1964 films
Related: film - 1964 - 1960s - 1960s films
Films: The Masque of the Red Death (1964) -
The Masque of the Red Death (1964) - Roger Corman [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
More films
The Cool World (1964)
The Cool World (1964) - Shirley Clarke
The Cool World is a 1964 film which tells the story of life in the African-American ghetto in the early 60s. It stars Hampton Clanton, Yolanda Rodríguez, Bostic Felton, Gary Bolling, Carl Lee and Clarence Williams III.
The movie was adapted by Shirley Clarke and Carl Lee from the novel and play by Warren Miller and Robert Rossen, and directed by Clarke. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cool_World [Feb 2006]
Soundtrack
The film was shot in Harlem and the man with the horn was Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy and his band with Yusef Lateef, Aaron Bell, Arthur Taylor and Mal Waldron, played Waldron’s original compositions which were used for the film. But when the soundtrack surfaced in mid-1964 it was slightly different. For a start, the entire soundtrack was rerecorded for release with more or less the same tunes but attributed to Dizzy Gillespie with another band [James Moody, Kenny Barron, Chris White and Rudy Collins]. The original Waldron soundtrack has been lost for decades. --http://www.bigomagazine.com/archive/ARrarities/ARmwcoolworld.html [Feb 2006]
Docudrama
DDH: Twenty years later, people talk about discovering the "new form": docudrama--dramatic documentary. But that happened in The Cool World in 1963.
SC: That was the first of that particular kind of thing. There had been The Quiet One, which was James Agee's reenacted documentary. The kid was a real kid and he played himself. I had seen it and Helen Levitt's work, a little film on Halloween that she did, In the Street. It had a very big effect on me combined with Rossellini and his films: Neo-Realism. That's what I fell in love with.
DDH: Any film in particular?
SC: Open City. And that's what made me want to make The Cool World. That's what I was looking to do in The Connection also, but I ended up having to do it in a set. The original idea was to shoot it in the streets of New York, but at that point in time we were scared to shoot 35mm without better sound controls. When it came to The Cool World, we developed the radio mike, and took it into the streets so the kids could talk running up and down the streets. --http://207.56.97.90/shirleyclarkeinterview.html [Feb 2006]
See also: African-American - documentary film - 1964 - cool - registry - black
The Pawnbroker (1964) - Sidney Lumet
The Pawnbroker (1964) - Sidney Lumet [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Pawnbroker is a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant which tells the story of a concentration camp survivor who suffers flashbacks of his past Nazi imprisonment as he tries to cope with his daily life.
It was made into a 1964 film which stars Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Brock Peters. The film was considered shocking when first released, both because of its rawness and because of brief nudity (female breasts). The film is black and white, with lots of atmospheric trumpets by Quincy Jones.
The Pawnbroker should be remembered as the first American film to transgress the Hays Code, a code strictly limiting all expression of sexuality.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pawnbroker [May 2005]
Naked Kiss (1964) - Samuel Fuller
Constance Towers, head shaven
Naked Kiss (1964) - Samuel Fuller [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Until Sam Fuller came along, movies in the 1960s were still bound by Hollywood's self-imposed and often hypocritical rules of discretion. The crimes and misdemeanors of lurid pulp fiction remained on drugstore spin-racks and newsstands, diluted on screen until Fuller, with his cigar-chomping audacity and confrontational style, liberated movies from artificial restraint and kicked them into the meaner, darker, but more honest maturity of the post-Kennedy era. Shock Corridor announced Fuller's brazen agenda a year earlier, but The film begins like no other before it: Kelly (Constance Towers) beats her pimp with a handbag, grabs the cash he owes her, adjusts her telltale wig and makeup, and sets out to begin life anew, free from the shame of prostitution. Two years later she's in Grantville, a typically Rockwellian slice of Americana, working wonders with disabled kids and gaining distance from her miserable past. She's even engaged to the town's most respected citizen, but dark clouds are gathering: a corrupt cop knows Kelly's hidden secrets; a nearby brothel taints the community; and a pedophile is lurking in the shadows. Through it all, Fuller calibrates The Naked Kiss with such precision that sentiment and sordidness can run parallel without colliding, shifting from outrageous vice to shameless tear-jerking with equal facility. With twisted tricks up his sleeve, Fuller can be accused of tabloid tackiness, but that would be missing the point: In Fuller's cruel and ugly world, compassion still finds a way to survive. --Jeff Shannon for Amazon.com
Sordid
Notes:
Samuel Michael Fuller
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, he began, from a very young age, in the field of journalism, becoming a crime reporter at age 17. He wrote pulp novels and screenplays from the mid-30s onwards.
Fuller's journalistic background and his early beginnings as a pulp-fiction writer have informed his film work, particularly Park Row (1952), Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1965). Fuller's style has been described as "primitive". --excerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Fuller [Aug 2005]
See also:
American cinema
A beautiful heiress is kidnapped and held hostage until her wealthy father comes up with a ransom. The heiress develops an attraction to one of her kidnappers, but another member of the gang tries to rape her, leading to a deadly triangle. --Ray Hamel via imdb.com
The prolific and notorious Jose Benazeraf was behind the camera for this sex film classic about a beautiful young woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom, while her captors give in to the passion she inspires. Includes a jazz score by the legendary Chet Baker. From Radley Metzger's Audubon Collection of European Erotica. Adults only. --http://www.buyindies.com/listings/3/1/FCTS-31851.html
Filthy, dirty, squalid, morally degraded
“The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils” (James Joyce).
Samuel Michael Fuller (August 12, 1911 - October 30, 1997) was an American film director.
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) - Stanley Kubrick
Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold-war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with "the purity of precious bodily fluids," mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so- called "Doomsday Device," and the world hangs in the balance while the U.S. president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. Sellers also plays a British military attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr. Strangelove; George C. Scott is outrageously frantic as General Buck Turgidson, whose presidential advice consists mainly of panic and statistics about "acceptable losses." With dialogue ("You can't fight here! This is the war room!") and images (Slim Pickens's character riding the bomb to oblivion) that have become a part of our cultural vocabulary, Kubrick's film regularly appears on critics' lists of the all-time best. --Jeff Shannon for Amazon.com
Sexus (1964) - José Bénazéraf
Sexus (1964) - José Bénazéraf 
The original title was La Plus Longue Nuit. They sold a lot of Henry Miller books on the basis of the movie, but I suspect that a lot of people went to the movie thinking it was the film version of that book. We had another José Bénazéraf movie, The Fourth Sex, and I've seen all his movies. He really has a feel for making an erotic movie. There's a degenerate streak in his films, which he lives. You literally can smell the film. It's a gift. And he has impeccable taste in choosing his girls. Sexus was a very strong picture at the time. We were a little worried about it because it had a couple of lesbian striptease acts.