100 Best Movies of 1969

The Wild Bunch celebrates its 55th anniversary!

We’re ranking the 100 best movies of 1969 by Tomatometer, starting with Certified Fresh films like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

With the women’s liberation movement, Vietnam War protests, and hippie counterculture, the late 1960s were a cocktail of social unrest that splashed into the movies. At that same time, censorship was loosening its grip on Hollywood. The Hays Code, the self-governing production rules that dictated what was acceptable on-screen, was abolished in 1968. Suddenly, there was an immediate uptick in depictions of violence, nudity, moral depravity, and scenes of hot explicit tax evasion.

Easy Rider best represents the first year of a new world, the road classic starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, acclaimed for its mainstream-rejecting authenticity. Yes, sir, that’s real par-tokin’ you see up there. Rider‘s spirit of freedom rang with American audiences, bringing home $41 million in ’70s-bucks on a $400,000 budget.

Urban tragedy Midnight Cowboy won the Best Picture Oscar, the first with an X rating to do so. It was up against Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly!, and Z. Additionally, John Schlesinger won for directing Midnight Cowboy, and acting awards went to True Grit (John Wayne, Best Actor, in his only win ever), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith, Best Actress), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Gig Young, Best Supporting Actor), and Cactus Flower (Goldie Hawn, Best Supporting Actress).

We said good-bye with several bullets to the Western, as a big blast of glory unleashed True Grit, director Sam Peckinpah’s down-and-dirty The Wild Bunch (a revolution in the editing suite), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which would top the box office that year with $102 million.

The rest of 1969’s box office top 10 was filled out by The Love Bug, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Hello, Dolly!, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Paint Your Wagon, True Grit, Cactus Flower, and Goodbye, Columbus.

From England, the sixth James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (seventh if you count the 1967 Casino Royale) released, and Lindsay Anderson had his searing take on youth in revolt with If…. Beyond, Costa-Gavras’s Z won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Would things have looked differently if Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows had shown in America the same year, instead of its belated release 37 years later in 2006?