Along with his excellent work with Losey were several average films in the ‘60s, always enriched by Bogarde’s performances: The High Bright Sun, set in British-occupied Cyprus, and the Bond spy spoof Hot Enough for June (both 1964). The decade would also see him support his friend Judy Garland in I Could Go On Singing (1963). He was excellent as the icy surgeon and ex-lover, but the film was more a showcase for Garland, greatly aided by his ‘mending’, or rewriting a good deal of the script to please a difficult Garland and to get the film completed and her performance in the can.

In 1968 he made the two films he went on record as hating the most: Sebastian and The Fixer, neither giving him the satisfaction he had felt from working with Losey and Clayton. David Greene’s Sebastian was another ‘60s atmospheric piece but from a different angle with Bogarde playing a mathematician in charge of codebreaking. ‘I was so unhappy and disenchanted that I kept my shirt on in one of the bed scenes,’ he recalled. (Castell, June 1974, 387) Greene’s hurrying of scenes during the filming dismayed Bogarde enough to comment on the director’s stopwatch approach - ‘...Everything done in what he calls “quick time.” Of course I can shorten a scene from one minute to five seconds, but it wouldn’t be the same scene, would it? In television, they don’t want screen time, they want scene time. We don’t make films that way in Europe any more. That probably is one of our greatest secrets . . . Now the best things that go on television are the old movies. They were never made with the premise that they had to be made in ten minutes.’ (Wiedenman, 56) Yet many filmgoers enjoyed the swinging atmosphere in Sebastian, its Jerry Goldsmith score, and watching Bogarde, Gielgud and Susannah York manoeuvre its various plot twists.