Success or Snub? The French Connection (44th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

To see part 1, click here.

Dirty Harry Soundtrack Suite~Dirty Harry - Lalo Schifrin

        1971 was yet another great year for movies and was arguably the high-water mark of the auteur era in Hollywood. When you read some of the movies that producers cut blank checks to, it's hard not to so feel generationally jealous. In fact, the number of high-quality movies was so high that it can make you wonder just how they ascertained these choices as to which is the single best but I digress. Let’s check out some cool flicks, shall we?
       Before we talk about the New Wave, let’s first start out with some pulpier quick-hitters that made their mark in cinematic history. After George Lazenby’s outing as Bond ended after only one film, the producers brought back Sean Connery (for a then-record $1,250,000 salary) in Diamonds Are Forever.

        While the 60s spy films tended to take themselves seriously on some level, the Bond movies in the 70s would lean more into the camp and silliness. Despite Connery being known for being the definitive Bond, Diamonds Are Forever is the first silly Bond movie and is usually not regarded as one of the series’ highlights. Still, it is fun and created another pair of iconic villains, in this case the henchmen, Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), a pair of homosexual assassins who complete each other’s sentences and trade dark quips while killing people.
        Also iconic was The Andromeda Strain,

the first film adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel who was known for making scientific techno-babble a huge part of his plot. This movie revolves around a series of scientists with colorful personalities needing to go underground to discover this hidden virus before it causes the end of humanity. What makes the movie stand out compared to previous sci-fi films is how much the science drives a lot of the plot. I don’t know how scientifically accurate it actually is but it’s enamoring to watch and always explains the rules carefully enough so you can follow along.
        Going back to the Academy Award nominees themselves, as you have probably figured out by now, while the focus in in Hollywood at this time would be that between the character studies and artistic epics that would get nominated at the Academy Awards, the musical theater crowd that still made up the old branch of the Academy would always get one of their movies sneaked into being one of the frontrunners. In this case, the musical that got the most nominations this year, including for Best Picture, was Fiddler on the Roof.

        One of the last of the epic musicals, the film is set in a Ukrainian Jewish village called Anatevka, revolving around the family dynamics of a poor milkman named Tevye (Chaim Topol), his wife Golde (Norma Crane) and his three daughters (Rosalind Harris, Michéle Marsh and Neva Small) who are all getting to the age where they’ll be matchmade and married off. The film is largely about the familial dynamics as each daughter wishes to marry for love and the very TRADITIIIIIIIIIONally-minded Tevye must choose between his long-standing culture and being a good and supportive father.

        The movie musical was dying out by this point but Fiddler on the Roof acted as one of the last hurrahs of the genre, grossing so much that it became the highest-grossing movie of the year. While it wears its heart on its sleeve and doesn’t have much subtlety, the movie is talking about an interesting conflict and the musical numbers are excellent. All of the songs are memorable and the film was able to bridge the gap between the stage and the screen, with the editing in the opening being especially excellent in this regard.
        1971 was a pretty strong year for musicals, the last one for over 20 years, as there were two more classics in the genre. First was Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

        Arguably the best movie of the Disney Slump (the years in the company’s history between when Walt died and the Disney Renaissance began), Bedknobs and Broomsticks is set during World War II where a trio of orphans (Ian Weighill, Cindy O’Callaghan and Roy Snart) are adopted by a witch named Ms. Price (Angela Lansbury) who adopts them only reluctantly as she is focused on discovering a new spell that can help the war effort. This is basically just Mary Poppins (1964) but with swords and guns and, honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not as deep but still contains several memorable setpieces, a great lead and probably one of the catchiest songs in musical history with the Portobello Road number.
        Rounding out the trio of these musicals was the least successful at the time but arguably the most famous as the years have gone on, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

