THE BEST PICTURES OF I960

AMERICAN

THE APARTMENT. The sourly funniest U.S. comedy since 1959's Some Like It Hot--which also starred Jack Lemmon and was also directed by Billy Wilder.

COME BACK, AFRICA. Director Lionel Rogosin, who shot this picture secretly in South Africa, has produced an honest, impartial, heart-harrowing study of an average Negro's life in the black hole of Johannesburg.

ELMER GANTRY. Burt Lancaster, faultlessly directed by Richard Brooks, roars down the sawdust trail like hell on wheels in this trashy, flashy but grandly entertaining cinemadaptation of the classic Sinclair Lewis satire on that old-time religion.

SONS AND LOVERS. Director Jack Cardiff's translation of D. H. Lawrence's part novel, part memoir of his youth in a Midlands mining town sets the theater roaring with a proletarian rage to live.

Wendy Hiller and Dean Stockwell are excellent, but Trevor Howard covers himself with soot and glory.

SUNRISE AT CAMPOBELLO.

Dore Schary's film version of his Broadway success develops Franklin Roosevelt's ordeal by polio into a superior drama that is also a superb soap opera--and one of the year's shrewder pieces of political propaganda. Ralph Bellamy and Greer Garson make wonderful theater out of Franklin and Eleanor.

SPARTACUS. Director Stanley Kubrick and Scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, in adapting the tragedy of the heroic slave to Super-Technirama 70 and the various other disadvantages of a $12 million budget, have managed to achieve that happy contradiction in cinema terms, an intelligent spectacle.

WEDDINGS AND BABIES. An arresting attempt at "candid cinema," in which Director Morris Engel also tells an amusing, affecting story of a Greenwich Village photographer who doesn't want to marry his "model."

EXODUS. Director Otto Preminger and Scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo have reduced a fatty mess of prose by Leon Uris to a lean, keen saga that keeps the audience on seat's edge as ten name players and 45,000 extras pseudohistorically re-enact the founding of Israel.

FOREIGN

IKIRU. Japan's Akira Kurosawa has produced the year's most deeply moving film, the story of a pathetically ordinary man who begins to live only when he begins to die.

A LESSON IN LOVE. The gutsiest and funniest of Ingmar Bergman's battle reports on the war between the sexes. DREAMS. A second Bergman skirmish, almost as uproarious and rather more deeply ironic, in the same campaign. THE VIRGIN SPRING.Bergman's latest picture--a dark and moving miracle play that comes to a climax in a rape that is also an annunciation.

I'M ALL RIGHT, JACK. Peter Sellers is a caution as a tuppenny Hitler in this hilarious travesty on labor-management relations in the "farewell state."

HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR. Hiroshima rises again as a redeeming love in this dreadful, beautiful film by France's Alain Resnais.

THE WORLD OF APU. In this concluding section of a trilogy (Part One: Father Panchali; Part Two: Aparajito) by Satyajit Ray, contemporary India is born in suffering, and the film itself emerges as a modern Mahabharata, one of the most generously vital movies ever made.

GENERAL DELLA ROVERE. In the best work he has done since Paisan (1946), Italy's Roberto Rossellini tells the powerfully affecting story of a petty thief who finds his own salvation by living another man's life.

THE LOVE GAME. Philippe de Broca's bedspring farce, the first comedy turned up by the new wave of French cineastes, bounces along like the movies did when Rene Clair first made them.

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