Psychobabble’s Favorite Year at the Movies: 1968!

A somewhat recent trend in cinema studies finds writers naming their choice for the best year in movies and penning full-length arguments to back up their picks. There have been a couple of books arguing in favor of the year of The Wizard of Oz  (yay!) and Gone with the Wind (gag!). I have not read Charles F. Adams’s 1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year or Thomas S. Hischak’s 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year, though I have read and reviewed Brian Rafferty’s Best. Movie. Year.Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen and Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan’s Cinema ’62. I enjoyed both of those books very much even though I do not share the respective writers’ opinions that 1999 or 1962 are cinema’s best years. They did get me thinking about my personal choice, though, and let’s be honest, all of these books are nothing if not expressions of their writers’ personal tastes. I’ve settled on 1968.

Why ’68? In short, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Producers, Romeo and Juliet, and several others that a lot of people regularly rank among the best movies ever made. However, I believe any year deserving of the title of “Cinema’s Best” needs to offer more than a bunch of really great movies. The movies need to have changed the way we watch movies. They need to signify leaps forward in the evolution of cinema like a bunch of celluloid monoliths. 1968 delivers on that. It is a year in which almost all of its most interesting films shunned traditional storytelling, editing, performance, cinematography, and subject matter.

Major ground was broken in African-American and LGBTQ cinema. A cash-in cartoon arrived with eclectic pop-art animation and some of the best music of the decade. A camp superhero parody arrived with wild color, flashes of unexpected animation, and one of the weirdest endings of the decade. An epic sci-fi special effects extravaganza also delivered a hell of a weird ending—as well as a weird beginning and middle. A vehicle for the decade’s biggest rock star was so weird it was withheld from release for two years. Plenty of other movies picked up the Rock & Roll slack though. 

In 1968, zombies became mindless flesh-eaters, the decade’s most derided bubblegum band became avant gardists, and Nazis became hilarious. So grab yourself some chocolate mouse and a tab of acid and brace yourself for the ultimate trip: Psychobabble’s Favorite Year at the Movies: 1968!

1. Drama ’68

Drama is storytelling at its most essential. It requires no laughs, no scares, no songs, no special effects. Yet the dramatists of 1968 were not happy to just tell well-plotted tales with compelling characters. Lindsay Anderson was not satisfied merely giving viewers a naturalistic peek into the daily toils of students at a traditional British public school. He mixed up If… with both color and B&W film (an approach that began as a time saving measure), ladled in enough satiric humor and fantasy sequences to blur genres, and ended it all with a shocking, revolutionary climax that would never, ever fly today. With its agit-prop violence, countercultural ethos, and sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality, If… earned an X certificate.

That was better treatment than Donald Cammel and Nicholas Roeg’s identity-bending Performance received. This feature-length argument that Rock stars are even more decadent than gangsters was considered so shocking that its queasy soundtrack, violence, and sex allegedly made the wife of a Warner Bros’ exec barf during a test screening. Those who did not regurgitate were largely baffled by the film’s lysergic editing or discomforted by its orgy sequences and an incredible proto-music video for star Mick Jagger’s “Memo from Turner” in which tough-guy gangsters strip to their skivvies and snuggle. Consequently, the film’s release was delayed until 1970. Strangely, Performance was not the only impressive Jagger vehicle of 1968 to languish on the shelf for years.

Performance and If… are special because they both pushed dramatic storytelling into uncharted and daring territory. The Story of a Three-Day Pass did too, but it also paid explicit tribute to cinema’s recent past, working as one of the first examples of retro, self-aware filmmaking. With his first feature, Melvin Van Peebles paid explicit tribute to the French New Wave of the late fifties and early sixties with its moody B&W cinematography, Parisian setting, socio-political focus, and visual experiments. Yet The Story of a Three-Day Pass is also something totally new: a major feature made by an African American filmmaker. The acting is sometimes a tad amateurish, but that actually adds to the realism that butts up against the film’s fantasy sequences and clever recurring device in which soldier Turner’s self-doubts come to life via his own abusive mirror reflection.

2. Comedy ’68

Satirical dramas such as If… and The Story of a Three-Day Pass could almost as easily fit in the comedy drawer. There’s nothing serious about The Producers, though it deals with the most serious topic of any film from 1968. In an age of stuff like Jojo Rabbit, it’s easy to forget that Nazis were not always acceptable comedy material. To be fair, Mel Brooks did not really break this particular ground since Charlie Chaplin used laughs to knock Hitler off his pedestal way back in 1940 with The Great Dictator. However, that film was not as audaciously tasteless as The Producers, in which a ne’er-do-well theatrical producer convinces a meek accountant to join him in bilking little old ladies by getting them to invest in a musical doomed to fail: Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolph and Eva at Berchtesgaden. Perhaps no previous mainstream, hit movie took tastelessness to the breaking point as The Producers did. Perhaps no comedy had ever been so unrelentingly funny either. My favorite bit: “Churchill! With his cigars and his brandy and his rotten paintings. Rotten! Now, Hitler. There was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon. Two coats!”

