Best Music Movies of 1968

Musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a classic tale of an orphan who runs away from the workhouse and joins up with a group of boys headed by the Artful Dodger and trained to be pickpockets by master thief Fagin.

A hapless inventor finally finds success with a flying car, which a dictator from a foreign government sets out to take for himself.

After years of diminishing returns on the big screen, Elvis gets back to his roots on television, and turns in one of the greatest performances of his career.

Featuring performances by popular artists of the 1960s, this concert film highlights the music of the 1967 California festival. Although not all musicians who performed at the Monterey Pop Festival are on film, some of the notable acts include the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Otis Redding, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix's post-performance antics -- lighting a guitar on fire, breaking it and tossing a part into the audience -- are captured.

Winnie the Pooh and his friends experience high winds, heavy rains, and a flood in Hundred Acre Wood.

Two ballet dancers perform a dance enhanced with surreal after-image visuals.

Gertrude Lawrence rises to stage stardom at the cost of happiness.

A biography of the dancer Isadora Duncan, the 1920s dancer who forever changed people's ideas of ballet. Her nude, semi-nude, and pro-Soviet dance projects as well as her attitudes on free love, debt, dress, and lifestyle shocked the public of her time.

A Classic Holiday Celebration with Dean and Friends.

An Irish immigrant and his daughter arrive in Kentucky with a magical piece of gold that alters the course of several lives, including those of a struggling farmer and an African American community facing persecution from a bigoted politician.

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary.

An exhilarating, provocative motion picture. The Rolling Stones rehearse their latest song, "Sympathy For the Devil," in a London studio. Beginning as a ballad, the track gradually acquires a pulsating groove, which gets Jagger into a rousing vocal display of soulful emotion that Godard captures on film.

Les Blank's portrait of the great Texas bluesman, 'Lightnin' Hopkins. The film includes interviews and a performance by Hopkins.

A close-up of bass player and composer Charlie Mingus as he and his five-year-old daughter await eviction by the City of New York.

Striking a zeitgeist nerve, Wild in the Streets stars Christopher Jones (Ryan's Daughter) as Max Frost, rock singer and poster boy for the counterculture revolution of the '60s. While performing with his band, The Troopers, at a political rally for Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild), Max seizes the opportunity to spout his own political philosophies which include, among other things, that the voting age should be lowered to 14. And thus begins the tale of Max's meteoric rise. But as he moves further and further into uncharted waters, first as a voice for the youth movement (or is he just a mouthpiece for opportunist politicians?) and then as a nominee for President of the United States, Max will not bend to the will of the old guard. Instead he begins implementing his own ideas of what would make a better world, including re-education camps for those over the age of 35 along with a liberal dosing of LSD.

Photographer Greg Nolan moonlights in two full-time jobs to pay the rent, but has trouble finding time to do them both without his bosses finding out.

The last five years of Frederick Delius's life through the eyes of a young composer and aide, Eric Fenby.

A race car driver tries to outrun the beautiful tax auditor out to settle his account.

The historic Farewell Concert at Albert Hall in London by one of rock's greatest groups has been dynamically recorded in this film by Robert Stigwood. The group, composed of Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Jack Bruce on bass and lead vocals, and Ginger Baker on drums, give an electrifying performance that is as exciting to watch as it is to hear. Each of the musicians has gone on to become a superstar in his own right, and we get to see fascinating backstage interviews with all of them. Highlights include the long version of "Sunshine of Your Love" and "White Room" along with other Cream hits.

Jenny, a deaf runaway who has just arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to find her long-lost brother, a mysterious bearded sculptor known around town as The Seeker. She falls in with a psychedelic band, Mumblin' Jim, whose members include Stoney, Ben, and Elwood. They hide her from the fuzz in their crash pad, a Victorian house crowded with love beads and necking couples. Mumblin' Jim's truth-seeking friend Dave considers the band's pursuit of success "playing games," but he agrees to help Jennie anyway.

