In 1966:
Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India;
John Lennon told a reporter for the London Evening Standard the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus;”
The Cultural Revolution began in China;
It’s a Small World opened in Disneyland;
The US Supreme Court ruled suspects must be informed of their rights before they can be questioned;
England won the FIFA World Cup;
Caesars Palace opened in Las Vegas;
Star Trek and The Monkees debuted;
Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party;
Edward Brooke became the first African-American elected to the US Senate since Reconstruction;
Patrick Dempsey, Rainn Wilson, Neal McDonough, Cindy Crawford, Rachel Dratch, Billy Zane, Téa Leoni, Zack Snyder, Michael Irvin, Rodney Peete, Tom Glavine, Robin Wright, Michael Imperioli, Greg Maddux, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, John Daly, Stephen Baldwin, Darius Rucker, Janet Jackson, Thurman Thomas, Mindy Cohn, Lisa Edelstein, H. Jon Benjamin, Helena Bonham Carter, Julianna Margulies, Dikembe Mutombo, J.J. Abrams, John Cusack, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mike Tyson, Matthew Fox, Tim Brown, Dean Cain, Tim Wakefield, Jimmy Wales, Halle Berry, Rik Smits, Tim Hardaway, Salma Hayek, Toby Jones, Adam Sandler, Soledad O’Brien, Sherman Alexie, David Cameron, Luke Perry, Jon Favreau, Matt Drudge, Andy Richter, Adam Horowitz, David Schwimmer, Gordon Ramsay, Curt Shilling, Daisy Fuentes, Sophie Marceau, Troy Aikman, Vincent Cassel, Larry Walker, Fred Armisen, C. Thomas Howell, Sinéad O’Connor, Kirsten Gillibrand, Anthony Mason, and Kiefer Sutherland were born;
While Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Sophie Tucker, Chester Nimitz, William Frawley, Alice Pearce, Flann O’Brien, Evelyn Waugh, Bob Elliott, Montgomery Clift, Lenny Bruce, Francis X. Bushman, Margaret Sanger, Clifton Webb, and Walt Disney died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 1966:
10) The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short
Middle aged teacher Govert Miereveld is so obsessed with one of his pupils, Fran, when she graduates from his school, he quits to avoid memories of her.
He takes a job with the justice department helping the coroner. During the course of his work he continually encounters things that remind him of Fran.
In an ambiguous scene which may be the product of a delusional mind, Govert runs into Fran who has become a celebrity. As they reminisce, he unburdens himself, and she shockingly confesses she loved him too.
It’s a wonderful film about obsession and how people develop such strong, irrational feelings. Govert is a depressing and soulful everyman whose fixation on Fran gives him identity and purpose.
9) How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Fifty years later, Boris Karloff’s narration of the Seuss story is a near perfect adaptation. A testament to its durability, every American born post 1960 can hum and sing at least a portion of the title song.
It’s an integral part of the American Christmas experience.
8) Seconds
As listless and depressed Arthur Hamilton muddles his way through a midlife crisis, he’s approached by a man he thought was dead and told about the “Company,” a secretive group conducting illicit surgeries to give people second chances in life by placing them in younger, more virile bodies.
Hamilton is given a new body and renamed Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). At first, he’s enamored with the experiences this affords him, but soon yearns for the relationships of his previous life. After he checks in on his wife, pretending to be an old friend of her deceased husband, he’s visited by a member of the “Company” and foolishly asks for his old life back.
John Frankenheimer’s paranoia filled films of the 1960s, including this, The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, foresaw the rampant paranoia of the 1970s.
This is a brilliant rendering of our arrogant assumptions about the possibilities of scientific progress and the limits of science as religion. We’ve been led to believe all problems can be solved by science, if we are patient, but Frankenheimer points us in a different direction. His argument is twofold: 1) scientific progress may solve a problem, but there will inevitably be additional problems as a result and 2) without an underlying ethical and moral principle, the result may look different than what we anticipate.
Frankenheimer suggests science is a tool, not an end in itself and laments what the elevation of science has done to our human experience.
7) The Nun
To hide the stain of their child’s adulterous origin and avoid a dowry, Suzanne’s parents place her in a nunnery. After reluctantly taking her vows, the novice is treated well by her first Mother Superior, de Moni, but after de Moni’s death, she is treated cruelly. Suzanne hires an attorney and gets a transfer where her third Mother Superior attempts to seduce her. Horrified, Suzanne runs away with a monk who then also makes unwanted advances.
Eventually, a kindhearted woman takes the downtrodden Suzanne off the street, but when the erstwhile nun realizes she’s been adopted into a brothel, she defenestrates herself.
Anna Karina, the former wife of Jean-Luc Goddard and icon of the French New Wave, is wonderful as the titular nun. Suzanne’s pious struggle reminds me of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc.
Adapted from an 18th century novel by Denis Diderot which was conceived as an elaborate joke, Jacque Rivette’s film is a moving examination of the underbelly of religious life, a damning look at the way institutions protect themselves and are often manipulated by the powerful, forcing viewers to examine their own faith and complicity in the worst parts of their faith.