        This one is a lot more fairy tale-esque and whimsical as a reclusive candy baron named Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) sets up a contest where any child who finds a golden ticket in one of his chocolate bars will be invited to a grand tour of his factory. One of the winners ends up being poor Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a good kid who lives in deep poverty. After a pretty good amount of build-up, the rest of the movie is then Charlie, his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) and the four other ticket winners embarking on the tour of the factory and all the magical wonders within.
        Unlike Fiddler on the Roof, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory were comparatively ignored and didn’t do too well at the box office, barely making their money back. One thing I haven’t mentioned about a lot of these old-school epics that were big in the 60s and 70s is that there used to be something called a roadshow that these movies tended to premiere in. Basically, these would be limited-run theaters that had the biggest screens and best audio in the country. After a movie would ride the roadshow circuit, the hope was that the positive word-of-mouth would make audiences around the country want to see it. Shortly after the 70s began, a lot of the New Hollywood epics (i.e. Patton (1970), The Godfather (1972) etc.) would skip the roadshow entirely and just mass release across the country. In other words, this would be what we would nowadays call a limited release but with the expectation of releasing in wider markets later on to enlarge the gross. (Considering how strapped for cash Hollywood is these days, I’m surprised they haven’t tried bringing this back at one point.)
        I bring this up because the reason why Fiddler on the Roof made a lot of money and the other two movies didn’t is because Fiddler on the Roof was a roadshow picture (in fact, the last one of note) and the other two were not. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was also subject to two PR disasters at the time which couldn’t have helped: One was that the original novel by Roald Dahl was called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), which would make more sense since he’s the main character, but the title change was needed since “Charlie” was slang for the Viet Cong (VC=Vector Charlie). More hilarious and disastrous is that the movie also had a tie-in with Quaker Chocolates as a pre-emptive merchandising plan but this ended up backfiring as Quaker Chocolates supposedly tasted like crap.
        Also around this time is when I think the gap between what was considered children’s movies and adult movies started to become a pretty stark divide, particularly in terms of animation (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, like Mary Poppins, while primarily live-action had long animated sequences). Back during the days of the Hays Code and the dawn of animation, movies were ideally supposed to be made for everyone and adults would be open to seeing Disney movies without child accompaniment. Starting in the 50s, the usage of animation for lowbrow commercials on TV (where advertisers and network executives were even stricter in what they would let be seen than the Hays Office) caused the medium to start being associated exclusively for children. Throw in the fact that Walt Disney was one of the icons of pre-60s America and, yeah, baby boomers were definitely primed to be very dismissive towards family entertainment. 
        This is an interesting point about how a film’s legacy can transcend beyond just the end of the year, especially ones made for the whole family. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a great case study for this as, despite its original failure, it remains a beloved film for most Gen Xers and Millennials, being one of the most ubiquitous films screened on many TV networks. Compared to many of its contemporary musicals back then, it has a more consistent tone, better pacing and a tongue-in-cheek cynicism about it. But, alas, it would be ignored and derided because people were getting sick of the genre. Even accounting for that, though, Gene Wilder’s performance as Willy Wonka is one of the greatest and most memorable movie performances ever and a snub for being nominated for Best Leading Actor, constantly changing personalities and emotions (from sweet and lovable to sarcastic to deranged to furious) and coming off as a cross between a heartwarming fairy godfather and a Bond villain.
        With those out of the way, let’s go to New Hollywood as that’s clearly where the focus was. 1971 was arguably the true height of the auteur era of Hollywood; directors could get blank checks for anything and I do mean anything. Unlike earlier or later eras where bad movies that caught on would be soulless corporate cash grabs, bad movies that caught on in 1971 would be soulful artistic pieces that could still push careers forward because everyone was trying to say something, God dammit. A few notable cult classics in this regard include The Panic in Needle Park

(a character study of heroin junkies (Kitty Winn and Al Pacino in his film debut) in Manhattan that contains needlessly long and gratuitous scenes of needle usage), Carnal Knowledge

(a character study of two friends (Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson) who have different views on relationships and is very, very long and dragged out though it is forward-thinking in its study of its misogynistic protagonist), Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

(a character study of a love song singer (Dustin Hoffman) who is chronically unhappy and unable to get a meaningful relationship that has one of the most bizarre stream-of-consciousness storytelling styles in movie history which is both the best and worst thing about it) and The Devils

