1962 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 1962:

1. The Longest Day
2. Lawrence of Arabia
3. The Music Man
4. That Touch of Mink
5. Mutiny on the Bounty
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
7. Hatari!
8. Gypsy
9. Bon Voyage! The Interns
10. In Search of the Castaways

What are your top three films for 1962? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. Jules and Jim
2. Vivre sa Vie
3. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

What are some of the forgotten gems from the year? What is overrated? What did you discover at a young age and what did you discover later?

YEARS IN FILM • forum.chorus.fm

 

1. Vivre sa vie
2. Harakiri
3. Pitfall

 

1. Harakiri
2. Lawrence of Arabia
3. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Harakiri is another masterful film by Kobayashi, love the way the story unfolds. Lawrence of Arabia was a film I'd heard so much praise for before I finally saw it and it still somehow surprised me with how good it was, still one of the most impressive films I've seen visually. Baby Jane was just a super interesting idea for a film and I loved both of the lead performances.

 

1. Harakiri
2. Lawrence of Arabia
3. To Kill a Mockingbird

harakiri has been a recent watch but few films have floored me as much in the last handful of years as that one has. just masterful.

 

Another great year.
1. Vivre Sa Vie
2. Harakiri
3. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Vivre Sa Vie is my favorite Godard and one of my favorite films ever.
Honorable mentions: pretty hard to leave out La Jetee (which probably gets left out because of its short runtime) and Jules and Jim. Both are probably better than Valance but that is one of the few films my dad and I agree on so it gets a bump.

 

This is the first year of this series that has had more than half a dozen films I could easily choose but these are the ones I find myself either rewatching or still thinking about

1. Dr. No
2. The Manchurian Candidate
3. Birdman of Alcatraz

 

I assume a lot of people already know this, but Letterboxd is a great tool for seeing what you have seen from each year. It can filter into decades and individual years.

 

Two works from 1962 that I think are particularly underrated are Kaneto Shindo's Human and Jacques Paniel's Octobre a Paris.

Shindo's film is an incredible work of psychological drama, following a group of people stuck at sea on a boat. Shindo is obviously most celebrated for his pair of 60s horror films, Onibaba and Kuroneko, and I think this earlier film already shows his incredible ability to generate tension and unease. I watched a dozen or so of his films from the 50s-70s last year and this one ranked among my favourite. (Additional fun fact: before his death, Shindo was the oldest living-working Japanese filmmaker, and second oldest in the world after the great Manoel de Oliveira.)

Octobre a Paris is a criminally underseen film which I discovered via a list of films for a planned alternative retrospective on the French New Wave (I think it was at MoMA and got cancelled because of the pandemic). It's really shocking stuff, an on the ground documentary about the treatment of Algerian refugees in Paris. Vital work, even if it is a very difficult watch. I think it's a great companion to Battle of Algiers through the way the films are in dialogue about the Algerian condition at home and abroad.

 

1. Jules and Jim
2. Vivre Sa Vie
3. La Jetee

 

1. Jules & Jim
2. Vivre Sa Vie
3. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I like La Jetee a lot too. Sans Soleil might
threaten for my 1 of 1983

 

Shocked not to see a single vote for my #1!

1. Cleo from 5 to 7
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
3. Jules and Jim

 

Vivre sa Vie takes it with 12 votes. Both Harakiri and Jules and Jim were close with 10 votes each. Vivre sa Vie will move on to the bracket.