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1968 Oscar® Chronicle
1968 (41st) Academy Awards, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles; 14 April 1969
Best Picture: Oliver!
Best Director: Carol Reed
Best Actor: Cliff Robertson
Best Actress: Katharine Hepburn & Barbra Streisand (tie)
Best Supporting Actor: Jack Albertson
Best Supporting Actress: Ruth Gordon
View all the Oscars® for 1968

The Year in Summary:

The marriage of films and television was in for a shaky time this year, with television companies going into their own production of films for theatrical release, to which end they signed deals with some of Hollywood's major directors and actors. They could thus compete with Hollywood-produced films for subsequent sale to TV. The year also continued the pace of recent film-making. More and better films were being made around the world with American money financing a large percentage of them. Films of note for the year included The Fixer, The Lion in Winter, Barbarella, In Cold Blood, Isadora, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Planet of the Apes, and The Legend of Lylah Clare. Musicals included Oliver!, Star!, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Fred Astaire's return to the screen in the delightful Finian's Rainbow. New faces of promise were Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, Carol White, Joanna Shinkus, Anita Pallenberg, and Barbra Streisand, the Broadway favorite who starred in three musicals -- William Wyler's Funny Girl, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, directed by Vincente Minnelli, and Hello, Dolly!, directed by Gene Kelly. Death claimed Nick Adams, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Bobby Driscoll, Fay Bainter, Dorothy Gish, Hunt Stromberg, Robert Z. Leonard, Franchot Tone, Lee Tracy, Ramon Novarro and Walter Wanger.

  • New Delhi, 5 January: Louis Malle has arrived in India, where he plans to make Calcutta, a documentary film.
  • New York, 15 January: Customs officials have seized a copy of Jack Smith's avant-garde film Flaming Creatures. The picture has been declared obscene, and the Justice Department is starting proceedings against its distributor.
  • New York, 19 January: A Swedish film directed by Vilgot Sjöman, Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult (I Am Curious -- Yellow), in which Lena Nyman is the central figure, has been seized by the United States Customs Service here. Arthur Olick, an assistant U.S. attorney, said yesterday that the film was seized because "...it leaves nothing to the imagination, including the act of fornication."
  • London, 20 January: Last year, the Polish-born director Roman Polanski made The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, in London, with a young unknown American actress, Sharon Tate. Today, aged 33, Polanski married the 24-year-old Tate. Polanski began his career in Poland, but has since made films abroad, one in Holland (an episode of The Beautiful Swindlers) and three in England, the first two being Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac. He now hopes to settle in the United States with his wife. Polanski has just signed a contract to direct his first Hollywood film, Rosemary's Baby, a horror story set in Manhattan.
  • New York, 9 February: Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes looks like it may change the course and momentum of science fiction films, which have been in the doldrums for most the decade, in large part reduced to the role of a supermarket supplying decorative elements to spice up other genres. Adapted by the prolific Rod Serling and the former blacklist victim Michael Wilson from the satirical novel by Pierre Boulle titled Monkey Planet, Planet of the Apes has reworked the time travel theme, putting astronaut Charlton Heston through a timeslip and on to a pre-holocaust Earth in which intelligent apes have become the defenders of "humanity." Firmly controlled by Schaffner, an old-fashioned craftsman, and strikingly photographed in the national parks of Utah and Arizona by Leon Shamroy, Planet of the Apes moves at a measured pace towards a memorable climax in which Heston finds the ruined, half-buried remains of the Statue of Liberty and comes to the bitter realization that he is on Earth after all. The remarkably flexible ape makeup, which has enabled the actors playing the apes to create believable characters rather than sterotypes, was created by John Chambers. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter are outstanding as the sympathetic ape scientists who examine Heston to discover whether he might be the "missing link" in simian development, a delightful conceit that neatly underlines the notion of rational ape confronting irrational man.
  • London, 15 February: Laslo Benedek's The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, has at last been seen here. It has been banned by the British censors for 14 years due to the activities of a group of bikers in the film that were judged likely to incite violence among the youth.
  • New York, 21 February: Variety has reported that the 1967 release of Gone With the Wind earned $7.5 million in film rentals for MGM.
  • New York, 25 February: MGM has launched its publicity campaign for Stanley Kubrick's new film 2001: A Space Odyssey with a four-page advertisement in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Star.
