1969 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 1969:

1. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
2. The Love Bug
3. Midnight Cowboy
4. Easy Rider
5. Hello, Dolly!
6. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
7. Paint Your Wagon
8. True Grit
9. Cactus Flower
10. Goodbye, Columbus

What are your top three films for 1969? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. The Wild Bunch
2. Midnight Cowboy
3. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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

 

I really regret never having seen Kes.

 

1. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
2. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
3. Easy Rider

 

Far easier year this time to choose films from given I have only seen nine and two of them I wouldn't recommend anyone plus my first pick is a given since it is one of my all-time favorites.

1. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
2. The Italian Job
3. The Wild Bunch

I would also recommend Latitude Zero, Pit Stop and The Valley of Gwangi.

 

1. Kes
2. Funeral Parade of Roses
3. The Passion of Anna

Kes is Ken Loach's first of many masterpieces, a really poignant and tragic story about a young boy and his kestrel. It's grounded in realism, cast with amateurs or non-professional actors, able to perfectly portray the roles they're cast in. I feel it should be mandatory watching for all 14 year olds. Despite being British and from (ish) the same region this is set and filmed, I still needed subtitles the first time I watched it.

Funeral Parade of Roses is a fantastic whirlwind film about gay or trans subculture in late 60s Japan. Somewhere between a documentary and an exploitation thriller, blending interviews with the actors playing the true to life characters, as well as highly stylised and grisly murders. A big influence on Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, which is pretty apparent. It's also messy and scruffy in the best way, this is something made fast and loose, where you can see the film-makers and stars needed to get it out ASAP.

The Passion of Anna feels in many ways the sequel to Bergman's Shame, released the year before. Basically the same cast, and filmed in the same sets. Like a lot of Bergman films, it examines isolation, faith and loneliness, as well as having acts of senseless and seemingly random violence. The island they're living in is an unhealthy and oppressive place to be, and it shows. Similar to Funeral Parade of Roses (though this is the only way they're similar!), the cast all get interviewed within the film about the characters they're playing, which is a bit odd - and not something I would expect from Bergman.

Honourable mentions for the year include Midnight Cowboy, Army of Shadows, My Night at Maud's, The Milky Way and Orgies of Edo.

 

Only five minutes long, but also from 1969 and well worth the very short time to check it out is David Lynch's short student project, The Alphabet. Made when he was only 22, and a terrifying fever dream animation with creepy and horrifying sound effects, like a Monty Python sketch that's gone seriously wrong somewhere along the way. Genuinely scarier than most films manage in 90 minutes, and he does it in 5, at 22.

 

1. Easy Rider
2. Women in Love
3. Kes

Ken Loach has really become a favorite in the last year or so. I’m also big on Ken Russell’s Women in Love

 

1. The Passion of Anna
2. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
3. Midnight Cowboy

 

Just to add a little bit of negativity to these overwhelming positive threads, I'm looking through the films I've seen (that I can remember anyway) from the 60s, to find something I didn't like, and I think the worst film of the 60s (that I've actually seen), is probably Bergman's The Rite from 1969, which I found fairly incomprehensible, and what feels like it was written to settle some scores with someone about censorship, but didn't hit at all for me.

Hitchcock's Marnie is also a film I recall not enjoying much, and would probably be bottom of the barrel Hitchcock, but it's been a long while since I've seen it, so I can't recall much more than thinking it wasn't anywhere near his level.

It's much harder than I expected to find films I can recall that I dislike from the 60s. If they survived enough to be easily available 50 years later, there's probably something worthy about them, and the two examples that came to mind are obviously films by remarkable directors, which likely is the reason for them sticking around. Will be much more films I disliked in coming decades I suppose.

 

Marnie is NOT good. Even without the outright rape that looks horrendous now, it’s a blah as hell. His fixation with very literal Freudian psychology led to some weak films (Spellbound is low on his totem pole too).

 

1. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
2. Midnight Cowboy
2. Hello, Dolly!

Others I really like:
The Secret of Santa Vitoria
Take the Money and Run
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
My Night at Maud’s
The Wild Bunch
Medium Cool
Cactus Flower
They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
Anne of the Thousand Days
Paint Your Wagon
The Learning Tree

Good ones:
Easy Rider
Z
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
True Grit
The Cow
Let It Be
In the Year of the Pig
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Marooned
Goodbye, Columbus

Not a fan:
The Color of Pomegranates
Alice’s Restaurant
Fellini Satyricon
Women in Love
The Sorrow and the Pity
The Happy Ending
The Sterile Cuckoo

 

I think part of it is -- at least for me -- is that really terrible movies just don't survive as long. With that said, I really did not care Agnes Varda's Lions Love or Arthur Penn's The Chase, to name two off the top of my head that I've watched recently.

 

I'm sad to see The Wild Bunch get pretty much ignored. I can't imagine most of Tarantino's films without the ending shootout, just an absurd explosion of violence that teases victory for the gang even though you know what is ripping their bodies apart.

 

1. Boy
2. Funeral Parade of Roses
3. My Night at Maud’s

Oshima in the number one again. Completely devastating film and something of a departure within his body of work at this point. Funeral Parade of Roses was a relatively recent watch - a total revelation in both form and content. Been a few years since I’ve seen the Rohmer but at the time it was the first of his I ever liked after a few other attempts.

Another strong year. Some other favourites that I don’t think were mentioned yet: Pirosmani, Back and Forth, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, Early Works. I’m also a big fan of The Color of Pomegranates and The Rite (bizarre film for Bergman but I found it utterly fascinating).

 

It would probably be my number 4, its really great.

 

If I was going to be negative about any film from this year or the sixties as a whole it'd have to be the definite low point of the Shōwa era of Godzilla films that is All Monsters Attack.

 

Need to see more from this year also but The Wild Bunch is great. That was my first Peckinpah and is still probably my fav

 

1. Easy Rider
2. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
3. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

 

I think it’s second for me behind Ride the High Country but a fantastic movie

 

No love for Army of Shadows?

 

I have literally only seen Midnight Cowboy and Frosty the Snowman lmao

 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wins it with 10 votes. The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider were close with 7 votes each. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid will move on to the bracket.

 

I am watching Midnight Cowboy

 

I am watching The Wild Bunch. Pretty important year huh