  A concept that, thru the flesh decomposing script of George Romero, is convincingly depicted in the behavior of the various protagonists of NotLD and is the primary reason why the externally exhumed heart of this horror classic still beats strong today.

  At the outset of the first western movies, the cowboy characters had been categorized between two basic types: Those who wore the white hats, and those who wore the black ones.
  As time passed though, and as I already alluded to in a previous entry, the colors of the hat began to blur between who was good, who was bad, and then to eventually who was just plain ugly.
This is the final film in the "Man With No Name" trilogy, and IMO, its the best and most definitive one of the three.
  Although several iconic figures have emerged from the dust and grit of the spaghetti westerns that emerged in the 60's, the truth is, it's almost impossible to envision the entire genre, let alone this particular series and not see an image of the iconic trio of Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach.



  I think it's pretty obvious in the other spaghetti Western entries I have on this list that I really enjoy the dusty, gritty spin that the Italian movie makers have brought to the rough riding world of Wild West cinema. That in of itself would've been enough to make make fall in love with the subgenre.
  But combined with the sharp, edgy visage of Eastwood himself, who probably helped to define the mythical figure of the cowboy more than just about any other Hollywood player, with the obvious exception of John Wayne, that was the final bullet that ensured my affection for this "new" way of depicting the lawless lands of cowpunching, bronco bustin' and ruthless wranglings. Clint's roles in the Italian slant of the genre took the gunslinger figure from a glory seeking gunhand, down to a level that was of a more dusty, gritty nature. That of a sole rough rider who blazed a trail through the Wild West, alone, with just a pair of six-shooters, a sturdy horse and the rugged scars of journeys past that were as just mysterious as was his name.

  As anyone who is a true aficionado of film knows, director Stanley Kubrick had a habit of creating one masterpiece after another. With works such as Doctor Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket,
not only does he have a substantial amount of cinematic classics under his belt, but on top of that, they are a collection that have quite a wide range in between them in terms of genre. Any movie director would die to have half the movies of Kubrick's in their filmography, let alone the different categories of which they are all separatedly labeled in. 
And as obvious as it may be to mention, here is a space odyssey that has been dileberated, examined and debated countless times in film study classes, movie articles, and on online discussion sites for many decades after it's initial release.



  2001 is one of the very first incredibly realistic portrayals of a science fiction story, during a time when the focus was more on the fiction than on the science. Great futuristic yet believable visuals back when this stuff was immensely difficult to create (especially without the help of computers), it is a futuristc, cosmic vehicle that also wields a suspense thriller plot-line that is masterfully yet almost quietly delivered in that deep, philosophical and distinctive manner that only Kubrick could manage. Space Odyssey is an attention spanning exploration that can methodically pull the viewer in and take him/her through a "trip" that spans a lifetime which is measured through the light years that it's ahead of itself of.

  And yeah, that preposition there at the end... I meant to do that.