In 1963,
The United States banned travel to Cuba;
Harold Wilson became prime minister of the United Kingdom;
Marin Luther King Jr. wrote “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” and gave his “I Have a Dream,” speech;
Buddy Rogers became the first WWWF Champion;
Coca Cola introduced its first diet drink, Tab;
ZIP codes were introduced in the US;
JFK was assassinated;
Kenya became an independent nation;
Marvel’s Avengers debuted;
Doctor Who premiered;
Dave Foley, Steven Soderbergh, Hakeem Olajuwon, John Michael Higgins, Michael Jordan, Larry the Cable Guy, Seal, Charles Barkley, William Baldwin, Vijay Singh, Jean-Marc Valee, Rick Rubin, Alex Kingston, Bret Michael, Vanessa Williams, Kathy Ireland, David Thewlis, Quentin Tarantino, Clark Spencer, Dean Norris, Gary Kasparov, Conan O’Brien, Eric McCormack, Jet Li, Michael Waltrip, Joe Dumars, Mike Myers, Victor Orban, Jason Isaacs, Johnny Depp, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Laura Ingraham, Randy Couture, Colin Montgomerie, Yann Martel, George Michael, Rupert Graves, Edie Falco, Lisa Rinna, Spud Webb, Phoebe Cates, Karl Malone, Lisa Kudrow, Fatboy Slim, Coolio, Demian Bichir, John Carrol Lynch, James Hetfield, Mark Strong, Harold Perrineau, Whitney Houston, Valerie Plame, Emmanuelle Beart, John Stamos, Tori Amos, Park Chan-wook, Michael Chiklis, Randy Johnson, Richard Marx, Cecil Fielder, Tate Donovan, Mark McGwuire, Elizabeth Shue, Daniel Pearl, Natalie Merchant, Marla Maples, Lauren Holly, Dermot Mulroney, Rob Schneider, Tatum O’Neal, Hugh Bonneville, Billy Gunn, Terry Farrell, Ming-Na Wen, Nicollette Sheridan, Ann Patchett, Benjamin Bratt, Charles Oakley, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Beals, Lars Ulrich, and Sean Payton were born;
While Dick Powell, John Farrow, Sylvia Plath, Patsy Cline, Robert Frost, Joe Judge, Monty Woolley, Pope John XXIII, Zasu Pitts, Medgar Evers, Estes Kefauver, W.E.B. Dubois, Edith Piaf, Adolphe Menjou, Aldous Huxely, JFK, C.S. Lewis, Lee and Harvey Oswald died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 1963:
Itinerant worker Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) is manipulated into helping a group of nuns build a new chapel in the Arizona desert. Only the Mother Superior (Lila Skala) speaks English, but she persuades Homer to help despite his misgivings and their inability to pay for the work.
Poitier deservedly won an Oscar, becoming only the second black performer to win the coveted award and a Hollywood superstar.
In a world full of cynicism aimed at religious motivation, this simple film reminds us of the power of faith to overcome differences (including racial and cultural ones).
Aspiring songwriter Albert Peterson (Dick van Dyke) uses the impending draft of rock superstar Conrad Birdie to manipulate him into singing one of his songs on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Janet Leigh is Albert’s love interest Rosie DeLeon (race switched from Rose Alvarez in the original musical). Maureen Stapleton is Mae Peterson, Albert’s mother. Ann-Margaret is Kim Macafee (a high schooler randomly chosen to kiss Conrad on air).
It’s a chaotic, rollicking good time which satirizes Elvis’s military service and the hysteria of his meteoric rise to fame. The movie wisely eliminated some of the more edgy elements from the source material (like Mae’s racism and Conrad’s arrest for statutory rape).
Dick Van Dyke was sensational in his film debut (reprising the role from Broadway). Ann-Margaret became an overnight star based on her alluring performance. Janet Leigh was solid. Maureen Stapleton was as good as always. Ed Sullivan’s cameo gives the film a decidedly meta vibe. It’s amazing to think this film satirizing rock stardom with The Ed Sullivan Show as a plot point debuted the year the Beatles made their famous debut on the same program.
The producers wanted Elvis to play Birdie, but Colonel Tom Parker was leery of allowing him to be ridiculed. It’s too bad, because that extra layer would have elevated the film and might have transformed Elvis’ film trajectory.
8) The Cardinal
Through flashbacks, the film follows the journey of young priest Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) all the way to his installation as cardinal.
Along his spiritual journey, he clashes with an elderly superior (John Huston), learns humility from a country priest, has a crisis of faith after his unmarried sister dies in wedlock because he refused to allow the doctor to abort her unborn child, and helps a black priest in his fight against the Ku Klux Klan in the American South.
Huston was impactful in a small role, rightfully earning an acting Oscar nomination.
Tryon found it difficult to watch the film because of his treatment by director Otto Preminger, alleging the powerful director ruled over his cast like a maniacal dictator.
It’s hard to believe such a balanced and thoughtful view of patient, sacrificial faith could be shepherded by someone so callous and indifferent to those around him, but it’s not unprecedented and another reminder of how difficult it can be to separate the artist from the art.
7) The Silence
Sisters Ester and Anna travel through Europe with Anna’s young son Johan. While on a stop in Timoka, the film explores their shared disillusionment. Both woman are unhappy, but neither can articulate the cause of their malaise. Anna is a sexual, adventurous woman, while Ester is repulsed by the physical realm and yearns for a world outside the messy living of actual bodies.
