We are officially hitting our 33rd My Oscar Ballot, which given that we just had the 98th Academy Awards, I am officially also a third done with this project (for the uninitiated, there are links to all of my past contests at the bottom of this article). If you missed it, we already did the 1964 Oscar Viewing Project, where I see all of the films that Oscar nominated, but this is my turn-where I turn the tables and pick the films that I most liked from 1964, seeing dozens of films above-and-beyond the Oscar Viewing Project. While I see all of the Oscar-cited films, I don't (and can't) see all of the films (I'd never finish the project if I did...hell, I'd never finish 1964 if I did), and so if there's one title missing below, make sure to ask in the comments before assuming I'm committing a massive snub.
This is the first year of the 1960's I've done (we now only have the 1920's & 1950's left in terms of decades I haven't hit, the former a year I suspect we won't get to for a very long time as I plan on ending the series with 1927-28, so 1929 is my only option, and the latter we should get to later this year after I complete our next two years, 1990 & 1985). Given the 60's is a transitional decade for Hollywood, I'm kind of glad I'm leading with one of the quintessential transition years for Oscar, with sturdy studio system fare like My Fair Lady competing against chic, groundbreaking work like Dr. Strangelove. Overall, I like both of these styles, and free from the shackles of having to prove myself either cool or supportive of the system (I always make these decisions in a vacuum, as that's the whole point of the My Ballot project-to pick solely based on who is best without consideration of spreading-the-wealth or taking into account an artist's personal life), I ended up nominating both. This is definitely a list that I feel is cooler than Oscar; you'll see films from filmmakers as cutting edge at the time as Sergio Leone, Masahiro Shinoda, & Jean-Luc Godard), but also features some Hollywood fare, including genre pictures (horror, westerns, & even rock-n-roll show up below). You also will see first-time nominations for several major Hollywood stars like Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, & Jimmy Stewart, starting off their My Ballot run but undoubtedly not getting their only citation.
Note about eligibility: Oscar played far faster and looser with his rules in the 1960's & 70's, which resulted in several movies being nominated in two separate years, including several in 1964: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg & Women in the Dunes. The rule when this happens (in place by me) is that I will nominate the year that they received the bulk of their nominations, which in both cases is 1965. So while both of these movies (today) feel more like "1964" movies in common parlance, they will not show up below because they're 1965. The same is true for other films that sometimes feel like 1964 movies, but were nominated exclusively in 1965 (The Train & Kwaidan being the examples that stick out most in my brain). On the flip side, a film like Marriage-Italian Style which was cited in 1964 for Best Actress but for Foreign Language Film in 1965 at the Oscars is eligible in 1964. For films that don't have Oscar nominations (so I match up to the OVP as much as possible), I stuck with the year they're associated most with, not necessarily their Oscar eligibility window (a good example of this is A Fistful of Dollars, which was not released in the United States until 1967, but is by pretty much everyone's definition a 1964 movie). As ever, I largely stuck to Oscar's categories, but I didn't include a breakout of Black & White films, and I also have categories for Makeup & Dance Direction because I think both feel relevant so that my My Ballot as consistent as possible.
Band of Outsiders
Diary of a Chambermaid
Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
A Fistful of Dollars
Goldfinger
A Hard Day's Night
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
Pale Flower
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Gold: In a year where a lot of these films were just as much about mood as they were about plot or ideas, an unlikely picture fit that path more than anything. A Hard Day's Night is indescribable, filled with four artists in their pop star god mode, forever untouchable and filled with youth and energy.
Silver: The surprisingly beautiful Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's legendary, black-as-pitch comedy made at the height of the Cold War, is a testament to the follies of male supremacy (and the realities of male fragility).
Bronze: The start of Sergio Leone's most famed trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars, is as good as pretty much anything he's done (which is to say, yet another masterpiece in a career with an impossibly high batting average), a gorgeous western with an unknowable Clint Eastwood smack-dab in the center.
Luis Bunuel, Diary of a Chambermaid
Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove
Sergio Leone, A Fistful of Dollars
Richard Lester, A Hard Day's Night
Masahiro Shinoda, Pale Flower
Gold: One of the things about making these in a vacuum is you get the sense of which people are going to get a LOT of medals, when you might have otherwise spread the wealth. Of course, then you cannot properly identify the legends, which is what Stanley Kubrick (now on his third Director medal already, and his first gold...and he's only been eligible three times) is, giving us a taste of the paranoia (both ridiculous and terrifying) that ravaged the world in the 1960's.
