The films that shaped an icon: Brian De Palma’s favourite movies of the 1960s
It’s been a long time since he made anything comparable to his heyday, but no late-stage downturn will ever be able to detract from the fact Brian De Palma was one of his generation’s standout filmmakers.
With 29 features to his name spanning more than half a century, it was unlikely he could maintain the level of quality that defined the hottest streak of his career. During this period, he directed a series of wildly disparate films that all achieved success and secured classic status within a little over a decade.
Between 1976 and 1987, De Palma helmed supernatural horror Carrie, psychological thriller Dressed to Kill, noir-infused mystery Blow Out, gangster favourite Scarface, the erotically-charged Body Double, and The Untouchables, an incredible run that matched its quantity with quality.
De Palma has never been one to let himself be pigeonholed by any particular genre, and that desire to continue broadening his horizons dates back to the films that initially inspired him. After all, he listed Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and William Castle’s Homicidal among his favourites of the 1960s, and that influence can be felt across several of his own efforts, including Carrie, Obsession, and The Fury.
Eroticism, explorations of the human psyche, and bursts of jarring on-screen violence quickly became three of De Palma’s trademarks, too, so it makes complete sense that he’d be so enamoured by a number of movies that tick at least one very similar box if not several of them.
Samuel Fuller’s neo-noir drama The Naked Kiss, Richard Brooks’ Truman Capote adaptation In Cold Blood, Michelangelo Antonioni’s unnerving Blow-Up, and Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low all deal in character dynamics, themes, and motifs that would end up becoming regular fixtures of De Palma’s work, whether it was the duality of its protagonists, a slowly unravelling central mystery, or melodrama mixing liberally with sensationalism.
The historical epic is something De Palma has never tried his hand at, though, but it would be madness if any auteur of his era didn’t name Lawrence of Arabia as an influence, given the way David Lean’s sumptuous epic weaponized a sense of scope and scale as no other movie had before.
Some directors love watching films that don’t end up impacting their own oeuvre at all, but based on the 1960s classics that made De Palma’s list of all-timers, he clearly wasn’t among them.
Brian De Palma’s favourite movies of the 1960s:
- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
- Homicidal (William Castle, 1961)
- Two Rode Together (John Ford, 1961)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
- Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
- The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)
- Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
- Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
- David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1967)
- In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967)
- The Secret Cinema (Paul Bartel, 1968)
- Salesman (Albert Maysles, 1969)
- The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969)