(a character study of a womanizing priest (Oliver Reed) who is made a victim of political prosecution by the Church; needless to say this is one of the most controversial movies of all time and feels like a cross between an exploitation film and Tom Jones (1963)). All of these are films that stick with you and say interesting things even if they don’t fully work. They’re messes but they’re artful messes that are trying new things and audiences were eager to lap them up.
        But we’re not here to discuss the cult classics that failed to launch, we’re here to discuss the ones that could’ve been called the best of the year potentially. So how about the cult classics that succeeded in launching?
        In a pretty impressive turnaround window, fresh off of M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman came out with McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

        This is Altman’s spin as a revisionist Western, showing a bit more of the uglier and quirkier side of the Wild West as a self-proclaimed Western legend named John McCabe (Warren Beatty) joins forces and falls in love with an opium-addicted brothel madam named Constance Miller (Julie Christie) to invest in a boomtown. While classic Westerns show the hero complex of many Western legends who lead their frontier societies into working together, McCabe & Mrs. Miller shows an opposite theme where our self-righteous heroes end up destructing because of their refusal to go along with the rest of the town. It’s definitely uneven and hard to follow at times but still keeps with Altman’s risque meanness and has some beautiful winter cinematography.
        Another New Hollywood darling was Klute.

        This is a neo-film noir about a private investigator named John Klute (Donald Sutherland) whose investigation of the disappearance of a high-ranking business executive (Robert Milli) leads him to a call girl named Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). Similar to The French Connection, this updates the film noir to the modern-day, with the dark shadows and inky blackness that were made famous by Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) being accentuated to an almost trippy degree in this film. It’s a pretty damn solid noir too, with the two leads being in a constant dance of dialogue and paranoia as they are unsure how much they can trust each other and just how dangerous the mystery is getting. Jane Fonda was especially lauded, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role in a pretty solid decision.
        Noted Western director, Sam Peckinpah, made one of his most controversial and arguably best movies with Straw Dogs.

        Straw Dogs is a movie that deliberately starts off as a slow melodrama before steadily steering its way towards a dark thriller. The movie revolves around a couple called David (Dustin Hoffman) and Amy Sumner (Susan George) who move back to Amy’s hometown in England. As they’re settling down, they encounter a group of local hooligans, one of whom is Amy’s old boyfriend (Del Henney). Straw Dogs starts off deliberately slow, almost mind-numbingly so, though its steady steering to the darker parts of the human animal does make it worth it. The last half-hour of this movie shows Peckinpah at some of his best with the final sequence being a beautiful piece of claustrophobia and commentary on masculinity. That having been said, this one requires a huge asterisk in recommending it as the film features gore that, while sparing, is pretty gnarly and a very graphic rape scene (both of which garnered a lot of controversy when it first came out).
        Not as lauded in America but still pretty noteworthy was the Australian export, Walkabout.

        The New Wave hit the Land Down Under a little later than the United States but hit it did with Walkabout being the film that launched its own film movement. Similar to other New Wave pioneers like The 400 Blows (1957) and The Graduate (1967), Walkabout is an examination of the youth of the nation though in a much different nature. The movie is about a young girl (Jenny Agutter) and her baby brother (Lucien John) who are driven to the Outback by their father (John Meillon) so he can murder them. They are saved by an Aboriginal kid (David Gulpilil) who then guides the two siblings out of the desert. Walkabout is cinema at its most simple and engaging. None of the characters are ever named and yet it still allows an examination of youth across cultural barriers, examining both the privilege and weakness of suburban lifestyle as well as the racism of Australians towards Aboriginals, even from children (the girl is pretty awful toward the Aborigine boy despite him saving their life). Much of the movie is told non-verbally through a language barrier and the minimalist story of three kids just trying to survive in the wilderness both pioneered these sort of wilderness survival movies (e.g. Blue Lagoon (1980), Alaska (1996)).
        While these four movies are all classics, they are somewhat on the slow side which might preclude them from movie of the year status. So let’s genre-hop once more. The 70s was a pretty nihilistic decade in general and nothing makes the tragedy of life more bearable than a little comedy. I’d argue the 70s is where modern comedy began as there were some pretty funny films that came out in 1971 and not only are they still funny, they’re also dark. As an example, look no further than Woody Allen’s breakout film, Bananas.

