The Tower of Film: My Top 25 of 1964

For those who might think it is in poor taste for me to use the word "tower" so blithely in an article title on September 11, my answer to anything negative you might have to say about it is a deeply cold "Fuck you, it's my goddamned birthday."

Also, this tower is still standing. (And please don't cue the Elton song...) This tower stands as long as I do (or at least as long as I can breathe, if in fact standing ever becomes a true difficulty, then I shall watch sitting down). The Tower of Film is my term for the figurative monstrosity that has arisen out of the 12,000-plus feature films that I have watched in my now fifty-two years on this spheroid, with the very cream of the crop occupying the higher, more exalted positions on that tower.

The Tower of Film started out a few years ago as a different project which slowly evolved into its current state, once I realized the enormous breadth of the project and just how much I had underestimated its original potential. That first intent was merely to make sure that I watched the most important films that had been released within each year of my lifespan, but then went far beyond that I started accumulating an enormous database of films, which ultimately spanned over 6,000 films before I stopped pulling it together about three years back. (I have yet to update it to account for those last three years.)

Early on in the project, I decided to start going through the list and concentrated on the very first year within it, that naturally being 1964, the year of my birth. Using the website Flickchart to rank all of my films (to date, I have ranked 12,040 feature films – that I have views from start to finish, a prime criteria for candidacy on my part – on that site), I've discovered that I have watched 164 films from 1964. (Not every film that I have seen is on Flickchart yet, so there are some titles left out each year.)

After several years of ranking my films one against the other on Flickchart (I highly recommend it for movie buffs if you are at all interested in determining your favorite films of all time), I present now on this celebration of my 52nd year my Top 25 films of 1964:

[# | title | director | my ranking overall on Flickchart out of 12,040 films as of 9/11/2016]

#25 | The Pawnbroker | Sidney Lumet | Flickchart: 1,447
#24 | Nothing but a Man | Michael Roemer | Flickchart: 1,340
#23 | Fail-Safe | Dir.: Sidney Lumet | Flickchart: 1,336
#22 | World without Sun | Jacques-Yves Cousteau | Flickchart: 1,306
#21 | The Gospel According to St. Matthew | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Flickchart: 1,300

#20 | Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster | Ishirô Honda | Flickchart: 1,299
Some of you might be surprised that I am able to have a big, stupid, Japanese monster film appear on the list slightly higher than a far more sober and intellectually demanding Pasolini film (as well as a trio of steady, sharp dramas). I have two answers to that: 1) I am an atheist, and if I do have a god, it is only Godzilla, not the Jesus (though he seemed like such a nice boy...); and 2) Welcome to the world as occupied by my brothers and I, the world of Silly and Serious, where equal weight is given to items in both camps at the same time. I am deathly serious about my silliness, and can be most silly when it comes to matters of great seriousness. For me, Pasolini sits alongside Toho quite easily, and I can jump from one to the other in seconds. And my love for the Ghidrah film (though I prefer it to be spelled Ghidorah) is high enough where I could have placed this even further up on the list given my druthers. However, no one has given me any druthers in a good while, so the film sits in the list where it is for the moment.

#19 | Seance on a Wet Afternoon | Bryan Forbes | Flickchart: 1,162
#18 | The Masque of the Red Death | Roger Corman | Flickchart: 1,033

#17 | The Train | John Frankenheimer | Flickchart: 1,032
If I had been exposed to this Burt Lancaster film a few years earlier than I actually was it would probably rank even higher on this list than it does. I have always been a sucker for Lancaster, and this would have made me crazy had I seen it at twelve or thirteen.

#16 | Une femme mariée | Jean-Luc Godard | Flickchart: 1,004
#15 | Seven Faces of Dr. Lao | George Pal | Flickchart: 1,003
#14 | Gate of Flesh | Seijun Suzuki | Flickchart: 961

#13 | The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | Jacques Demy | Flickchart: 927
This might as well be called The Umbrellas of Charm-bourg, because once I saw it a few years ago, I knew that it was just so perfect. Where had it been all my life? (Though it is likely I would have hated it as a child...) This film has the greatest chance of moving straight up the charts for me on subsequent showings. It already has a tad.