3. Shakespeare ’68

Although the controlling theme of 1968 was revolution, the year was not devoid of tradition, and nothing is more traditional than Shakespeare. The year produced two important adaptations, though both still managed to offer something new. The best is Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which was unusual in its use of actual teenagers to play the teenaged star-crossed lovers. Clever slight-of-hand editing and trimming covered up the young leads’ limitations while support from more experienced actors—most notably the marvelous Pat Heywood —brought the picture to life as assuredly as its lush costumes, settings, and music did. The tragic climax is a bit perfunctory, but Romeo and Juliet is one of the very best and most moving Shakespearean adaptations ever made.

Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is almost the anti-Romeo and Juliet, and not just because it contrasts Shakespeare’s most heartbreaking tragedy with what may be his silliest comedy. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as lo-fi as Romeo and Juliet is slick, as distinctively ’68 as Romeo and Juliet is timeless. It looks like Hall shot the film on the fly around some country estate and spent most of the budget on green body paint for the fairies and a crappy donkey mask for Bottom. A lackadaisical approach to period detail allows Diana Rigg to romp through the picture in go-go boots. But all of that accounts for the refreshing charm of the rare Shakespeare adaptation willing to shrug off reverence and have a blast. Plus its cast—Rigg as Helena, Helen Mirren as Hermia, fig-leafed Judi Dench as Titania, tongue-wagging Ian Holm as Puck, David Warner as Lysander, Darth Vader as Quince—is a gas. The films’ only real problems are the disposable play-within-a-play that drags it beyond its natural stopping point and the suspension of disbelief required to accept that go-go-booted Diana Rigg is ugly as a bear.

4. Horror ’68

Okay, kids. Let’s not forget where we are. All these dramas and Shakespeares are fine for the Film 101 professors, but this is Psychobabble, a home for Groovy Ghouls and Kooky Cultists. Our bread and butter is the horror flick, and 1968 had no shortage of audacious ones, several of which rewrote what we thought we knew about ghouls and kooks. 1968 was the year that something as mundane as learning your ABC’s could become grist for the nightmare mill as David Lynch made his first proper movie with his unsettling and resourceful four-minute short The Alphabet. Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies may have given the undead a fresh buffing in 1966, but it was 1968’s Night of the Living Dead that solidified the concept of zombies as swarming, mindless, flesh eaters rather than voodoo products. It was also the rare 1968 film to really reflect the year’s violence and turbulence as George Romero shot Night of the Living Dead to look like nightly news footage from Vietnam. The casting of Duane Jones in the lead role both thumbed its nose at notions of what African-American actors could do in film and reflected the time’s racial realities with a shock ending that would play totally differently with a white actor.  

Even more shockingly realistic is Peter Bogdonovich’s debut film, Targets, which creates a very explicit contrast between the charmingly harmless monsters of old that star Boris Karloff once portrayed and a new breed of complex monster like the disturbed Vietnam vet who goes on the kind of random shooting spree we see all too often today. Another well-traveled bogeyman got a chance to explore real-life horror as Vincent Price toned down his usual shtick to portray historical monster and “witch” persecutor Matthew Hopkins in Michael Reeves’s unflinchingly violent and grim Witchfinder General (Lon Chaney, Jr., was also afforded a change of pace when Jack Hill’s deliciously transgressive 1964 production Spider Baby was finally released in ’68).

Witchfinder General was quite a change from the usual Poe adaptations Price starred in for Roger Corman. So was Histoires Extraordinaires, a Poe portmanteau very different from Corman’s Tales of Terror. Roger Vadim, Louise Malle, and Federico Fellini explore lesser-known Poe titles with heightened sex and sadism, bridging the innate nastiness of Poe’s work with the loosening standards of contemporary cinema. A more legitimately intense bridge is Kaneto Shindo’s eerie and beautiful Kuroneko, which is a traditional Samurai tale on the surface but its story of the human price of war could easily have been updated to 1968 Vietnam. It also may be the only film of the year to consider how war affects women. It’s certainly the only film of the year to feature cat vampires.

