Movies of My Life: 1965

Not one of my favorite years, but still some interesting flicks here.

(1) A Patch of Blue

The same year Martin Luther King Jr. led the march from Selma to Montgomery, Sidney Poitier was breaking stereotypes on the screen. I watched this movie so many times growing up, I know it had an impact on me. Poitier plays an educated black man who tries to help a blind girl escape from her abusive mother and her sheltered life. This movie is overshadowed by his work from 1967 (when he had three box office hits released just a few months apart), but its subtlety is exquisite.

(2) Repulsion

Wow! Catherine Deneuve plays a disturbed woman who’s left alone for the weekend. Seems like a simple enough story until she starts letting her delusions get the best of her. It’s Roman Polanski’s first English-language film. 

(3) Alphaville

Jean-Luc Godard deconstructs the science fiction movie with no special effects, costumes, or gadgets. A Ford Mustang stands in for a spaceship. The futuristic city is just Paris in the 1960s. The hero of the story is Lemmy Caution, a character that appeared in numerous crime dramas previously. He dresses, talks, and acts just like any film noir hero from the period. It’s an unusual take on a familiar genre.

(4) The Sound of Music

Christopher Plummer, who plays Captain von Trapp in this movie, called it “The Sound of Mucus.” Critic Pauline Kael called it, “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies.” Still, I love it. Great songs, great cinematography, Julie Andrews. Maybe there is a “luxuriant falseness” to it, as Kael says, but it’s the kind of “luxuriant falseness” that’s really entertaining.

(5) Flight of the Phoenix

I like stories about disparate groups of people stranded together, trying to make the best of it. This one has the advantage of the angsty postwar Jimmy Stewart as an airplane pilot arguing with an overly self-confident German engineer (Hardy Kruger) about what to do with their crashed plane.

(6) Crack in the World

One of the best in the “unintended consequences” category of science fiction movies from this era. A group of scientists trying to tap into the geothermal energy at the Earth’s core inadvertently cause the global catastrophe of the title.

(7) The Collector

Super creepy movie about a butterfly collector, played by Terence Stamp, who turns his attention toward “collecting” a young blonde art student. The movie and the book on which it was based have had some real life “unintended consequences.”

(8) The Greatest Story Ever Told

In 1964, we had an Italian Jesus. In 1965, he’s Swedish. Max Von Sydow plays Christ in this dark blockbuster that follows Jesus’s life from nativity to resurrection. The movie has an all-star cast, and perhaps it’s worth sitting through its four hours just to hear John Wayne as a Roman Centurion say, “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

 (9) Cat Ballou

Lee Marvin plays two roles – a drunken has-been gunfighter and his villainous brother with a silver nose, while Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole perform as a kind of Greek chorus with banjos. Jane Fonda stars as the title character in this comedy western.

(10) Dr. Who and the Daleks

I’ve been a fan of the Doctor Who TV series since the 1980s, when PBS began broadcasting the Tom Baker episodes. This movie has The Doctor (played by Peter Cushing) and his most famous enemy, the Daleks, but it veers too far away from the canon of the series. It’s only in this list because it was the first movie my wife Karen and I watched together when we started dating. The fact that she still watches Doctor Who with me 30 years later says a lot about her endurance!