By James David Patrick
Over the course of 2021, I’ll call out the Underseen and Underappreciated films from the year’s big anniversaries—10, 20, 30 years ago… you get the picture. Meanwhile over on Twitter, I’ll send a monthly message calling for recommendations. That list made from your suggestions will inspire an upcoming episode of the Cinema Shame Podcast, where I discuss five new first-time watches. This month, it’s time to fire up the flux capacitor and travel back in time to 1961.
Off the top of my head, I knew only West Side Story, The Hustler, The Innocents, and Taste of Fear (aka Scream of Fear). This has less to do with the notable quality of the 1961 collection than it does with the dramatic decrease in availability and visibility of titles available for viewing… and titles I’ve researched lately for other articles.
Luckily, however, a little bit of digging revealed a relative bounty of underseen and underappreciated titles that you’ll surely want to add to your queue to flesh out your own 1961 mental catalog. There’s so much more to that year beyond the glossy, Hollywood offerings of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story. In fact, 1961 features an extraordinary array of offerings from the greatest filmmakers that ever lived.
Billy Wilder, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Demy, Elia Kazan, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Huston, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Jean-Pierre Melville all released films – just to name a few. It’s an auteur theory fever dream. Alongside those titans of cinema, audiences partook of the pleasures of William Castle and Roger Corman and witnessed the rise of Hammer Studios as an international box office force. Godzilla imitators attacked more theaters than you could hang in a rubber suit closet: Mothra, Gorgo, Konga, and Reptilicus. 1961 offered something for everybody.
If 1971 represented a post-Hays era of unlimited creative potential populated by a new generation of filmmakers, 1961 teased the future of cinema. Fueled largely by the drive-in culture, the rise of the B-movie began in the 1950s and expanded the expectations for populist entertainment. Studios such as Hammer and AIP made movies fast and cheap and sold to the youth market of the moment based on name alone. Would you not rush out and catch a hypothetical double bill of Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory and Sex Kittens Go To College?
Walt Disney (101 Dalmatians, The Absent-Minded Professor, The Parent Trap) and epics (The Guns of Navarone, King of Kings, and El Cid) dominated the box office. As the only musical in the Top 10, West Side Story represents the genre’s waning influence. If anything, the box office figures represent an industry in transition and inundated with offerings from more progressive European filmmakers. Case in point: much to my surprise Fellini’s U.S. release of La Dolce Vita (1960) bested Elvis (Blue Hawaii).
So, I guess that means I know where to start this list of Underseen and Underappreciated gems from 60 years ago—but first, as always…
My Subjective Top 5 from 1961 (alphabetical order)
Blue Hawaii (Norman Tourag)
The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
The Innocents (Jack Clayton)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais)
Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)
Blue Hawaii (Norman Tourag, 1961)
Why do you watch movies? Follow up question: Why do you watch Elvis movies?
If you’re tuning in for deep, resonant, emotional intelligence, your attention has been misplaced. It’s not that Elvis was an incapable actor; given the right opportunity and director he could carry a dramatic role. Watch Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960) as Example A. There’s a reason people consider that film “surprising.” It’s because the script requires Elvis to act and that’s something to which they’re not accustomed.
The average contemporary viewer’s big-screen Elvis exposure usually begins and ends with Jailhouse Rock (1957) and Viva Las Vegas (1964). In the former, he’s totally raw, playing a petulant teenage rock star. In the latter, he's Elvis playing a race-car driver and second-fiddle to Ann-Margret’s hips. The narrow Elvis bandwidth allows us to enjoy the prefabricated “Elvis” personality. And no movie nakedly trades in this commodity more than Blue Hawaii—the other Elvis movie people may have seen, but also probably dismissed.
Less a movie than a series of almost-connected musical interludes, Blue Hawaii does not care. Angela Lansbury plays Elvis’ narrowminded mother. She was 35. He was 25. Blue Hawaii does not care. A song devoted to a character’s love of food? Blue Hawaii doesn’t care.
Ito is an eating boy
He never get enough from fish and poi
He eat everything he don't care what
He even eat the shell from the coconut
Eat Ito eat all the night and the day
And in the next minute Elvis is crooning “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Rock-a-Hula Baby.” Tonally schizophrenic and overflowing with froth, Blue Hawaii indulges Hawaiian scenery, pretty girls, and Elvis-gazing. The plot concerns nothing more taxing than an ex-GI returning home to Hawaii who just wants to hang with his friends and surf rather than enter the family Pineapple business.
