The best bad movies of the 1960s, according to the Coen brothers: “A very weird, wooden aesthetic”
Everyone has at least a couple of objectively terrible movies that they’ll defend to their dying breath, and just because they’ve made some of the most acclaimed pictures of the last 40 years, it doesn’t mean that the Coen brothers are any different.
Some people might operate under the belief that a filmmaker will exclusively watch things that reflect their onscreen sensibilities, which is fair enough. Then again, the fact that Christopher Nolan adores MacGruber and is obsessed with Fast & Furious quickly blows a hole right through that theory.
Since Joel and Ethan have largely specialised in offbeat, eccentric, and idiosyncratic genre fare that weaves between drama, comedy, farce, thriller, and many more genres at the drop of a hat, it wouldn’t be the wildest guess in the world to assume that’s what they grew up watching as a pair of young, inexperienced, and aspiring auteurs in rural Minnesota, but they didn’t.
Instead, they pretty much watched anything they could lay their eyes on, which sent them down several strange rabbit holes. Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur, two of the most prominent epics of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, didn’t grab their attention, with the Coens admitting that they could barely sit through either.
Meanwhile, the 1965 sex comedy Boeing Boeing, starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, which they acknowledged was a bad movie by any measurable metric, became so integral to their shared cinematic upbringing that they called it both “the formative movie” of their lives and the one film they’d happily watch forever, which makes sense for the Coens, since it doesn’t really make sense at all.
“A movie like Boeing Boeing was big with us,” Joel confirmed, but it was far from alone. The four-time Academy Award winners would also rattle off a few other 1960s flicks that remain seared into their collective consciousness, and while a couple of them aren’t awful in the strictest terms, lumping them in with Boeing Boeing says a lot about how the siblings remember them.
“We were into movies like That Touch of Mink, A Global Affair, Bob Hope movies, Jerry Lewis movies, anything with Tony Curtis, Pillow Talk,” Joel continued. “We tried to see everything with Doris Day. Those were important movies for us. I saw Pillow Talk again recently. It’s incredibly surreal.”
Chiming in, Ethan described those movies as having “a very weird, wooden aesthetic that nobody’s interested in anymore,” before adding The Chapman Report to the collection because it’s “great that way, too.” While it may not sound like they’re being disparaging, let’s not forget that the Coens had previously described that very era as the “shittiest” in the history of mainstream Hollywood.
Pillow Talk and That Touch of Mink are arguably the best of the bunch, and while they each have their own merits, and Joel and Ethan aren’t trying to deflect how instrumental they were in getting them engaged with cinema, it’s obvious that they don’t hold any of them on an especially high pedestal beyond that.