Silver: Sergio Leone is also a favorite, and man is his work here exceptional. The way that he crafts the legend of the west into an Italian setting, making you forget about the dubbing the visuals and storytelling are so compelling, is a miracle, and something he'd spend much of the rest of his career duplicating with success.
Bronze: The one director on this list I knew the least about is Masahiro Shinoda, but after Pale Flower you can bet I added a half dozen of his films to my Letterboxd Watchlist immediately. A sinful, seductive look at gambling and the criminal underworld in Japan in an era where their filmmakers were not just borrowing from film noir but sometimes eclipsing it.
Richard Attenborough, Diary of a Chambermaid
Richard Burton, Becket
Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady
Peter O'Toole, Becket
Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove
Gold: I mean, in some ways Peter Sellers is not playing with a fair deck. Against a very good (and very Oscar-y, especially for this category) lineup, he has the advantage of not just playing one memorable character, but three. But his comedic genius is so essential to the core of Dr. Strangelove, and its bizarre otherworldliness that even with just one role, he'd surely be at the top of this heap.
Silver: Becket features our first outing in the My Ballot with two of Oscar's most noted bridesmaids, and of the two I think I favor Peter O'Toole, who has a slightly bigger range as the King clearly in love with another man, but whose pride (and belief in his divinity) ensures that they will never be together as friend or more.
Bronze: Close behind O'Toole is Burton, though (I really liked Becket, way more than I was initially expecting). Burton's work here is extraordinary; it's hard to nobly and convincingly play a doomed man as if he's not doomed, but he does it with an enormous, Shakespearean grace.
Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins
Ingrid Bergman, The Visit
Audrey Hepburn, My Fair Lady
Jeanne Moreau, Diary of a Chambermaid
Kim Stanley, Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Gold: There's always an internal wager I have about whether Best Actor or Best Actress will have the better lineup, and in 1964 I have to give it (slightly) to the ladies. And so the actor that comes out on top is also the world's most famous nanny (or at least in that contest she's competing with herself), the charming and practically perfect Mary Poppins, played by the truly perfect Julie Andrews.
Silver: This means that in one of the most famous Oscar matchups that never was, I do pick Andrews over Audrey Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle, and yes it's the singing that probably breaks the tie. But unlike Oscar I had the good sense to at least nominate her, as her charming, eventually enchanting flower girl is the stuff of breezy, effervescent movie magic.
Bronze: In a complete departure from these two musicals, we have Kim Stanley with the bronze. Seance is one of those 1960's horror films that is truly creepy even today, and a big part of that is Stanley, who starts the film with us so confidence in our expectations of her, and then subtly moves away from them, us not knowing all that is beneath the surface until she's ready to reveal.
Georges Geret, Diary of a Chambermaid
Sterling Hayden, Dr. Strangelove
Stanley Holloway, My Fair Lady
George C. Scott, Dr. Strangelove
James Stewart, Cheyenne Autumn
Gold: He might not be willing to accept, but George C. Scott gets the gold here for his totally unhinged portrayal of bravado and machismo in Dr. Strangelove. I love the way that the film is perpetually poking fun at him, but he never lets on, making the joke that much better (and more realistic).
Silver: In one of the weirdest nominations I've done, we have Jimmy Stewart's first citation (coming from a movie that is almost never name-checked as one of his best). But while the rest of Cheyenne Autumn is just okay, the way that he plays his hilarious, fumblingly awesome Wyatt Earp steals the picture (and contains the promise of a better one).
Bronze: The political underbelly of Diary of a Chambermaid is where its genius lies, and you can't have that genius without the work of Georges Geret in the critical role of Joseph, the fascist chauffeur who is treated by those around him as a joke...even though he seems himself as very real.
Diane Baker, Marnie
Glynis Johns, Mary Poppins
Angela Lansbury, Dear Heart
Ann Sothern, The Best Man
Ann Sothern, Lady in a Cage
Gold: Unlike Oscar (used to), I actually allow myself the ability to give actors multiple nominations in the same category, and in this case that double nominee comes out on top. Ann Sothern's work in Lady in a Cage is something else-a woman who has "seen it all"...but she's never seen this.
Silver: Diane Baker, decades before Hannibal Lecter loved her suit, is the quintessential definition of a Supporting Actress nominee, playing a woman on the edge of a relationship, one with secrets & ulterior motives, yet as trapped as anyone in Marnie by what's to come.
Bronze: At the time, there was a lot of Oscar buzz for Sothern in both of these roles-it's bonkers she didn't get in for one of them. We're finishing the acting field out with her here, with The Best Man in a showy role (that, weirdly enough, I saw her fellow nominee Angela Lansbury play on stage), one that gets her a look at both the unusual role that women were (and weren't) allowed to play in politics of the 1960's.
