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It’s been 40 years since we lost Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. That same year, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In debuted on TV and the off-Broadway musical Hair migrated to the Great White Way. The Vietnam War still raged on.

At the movies, there was a war raging on as well. It pitted establishment Hollywood with the youth movement, and the studios were trying to get their bearings. For years, they seemed to ignore the kids who comprised a large percentage of the audience. But they couldn’t do it much longer, not if they wanted to survive.

So, the movies of 1968 offered a culture clash of sorts of old and new Tinseltown. Some of the films turned out to be classics. Others, not so classic. And others, at the time, seemed experimental in nature, but are recognized as groundbreaking works now.

1968 was definitely a breakthrough for science fiction, whether you took the subject seriously or not. The space race was at the forefront of many people’s minds, with the U.S. landing on the moon just a year away. Would the future bring happiness or hell? So it made sense that Hollywood would reflect the keen interest in the skies.

First and foremost, Stanley Kubrick delivered the long-in-the-works, much-ballyhooed 2001: A Space Odyssey, an epic advertised as “the ultimate trip.” This tag line had double meaning: The film did indeed present groundbreaking special effects, but also offered wild hallucinogenic images that won favor with audience members on artificial stimulants. Adapting Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Star Child, Kubrick offered nothing less than a survey of evolution, intelligence (artificial and otherwise) and philosophical musings in the guise of a psychedelic journey fueled by classical music. Presented (but not filmed) in Cinerama, and featuring an ending that has been reinterpreted over and over, 2001 remains an enigmatic masterwork that is still debated today.

Also grappling with serious themes, but in a more broadly entertaining fashion, was Planet Of The Apes, the filmization of Monkey Planet by Pierre Boulle, who wrote The Bridge On The River Kwai. Marvelously adapted by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, the story tells of an astronaut (muscularly played by Charlton Heston) who lands on a distant planet dominated by intelligent apes, who cull herds of a savage human populace. The space traveler finds that politics and racial issues have a place even in this alien society, and eventually discovers—in one of the most mind-blowing endings of all time—that the simian society is a lot closer to his own than he could’ve thought. The film, of course, was a huge success, leading to several sequels and a short-lived TV series down the road.

With one fowl swoop, Barbarella turned formerly serious actress Jane Fonda into a sex bomb. Directed by then-hubby Roger Vadim, this international Dino de Laurentiis production, partially adapted from a French comic strip by Terry Southern, was similar to 2001 in that it was about the future and it was trippy. All similarities stop there. Barbarella begins with an intergalactic striptease (even if it is only rated PG!), then goes bonkers—sexually and otherwise—as Barb sets out throughout the galaxy to find Durand Durand, the inventor of a powerful laser gun. The trip takes her on encounters with all sorts of bizarre critters (blue bunny rabbits), flesh-eating dolls, and a hairy kid-catcher. One can imagine Ted Turner’s expression when he screened it decades later.

A film set right here on terra firma, but definitely dealing with fear of the future, was Wild In The Streets, a thought-provoking anti-counter-culture essay from counter-culture cheerleaders American International Pictures (AIP). Christopher Jones plays Max Frost (nee Flatlow), a rock star enlisted to stump for a young congressional candidate who proposes to lower the voting age to 14. Max uses his brief political experience to become President of the U.S., doses the water supply with LSD, and has all constituents over 30 thrown into concentration camps. Although the film offers all the AIP requirements of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll (and includes the classic Shape Of Things To Come on the soundtrack), the script by Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) is politically astute and thought-provoking. Helping Wild In The Streets score with its brand of dark satire is a supporting cast that includes Richard Pryor, Diane Varsi, Hal Holbrook, Shelley Winters, and Larry Bishop.

Wild In The Streets was only one of several 1968 films made for and about the kids that had no problem criticizing them at the same time. In I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Peter Sellers is a straitlaced lawyer who breaks up with his needling fiancée and gets an up close and personal view of the counter-culture when he meets his brother’s hippie-dippie, sexually adventurous pal Leigh Taylor-Young. After ingesting hashish-spiked brownies, groovieness overcomes the perpetually square Sellers, and he quickly turns in his suits for flower power garb, and adds a headband for his recently shed hair. But Sellers eventually discovers that his new chick’s free and willing life credo is too much for him to handle.

A collision of establishment Hollywood and anti-establishment Hollywood can be found in a few other remnants from 1968. For example, there’s Candy, the all-star treatment of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s best-selling erotic take on Candide. While the producers chose hip French actor Christian Marquand to helm and The Graduate scripter Buck Henry to bring the novel to the screen, they also recruited a mish-mash of old and new Hollywood to join Swedish sex kitten Ewa Aulin in the cast. Among them: Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Charles Aznavour, John Huston, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, John Astin and James Coburn.

Old and new were also brought together for the equally impressive cast of Skidoo (not on DVD). In this misguided effort directed by Otto Preminger, Jackie Gleason plays a gangster in prison who drops acid and tries to escape his confines in a hot air balloon. Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Carol Channing, Peter Lawford, Groucho Marx, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin and Cesar Romero (Hey—Three Batman villains!) share the screen with Frankie Avalon, Austin Pendleton, and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. As Otto would say in the film’s trailer: “Groovy!”

Sometimes, movie studios youth-enized old stories to attract the younger crowd. And in the case of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo And Juliet, it worked. The adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragic love story featured up-and-coming performers Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in the leads, nudity, stylish costumes, and a lush score by Fellini collaborator Nino Rota. The film won two of the four Academy Awards it was nominated for, and was a box-office hit, taking in an impressive $38 million in the United States.

