When the 1960s began, the French New Wave was only just emerging, Alfred Hitchcock was at his peak, the Hays Code was still very much in effect, and black-and-white pics were still very much the norm; Dwight Eisenhower was president, nobody had heard of Bob Dylan or the Beatles, and the Vietnam War was barely a blip on any American’s radar. Fast-forward ten years, and everything had changed: TV and movies in color, a nation divided by war, a cultural landscape in flux, social movements making rapid gains, longstanding institutions and norms in question and in decline, Hitchcock near the end of his career, the French New Wave supplanted by the New Hollywood, the Hays Code trashed and gone, a rising right-wing backlash against all of it, and everything fueled by sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll.
Faced with all that change and uncertainty and flux - coupled with the freedom brought by the decimation of the Hays Code - the best filmmakers of 1969 responded with movies whose heroes were outlaws: drug dealers, murderers, robbers, petty thieves, prostitutes, and political revolutionaries, all of them standing against corrupt systems of law, authority, and tradition that served only to keep people down, trap them in poverty, force them to conform, and profit off their suffering and subjugation. And these heroes weren’t great people either: they were coarse, unpleasant, thoughtless, and selfish. It wasn’t about overthrowing one system and replacing it with another: rather, the best films of ‘69 were more anarchic. Or maybe nihilistic is a better word: these were gritty, grimy films, turning their cameras on a world whose people and institutions and ideas and places (even the ‘good’ ones) had all been dulled and sullied by decades and centuries of built-up dirt. Hardly the we-can-do-anything flower-power Woodstock optimism we associate with 1969 - but then again, the year ended at Altamont, so maybe the filmmakers were on to something.
To identify the Best Picture of 1969, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
If there’s a Platonic ideal of a 1969 film, it’s probably The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah's orgiastically violent masterpiece about robbers and warlords alternately teaming up with and double-crossing each other until practically everybody dies in a hail of blood and bullets. Wild Bunch also holds a significant place in film history, influencing a generation of directors with its graphic realism. So it’s no surprise that Wild Bunch is also one of the most acclaimed movies of the year, showing up on critics’ “all-time best” lists far more often than any other ‘69 film.
But critics love the New Hollywood movement and 1969 is rife with New Hollywood classics, so the year as a whole is pretty well represented even without Peckinpah. Also earning acclaim is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s buddy comedy that replicates The Wild Bunch’s violence, pessimism, and anti-establishmentarianism with a lot more humor, polish, and Hollywood good looks. (That idyllic bike ride would probably hit differently with Ernest Borgnine riding the bike.)
Then there’s Easy Rider, which took Butch and Sundance and put them on a motorcycle, with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda standing in for Newman and Redford’s doomed wild outlaws who only want to be free. Wyatt and Billy may not be quite as charismatic as Butch and Sundance - it’s hard to beat Redford and Newman in that regard - but with its present-day setting, Easy Rider offers a more searing indictment of America’s hypocritical conformist culture than the other two films even attempt.
Finally, not to be overlooked is 1969’s X-rated Oscar winner. Moving from the highways to the streets, from the Wild West to the modern city, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy offers a bleak vision of urban decay that’s far less bloody than Wild Bunch but just as pessimistic. (If you want a film that combines the bloody orgy with the bleak urban decay, don’t worry: Martin Scorsese will be entering the chat shortly.) Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo are a buddy pair just as compelling as Billy & Wyatt or Butch & Sundance - but like The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy pulls even its heroes into its indictment: we sympathize with Joe and Ratso because they’re struggling within a hyper-powerful system that beats them down, but we’re also aware that they’re ugly and unlikable too. Good times!
Here’s a list of 1969 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): The Wild Bunch (T84), The Color of Pomegranates (T84)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Kes (T75), The Wild Bunch (T75)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Midnight Cowboy (43), Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (73), The Wild Bunch (79), Easy Rider (84)
Leonard Maltin: The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (54)
BBC American (2015): The Wild Bunch (52)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): The Sorrow & the Pity (20), Midnight Cowboy (57), The Wild Bunch (83)
The Wild Bunch gets the most citations, most notably a spot on Sight & Sound’s prestigious top-100 list, but Easy Rider, Butch & Sundance, and Midnight Cowboy all get multiple mentions of their own. (One critics’ list includes all four: the American Film Institute’s 2007 ranking of the 100 best American movies of all time.)
