The 1961 Mini-List

[swo17]

RESULTS

Below is a list of films you can vote for from this year. If you want to be able to vote for something that isn't listed here, you need to ask me to add it to the list. The only reason I won't do so is if I deem that it belongs in another year. I have my own curious system for assigning films to years, but rest assured that I will never let a film miss its chance to qualify in one year or another. I am the ultimate arbiter of year assignments.

Discussion for this mini-list and requests for additions to the list of films below will run until April 30. On May 1 I will create a form for voting that will allow you to populate anything between a top 10 and a top 25 from among the films listed below. You will have until the end of the day May 15 to submit a ballot that way. If you don't see a certain film listed below, you won't be able to vote for it, so please speak up before April 30 to avoid disappointment.

Sorted alphabetically by title, using the native title for German and all Romance languages other than Romanian, and the English-language title in all other cases

The Absent-Minded Professor (Robert Stevenson)
Acariño galaico (de barro) (José Val del Omar)
Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Aimless Bullet (Yu Hyun-mok)
All in a Night's Work (Joseph Anthony)
Allures (Jordan Belson)
L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais)
L'assassino (Elio Petri)
Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family (Yasujirō Ozu)
Banditi a Orgosolo (Vittorio De Seta)
Barabbas (Richard Fleischer)
Barravento (Glauber Rocha)
Birth Certificate (Stanisław Różewicz)
Bitter End of a Sweet Night (Kijū Yoshida)
Blast of Silence (Allen Baron)
Blazes (Robert Breer)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards)
Il brigante (Renato Castellani)
Brutalität in Stein (Alexander Kluge & Peter Schamoni)
Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence)
Ce soir ou jamais (Michel Deville)
The Children's Hour (William Wyler)
Chronique d'un été (Paris 1960) (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin)
El Cid (Anthony Mann)
The Coachman (Kang Dae-jin)
The Comancheros (Michael Curtiz)
Come September (Robert Mulligan)
The Connection (Shirley Clarke)
Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner)
The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher)
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest)
Death + Transfiguration (Jim Davis)
Les Dents du singe (René Laloux)
The Devil's Trap (František Vláčil)
Divorzio all'italiana (Pietro Germi)
Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage)
L'Enclos (Armand Gatti)
Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Vittorio Cottafavi)
The Errand Boy (Jerry Lewis)
Ersatz (Dušan Vukotić)
The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie)
Der Fall Gleiwitz (Gerhard Klein)
Flame in the Streets (Roy Baker)
The Frightened City (John Lemont)
Fuego en Castilla (José Val del Omar)
Gli invasori (Mario Bava)
Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol)
Le Goût de la violence (Robert Hossein)
La grande olimpiade (Romolo Marcellini)
The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson)
Los hermanos Del Hierro (Ismael Rodríguez)
Homicidal (William Castle)
The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
The Innocents (Jack Clayton)
Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer)
King of Kings (Nicholas Ray)
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis)
The Last Sunset (Robert Aldrich)
Léon Morin, prêtre (Jean-Pierre Melville)
Lisa and the Other Woman (Dinos Dimopoulos)
Lola (Jacques Demy)
Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann)
La Lutte (Michel Brault et al.)
Maciste contro il vampiro (Giacomo Gentilomo & Sergio Corbucci)
The Man with a Shotgun (Seijun Suzuki)
Master of the World (William Witney)
Les Mauvais Coups (François Leterrier)
The Misfits (John Huston)
Mr. Sardonicus (William Castle)
Mood Mondrian (Marie Menken)
Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz)
Mothra (Ishirō Honda)
My Mother and Her Guest (Shin Sang-ok)
Mysterious Island (Cy Endfield)
The Night Before Christmas (Alexander Rou)
Night Tide (Curtis Harrington)
No Love for Johnnie (Ralph Thomas)
La notte (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Of Stars and Men (John Hubley)
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (Clyde Geronimi et al.)
One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder)
One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando)
Paris Blues (Martin Ritt)
Paris nous appartient (Jacques Rivette)
Pigs and Battleships (Shōhei Imamura)
The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman)
Plácido (Luis García Berlanga)
Pleins feux sur l'assassin (Georges Franju)
Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra)
Il posto (Ermanno Olmi)
Private Eye, Private Eye (Barry Shear)
Rabindranath Tagore (Satyajit Ray)
La ragazza con la valigia (Valerio Zurlini)
La ragazza in vetrina (Luciano Emmer)
A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie)
El rufián (Daniel Tinayre)
The Shadow of the Cat (John Gilling)
Something Wild (Jack Garfein)
The Song of the Grey Pigeon (Stanislav Barabáš)
Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan)
The Steamroller and the Violin (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Summer and Smoke (Peter Glenville)
Taste of Fear (Seth Holt)
A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson)
Ten Dark Women (Kon Ichikawa)
The Terror of the Tongs (Anthony Bushell)
They Took Us to the Sea (John Krish)
Three Daughters (Satyajit Ray)
Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
Tokyo Knights (Seijun Suzuki)
Too Late Blues (John Cassavetes)
Two Half-Times in Hell (Zoltán Fábri)
Two Rode Together (John Ford)
Un coeur gros comme ça (François Reichenbach)
L'ultimo dei Vikinghi (Giacomo Gentilomo)
Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller)
Une femme est une femme (Jean-Luc Godard)
Une histoire d'eau (Jean-Luc Godard & François Truffaut)
Uproar in Heaven (Wan Laiming)
Ursus (Carlo Campogalliani)
Vanina Vanini (Roberto Rossellini)
Le vergini di Roma (Vittorio Cottafavi et al.)
Victim (Basil Dearden)
Viridiana (Luis Buñuel)
Visa to Canton (Michael Carreras)
Una vita difficile (Dino Risi)
Viva l'Italia (Roberto Rossellini)
Vu du pont (Sidney Lumet)
West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins)
Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes)
A Wife Confesses (Yasuzō Masumura)
The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass (Seijun Suzuki)
Yōjimbō (Akira Kurosawa)
Zero Focus (Yoshitarō Nomura)

