1968 was a dynamic year in cinema. French cinema. Important new movies from Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol. Even more revolution happening off screen. Many young French directors staged a revolution at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. One of the godfathers of the French New Wave, Henri Langlois, was fired from his long-time post as head of the Cinematheque Francaise, leading to further rebellion. Godard even went so far as to punch producer Iain Quarrier in the face in a dispute over the cutting of his film One Plus One. Yes, it was a wild and crazy year.

But not in the USA. Traditional Hollywood was in some major doldrums. The five movies nominated for Best Picture from 1968 – The Lion in Winter, Rachel, Rachel, Romeo and Juliet, Funny Girl, and eventual winner, Oliver!, run the gamut from mediocre to pretty good. Nothing particularly revolutionary, new, or exciting. I admit that the one movie to which the cinephiles flocked, 2001 A Space Odyssey, has never done very much for me. Mark Harris’ book “Pictures at the Revolution,” does a marvelous job of analyzing the five Best Pictures contenders in 1967 and demonstrating the changing of the guard that was going on in mainstream American film.

But that was 1967 and I can’t very well write a remembrance on the 51^st anniversary of a year. No, 50 years on and I am stuck looking back at 1968, what would appear to be a rather drab year for American movies.

And yet, there were bright spots. Because just beneath the surface, the kind of revolutionary spirit that was in full force across the Atlantic in France was sprouting some growth in SoCal. Let’s take a look, shall we, at five debuts from the year 1968. Four of them are fine movies. One is not. Four of the filmmakers would go on to have significant careers. One would not. And one of the movies may not really be a debut since the director had already completed another movie. But that one wouldn’t be released until several years later, so for purposes of this little experiment, I’m referring to his second completed movies as his debut.

With that preamble out of the way, I give you 1968 – the Rookies.

THE OBSESSIVE – Brian De Palma – Murder a la Mod and Greetings

I am beginning with a double feature of debuts from De Palma. Both were released in 1968, and they reveal different aspects of his style. Though in later years, he would come to be seen as the most devout imitator of Alfred Hitchcock (indeed, Thomas Leitch wrote an entire chapter entitled “How to Steal from Hitchcock” about the works of De Palma), at the beginning of his career, De Palma was more interested in playing with many more influences in an attempt to get at his true concern – the nature of obsession. Murder a la Mod, the first and lesser of his two 1968 releases, is teeming with ideas about the nature of film. It has a Truman Show quality, but is a lot more surreal and silly. Greetings, a more serious experiment, portrayed three restless young men, each struggling with a different obsession. One is a sex addict. Another devotes his entire being to disproving the Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination. And the third is a voyeur. Through a loosely defined episodic plotline, each will come to an ironic resolution. This counter-culture exploration shares some thematic concerns with the monster hit from the following year, Easy Rider. But De Palma shows a good deal more cinematic exuberance and genuine wit in both of his movies than you’ll find in Dennis Hopper’s breakthrough. And in Greetings, he has a very young Robert De Niro as one of his three protagonists. (I won’t tell you which one.)

De Palma would become a major director throughout the 1970s with those Hitchcockian suspense stories, one of which was actually called Obsession, and was drawn from Vertigo. And as such, he would get the reputation as an imitator. But Greetings reveals a young director brimming with ideas of his own, as well as those borrowed from others, and still stands as a testament to the rebellious spirit of the late ‘60s.

THE ROCK STAR – Bob Rafelson – Head

Rafelson would go on to forge an interesting career in film, but I’ve got to say it right up front. Head is a dreadful movie. There is some debate as to whether it was intentionally dreadful, but I tend to think that this was just a guy in over his – you got it – head. As Rafelson himself admitted, he didn’t think he’d ever get the chance to make another movie so he just poured every slapdash idea he had onto the screen in his debut. He had led an interesting life before getting into film. A bit of a Good Morning Viet Nam resume, serving as a DJ while stationed in Japan, and later playing in a rock and roll band in Mexico. That experience led him, along with producing partner Bert Schneider, to develop a madcap series about the adventures of a young rock and roll band. Their idea fortuitously coincided with the rise of a rather popular foursome from Liverpool, and thus, The Monkees were formed. Rafelson co-produced two seasons of that underrated TV show and then, in the wake of successful Beatles movies, got the backing to put the Monkees into a movie. The Monkees were talented comedians and passable actors, but Head is a mess, with little of the control Richard Lester would show in his Beatles movies. Still, it is hard not to laugh watching Peter Tork confronted by an aggressive, uniformed football player in a foxhole during battle. There are good things in Head, but it seemed that Rafelson was not a director with proper restraint or maturity to make an entire film work.

