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| Bergman's Winter Light, my favorite film of the period |
I have long championed the 1970s as the best decade in cinema history and have also sang the praises of the 1930s. However I recently found a seven-year period that does not fit neatly into a single decade, that produced a surprising number of classic films: 1957 through 1963. In total I rank thirty-five movies (an average of five a year) among my all-time favorites, nine of which are on my top one hundred, three in the top ten. Of those thirty-five, twenty-three (about two-thirds) were made outside of the United States. It was a slack period for American cinema and fecund for European film.
One thing I found interesting about this seven-year run was that there were a mere handful of films I rate highly in the years immediately preceding and following it. Somehow it stood in isolation. Why? Perhaps largely because several European directors were at their best during that time. Meanwhile other great directors had faded while a new batch of American directors were several years away from cranking out classics.
Another contributing factor has to be that walls of censorship were finally being chipped away, particularly in Europe. American film did not free itself from the restraints of censorship until the end of the Sixties.
The main contributor to the list was the great Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, with six — twice as many any other director. Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni each contributed three. There were five directors with two films, Luis Buñuel and Mikhail Kalatozov and three others who made English-language films, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock.
Here are the films:
The Seventh Seal (1957) Bergman
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) Bergman
Nights of Cabiria (1957) Fellini
The Great Escape (1963) J. Sturges
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) Mackendrick
Ivan's Childhood (1962) Tarkovsky
The Virgin Spring (1960) Bergman
Ride the High Country (1962) Peckinpah
Shoot the Piano Player (1960) Truffaut
Some Like it Hot (1959) Wilder
Letter Never Sent (1960) Kalatozov
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The Organiser (1963) Monicelli
The Cranes Are Flying (1957) Kalatozov
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