Sex, death, reptiles, charisma and a unique variant of the electric blues gave the Doors an aura of profundity that has survived the band's demise. In September, 1968, The Doors gave a history making performance at The Roundhouse in London's Chalk Farm. They gave powerful renditions of their best songs. Part of the Pioneer Artist Concert Film Series.

Released in 1968 and often referred to as Canada’s first music video, The Ballad of Crowfoot was directed by Willie Dunn, a Mi’kmaq/Scottish folk singer and activist who was part of the historic Indian Film Crew, the first all-Indigenous production unit at the NFB. The film is a powerful look at colonial betrayals, told through a striking montage of archival images and a ballad composed by Dunn himself about the legendary 19th-century Siksika (Blackfoot) chief who negotiated Treaty 7 on behalf of the Blackfoot Confederacy. The IFC’s inaugural release, Crowfoot was the first Indigenous-directed film to be made at the NFB.

The Bower Family Band petitions the Democratic National Committee to sing a Grover Cleveland rally song at the 1888 convention, but decide instead to move to the Dakota territory on the urging of a suitor to their eldest daughter. There, Grampa Bower causes trouble with his pro-Cleveland ideas, as Dakota residents are overwhelmingly Republican, and hope to get the territory admitted as two states (North and South Dakota) rather than one in order to send four Republican senators to Washington. Cleveland opposed this plan, refusing to refer to Congress the plan to organize the Dakotas this way. When Cleveland wins the popular vote, but Harrison the presidency due to the electoral college votes, the Dakotans (particularly the feuding young couple) resolve to live together in peace, and Cleveland grants statehood to the two Dakotas before he leaves office (along with two Democrat-voting states, evening the gains for both parties).

Originally a BBC documentary, this film by Tony Palmer about the 1960's music scene was later released as a standalone DVD by the BFI

The San Francisco scene in 1967-68. Documentary about hippies shot during the height of the movement . Viewpoints from many kinds of people. Music by Steve Miller Band, Mother Earth, Quicksilver Messenger Service and others.

When 17 year old Joanna comes to Swinging London, she meets a host of colourful characters, discovers the pleasures of casual sex and falls in love. That's when things get complicated.

Joe Lightcloud persuades his Congressman to give him 20 heifers and a prize bull so he and his father, Charlie, can prove that the Navajos can successfully raise cattle on the reservation. If their experiment is successful, then the government will help all the Navajo people. But Joe's friend, Bronc Hoverty, accidentally barbecues the prize bull, while Joe sells the heifers to buy plumbing and other home improvements for his stepmother.

Jimi Hendrix: Experience

A hobo (Lance Percival) goes to London with a rock group (Herman's Hermits) and their prize racing greyhound, Mrs. Brown.

The priest of Villablanca is determined to build a housing for the poor. However, do not have enough money and will have to earn singing in festivals. They are all obstacles to get what you want, but his faith makes him see the problems as easy to overcome.

TCB is a 1968 television special produced by Motown Productions and George Schlatter–Ed Friendly Productions of Laugh-In fame. The special is a musical revue starring Motown's two most popular groups at the time, Diana Ross & the Supremes and The Temptations. Containing a combination of showtunes, specially prepared numbers, and popular Motown hits, the special was taped before a live studio audience in September 1968 and originally broadcast December 9, 1968 on NBC, sponsored by the Timex watch corporation. The title of the program uses a then-popular acronym, "TCB", which stands for "Taking Care of Business".

The Committee, starring Paul Jones of Manfred Mann fame, is a unique document of Britain in the 1960s. After a very successful run in London’s West End in 1968, viewings of this controversial movie have been few and far between. Stunning black and white camera work by Ian Wilson brings to life this “chilling fable” by Max Steuer, a lecturer (now Reader Emeritus) at the London School of Economics. Avoiding easy answers, The Committee uses a surreal murder to explore the tension and conflict between bureaucracy on one side, and individual freedom on the other. Many films, such as Total Recall, Fahrenheit 451 and Camus’ The Stranger, see the state as ignorant and repressive, and pass over the inevitable weaknesses lying deep in individuals. Drawing on the ideas of R.D. Laing, a psychologically hip state faces an all too human protagonist.

