The 1950's are my favorite decade for cinema, but 1960's come second : My favorite actresses were busy in the '60s.

1960: A Bout De Souffle/Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Seberg!!)

1961: The Hustler (Robert Rossen)

1962: Lolita (Stanley Kubrick)

1963: Hud (Martin Ritt)

1964: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy and Catherine Deneuve!!)

1965: Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina!)

1966: Persona (Ingmar Bergman)

1967: Two for the Road (Stanley Donen and Audrey Hepburn!)

1968: Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski and Mia Farrow!)

1969: Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper AND Peter Fonda AND Jack Nicholson AND Phil Spector, a great farewell to an amazing decade)

Hey Goog, great list therefore I will share mine.

Federico, we expect to see one from you as well. :}

First, the sixties were a turning point for Hollywood, where the independent film directors started to have much more say especially with the successes of Dennis Hopper, John Cassavetes and visionaries like Stanley Krubrick.

Also 1967 seemed like the best year of the decade, and the best actor, Sidney Poiter. Just in 1967 alone he had made "To Sir, with Love", "In The Heat of The Night" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". WOW!!!

Here's my list and I had to add a Honorary mention, just to many choices. :}

1960
“Psycho” Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh
Psycho Marion Crane on impulse steals $40,000
that has been entrusted to her by her employer.

Honorary mention:
“The Apartment” Dir: Billy Wilder
starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine
Bud Baxter is a struggling clerk in a huge New York insurance company.

1961
"The Hustler" Dir: Martin Ritt
starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott

A boozing pool shark works his way up the ranks from small pool halls to the big-time.

Honorary mention
"The Misfits" Dir: John Huston
starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift
Roslyn divorces Ray in Reno and then meets widower Guido.

1962:
“Lawrence of Arabia” - Dir: David Lean
starring Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn

Based on the true story of British Army lieutenant T.E. Lawrence.

Honorary mention
"To Kill a Mockingbird" Dir: Robert Mulligan
starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham
Local lawyer Atticus Finch agrees to defend a black man accused
of raping a white woman.

1963
"The Birds" Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren and Jessica Tandy

Honorary mention
“Hud” Dir Martin Ritt
starring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas


1964
"A Hard Days Night" Dir: Richard Lester
Starring The Beatles

Honorary mention:
"The Pawnbroker" Dir: Sidney Lumet
starring Rod Steiger and Geraldine Fitzgerald

This was one of the first film's to deal with the affects of Nazi Germany's
concentration camps on their survivors.

1965
"The Sound of Music" Dir: Robert Wise
starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer

Honorary mention:
"Repulsion" Dir: Roman Polanski
starring Catherine Deneuve and Ian Hendry

A young manicurist, with very pent up anxieties about sex,
descent into a kind of hallucinatory madness that drives her to commit murder.

1966
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" Dir: Mike Nichols
starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

Turning the underbelly of bourgeois academia into a microcosm of human relationships
in all their arduous complexities, Mike Nichols' auspicious debut feature is a harrowing descent into the private lives and painful secrets of two couples thrown together for an evening.

Honorary mention:
"Born Free" Dir: James Hill
starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers

Joy Adamson and her husband, Kenya game warden George Adamson, raise Elsa, a lion cub. When Elsa approaches maturity, Joy determines she must re-educate Elsa to living in the wild so that the lioness can return to a free life.

1967
"The Graduate" Dir: Mike Nichols
starring Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross and Anne Bancroft

Shortly after graduating from college, Benjamin begins a secret affair with an older woman.
Meanwhile, he begins to fall in love with her daughter and has to stop the affair before anyone finds out.

Honorary mention:
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" Dir: Stanley Kramer
starring Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier

The daughter of a well-to-do white family comes home from a vacation to announce her intentions of marrying a well-to-do black physician.
The prospective in-laws must come to terms with the implications.

1968
"2001: A Space Odyssey” Dir: Stanley Krubrick
starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood

After thousands of years, a monolith reappears on the moon. When modern astronauts go to investigate its presence they find they need to travel to Jupiter, but when the on board computer HAL 9000 malfunctions it tries to cover its mistake by killing.

Honorary mention:
"The Odd Couple" Dir: Gene Saks
starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau

Felix Ungar has just broken up with his wife.
Despondant, he goes to kill himself but is saved by his friend Oscar Madison.

1969
"Easy Rider" Dir: Dennis Hopper
Starring Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson

After scoring cocaine in Mexico, then re-selling it in California,
two free spirited bikers set off on a trek from Los Angeles to New Orleans
for Mardi Gras then on to Florida to retire.

Honorary mention
"The Wild Bunch" Dir: Sam Peckinpah
starring William Holden and Ernest Borgnine

An aging band of outlaws makes one last score and heads to Mexico
with a band of bounty hunters on their heels.
They leave a trail of bloody mayhem and violence along the way

I always thought that the 60's were the worst decade for movies--an era when mainstream schlock was so bad that boring hippie schlock like "Easy Rider" would be somehow considered a "classic" in comparison.

Tend to go along with AMW on this one. Lots of grand production epics and musicals.