  • London, 4 March: At the ages of 17 and 15 respectively, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey are as close to the ages of Romeo and Juliet as William Shakespeare intended. And, indeed, they make a very pretty couple of star-crossed lovers in Franco Zeffirelli's exuberant screen version of Romeo and Juliet. Alas, neither of them has a shred of acting ability, so that Shakespeare's verse is hopelessly garbled whenever they appear. Poetry takes second place to pictorial extravagance, with the rich Technicolor photography of Pasqualino De Santis and handsome costumes designed by Danilo Donati a treat for the eye. Some acting ballast is provided by Laurence Olivier's prologue, Michael York's athletic Tybalt and John McEnery's whimsical Mercutio. The Italian Zeffirelli began his career as an actor and later became Luchino Visconti's assistant on films like La Terra trema and Senso. He has also enjoyed a successful career as an international opera designer and director in London, New York and Milan, with a reputation for spectacle.
  • Copenhagen, 20 March: The death of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, aged 79, has caused sadness and anger among his admirers, due to the negative response to his last film, Gertrud, released in 1965. The film, which deals with the growing awareness of a young woman (Nina Pens Rode) betrayed in love (by Bendt Rothe), has remained both unappreciated and misunderstood. Subsequent to its failure, the great director had difficulty in getting his projects realized. He never got the chance to make Jesus Christ Jew, which had haunted him since 1949. To quote Gertrud, his life was "a long, endless pursuit of dreams, one superimposed upon the other."
  • New York, 4 April: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, loosely adapted from his own story The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke, explores at greater length the question taken up in Planet of the Apes regarding the forces that control man's evolution. 2001, shot in England at a cost of $10.5 million, aims to restore speculative thought to science fiction film, along with a primitive sense of wonder that harkens back to the early days of cinema. The result is a technical tour de force in which images of vast, complex spacecraft float infinitely slowly through deep space to the strains of Strauss' waltz, "The Blue Danube." At its heart the film contains one of the most stunning jump cuts in film -- the moment when an animal bone hurled into the air by a prehistoric ape/man is transformed into a slowly turning spaceship. We follow space-age man Keir Dullea in a search for a Higher Power behind a mysterious monolity discovered buried on the moon. He outwits the homicidal mission computer HAL (move each letter in "IBM" back one letter!) before taking a hallucinogenic ride through a star gate to reemerge as a "transcended man." Kubrick has a clinical vision of the future in which mankind is just a cipher controlled by the force embodied in the monolith. But the reclusive filmmaker remains coy about the message, claiming, "The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it. Those who won't believe their eyes won't be able to appreciate this film."
  • Paris, 8 April: George Gorse, the Minister for Information, has authorized the release of Romain Gary's Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Péron (The Birds Come to Die in Peru), starring Jean Seberg and Maurice Ronet. The Cinema Control Commission had asked for a ban on the film.
  • Los Angeles, 10 April: This year the Academy Award ceremony was held under unusually somber circumstances. The assissination of Reverend Martin Luther King caused the event to be postponed for 48 hours. And for the same reason, the annual post-Oscar® ball was canceled altogether. It was significant, therefore, that most of the major awards went to two films that deal with racial prejudice. The Best Picture winner, Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night, takes place in a small, steamy Mississippi town where Philadelphia's number one detective Virgil Tibbs reluctantly arrives to help the redneck police chief to solve a murder. The fact that the senior visitor is black -- Sidney Poitier at his most dignified and passionate -- and that the local cop is a white bigot, makes for an entertaining game of dominance, with a social message. Rod Steiger, behind yellow sunglasses and incessantly chewing gum, won the Best Actor prize for managing to find nuances in his role as Poitier's adversary. Katharine Hepburn was presented with her second Best Actress Oscar® for Stanley Kramer's comedy of racial coexistence, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. She gave a warm and touching portrayal of an understanding woman whose daughter wishes to marry a black man (Sidney Poitier again), partnered for the last time by Spencer Tracy. Both movies won screenplay Oscars®. The Best Director award went to Mike Nichols for only his second film, The Graduate, a movie that touched a chord among the nation's youth.
  • New York, 17 April: Variety has announced that Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor are to co-star in The Only Game in Town. Filming is scheduled to start in early September.
