La Ciociara (1960)

This film, despite being titled Two Women in English, is not about two women. It's about one woman attempting to run the war by leaving Rome and returning to a small village. She encounters the war there, as well, and La Ciociara is quite a sad movie, like so much of De Sica's postwar stuff. Sophia Loren is great in this, and so is Jean Paul Belmondo.

The Mark (1961)

The Mark is a pretty extraordinary film about the way that society punishes formerly incarcerated individuals, especially so-called sex offenders. The Mark is made very well, and it's a stunningly humane portrayal. I really appreciated this and also really enjoyed it. It's a remarkable movie. Rod Steiger is brilliant in this.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Peeping Tom is creepy and interesting and just a little bit unhinged. The fact that Michael Powell directed this X-rated picture in 1960 (without Emeric Pressburger) is sort of nuts to me. This is a really important movie.

Zero Focus

Zero Focus (ゼロの焦点) is a very good mystery film about a newly married woman whose husband disappears under mysterious circumstances during the winter in Kanazawa. She slowly solves the mystery as the past is told in flashback for us and she treks around Japan trying to figure out what happened to this man that she doesn't even really love but to whom she is tied.

I am still working through this Japanese Noir series on the Criterion Channel.

Placido (1961)

Placido is a madcap farce, or at least this is a movie that pretends to be a madcap farce while actually working quite well as a critique of the Spanish bourgeoisie, who pretend to care for the poor but don't give a damn. This is totally enjoyable, but actually rather frustrating to watch for much of its running time.

And blessings on the Criterion Channel for making this available. Berlanga's movie was never released in the U.S. in theatres or on DVD.

The League of Gentlemen (1960)

The League of Gentlemen is a great crime caper. It's filled with excellent characters and wonderful acting, and I loved every second of this. Basil Dearden is such a good director, and I continue to be impressed with his work. Of course because it is 1960, the gang can't get away with their heist, and that's always the main disappointment of these heist films, but dammit I do love a good heist film, and The League of Gentlemen is an excellent one.

I'm not adding The League of Gentlemen to be my Cinema Q list, although a case could certainly be made for it. There is a lot of homoeroticism among the criminals – especially Kieron Moore's character, who is some kind of a coach at a men's gymnasium and is massaging a young man played by Dinsdale Landen when we first meet him. Then there is Roger Livesey's character who we learn has been convicted of Gross Indecency.

My personal favorite queer moment in the movie is when the league meets for the second time all together to discuss their plan. They meet at a kind of community theatre hall and two very effeminate gay men complain that the men in the league (who are pretending to be reading a play) are intruding on their rehearsal space. It's a completely unnecessary little sequence, and I loved it. I probably shouldn't make too much of these small moments of queerness, but Basil Dearden's next movie would be the crime thriller Victim, which is a shockingly good film about a gay man trying to cover his tracks and a blackmail ring who is threatening to out him.

Both The League of Gentlemen and Victim are available via Criterion.

The Ninth Circle (Deveti Krug) (1960)

Wow. Wow. Wow.

So, The Ninth Circle was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar the same year (1961) as Pontecorvo's Kapò, Roberto Gavaldón's brilliant Macario, and Clouzot's La Vérité (also brilliant), and they gave the damn Oscar to Bergman's boring The Virgin Spring. In any case, The Ninth Circle is very, very well made, and it is surely – with Kapò – one of the first films made about the camps. So much of the film is a love story (under Nazi duress) that I was expecting something else entirely from this film by the end – I, incorrectly, as it turns out – assumed the ninth circle was a reference to Dante's final circle of the inferno and signified the betrayals of Judas, Lucifer, and Cain.

But Deveti Krug shifts boldly in subject matter in the middle of the third act, and the ninth circle of the title turns out to be a literal section of the camp and not a literary reference to treachery. (Incidentally, Peter Weiss's The Investigation uses the circles of the Inferno as a formal way of tracking through the camps and the Nuremberg trials, and in the play we move further and further inside the camps.)

Because the movie shifted so drastically, I really wasn't prepared for the punch France Štiglic's movie delivered, and I ended up truly stunned by The Ninth Circle. Boris Dvornik, who plays the male lead, is outstanding in this.

La Vérité (1960)

La Vérité is excellent. Bardot is superb, and Charles Vanel is brilliant. The script is absolute aces, and it captures perfectly the generational gap in Paris in 1960. It seems to prefigure May '68 in many ways, even. It's a very, very good movie. Making it even better are the repeated covert nods to Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. I loved this film.

La Grande Guerra (1959)

The brilliance of La Grande Guerra lies in its direction. Mario Monicelli is able perfectly to capture the satirical comedy for which he is known, the critique of war that calls such violence absurd, while also mercilessly showing us the damage that war does.

The characters are cowards, to be sure, but they are ethical and wise. They simply do not buy into the theory that war is good.

The film is absolutely genius, and if the tone of the movie is frequently comic, Monicelli's satire is consistently undergirded by carnage, by Marxist critique, and by an absolute refusal to see soldiers as heroes.

This is a kind of film that won't be seen again until Arthur Hiller's The Americanization of Emily in 1964, and even then won't be done as well as La Grande Guerra.