Identification Marks: None (1965)

Jerzy Skolimowski's Rysopis (Identification Marks: None) is an astounding 1960s film about malaise in contemporary Poland. This movie was released in Poland in 1964/1965 and the U.S. in 1968. I think what's so fascinating is that I just saw Ivan Ostrochovský's 2020 film Servants – a film that's also about 1960s Poland (and includes a scene in front of a military board that cites Skolimowski's film specifically) – but Identification Marks: None is so, so, so much better, despite being obviously made on a shoestring budget and without a cameraman half the time. This is a really stunning film. I have known nothing about Skolimowski until 2022's Io, but now (thankfully) every streaming service I get is showing Skolimowski movies, so I can watch a few.

Identification Marks: None is showing exclusively on MUBI.

Charly (1968)

Charly is a 1968 film based on the story Flowers for Algernon, and it's a very 1960s film. It does these split-screen double shots seemingly for no reason at all other than because it can, and when it should use them near the end for emotional payoff, it chooses not to. It's also sometimes filmed rather like a horror film – or perhaps I should say rather like a Frank Perry film. This definitely has the vibe of a film made by the Perrys – constantly telling a story that isn't scary as if it's terrifying. Charly's ethics, too, are suspect, and it approaches its central character with a gaze I found frequently hostile. Charly won Best Actor in 1969 for Cliff Robertson, and this was the very last of the 1968 Oscar nominees I needed to see. Well, I've seen it now. Meh.

Finian's Rainbow (1968)

Very strangely, Finian's Rainbow is one of two films I need to see before I'm done with all of the movies nominated for Oscars in 1968 (I've seen most films from most years, and I'm close on a lot of them.) But Finian's Rainbow is a musical, and so I should have seen it a long time ago. I think there's a reason I haven't. This is... a weird thing. It's a kind of Brigadoon meets... well, I don't know what it meets. The music feels simultaneously 1960s and 1940s. It's sort of nominally about fighting racist prejudice, but its main song – one that keeps recurring – is about some fantasy version of Ireland. And although this is quite a stagey musical, with a very weird episode of non-musical, non-minstrel blackface involving turning a racist white man Black, this is directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who would, of course, make The Godfather just four years later. Honestly, this felt like it had a lot of cool elements, and the songs were also good, but they felt mashed up oddly in this movie.

For Love of Ivy (1968)

One doesn't normally think of Sidney Poitier as a romantic comedy performer, but For Love of Ivy is so much fun, and Poitier is delightful. I loved this film. It's smart and charming and poignant and very funny.

The Swimmer

For me, The Swimmer doesn't work. I really wish I had read the John Cheever story before watching this movie, but it was leaving Criterion in 3 days and I was on a time crunch. But here's the thing: The Swimmer is a Frank Perry movie, and the Perrys make horror movies. All of their movies are horror movies, even though none of them is actually in the genre: they're just made like horror movies. Mommie Dearest is actually a superb example. There's no reason for the film to be made in the way it is, but instead the camera lingers in weird ways, focuses on strange things, watches Joan Crawford walk eerily up the stairs. 

In any case, the trouble with the Perrys' version of The Swimmer is that we know something is off from the very beginning of this movie, even though it would have worked much, much better if we didn't perceive something as being wrong until much later when the main character himself starts to realize something is wrong.

This is John Cheever's Willy Loman, but we shouldn't start seeing ghosts in scene one.

Lancaster is expertly cast here, though. He's the perfect actor for middle-class unraveling as he has proven in many other films.

The Fixer (1968)

John Frankenheimer's The Fixer is a tough, tough film about injustice and anti-Semitism. It is also quite clearly a film about prison systems, state violence, and torture. Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde are excellent. This is a hard movie to watch, though. We spend most of our time in solitary confinement with Bates's character, and the prison is a terrible, horrible place.

It is crazy, I have to say, that this movie is almost impossible to find. It's not streaming anywhere and it's not on blu-ray. How is this Frankenheimer film so neglected?

The Odd Couple (1968)

Neil Simon is funny, and there's kind of no way around that. I had never seen the original Odd Couple film, although I have seen the play onstage several times. I did not expect to laugh much at this old style of humor with which I have become very impatient. (I especially find Jack Lemmon's characterizations at this point in his career very annoying.) But The Odd Couple is laugh-out-loud hilarious, and it's funny primarily because Walter Matthau's facial expressions get to do most of the work. In other words, the medium allows this old story – and the jokes I know by heart – to be funny all over again because I have a different kind of access to the comedians than I would if I saw them onstage. I laughed a lot at this.

Admittedly, when it ended I was like wait, that's the end? I had forgotten that this little thing that has been selling tickets across the country for more than 60 years basically has no stakes at all. The entire thing is insanely contrived and absurd. But I must admit that it is legitimately funny.

War and Peace

Sergei Bondarchuk's 7-hour epic is a stunning, incredible achievement, and I loved it.

Bondarchuk's film emphasizes poetry over story. Flashback, nuance, dreams, and the sheer phenomenological experience of wonder take priority over historical facts. And this is all to the good. Rather than feeling as though we can always make sense of something, we instead feel overwhelmed by Tolstoy's world – and deeply a part of it.

