What We Missed: 1968
This whole post is about "Funny Girl."
ICYMI: the five films nominated for Best Actor Oscars from 1968 were Oliver!, Charly, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Fixer, and The Lion in Winter. The links provide the trivia write-ups on those films while this post discusses what else was happening in the movies that year.
1968 Best Picture winner: Oliver! This was a bad choice. A very bad choice. Like, you’re gonna give Best Picture to a 1968 musical and you choose Oliver! over William Wyler’s masterpiece Funny Girl? For real? Actually for real?? That’s insane. Oliver! sucks and Funny Girl is just impossibly charming.
Funny Girl follows the relationship between old-timey Ziegfeld girl Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand, reprising her role from the Broadway show) and charming rogue Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif, taking over for Charlie Chaplin’s son Sydney Chaplin). Streisand was already a megawatt star in 1968, both for her pop singing and her work on Broadway, but we’ll cover her career when we watch the 1991 film The Prince of Tides. And Omar Sharif? He spends this whole movie giving Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, and it is a vibe.
Oh, and two-time Best Actor nominee Walter Pidgeon plays Florenz Ziegfeld.
Funny Girl is a musical and you should know a handful of songs from it:
“If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” (the movie gaslights you into thinking Barbra Streisand isn’t pretty and then reveals that she is, in fact, pretty)
“People” (“who need people are the luckiest people in the world”)
“Don’t Rain On My Parade”
Oh, there was also recent “Funny Girl” drama! 2022 saw a revival of the musical on Broadway, led by Beanie Feldstein. Feldstein had big shoes to fill, though, and the general consensus was that she didn’t have the voice for the role. She was quickly replaced by former “Glee” actress Lea Michele, someone who had been angling for the role for her entire life and also can probably read.
…oh, this column isn’t just about Funny Girl? My bad. Besides Oliver! and Funny Girl, there were three other Best Picture nominees. We watched one (The Lion in Winter) while the other two are discussed briefly below.
Rachel, Rachel. Paul Newman directed and his wife Joanne Woodward starred. The film is a sensitive look at the life of a spinster, but the second half devolves into a generic pregnancy scare plot.
Romeo and Juliet. This one’s famous because director Franco Zeffirelli cast teenagers to play the title roles.
1968 highest grossing film: 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Or maybe Funny Girl, depending on your source.) It’s more a “vibes” movie than a “plot” movie: there’s some black monoliths, an AI who kills some astronauts [insert topical AI joke here], and a glowing space fetus. It’s, uh, not nearly as watchable as Funny Girl.
Best Actress Oscar race: A DRAW! Both Katharine Hepburn (for The Lion in Winter) and Barbra Streisand (for Funny Girl) took home trophies. Streisand’s win as Fanny Brice avenged her Tony loss to Carol Channing, while Kate’s win gave her back-to-back Best Actress Oscars (a feat previously only done by Luise Rainer).
The other nominees were Joanne Woodward (for Rachel, Rachel) and:
Patricia Neal for The Subject Was Roses. It’s an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning play about a vet (played by Martin Sheen) who comes home to find his parents squabbling. You might remember Patricia Neal from her excellent performance in Hud. (I mean, I didn’t, but you might.)
Vanessa Redgrave in Isadora. The film is about the modern dance choreographer Isadora Duncan, who is (unfortunately) best known because of her death: while driving, her scarf caught in the spokes of the car wheel and strangled her.
Relitigating the Best Actor race: We’re taking it away from Cliff Robertson—his Charly performance was not good. And you know what? If they can have a tie in the Best Actress category, let’s call it a draw here too and award both Alan Bates and Alan Arkin Oscars. Y’all know I loved the performances in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and perhaps awarding Bates an Oscar can get The Fixer released on DVD.
Quick Hits
Rosemary’s Baby, about a woman getting impregnated by the devil. The book by Ira Levin is pretty breezy, but Roman Polanski directed the film adaptation and, y’know, I don’t wanna watch that.
A Steve McQueen twofer: Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair. A little editorializing: I don’t think either of these films have aged well. Bullitt’s police plot feels thin and its action dated, while The Thomas Crown Affair is an incoherent acid trip. Nonetheless, McQueen’s enjoyable in both.
How about some more musicals that didn’t win Best Picture?
Star!, a musical biopic about Gertrude Lawrence (the lady who first played Anna in “The King and I”) starring Julie Andrews.
Finian’s Rainbow, an early Francis Ford Coppola film. An Irishman steals a pot of gold and absconds with it to the American South with the leprechaun Og in hot pursuit. No, I did not make any part of that up.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, about a magical flying car, starring Dick Van Dyke and written by Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). This one’s also not made up.
The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and the Monkees’ Head.
Barbarella. Jane Fonda was directed by her husband Roger Vadim in this adaptation of a French comic (produced by Dino De Laurentiis). It’s billed as a sexual Alice in Wonderland set in space, which, uh, YMMV with that. The band Duran Duran got their name from the villain from the film.
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. This one’s considered the first modern zombie movie and a watershed moment for the horror genre.
Quicker Hits: the first Planet of the Apes…Ice Station Zebra…the Clint Eastwood Western Hang ‘Em High and WWII film Where Eagles Dare…Skidoo, which is like Barbarella with worse press….Peter Sellers in The Party…The Odd Couple, which we discussed briefly here…Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West…The Boston Strangler, with Tony Curtis doing the strangling…two Ingrid Bergman films…Brian De Palma’s Greetings, which was Robert de Niro’s first major role and the first film to be rated X by the MPAA…John Cassavetes’ Faces.
Trivia Questions
The quiz below serves as a refresher for some of the material covered in the five posts on 1968 films. The answers can be found in the footnotes.
This character in “A Tale of Two Cities” marries Charles Darnay and is loved by Sydney Carton.1
This villain of “David Copperfield” is a law clerk embezzling from Mr. Wickfield.2
This “little” character is the protagonist of “The Old Curiosity Shop.”3
This man wrote the epistolary novel “Flowers for Algernon.”4
Ravi Shankar is the father of this artist, whose best-selling jazz-pop album “Come Away with Me” won the 2003 Grammy for Album of the Year.5
Merdeka 118, the second-tallest building in the world, is located in this country. (Hint: that country had the world’s tallest building from 1998 to 2004.)6
This Carson McCullers novel is about a lonely girl who wants to go on her brother’s honeymoon.7
This Austrian composer, known as the Father of the Symphony, composed over one hundred of them.8
This French composer is known for his “Symphonie fantastique” (1830).9
This director helmed The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964).10
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was also known for penning this anti-war novel whose name flips a phrase popularized in the George M. Cohan song “Over There.”11
This holiday, which begins five days after Yom Kippur, commemorates the Israelites’ time in the desert.12
The story of the foiling of Haman’s plot to exterminate the Jews of the Persian Empire (which is celebrated on Purim) is told in this book of the Old Testament.13
This director was behind the camera for eight Katharine Hepburn films, including Little Women (1933), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and Adam’s Rib (1949).14
This woman was the mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John.15
On to 1969!
Lucie Manette.
Uriah Heep.
“Little” Nell Trent.
Daniel Keyes.
Norah Jones.
Malaysia.
“The Member of the Wedding.”
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869).
John Frankenheimer.
“Johnny Got His Gun.”
Sukkot.
Book of Esther.
George Cukor.
Eleanor of Aquitaine.