Welcome to the swinging ‘60s, a time of revolution, transformation and turmoil - and also an era of great, great films. The decade kicked off in a big way with a seminal French New Wave classic, an Italian masterpiece that coined a new word, and probably the most famous and influential film Alfred Hitchcock ever made - and that’s not even to mention Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the timely and timeless comedy that swept the Oscars that year. But which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1960, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
Film critics love the 50s, 60s, and 70s; that’s the period for most of the movies that show up on all-time ‘best’ lists. 1960’s right smack in the middle of that era, so it’s no surprise that it’s well represented in those discussions.
Five movies in particular stand out. We can start with Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial debut, which came close to making the all-time top ten in Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 surveys of international critics and directors. Breathless also just missed the top ten in the BBC’s 2018 ranking of the greatest foreign-language films ever made - surpassed there, though, by another great 1960 film, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. (That’s our aforementioned Italian masterpiece; it gave us the word “paparazzi.”) Fellini also made Sight & Sound’s top 100, but not as far up the list as another Italian classic, Michelangelo Antonioni’s mysterious L’Avventura. All three films are cited on numerous all-time “best” lists - including Entertainment Weekly’s top 100 from 2013, which is especially remarkable because that was a more populist and America-centric ranking by design. Godard, Fellini, and Antonioni still made the cut.
Not to be outdone, we also have a pair of stone-cold classics from American filmmakers - or European expats in America, at least. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, our Oscar winner, still holds up, making Sight & Sound’s top 100 as well as numerous others. But it’s Hitchcock’s Psycho that gets the most citations of all, making Sight & Sound’s top 50 as well as a couple all-time top tens. Not bad for a slasher flick that the studio didn’t even want him to make!
Here’s a list of 1960 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Breathless (13), L’Avventura (T21), Psycho (T35), La Dolce Vita (T39)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Breathless (11), L’Avventura (T30), La Dolce Vita (T37), The Apartment (T44), Psycho (T48)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Psycho (14), The Apartment (80), Spartacus (81)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Psycho (53)
Leonard Maltin: Psycho, La Dolce Vita
National Society of Film Critics: Breathless, La Dolce Vita, The Entertainer, Psycho
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Psycho (41)
BBC American (2015): Psycho (8), The Apartment (24)
BBC Foreign (2018): La Dolce Vita (10), Breathless (11), L’Avventura (45)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Psycho (5), Breathless (54), L’Avventura (70), La Dolce Vita (87)
If you’re keeping track, Psycho leads with nine citations there, followed by La Dolce Vita (six), Breathless (five), L’Avventura (four), and The Apartment (three). Two other 1960 films merited a single mention: Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, which made the AFI’s 2007 list of the top 100 American films, and the Lawrence Olivier vehicle The Entertainer.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes sixteen films from 1960:
(16) Breathless
(22) Psycho
(30) La Dolce Vita
(37) L'Avventura
(59) The Apartment
(168) Rocco and His Brothers
(282) Peeping Tom
(311) Eyes Without a Face
(429) Shoot the Piano Player
(468) The Cloud-Capped Star
(664) The Virgin Spring
(725) Spartacus
(773) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(820) Le Trou
(876) The Naked Island
(892) Strangers When We Meet
There are our five frontrunners again, all in the top 60; no other year has that many films so highly ranked. (In fact there are only four other years with five films in the top 100: 1954, 1959, 1966, and 1975.)
Film critics have five clear favorites from 1960, but several other movies are worth mentioning here - including Rocco and His Brothers and Peeping Tom, both masterworks by directors we haven’t encountered in over a decade. Rocco was directed by Luchino Visconti, who’s only earned one Moonlight nomination so far, for 1943’s Ossessione; Peeping Tom marks the return of Michael Powell, whose last Moonlight nomination was in 1948 for The Red Shoes.
We’ll see Visconti again a couple more times before we’re through - but Peeping Tom was a career-ending disaster when it first came out, so this will be our last ride with Powell.
General Audiences
But which films from 1960 do general audiences still watch?
That’s a hard thing to measure; there’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film. So we looked at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. (You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger and maler than the average person, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit.)
Here are the ten most-viewed films from 1960, according to IMDB (as of November 12, 2021):
Psycho (635,851 votes)
The Apartment (173,255)
Spartacus (130,473)
The Magnificent Seven (91,846)
Breathless (77,800)
La Dolce Vita (70,317)
The Time Machine (39,379)
Peeping Tom (33,738)
Eyes Without a Face (30,052)
Inherit the Wind (29,174)
L’Avventura is in 11th place, just outside the top 10 with 28,376 votes.