While flying to the first stop on their latest tour, the four members of the Australian music group The Seekers recall in flashback the origins of the group and their rise to success.

In the late 1960s Rolf Liebermann, the legendary intendant of the Hamburg State Opera, had the visionary idea of presenting a number of operas in filmed versions, among the first ever done in color, to be shown on German television. This is the historic recording of a 1968 production by the Hamburg State Opera.

In 1968 Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark sang together her song On the Path Of Glory for this special on NBC. Not such a remarkable event in itself, but Petula touched Harry's forearm during the duet and made TV history. It was the first time a white woman had touched a black man on US television. The sponsor insisted the touch be cut from the programme, the programme makers refused. In the decade’s “year of revolt”, Clark found herself at the centre of a media controversy involving race, censorship and endemic bigotry in a newly desegregated yet depressingly divided US.

From 1967-71 Barry Spinello made films without camera or tape recorder by hand drawing both sound and picture directly onto clear 16mm leader. His interest and education (at Columbia) was in music, painting, and poetry. His effort was to merge these three: “to squeeze sound and picture out of the same tube – to weave a cloth with warp as sound, woof as picture, and meaning the fabric itself."

A montage of the weird, a freak-out film that appeared when the expression was in fashion and in flower, along with the flower people. The film was one of the first exponents of the mobile camera-rock track-optical effect school of filmmaking, and it is much a document as it is a documentary. A repellent and fascinating depiction of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, along with Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and the East Village in New York. Tiny Tim amounts to something resembling a recurring motif and narrator.

Part two of a two-part portrait of the great Jazz composer and pianist. On his European tour his quartet was joined by Ray Copeland, Clark Terry, Phil Woods, and Johnny Griffin. They traveled as part of George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival road company to London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Mainz, and Rotterdam.

The Eurovision Song Contest 1968 was the 13th edition of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. It took place in London, United Kingdom. Organised by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and host broadcaster British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the contest was held at Royal Albert Hall on Saturday 6 April 1968, and was hosted by Katie Boyle for the third time. It was notably also the first time that the contest was broadcast in colour.

Pinocchio is a musical version of the story that aired in the United States on NBC, with pop star Peter Noone playing the puppet.

Mitzi Gaynor welcomes guests George Hamilton & Phil Harris (The Jungle Book) for a sparkling hour of music, comedy and dance. Songs performed include "Everybody Loves My Baby," "Gentle on My Mind," "Pretty," and "Love Is Blue." Mitzi & George parody classic movies on the late-late show, George playing Cary Grant to Mitzi's Rosalind Russell, Rock Hudson to her Doris Day, and Glenn Ford to her Rita Hayworth.

Having established himself as a household name after his previous A Man and His Music specials, Frank Sinatra made a bold statement in 1968 by starring in an NBC television special celebrating black music and its cultural impact in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle. Featuring special guests Diahann Carroll and The 5th Dimension.

A girl tries to become the top star in the glamorous world of Go-Go Dancing.

Distraught after being fired from his job, Willi Willeboer leaves town for Oubaas du Toit's Paradise Game Reserve, where he falls for the owner's daughter, but she sees him as nothing more than a brother.

A music documentary made with Sun Ra.

The Small Faces’ legendary feature on an episode of the BBC’s TV show “Colour Me Pop” in June 1968, with the highlights being their performance of “Happiness Stan” and Peter Whitehead’s promotional film for ‘Lazy Sunday’.

This documentary interviews young people on war, religion, music, sex, and other topics. Part of NBC's Experiment in Television.

A BAFTA award nominated documentary looking at music in Britain including soul, folk, pop, rock opera and brass bands.

Vinko Globakar, a virtuoso trombonist, plays on a stage, alone, Luciano Berio's Sequenza for Trombone.