The Films of 1971

There are many books, articles and essays on particular years in film designated as seminal or highly influential. 1939 is seen as the zenith of the Golden Age of the Hollywood Studios. Several volumes have been published on 1967 as the harbinger of the independent film. I just saw a book on Amazon about 1991 as an important year. For me, 1971 was probably the watershed in movie appreciation. Many of the films I either saw that year or that were released then and I saw later, had special significance for me. Some were the work of my favorite directors who were at their peak artistically (Altman, Bogdanovich, Kubrick). Some expressed the transition from childhood into the beginning of maturity. Some deal with frank sexuality. The Oscar ceremony honoring that year's films (held in 1972) were the first Academy Awards I can remember being allowed to stay up and watch until the end. 

Timothy Bottoms and Cloris Leachman in
The Last Picture Show

My most significant 1971 movie was The Last Picture Show. Though Peter Bogdanovich's sensitive study of life in a tiny Texas town lost the Best Picture Oscar to William Friedkin's intense, jagged police procedural The French Connection, it did receive 8 nominations and won for Best Supporting Actor and Actress.  Picture Show was Bogdanovich's big breakthrough and was hailed as the greatest film by a young director since Citizen Kane. I was only 12 at the time of its release and I knew I wanted to see it. Maybe because of the cast which included Cloris Leachman, who I knew and loved for her role on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Maybe because it had received such spectacular reviews and I wanted to see a grown-up film. But the movie was rated R and an adult had to accompany me. (They don't still have those ratings, do they?) My dad agreed to take me and though there were some explicit nude and sex scenes, I understood the gist of the film and appreciated its themes of desolation and loneliness. We saw it at the Gateway Cinema near King of Prussia, PA and I can recall the manager asking my father if he knew the nature of the film and that it was for mature audiences. My dad said he understood and that it was okay for me to see it. So I am grateful to him for indulging me and deeming me mature.

At 12, I didn't full comprehend all of the movie's subtleties, but I knew the acting was truthful and deep. Both Leachman and Ben Johnson deserved their Supporting Oscars. Bogdanovich brilliantly underscores Leachman's big coffee-pot-hurling scene with the soundtrack of an inane TV comedy show. Lately I've been watching Johnson in John Ford Westerns and his acting in understated as Sam the Lion, the father figure to Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges. Years later I read Larry McMurtry's novel and this one of the few times when the movie was better than the book. 

Peter Finch, Murray Head, and Glenda Jackson
in Sunday, Bloody Sunday

There was another R-film released that year which would prove significant, but it's just as well I did not ask my father to take me to see it. I would probably not have been ready for Sunday Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger's British bisexual triangle not-quite love story. I saw it about seven years later when I was in college in Pittsburgh. The Steel City was chock-full of restoration cinemas displaying classics, plus my university showed three movies a week. I remember my first week I went to the movies every night. Sunday was on a double bill with another Glenda Jackson film, Women in Love. I'm pretty sure I took both in on Super Bowl Sunday so the theater was nearly deserted. Both films had gay themes and seeing a same-sex affair treated seriously was important to me in my early coming out. Peter Finch's gay doctor was one of the earliest portrayals of a queer character who was not the butt of a joke or the victim of a suicide. Finch and Jackson are both having a romance with bisexual Murray Head. The two of them are middle-aged and lonely, both really in love with the younger Murray. But he is shallow and about to leave them both to pursue career opportunities in New York. Penelope Gilliatt's screenplay deals with intelligent, heartbroken people in their everyday activities. Like Last Picture Show, it was not a blow-em-up, action picture which is what everyone seems to want these days.

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie
in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

I later transferred to Temple University in Philadelphia where there were not quite as many revival houses, but there was the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street (formerly a legitimate theater, I saw You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown there.) I would often take the subway from my shabby digs on Spring Garden Street to this artistic bohemia to see old movies. I'm not certain, but I'm fairly sure this is where I first saw Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (another '71 flick) along with several other Altman pix. Altman captivated me in high school with Nashville with its overlapping dialogue, broad canvas, smirky humor and cynical attitude. I loved that he used the same actors from picture to picture and the realism of his stories. McCabe eschewed the familiar western movie tropes and presents a grimy, unflinching view of what the wild west was probably really like. Julie Christie as the non-nonsense madame Mrs. Miller was Oscar-nominated along with Glenda Jackson, but they both lost to Jane Fonda in Klute.

Julie Christie and Margaret Leighton in
The Go-Between

Christie appeared as a totally different character that same year in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between. My husband Jerry and I watched it on Amazon while on vacation at an Air BnB on Long Island during this COVID summer since there was no TV there. Here Christie is the seemingly prim rich daughter of a country mansion conducting a secret affair with the estate's rugged tenant farmer (Alan Bates). A visiting schoolchum of the youngest son is recruited to carry letters between them. Harold Pinter's spare screenplay is elegant and simmering with sexuality beneath the proper, patrician surface. Margaret Leighton suppresses outrage as the commanding mother and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Another losing Oscar nominee was George C. Scott who gave a brilliant performance in Paddy Chayefsky's dark comedy The Hospital. The winner was Gene Hackman for The French Connection. Scott had famously refused the Oscar the year before for Patton. I did considerable research on the film for my biography of George C. Scott (Rage and Glory) so it sticks in my mind. While filming the story of a doctor going through a painful divorce while his hospital falls apart under the weight on inept bureaucracy, Scott was going through his own painful divorce--for the second time--from Colleen Dewhurst.

Wild dark comedies proliferated including the largely forgotten but hilarious Cold Turkey from Norman Lear and A New Leaf from Elaine May. Woody Allen came out with Bananas (which I saw at Philly's TLA) and John Cassavettes featured his wife Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassell in Minnie and Moscowitz. Mike Nichols explored sexuality in Carnal Knowledge with an impressive performance from Ann-Margret and Roman Polanski gave us an erotic Macbeth. The New York Film Critics Circle gave its Best Picture prize to Kubrick's frightening A Clockwork Orange, the polar opposite of his other vision of the future, the cool, intellectual 2001: A Space Odyssey. So much was going on that year, in TV Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, and Laugh-In were shifting our expectations of video comedy just as the films of 1971 were taking on more adult themes and reflecting audiences' lives more truthfully.