Becket
Diary of a Chambermaid
Dr. Strangelove
Mary Poppins
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Gold: I tend to favor plotting, which this film admittedly has, more than simply dialogue or quotes when it comes to deciding which scripts I'm going to favor. But man, you can't deny the endlessly quotable lines of Dr. Strangelove. Whether it's "you can't fight in here...it's the War Room!" or Sterling Hayden's deranged monologues, it's a movie you can always trot out at dinner parties.
Silver: But if we're going to go with plotting, you can't go wrong with Diary of a Chambermaid. Years before the (very different) Cabaret, the movie inspires it (and borrows to some degree from Rules of the Game) to create a taut, sophisticated mystery that is also a cautionary tale.
Bronze: Seance on a Wet Afternoon gets much of its power from its twists, the way that it plays with our expectations of these two kidnappers, and what they are up to as the picture moves us into uncomfortable conversations about grief, greed, and the power balance in marriage.
A Hard Day's Night
The Naked Kiss
One Potato, Two Potato
Pale Flower
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Gold: By 1964, film noir had basically drowned in Hollywood, and we were a few years away from Arthur Penn & Roman Polanski creating it for a new generation of moviegoers. So it was left to the international cinema, and in particular Japan, to carry that torch, which it does beautifully in the dreamy Pale Flower.
Silver: On-paper A Hard Day's Night is no one's definition of a writerly film. Indeed, the movie at times reads like a quasi-documentary, following John, Paul, George, & Ringo around as they are mobbed by screaming fans. But that's the greatness of Alun Owen's script-he makes you feel like you're actually spending time with a charming, engulfing rock band...so much so that it feels like it's not scripted.
Bronze: A now-forgotten look at biracial marriage in the 1960's, One Potato, Two Potato eschews many of the pitfalls of an "issues" film by giving us realistic depictions of love, acceptance, race, and the cruelties of having a child who can't understand any of them...even if she has to live them.
Fail Safe
A Hard Day's Night
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Gold: I say this too often in these write-ups for it to feel true anymore, but I don't just automatically default to musicals when it comes to this category (something Oscar frequently did), but with these nominees (and medalists) we're going to get a shocking amount of musicals. The first is My Fair Lady, which has not only grand orchestral work, but also perhaps the most seamless case of dubbing in the history of cinema with Marni Nixon.
Silver: Blending the screaming hoards & classic pop ballads, A Hard Day's Night is able to craft something truly magical. We get a sense of them performing this both in person and clearly in recording, which is not an easy task, and it feels authentically true even in the comedic bits, where you are organically pulled in through the sound of the era.
Bronze: We're finishing with one more musical (I wasn't kidding), and of course in this case it's a situation where we're putting sound on top of visual effects on top of the sounds of a studio lot London, all to bring the magic together for Mary Poppins.
Dr. Strangelove
Fail Safe
Goldfinger
A Hard Day's Night
Mary Poppins
Gold: The tech gadgetry in all James Bond movies is a large part of why 007 has stayed iconic long after Sean Connery's heyday. You see that in the action set pieces, and the most thrilling of scenes (such as the laser work) that couldn't be possible without the sound editing team carrying the day in the background.
Silver: As I said above, the genius of A Hard Day's Night is the freshness of the film, the way that it blends in pre-existing recordings (like these brilliant songs), to make something that resembles at once a musical and a pioneering music video.
Bronze: Nuclear explosions, tense plane conversations, and Slim Pickens riding a warhead into oblivion, Dr. Strangelove is heightened by what it's aurally putting into the viewers ears. The omnipresence of sound in some scenes while we get a pin-drop in others mirrors the world's thoughts on the Cold War...that it's always there, but could stop at any moment (and not in a good way).
A Fistful of Dollars
Marnie
Mary Poppins
The Pink Panther
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Gold: Being iconic doesn't automatically equal that you are good. A lot of icons are middling (just look at a good chunk of the history of pop music). But in the case of Henry Mancini's delicious, smooth-as-silk jazz odes in The Pink Panther, it's a case where the hype is quickly lived up to-an absolutely outstanding mix of playfulness and mystery.
Silver: The music of Ennio Morricone in the westerns he made with Sergio Leone are amongst some of the best ever committed to celluloid, and that doesn't end in A Fistful of Dollars. Glorious, paired with the wide expanse of the cinematography, everything about this film is creating its own mythology.
