My Top Ten Films of 1963

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

8 ½ - Fellini's self-examination through cinema is a magnificent culmination of so many of the director's best impulses and filmmaking ideas. It's also his most cinematically adventurous, mixing fantasy, reality, the personal, the fictional, and the symbolic. This may be the first Fellini film that properly feels "Felliniesque," with its wildly freewheeling style, wonderfully mobile camera, and the parade of circus imagery. The movie contains one of my favorite endings of all time, one that is simultaneously a beautiful summation of Fellini's worldview and a piece of spectacle that could only exist in the movies.

The Big City - This is my favorite Satyajiit Ray film, a great example of a culturally specific story being told in very universal terms. We watch the members of a family adjust to changing economic and social realities in India at a particular point in time - allowing the wife to join the working world and putting her husband and father-in-law in existential crisis. It's such a beautifully balanced film, juggling multiple main characters and viewpoints, and handling its themes with nuance and consideration. It may look like a typical social drama at first glance, but demonstrates over and over that Ray has more on his mind.

Charade - This is a perfect combination of romantic comedy and Hitchcockian thriller, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. They are exactly the right pair to sustain the mood of suspense and romantic tension as they race around Paris trying to evade assassins and solve a mystery. Add one of Henry Mancini's best scores and a delightful Peter Stone script full of twists on top of twists, and the film feels effortlessly charming and buoyant. It's difficult to appreciate how well made and nimble "Charade" is until you look at all the subsequent films that have tried and failed to imitate it over the years.

Winter Light - One of Ingmar Bergman's quieter, introspective films on the themes of faith and doubt. A pastor struggles through a crisis of faith, and has encounters with various parishioners as he tries to grapple with his inner demons. This is a very grounded film, taking place in the present day and dealing with modern concerns. It's often viewed as Bergman's final word on the existence of God, but there are no clear answers - just the continuing fight against doubt and dread. It's the kind of cinema about Christianity that I appreciate more over time, as this kind of film is so rarely made anymore.

Passenger - The unfinished Andrzej Munk film examines the power struggle between two women who first met as a female prisoner and a female guard at Auschwitz. The story itself is absorbing, and contains very good performances from the two leads. However, the decision to release the film in its unfinished state is much more fascinating, since the documentary elements and the explanatory framing device employed by directors Witold Lesiewicz and Andrzej Brzozowski, who assembled Munk's incomplete footage, give a sort of unique found-footage effect to the presentation I've never seen duplicated.

Judex - Georges Franju's homage to the silent era and the work of Louis Feuillade is better than the original. The little touches of surrealism, especially the party scene with the bird masks, are fabulous. The leading man, Channing Pollock, was one of the preeminent magicians of his time, and brings just the right amount of style and showmanship to the main character, the masked vigilante Judex. While I appreciate the serials that this was based on, the technical limitations always kept me from embracing them fully. "Judex," however, successfully updates the material while retaining the thrills and mystery.

The Leopard - Luchino Visconti's historical epic examines the twilight of the Sicilian nobility in 1860, on the eve of revolution and a new social order. He considers both the high and the low classes against the backdrop of Italian history, combining insightful social commentary with lavish spectacle. The famous ball sequence is one of the highlights of Italian cinema, not because of the grandeur of the art direction or the scale of the production, but because of the wistful nostalgia of the portrayal. It's Burt Lancaster's Prince, walking alone through the celebration, realizing his time is over, and seeing the end of his era.

The Great Escape - An all-star WWII escape film that makes for an unlikely crowd pleaser. It's three hours long, and doesn't end happily for most of the characters. However, it's also a perfectly constructed heist story that celebrates the ingenuity and gumption of its heroes, and puts Steve McQueen on a motorcycle in the last act where he belongs. A great deal of its appeal is its simplicity - there are few side plots, characters are kept sparse and iconic, and you always know who you're rooting for. It's a long, tense buildup to one of the best finales of the genre, and it's done just right.

The Fire Within - Nobody broods on film the way Louis Malle's characters do. And so it is with the protagonist of "The Fire Within," a depressed young man who wanders around Paris, deciding whether or not to kill himself. Accompanied by Erik Satie's piano music, we watch his adventures unfold - a journey of increasing alienation and distance from the rest of society. It's a glum, introspective movie, but also a beautifully intimate experience. You can see Malle working through many of his own existential questions in the film, and exploring the ins and outs of a Paris that he clearly loves.

The Birds - Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock to turn a B-movie premise into one of the great horror pictures of the '60s. There's no reason given for why the birds turn on us, no logic, no message, and no real narrative beyond the humans wanting to stay alive. And as a result, "The Birds" offers a purely visceral thrill. Nobody remembers the names of the characters or the particulars of their relationships, but everyone remembers the crows on the jungle gym and the seagulls attacking the phone booth. Everyone remembers the terror and the unease that linger long after the film is over.


Honorable mention
Lilies of the Field
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