In 1965:
Lyndon Johnson unveiled the Great Society;
The United States passed the Voting Rights Act;
Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov became the first person to walk in space;
The Astrodome opened;
Bob Dylan went electric;
The Watts riots take place in Los Angeles;
The Beatles performed at Shea Stadium;
After fifty five years, Casey Stengel retired as a professional baseball manager;
Sandy Koufax pitched a perfect game;
Great Britain banned the death penalty;
Rob Zombie, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Diane Lane, Brandon Lee, Dr. Dre, Paul W.S. Anderson, The Undertaker, Sarah Jessica Parker, Piers Morgan, Rodney King, Robert Downey Jr., Jon Cryer, Kevin James, Suge Knight, Owen Hart, Trent Reznor, John C. Reilly, Brooke Shields, Mick Foley, Elizabeth Hurley, Alex Winter, Connie Nielsen, Stuart Scott, Shawn Michaels, J.K. Rowling, Sam Mendes, Kyra Sedgwick, Shania Twain, Charlie Sheen, Bashar al-Assad, Kyle Chandler, Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, Steve Coogan, Bjork, Ben Stiller, Nicholas Sparks, and Heidi Fleiss were born;
T.S. Eliot, Nat King Cole, Malcolm X, Felix Frankfurter, Stan Laurel, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Edward Murrow, Spike Jones, Judy Holliday, David O. Selznick, Adlai Stevenson, Moonlight Graham, Albert Schweitzer, Clara Bow, Dorothy Dandridge, Henry Travers, Winston Churchill, and Somerset Maugham died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 1965:
10) The War Game
Peter Watkins’ film about a potential nuclear holocaust is a master use of documentary tropes in a fiction format.
This is a dark film from a dark time, the height of the Cold War when nuclear conflict was an existential threat. Sixty years later, it’s fascinating to see how seriously people took the risk of nuclear war, and it’s crazy to think we had detailed plans in place for a near extinction event.
9) Help!
After Ringo receives a ring marking him as the next victim of a bizarre death cult (clearly modeled on the Thuggee), the boys get embroiled in a series of misadventures to protect him.
The follow up to A Hard Day’s Night is clunky in places, but the essence of what made Beatlemania so successful is on display, and it’s hard not to giggle at how silly they are. In interviews, the surviving Beatles routinely mention how stoned they were during production, which explains a lot.
Director Richard Lester’s strengths, camp and over the top zaniness, were a perfect fit with the lads from Liverpool, and you can see echoes of this film in the music videos of the last fifty years.
After hearing a demo, film producer Ray Swan (Christoper Plummer) signs desperate wannabe starlet Daisy Clover (Natalie Wood) to a contract.
To further her career, Swan convinces Daisy to put her eccentric mother (Ruth Gordon) in a mental institution, then arranges for Daisy to meet a young actor at his production company, Wade Lewis (Robert Redford). After a brief courtship, the two young stars marry only for Daisy to discover Wade is a closeted homosexual and their marriage is a public relations move.
The pressure of stardom, Swan’s demands, and guilt surrounding her abandonment of her mother cause Daisy to have a breakdown and attempt suicide.
Considering when the movie was released, it’s astoundingly sympathetic to the plight of homosexual Lewis.
This film is too focused on the negative side of notoriety, as if there are no benefits to being well-known. Although it’s impeccably cast, the tone is uneven; it can’t decide if it wants to be a farce or a serious drama about the pitfalls of stardom. With more focus and tighter plotting, it could have been very good, but instead feels like a rough draft.
When Francis (John Gielgud) loses his Hollywood job and commits suicide, his English nephew Dennis Barlow (Robert Morse) contracts Whispering Glades cemetery to handle the arrangements. He falls in love with a cosmetician who works there, Aimee Thanatogenos, but must compete for her affection with the chief embalmer, Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger).
The owner of Whispering Glades, Reverend Wilbur Glenworthy (Jonathan Winters), uses his pious persona to mask less than savory business practices. To pay the extravagant price for his uncle’s funeral, Dennis gets a job at Happier Hunting Grounds, a pet cemetery owned by Glenworthy’s brother, Henry (also played by Winters).
Loosely based on the Evelyn Waugh novel, this unrelentingly cynical film finds decadent hypocrisy in every aspect of American culture, which callously turns a sacred religious ceremony regarding the death of a loved one into another opportunity to make money.
Best known as Bert Cooper, this was regrettably one of the few leading opportunities for Robert Morse. Director Tony Richardson excelled at British farces like this and Tom Jones (1963). Jonathan Winters is an underrated comic genius, and this, his most straightforward role, proves his considerable talent. Unfortunately, a series of mental health issues hampered his career.
It’s not as biting as it was in 1965, but this is still very funny and, unlike many recent dark comedies, is actually trying to say something.
Falstaff (Welles) initiates young Prince Hal into a world of debauchery, but when Henry IV (John Gielgud) dies and Hal ascends to the throne as Henry V, the new king rejects his former lifestyle and abandons his old friend.
Combining parts of five different Shakespeare plays (Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor), Orson Welles transforms the history of the British monarchy into a poignant tale of friendship.
We understand Falstaff is a bad influence. We disparage his lying and loathe his cheating. We rightfully see him as a morally bankrupt character. Yet despite his immense flaws, we sympathize with him because he’s a lovable, vivacious character and clearly loves Hal. Our hearts break in sympathy when he’s rejected.
