Seeing through '68-Colored Glasses

Raymond Benson's Best of 1968 Countdown ended last Friday with the pretty unimpeachable choice of 2001: A Space Odyssey, an April '68 release in the United States. Can you imagine anything that mind-blowing coming out in April these days? I mean, even more mind-blowing than Smart People?

Raymond's list is Raymond's list, but as several commenters noted, it's basically the same list Leonard Maltin or Leah Rozen would have picked to commemorate that year. Granted, 1968 sported so many classics that have endured for multiple generations; it's hard, in the face of 2001 and Rosemary's Baby and Once Upon a Time in the West to avoid a consensus-type list. But, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter? Yellow Submarine? The Producers? Even, as much as I adore it, The Lion in Winter?

I still have a ways to go as a 1968 completist. My first compensatory stop obviously needs to be Lindsay Anderson's If..., but I also feel the pain of missing Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates, Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, Straub & Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, Pennebaker's Monterey Pop, and Bertolucci's Partner... plus some fun-sounding trash like Russ Meyer's Vixen! and Barry Shear's Wild in the Streets, both of which await me at my hometown public library once I'm back from this trip.

Again, 1968 is a great enough year that I'll give a shout-out to a list of ten runners-up for my own list. These would be John Cassavetes's Faces, the one movie I really hate to leave off, then Salesman, The Thomas Crown Affair, Planet of the Apes, and Lonesome Cowboys, followed up by Winnie-the-Pooh and the Blustery Day, The Lion in Winter, Bullitt, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Pretty Poison. I'm about halfway through Emile de Antonio's important Vietnam War documentary In the Year of the Pig, which has some eye-opening and some repulsive footage, but it isn't tightly structured enough to crack this list of honorable mentions, I'm guessing.

Even better than all of those are these, my own Top Ten of 1968, at least so far. Make your own feelings known in the comments!