#12 | Topkapi | Dir.: Jules Dassin | Flickchart: 883

#11 | Goldfinger | Dir.: Guy Hamilton | Flickchart: 645
I am going to admit here and now that as they age and as I do too, some of the older Bond films are slipping for me. Maybe it is because I am becoming ever more progressive in my attitudes with each passing year, but attitudes that I once either accepted, shrugged off, or embraced are harder for me to simply let pass. Still, I love the early Bond thug as portrayed by Connery (and still the best Bond for my money) and it is hard to ignore the famous set pieces, villains, punchlines, and hardware that have been ingrained in my head since youth. It has come down my list a bit in recent years, but it is still hanging in there. I do not expect Mr. Bond to die.

#10 | Zulu | Cy Endfield | Flickchart: 618
#9 | Becket | Peter Glenville | Flickchart: 542

#8 | Band of Outsiders aka Bande à part | Jean-Luc Godard | Flickchart: 370 
Only the second director to land on the 1964 list twice (the other being Lumet), I expect this Godard classic will bring the most debate from my fellow film buffs for being this far down in my Top 10. My defense is simple: I did not see it until after the age of thirty, I like other Godard films of that era better (Contempt, Week-End), and my Top 3, maybe 5 are almost impossible to surpass in my mind on a nostalgic level, being a child of 1964 (though, of course, I did not see any of them until I was a good bit older than a mere baby).

#7 | Woman in the Dunes | Hiroshi Teshigahara | Flickchart: 338
I bought the Criterion triple-movie box set of Teshigahara's films sight unseen just because Woman in the Dunes came highly recommended to me from about four thousand different corners, and the substandard print I found on YouTube was too fuzzy to understand. A most stunning film, though I liked his film The Face of Another even more. Just discovering Teshigahara for myself made the entire effort of spending months creating my database entirely worth it. If all of this had only brought me to discover his films, I would have been content. But I have found so much more.

#6 | Kwaidan | Masaki Kobayashi | Flickchart: 311
#5 | Mary Poppins | Robert Stevenson | Flickchart: 261
#4 | A Fistful of Dollars | Sergio Leone | Flickchart: 195

#3 | A Shot in the Dark | Blake Edwards | Flickchart: 136
While my love for Blake Edwards comes down to The Great Race from 1965, my esteem for Peter Sellers is built initially from my early exposure to this quite silly Inspector Clouseau film, the best of The Pink Panther series. It is only in the #3 spot for 1964 because two greater comedies were released in the same exact year...

#2 | A Hard Day's Night | Richard Lester | Flickchart: 15
I will never get this film out of my system, no matter what I do. Richard Lester is absolutely underestimated as a director and needs a serious career reevaluation. Entirely too influential, sometimes in ways that people who have never even seen this film will never know. Plus, the Beatles were great natural actors, and hilarious as well. That it is all wrapped about live (though staged) footage of the boys in their prime makes it even better, giving us a real time capsule glimpse of history in the making, while also making us laugh with pre-MTV video antics and trademark Lester wackiness.

And for me, though it is sometimes a close swap with the #2 in the list, there really is only one film that could possibly top my Top Films of 1964 list:

#1 | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Stanley Kubrick | Flickchart: 8
The film that I watch on my birthday more than any other (probably about twenty times or so, though I am skipping it this time). In my all-time Top Ten, my favorite Kubrick film, and my favorite Sellers film. Eminently quotable, endlessly ridiculous, and ultimately vital in the times in which we find ourselves. Quite simply the sharpest, wittiest, most dead on satire ever created.

---

Well, that's it. I am sure many of you will have disputes about favorite films left off MY list. See, that the gist of it... this is MY list. These are films that have either influenced me quite young, as many of the movies higher up on the list did, or that have come into my life later of which I have grown an abiding fondness. However they got there, they are my treasures, and on this birthday, it is likely that I will choose at least one or two of them to revisit to make my day brighter. I hope you do the same, especially if there are films that you haven't seen yet on here. You could do far worse (and probably will at some point, just as I do...)

Hell, I started the day watching The Crawling Eye...

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 4: Getting A Party Started Which Has Already Begun...

I have called it quits. The building of The 46x60 or So Project: Roughly 5000 Films from 1964-Present is over. Well, at least, 99% of it is...

As of today, not counting 2009, which will not be finished until after the awards get announced early next year, from 1964 through 2008, these are the stats:

• Total Films on List: 4966
• Total Films Not on DVD: 1372 (27.62%)
• Total Films on List Seen Since April 2005: 725 (14.59%)
• Total Films Left to See: 2869 (57.77%) 
• Average Films Per Year: 110.35 
• Biggest Year 1964-1969: 1964 - 101 films 
• Biggest Year 1970-1979: 1973 & 1974 - 108 films each 
• Biggest Year 1980-1989: 1987 - 127 films 
• Biggest Year 1990-1999: 1996 - 139 films 
• Biggest Year 2000-2009: 2006 & 2007 - 144 films each

It seems like an awful lot of movies to watch, and it is. But, it is not so out of bounds as you might think.