        This is a very funny movie as a loser writer named Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen) gets dumped by his social activist girlfriend (Louise Lasser) so, to impress her, he travels down to a Latin American republic that is undergoing a civil war and ends up getting caught up in the revolution. Allen would be one of the darlings of the comedy scene of the 70s, making beloved film after beloved film that he was able to basically coast on that goodwill all the way up until about 2017 for reasons that if I were to determine the validity and/or morality of for each and every figure of the Hollywood New Wave (and Old Hollywood for that matter) who did something similar, this blog would be novel-length. Either way, watching Bananas after being familiar with Allen’s later, Oscar-baiting work is interesting as his work did become drier and more mature as he got older. Bananas, on the other hand, is a much meaner, more cartoonish film that is admittedly blunt and episodic but still pretty funny satire.
        Much more existential than Bananas was Harold and Maude.

        This is a romantic-comedy revolving a suicidal, death-obsessed young man named Harold (Bud Cort) who meets and eventually falls in love with a 79-year-old free spirit named Maude (Ruth Gordon). This movie feels like a pioneer of what I call awkward comedy; a type of humor where the laughs come from just how uncomfortable it makes you, the audience, feel (the most famous modern example being the sitcom The Office (2005-2013)). Harold’s obsession with death, utter hatred for the world around him and eventual hooking up with a woman old enough to be his grandmother are all things that make you intrinsically uncomfortable but the film manages to make it all click and still elicit some genuine laughs. Sadly, like director Hal Ashby’s previous work, The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude failed when it first came out (hilariously, most reviews attacked it for the revolting idea of screwing Maude instead of analyzing the social commentary), not turning a profit until 1983, though it is now Ashby’s most famous work and regarded as a classic.
        Perhaps even darker than Harold and Maude is The Hospital.

        As you can tell by now, many movies of the auteur era were just exploring characters in certain settings to commentate on how that setting reflects the contemporary world. In this case, a doctor (George C. Scott) at a hospital basically starts giving up on life because he works in a building where people die every day, to an extent that he and his staff can barely even remember who died when and how. The cheapening of human life to such a degree is a very morbid and uncomfortable idea but, again, the movie is able to blend humor with drama as well as a pointed criticism of the medical profession.
        Last of this line-up of comedies was Summer of ‘42.

        This is probably one of the most influential movies that you’ve never heard of. Summer of ‘42 is set on Nantucket in 1942 as a pair of teenaged boys (Garry Grimes and Jerry Houser) endeavor to lose their virginity before the summer is out. So, yes, this is the first ever movie where the primary plot revolves around the characters attempting to get laid, an unsurprisingly pretty reoccurring plot in many teen movies for years to come. This film is partially based off of screenwriter Herman Raucher’s own formative summer and has a very nostalgic bent on it, with the film being narrated by the protagonist’s older self (Robert Mulligan) looking back fondly on his youth, which also inspired its own cliché. In other words, if you’re familiar with both of these tropes (basically imagine The Sandlot (1993) mixed with American Pie (1999)), this can make Summer of ‘42 a very fascinating watch. The movie is still pretty funny, mostly because of how realistically dumb the teenagers actually are, though the biggest surprise of the film is that, despite the bawdy sex jokes, the climax of the film is very romantic.
        So, with so many great movies out in one year, how does one ascertain what is actually the best? Well, it’s almost like deciding that one is better than another is pretty foolish and is instead just an excuse to have a party celebrating how awesome you are. But, if we were to play the Academy’s games, perhaps it would be most appropriate to examine the movies that best reflected the times. Granted, most of the movies here are certainly doing that so this could also be an exercise in futility but, regardless, let’s move onto our feature presentations.
       Probably the biggest news story of the year was the infamous Kent State Massacre where the National Guard opened fire on Vietnam War protestors, killing multiple students (including at least one who wasn’t even involved in the protests). Considering the numerous protests and riots that were still breaking out across America, a movie examining the uglier side of law enforcement seemed pretty timely and appropriate. So what movies best reflected the height of Nixonland?
        Well, speaking of movies about the youth, one of the most famous movies, and frontrunners at the Oscars, that year was Peter Bogdanovich’s breakout film, The Last Picture Show.