Beyond that, three other films earn citations. Making Sight & Sound’s top 100 alongside Wild Bunch is The Color of Pomegranates, Sergei Parajanov's surrealist biopic of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. Sight & Sound also cites Kes, Ken Loach’s kitchen-sink drama about a working-class South Yorkshire boy and the kestrel he decides to train; it’s been required viewing for generations of British kids ever since, and its attack on the UK’s school system is every bit as indelible as Lindsay Anderson’s in If… the year before. And if none of those films are bleak and depressing enough for you, there’s also The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ four-hour Holocaust documentary that Entertainment Weekly cited as the 20th-greatest movie ever made.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes sixteen films from 1969:
(69) The Wild Bunch
(183) Kes
(249) The Color of Pomegranates
(261) My Night at Maud's
(336) Midnight Cowboy
(350) Army of Shadows
(418) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(462) The Sorrow and the Pity
(470) Easy Rider
(533) The Damned
(559) Satyricon
(596) Salesman
(657) Antonio das Mortes
(779) Z
(854) Diaries, Notes and Sketches
(894) Macunaima
The Wild Bunch tops the list here too, but all seven of the films we’ve mentioned make TSPDT’s top 500 - albeit with Kes and Color of Pomegranates ranking a little higher than Midnight Cowboy, Butch & Sundance, and Easy Rider. Also high on the list: My Night at Maud’s, one of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, and Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville’s recently-rediscovered masterpiece about the French Resistance in World War II.
General Audiences
But which films from 1969 do general audiences still watch?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger than average and more likely male, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1969, according to IMDB (as of August 27, 2022):
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (215,118 votes)
Midnight Cowboy (110,755)
Easy Rider (109,799)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (91,855)
The Wild Bunch (84,572)
True Grit (47,532)
The Italian Job (46,343)
Take the Money and Run (30,034)
Z (28,748)
Army of Shadows (23,640)
Kes is just behind in 12th place; My Night at Maud’s and The Color of Pomegranates trail further back, in 19th and 21st place respectively.
James Bond always does well on IMDB, but otherwise, there are our four New Hollywood classics at the top of the list: Butch & Sundance gets more than twice as many votes as any other film; Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider are neck-and-neck in second and third; The Wild Bunch is a little further back in fifth; and then there’s a huge gap between those four and the rest. It’s been a recurring theme throughout this project, and we see it again here: critics and general audiences really do gravitate toward the same movies, even though we often say they don’t.
Slightly further back are Z and Army of Shadows, two films about European resistance movements that also made TSPDT’s top-1000 list. Also noteworthy in eighth place: Take the Money and Run, our first encounter with Woody Allen. One thing we haven’t noted yet is the predominance of early-career directors this year: Sam Peckinpah, John Schlesinger, Ken Loach and George Roy Hill had all helmed films before, but 1969 is the breakout year for all of them. (Not to mention Dennis Hopper, who made his directing debut on Easy Rider.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1969 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
Midnight Cowboy (4) 146
The Wild Bunch (3) 120
Easy Rider (2) 110
The Sorrow and the Pity (3) 106
Z (2) 79
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1) 74
Army of Shadows (1) 70
My Night at Maud's 66
The Color of Pomegranates (2) 56
Kes 49
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1) 45
Satyricon 40
The Italian Job 32
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1) 31
True Grit 26
Medium Cool (2) 23
Putney Swope 13
La Femme Infidele 9
The Learning Tree 8
This Man Must Die 8
A Very Curious Girl 7
Boy 6
Hello, Dolly! 5
Goodbye, Columbus 4
Salesman 4
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice 3
Cactus Flower 3
The Damned 3
Burn! 1
Not everybody is a fan of 1969 in film: one of our 23 panelists elected to pass on this year entirely!
There’s very little consensus among our panelists this year. Eleven different films got first-place votes, tying a record first set in 1961, and no film got more than four first-place votes. 1940 and 1957 were the only other years where not a single film has gotten at least five first-place votes - and we had fewer voting panelists in the ‘40s and ‘50s as well, so it’s even more remarkable that it happens here. (And it won’t happen again for a while: we already have our panelists’ votes in for the 1970s, and there’s not a single year in that decade where the first-place votes are this widely scattered.)
Nevertheless, several movies stand out above the rest, and here again we see those same New Hollywood classics rising to the top. There’s Midnight Cowboy in first with 146 points, easily outpacing second-place Wild Bunch; Easy Rider trails just behind in third. Surprisingly, Butch & Sundance doesn’t do as well, trailing well behind in sixth place; maybe our panelists like their outlaw films a little grittier. (What does perform well is The Sorrow and the Pity, in fourth place well ahead of fifth-place Z.)
Also worth noting is Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler’s exploration of divided America that blends fiction with documentary; it didn’t ping our radar, but it got two write-in first-place votes.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch, and Easy Rider are all no-brainers; so is Butch & Sundance, even though it didn’t hit quite as well with our panel. You might have other favorites - I’m an Army of Shadows fan myself - but between critics, scholars, and general audiences, there’s a strong consensus that these are the four standout films of 1969, the ones that best stand the test of time.