  • Paris, 17 April: François Truffaut has paid his most direct homage to his idol Alfred Hitchcock in his new film, La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black). Based, like Rear Window, on a novel by William Irish (Cornell Woorich) and with a score by Bernard Herrmann, Hitch's frequent composer, it relates how the widow of a man shot dead on his wedding day tracks down the group of men responsible, and eliminates them one by one. Jeanne Moreau is superb as the seductive avenging angel, and there are splendid cameos from the victims.
  • New York, 18 April: The popularity of film study courses has soared in the last year. There are now 60,000 graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in 1,500 film courses at 120 colleges and universities throughout the United States.
  • New York, 28 April: The American premiere of the Russian-made War and Peace will be held tonight at the DeMille Theater, Seventh Avenue and 47th Street. According to the Russians the seven-hour film is the most expensive ever produced. Screenings will be in two parts: alternate matinees and evenings. Admission prices are a record $7.50 for the best seats.
  • Paris, 30 April: The affair of the Cinémathèque Française has been brought to an end with the reinstatement of Henri Langlois as its head. The crisis erupted last February, but the attempt of the State to control the Cinémathèque dates back further. When André Malraux became Minister of Culture in 1959, the government demanded representatives on the administrative council of the Cinémathèque. They removed control over the funds from Langlois, and appointed a deputy financial manager. Rapidly, the Treasury started quibbling, and the number of civil servants on the administrative council was increased until they had gained a majority. During a meeting of the council on 9 February, Pierre Moinot was elected to the presidency of the Cinémathèque, replacing the film director Marc Allégret. Moinot demanded Langlois' suspension and named Pierre Barbin in his place. Le Monde published a protest signed by 40 directors on 10 February, which mobilized the entire profession. French as well as foreign filmmakers (including Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman) announced they would not permit the new administration to screen their films. Four days later, there were demonstrations outside the Cinémathèque. Given the passion aroused, the State had no choice but to withdraw its control, but also its subsidies. The Cinémathèque will now be free, but poor.
  • New York, 2 May: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are paired again in the screen version of Neil Simon's Broadway smash The Odd Couple, in which two divorced men share an apartment. Matthau is reprising the role he played in the original, that of sloppy Oscar Madison, while Lemmon is cast as fussy Felix Unger, a role originated on Broadway by Art Carney. With a face that resembles a cross between a bloodhound and Yogi Bear, Matthau spent much of the early part of his screen career playing heavies. In a memorable screen debut in 1955 he took a bullwhip to Burt Lancaster in The Kentuckian. Now, at the age of 48, he's hit the big time.
  • New York, 3 May: Producer Joseph E. Levine has sold his company Embassy Films to the Avco conglomerate for $40 million. Embassy first made a name for itself in the early 1960s distributing foreign films, but soon moved into production. Its greatest success to date has been The Graduate.
  • Paris, 6 May: In an announcement made to the daily, Combat, Robert Favre Le Bret, the general organizer of the Cannes Festival, said: "This year's Festival will have sportsmen, musicians, festivities of all kinds and a truly exceptional selection of films."
  • Cannes, 18 May: Robert Favre le Bret, president of the Cannes Film Festival, had every reason to be happy. The 1968 vintage augured well and many prestigious guests were present at the gala opening, during which Gone With the Wind was shown in 70mm and stereophonic sound. Meanwhile, in Paris the students were confronting police across the barricades erected in the Latin Quarter. For some days, the festival-goers seemed unconcerned with the reverberations emanating from the capital. Yet today, just before the showing of the Spanish film, Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappé, an angry group of people climbed onto the stage and grabbed the curtain. "In no way are we going to allow the Festival to continue while students are endangering their lives on the barricades of Paris," they shouted. Among this group were two of the young lions of the New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, as well as Claude Lelouch, Claude Berri, the critic Jean-Louis Bory and the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. In addition to their desire to demonstrate their solidarity with the students, the rebellion was provoked by Culture Minister André Malraux's decision to fire Henri Langlois from his post as head of the Cinémathèque. And in Cannes, as in Paris, events were moving fast. A press conference was held regarding the "Cinémathèque affair," and there were meetings in the auditorium of the Palais. Then came the news of the resignation of four members of the jury, including Louis Malle and Roman Polanski, followed by the decision of Alain Resnais, Milos Forman and Carlos Saura to withdraw their films from the Festival.
