Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

"In this tidy, taut, and tangy study, Dixon . . . covers the weird and wacky sick films of the period–from director Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960) to Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope (1969)–and he also pops across the pond to celebrate the cheerful nihilism of the peculiar British works of Richard Lester and Tony Richardson. Dixon [also] devotes chapters to violence in the silent cinema and the 1930s B Westerns of D. Ross Lederman; the driven films of Mexico's prolific 'phantom' filmmaker Juan Orol; director Richard Sarafian's existential road movie Vanishing Point (1971); the 'invisible cinema' of the neglected Marcel Hanoun; and the romantic fatalism of French auteur Max Ophüls . . . lucid and compelling." - Choice