[knives]

Was it ever discussed the reason for he Romanian exception?

[swo17]

No, I just made a judgment call

[yoshimori]

I'd ask to have Bitter End of a Sweet Night (Yoshida Yoshishige) and "Blazes" (Robert Breer) added. Bruce Conner's "Cosmic Ray" is from this year, but imdb has it as 1962, so ...

And I chuckled at the inclusion of Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family. I suspect most here will have seen this film, but few will realize it!

[swo17]

Actually one of the benefits of this approach is that I can correct faulty IMDb information. (Don't most people use Letterboxd now anyway? Not that that's perfect either.) So I've added all three!

[domino harvey]

This, funnily enough, is my least-seen year of the decade, with "only" 97 films. For those who need a helping hand, here's 25 films on my shortlist for the year. swo, go ahead and verify any of these that don't appear, please!

Spoiler

All in a Night's Work
Amazons of Rome
Barabbas
Ce soir ou jamais
Come September
the Hustler
L'Annee derniere a Marienbad
La ragazza con la valigia
the Ladies Man
the Last Sunset
Leon Morin, pretre
Les Godelureaux
Les mauvais coups
Lola
Lover Come Back
Paris Blues
Splendor in the Grass
Summer and Smoke
Taste of Fear
Through a Glass Darkly
Un Cœur gros comme ça
Une femme est une femme
Une histoire d'eau
Viridiana
West Side Story

[domino harvey]

Adorable menteuse is unambiguously 1962. I'm curious what you're looking at that has it as 1961, it's that on IMDB and Letterboxd?