        Like Summer of ‘42, The Last Picture Show is a character study of two teenaged friends (Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges) who lazily spend the best years of their life cavorting around small town America and chasing girls in a pre-Vietnam era. Unlike Summer of ‘42, The Last Picture Show has a much more dismal and eerie feeling about it. It’s set in the Texan panhandle and everything about it elicits the feeling of a dying town. This is that sort of town where there is nothing to do but go to the same three spots, sit at home and watch TV or take off into the flat-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see prairie and drive for over an hour until you reach another town with an identical makeup. Anarene, Texas is the sort of place where the population dwindles further and further every year as everyone who grows up there either grows old and dies or leaves and never returns. And the people who have chosen option A clearly made the wrong one.
        There’s an undercurrent of sadness to The Last Picture Show that’s hard to articulate and hard to evoke, which makes it even more impressive that Bogdanovich was able to do so for one of his first films. The characters in this movie are so wrapped up in their petty problems because that’s really the only thing they have going for them in their lives. It’s a very middle American Gothic and makes you just feel sorry for everyone while still getting wrapped up into every detail of their meaningless lives. One of my favorite movie studies revolves around this movie when legendary critic Roger Ebert noted that for a movie that has so much sex in it, there is practically no eroticism to The Last Picture Show.
        In a time period where much of America was trying to harken back to the old days of the pre-60s cultural revolution or the glory of small-town America, The Last Picture Show instead questions just how hollow that ethos is. It’s actually interesting that the movie is set in the early 50s since, honestly, I feel like a town in Anarene, Texas in 1971 probably wouldn’t have changed all that much.
        A trend that was totally ignored by the Academy was the beginning of the blaxploitation genre this year, which saw its breakout with the films Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

and Shaft.

        Blaxploitation was a portmanteau of the words “black” and “exploitation” which should tell you most of what you need to know of this short-lived but highly influential film genre. Blaxploitation films were the first movies made by black directors for black audiences, eschewing a lot of the stereotypes and unintentional condescension seen in movies such as Lilies of the Field (1963) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967). These were movies that were much more in-your-face and featured black protagonists who were proud of their masculinity and often fought their (white) antagonists to the death in an all-out hail of gunfire, fisticuffs and (after these movies started making their own inroads in America) martial arts. They’re very “fight the man” type films, refusing to let their protagonists bow down to the culture that is being presented to them.
        Between these two, they actually do offer an interesting dichotomy in how they’re made and how they were presented. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song is the more indie of the two movies, both in its production history and how it actually feels. The film revolves around the titular Sweetback (Mario Peebles as a kid, Melvin van Peebles as an adult) who goes on the run from the police after they try to pin a crime that he didn’t commit on him. The rest of the movie is one long chase as Sweetback is aided by a variety of members of the black community to get away from the manhunt. The film feels very much like a 70s fairy tale with not a whole lot of external logic to it (the police go to almost cartoonish extremes trying to capture Sweetback who everyone in the Goddamned country seems to know on a first-name basis) but is interesting to watch to understand the logic of much of the Black Power ideology that the movie espouses.
        Shaft is the more mainstream of the two movies, as it revolves around a black NYPD officer named John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) who straddles the line between the law and the underworld. He learns that a bigshot Harlem gangster named Bumpy Jonas’ (Moses Gunn) daughter (Sherri Brewer) has been kidnapped by the Mafia so Jonas asks Shaft to rescue her before things boil over. The rest of the movie is a genuinely great crime thriller though what sets it apart is the character of Shaft. Unlike Sidney Poitier’s characters who were defined by the suits and chosen snarls but were otherwise generally straitlaced, Richard Roundtree’s Shaft is unapologetically black and proud of it: he wears an afro, tight leather, sleeps with enough women to rival James Bond’s bodycount and doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone. This was the first action hero who was black and he was arguably blacker than anyone who came since then.
        Comparing the two films, Shaft is the more mainstream and enjoyable of the two though, for the sake of a record, it did come second and Melvin van Peebles stated that he thinks that Shaft was directly influenced by Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The interesting thing is that in the original screenplay, Shaft was written to be a white (or at least racially neutral) policeman and, if you watch the movie with that in mind, you can see it. Most of the character’s identity comes from the performance and wardrobe alone which is what makes him such a memorable character. You think that the reason for this character being so iconic coming entirely from the actor, not the script, would be enough to qualify Richard Roundtree as a nominee for the Best Actor Oscar but I guess not.
        Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, on the other hand, is definitely a film that is more indie and would appeal to a niche audience, both back then and now. Just about every white character in it is evil while Shaft does have a few token good guys (though it definitely is not nearly as nice or believing in the better angels of our nature as, say, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). Though I don’t think that’s the reason why Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song is poorly-aged. The film features scenes of gratuitous sex where, as an artistic choice, Sweetback imagines and/or flashes back to his younger self having sex with the same woman; a feat that van Peebles accomplished by having his son portray his younger self. In other words, Melvin van Peebles decided to become Eskimo brothers with his own underage son and shot it on-camera. And, unlike some of the appalling stuff that Woody Allen or Dustin Hoffman did, this is right on-camera in the movie so it’s a bit harder to separate the art from the bad actions of the artist in this instance.
        (Other highlights of this movie’s insane BTS stories include van Peebles having members of the crew force Hell’s Angels to act at gunpoint and later contracting gonorrhea while filming one of the sex scenes. He filed a workman's comp claim with the Director’s Guild of America, they gave him a payout to treat the gonorrhea and he instead used the money to further fund the film.)
        But, I digress, both of these movies are highly influential, both culturally and artistically. The other side of the political coin also saw its own blockbusting cop character that year with Dirty Harry.