The best horror movie of 1968 also took the woman’s POV despite being made by the depraved Roman Polanski. But let’s not pretend Rosemary’s Baby is all Polanski’s achievement. Its script was faithfully based on Ira Levin’s film-like novel. The cast is magnificent with Mia Farrow striking the perfect balance between frail paranoia and powerful determination, John Cassavetes as her unctuous and duplicitous husband, and best of all, Ruth Gordon as cinema’s most adorable Satanist. With its pungent horror, expertly sustained tension, superb acting, disorienting editing, sly comedy, and utter nowness, Rosemary’s Baby embodies much of what made the films of 1968 so outstanding…

5. Sci-Fi ’68

…yet none of the year’s films is as great as 2001:  A Space Odyssey. With this one, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke truly brought science fiction into the present. A genre once associated with laser pistol-wielding Martians and paper-plate UFOs suddenly became intellectual, seemingly impenetrable (though both Kubrick and Clarke were pretty up front about what it all meant), and utterly sublime. No science-fiction movie before it and few since have had special effects as convincing as those of 2001. The film is less like a movie about space and more like an immersive 142-minute trip to the stars. It is also a grand exploration of intellectual evolution and a very prescient comment on the dangerous powers of a computerized society.

In light of 2001’s apes and spaceships, The Planet of the Apes may seem like a B-movie. Yet underneath its more traditional sci-fi action it is also intellectually curious, exploring several of the same ideas as 2001 with more of a matinee flare. It too considers a world without a traditional god and explores evolution and the dangers of technology. The Planet of the Apes is also immense fun and packs what is probably cinema’s most legendary twist…although anyone familiar with the work of co-screenwriter Rod Serling might have guessed that it was Earth all along well before Bright Eyes trots up to the Statue of Liberty.

6. Musicals ’68

Primates of a different sort could also be seen cavorting in the year’s most unlikely movie. By the end of 1968, 1967’s top pop stars were no longer selling as many records as they did a year earlier and were no longer on TV. November of 1968 was not the right time to release a Monkees movie. Really, there probably was no right time to release a movie in which Micky, Mike, Davy, and Peter get stuck in a trench in Vietnam, Victor Mature’s hair, a boxing ring with Sonny Liston, and a big black box representing their own confining status as bubblegum stars. The most avant garde mainstream movie of 1968, Head confounded teeny boppers, repulsed critics, allegedly spent a mere weekend in theaters, and essentially ended the Monkees’ career. In the years to come, Bob Rafelson’s film would be regarded as truly revolutionary and bolstered with great songs. The Monkees would too.

Unlike The Monkees, The Beatles always had the critics on their side (despite a little hiccup in the relationship when they made Magical Mystery Tour). That’s because The Beatles picked their projects carefully. They were more than a little wary of the idea of being depicted in a cartoon, but the desire to fulfill their big-screen obligations prompted them to green-light Yellow Submarine. Unfortunately, a movie to which they didn’t even lend their speaking voices failed to satisfy United Artists. Fortunately, the resulting film met The Beatles’ usual high standards for quality and innovation. No animated movie looked like it. Yellow Submarine is a true pop-art cartoon. One moment it mimics the distorted rainbow dreams of Peter Max. The next it is as graphic as if Peter Blake had rendered it. Then it juxtaposes outrageous objects like a Tom Wesselmann collage. All of these vivid images play to some of The Beatles’ most vivid music while the theme that conflicts can be settled with love, understanding, and music was also perfectly Beatlesque and perhaps a touch sadly ironic in the year that saw the band’s rapid dissolution.

7. Concert Films ’68

The most interesting musicals in the year of Oliver! and Funny Girl placed pop musicians in surrealistic, psychedelic wonderlands. For a more grounded vision of contemporary pop, Monterey Pop got the job done. D.A. Pennebaker’s document of the Summer of Love’s ultimate festival is a neat time capsule of goofy hippies (“The vibrations are just gonna be floating everywhere!!!” Like, wow.) and a stunning portrait of pop at its peak. Jefferson Airplane’s three-part contrapuntal harmonies dart around each other like high-flying birds. Otis Redding soul shakes. Janis Joplin soul shrieks. The Who goes to war. Hendrix commands a flaming counterattack. Ravi Shankar contributes a 19-minute raga and rivets for every second of it right up until the orgasmic applause that climaxes the picture. Woodstock would just look like an interminable portrait of mud compared to the vibrant vibrations of Monterey Pop, the ultimate straightforward concert film.

