Midnight Lace (1960)

Filled with Hitchcock alumni - Doris Day from The Man Who Knew Too Much and John Williams from Dial M For Murder, but alongside Rex Harrison, not James Stewart or Cary Grant - and about an American woman (Day), newly married and in London, in distress after she starts being stalked by a disembodied voice - first in a pea soup London fog, atmospherically, and then over a series of phone calls - this thriller directed by David Miller really feels like a classic Hitchcock: London, too, with its double deckers, phone boxes, opera performances, and pubs, and while thriller fans will know where it's heading, there are a few well-handled surprises in the end.

★★★★☆

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Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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Classe Tous Risque (1960)

A criminal (Lino Ventura) on the run with his wife and two young boys in tow enacts a plan with a friend to steal some money and escape to a quiet family life in Paris, but things go horribly wrong and when the man calls upon his old mobster trenchcoat fraternity for help, he discovers their loyalties have shifted.

★★★★☆

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The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

The joys of The Little Shop of Horrors, which as a musical continues to lure to theatres crowds that raucously sing along and guffaw, elude me and watching this 1960 movie which started it all - not a musical but a camp scifi with a wet sense of humour and a cult following, made on a budget of $30,000 - I am nonethewiser, mystified as to why people so enjoy the story of a plant named Audrey Two which has an insatiable appetite for human blood..

★★☆☆☆

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Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) (1960)

Despite one major and several minor deviations from the source material that will nag at devotees of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, this is a top-class French thriller with a more sociopathic, more conniving version of the impulsive Tom Ripley of the book and Anthony Minghella movie, but he is still exceeding lucky as he narrowly avoids detection in a murder investigation conducted across the exquisitely, luxuriously photographed sun-bleached coastal regions of Italy.

★★★★★

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Psycho (1960)

A woman steals from her boss, goes on the run, and ends up in a chilling encounter with a psychopath at the Bates Motel in this Hitchcock thriller that really did introduce "a new and altogether different screen excitement" to cinema.

★★★★★

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Peeping Tom (1960)

Psycho made a mystery of its killer's identity and motives whereas this technicolour predecessor reveals alot more much earlier on, leaving just one detail as a surprise for the film's climax, but the reveal is hardly worth it: the pace is plodding and the killer such an obvious weirdo from the start surrounded by so much garishness (pornography in the 60s and its purveyors) that today this serial killer thriller is not shocking nor suspenseful, just very hard to like. 

★★☆☆☆

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