Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Two

David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia": '62's Crown Jewel

Look, I love the film year 1939 as much as the next cinéphile, but the 70 years of praise that it has accumulated (and, I hasten to add, deserved) tends to diminish other great movie years, before and after.

Case in point: 1962. Great, great year.

For longer than I care to remember, I've been doing spin for 1962. If neglected films are my forté - not to mention, the thrust of this site - then 1962 defines everything that is important to me in terms of movies.

I was a lone voice on the subject until Stephen Farber wrote his fabulous essay,"1962: When the Silver Screen Never Looked So Golden" for The New York Times on Sunday, 15 September, 2002.

Exacerbating matters for films that year, a city-wide strike halted newspaper production in December, which meant no Ten Best lists and no film critics awards in '62. But, now, the film arm of Brooklyn's Academy of Music (BAM) has set out to belatedly correct matters by organizing a modest event titled BAMcinématek 1962: New York Film Critics Circle, which will be devoted to a handful of titles from that year.

Check out A.O. Scott's NY Times report.

Twelve films will be introduced by members of the New York Film Critics Circle, beginning with Jacques Demy's "Lola" on Friday, 23 October, with screenings at 2, 4:30, 6:50 and 9:30 p.m.; NYFCC chair Armond White of New York Press will introduce the Demy movie.

With that said - and in addition to Demy's "Lola" - here is a unannotated list of the noteworthy films of 1962, noteworthy for their breadth and variety and for their eclectic mix of veteran filmmakers and newcomers.

Some are great, some merely good. But I think you'll agree: It was some year. BAM is scratching only the surface of '62's fascinating filmography.

Here goes:

David Lean: "Lawrence of Arabia"

Alain Resnais: "Last Year at Marienbad"

Three by John Frankenheimer: "The Manchurian Candidate," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "All Fall Down"

Three by Delbert Mann: "The Outsider," "Lover Come Back" and "That Touch of Mink"

John Cassavetes: "Too Late Blues"

Sidney Gilliat: "Only Two Can Play"

Two by Frank Tashlin:
"Bachelor Flat" and "It's Only Money"

Parrish and Harvey, "The Manchurian Candidate"

Guy Green: "Light in the Piazza"

Pietro Germi: "Divorce - Italian Style"

Two by Sidney Lumet: "A View from the Bridge" and "Long Day's Journey into Night"

Two by Vincente Minnelli: "Two Weeks in Another Town" and "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"

Two by Edward Dmytryk: "Walk on the Wild Side" and "The Reluctant Saint"

Otto Preminger: "Advise and Consent"

Jacques Rivette: "Paris Belongs to Us"

Roger Corman: "Tales of Terror"

Stanley Kubrick: "Lolita"

John Guillermin: "Waltz of the Toreadors"

Delmer Daves: "Rome Adventure"

Leo McCarey: "Satan Never Sleeps"

Newman and Page, "Sweet Bird of Youth"

Two by Sidney J. Furie: "Night of Passion" and "Wonderful to Be Young"

Andrei Tarkovsky: "The Violin and the Roller"

Richard Brooks: "Sweet Bird of Youth"

Orson Welles: "Mr. Arkadin"

Two by Henri Verneuil: "Maxime" and "The Most Wanted Man in the World"

Two by Tony Richardson: "A Taste of Honey" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"

Jack Clayton: "The Innocents"

Michael Cacoyannis: "Electra"

John Ford: "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence"

Peter Ustinov: "Billy Budd"

Agnes Varda: "Cleo from 5 to 7"

Two by Blake Edwards: "Experiment in Terror" and "Days of Wine and Roses"

Freddie Francis: "Two and Two Make Six"

Bryan Forbes: "Whistle Down the Wind"

Serge Bourguignon: "Sundays and Cybele"

Mervyn LeRoy: "Gypsy"

Morton DaCosta: "The Music Man"

Two by Luis Buñuel's: "Viridiana"

'62 produced at least two top movie musicals - LeRoy's "Gypsy" and DaCosta's "The Music Man," both from Warners

Michael Powell:
"Peeping Tom"

Andre Cayette:
"Tomorrow Is My Turn"

Two by Philip Leacock: "13 West Street" and "The War Lover"

Two by Michelangelo Antonioni: "Eclipse" and "Il Grido"

Sam Peckinpah: "Ride the High Country"

Inoshiro Honda: "Mothra"

José Ferrer: "State Fair"

J. Lee Thompson: "Cape Fear"

Arthur Penn: "The Miracle Worker"

Lewis Gilbert: "Damn the Defiant!"

Rock and Doris and Tony - Oh, my!

Martin Ritt: "Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man"

Michael Gordon: "Boys' Night Out"

David Miller: "Lonely Are the Brave"

Don Siegel: "Hell Is for Heroes"

William Castle: "Zotz"

Daniel Mann: "Five Finger Exercise"

Samuel Fuller: "Merrill's Marauders"

Jane and Blanche Hudson

Richard Quine: "The Notorious Landlady"

Howard Hawks: "Hatari!"

George Seaton: "The Counterfeit Traitor"

Jules Dassin: "Phaedra"

Two by Jack Cardiff: "My Geisha" and "The Lion"

Henry Koster: "Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation"

Frank Perry: "David and Lisa"

Two by Robert Mulligan: "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Spiral Road"

David Swift: "The Interns"

Phil Karlson: "Kid Galahad"

Basil Dearden: "Victim"

Richard Fleischer: "Barabbas"

George Roy Hill: "Period of Adjustment"

Lewis Milestone: "Mutiny on the Bounty"

Robert Wise: "Two for the Seesaw"

Guy Hamilton: "The Best of Enemies"

Three by Ingmar Bergman: "Through a Glass Darkly," "Night Is My Future" and "The Devil's Wanton"

Louis Malle: "A Very Private Affair"

Peter Sellers: "I Like Money"

Three by Francois Truffaut: "Jules et Jim," "Love at Twenty" and "Shoot the Piano Player"

Charles Walters: "Billy Rose's Jumbo"

John Huston: "Freud"

George Pollock: "Murder She Said"

Irvin Kershner: "A Face in the Rain"

Jack Garfein: "something wild"

Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau: "The Sky Above - The Mud Below"

Kelly and Gleason on location in Paris for "Gigot"

Shirley Clarke: "The Connection"

Albert Lamorisse: "Stowaway in the Sky"

Robert Aldrich: "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Gene Kelly: "Gigot,"(covered here a year ago as a piece of Cinema Obscura)

Ralph Nelson: "Requiem for a Heavyweight"

Hark Harvey: "Carnival of Souls"

Mauro Bolognini: "Bell'Antonio"

Daniel Petrie: "The Main Attraction"

Akira Kurosawa: "Yojimbo"

George Marshall: "The Happy Thieves"

Federico Fellini: "The Swindle"

Henry Hawthaway, Ford and Marshall: "How the West Was Won"

Ken Annakin, Andrew Morton and Barnhard Wicki: "The Longest Day"

Luchino Visconti, Mario Monicelli, Vittorio DeSica and Fellini: "Boccaccio '70"

And George Cukor: "The Chapman Report" (also recently covered here as another example of Cinema Obscura)

Lemmon and Novak take a break from shooting Richard Quine's "The Notorious Landlady"