The ultimate non-straightforward concert movie would sadly suffer the same fate as Performance multiplied by fourteen. Michael Lindsay-Hogg filmed The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus for TV at the end of 1968, but it was not released until 1996. Rumor has it that the Stones were unhappy with their performance or felt they’d been upstaged by special guests The Who. They might have also been uncomfortable with how sickly Brian Jones looked. Whatever the case, one of the most electrifying documents of 1968 did not get released in its own time. That’s a shame considering that its union of the big top and Rock arena was so original and its performances are so uniformly excellent. Yes, The Who is the best live band of all time and their version of “A Quick One, While He’s Away” is the best live performance by any band ever caught on film, but the Stones are no slouches despite having been off the road for over a year and having to shoot their performance at the ungodly hour of 5 AM. Mick looks gorgeous as he seduces the audience with an early rendition of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and is hilarious as he apes demonic possession during a transcendent version of “Sympathy for the Devil”. There are also monumental appearances by Taj Mahal and a one-time super group of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Keith Richards, Mitch Mitchell, and Eric Clapton. That 1968 was the best year for movies and probably the second best for music (after 1967, of course) is not entirely a coincidence…

8. Documentaries ’68

…case in point. Another document created for television captured much of what made the late sixties such a thrilling time for music and actually made it on air despite often careening into the grotesque. Tony Palmer’s documentary for Britain’s Omnibus series, All My Loving, presented pop’s state of the union for 1968. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Martin, Pete Townshend and The Who, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, Cream, Donovan, Pink Floyd, Lulu, and George Harrison’s mum are all on hand to pontificate and perform in one of the first docs to take pop seriously… and one of the first to get seriously cheeky.

For insight into the state of the young people consuming all that exceptional pop in 1968, no film is more eye opening than Frederick Wiseman’s extraordinary, fly-on-the-wall documentary High School. This is largely because it shines such an unflattering light on what the kids were up against. The older generation is often shockingly insensitive and ignorant. There are oases among the crew-cut, finger pointing faculty, such as a young teacher sincerely enthused about using Simon & Garfunkel’s “Dangling Conversation” to teach poetry. The focus is often on the adults, though certain kids stand out, such as one young smart ass in shades and a sharp-dressed guy who agree that Philadelphia’s Northeast High School is “morally and socially… a garbage can.” As All My Loving took the pop music they loved seriously, High School is radical for taking young people equally seriously.

Even more radical is what may be the first documentary to take the LGBQT community seriously. Frank Simon’s The Queen does not invite us to mock the drag queens he caught on film as they prepare to participate in a pageant. The most surprising thing about The Queen is how utterly humane it is considering when it was made. These men (most participants seem to identify as male) discuss their identities, relationships, and conflicts candidly. The Queen is also highly entertaining as a sort of proto-reality show, and it’s impossible not to get wrapped up in the pageant’s backstage drama or choose your own preferred contestant. I was really disappointed that the immensely talented performer who sang “Honey Bun” from South Pacific and had the guts to refuse to participate in the swimsuit competition didn’t make the final cut.

9. Camp ’68

The truly refreshing thing about The Queen is that it almost entirely skirts (sorry!) succumbing to camp. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of camp, and in the days when Bill Dozier’s Batman was still on the air, camp still had a very prominent place in pop culture. Surely, neither Roger Vadim’s Barbarella nor Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik would have been made had Adam West never punched his way into the world’s heart. While neither of these comic book flicks was quite as sublime as Batman, they both upped the sexiness, though Barbarella’s helplessness in the face of predatory men has not aged well at all. A far more equitable view of sex can be found in Bava’s picture, as anti-superhero Diabolik shares his crime capers and a very mutually satisfying relationship with partner Eva Kant. Danger: Diabolik also boasts Bava’s signature bravura use of color and an outlandish ending that should be tragic but is undermined by a jolly wink to the camera. What fun!

You probably wouldn’t want to watch Barbarella or Danger: Diabolik with your kids, but the whole family is welcome to the year’s biggest kaijū big battle. Godzilla! Mothra! Rodan! King Ghidorah! Gorosaurus! Manda! More! As the popularity of the Godzilla series waned, its originator, Ishirō Honda, gathered the whole gang together in much the same way that Universal united Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolf Man for its own monster rallies twenty-five years earlier. However, Destroy All Monsters sidelined its giants for much of the picture while astronauts face off against the sparkly aliens controlling Godzilla and his gang. Fortunately, the whole bestiary gathers on screen for a big brawl at the picture’s climax… and isn’t that the most perfectly symbolic scene for a year in which beautifully mutated monsters of drama, comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentaries, and pop musicals crowded onto screens, making 1968 the greatest year for movies ever?