Mining the ‘68 Seam

Alan Bates puts in a powerful performance as an unjustly imprisoned Jewish handyman clinging to his principles in The Fixer directed by John Frankenheimer and loosely based on the infamous Beilis trial. Anti-Semitism was rife in Tsarist Russia, so when a boy turns up murdered it’s easy for the locals and authorities to blame a nearby Jew but they didn’t count on his tenacious refusal to confess despite their brutal, merciless treatment. Bates is ably supported by Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm but they pale way into the background as Bates rounds out the razor sharp script out with a perfectly pitched portrayal of a man driven to despair and beyond.

 

Tony Richardson scorched the screen in ‘68 with his savagely satirical The Charge of the Light Brigade. Targeted squarely at the idiocy of the Victorian upper class twits behind the planning and execution of the Battle of Balaclava, the film follows a young officer, played by David Hemmings, who fails to talk sense into his superiors and suffers a miserable end along with the rest of the troops. Trevor Howard, Vanessa Redgrave and John Gielgud bring plenty of colour to the smaller roles and Richardson’s deft direction balances the tragic and comic beautifully. An underrated classic.

Wayward Westerns

The Great Silence is an atmospheric spaghetti western directed by Sergio Corbucci (of Django fame) in 1968. During a harsh winter a mute gunslinger squares off against a band of voracious bounty hunters who store their victims in snow drifts till spring. Though there’s not much to the script and it’s seems a little clichéd 40+ years later there’s a delicious cynicism and plenty of merciless violence to keep you entertained as the atmosphere builds to an explosive and suitably dark finale. Brilliant but probably not to everyone’s taste.

Sidney Poiter joins forces with James Garner to escort a bunch of soldiers through Indian infested territory in Duel at Diablo but the wheels soon fall off their wagon haha and a relentless siege ensues. It starts off fairly atypically, the usual technicolour 60’s western bedecked in thinly veiled social commentary but it soon reveals a surprisingly dark underbelly of violence once the journey gets underway. With a strong, sharp script and some talented performances this tense little gem packs a punch and is woefully neglected.

Sixty Eights

Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony is a fraught, twisted melodrama bedecked with the talents of Liz Taylor, Robert Mitchum & Mia Farrow. Grieving the loss of her daughter, Taylor's whore befriends a recently orphaned teenager after an encounter on the bus and the pair develop an unnerving, fantastical relationship, each playing the 'role' of their lost loved who they happen to resemble. Cooped up together in the plush manor Farrow inherited, their intense bond is further complicated with the arrival of a predatory Robert Mitchum. This is a dark, wordy film about the dirty interpersonal webs we weave, tear at, then reweave and it's three leads, even Taylor, put in exceptional performances.

Otto Preminger's Skidoo is a big studio attempt to cater to 1968's acid crowd but mostly falls flat on it's face in a similar fashion to say, I Love You Alice B Toklas. An aging mobster, played by Jackie Gleason, is forced out of retirement to deal with an errant mobster by God, his eccentric kingpin and a mildly entertaining, faintly psychedelic caper ensues. Sporting a veritable panoply of stars including Groucho Marx, Slim Pickens & Burgess Meredith the comedy is inconsistent, plotting half baked and the LSD trip sequences so cliched and trite that it's immediately obvious that no-one involved had ever had a taste of the good stuff. A spectacular, craptastic failure.

Prime Pollack

Ossie Davies and Burt Lancaster star in Sidney Pollack's comedy/western, The Scalphunters. Lancaster's mountain man trapper is forced to hand over his furs in exchange for an erudite slave by a bunch of Indians and kicks off a action filled cross country romp to retrieve them. The two leads are admirable and handle the intelligent, witty script with brio and it's all beautifully paced with the lulls in action providing room for the snappy banter. A brilliant little gem that's got a whole lot more than to it than just shootouts and spurs.

Sidney Pollack's next feature, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, released the following year, received a whole sackful of awards and rightly so as it's a vicious depiction of the American dream in all it's brutal greed and ignominy. An ensemble cast including Jane Fonda, Susannah York & Bruce Dern compete in a epic dance marathon run by a merciless, cynical MC. The desperate characters are lured by the chance of a big pay out but still yearn and pander for pennies thrown by the ever present audience. This is intense stuff with 'big' performances all round, some superb cinematography that enriches the insanity and as the contestants are thinned out the atmosphere spirals deeper and deeper into the gloom towards a stunning climax.