Movies of 1960



Clips from Pyscho, The Bell Boy, Spartacus and Inherit the Wind

Academy Awards 1960

Best Picture: The Apartment  beats "The Alamo", "Elmer Gantry", "Sons and Lovers" and "The Sundowners".

Screen adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel of religious fraud. The Apartment

Best Director: Billy Wilder beats Jack Cardiff for "Sons and Lovers", Jules Dassin for "Never on Sunday", Alfred Hitchcock for "Psycho" and Fred Zinnemann for "The Sundowners".

Best Actor: Burt Lancaster - Elmer Gantry beats Trevor Howard in "Sons and Lovers", Jack Lemmon in "The Apartment", Laurence Olivier in "The Entertainer" and Spencer Tracy in "Inherit the Wind". Elmer Gantry

Best Supporting Actress: Shirley Jones - Elmer Gantry beats Glynis Johns in "The Sundowners", Shirley Knight in "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs", Janet Leigh in "Psycho", Mary Ure in "Sons and Lovers".

Best Actress:

Elizabeth Taylor  Butterfield 8 beats Greer Garson in "Sunrise at Campobello", Deborah Kerr in "The Sundowners", Shirley MacLaine in "The Apartment" and Melina Mercouri in "Never on Sunday" Adaptation of 1935 John O'Hara's novel of a prostitute almost saved from the business by love. (Laurence Harvey)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Peter Ustinov in Spartacus beats Peter Falk in "Murder, Inc.", Jack Kruschen in "The Apartment", Sal Mineo in "Exodus" and Chill Wills in "The Alamo".

Director Stanley Kubrick made a name for himself with this movie, though he later disowned it because of creative friction between himself, writer Dalton Trumbo and  Actor/Producer Kirk Douglas who referred to Kubrick as a "talented shit." More importantly, Kirk Douglas used the movie to break the Hollywood Blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo (one of The Hollywood Ten jailed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. In the same year Trumbo received full credit for his work on Exodus.

Best Foreign Language Film: The Virgin Spring - Ingmar Bergman

Top Box Office 1960

The Magnificent Seven

John Sturges directs Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn and Eli Wallach in this Western precursor to The Dirty Dozen.

The Magnificent Seven

Psycho - Starring Tony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Martin Balsam . Director Alfred Hitchcock and distributor Paramount mandate that no one will be admitted to theaters after the film has begun. Psycho

On the Beach

Directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.

La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini directs Marcello Mastroianni, and Swedish actress Anita Ekburg.

Inherit the Wind Stanley Kramer directs Spencer Tracy, Fredric March and Gene Kelly who play Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and H.L. Mencken in the famous 1925 Scope's Trial which held it a crime to teach evolution in public schools in Tennessee. 

Entertainment News 1960

The Rat Pack

While filming Ocean's Eleven in the Fall of 1960; Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford became the celebrity talk of the year. After a day's filming they would carouse the Strip and end each night doing a show at the Sands. The Sand's ballroom becomes the place to be at Midnight for every who's who in America. Tickets were scalped for thousands and some of the biggest names in show business and politics were turned away. Ocean's Eleven

Angie Dickinson, Juliet Prowse, and Shirley MacLaine were the Rat Pack groupies of the day. The group became political by backing JFK, but Sinatra's ties to the Mafia cooled the relationship after Kennedy became President. The Rat Pack does deserve historical credit for changing Nevada politics when they refused to work in segregated venues. It changed the face of the Las Vegas strip in just a few weeks, helping change the face of America in just a few years. The Rat Pack

59 year old Clark Gable dies at the end of filming The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe. Clark Gable

49 year old 1940's actress Margaret Sullavan commits suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. Once married to Henry Fonda and  Director William Wyler.

B Movies 1960

It was the height of the Drive-in Theater where B Movies made their money and teenage boys made their girlfriends.

13 Ghosts - Here Martin Milner is crushed to death by one of the Ghosts. Director William Castle's (The King of Ballyhoo) gimmick for this movie was called Illusion-O. The audience was given Ghost Viewers so they could see the ghosts hidden by color shading in this B&W movie which otherwise could not be seen.

Roger Corman became king of the B Movie with three films in one year: House of Usher, Little Shop of Horrors and Last Woman on Earth.

Village of the Damned

George Sanders stars in this British horror classic.

The Time Machine
George Pal directs starring Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux in this H.G. Wells Classic

The Lost World

Director Irwin Allen does a poor job of bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 19th Century book to life. With Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, Jill St.Johns and Fernando Lamas. The Lost World.

Smell-O-Vision - Bottles of scent were held on a rotating drum and the process was triggered by a signal on the film and sprayed over the audience. Only one film, Scent of a Mystery, was made in Smell-O-Vision. This became one of the classic failures of the business. Mike Todd, Jr., son of the famed director, lost his entire inheritance and left the film business.

New Movies

Can-Can

Operation Petticoat

Suddenly Last Summer

Solomon and Sheba
Where the Boys Are
Never on Sunday
Exodus
Macumba Love

More on each new movie of 1960 at Wikipedia