Some noteworthy films here: Breathless is easily Godard’s most popular film, with more than twice as many votes as second-place Pierrot le Fou; The Apartment is Wilder’s third most popular movie, trailing only Sunset Blvd and Some Like It Hot; and in spite of its savage initial reception, Peeping Tom today is the most-watched film of Michael Powell’s career.
But Psycho tops the list by a mile. It’s not only the most-viewed film of the year, it’s also the second most-viewed film of the entire decade (trailing only The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly); and it’s easily the most-watched film of Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary career, beating second-place Rear Window by nearly 200,000 votes.
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1960 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
Psycho (8) 198
Breathless (6) 179
La Dolce Vita (2) 142
L'Avventura (1) 132
The Apartment (1) 112
Peeping Tom (1) 82
Spartacus (1) 73
Shoot the Piano Player 68
Rocco and His Brothers (1) 47
Eyes Without a Face 44
The Magnificent Seven 41
Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1) 39
Inherit the Wind (1) 21
The Entertainer 14
The Virgin Spring 14
Two Women 8
Late Autumn 7
Le Trou 7
House of Usher 5
Plein Soleil 5
Exodus 4
Never on Sunday 4
The Cloud-Capped Star 3
Ocean's 11 3
Village of the Damned 3
Cruel Story of Youth 2
The Little Shop of Horrors 2
The World According to Suzy Wang 2
Primary 1
(A hearty welcome to ten new expert panelists: John Bruns, Dana Coen, Blair Davis, Herbert Golder, Beverly Gray, Jeff Menne, Leland Monk, Maria San Filippo, Deborah Swedberg, and Virginia Wexman.)
Fourteen films got write-in votes this year, the most we’ve ever had. We’ll see that trend continue throughout this decade, though.
Our panelists’ top five are in line with critics. It's a two-film race for first, with Psycho checking in just ahead of Breathless; La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura duke it out for third; and The Apartment is a solid fifth, well ahead of sixth-place Peeping Tom. Psycho and Breathless also combined for 14 of 24 first-place votes.
And on the other side of the standings, pity Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star, which garnered the fewest votes of any shortlisted film this decade. Shoulda gone with Virgin Spring instead, I guess.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
It’s not hard to pick a top five this year. Psycho, Breathless, La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura and The Apartment are the clear top five with critics and scholars alike - and for good measure, four of them rank among the six most-watched films of the year with general audiences too.
Without any further ado, our five Best Picture nominees for 1960 are:
THE APARTMENT L’AVVENTURA
BREATHLESS
LA DOLCE VITA
PSYCHO
Honorable mention? There’s a big gap between those five films and the rest, but Peeping Tom and Spartacus are solidly in sixth and seventh. 1960 was a phenomenal year all around: great films like Rocco and His Brothers, The Magnificent Seven, Shoot the Piano Player, and Eyes Without a Face (among others!) don’t even make the top-five conversation.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
All five nominees are deserving, but it’s a two-film race this year. Breathless and Psycho top our other three films on every metric - including with our expert panel, where there’s a wide gap between second-place Breathless and third-place La Dolce Vita. (The Apartment does come in ahead of Breathless with general audiences, at least according to IMDB; even so, Breathless is the clear leader overall between the two.)
So between Breathless and Psycho, which film comes out on top? Both films are all-timers, but this is an easy one too: Breathless narrowly leads with They Shoot Pictures’ critical aggregate and also on the Sight & Sound rankings, but Psycho is the runaway winner on every other metric. Psycho gets more mentions on critics’ “best” lists; it’s the landslide winner with general audiences; and it’s tops with our panel of experts too. Godard will get more chances later in the decade, but this year is Hitch’s.
And so: congratulations to Psycho, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1960!
Alfred Hitchcock wins his fourth Moonlight, twice as many as any other director; he also has 12 nominations, three times as many as any other director. (Billy Wilder, incidentally, is tied for second on both counts, with four nominations and two wins.) Hitch is far and away the most celebrated director in film history - and on top of the four Moonlights he’s won outright, you could also make a strong case that The 39 Steps should have won in 1935 and Rear Window should have won in 1954. He’s hard to beat.
Federico Fellini, meanwhile, remains winless on his third nomination, but he’ll get another shot in 1963 with 8 ½. In fact, 1963 will be essentially a repeat of 1960: there too, the three leading candidates will be a Fellini film (8 ½), a Hitchcock film (The Birds), and a Godard film (Contempt). Those are three pretty good directors.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1961:
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
VIRIDIANA WEST SIDE STORY
YOJIMBO
Akira Kurosawa finally gets his fourth nomination, after coming up just short in 1957 and 1958 with Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress; that moves him into a tie for second with Wilder, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, and Frank Capra. Luis Buñuel and Alain Resnais get their third nominations each for Viridiana and Marienbad, respectively.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1960? Who should win the Moonlight for 1961? Join our community and weigh in!
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