The Metro Goldwyn Mayer Story (1960-1964)

Big changes would occur throughout Hollywood and with all of its major studios throughout the 1960's. In their continued efforts to lure audiences away from their television sets and back into the theaters, the studios would increase their focus on epic, lavish, big budget spectacles. Unfortunately, such ambitious projects were always expensive and more often than not, they bombed at the box office, leaving their studios to pick up massive amounts of financial debt. Something had to be done in order to keep making money without losing too much of it. Following the successful example that had recently been set by United Artists, all the major studios, MGM included, would also form partnerships with various independent production companies and distribute their product to theaters. By the mid 1960's, this would become the standardized norm for each studio's annual release slate. The end of the old studio system meant that there was no such thing as the long term studio contract anymore so aside from a select very few veteran stars (Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds) who routinely returned for a picture or two every year, MGM no longer had its own stable of contract players. Some performers though like Glenn Ford, Paul Newman and Elvis Presley were starring in films at the studio often enough that they could very well be considered among the very last MGM affiliated stars.

The MGM films that would comprise that transitional period, from old Hollywood to new, are all compiled here. In my own efforts to be as complete as possible with this filmography, every movie that opened with the MGM logo in the U.S. (with a few internationally released exceptions that never saw theatrical release in the U.S.) is listed even if MGM had nothing to do with its production. Naturally, this includes those aforementioned independent "pick ups" and various foreign films that MGM dubbed or subtitled to release in the U.S.

Related lists

View more top voted lists

Embed this list with widgets RSS Feed