Faces (1968)

Faces is tough. It feels cool and fresh – certainly it is unlike most of the other movies from the 1968 season. The acting is excellent; the script is great. But... I can't say I enjoyed myself very much. Cassavetes' work here is hard to love. The camera follows these characters around closely; it gets into their faces. And everyone is miserable. I think I just wish there were a little more time to breathe. This felt frenetic and sad.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

It's weird. I loved this novel so much, but it seems like director Robert Ellis Miller and screenwriter Thomas C. Ryan thought the novel was about something much different than I thought it was. In the first place – and most strangely – they cast Sondra Locke in the role of Mick, which really transforms the part from someone who doesn't fit in and can't make sense of her world into something else... a girl who's gonna be alright. The whole thing felt sort of weird. This is a novel about longing and dissatisfaction and frustration. But the screenplay eliminates two of the central characters early on, and spends its time focused on (what the movie figures as) a poor, white straight girl. Sigh. It's a giant missed opportunity, and I suppose it might one day be made into a good movie or tv series. 

Alan Arkin, to be fair, is great. Even more, Laurinda Barrett is excellent, and so is Cicely Tyson, but of course the film's focus is on Sondra Locke, who is terribly miscast. It throws off the whole picture.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

I'm not sure what I was expecting of the original Planet of the Apes, but I sure as hell wasn't expecting this philosophical meditation on humane behavior. This is a kind of Marivaux experiment in which the author reverses the world. On this planet, the apes are in charge, and humans are treated as animals. This allows for all sorts of philosophical meditations on what it means to be humane, how we treat non-humans, and – most importantly – how we let religious conviction stand in the way of scientific truth and real research.

But Franklin Schaffner's film is not very much fun. It's very, very talky, and there just isn't as much action as I had hoped for. Jerry Goldsmith's score is incredible, though. It feels very ahead of its time.

Two from 1968

The Shoes of the Fisherman is a beautifully shot and beautifully scored terrible movie. This film has an excellent cast and it's based on what was, in the mid-1960s, a famous novel, but Michael Anderson's film adaptation is a plodding, self-important, strange mess. It doesn't know where to focus – continually and bafflingly pulling us back to a plot between a newsman and his doctor wife and their marital problems – and even when it's focused on the important plot, the decisions of the new pontiff, it takes too long to do everything and is far too precious with the narrative's events.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a Sherman Brothers movie-musical, also from 1968, that is insane and widely beloved. The title refers to the name of a car that a crackpot inventor (played by Dick Van Dyke) has rigged up, and the two children who star in the film think the sounds car makes sound light "chitty chitty bang bang", so they make up a song with these words as a title and refrain. It's an asinine song that I have been singing for days since I saw the movie.

The plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is also completely bizarre, and the songs really don't go together at all. There's one about a candy whistle our crackpot has invented, and there's a diegetic song set in a circus performer's show in which our inventor is forced into performing but in which he performs astoundingly well. And then there is the flying car, which takes our characters off to a land in which all the children are imprisoned. This is entertaining stuff, and if the film makes no sense at all, it's very fun, and Dick Van Dyke is wonderful. Sally Ann Howes is no fair substitute for Julie Andrews, but her voice is gorgeous, and she performs admirably.

I watched both The Shoes of the Fisherman and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on DVD. It's just a fluke that they were both from 1968.

The Queen

This is an extraordinary documentary of a rigged pageant in 1967 with some fabulous characters. Queens have been quoting this documentary for years. "Look at her makeup. It's terrible" and "I'll sue the fool" are amazingly quotable lines, and god bless Crystal LaBeija for saying them. 

I watched The Queen on the Criterion Channel. Happy Pride.

Barbarella

Totally fun, sexy, imaginative, campy. In short, almost utterly delightful. Barbarella is like a Terry Gilliam movie but enjoyable.

Bullitt (1968)

This film is excellent. The car chase is fuckin' cool. The plot is great. Jacqueline Bisset is wonderful. McQueen is perfect.

The Two of Us (1967)

Le Vieil Homme et l'Enfant, which was released in the U.S. as The Two of Us in 1968, is a charming, heartwarming comedy about anti-Semitism and French country folks. It's a great little movie, with many lovely insights. I've been meaning to watch this for a long time. Of course, it's on the Criterion Channel now. This channel is the best.

A Dandy in Aspic (1968)

A Dandy in Aspic is a thinking man's spy film with Laurence Harvey from 1968. This is Anthony Mann's final film, and I enjoyed it immensely. I'm almost always up for a crime film like this, and as I watched Laurence Harvey play a British double agent, I was surprised that he was never asked to play James Bond. It's odd, isn't it? He'd have been the perfect Bond. At any rate, he's great in this, and Mia Farrow is fabulous.

To be honest, I had never even heard of A Dandy in Aspic until the Criterion Channel told me I should probably watch it. I am very grateful to them. This film is great.

The Thomas Crown Affair (the Original)

What sexy fun! I loved The Thomas Crown Affair. It's superbly directed, delightfully performed, with the perfect light touch by both Dunaway and McQueen, and it's just so pleasurable! It's also brilliantly scripted. Structurally, Alan Trustman (who also wrote Bullitt) has put the big set piece in the opening twenty minutes. It's a brilliant move that is so surprising and challenging, and it cleverly lets the rest of the film be about something else. So smart.

I Even Met Happy Gypsies

I wish I had more to say about Aleksandar Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies. The filmmaking is cool, but the story is just not that interesting.