         Because of the disruptions to the Festival, many of the interesting works were not shown. The films selected bore witness to the new movements and tendencies in world cinema, particularly the emergence of a whole new generation of young directors who promise to be tomorrow's masters of the art. Among them are representatives of the young Czechoslovakian cinema. Jan Nemec's bold Kafkaesque film, O slavnosti a hostech (A Report on the Party and the Guests), was made two years ago, but was denounced by the National Assmbly in Prague, and has only now been released. Milos Forman, who had astonished us with 1965's Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde), was to have screened Horí, má panenko (The Firemen's Ball) (1967), a virulent satire on Czech society. Another example of the regeneration of the film industry in Eastern Europe is the Hungarian Miklós Janscó, whose originality is well demonstrated in Csillagosok, katonák (The Red and the White) (1967). He uses the possibilities of the large screen, orchestrating a large-scale drama of domination and submission, with minimum dialogue. Conventional editing disappears in this film of less than 25 uninterrupted, single-shot sequences with the camera in constant choreographic movement throughout the action. The Spanish director Carlos Saura would have been one of the top contenders for a prize with his Peppermint Frappé, had the showing of his film not been interrupted. The director has dedicated his film to Luis Buñuel, whose influence is evident in his treatment of the dreams and memories of his hero, focusing on his repressive religious upbringing. However, the demonstrations heralded the death warrant of this year's potentially rich Cannes Film Festival.
  • Los Angeles, 1 June: Director Jacques Demy is making The Model Shop.
  • New York, 3 June: Andy Warhol was hit by several bullets fired by one of his entourage, Valerie Solanis. He is in a hospital, reported to be in critical condition.
  • Washington, DC, 16 July: The American Film Institute has embarked on an ambitious new publishing project to compile a complete catalogue of all films produced in the U.S. since the beginning of the film industry.
  • New York, 12 June: Waif-like beauty Mia Farrow gives monstrous birth to a child of the Devil in Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's brilliant shocker adapted from a novel by Ira Levin. When she and her husband John Cassavetes move into a Gothic apartment building in Manhattan, they are adopted by their elderly neighbors Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. But their kindly attentions mask a sinister purpose, for they are Satanists, and Farrow has been chosen to carry the Devil's baby. Making his Hollywood debut, Polish writer-director Polanski tells the story from Farrow's point of view, so that the audience shares the growing realization on her part that there is something horribly wrong with her pregnancy, and that the twittering, vulgar Gordon and the courtly Blackmer are not all that they seem. Even Cassavetes turns out to be party to the plot as her grisly confinement draws near. Shot on location in the creepy Dakota apartment building in New York City, Rosemary's Baby cleverly mingles the mundane and the macabre to suspend our disbelief in witchcraft and give the film's coven a terrible plausibility.
  • Boston, 19 June: There's never been an insurance investigator like Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair. With a wardrobe full of Paris fashions, some of them rather startling, she has been unleashed on Steve McQueen's Tommy Crown, a laid-back Boston playboy who has a nice line in bank heists. Now he's planning another one, with the full knowledge that he is being stalked by the sophisticated Dunaway, whose investigative methods are as unconventional as her clothes. When they lock horns over a game of chess in Crown's pad, the way they handle the pieces gives a new meaning to the notion of foreplay. Director Norman Jewison's use of split-screen heightens the tension in a movie as sleek and self-satisfied as its protagonists.
  • Hollywood, 5 August: Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni has started shooting his first American film, Zabriskie Point, with Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin.
  • Colorado, 31 August: Robert Redford has opened an ecological ski resort, Sundance, created and named by him.
  • Rome, 13 September: Director Pier Paolo Pasolini's film, Theorem, has been seized by order of the courts.
  • Venice, 18 September: The Festival had ended today in confusion. The Grand Prix of the International Catholic Office of Cinema has been awarded to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem, although it was seized six days ago by the public prosecutor in Rome for obscenity. The film has thus divided believers as much as the general public and critics. It has also displeased some Marxists, who see it as an implicit attack on their ideology, and has disturbed puritans with its attitude toward sexual taboos. This fable of the middle-classes tells how a handsome young man (Terence Stamp) ingratiates himself into the home of a wealthy industrialist and sleeps with every member of the family -- the father, the mother, the daughter, the son, and even the maid. (The latter is played by Laura Betti, who took the best actress prize.) The Q.E.D. of Pasolini's theorem might be puzzling, but there is a certain mathematical beauty in his efforts to reach it.
