I have a softspot for deconstructed “Spaghetti Westerns.” I think “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “The Wild Bunch,” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” are among the best films ever made, Peckinpah’s quaint slow-mo 1960s ultraviolence and all. I also have a soft spot for an obscure spaghetti-wannabee, Martin Rackin’s 1967 “Rough Night in Jericho” with George Peppard and Dean Martin. I think it may be the only film made with Dean Martin that was absolutely straight action-drama with no hint of comedy, not even black humor. He was cast as the heavy, a corrupt sheriff named Flood, and is credibly menacing and brutal in the role.
For Westerns more conventional in tone, “Big Jake” with John Wayne is a dark piece of cinematography that shares a theme with “The Wild Bunch,” and maybe not even on a level the writers and directors were conscious of, about a weary old man whom a new era has passed by. The “gratuitous violence” that horrified critics in 1971 is now cartoonish, a quaint artifact from a world long gone. “The Searchers” with John Wayne is also maybe more than a little unconsciously symbolic, a story about a bitter man who’s consumed by his own rage at a changed world, which was a bold stance for a film to take in 1956. It’s a dark film centered on Wayne’s character Ethan, who goes back and forth between being an antihero and a villainous protagonist.
Best zombie apocalypse movie ever made was “The Omega Man” with Charlton Heston, which awakened in me a lifelong desire to own a Smith & Wesson M76 submachinegun, and to take potshots at zombies with an M1918 BAR with a night vision scope from a balcony while wearing an Edwardian smoking jacket with a ruffled collar.
“The Dirty Dozen,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” and “Kelly’s Heroes” are the best World War II movies, deconstructing and challenging popcultural myths about the war that even eighty years later border on the sacred.
I also have some admiration for the genre of 1950s-60s proto-steampunk quasi-Victorian adventure films like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” which usually were either based on a Jules Verne novel or had Vincent Price, sometimes both. The best of them, and the most subversive, was 1968’s “The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.” with Oliver Reed doing his best James Bond impression alongside a young, delicious Diana Rigg. It’s a surreal black comedy-adventure that seems to be set in an alternate universe somewhere between 1900 and 1920, one where the First World War never took place, pertaining to a plot to start a devastating world war… possibly because it’s based on an unfinished Jack London novel from 1910. Everything is wrought-iron and covered with gigantic knobby rivets. Except for Diana Rigg, of course. It’s colorful and weird, and doesn’t always make much sense, but Diana Rigg was always delightful to look at, and whoever did set design and props deserved an Oscar.
The “James Bond” films created the “spy movie” genre in the long-distant, long-dead 1960s, an era so innocent that you could make a movie about a clandestine agent of a Western government and cast him as a protagonist, and people would not only find this plausible but lay down cash money to be entertained by it. The genre was parodied mercilessly almost immediately, and probably the best of them were the Matt Helm films with Dean Martin, made between 1965 and 1968, “Murderer’s Row,” “The Wrecking Crew,” “The Silencers,” and “The Ambushers.” They are relentlessly silly, and no one’s taking any of it the least bit seriously, least of all Dean Martin himself, smirking his way through every scene. Oddly, the original Matt Helm pulp spy novels by the late Donald Hamilton were all deadly serious and brutally violent, with scenes that may make even jaded Internet kiddies who grew up with Ogrish and Rotten.com wince. None of that is obvious from the films, which are entertainingly silly with a tone not too different from the “Get Smart” TV series, and lots of eye candy in the form of Elke Sommer and Ann-Margaret. There was going to be a fifth Matt Helm film, but Sharon Tate was murdered just before production was to begin, and the decision was made to drop the whole thing silently rather than try to cast someone else in the role.
Another personal favorite of mine is 1963’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” a very dark comedy-adventure film about greedy idiots searching for treasure. The scenes with Jonathan Williams as a short-tempered, dim-witted truck driver are all a joy to watch.
Speaking of comedies, 1983’s “Doctor Detroit” with Dan Akroyd and Howard Hesseman is another personal favorite, a goofy comedy about a mild-mannered college professor who is, inexplicably, talked into standing in for a notorious pimp who’s being hunted by the Mob. It features a Devo soundtrack, a rotisserie kabob sword fight, and lots of eye candy in the form of Donna Dixon, Lydia Lei Kawahara, Lynn Whitfield, and a young, hot Fran Drescher. I don’t really see what more you could have wanted from a film in the 1980s.
Lastly, there’s another film I admire that could never have been made at any time but the 1960s, “Candy” with Swedish model Ewa Aulin in a psychedelic parody of Voltaire’s “Candide,” with a script written by Buck Henry based on a Terry Southern novel. Has everybody who was anybody in Hollywood circa 1968, from Walter Matthau to Marlon Brando to Ringo Starr, of all people, all chewing cheerfully on the scenery while Miss Aulin, as the eponymous Candy, stands there and looks adorably confused. None of it makes the least bit of sense and no one cares, because everyone’s having too much fun, and the sense of fun is infectious. And Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography is gorgeous.