6) The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In his final collaboration with Sergio Leone, Eastwood gives us one last incarnation of his famed “Man with No Name” character (nicknamed “Blondie” in this film).
Eli Wallach is perfect as the borderline buffoon, Tuco, Blondie’s partner; as is Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes, the ruthless bounty hunter trying to make a buck in the closing days of the Civil War.
The film uses the promise of hidden, stolen Confederate gold to create a tense character study of betrayal and double crosses, exploring the lengths people will push the boundaries of who they are to get what they want.
The three-way Mexican standoff at the film’s climax remains one of the most influential scenes in the western genre, and this film, the apex of the spaghetti western, cemented Eastwood’s place in the gallery of machismo, transforming him from a TV star into a bona fide cultural phenomenon.
Young Milos Hrma takes a job as a guard in a small Czech train station during the height of the Second World War. The station is a focal point of the resistance effort and circumstances there force the naive and inexperienced Milos to choose between becoming an active member of the resistance or prolonging his own life by hiding his sympathies.
It’s a beautiful elegy to a youth and childhood destroyed by war and violent ideologies.
Reprising his award-winning performance in Robert Bolt’s play, Paul Scofield is wonderful as the beleaguered catholic Thomas More. His stand for his faith during the Protestant Reformation is lionized and extrapolated as a proxy for anyone interested in defense of truth.
John Hurt makes an early appearance as Richard Rich, Robert Shaw is excellent as the mercurial king, and Orson Welles lends gravitas as Cardinal Wolsey.
The conflict between faith and a desire to do what’s right vs. political and personal expediency is still relevant more than fifty years later.
3) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
George (Richard Burton), an associate history professor, is married to Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), the daughter of the college president.
When Martha invites new professor Nick (George Segal) and his wife Honey (Sandy Dennis) over for late night drinks, George and Martha engage in a series of humiliating “games” in front of their guests, exposing fractures in both relationships.
The movie builds to a pair of devastating discoveries. George and Martha couldn’t conceive and created a fictional child for the sake of their relationship. Nick married Honey because he thought she was pregnant, only to find it was a hysterical pregnancy. He’s resentful, but doesn’t know the truth: Honey was actually pregnant, but terminated her pregnancy.
Nick and Honey are what George and Martha must have been like twenty years earlier, naively believing they could overcome the imperfections in their relationship by lying.
What makes this movie special is the real, stormy relationship between Burton and Taylor. It’s easy to imagine the film as a window into their personal lives.
This was a turning point in Elizabeth Taylor’s career. Before this film, she was known as one of the most gorgeous women in Hollywood, but after gaining thirty pounds to play the unglamorous Martha, it was impossible to dismiss her as simply a beautiful face.
This powerful adaptation of Edward Albee’s play advocates for honesty, while acknowledging even the best relationships incorporate falsehoods to make things function more smoothly. A wife deludes her husband into thinking he’s as attractive as he was when they first met. A husband doesn’t tell his wife he hates her cooking. But the movie patiently reminds us the bigger the lie, the bigger the fallout when it’s exposed.
After the King Vidor version of the seminal Russian novel was released in 1956, embarrassed Russian officials commissioned their own production in a cultural parallel to the space race.
Tolstoy’s epic love triangle of the idealistic bastard Pierre Bezukhov, the aristocratic soldier Andrei Bolkonsky, and the tempestuous Natasha Rostova was transformed into a test whether communism could produce a fruitful artistic effort.
Due to internal party politics, relatively unknown director Sergei Bondarchuk was chosen to helm the picture (and cast himself as Pierre after his initial choice didn’t work out).
Set during Napoleon’s Russian campaign (a defining nineteenth century moment) the film functions like a Russian counterpoint to Gone with the Wind.
I adore Tolstoy and while his wonderful philosophical and religious ruminations on the role of great men in history is lost in the journey from page to screen, this is a delightful adaptation of one of the most important novels ever written.
Roaming the Italian countryside, Toto and his son Ninetto meet a talking crow who tells them the story of two Franciscan friars (played by the same actors) commissioned by St Francis to preach the Gospel to the hawks and sparrows.
As Toto and Ninetto continue their journey, they encounter a variety of characters, primarily the poor and displaced.
Pasolini is one of the most overtly spiritual directors. His films work out the ramifications of intellectual assent to religious and theological ideas.
Here, he wisely casts the famed Italian comedian Toto in the lead role. I’m not overly familiar with Toto’s work, but he appears to be similarly placed to Chaplin in the Italian canon.
Pasolini uses his audience’s familiarity with Toto to disarm them and suck them into his meditation on the meaning of the gospel.
Some of Pasolini’s work is a bridge too far for me (120 days of Sodom), but when he tones it back, I find him to be a thoughtful, engaging voice, with a deep sense of right and wrong and an appreciation for the radical message of Christ.
While I don’t always agree with his politics, I admire Pasolini’s audacity in trying to bridge the gap between socialism and Christianity.