That leaves just one spot, and there are six films that could realistically claim it: The Sorrow and the Pity, Z, My Night at Maud’s, The Color of Pomegranates, Kes, and Army of Shadows. Z and Army of Shadows play best with general audiences; Kes, Maud’s, and Pomegranates score highest with critics; and The Sorrow and the Pity was the clear favorite with our panelists. There’s not a clear right or wrong answer here - but this is probably our best chance to honor the legendary Ken Loach, so we’ll go with Kes. If you disagree, you can slot your own favorite into that fifth spot - but there’s no disputing which films are the top four.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1968 are:
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID
EASY RIDER KES MIDNIGHT COWBOY THE WILD BUNCH
The Sorrow and the Pity is probably our runner-up, based on its strong showing with the panel. So far, we’ve only nominated two documentaries, Night & Fog and (unfortunately) Triumph of the Will - but the 1970s are a banner decade for documentary films, so it won’t be long before another one makes the cut.
In a year that’s dominated by a movement called “New,” it’s fitting that - for the first time since 1933! - all five of our nominees feature directors who’ve never been nominated for a Moonlight before: George Roy Hill, Dennis Hopper, Ken Loach, John Schlesinger, and Sam Peckinpah. That’s even true of our five runner-up films: Army of Shadows’ Jean-Pierre Melville has a nomination for Le Samouraï in 1967, but Marcel Ophuls, Eric Rohmer, Sergei Parajanov, and Costa-Gavras would all have been first-time nominees too.
And as all of our directors are newbies, it’s no surprise that these films represent a leap forward in movie history in several ways. We’ve already mentioned that most films were in black and white at the start of the 1960s - in fact all five of our 1960 nominees were B&W films - but this year all our nominees are in color, only the second time that’s happened. (1967 was the other year.) And these films are also emblematic of another new trend in moviemaking: the use of pop songs in the soundtrack. We’ve already seen it here and there, in films like The Graduate, but 1969 is when pop songs become a lot more ubiquitous: Butch & Sundance wouldn’t be the same without “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” nor would Easy Rider without “Born To Be Wild” or Midnight Cowboy without “Everybody’s Talkin’.” We’ll see that much, much more often in the years to come.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s a tougher call this year: it may be obvious which films are the top four, but it’s a lot harder to rank them in order. The Wild Bunch is the clear leader with film critics; Butch & Sundance is the runaway winner with general audiences; Midnight Cowboy is tops with our panel; and Easy Rider scores well across all three metrics. How to decide? We can eliminate Easy Rider first, for one very simple reason: it trails Midnight Cowboy on every metric, if only slightly. After that, we’ll listen to our panelists and knock off Butch & Sundance; it may be tops with general audiences, but it definitely ranks behind Midnight Cowboy and The Wild Bunch everywhere else.
So: Midnight Cowboy, or The Wild Bunch? Peckinpah has the edge with critics: Wild Bunch made Sight & Sound’s top 100 and ranks ahead of Midnight Cowboy on TSPDT’s aggregate ranking. But general audiences favor Midnight Cowboy by a slight margin, and so do our panelists - and all else being equal, we’ll side with the panel.
So congratulations to Midnight Cowboy, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1969!
End your movie with Dustin Hoffman riding in the back of a bus, and you’ve got a hit on your hands.
Midnight Cowboy doesn’t often show up on lists of the greatest films ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, but maybe it should. It’s only the fourth film to win both the Oscar and the Moonlight for its year, joining It Happened One Night (1934), Casablanca (1942 Moonlight/1943 Oscar), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). We could see this list grow soon, though: The Godfather is likely a lock for 1972, at least, and there are several other Oscar winners from the ‘70s that still hold up.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1970:
THE CONFORMIST
FIVE EASY PIECES
GIMME SHELTER MASH PATTON
Once again, all five directors are first-time Moonlight nominees. It hadn’t happened since 1933, but now it’s happened two years in a row - underscoring just how much of a generational transformation was underway here at the end of the ‘60s. The next decade is largely going to be dominated by directors we haven’t yet met: Altman, Friedkin, Coppola, Brooks, Spielberg, Forman, Malick, Lucas, Allen, Lynch, Scorsese. Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman still have great work ahead of them (as do Sidney Lumet and Andrei Tarkovsky, whom we’ve seen once each so far), but otherwise - except for the odd film here and there - we’re not going to hear much again from any of the directors we encountered through 1967. New Hollywood really does take over the industry, to a degree we’ve never seen before.
In the meantime, we’ve got an interesting crop of films here. It’s our first look at Robert Altman (MASH) and Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist). Patton won the Academy Award that year, so we could see our fifth Oscar/Moonlight double very soon. Five Easy Pieces is our first nominated film with Jack Nicholson in a starring role, following his supporting turn in Easy Rider.
And following The Sorrow & the Pity’s near-miss this year, Gimme Shelter becomes our third documentary to earn a nomination - and the first one unrelated to the Nazis. (It may have more company soon: other documentaries from the decade include 1975’s Grey Gardens, 1976’s Harlan County USA, and 1978’s The Last Waltz.) Gimme Shelter is also noteworthy for another reason: co-director Charlotte Zwerin becomes our fourth female nominee, alongside Agnès Varda, Maya Deren, and fellow documentarian Leni Riefenstahl.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1969? Who should win the Moonlight for 1970? Join our community and weigh in!
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