Woody Allen (among others) suggested the central sisters are two sides to the same woman, but, in my opinion, they’re more likely a generalized representation of the universal struggle between the mind and the flesh. Carnal desires are viewed suspiciously by Bergman, but he acknowledges the power they possess. He sympathizes with Ester’s attempts to limit the physical parts of life, but, like Anna observing a couple having sex in a café booth, he’s drawn to the ugliness.
The Silence indicts God for failing to provide guidance in our efforts to find a balance in the duality of our existence, the seeking of pleasure versus more esoteric, intellectual pursuits.
Bergman is one of my favorite filmmakers. His searching for God and desire for clarity resonate deeply with me. His films are difficult, but they do more to grapple with complex issues than most films made since.
6) Tom Jones
This adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 18th century comic novel is true in spirit to the madcap hilarity of the novel but bowdlerizes some of the book’s more outrageous sexual elements (like the possibility Jones may have committed incest with his mother).
The book begins each chapter with commentary from the author (in a similar way to War and Peace a century later). The movie predictably forgoes this affectation to make the sprawling story more filmable.
The acting is superb. Albert Finney became a star on the back of this magnetic performance. Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman were all Oscar nominated, but their vote splitting allowed the unlikely Margaret Rutherford to win.
The satire still lands sixty years later, proving both Fielding’s and director Tony Richardson’s genius. It’s bawdy and frolicking and never gets too silly like other sexual farces of the era (probably owing to Fielding’s intricately plotted source material).
5) Charade
When Regina Lampert’s (Audrey Hepburn) husband dies, she embarks on a madcap chase for his hidden money. He was tasked with recovering stolen money during the war, but double crossed his partners and kept the funds. His former partners subsequently tracked him down to kill him then attempted to force Regina to give them the money.
Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy give fun performances as Regina’s pursuers.
Cary Grant is at the peak of his debonair charm as Peter Joshua (whose shifting aliases and duplicity is the main driver of the film).
It’s a screwball romantic comedy mashed up with a Hitchockian spy chase. It’s North by Bringing Up Baby, and Grant’s performance prevents it from bogging down in a potential identity crisis.
Audrey Hepburn is delightful and Regina’s naivete about her husband’s true nature combined with her crush on Grant (despite the numerous times he gives her reason to mistrust him) is disarming.
Stanley Donen deserves to be more widely known outside of cineaste circles. His popular cache has peaked and he’s been slowly relegated to a bygone era, but he was so much more than the song and dance man responsible for Singin’ in the Rain.
This is an earnest, fast paced amusement park ride, which I hoped wouldn’t end.
After he’s fired from the police force, depressed Nesto (Jack Lemmon) hangs out at a bar known as a haunt for prostitutes and meets Irma la Douce (Shirley Maclaine). After he inadvertently chases off her pimp, he replaces him. Infatuated, but afraid to tell her how he feels, he creates a persona, Lord X, and pays for her company. To protect this ruse, he says he is impotent from the war and only wants her companionship two nights a week.
As they grow closer, her former pimp, Hippolyte, intervenes and mistakenly thinks Nestor killed Lord X when Nestor throws his costume into the Seine.
There’s a comical character, Moustache, who appears to be a forerunner of George Santos, who frequently interrupts his fantastical stories halfway through by saying “but that’s another story.”
Reuniting the principal team from The Apartment (director Wilder with stars Lemmon and Maclaine), this is another success with similar themes of sexual mores and how love can overcome and change opinions.
3) The Balcony
Madame Irma (Shelley Winters) runs her brothel as a personal fiefdom, oblivious to the outside world. This illusion is challenged when the Police Chief (Peter Falk) asks her to impersonate the missing queen to help squash a local revolution. She counters his offer, suggesting three of her clients assume the identity of influential people who have already been killed during the violence.
Winters and Falk are amazing. Falk was just coming into his own before Columbo would become his life’s work. Winters was at the height of her powers, this film fell in between her two Oscar wins. Lee Grant and the underrated Ruby Dee are wonderful and it’s a treat to see a pre-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy.
This film asks challenging questions about power and truth, how much of it is a just a game, and how little it affects the every day lives of the people involved.
It’s a great movie with fantastic central performances.
2) 8 1/2
As acclaimed director Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) struggles with the pressure of making his latest film, his personal life converges upon him. His wife, his mistress, and his ideal woman guide him as he navigates what it means to be an artist, and the pain of telling a personal story only to immediately see it ripped apart by criticism.
Fellini is an undisputed master and his influence continues to grow. This is the most accessible of his later films, but a far cry from the neorealism which dominated his early career.
He’s an Italian so, of course, there’s a lot of Catholic guilt and symbolism. I absolutely ate it up.
1 )Winter Light
Unable to reconcile the atrocities he witnessed during the Spanish Civil War with the idea of a loving God, pastor Tomas Ericsson’s faith has become a perfunctory show; a job, not a calling.
Tomas must deal with the conflicted emotions of his former lover Marta and the suicide of his parishioner Jonas (Bergman regular Max von Sydow) who was terrified after he learned China had developed an atomic bomb.
The movie offers a challenging, pessimistic view of traditional Christian morality, but ends with a glimmer of hope. Tomas refuses to cancel his afternoon service despite only one person showing up, suggesting even a tiny amount of faith deserves our respect and attention.
The second part of Ingmar Bergman’s spiritual trilogy beautifully explores unanswerable questions and the inner workings of the soul.