Yahoo News The 25 best '60s movies
As American society dramatically changed, foreign filmmakers produced work that eclipsed big Hollywood studio features.
Whatever you think the 1960s to have been like or looked like, think again. The tumultuous decade is multi-faceted in all manner of ways, including movies. But which films of the 1960s are actually the best?
In a decade characterized by changing societal norms, not to mention the civil rights movement and the political quagmire that was Vietnam, movies of the 1960s similarly reflected a global community in flux. Avant-garde foreign imports from Japan, Italy, France, and elsewhere took attention away from tried-and-true American styles. All the while, filmmakers saw their craft defied by a new, cheaper alternative of entertainment: television. Rather than offer a higher level of spectacle than TV’s miniscule budgets could match, however, films of the decade sought to challenge audiences with more subversive stories that redrew the boundaries of acceptability.
Like the 1950s before it, the 1960s foresaw the moral ambiguities of the near future. As the parochial Hays Code lost its vise grip, the sudden explosion of New Hollywood – already precluded by the French New Wave – gave filmmakers more creative authorship, allowing them to reflect in their films a hip counterculture that permeated in cities, communes, and university campuses everywhere.
With so many classic movies to name, here are some of the best movies of the 1960s.
As American society dramatically changed, foreign filmmakers produced work that eclipsed big Hollywood studio features.