        If The Man with No Name made Clint Eastwood a star, Dirty Harry is what made him an icon. Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan is the most universally reviled cop in the San Francisco Police Department as he is crude, rude and carries an oversized .44 Magnum as his preferred gun of choice. But he’s also far and away the best cop on the police force, forcing him to test his mettle when the police start getting taunting messages from a serial killer known only as Scorpio (Andy Robinson).
        Dirty Harry was the first ever maverick cop in movie history and rivals James Bond for being one of the most imitated movie characters. This archetype would become damn near ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s as a siren call of American masculinity. This is the cop who resents authority but is better at his job than anyone else. His superiors hate him for flouting the rules but they know that he’s the best cop they have. He’s rude and doesn’t care who he insults, but he that's only because he's telling it how it is. Dirty Harry has little respect for those pansy rules and regulations that stop him from getting justice, one bullet at a time.
        Basically, this is the conservative backlash equivalent to Shaft. Of all the movie tropes, this renegade cop who plays by his own rules is one of the most controversial and has had disturbing implications over the generations. The appeal of a character like Dirty Harry was that he spoke to a lot of frustrations that people feel about wanting to stop wrongdoers from breaking the law because he knows right from wrong better than the so-called man. Of course, many of the things that he does infringes upon criminals’ constitutional rights and the reason why these rights exist is because, in the heat of the moment, you don’t know whether or not the person in front of you is the criminal no matter how badly you think you do. If you think about this seriously, real police officers idolizing people like Dirty Harry or Death Wish’s (1974) Paul Kersey has very disturbing implications for the real world, especially in light of current events at the time of this blog being written. Some more liberal critics at the time even accused Dirty Harry of encouraging fascism in the United States.
        On the flip side, however, I think Dirty Harry is a far more intelligent film than many of its imitators and does ask provocative questions of its audience. One of the conservative movement’s more fair complaints (and biggest motivators) was mobilizing against the massive crime wave that swept across America from the late 60s through the early 90s. Many average middle-class Americans felt frustrated at being mugged on an almost daily basis in major American cities and felt that the justice system was treating criminals with kid gloves who would, of course, take advantage of this. Dirty Harry spoke to a lot of that frustration and articulates many of these emotions. A key and great scene is when Scorpio slowly kills a little girl, Harry tracks him down without getting a warrant first and, in the following scene, the District Attorney (Josef Sommer) seems more concerned about Scorpio’s rights as opposed to the rights of the murder victim.
        Dirty Harry is basically a Western set in modern-day America with all of the frontier justice that 19th Century America would’ve entailed. Even ignoring some of the ruminations, disturbing or otherwise, it’s a great crime thriller with a great hero and great villain and almost every scene is memorable, with particular mention going to the iconic scene where he has a standoff with a bank robber and asks him to think, "Do I feel lucky?" (Often misquoted as "Do you feel lucky?")
        (Clint Eastwood was also the lead that year in the first movie he ever directed, Play Misty For Me,

