1960s
Matt Wolf
Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in the early 1960s for keeps, Theodore Melfi's slice of a forgotten swath of history might have "Oscar upset" written across it – if La La Land at this point didn't look like such a lock. That the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There were signs of a collision as early as the second series. The event loomed larger in the third last year and last night, after an actual car crash, it finally happened: Endeavour became interchangeable with Midsomer Murders. How are the mighty fallen.Morse, investigating the disappearance of an academic in 1962, had doors slammed in his face while Morris Men practiced their menacing moves in the picturesque village of Bramford. The local yokels were preparing for the autumnal equinox (even though the trees were covered in green leaves) just as they were when the botanist, checking Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the last week of September 1973, Guy Darrell peaked at number 12 on the British single’s chart with the catchy blue-eyed soul pounder “I’ve Been Hurt” and performed on Top of the Pops. His was a grassroots-driven success. “I’ve Been Hurt” was popular on the northern soul scene and initial sales were to fans hearing the song in clubs as it packed dance floors rather than on the radio.Despite then-hot popsters David Essex, Sweet and Wizzard being lodged in the Top Ten when Darrell’s single was selling at its fastest, this was not a week when pop was looking forward. A reissue of David Bowie’ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “tensile strength” of materials. You can treat the Hadley short story as that sort of device in itself. Precision engineered and finely calibrated, it stress-tests not only marriages and affairs but memories, desires, even identities, with episodes of crisis and discovery that reveal each fault-line or fracture. The reader marvels at the almost scary exactitude – but relishes the steel-edged finesse. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“A First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases,” remarks Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Melania Trump, take note. Jackie, the first English-language film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain (Neruda, No), is set in the week following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, as Jackie moves out of the White House and before the Johnsons move in. In a disjointed, non-chronological way – the assassination scene keeps recurring – it’s framed through the lens of Jackie’s interview for Life magazine.The unnamed journalist (an unsympathetic Billy Crudup) is based on Theodore H Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hailing a lift in torrential rain one night from an early 2000s Dylan concert at Docklands Arena – that long-gone ghost of a room – I fell into conversation with a fellow passenger who apologetically turned to me, admitting in old-fashioned Received Pronunciation, to booing the man at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966. You could see it now, I suppose, as a pioneering form of no-platforming – a safe space for the acoustic set. She was very polite about it, and I doubt if I would be able to pick out her RP boos on the latest two-CD set in the Official Bootleg series, The Real Albert Hall Concert. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.Mose Allison’s music was integral to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven. The latter also starred Steve McQueen, with whom Vaughn Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ewan McGregor has been judged unworthy of adapting Philip Roth in the US. But his directorial debut is finely crafted, and powered by visceral emotion embodied in one of his best performances. As Seymour “Swede” Levov, he’s an All-Jewish-American hero, living the 1950s dream, till the 1960s bring it crashing down. His beloved daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning, pictured below right) is the agent of his destruction, in a one-sided generation war unusually seen from the straight-edged parents’ side. McGregor, here a kinder artist than Roth, cares about the father and daughter with a painful Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In case one thought that turning hit TV shows into movies was a 21st century phenomenon, here comes a restoration of The Small World of Sammy Lee to prove that film-makers were at it back in 1963.Writer-director Ken Hughes's noir drama started off as Sammy, a tense, one-hour, one-location television play made in 1958. Its small screen success allowed Hughes to hire the incomparable documentary photographer Wolf Suschitzky as his DP and cast musical star Anthony Newley for the feature film version. Newley plays Sammy, a small-time hustler in Soho, dodging the bookies' heavies who are chasing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Television is not a medium we much associate with any sense of the "sacred". It grapples with "momentous" frequently enough, in snatches of news tragically reported; it rings in, and out, the history that defines our lives. We may debate, equally, whether the small screen is replacing the big one as the bringer of what was once considered cinema art. But for that far most elusive thing, the miraculously elevated experience shared across a nation, and somehow revalidated by that breadth of audience – rarely, so rarely.But I cannot think of any better term than sacred to describe the 60 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser, of Twilight fame) and her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). With Mr Zander having been killed by a drunk driver, Alice and the girls are eking out a living with their fake spiritualist act, conning bereaved punters with bogus spirit visitations, sputtering candles and wobbling furniture. It's an Read more ...