Wild with today's eyes, it is not. Yet Rosemary's “very in” Vidal Sassoon #PixieCut was a shocking affair in 68. Director Roman #Polanski flew in Vidal Sassoon – the world's hottest hairdresser – all the way from London, to cut Mia Farrow's hair in a boxing-ring-turned-pressroom. All of a sudden, in her lunch break, Mia/Rosemary transformed from timid waif to women's lib.

“It's by Vidal Sassoon. It's very in.”

– Rosemary Woodhouse

Both the lady's movie husband Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) and real-world husband Frank Sinatra were incensed by the bold move. Of course, in Rosemary's Baby the haircut is Rosemary's attempt to make sense of the changing world around her. Moving to a new city, an unexpected pregnancy, all those lovely new neighbours to socialise with… a girl needs to feel in control!

“The Kola Loka is the law!”

– Limonádový Joe

John Hillcoat's deeply unpleasant debut is based on In the Belly of the Beast (1981), a collection of excerpts of letters between prisoner Jack Henry Abbott and author Norman Mailer. True to the book's format, Ghosts consists of disjointed vignettes of monologues, #CCTV footage, title cards, and prisoners' phone calls.

 

For the last 37 months, these filters inform the observer, the hypermodern #supermax Central Industrial Prison has been in permanent lockdown. The cast, a mix of professional actors and ex-cons, and the location, a clean factory-style hangar in the middle of the Australian desert, underscore the underlying raw brutality of the unfolding events.

 

“Officer, come here. I wanna spit in your fucking eye!”

– Maynard

The #industrial soundtrack is by Bad Seed Nick Cave (co-writer and starring as Maynard), Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld from when they were still closer to being birthday boys than morose crooners.

“It sounded interesting, at least while I kept out of the rain. But if it's a sermon, I'd sooner listen to the rain.”

– commoner

Shot on location in Greece, sponge diver Phaedra (Sophia Loren) makes a splash when she finds an ancient statue of a boy on a dolphin, rumoured to bring good luck to her town. Her attempts to sell it to the highest bidder makes not only the bronze but also her the object of desire of an honest archaeologist and an unscrupulous antiques dealer playboy.

“Our paths have crossed and re-crossed: in Dresden, Rotterdam, Florence – wherever the Nazis looted. Raphaels, Rembrandts, even down to a dreary little china pot, which belonged to Madame Pompadour… there was always Captain Jim Calder of the U.S. Army, restoring priceless objects to their rightful owners – a typical middle-class gesture.”

– Victor Parmalee

Boy on a dolphin is not only the title of this movie but also possibly a reference to #Arion, son of the inhabitants of Lesbos (would that make this movie a bit too wild for 1957?), or #Taras, son of Poseidon and Satyrion. According to Greek legend, both mythological characters were saved by #dolphins.

The one that got bombed by Strangelove.

“You're talking about a different kind of war.”

– General Stark

Both Lumet's Fail Safe and #Kubrick's #ColdWar comedy came out in 1964, right after the #CubaCrisis. The world was awash with the realisation that the bomb, The Bomb, wasn't merely proverbial flexing. And when crisis happens, there are two options. One is to laugh, the other is to grasp. Sadly for Lumet, and the world, his Fail Safe was released while everyone was still too busy chuckling.

A Walloon language professor and his French set designer fiancée are at an impasse. While his Flemish students vocally protest against more Walloon influence at their uni, the couple – who superficially speak the same #language, #French – struggles to find the right words. They meet, part ways, then find each other again on a train that at morning turns out to be standing still in the middle of nowhere. The man, now without her, disembarks and with two acquaintances who also were on that train tries to find out where he and she are.

 

André Delvaux's Un soir, un train is a masterpiece about finding the right language in a fractured world.

An American tourist visiting Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by volatile con King – a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous advances.

“I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!”

– King

The couple elopes to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control.

 

They are the damned.

A young woman jumps out of a window, leaving behind her husband, an #antiques dealer. Sitting in their bedroom with the body lying in state, the widower remembers her. In his memory, she is nameless, abstract, a state not a life..

 

Une femme douce is closely adapted from Fyodor #Dostoyevsky Кроткая [Krotkaya / A Gentle Creature] (1876).