1968 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 1968:

1. Funny Girl
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. The Odd Couple
4. Bullitt
5. Oliver!
6. Planet of the Apes
7. Rosemary's Baby
8. Romeo and Juliet
9. Yours, Mine and Ours
10. The Lion in Winter

What are your top three films for 1968? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. Rosemary's Baby

What are some of the forgotten gems from the year? What is overrated? What did you discover at a young age and what did you discover later?

YEARS IN FILM • forum.chorus.fm

 

Looks like I have ~36 features from ‘68. Hard to pick a top 3 honestly.

1. Monterey Pop
2. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. The Party

Almost picked ‘em:
Yellow Submarine
Romeo and Juliet
Ice Station Zebra
2001: A Space Odyssey
Bullitt
The Lion in Winter
Targets
Rosemary’s Baby

 

I had seven films to choose from so this was difficult for me so I picked the ones I have seen the most and still adore despite multiple rewatches.

1. Once Upon a Time in the West
2. Bullitt
3. Where Eagles Dare

 

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Rosemary's Baby
3. Night of the Living Dead

It's crazy how well 2001 holds up today, especially visually. Shame, Once Upon a Time in the West and the original Planet of the Apes are all fantastic as well.

 

1. Rosemary's Baby
2. Shame
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rosemary's Baby is a pitch black comic masterpiece, that takes the claustrophobic horror and paranoia that Polanski did with Repulsion, and adds just a little bit of gothic camp, with it's group of occult witches, living upstairs in a nice Manhattan apartment.

Shame is one of Bergman's most straightforward and bleak films, exploring the guilt left over from the Second World War, and the ongoing Vietnam war, showing how an unnamed conflict or civil war affects our central couple, with the threat of unknown and un-named violence hanging over their heads. The set and basically the entire cast were re-used the next year for The Passion of Anna, which is also fantastic.

2001 is 2001, there's not a lot more to be said about it. Absolutely ground breaking visually, unbelievable that this came out in 1968. I saw this in the cinema a few years back too, and the finale on the big screen was absolutely incredible - enjoyed it a lot more than I had previously, when watching on home on a TV or laptop.

Close to making the top three for me, but not quite would be; Hour of the Wolf, Once Upon a Time in the West, Affair in the Snow & Kuroneko.

For an underrated film, that probably wasn't going to make the top 3, I would recommend The Girls, a Swedish film directed by Mai Zetterling, and starring a collection of Bergman regulars (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom and Gunnar Björnstrand), and is a playful meta-film about the production of a feminist re-telling of the Ancient Greek drama of Lysistrata with a theatre troupe performing and adapting it.

There's something a bit Godard or 8 1/2 esque about the way they engage with the material and how it starts appearing in day to day life. Not perfect, but an interesting and engaging watch, and not one I've seen mentioned elsewhere really.

It's available on the UK Netflix too (not sure about elsewhere, but if it's on Netflix, it won't be a hard film to track down...).

 

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. If...
3. Where Eagles Dare

 

It is such a strong year. Once Upon a Time in the West is a masterpiece; just hearing that song brings me back to its breathtaking beauty and tragedy. It is such a career reinvention for Leone, who had built a mythological character in the Man With No Name, only to show that there is no victory in bloodshed.

To talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey is almost pointless, as so many people have dissected it to death. Like The Tree of Life, it is a monumental task to try and capture the totality of time and to examine our ultimate irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. The two films vary wildly on their ultimate conclusions about our species' time on this mortal realm, but 2001: A Space Odyssey suggests a forward progression in evolution that is both unknowable and inevitable.

 

By the way it didn’t really stand a chance at my top 3, but an interesting deep cut if anyone’s looking for one is Story of a Three-Day Pass. Directed by Melvin van Peebles (who basically went on to invent blaxploitation and was a pioneering black director) on a shoestring in France and showing a ton of New Wave influence. I liked it quite a bit.

 

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Bullitt
3. Rosemary’s Baby

maybe the easiest top choice of the bunch for me thus far

 

Another year with way too many options to list, let alone rank. I think 2001 is my top, but everything else is either so good or something I’ve watched so many times that I don’t know what to do. There’s The Odd Couple, The Producers, Shame, Faces, Night of the Living Dead, and those are just the ones that get written about regularly.

