Year Eight of Scarecrow Academy undertakes "The Sixties on Film," a yearlong look at how the 1960s erupted across the world of movies. Part One is our Spring semester, a ten-week online discussion series built around some of the key titles from that wild and boundary-breaking decade.
Discussions are led by National Society of Film Critics member Robert Horton, author of the Seasoned Ticket column at the Scarecrow blog and Scarecrow's "Programmer-Historian in Residence." The Zoom sessions are free and open to all; there's no homework, but we encourage you to watch that week's movie, and please register online in advance. We meet on Saturdays at 2pm Pacific Time, beginning March 28, 2026.
March 28
THE APARTMENT (Billy WIlder, 1960)
By 1960 Hollywood had perfected classical storytelling, as that year's Best Picture Oscar winner proves. The Sixties were about to take it all apart. Wilder's comedy, about a corporate climber (Jack Lemmon) learning that the price of success includes loaning out his flat for his boss's extramarital trysts, is a wry snapshot of a culture on the cusp of change.
April 4
PSYCHO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Movies would never be the same after Hitchcock's rule-breaking suspense film, which begins with a robbery and ends in a fetid swamp behind a motel on the old highway. The movie not only invaded the culture (Anthony Perkins was permanently typecast), it told moviegoers that the rules no longer applied.
April 11
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (Stanley Kubrick, 1964).
Striking out to make a thriller about an inadvertent nuclear emergency, Kubrick found that the subject matter demanded an absurdist approach. The result—also a showcase for the genius of Peter Sellers—is one of the funniest movies ever, even if the laughter sometimes sticks in the throat.
April 18
CONTEMPT (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
With Breathless in 1960, Godard galvanized the French New Wave and re-wrote film language. Contempt is arguably his greatest work, in which a marriage (embodied by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli) collapses during a movie production.
April 25
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (Richard Lester, 1964)
The New Wave of film spread to the UK, where an ingenious American director collided with the joyous phenomenon of a new pop group and—to the delight and surprise of critics and audiences—created gold. Cinema: Meet The Beatles.
MAY 2
PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
The Swedish maestro was already an established arthouse star when he pushed himself into even more astonishing territory with this study of two women (Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson) sorting through issues on an isolated island.
May 9
BONNIE AND CLYDE (Arthur Penn, 1967)
This startling mix of humor, violence, and sex became an overnight conversation piece and a death blow to whatever remained of Hollywood's ancient Production Code. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway play the 1930s crime couple; as the poster put it, "They're young…they're in love…and they kill people."
May 16
BLOW-UP (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
It was an era when an enigmatic puzzle that nobody understood could turn into a zeitgeist hit … like this movie, a London-based story of a trendy photographer (who might have captured a murder through his unreliable lens) from Italy's leading poet of alienation.
May 23
PLANET OF THE APES (1969, Franklin Schaffner)
At a time like 1968, science fiction was ripe for barely-disguised allegories about race, class, and the cynicism of a new era. This is one of the most enjoyable, with astronaut Charlton Heston marooned among the primates.
May 30
BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (1969, Paul Mazursky)
The times were a-changin', all right, and Mazursky's affectionate satire has middle-class seekers floundering toward the new freedoms—an American sex comedy with European-style storytelling.