Meanwhile, the distinctive audience of college-aged moviegoers that comprised much of the 2001 audience emerged—and not all of them wanted to turn on during the movie. And so, the seeds of the American independent film movement began to take root. David Holzman’s Diary offered a faux documentary look at a filmmaker trying to chronicle his existence on celluloid, and who eventually finds his efforts affecting his personal life. Shot in cinema verite style in and around the New York City apartment of Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson, a friend of the film’s auteur Jim McBride), David Holzman’s Diary remains a genuinely compelling and crafty look inside itself that offered first generation film schoolers hope, for their careers if not in their personal lives.

Also New York-based in that era was Brian De Palma, who had already made several shorts, a documentary and a short feature, when he directed the vignette-based Greetings, featuring Robert De Niro as one of three aimless pals, trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He selects “amateur” filmmaking, while one pal (Jonathan Warden) tries to dodge the draft and the other (Gerrit Graham) spends much of his time trying to refute the Warren Commission, pointing out a conspiracy in the JFK assassination.

Greetings has a loose, anything-goes feel that works perfectly with a film that references such topics as Vietnam, voyeurism, Alfred Hitchcock, race relations, Jean-Luc Godard, silent movies, and more. It’s hard to believe that Greetings received an “X” rating for what seems like very little nudity, but it was successful enough to spawn Hi, Mom!, a sequel with De Niro playing the same character, two years later.

East Coast native Peter Bogdanovich had gone to Hollywood to make his first feature under the auspices of “B” movie mogul Roger Corman. In fact, Bogdanovich used portions of Corman’s The Terror in his film Targets, about a horror movie star (Boris Karloff) making a personal appearance at a drive-in where a deranged military veteran begins a random shooting rampage. The impressive debut, in which the director also plays a key role, led Bogdanovich to The Last Picture Show, his breakout project.

With Targets, the shadow of Vietnam was present, even if the film was not overtly about the war. In general, however, Hollywood was shy about encountering the ongoing struggle, although John Wayne, a supporter of the conflict, chimed in with The Green Berets. The Duke won favor with conservatives and the older audiences who helped make Wayne a steady box-office draw into his 60s. Political supporters found The Green Berets compelling in its depiction of the country’s elite fighting corps, while younger, left-leaning audiences ridiculed the film’s old-fashioned rah-rah attitude, right-wing politics, and stoic acting.

Also attracting older audiences were the musicals Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand as entertainer Fanny Brice and Oliver!, the classy interpretation of the stage musical based on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. In fact, Carol Reed’s take on the hit Broadway musical eventually captured five Academy Awards, including for Best Picture and Best Director, out of a total 11 nominations.

Several other 1968 films made an impact with critics and movie buffs alike. Two landmark horror efforts came out that year: Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s masterful adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel in which New York newlyweds Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes deal with Satanists and pregnancy; and George A. Romero’s low-budget zombiefest Night Of The Living Dead, which became a huge hit on the drive-in and midnight circuits.

Popular leading man Steve McQueen made a large impact in two distinctly different crime sagas. In Bullitt, he was a Mustang-driving San Francisco detective, suspicious of conniving politician Robert Vaughn. While the film is best-known for its high speed car chase through the Bay Area hills, it also stands on its own as a solid police story with a typically charismatic turn by McQueen. In the same year, the King of Cool hit the other side of the tracks as the lead character in The Thomas Crown Affair, a bored Boston banker who pulls off an elaborate heist and goes head to head with sharp and beautiful insurance investigator Faye Dunaway. Norman Jewison’s stylish direction coupled with split screens, a lushly romantic score by Michel Legrand, sleek surroundings, and an attention-getting erotic chess game, helped this Affair amass a huge following.

While westerns were definitely on the wane (not John), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West—an operatic take on such genre favorites as Johnny Guitar and Rancho Notorious—got unleashed upon America. Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, and Jason Robards, Jr. may have been familiar to U.S. audiences, but they’d never seen them as Leone framed them—grungy and in extreme close-ups, with Ennio Morricone’s haunting score in the background.

Two classic comedies whose reps have been steadily built over the years came out: Mel Brooks’ directorial debut The Producers, boasting Zero Mostel as shifty Broadway impresario Max Bialystock and Gene Wilder as his neurotic accountant Leo Bloom; and Richard Lester’s satiric Petulia, which dealt with infidelity, the counter-culture and trying to find oneself, set against the backdrop of San Francisco in the 1960s. George C. Scott assayed the recently divorced, disillusioned doctor who hooks up with radiantly kooky and married Brit Julie Christie, but learns that the free-spirited woman carries some excess baggage with her. Directed with hyperkinetic energy by Lester, the film manages to be both unmistakably groovy and a bummer--with its flash-forwards, flashbacks, zippy editing, gorgeous cinematography (courtesy of future director Nicolas Roeg), and appearances by The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, paired with subplots involving marital abuse, an injured child, and midlife crisis.

At that time, of course, Lester was known as the man who guided The Beatles on screen in A Hard Days’ Night and Help! Well, in 1968, the Fab Four were ever-present in cinema with Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour. The former used John, Paul, George and Ringo’s animated likenesses to take fans on a psychedelic journey on an underwater vessel; the latter, actually produced for British television, employed the real moptops to take fans on a psychedelic journey on a bus ride.

The Beatles may have simplified things by singing All You Need Is Love, but moviegoers figured out in 1968 that you certainly needed more than love.

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