Inspired by my friend’s blog, Haunted Jukebox, I have decided to start a new semi-regular piece on my very infrequently updated blog, where I will share my favorite films for each year starting with the year of my birth, which happens to be 1962. I thought this would be a great project for me to have started before my retirement, which will hit in 2026, and it’s also a great way to pick up a lot of films from over 50 years ago that I have missed. As you might imagine, this piece will probably show up every few months, as I want to hit a critical mass of films viewed for each year, and for the first 20 or so years, I suspect that will require a lot of viewing to get to that mass.
1962 was a great year, for film, actually, and while I had only seen about a dozen films from that year before I started this journey, my #1 film was one of them. I watched an additional twenty or so before feeling confident enough to have a list of top films. Like my fellow blogger, I will also include a short list of films I still want to see from that year that I didn’t get to. Ultimately, my total list for films viewed in 1962 amounts to 25, and here are my Top 10.
- To Kill a Mockingbird (dir. Robert Mulligan)
- Cleo from 5 to 7 (dir. Agnes Varda)
- Jules et Jim (dir. François Truffaut)
- The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer)
- Billy Budd (dir. Peter Ustinov)
- Harakiri (dir. Masaki Kobayashi)
- A Kind of Loving (dir. John Schlesinger)
- Knife in the Water (dir. Roman Polanski)
- An Autumn Afternoon (dir. Yasujirô Ozu)
- The Intruder (dir. Roger Corman)
Honorable mentions: The Third Love, The Tale of Zatoichi, David & Lisa, Pitfall, Sweet Bird of Youth
Watchlist: Chushingura, Dr. No, L’Eclisse, The Exterminating Angel, The View from a Bridge, Vivre sa Vie, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
It’s hard to deny the top spot to what is arguably one of the best film adaptations of a novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Agnes Varda’s look at a young woman spending an anxious day awaiting a possibly difficult medical diagnosis in Cleo from 5 to 7 gives a decidedly female slant to the French New Wave. Jules et Jim tracks a friendship between a French man and a German man in the context of World War II. Peter Ustinov adds a humanist look at a difficult ethical decision at sea in Billy Budd, featuring the sparkling debut of the recently passed Terence Stamp. The first of two Japanese films, Masaki Kobayahi’s Harakiri tells a complex tale of revenge during the time of the samurai, while Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon looks a at the time, contemporary family life. With A Knife in the Water, a slow burn thriller gives us a peak at films to come for Roman Polanski’s first feature film. Finally, The Intruder sees schlock horror director Roger Corman exercising a different kind of horror in this tale of racism starring William Shatner.
I’m looking forward to rounding out my 1962 films with the titles listed on my Watchlist, but I’ve already started looking at the films of 1963 for the eventual second part in this series.