Bronze: Like Oscar, I'm occasionally a bit of a snob when it comes to musicals in this category-I have a Best Scoring category we can get to in a minute, and let's face it-most scores borrow so heavily from the original tunes that it's hard to really justify them getting into this category. But color me delighted that Mary Poppins has a wonderfully spry, winsome bit of music to bridge all of those ditties.
A Hard Day's Night
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
Gold: Maybe the most inevitable trio I've ever pulled together (certainly in this category), we have three all-timers just jockeying over position on the medal stand. In this case, I'm going to give the gold to My Fair Lady, the only one without an original ballad, mostly because I think it does such a ravishing job of incorporating the music, and we have two iconic, juxtaposed singing styles between the heavenly Marni Nixon and the speak-sing cleverness of Rex Harrison.
Silver: That said, you'd be hard-pressed to have a movie with the kind of soundtrack that A Hard Day's Night pulls together. Seriously-pulling out just an endless litany of Beatles' classics, most of them coming onto your screen for the first time in this picture...it's musical heaven.
Bronze: We conclude with what is surely the strongest bronze medalist in this article. The thing about the songs of Mary Poppins is that they feel filled with wonder and wisdom. Wonderful tunes like "Tuppence of a Bag" and "A Spoonful of Sugar" have the element of observation, something that sets Mary Poppins apart as a character.
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
Viva Las Vegas
Gold: Mary gets her revenge in this one, though, as she glides to a gold medal. The dance direction here isn't just Julie Andrews & Dick van Dyke sailing across a smoky English skyline, but also the insane visual effects on display to get them realistically dancing with animated penguins and plopping along through Disney's imagination.
Silver: My Fair Lady isn't a musical you'd automatically name-check as filled with a lot of dance numbers. Harrison & Hepburn are not Astaire & Rogers. But that doesn't negate the moments of whimsy here as Hepburn floats from room to room (as she could've, indeed, "danced all night"), or her signature ballroom moment-of-triumph later in the picture.
Bronze: We're getting back to that word "iconic" with our bronze medalist, and the gloriously choreographed dancing between Elvis Presley (who is pretty good) and Ann-Margret (who is revolutionary and basically inventing a new generation of swinging hips and thrusts that even Elvis can't compete with) in Viva Las Vegas.
"Can't Buy Me Love," A Hard Day's Night
"Goldfinger," Goldfinger
"A Hard Day's Night," A Hard Day's Night
"A House is Not a Home," A House is Not a Home
"If I Fell," A Hard Day's Night
Gold: This category is CRAZY. I mean-I have original tunes by Elvis Presley AND an entirely original classic Disney score I'm somehow leaving out, but whom do you cut? Certainly not "If I Fell," one of the best and most gorgeously melancholy love tunes that ever came from the Fab Four.
Silver: Only peak Beatles could disrupt Shirley Bassey, ensuring you know there are a lot of notes out there and she's going to sing them all, in the opening medley of the signature Bond tune, "Goldfinger." It's an unending crescendo, going up, up, up until it erupts with "he loves GOOOOOOOOOOLD!"
Bronze: We end with a second Beatles song, in this case me picking "Can't Buy Me Love" over A Hard Day's Night's title track, mostly because I feel like, even more than that song, it captures the fizzy youth of the picture, and what sets it apart as the most celebrated of the Beatles' multiple movies.
Becket
Dr. Strangelove
My Fair Lady
What a Way to Go!
Zulu
Gold: Realism is overrated. It's pretty clear that My Fair Lady is shot on a soundstage, and that scenes like the Ascot Opening Day or Eliza walking down the streets of London are not actually being constructed in the real-world. That they feel that way, that heightened sense of discovery, is because of the art directors, giving us exquisite detail and color to transport us into Eliza's universe.
Silver: I mean, when you have Cecil Beaton constructing towering odes to different men, you're going to end up with something spectacular. The design and scale of What a Way to Go! is what makes it stand apart-sure it's funny, but it also has a marvelous sense of space & scale, reflecting each character succinctly because that's the only way the picture will work.
Bronze: The iconic war room is honestly enough to nominate Dr. Strangelove on its own. The cold, impersonal use of space here is really an achievement-it's meant, even in its funniest moments, to remind you that we are closed off (think of how often these scenes, save for the war room, seem small in comparison to its scale).
Cheyenne Autumn
A Fistful of Dollars
I Am Cuba
Marnie
Red Desert
Gold: A Fistful of Dollars changed the way that we looked at westerns (and you can see that in comparing it to the nearly-as-strong bronze medalist here, the latter very much a product of the studio system lensing of the new frontier). It doesn't really matter that this is very visibly not Mexico, but instead Spain. The wide Techniscope expanses, giving us endless landscape, alternating with the close-ups on Clint Eastwood's enigmatic visage...it's perfect, and created the spaghetti western.
