My Top Ten Films of 1969:

1. Army Of Shadows
2. Kes
3. Salesman
4. Midnight Cowboy
5. Women In Love
6. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
7. Z
8. Medium Cool
9. Funeral Parade of Roses
10. Putney Swope

Honorable Mentions: Burn!, Coming Apart, The Magic Christian, My Night at Maud’s, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sweet Charity

For My Watchlist: Age of Consent, Boy, Last Summer, Lions Love, The Milky Way, The Passion of Anna, The Sterile Cuckoo

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That halcyon year before Covid, the theatre I worked at put on a “Summer of ‘69” series spotlighting some of that year’s chestnuts on their fiftieth anniversary (plus the documentary Woodstock, a thrill to take in on the big screen in all its split-screen glory.) As part of this series, for the first time I saw Medium Cool and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid; easy to see why the latter was a phenomenon although it felt a little creaky a half century on while the former was revelatory for its docu-fiction hybrid and Robert Forster’s presence. In this series, I also rewatched Midnight Cowboy, whose Best Picture win remains galvanizing—proof of how quickly the culture was changing—and Sweet Charity, flawed and mawkish but still containing three or four of the all-time best musical sequences in film.

However, Army of Shadows was an easy choice for the top slot. Not officially released in the US until 2006 (I first saw it then at the Kendall Square Cinema), this moody, minimalist account of French resistance fighters during World War II is still my favorite Jean-Pierre Melville film even if the Alain Delon-starring Le Samourai from two years before remains his most popular and iconic. Simone Signoret might have won an Oscar a decade earlier for Room At The Top but had this received a domestic release at the time, she should have been a shoo-in for another one.

Kes and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? were relatively recent discoveries as were Funeral Parade of Roses and Putney Swope though I had no qualms about rating the first two far higher than the others. Z, which originally required three separate viewings for me to stay awake through is one I’d love to revisit, ideally in a cinema. A very recent watch, Ken Russell’s currently non-streaming Women in Love (recorded off of TCM) is one of his best thanks in part to Glenda Jackson’s tremendous performance. Still, if you want the most accurate vision of what 1969 was really like, check out the Maysles brothers’ Salesman, a documentary about door-to-door bible hawkers that plays out like Death of a Salesman (minus the death) in real time.

I have my own reasons for each of my watchlist selections (Agnes Varda, Michael Powell’s obscure last film, one of Liza Minnelli’s first, etc.) and almost caught Last Summer when it appeared on TCM’s schedule a year or two ago but then either failed to record on my DVR or didn’t air at all. If the cable network ever gets really adventurous and screen Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart (which I last saw decades ago in grad school with the director in attendance), I wouldn’t mind returning to this single-shot, Rip Torn-starring oddity.