The Swimmer is one that has certainly been underrated but is getting kind of a following now. One of Burt Lancaster’s best, and it’s incredibly surreal, disturbing, and thoughtful. Worth mentioning that it just got an amazing blu ray release from Grindhouse Video. The only other release was pretty bland and OOP, but this has three discs including a CD of the score and absolutely gorgeous artwork. Highly recommended for anyone who is into physical media.

I just watched Rachel, Rachel for the first time this year and fell in love with it. Paul Newman’s debut as a director featuring one of Joanne Woodward’s best performances. Fits in well with a lot of the great character studies from this and the next decade, and unlike so many stories about women it doesn’t add in a ton of unnecessary suffering and ruin for the character. Estelle Parsons is also perfect as usual.

Funny Girl gets all the credit in 1968 for massive biopics starring true icons early in their careers, but Star! with Julie Andrews is worth a watch as well. It goes on a bit long, but some of the numbers are great and the relationship between Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward is great. Daniel Massey was Coward’s godson and brought a ton of love and care to the role.

I’m pretty sure every year up until maybe the mid80s will be an absolute nightmare for me to choose, so so many favorites coming up.

 

I agree with basically all your thoughts on Rachel Rachel and Funny Girl.

 

1. Death By Hanging
2. Je t'aime, je t'aime
3. Theorem

A lot of stuff that was really tough to leave off here. I just watched Mandabi a couple days ago, a fascinating and at times hilarious indictment of "post" colonial corruption in Senegal. The Hour of the Furnaces speaks for itself - perhaps the purest distillation of "Third Cinema." The two Bergman films - Shame and Hour of the Wolf - both rank near the top of his filmography for me, I've always been a bigger fan of his mid to late 60s work than some of the more canonical titles from the 1950s. Stolen Kisses which, controversially, might be favourite Truffaut film (Day for Night being the other one I would consider). Chronicle of Anna Magdalene Bach, while far from my favourite Straub-Huillet film, is a landmark in their body of work and displays their incredible commitment to the integrity of integrating other arts into the cinema. Godard's Sympathy of the Devil is one of my favourite films about the artistic process precisely for the provocative nature that sets it apart from the average "making of" documentary. Other than Death By Hanging, there is some other strong work out of Japan this year - Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods, Shindo's Kuroneko, Yoshida's Affair in the Snow (I'm still sitting with this one, which I just watched yesterday, but it would be an interesting companion to the Resnais film I included in my top 3). And finally L'enfance nue, the debut feature from Maurice Pialat, one of the most significant filmmakers in post-New Wave French filmmaking. He would go on to make many films that I find much better than this one, but it's astonishing how fully formed his brand of realism already is here.

And none of this is to even mention the wealth of great American films released this year.

 

By coincidence, the trailer for the new restoration of this film was just released today. Haven't seen it yet myself but I've been intrigued by it for a while. I will definitely try to catch this restoration sometime this year (it's Janus, so a Criterion/Criterion Channel release is likely on the horizon).

 

Agreed on that timeline of Bergman’s work being his best.

 

Oh shit that rules. It's in need of it. The transfer I saw didn't seem like one that had been given a lot of care and attention.

 

2001 is actually the only film from 1968 that I have seen *dodges brick*

I'm definitely going to get to Rosemary's Baby/others sooner or later but I have a hard time believing any of them will be as good as 2001, it's transcendent

 

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. Rosemary’s Baby

2001 is a perfect movie imo, and for its ambition to be perfect makes it the best film ever made imho. Rosemary’s Baby could fairly be number two, basically a coin flip for me.

 

1. 2001
2. Death By Hanging
3. Rosemary’s Baby

I hope people watch Death by Hanging

 

Can anyone imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey being the second highest grossing movie of the year these days? Everyone would have walked out of the theater before the Moon sequence was over.

 

I’m not sure it’d get made. I guess if Kubrick were around today as theaters die and streaming rises he’d get a Scorsese style treatment where Netflix and Apple are giving him blank checks to do something for their streaming service.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey takes it with 22 votes. Once Upon a Time in the West and Rosemary's Baby both had 9 votes each. 2001: A Space Odyssey will move on to the bracket.

 

I missed the vote, which is ok because none of my three (High School, Head, and Stolen Kisses) were on any other lists.

 

High School is excellent. Great pick

 

That was the next one I was going to watch for this year but I didn't get time. Its high on my watchlist though.