Silver: Maybe the tightest contest this year between Gold & Silver, I Am Cuba is a film that kind of has to be seen to be believed. Gorgeous, ethereal looks at Havana and the rest of the Cuban countryside, the film's propaganda origins do not bely the fact that the camerawork (daring, modern, singular) is amongst the best of the 1960's.
Bronze: Cheyenne Autumn is not just the last grand-scale John Ford western, but it's also the last really important look at the Monument Valley-adorned view of the west. After this, everything would modernize, and so it's wonderful to see the homages to classic westerns like Stagecoach here against a glowing testament to location shooting and the gigantic way that Ford's films would inform movies.
Marnie
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
What a Way to Go!
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Gold: It's not just about Audrey Hepburn's big hat...though that's not not what it is. My Fair Lady is a gorgeous tapestry of Cecil Beaton masterpieces, taking the most glamorous movie star of her era, and putting her in an endless series of perfectly designed, sample size dresses that inform her ascension...all the way to that giant hat.
Silver: Again, it's not just the scene where Shirley MacLaine shows up in a gigantic hot pink fake fur with matching hair...though that is the best outfit in this movie. Indeed, Shirley has never looked more sensational, and the way that she uses her character's assimilation into the lives of men while still keeping some sense of herself, it's yet another example of how good at this Edith Head was.
Bronze: Another film where the lead actress had a signature look, but it's only part of the conversation. I mean, you have that perfectly tailored blue suit, but you also get a sense of Mary's attitude toward (regimented) fun with her white-and-red dress to go into a world of make-believe, or the lovely looks of all of the Banks family, carefully-constructed but exterior.
Band of Outsiders
Fail Safe
A Fistful of Dollars
A Hard Day's Night
Pale Flower
Gold: The manic energy of A Hard Day's Night is what makes it work. The film intersperses fictionalized versions of real people, singing the real songs that made them famous, while also giving us characters that don't really exist. All of that has to be spliced together with a series of great musical numbers, ones that will inspire countless radio plays & record sales. That no one else has done this this well is a testament to how tight this movie plays.
Silver: Were it not for the dubbing (which is not great), A Fistful of Dollars probably lands the top spot here. The movie takes an absurdly handsome & rugged Clint Eastwood, and has him in near constant crescendo, even if (in terms of characterization), we learn next-to-nothing about him as a human being.
Bronze: For me, the biggest reason to love Pale Flower are the gambling scenes. The movie's editing is what's driving that, with us genuinely wondering not just who is going to win. Even if you know none of the rules of Hanafuda (which I didn't), you're still glued to what's happening, and letting the cutaways tell you exactly who is winning.
7 Faces of Dr. Lao
Lady in a Cage
Marnie
The Night Walker
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Gold: I have long said that I am totally open to giving this award to pretty people being pretty if it's unique & interesting (unlike Oscar, who tends to favor prosthetics and making things ugly), and that's definitely the case with Marnie. The movie's hairstyling, overly-done and obsessively perfect patrician looks for actors like Tippi Hedren & Diane Baker gives it one of Hitchcock's most heightened aesthetic.
Silver: Sophia Loren, forever glamorous, inhabits three different women in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and while she's always Sophia, the makeup team informs so much about the way that her characters treat themselves, giving her a strong chance to actually distinguish between the three.
Bronze: I''m ending a bit more in Oscar's wheelhouse, and very much in the world of prosthetics and actorly transformations. The racial politics of this movie makes giving it a medal a bit problematic, I will own, but in terms of creation, you have truly stupendous figures (like Medusa) that are spellbinding makeup effects.
7 Faces of Dr. Lao
First Men in the Moon
Goldfinger
Mary Poppins
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Gold: Mary Poppins wasn't the first film to use a sodium screen (The Birds had done it the year before), but it's definitely the film that perfected it, giving us a new technology that continued to keep Disney (already the best game in town for visual effects) at the forefront of technology, with Julie Andrews & Dick van Dyke blending beautifully into animated worlds.
Silver: If Mary Poppins was a down payment on the future of this category, Goldfinger was showing what it could do at its peak in 1964. A combination of miniature work, and practical effects (think of the laser sequence with Sean Connery pinned to the table, inches away from death both literally and figuratively without the men behind this category), it's one of the best action films of the 1960's for a reason.
Bronze: Our final medalist is here both because of the shocking realism of the effects, particularly toward the end of the film (though they are throughout), but also because of the way that Ray Harryhausen's creations & characters litter through First Men in the Moon with impressive stature.
