These films were released in 1966

The Blue Max

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★★★★★[/types]]

The dazzling flying sequences in this movie are worth the price of admission all by themselves. This is a good thing because the story is nothing to write home about. Much like its contemporaries, Grand Prix and The Battle of Britain, The Blue Max presents a somewhat shallow, sudsy story set against a beautifully photographed backdrop of aerial combat in World War I. You’ll remember this movie for those scenes (and scenes of Ursula Andress barely wearing a towel) long after you’ve forgotten what the whole thing was all about.

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The Battle of Algiers

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★★★★★[/types]]

In late August of 2003, there was a special screening of this film at the Pentagon, a few months after President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The Department of Defense was not shy about their belief that the film offered valuable and necessary insight into the problems of fighting an insurgency in the Islamic world. In short, the American military had no illusions that the fight in Iraq was far from over, even if the politicians were pretending otherwise. If you needed any other evidence that this forty-year-old film was still uncommonly relevant and current, note the film was also banned by the French for five years after its release. Clearly, the French didn’t like to be reminded of past transgressions that far outstrip anything that U.S. forces in Iraq have been accused of.

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Grand Prix

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★★★★★[/types]]

Back in the 1960s, there was a particular genre of movies comprised of big budget epics with large international casts. Their sudsy stories usually centered on some larger-than-life subject. Another prime example would Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain. This film shares a lot of DNA with the later war epic. Both films work best when focusing more on the machines than the people inside them. When Grand Prix is in its element, using director John Frankenheimer’s car mounted cameras on the real circuits of the Formula One racing season, the film is exciting and visually spectacular. When the characters get out of their cars, strip off their racing suits and start talking to each other, the film runs into trouble.

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Torn Curtain

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★★★★★[/types]]

By 1966, Alfred Hitchcock had been working in film for 40 years and he was most certainly one of the few filmmakers, maybe the only one, still working regularly whose career stretched back to the silent era. Unfortunately, the director’s stubborn adherence to his old school ways, particularly his aversion to filming on location, had begun to catch up with him.

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The Sand Pebbles

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★★★★★[/types]]

Day seven of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

In 1966, the Vietnam war was just beginning in earnest and Robert Wise made The Sand Pebbles, an epic about another American intervention in Asia forty years earlier. After watching the film, it’s hard to judge whether the film was anti-Vietnam or just about an American gunboat in China in 1926, which is to its credit. Had Wise chosen to stack the deck politically, it would have weakened what was already a powerful story.

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The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!

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★★★★★[/types]]

Those of us who grew up during the Cold War and remember it as a time of very real suspicion and fear probably look fondly upon this lightweight but not unsophisticated farce. It’s message that “Russians are people, too” probably seems a little simplistic to those too young to remember the times in which it takes place, but in its day, the concept was sufficiently radical to make an impact in the box office. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most popular American films behind the Iron Curtain.

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