In later life, Orson Welles would claim this was his favorite film and list playing Sir John Falstaff as a career highlight. He identified with Shakespeare’s flawed character because he, like the Bard, understood the essence of humanity is ambiguity and imperfection.
Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee van Cleef) and a nameless bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood) infiltrate the gang of brutal fugitive, “El Indio,” intending to double crossing and kill him.
Sergio Leone’s collaborations with Ennio Morricone are a master class in the blending of music and cinema. Many films possess a wonderful soundtrack which adds a depth and dimension to the story, but Leone unselfishly allows the music to tell the story.
This sparse spaghetti western is the preeminent example of the genre and a highlight of Leone’s career. It’s a diminishing of the legendary American West, and an acknowledgment the rough conditions did not favor traditional heroes. Leone’s message: when faced with evil, sometimes slightly less evil is good enough.
Despite the film’s artistry, its complex moral vision wouldn’t have worked without the immense charisma of its leading man. Eastwood was, and is, the embodiment of machismo (even as an octogenrarian). Leone used his performance to explore ways the world rewards masculinity and the effect its value has had on the Western world.
4) Darling
When Diana Scott (Julie Christie) is interviewed for a film on the opinions of young people, she has an affair with the director, Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). Both leave their spouses, but the restless Diana soon begins a relationship with advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey).
Brand casts his paramour as the face of an opulent charity function to combat world hunger, but she grows tired of the decadent world of the super rich. After briefly flirting with a religious life, she impetuously marries an Italian prince.
When this too leaves her unfulfilled, she returns to Robert, then to the prince, then to Robert again, who sleeps with her once more as an act of revenge, but makes it clear their relationship has ended.
Christie is beautiful, Bogarde is a poor man’s James Mason, and Harvey is as creepy as ever.
Skewering the notion life is “about” anything, John Schlesinger’s critique of Western society is blistering, and there are moments, such as the charity ball, which echo a half century later.
When Nazi leaders give non-Jewish carpenter Anton Brtko control over a store run by elderly Jewish woman Rozáila Lautmannová whose unprofitable business relies on generous donations to stay open, the remaining Jews in the city offer to subsidize mild-mannered Brtko so a more ruthless and cruel Aryanizer won’t take his place.
When the authorities arrive to take the remaining Jews to a ghetto, Brtko, having grown close to his charge, tries to save her. But as the deaf and mostly oblivious woman learns what’s happening, she becomes hysterical. Brtko attempts to quiet her, but accidentally murders her. inconsolable and racked with guilt, he hangs himself.
This is a powerful film about the internal conflict of many Nazi sympathizers during the Holocaust. Many of them didn’t commit heinous acts themselves, but failed to stop the atrocities they knew were happening, rationalizing their hands clean. This film argues their silence was a tacit endorsement. We may never see the elderly Jewish grandmother we helped kill, but if we don’t stand up for what is right, opposing cruelty and bigotry, we’re as guilty as the one who pulled the trigger.
Initially studying to be a nun, free-spirited Maria (Julie Andrews) becomes the governess of the large Von Trapp family, teaching the children to sing and embrace life, while falling in love with their stoic father, Georg (Christoper Plummer).
As the Nazi threat closes in on their native Austria, Maria and her adopted family flee to Switzerland.
Inspired by true events, this romanticized tale has become an integral part of the American cultural experience. The music is the pinnacle of the legendary Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership and many of the songs, including “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” “My Favorite Things,” “Do-Re-Mi,” “Edelweiss,” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” are entrenched in the American Songbook.
On the heels of her iconic, Academy Award-winning role in Mary Poppins (1964), this cemented Julie Andrews as an American treasure, and the image of her singing in the lush Austrian countryside is a cherished memory for many. Despite Christopher Plummer’s alleged distaste for the film, his role as Captain von Trapp will be the first line of his obituary.
Instead of developing his own distinct style, director Robert Wise adapted himself to the material. Few directors are capable of helming small, psychological horror films, big, budget musicals, and science fiction spectacle. He never tried to make a “Robert Wise film,” just a very good one.
The film is almost too saccharine and glosses over some of the more uncomfortable realities of the Nazi regime, but Richard Rodgers responded to these complaints in his memoir, “no one is comfortable with an excess of hearts and flowers, but there is no valid reason for hiding honest emotion. This has always been a major element in the theatre, and it’s my conviction that anyone who can’t, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted.” I would add an addendum to say anyone who doesn’t have a soft spot for this film should reevaluate why they watch movies.
Murray Burns (Jason Robards), an unemployed writer raising the son of his deceased sister, is a delightful iconoclast who believes people identity with their jobs to distract them from more important questions.
This kinetic movie maintains the energy of the zaniest scenes of the Marx Bothers career through an entire film.
Robards is hysterical; it’s a shame he spent so much of his career in serious theater, particularly the works of sourpuss Eugene O’Neill.
Martin Balsam is more famous for being pushed down a flight of stairs by Norman Bates, but he won an Oscar for his work as Arnold, Burns’s more pragmatic brother. The dialogue between the pair is a master class in the real world effects of unchecked idealism.
No one wants to work. We’d all rather pursue things which interest us, but as Arnold Burns reminds us, if everyone followed this philosophy, there’d be a lot of hungry people.