Ranking Best Directors, 1960s

The studio system collapse at the dawn of the decade allowed more directors of foreign films (a record) and auteurs like Kubrick to get nominations. I can’t endorse 2001: A Space Odyssey except to acknowledge its influence and impact. I just wasn’t there, and it strikes me as inert as sci-fi and bunk as myth.

The Hague

Claude Lelouche – A Man and a Woman
Robert Wise – The Sound of Music

Meh

Stanley Kramer – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Otto Preminger – The Cardinal
Stanley Kubrick – 2001: A Space Odyssey
Robert Mulligan – To Kill a Mockingbird
William Wyler – The Collector
Tony Richardson – Tom Jones
Robert Stevenson – Mary Poppins
John Schlesinger – Darling
George Roy Hill – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Michael Cacoyannis – Zorba the Greek
Elia Kazan – America America
George Cukor – My Fair Lady
Anthony Harvey – The Lion in Winter

Sound, Solid Entertainments

Mike Nichols – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Norman Jewison – In the Heat of the Night
Robert Rossen – The Hustler
Richard Brooks – In Cold Blood
Fred Zinnemann – A Man for All Seasons
David Lean – Dr. Zhivago
Arthur Penn – The Miracle Worker
Pietro Germi – Divorce Italian Style
Sydney Pollack – They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins – West Side Story
Federico Fellini – La Dolce Vita
Fred Zinnemann – The Sundowners
Arthur Penn – Alice’s Restaurant

Good to Great

Costa-Gavras – Z
Arthur Penn – Bonnie and Clyde
Billy Wilder – The Apartment
Gillo Pontecorvo – The Battle of Algiers
Stanley Kubrick – Dr. Strangelove
Mike Nichols – The Graduate
Alfred Hitchcock – Psycho
John Schlesinger – Midnight Cowboy
David Lean – Lawrence of Arabia
Martin Ritt – Hud
Federico Fellini – 8½
Michelangelo Antonioni – Blowup

The Jury’s Out

Hiroshi Teshigahara – Woman in the Dunes
Jules Dassin – Never on Sunday