1969's Best Movies: 50 Years Later

I haven't seen Kes, Salesman, Antonio das Montes, or Diaries.

voted Salesman

colour of pomegranates is amazing

Z is seriously underrated in that list.

As Butch Cassidy is overrated.

Alfred: you might dig Salesman if only for all the old Miami/Southern Florida stuff in it.

It's also one of the best movies about work.

I thought for sure this list would have a glaring horror omission given the wealth of classics in '68 but, uh, very much nope.

where is Hello, Dolly!?

would take Wiseman's Law and Order over the Maysles and prob Ophuls

of what's up there, likely Kes followed by Wild Bunch, Z, Maud's

I like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? more than Midnight Cowboy and Support Your Local Sheriff! more than Butch Cassidy

The films ranked 1000-2000 on TSPDT from 1969 also look interesting. I haven't seen a lot of these:

The Milky Way (Luis Buñuel, France-Italy) #1082
79 Primaveras (Santiago Álvarez, Cuba) #1238
Boy (Nagisa Oshima, Japan) #1294
Lucía (Humberto Solás, Cuba) #1334
Take the Money and Run (Woody Allen, USA) #1344
Une Femme Douce (Robert Bresson, France) #1409
Macunaima (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Brazil) #1429
The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden) #1469
In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, USA) #1553
The Night of Counting the Years (Chadi Abdel Salam, Egypt) #1567
High School (Frederick Wiseman, USA) #1569
Tom, Tom the Piper's Son (Ken Jacobs, USA) #1629
Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, Japan) #1672
Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, USA) #1701
Women In Love (Ken Russell, UK) #1800
The Dependent (Leonardo Favio, Argentina) #1900
Dillinger Is Dead (Marco Ferreri, Italy) #1903
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Sydney Pollack, USA) #1916
Mississippi Mermaid (François Truffaut, France-Italy) #1936
La Femme Infidèle (Claude Chabrol, France-Italy #1973

(High School is listed as 1969 here but 1968 on IMDB)

Ah shoot, I should've added those all to the poll too. Will do so going forward...

was gonna mention Oshima's Boy as well.

Funeral Parade of Roses seems hard to say. BAM here is showing it next month on a doublebill with The Crying Game.

It's true Salesman has some good South Florida color in it (b&w color, that is). As a former resident of the area, it's on my mental list of older films that capture the vibe in an especially true-to-life way. Salesman's also the film I'd pick from the top list.

I gotta see Kes one of these days though.

midnight cowboy

loved that film, haven't seen it in decades

voted for My Night at Maud's

The Wild Bunch, fuck off

(I guess I should watch it again before I say stuff like that)

midnight cowboy

although those flashback scenes freak me out a bit.

I came up with these a couple years ago.

1. Midnight Cowboy, 2. My Night at Maud's, 3. Medium Cool

Never a big Wild Bunch fan--some of the performances are a little, uh, florid--although I understand its stature as a landmark film; High School seemed fairly conventional the one time I saw it next to the best of Wiseman's later films. Positive impressions of In the Year of the Pig and The Colour of Pomegranate, although I'd need to see them again. Would include Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and The Sterile Cuckoo in a Top 10.

army of shadows

Wild Bunch and Army of Shadows

Hope that Mel Gibson remake of the former dies on the vine, and if it doesn’t he’s sharp enough to admit he’s best suited for the Edmond O’Brien role these days.

Here are some '69 favorites I'd rate as highly as many of the Top 2000 finishers:

More (Barbet Schroeder, Luxembourg)
Venus in Furs (Jess Franco, W Germany)
Baby Love (Alastair Reid, UK)
The Price of Power (Tonino Valerii, Italy/Spain)

Applying some Letterboxd filters, here's the entirety of what I've seen from 1969: Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, True Grit, Take the Money and Run, Frosty the Snowman and For the First Time.

I like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, but they are so much of their moment that they hold me at a bit of a distance, and if I haven't seen more of the films mentioned in this thread, it may be because I regard so much of the cinema from this specific period as being something you had to be there to really get (I wasn't born for another decade). In contrast, I think that even the more zeitgeist-y films from the 70's (Nashville, to pick the most obvious example) are far more pleasurable on a purely cinematic level; I don't feel like I'm missing anything because I wasn't around for Nixon or oil shock or anything like that. It seems to me like quite a few of the movie's we're talking about on this thread wouldn't have been made even 3 years before or after 1969.

All of that said, there is absolutely no excuse why I still haven't watched my long-ago-purchased used DVD of The Wild Bunch.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

with all the movies I've been catching up on I still haven't seen even half of these, there is so much yet to watch

of the films in the poll, I haven't seen Kes, The Color of Pomegranates, Army of Shadows, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Damned, Salesman, Antonio das Mortes, Diaries Notes and Sketches

of the 20 films from 1000-2000 I think I've only seen three

of the ones I did see I really loved My Night at Maud's and Midnight Cowboy

Finally saw Kes. Impressive. Now I need to see it again with subtitles. Especially enjoyed the scene of the phys ed teacher talking the kids through a game of football. Feel like I know that type.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I wish I voted for My Night at Maud's

there isn't any eric rohmer film I love better