And even though I personally enjoy Easy Rider, I would likely pick Butch Cassidy as the better movie. Of movies not mentioned by Googa or Rick, I would probably have In The Heat Of The Night and and Dr. Strangelove on my list.

No love for Midnight Cowboy (1969) which was releases as an X rated movie? That one is a real NYC classic.

1960 - Spartacus - Kirk Douglas

1961 - Sail A Crooked Ship - Robert Wagner, Ernie Kovacs & Carolyn Jones

1962 - Hot the West Was Won - All star cast

1963 Beach Party - A Funnicello/Frankie Avalon

1964 - A Hard Day's Night - Beatles

1965 - Help - The Beatles

1966 - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Clint Eastwood

1967 Bonnie & Clyde

1968 - Barbaella - Jane Fonda

1969 - Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice - N Wood, R Culp, E Gould, D Cannon

Oh, I like it, Schlesinger was on a winning streak back then.

1960 was incredible, and Rick's mention of The Apartment and Psycho would be my runners-up.

1961 - Sail A Crooked Ship - Robert Wagner, Ernie Kovacs & Carolyn Jones

A movie I don't know??

For me:

1960. Psycho
1961. West Side Story
1962. Lawrence Of Arabia
1963. The Birds
1964. A Hard Days Night
1965. Doctor Zhivago
1966. The Good The Bad and the Ugly
1967. Bonnie And Clyde
1968. 2001 A Space Odyssey
1969. Midnight Cowboy

The 60's were worse than the '80s, '90s, '00s??

Things did pick up in the second half.

Sail a Crooked Ship is now my favorite movie not yet on DVD (that and WC Field's Million Dollar Legs.

It is Ernie's greatest film IMO. Carolyn Jones plays the bad girl again (as in King Creole) but it is a comedy. If you can find it on VHS - it is great! Delores Hart I believe is in it too. It is a must see. (I'm gonna have to hook up my VCR now to watch the tape.

Here's a review I found

Burglar Ernie Kovacs is robbing an employment place that hires men for construction or in this case destruction jobs and he answers a phone call from Robert Wagner. Wagner has a job for these guys to start demolishing a fleet of beat up old freighters from the World War II era merchant marine. Kovacs however hears the idea and comes up with a plan to steal one of these old tubs and he assembles a group of his peers to help. In the process they kidnap Wagner and his sweetheart Dolores Hart.

Along for the ride with Kovacs and the gang are his long suffering girl friend Carolyn Jones and his nephew Frankie Avalon. Avalon was at the height of his popularity and his presence guaranteed a profit for the film from the teenage trade alone. He sings a nice song in the film Opposites Attract more in Bobby Darin's style than his own.

Assembled for the caper are such scene stealing characters as Jesse White, Sid Tomack, Harvey Lembeck, and Frank Gorshin. Mix this group together with Kovacs and Jones and you got a pretty funny film.

Before her days as Morticia Adams when a French syllable would drive Gomez into heat, Carolyn Jones was a pretty funny woman, kookie and funny in a Shirley MacLaine way. Her and Kovacs have what's best described as a Nathan Detroit-Adelaide long suffering romance as she can't quite get him to the altar.

Sail A Crooked Ship was the last film for both Ernie Kovacs and Sid Tomack, both would leave us all too soon shortly after this film was finished. Especially Kovacs, his comic genius influenced a whole generation of comedians, the long running Laugh-in Show of Rowan and Martin should have been dedicated to him.

Dolores Hart two years after this film left Hollywood for a different reason. Her work on the film right before Sail A Crooked Ship, Francis of Assisi started her thinking about religion and she became a nun. As of this writing she's prioress of a convent in Connecticut.

It's a pretty funny film, the idea is that the gang sail the ship to Boston Harbor from the Hudson where it is docked and rob a bank there and make the getaway by sea. How many bank robbers make a sea getaway? Of course much happens along the way and things work out a bit differently than as planned.

Funniest moment, the ship steering Frankie Avalon during the hurricane as he yells for Robert Wagner, the only real seaman aboard. Worth seeing it for that alone.

Thanks Robert, I'll look for this one! Sounds like good, clean, unpretentious fun!

No way, especially the 2nd half as John G. pointed out as the indies (producers, directors and actors) started to make their way.

Yeah, I wanted to have "Midnight Cowboy" and the 1964 "Hard Days Night" was an ommision. I believe I need to edit this.

Rick A.

This should be fairly easy for me since the only 60s films I remember seeing at all are A Hard Day's Night, The Odd Couple, Planet of the Apes, bits and pieces of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Psycho and The Birds, as well as Disney's 101 Dalmatians and The Jungle Book, and out of those Planet of the Apes is probably my favorite followed closely by A Hard Day's Night and The Odd Couple. The two Disney films aren't bad by any means though. I'm just a little bored with them now thanks to my now 4 year old niece wanting to constantly see them with me when she first got them on DVD. For me trying to narrow down my favorites from this decade would be a whole lot tougher, but that's probably because I'm a lot more familiar with newer movies than older ones and trying to pick and choose would be like torture for me lol.