The waters have never been bluer, the flowers never brighter. Grab a Chi Chi, sit back, and enjoy these simple cinematic pleasures.
Come September (Robert Mulligan, 1961)
And speaking of frothy Technicolor pleasures, let’s talk Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962) directed this farce about an American playboy/businessman (Hudson) who travels to his Italian villa every year to spend a month with his effervescent mistress Lisa (Lollobrigida). This year, however, he’s moved his trip up to July and finds out that his major domo (Walter Slezak) has turned his September residence into a hotel during the other eleven months.
Upon arriving he bumps into a touristing group of teenage girls (including Sandra Dee) and their chaperone. Robert attempts to usher them out, but the chaperone slips on Robert’s champagne cork thus delaying their departure. A group of teenage boys (25-year-old Bobby Darin among them) sets up camp outside the villa to woo the lovely chaperone-less ladies. Robert takes it upon himself to protect the teenage girls from the lurking boys (a type of predator he knows all too well). He rattles off speeches about the importance of pre-marriage chastity and attempts to drink the fellas under the table to keep them from advancing their sexual agendas. The hypocrisy of his behavior infuriates Lisa who hops aboard the bus with the girls, leaving Robert alone in his empty villa.
Come September pleasantly unfurls with light comedy and entertaining individual performances – Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida are a spectacle unto themselves. When Lisa calls out Robert’s behavior and takes agency, the movie becomes something else, a slapstick farce not entirely unlike Mulligan’s earlier The Rat Race (1960). Imagine Rock Hudson, in a truck filled with geese, chasing after Gina Lollobrigida and a busload of teenage girls. It’s the kind of scene that takes you by surprise and reminds you that even 60-year-old movies hold unexpected magic.
Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence, 1961)
When Hammer Film Productions turned its attention to rekindling the horror genre in the mid to late 1950s, the studio gained international attention for its willingness to push the envelope of decorum. They reveled in showing “pulsating obscenity” (as it was termed by a British Board of Film Censors examiner) such as scars, violence, and ghastly deformities. By becoming synonymous with horror cinema, Hammer’s other output is often overlooked—especially when it’s a single-location, low-key but psychologically complex neo-noir crime thriller.
Made on a shoe-string budget, Quentin Lawrence shot Cash On Demand on a limited number of studio sets with a cast you could count on two hands. What this means, practically, is that the film features two heavyweight performances from stars Peter Cushing and André Morell.
Two days before Christmas, an insurance investigator, Gore Hepburn (Morell), attempts a bank heist by taking the family of the bank manager Fordyce (Cushing) hostage. Once the sternly officious Fordyce believes his family to be in jeopardy, he willingly goes along with the scheme, concealing his duplicity from his staff as Hepburn’s threats grow ever more ruthless.
Cushing’s steely performance turns this little B-picture into a subtle profile of a man caught between his professional duty and love of family. Shot in high-contrast black and white, Lawrence maximizes the budget and localized tension with the blackest shadows and tight focus on Cushing’s moral dilemma. It’s a quick hit of suspense and a master class in low-budget filmmaking.
Zero Focus (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1961)
I can’t help but love the visual poetry of a remote, isolated northern Japan and the woman that goes in search of her mysteriously disappeared newlywed husband Kenichi. Teiko Uhara (Yoshiko Kuga) travels across Japan to unravel the mystery of Kenichi’s “short” business trip using only two curious pictures she found in his belongings to guide her search.
The landscape of northern Japan plays a vital role in fostering the film’s unsettling anxiety. Zero Focus borrows some of the post-war bleakness found in American noir of the 1940s and filters it through a story of loss, alienation, and female stigmatization. As those who knew Kenichi spin stories meant to guide her in her search, Nomura’s narrative construct also recalls Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Reality and individual fictions misdirect her search and our experience viewing the film.
Zero Focus casts a spell. As the narrative drifts from visual poetry to a procedural drawn from unreliable narrators, you might find the shift jarring or uniquely thrilling as the disparate pieces of Kenichi’s life fall into place.
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.