And then, lo and behold, a few years later, he and writing partner/actor Jack Nicholson sprung Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens on the world. Two glorious explorations of disaffected America. Rafelson would make several more interesting movies, none of them totally successful, in a rather sporadic film career. But he gave us two gems, along with helping launch Nicholson’s career. And it all began with Head.

THE FORGOTTEN – Noel Black – Pretty Poison

Some of the other directors on this list were well known by the time they made their first features, but none of them had better standing as an actual filmmaker than Noel Black. That standing rested entirely on his acclaimed 17 minute coming-of-age film Skaterdater, which won prizes in festivals all over the world in 1966. Skaterdater remains an outstanding example of the short film, using music, ambient sound, and creative camerawork to document a group of adolescent boys moving from their passion for skateboarding to a newfound passion for the opposite sex. For his first feature, Black would also focus on an adolescent infatuation, only this time the adolescent was in fact a grown, albeit immature, man, and the object of his affections was far from the innocent girl in Skaterdater. Other highly-regarded movies from the late ‘60s – Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands – would build stories around a couple and a crime spree, but in actors Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, Black offered the quirkiest, and in some ways, darkest version of the story. Weld plays the seemingly innocent Sue Ann Stepanek, whose all-American beauty attracts the attention of Perkins’ older, and somewhat unstable, Dennis Pitt. Sue Ann is right out of the classic noir-ish femme fatale mold, easily manipulating the older man into freeing her from the burdensome restrictions of middle class suburbia. Pretty Poison’s unpleasant subject matter resulted in bad reviews and mediocre box office, and had not a few critics come to its defense, it would have probably vanished from history. But the critics did come and it eventually took its place as a minor gem, full of compelling performances and sharp critique of modern America.

Alas, Noel Black’s movies were deemed too narrowly focused to attract major audiences, and he vanished from the world of feature films not long after his two early successes. He would have a good career as a journeyman director of television projects, but he would never get the chance to develop his feature filmmaking beyond the promise of those early endeavors.

THE CRITIC – Peter Bogdanovich – Targets

Bogdanovich was the closest thing America had to Godard and Truffaut. Like the founders of the New Wave, he had begun as a film critic before taking his place behind the camera. His entrée into making movies came from Roger Corman, the titan of low budget filmmaking, who hired Bogdanovich to write a draft of Corman’s motorcycle drama The Wild Angels. A couple of years later, again with Corman’s backing, Bogdanovich tackled his first feature. Seen fifty years on, Targets is still jarring in its depiction of the all-American boy-turned-serial killer. This was two years after Charles Whitman killed more than a dozen people in a shooting spree that culminated at the University of Texas tower, the first mass shooting of its type in American history. Tim O’Kelly’s blandly handsome Bobby Thompson was clearly modelled on Whitman and his dispassionate cold-blooded killer has been seen time and time again over the past fifty years. The fascinating structural element of the story is how Bogdanovich found a way to weave a parallel storyline about an iconic horror film actor who ends up disarming the killer and then announcing that real life is now so much more terrifying than made up movie monsters. The reason for the odd structure is that Corman already had about twenty minutes of horror footage featuring the iconic Boris Karloff, with a commitment from the great actor to film several more scenes. So Bogdanovich, taking full advantage of the chance to work with Karloff, ingeniously wove the disparate storylines together. The result is a powerful and unique indictment of American gun culture.

This debut would launch Bogdanovich’s most fertile period. He followed it up with the magnificent Last Picture Show, the effective screwball What’s Up, Doc?, and the period con caper Paper Moon before seeming to run out of his original magic. A string of movies of varying quality followed, but he maintained his presence as a writer, actor, and television director. But Targets, perhaps sadly, still has relevance fifty years later.

THE KING – Mel Brooks – The Producers

It’s good to be the king. Brooks was past 40 and already a larger-than-life comedic presence by the time he got around to directing his first movie. He had risen to the top of the all-star writing staff of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and had begun a fledgling career as a performer, scoring big with his recording of “The 2,000 Year Old Man” comedy sketch in 1961. When he finally got the chance to stand behind the camera for a feature film, he pulled out all the stops in this hilarious depiction of the cutthroat world of Broadway. Constantly trampling the line between good and bad taste, the story revolved around a crooked, but kind-hearted producer (Zero Mostel) and his innocent accountant accomplice (Gene Wilder), and it featured such edgy ideas as a producer sleeping with very rich, very old women in exchange for their financial backing, and a singing and dancing extravaganza about Adolf Hitler. Only Brooks would have the audacity to try this, and the comedic genius to make it work. Though slammed by some, The Producers was enough of a hit to help launch one of the dominant voices in American film comedy in the final quarter of the 20^th century.

Perhaps sadly, Brooks moved away from the type of satire he featured in The Producers, toward spoofing existing genres, but his success in unquestionable. He has made some of the funniest movies in American film history. It’s good to be the king.

And fifty years ago, it was a pretty good rookie class.