Home › Best noir of the 1960s.
The 1960s were a transitional decade for noir. Classic Hollywood film noir, which had flourished from the early 1940s through the late 1950s, was exhausted as a form — the Production Code was weakening, the studio system was collapsing, and American audiences were changing. At the same time, something new was arriving from France, from Italy, from the European art cinema that would reconfigure what crime films could do. The essential 1960s noirs are the films that survived the transition.
Alain Delon as Jef Costello, a hitman living in a near-empty Paris apartment with a caged bird. He operates according to an absolute private code. He is hired to kill a nightclub owner. He is seen at the scene. The subsequent cat-and-mouse between Costello and the police is conducted in near-silence. Melville stripped the crime film to its barest elements and produced something close to pure cinema.
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Hitchcock kills his protagonist in the first act and spends the rest of the film in the aftermath of that murder. Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who steals money and ends up at the Bates Motel. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. The shower scene. The film that ended classical Hollywood filmmaking as a set of conventions about what movies could do.
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Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, a man who spent eight years in prison for rape and has come back to destroy the lawyer he blames for his conviction. Gregory Peck as the lawyer. Mitchum's Cady is one of the great screen villains — charming, patient, completely certain of his ultimate victory. The remake is louder. This one is meaner.
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The film that announced the end of classical Hollywood filmmaking. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Depression-era bank robbers. Arthur Penn and cinematographer Burnett Guffey shot the violence in a way that had never been seen in American cinema — the blood, the bodies, the final ambush. The film that made the New Hollywood possible.
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Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in the first and best adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. René Clément shot it on the Mediterranean coast and Delon is extraordinary — charming, cold, completely without conscience. The ending is different from the novel and works brilliantly on its own terms.
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See the Spy Noir page. Frank Sinatra. Brainwashing. Angela Lansbury as the mother of all villains.
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Le Samourai (1967), Psycho (1960), Cape Fear (1962), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Purple Noon (1960) are the essential 1960s crime films.
Classic Hollywood film noir declined in the late 1950s but the genre continued in different forms through the 1960s, particularly in European cinema. Le Samourai (1967) is one of the most important noirs of the decade.