Psycho
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1960
The film that invented modern horror: Hitchcock broke an unspoken rule about how a story is meant to behave, and every thriller since has been working in the space he opened.
★ 9.5
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1960
Showing 84 works across all media from 1960
Stand By Me
1960
That four-note bassline, a gospel hymn turned into a promise, and one of the warmest vocals ever recorded.
★ 9.4
La Dolce Vita
Directed by Federico Fellini
1960 · Italy
It put the word paparazzi into every language on earth: Fellini drifts through seven Roman nights of parties and beautiful exhaustion, and the fountain at dawn became permanent.
★ 8.8
The Apartment
Directed by Billy Wilder
1960
A comedy that breaks your heart and stays funny while doing it: Wilder took the sourest possible subject, a man lending his bed to his bosses, and made it warm.
★ 8.8
To Kill a Mockingbird
1960 · 376 pages
Scout Finch's father, a lawyer in a small Alabama town, defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman. The trial reaches you through a child who understands less than you do.
★ 8.6
Giant Steps
1960
The title track modulates through three keys so fast that the pianist, Tommy Flanagan, audibly struggles through his solo on the finished take.
★ 8.6
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1960 · France
Modern film editing starts here, and partly by accident: Godard shortened an overlong picture by cutting inside his own shots, and the jump cut has been legal ever since.
★ 8.3
Georgia on My Mind
1960 · From The Genius Hits the Road
Hoagy Carmichael's 1930 tune, remade as Charles's first Billboard number one and adopted as Georgia's state song in 1979.
★ 8.2
Walking Man I
1960 · Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Everything is scraped off the bronze except forward motion. One cast briefly held the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold.
★ 8.1
Will You Love Me Tomorrow (The Shirelles)
1960
King wrote the melody and the string arrangement, and a girl group topped the Hot 100 for the first time.
★ 8.0
At Last
1960 · From At Last!
Riley Hampton's strings behind a 1941 film tune James took over, and the Library of Congress preserved it.
★ 7.8
Giant Steps
1960 · From Giant Steps
Recorded May 5, 1959, with the band reading it cold, and those third-related key changes remain jazz's hardest exam.
★ 7.8
L'Avventura
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
1960 · Italy
It was booed off the screen at Cannes and won a prize at the same festival: Antonioni made drift and boredom into subjects, and cinema has been arguing since.
★ 7.6
Wonderful WorldSam Cooke
Wonderful World
1960 · From The Wonderful World of Sam Cooke
Cooke cut it at his last Keen session and credited the writing to his wife's maiden name.
★ 7.6
Only the Lonely
1960
Orbison meant it for Elvis; the Everly Brothers told him to keep it, and Nashville's A-Team built the ache.
★ 7.5
Spoonful
1960 · From Howlin' Wolf
A Willie Dixon lyric about craving, drawn loosely from a 1929 Charley Patton side, and Wolf looming over one chord.
★ 7.2
Save the Last Dance for Me
1960
Pomus, who had polio, wrote the lyric on the back of his own wedding invitation, remembering his bride dancing.
★ 6.9
Rabbit, Run
1960 · 325 pages
Harry Angstrom peaked at eighteen on a basketball court and now demonstrates kitchen gadgets. He leaves his pregnant wife and drives south. Updike gave the American suburb prose nobody thought it deserved.
★ 6.8
Shop Around
1960
Motown's first million-seller, recut at three in the morning with Gordy at the piano chasing a poppier hit.
★ 6.8
The Twist
1960
A Hank Ballard B-side first, then American Bandstand, then number one for Checker in 1960 and again in 1962.
★ 6.8
Money (That's What I Want)
1960
Motown's first hit, cut at Hitsville in 1959, with a bluesy piano vamp and a writing credit long disputed.
★ 6.7
The Burden of Southern History
1960 · 304 pages
Americans tell themselves a story of innocence, abundance, and invincibility. The South knew defeat, poverty, and the guilt of slavery, and Woodward offers that history as the corrective a superpower needs.
★ 6.7
The Magnificent Seven
Directed by John Sturges
1960
Kurosawa liked this remake of his own film enough to send Sturges a ceremonial sword: Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, with Elmer Bernstein's theme doing half the work.
★ 6.6
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
1960 · 1249 pages
Shirer broadcast from Berlin as the rallies filled, then worked through captured German files and Nuremberg testimony to tell the story from beer hall to bunker. A million American households bought it.
★ 6.5
Crowds and Power
1960 · 495 pages
Canetti anatomizes the crowd as a natural force, then locates power in the survivor who stands alive among the dead. Every command, he argues, leaves a sting in whoever obeys it.
★ 6.5
Promise at Dawn
1960 · 337 pages
Gary's mother told everyone in Vilna that her son would become a French diplomat, a war hero, and a great writer. He became all three, and the debt nearly crushed him.
★ 6.4
Stolen Moments
1960
A sixteen-bar theme, twelve-bar minor blues solos, and Dolphy, Hubbard and Bill Evans in Van Gelder's room.
★ 6.4
Moanin'
1960 · From Blues & Roots
Pepper Adams' extended baritone solo, and a whole blues album Mingus cut in one February 1959 session.
★ 6.4
Sketches of Spain
1960
Gil Evans built it around a Spanish guitar concerto, scoring the solo part for trumpet. It took months and nearly broke both of them.
★ 6.4
Cathy's Clown
1960
Cut live in one take with the brothers sharing a microphone, the drums looped on tape to double them.
★ 6.3
Spartacus
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1960
Kirk Douglas helped break the blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo's real name on this film: a slave revolt against Rome staged at enormous scale, with Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton circling the politics.
★ 6.1
This Magic Moment
1960
Pomus and Shuman wrote it, Leiber and Stoller wrapped it in strings, and Ben E. King made a kiss enormous.
★ 6.1
Spanish Harlem
1960
Cut at the October 1960 session that also produced Stand by Me, with Stoller's marimba triplets carrying everything.
★ 5.8
Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage)
Directed by Georges Franju
1960 · France
Viewers fainted at its first festival screenings and horror has been quietly borrowing from it ever since: a surgeon keeps trying to give his daughter a face, and her mask is unforgettable.
★ 5.8
Butcher's Crossing
1960 · 274 pages
Full of Emerson, a Harvard student goes west and finances a buffalo hunt into a hidden Colorado valley. The killing lasts weeks, the winter shuts them in, and nature stops being a consolation.
★ 5.8
The Four Loves
1960 · 180 pages
To love at all is to be vulnerable, Lewis writes, then sorts the risk into affection, friendship, eros and charity. Each natural love turns demonic the moment it is made into a god.
★ 5.6
Green Eggs and Ham
1960 · 62 pages
Sam-I-Am will not stop offering: not in a box, not with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain. Fifty words is all Seuss used, and the badgering turns into song.
★ 5.2
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu · 1960
Butcher's Crossing · 1960