  • New York, 19 September: Fanny Brice, born to a Jewish New York family, grew up with one burning ambition: to succeed in the theater. That Fanny was ugly, skinny and flat-chested, and yet overcame these apparent disabilities to reach stardom, was testament to her determination. The story of Brice was told in the Broadway musical, Funny Girl, which made a star of a Jewish girl from New York, determined to succeed -- Barbra Streisand. Now Funny Girl, directed by William Wyler, with choreography by Herb Ross, and its terrific Jule Styne-Bob Merrill score, has been filmed, bringing 151 minutes of Streisand. She has presence, humor, acting talent and, above all, a rich and powerful voice that belts its way through the songs with considerable artistry. And co-starring as Brice's no-good husband, Nicky Arnstein, is Dr. Zhivago himself, Omar Sharif, whose collaboration has, reportedly, incurred the disfavor of Egypt's government.
  • London, 26 September: Inspired by Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, Lionel Bart's 1961 London and Broadway musical hit glossed over some of Dickens' more graphic passages but managed to retain a strong subtext to what was essentially light entertainment. For its first half-hour or so, Carol Reed's film version, Oliver!, does a masterful job of telling its story almost exclusively through song and dance. Once 9-year-old orphan Oliver Twist (Mark Lester) falls in with such underworld types as pickpocket Fagin (Ron Moody) and murderous thief Bill Sykes (Oliver Reed), it becomes necessary to inject more and more dialogue, and the film loses some of its momentum. But not to worry: despite such brutal moments as Sikes' murder of Nancy (Shani Wallis), the film gets back on the right musical track, thanks in great part to Onna White's exuberant choreography and the faultless performances by Moody and by Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger. The supporting cast includes Harry Secombe as the self-righteous Mr. Bumble and Joseph O'Conor as Mr. Brownlow, the man who (through a series of typically Dickensian coincidences) rescues Oliver from the streets.
  • New York, 26 September: Flesh is the last film to come from Andy Warhol's Factory, which has closed after the attempt on Warhol's life in June of this year. It is Paul Morrissey's first full-length feature, and has all the hallmarks of the Factory, being peopled by junkies, hookers and drag queens. However, Flesh is narratively more ordered than Warhol's own experimental movies, and subsequently is being given a commercial showing. It is an amusing camp exercise in the best of bad taste. The plot, such as it is, concerns a male hustler (beefy Joe Dallessandro), who sells his body to pay for his wife's girlfriend's abortion. Other members of Warhol's band, such as Geri Miller and Candy Darling, make striking appearances. These characters are treated sympathetically and directly, and Morrissey films them in a simple, unfunny, cinéma vérité manner. Morrissey joined Warhol in 1963 as production assistant and cameraman.
  • Stockholm, 29 September: Release of Skammen (Shame), by Ingmar Bergman, with Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow.
  • New York, 2 October: Director Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood form an explosive partnership in Coogan's Bluff, a pacy police drama that dispatches laconic Arizona lawman Eastwood to New York to extradite homicidal hippie Don Stroud. When Stroud goes on the lam, Eastwood tracks him down by using methods more appropriate to the West than the Big Apple. Lee J. Cobb plays the bemused city cop trying to keep him under control. Stroud is splendidly malevolent as Eastwood's quarry, and Tisha Sterling catches the eye as his strung-out girlfriend. Director Siegel is a durable Hollywood veteran, a montage specialist at Warners in the mid-Forties, whose features career began with The Verdict in 1946. Many of his films have focused on outsiders balefully at odds with society, and Eastwood is the latest addition to Siegel's gallery of tough loners. The two men seem made for each other, and Coogan's Bluff promised an interesting partnership.
  • New York, 9 October: For the first time in the history of American motion pictures, the film industry has, of its own volition, opted to use a classification system. MPAA head Jack Valenti stated that the system will come into effect on 1 November. Classifications are as follows: G - general exhibition; M - mature audiences; R - under 17s only admitted accompanies by an adult; X - adults only (over 18). However, states may raise the ages of the last two ratings to comply with their own laws.
