Yesterday’s post on great movie years sparked some discussion of same over on the message boards. I posted to speculate on the worst movie years ever: 1947, maybe, or 1977. (If there’s a thirty-year cycle, like cicadas or something, 2007 definitely bucked the trend, or at least passed it off on 2006 instead.)

I was trying to figure what year had the worst best movie (sort of like the state with the lowest highest point). Sure, every year produces some good-to-marginally-great movies, but is there a year with no true acknowledged classics whatsoever?

It turns out there are a few pretty pitiful options. Here they are, with (by my taste) their best movies:

• 1926 (the original Ben-Hur, Son of the Sheik)
• 1943 (Shadow of a Doubt, Colonel Blimp)
• 1956 (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Court Jester)
• 1965 (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Sound of Music)
• 1988 (Your mileage may vary. A Fish Called Wanda? Rain Man? Big? Running on Empty?)

All great movies of course (well, maybe not those silents or, depending on your kitsch tolerance, The Sound of Music) but probably not part of anybody’s canon of unforgettable cultural touchstones.

Hey, speaking of Children of Men (which I did yesterday) and Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester (above)–we watched both of them recently and Mindy has a pet theory that they’re the same movie. Remember (spoilers for a two-year-old movie!) the climactic ten-minute Steadicam shot where Clive Owen moves through the war zone with the baby, silencing guns and making grown men kneel at every turn? It’s straight out of Court Jester! (Danny Kaye silences a civil war by showing both armies the royal “purple pimpernel” birthmark on the butt of the movie’s only baby.)

You don’t buy Children of Men as a Danny Kaye remake? Fine, then I won’t even bother you with the secret-but-obvious parallels between Babel and Hans Christian Andersen.