Cinema: THE BEST PICTURES OF 1961

A ever, perhaps even more than ever, sex was the principal theme of cinema in 1961. But also more than ever, it was true that the movies wore their sex with a difference. Inevitably, there was far too much “skinematography.” But there was also an impressive number of movies that took the primrose path because it is an avenue of life, and walked down it with unblinking eyes. Unfortunately, most of these movies were made abroad and could be seen in the U.S. only in art houses. For movies around the world, 1961 was a good year; for Hollywood it was, artistically speaking, a bad year, a slough of sex and spectacles. Yet now and then Hollywood eluded the cash nexus and the sin-drome and produced a good picture.

AMERICAN

FACTS OF LIFE. It was time somebody did a parody of the American Way of Love, and Norman Panama and Melvin Frank have done an uproarious one in which Bob Hope and Lucille Ball play a couple of flabby old marrieds who would dearly love to jump the fence but can’t even climb to the first wrong.

101 DALMATIANS. The yap-happiest curtoon fleature Walt Disney has ever whelped.

SHADOWS. With $40,000, no script, limited talent and plenty of gall. Director John Cassavetes and a cast made up principally of amateurs set up their camera on the sidewalks of New York, and then proceeded with all the mournful rage of inexperience to invent this movie as people invent their lives. Like life, the film has good and bad surprises; like life, it is totally alive.

COLD WIND IN AUGUST. With less daring, more training and a bit more money. Director Alexander Singer composed a melancholy essay on love as a girl grows older. Lola Albright is both touching and depressing as an aging stripper who robs the cradle to cheat the rocking chair.

THE HONEYMOON MACHINE. The production-line product at close to its best: a neat little cybernetic comedy in which the bank at a Venice casino is broken by a fellow named MAX (Magnetic Analyzer Computer Synchrotron).

HOMICIDAL. The sleeper of 1961: a cheap ($250,000) chiller that turned out to be the most frightening film since Psycho—and what’s more, nobody so far has guessed whodunit.

THE HUSTLER. Director Robert Rossen, in a formidable, expert and exciting commercial movie, promulgates a slangy, sexy saga of the pool halls, a remodeled myth in which the old king of the cuestick (Jackie Gleason) yields his laurels to the new (Paul Newman), but only after an enormously exciting trial by combat.

THE MARK. The sorriest of subjects —the hero is queer for little girls—is investigated with rare skill by Scenarists Sidney Buchman and Stanley Mann. The result is an earnest, valuable and even beautiful film.

EL CID. Samuel Bronston, who produced the year’s most embarrassing epic (King of Kings), also produced its only satisfactory superspectacle—thanks principally to Director Anthony Mann.

FOREIGN

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. Shakespeare’s fantasy re-enacted with puppets (see above).

BALLAD OF A SOLDIER. The best Russian movie since World War II: Director Grigori Chukhrai’s tender, sentimental, humorous, passionate, imaginative story of love without benefit of Lenin in a Russia without time for love.

BREATHLESS. Director Jean-Luc Godard, a 30-year-old Frenchman, produced a striking piece of cubistic cinema —technically and experimentally the most original film of the year—that describes the last three days of sex and violence in the life of a young thug (portrayed in feral fashion by Jean-Paul Belmondo).

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING. For connoisseurs of the actor’s art: this muscular adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s half-angry, half-funny novel of working-class life in England features Albert Finney, 24, the most talented young actor in the English-speaking world, as a sly young dog who growls at his fate and howls for his arf-‘n’-arf

L’AVVENTURA. The year’s finest film, possibly a great one: Michelangelo Antonioni looks long and carefully, as if through a microscope, at the life of a lecher, at “the sickness unto death, which is despair.”

LA DOLCE VITA. The year’s most scandalous success: an always vulgar, sometimes powerful Italian movie in which Director Federico Fellini says what Antonioni says so much better.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS. The third important film produced by the Italian rinascinemento (cinema renaissance) of 1960-61. Director Luchino Visconti’s monumental (2 hr. 29 min.) investigation of what happens (rape, murder, homosexuality) to a poor family when it moves from a village to Milan

THE KITCHEN. Something not often done and less often done well: a socialistic shocker. Working from a pink-hot play by Britain’s Arnold Wesker. Director James Hill gives the capitalist system a thorough roasting in 74 minutes

THE FIVE-DAY LOVER. The year’s funniest import, a gay Gallic comedy of promiscuities in which Director Philipe de Broca, with the inspired collaboration of Comedian Jean-Pierre Cassel (The Love Game), assembles charming wisps of humor, twists them into a pretty little cord —and strangles every libertin (and libertine) in Paris.

THRONE OF BLOOD. The most impressive living master of cinema, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon), has transformed Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a noh play loud with the wrangle of martial metal, soft with the rustle of imminent demonic populations.