  • New York, 17 October: Impressed by Britisher Peter Yates' staging of a car chase through London in Robbery (1967), Steve McQueen was responsible for getting Yates to direct Bullitt. The hero of this thriller, a police lieutenant, spends a great deal of time speeding after villains through the undulating streets of San Francisco. McQueen is not only bucked by an ambitious politician (Robert Vaughn) but by the mafia as well, as he picks his way through the knotted threads of a murder involving a grand jury witness. The memorable chase occurs about midway through the film, a chase with a difference, and probably the most thrilling ever committed to film, during most of which McQueen insisted on doing his own stunt driving. Jacqueline Bisset plays McQueen's attractive girlfriend. This thriller is put together with pace and style by Yates, directing his first American film, and making stunning use of the locations.
    There is a great, somewhat condensed, QuickTime version of the main chase sequence from Bullitt at classicmustang.com. The file size is 13.7 MB, but if you have a fast connection, it is well worth the visit.
  • Paris, 30 October: Release of La Chamade (Heartbeat), directed by Alain Cavalier, with a screenplay based on the novel by Françoise Sagan. Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve head the cast.
  • New York, 30 October: Director Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter is a 12th-century version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Henry II of England (Peter O'Toole) and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), meet on Christmas Eve to discuss the future of the throne. These two are having slight marital problems, as she is kept in captivity most of the year for raising a rebellion against him, and he flaunts his young mistress. Then there are the problems raised by their three treacherous and traitorous sons: Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry). James Goldman based his brilliant screenplay on his Broadway play. It is a tad wordy, as the action is kept to a minimum, but those words are sharp as daggers. The humor is wicked and black and delivered with very dry, dead-on precision. Sparks fly and the screen sizzles whenever Hepburn and O'Toole tango, which is often. There's also a homo-erotic exchange between Philip of France (Timothy Dalton) and Richard the Lionhearted (Hopkins). Both actors were making their feature-film debuts. Tickets to the film are being sold on a reserved seat basis.
  • Hollywood, 31 October: The blood-spattered corpse of 69-year-old silent star Ramon Novarro has been found sprawled in the bedroom of his Hollywood home. It seems that he choked to death on a lead Art Deco dildo -- a present from Rudolph Valentino -- that had been rammed down his throat by assailants, two young hustler brothers from Chicago, Paul and Tom Ferguson.
  • Paris, 11 November: The French director of Polish origin Walerian Borowczyk has won the art film prize for Goto, l'ile d'amour (Goto, the Island of Love), with Pierre Brasseur, Ligia Branice, Ginette Leclerc and René Dary.
  • Paris, 12 November: From today the Institute of Advanced Cinema Studies (IDHEC) will hold its classes in the Raleigh Cinema building in rue des Vignes.
  • San Francisco, 21 November: Jane Fonda has taken up the cause of the American Indians who have settled on Alcatraz Island.
  • Italy, 29 November: Romain Gary's French film, Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Péron (The Birds Come to Die in Peru), has been banned throughout the country.
  • London, 30 November: Premier of Jean-Luc Godard's film One Plus One, with the rock group the Rolling Stones.
  • New York, 4 December: George Romero's debut film is a Z-budget shocker, Night of the Living Dead, shot over several weekends in Pennsylvania. It chronicles the desperate efforts of a bunch of Middle Americans, trapped in a remote farmhouse, to beat off the attacks of an army of walking dead -- zombies who have inexplicably risen from the grave or broken out of the morgue. With a skill worthy of Hitchcock, Romero undercuts the traditions of the horror movie: the apparent heroine lapses into a state of permanent catatonia early in the film; a young couple, society's hope for the future, are burned to a crisp and return as zombies; and the black hero gets all his companions killed before being mistaken for a zombie and shot by a redneck rescue party. Film freak Romero worked as a grip on North by Northwest when he was at college. Now his own Pittsburgh-based Latent Image Company has graduated from commercials to a drive-in smash.
  • Paris, 22 December: Three Parisian cinemas specializing in sex films, the Strasbourg, Rex and Bosphore, have been closed by the police until mid-February.
  • Italy, 31 December: The total number of productions (including co-productions) for the year is 254 films, compared to 182 in 1965. About 40 films belong to the erotic comedy genre.

Number of movie titles reported for the year 1968 on the Internet Movie Database: 4,520


Lena Nyman and actor/director Vilgot Sjöman in
I Am Curious -- Yellow.

Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann in Bergman's Skammen.

Catherine Deneuve in Cavalier's La Chamade.

Posters for some of the pictures under Oscar® consideration for 1968.

Births:Deaths:
(Non-nominated links are to the IMDb)
Married:
(Non-nominated links are to the IMDb)