Here's one way to think about it: Say you are an average person, and that you rent five movies a week from your local Blockhead-Buster. You watch maybe one a night here and there, maybe skipping a night or three, and cramming a couple of films into one night. The renting of the film and the watching of it are a casual habit, something you do to cool off or something you and the wife or the kids do before bed. You don't really notice the pattern you have created; you just do it, almost by rote, sometimes with a yawn. Likewise, you never really think about how these films accumulate. You don't keep lists, and you are on what you believe is an erratic schedule, but the truth is you are averaging just over 250 films a year. 

And, in four years time, without your realizing it, you have watched over 1000 films.

Everyone has seen far more films than they think they have during their lifetime, in the same way that someone (and nearly everyone does) who insists they watch very little television is most likely lying straight through their McDonald's-fattened, hypocritical ass.

Those statistics of mine listed above, and the accomplishment of this seemingly ceaseless climb, are not so impossible. Since I tend to average over 1.5 films a day throughout the year, balancing out my low periods with massive marathons, it will probably take me a lot less time than you would surmise. After all, going by my rule of counting films I have seen up to four years ago (and this rule is basically so I can count more recent films that I have little interest in seeing this soon again), I am nearly at 15% seen already. As of this evening, since September 30th, I have watched 84 films over the past 52 days, just over the average I stated, and most of these films are on my list. Since I started four months ago, I have watched over 50 of the films in each of the years 1964, 1965 and 1966 already (less than 20 to watch in each year too), and I am well on my way there for 1967 as well. Once you get going, and just watch the films, things really get swingin'...

The worrying part of the list is the massive amount of films not on DVD at all. Where they are available online, such as on Crackle, Amazon Video on Demand (where there is nominal rental fee) or IMDb, I will take pains to watch them there. It just amazes me, since many of these are fairly acclaimed and even award-winning or at least nominated films, that they would be so absent from current view. I know it is all about commerce and what will sell, but in this day and age, where Warner Archives has started up what seems like such a noteworthy achievement in locating audiences for more obscure films (where they only commit the film to disc upon your purchase, allowing them to release many films that would normally languish in the vaults), you would think every studio would pick up on this and realize there is some solid money to be made on any film ever released.

Perhaps that is the wave of the near future, but for now, I have Turner Classic Movies at my rescue for many of them. Just tonight, I am being afforded the opportunity to see two of the films on my Not on DVD list within the project, 1964's One Potato, Two Potato and 1970's The Landlord, on TCM. This is where the importance of creating this list truly comes together for me. For many years now, I have led a fairly organic movie existence, doing what I call "The Bounce." Apart from small obsessions with certain lists of films I needed to see, for the most part, I have just let myself be led my own instincts into watching what crossed my path. It could be an article on a historical event that leads me to a filmic portrayal of the situation that leads me to another movie by the same director or star, and then when I am searching for one title I happen upon another that seems interesting, going through TV listings straight down and recording any film that might be worthwhile... etc., etc. Fairly nomadic. No real direction except in seeking out interesting films. It is "The Bounce" though, that partially got me to the point of building this Tower of Film, a need to focus on something that could potentially teach me more than the way I had been proceeding. And yet, I can still use the form of "The Bounce" to aid me in seeking out the films missing on disc. Which is how I noticed One Potato, Two Potato, which led me next to The Landlord tonight. 

The ultimate point is that I now that focus. I have, in the course of the past four months of intimacy with the list, so memorized its contents that I can see any list of films and tell you with about 80% certainty whether I need to see the film or not. And the list will not end. For as long as I am working on going through it, I am going to add to it. As I said much earlier in this ongoing piece, I might decide to add films from other festivals to it at some point. I might find another book or list with some other interesting films that I will wish to attach to the project. And, of course, as I am progressing, each new year will have to be appended. 2009 will add another 120 films or so to the project alone, and it is not out of sight to believe it could approach 6000 films before I am done.

You see, that is where I am now, deep in the throes of movie ecstasy, seeing every film released throughout my lifetime that I have ignored, not heard of, or just mocked without ever having any real knowledge about it. I will see The Last Detail at last, and I will be able to converse freely and truthfully about it. I am absolutely committed to seeing myself reach the summit of this Tower of Film ultimately.

If I stay alive, that is...

-FIN-