EDIT Cape Fear is also def 1962

EDIT AGAIN As is Adieu Philippine

[swo17]

I actually spent a little time looking into these and other cases, though it's of course possible that I'm wrong. But look at the year listed for these films in your Deville and Rozier sets. Is there reason to believe they're wrong? (Actually, Ce soir ou jamais is identified as 1960 in the French box but I noticed that too late to suggest that we should call it a 1960 film.) Same deal for Cape Fear--the only year identified on the back of my Universal Blu-ray is 1961

[domino harvey]

Menteuse wasn't reviewed in Cahiers until April 1962. IMDB and Letterboxd agree. There's literally no reason to believe it wasn't released in 1962.

Adieu Philippine was only privately screened in 1961 for buyers and Rozier's friends at Cahiers. It did not premiere until Cannes in 1962, as part of the 1e Semaine de la Critique. If anything, it has a better claim at being a 1963 film, since that's when it was actually commercially screened in France

[domino harvey]

And Cape Fear was released in April of 1962. You can find countless contemporary reviews verifying this. It's a studio film starring Mitchum and Peck, they weren't sitting on it for half a year after a slow open or something

[swo17]

That's fair. Do you think the Rozier should go in 1962 or 1963 then?

[domino harvey]

I'd say 1962, since I think a public premiere at a film festival is often what IMDB uses for years anyways. The inability of the film to get a commercial release (and then it's total failure at the box office when it finally was) was well covered by Cahiers, who did everything they could to raise attention for the film in the interim.

Also, I just checked and can confirm a fall 1961 release date for Ce soir ou jamais, again based on Cahiers

[swo17]

OK thanks. A lot of this will have to be case by case, because I want, for instance, Larks on a String to count as a 1969 film despite not actually being released until 1990. Or as another example, the BFI release of The Party's Over assigns it a release of 1963-1965 because the original cut kept being compromised before it was officially released in 1965 (the IMDb date). But the release makes a big deal about finally presenting the film as originally envisioned, and I think calling it a 1963 film is truest to the spirit of that.

Incidentally, both the BFI release of Vivre sa vie and the Criterion release of The Last Metro call Un histoire d'eau a 1958 film. What do you say to that? (Otherwise, everything on your shortlist was either already on the master list or I've now added it)

[domino harvey]

That one I was just going by IMDB and Letterboxd, but I'm looking through my books and they all say 1958, so I'm not sure what's going on there - perhaps it was not publicly screened until then? The Young Turks made a lot of shorts that even now are being rediscovered after never being commercially screened, so it wouldn't surprise me

[swo17]

That being said, it was specifically named as ineligible for our most recent '50s project and eligible for the first round of our '60s project, so it needs to go in some year in the 1960s. Since those decisions were based on IMDb, this one might as well be too

[TMDaines]

Please add Rou's The Night Before Christmas / Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka

[alacal2]

A Couple of Brit films worth a look I think:

Flame In The Streets
No Love For Johnnie

Both of these cry out for an Indicator treatment but appear to be owned by Strawberry Media so I'm unsure whether any upgrade is a no-no.

[swo17]

Added all 3, thanks

[Rayon Vert]

Comparing 1960 to 1961 in terms of high IMDB ratings, it left me with the impression that 1961 is quite the drop-off. Just got a few discs to view for this one.

[domino harvey]

Comparing 1960 to 1961 in terms of high IMDB ratings, it left me with the impression that 1961 is quite the drop-off. Just got a few discs to view for this one.

I would agree, based on my own personal ratings. I had to dip into films I only rated 3/5 on Letterboxd to come up with a full Top 25, which is... not great. But hopefully soon rectified!

[Rayon Vert]

Top 10 or 15 will probably be it for me!

[therewillbeblus]

I'm in the opposite camp- I would have 25 easy if I wind up participating, with more films I'm enthusiastic about than 1960 (though if we're comparing top fives in each, '60 wins out)

Also, aren't Two Rode Together and Pigs + Battleships 1961 films?

[swo17]

Two Rode Together was an oversight that I didn't include anywhere. I've added it now.

Pigs + Battleships is 1962 per Criterion but 1961 per Eureka, IMDb, and Letterboxd so I can move it here

[Rayon Vert]

Please add Viva L'Italia (aka Garibaldi) (Rossellini).

[swo17]

Added