A look at the US box-office top 10 for 1960, shows a penchant for classics and crud. Sounds familiar, writes DONALD CLARKE
THIS YEAR we celebrate the 50th anniversary of two hugely admired, enormously influential European films: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vitaand Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.
After enduring a period of critical suspicion, the Fellini picture now seems to have secured its position as a key meditation on fame and its absurdities. Breathless is, perhaps, better loved as a harbinger than for its own ragged virtues – it's a funky piece of work, but it doesn't really compare to later Godard masterpieces such as Vivre sa Vie, Alphaville, Bande à partor Pierrot le Fou.
Anyway, that is not our mission. The question is, rather, to do with what was popular – as opposed to acclaimed – in the first year of the decade that swung.
The US box-office top 10 for 1960 is a rather fascinating piece of work. Peruse:
1 Swiss Family Robinson($20,178,000)
2 Psycho($11,200,000)
3 Spartacus($11,100,000)
4 Exodus($8,332,000)
5 The Alamo($7,919,000)
6 Butterfield 8($7,552,000)
7 The World of Suzie Wong($7,500,000)
8 The Apartment($6,680,000)
9 Ocean's 11($5,650,000)
10 Please Don't Eat the Daisies($5,369,000)
So, do contemporary cinemagoers look like morons when compared with their parents and grandparents? Well, what immediately strikes you about the 1960 list is that it includes a Stanley Kubrick film and an Alfred Hitchcock film in the top five. Moreover, at No 8 we encounter not just any Billy Wilder film, but the picture many identify as that director’s very best.
The only movie in the list from 2009 that compares in quality with these releases is Up. (If we look at the worldwide – rather than just US – chart, then the situation is even more depressing. So let's not.) On the other hand, for all my reservations about 2009 topper Avatar, I'd rather endure that overblown space opera than sit through the stunningly ordinary Swiss Family Robinsonagain. Its bizarre success demonstrated how powerful the Disney brand still was in 1960.
Also, it is worth noting what odd, odd movies appear in this list's obscure corners. Okay, Exodus(endurable) and The Alamo(execrable) – both mild right-wing propaganda – were what we have since come to call Event Films. You had to have an opinion about them, so you'd better give them a brief once over, even if you had no interest in the Texas Revolution or the pre-history of the modern Israeli state.
Ocean's 11was useless, but, given how many movie stars turned out for it, you'd feel bad not buying a ticket. Please Don't Eat the Daisieswas far from the best of Doris Day's comedies, but the old girl (as she then wasn't) always gave good value for money.
No, the real weirdies here are Butterfield 8and The World of Suzie Wong. Both still turned up on TV quite a bit when I was a kid, but they are almost forgotten now.
The former does retain some notability – notoriety, perhaps – as the film for which Elizabeth Taylor won her first Oscar, allowing her to thrash and bellow as a dissolute woman with an overpoweringly unstoppable sex drive. It’s too turgid for words.
Suzie Wong could barely be broadcast now. Featuring William Holden as a traveller to Hong Kong who falls for a hooker with (yup) a heart of gold, the film features depictions of Asia that veer drunkenly from the patronising to the offensive without ever skirting the real world. I can't quite recall if Edward Said mentioned the film in Orientalism, but a glance at the ghastly thing will clarify the great man's entire thesis instantly.
What links these two films is that they are the sort of pompous pabulum that viewers in 1960 erroneously regarded as "sophisticated". Call me a moron, but I'd take the honest nonsense of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel – No 9– over those highly dubious slices of middlebrow dross.
For all that, this does remain a pretty decent list of movies. It should, however, be noted that this was a very slow year at the box office. Not one of these films made it into the box-office top 25 for the 1960s. A critic might in 1960 have argued that the medium was in the last stages of terminal decline.
It would, however, have been a fine wake. That year, The Apartmentwon the Oscar for best picture and La Dolce Vitapicked up the Palme d'Or. Not bad. Also released in 1960 were: Rocco and his Brothers, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Shoot the Piano Player, L'Avventura, The Housemaid, Eyes Without a Face, The Magnificent Seven, Village of the Damnedand Peeping Tom. Not bad at all.
This piece first appeared on Donald Clarke’s blog, irishtimes.com/blogs/screenwriter