one of the first stalker films. Despite some serious issues with pacing in the back half of the movie, it’s pretty good for a directorial debut with Jessica Walter being excellent as the deranged stalker.)
        It is interesting comparing Dirty Harry and Shaft with The French Connection, as all three movies seem to discuss law and justice and just how justified the common policeman is in crossing the law to catch the bad guys. Dirty Harry and Shaft seem to justify it (albeit from opposite sides of the racial spectrum) while The French Connection has a much lower opinion of its protagonist.
        Clearly the Academy thought so as Dirty Harry was completely shut out of the Academy Awards (even though feminists still showed up to picket the ceremony protesting the character) and Shaft only received a nomination for its (awesome) title song. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Richard Roundtree’s instantly iconic portrayals were nominated nor for their dark and stylish cinematography that turn San Francisco and New York City into murky underbellies.
        Yet these aren’t even the biggest snubs of the year. One of cinema’s greatest and most thoroughly unpleasant masterpieces came out that year in the form of A Clockwork Orange.

        A Clockwork Orange is set in a dystopic near-future as it revolves around the life and times of Alexander DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) who leads a band of hooligans around England to commit mischief and mayhem. The back half of the movie does change gears when Alex does inevitably run afoul of the law and comes into contact with the British government but, in case you don’t know what this entails and have never seen the movie before, I’ll do my best not to spoil it.
        Few movies have ever done so much to make the audience as physically uncomfortable as possible for the duration of its running time as A Clockwork Orange. Alex DeLarge is one of the most Godawful human beings to have ever graced the silver screen and yet he is the protagonist that the audience is invited to identify with. He rapes, he steals, he beats, he murders and he loves every second of it. Probably the most disturbing aspect, though, is that he is clearly very intelligent and cultured. He uses big words, he is a huge fan of Ludwig van Beethoven and other classical geniuses and he can play mind games like nobody’s business. In other words, this is someone who should know better and yet he doesn’t care and does these bad things anyway. The guy is just having a ball raising Hell and we the audience are viscerally disgusted by it. Yet, through some very carefully constructed and chosen moments, we do come to sympathize and feel sorry for him in the back half of the movie.
        During the aforementioned crime wave, particularly in the 60s and 70s, it was a big discussion in political and social discourse about how the youth of America was losing its morals. A Clockwork Orange takes that analysis and turns it on its head to analyze both what morality is and ultimately how all of society is amoral. While the movie’s protagonist is a young gangbanger, the film also features characters who represent different aspects of society’s institutions. The police, the government, the scientists and the social activists are all represented by one character or another and all of them turn out to be just as sadistic and self-centered as Alex DeLarge.
       Stanley Kubrick must have been in a very dark place when he made this film as its tone and themes are deeply uncomfortable to stew about. What causes A Clockwork Orange to haunt you is just how painful everything seems. The rape scenes in this movie don’t actually show any actual intercourse but the women are screaming in such pain that many people think you see the whole thing. There’s also one of the most iconic scenes in movie history when Alex is brainwashed with the Ludovico Technique where his eyes are pried open and he is forced to watch TV non-stop (an effect achieved by actually prying Malcolm McDowell’s eyes open; Kubrick was a notoriously uncaring bully to his actors). After the government rewires Alex’s brain, he reacts to pain by dry-heaving on all fours.
        It probably goes without saying that this is one of the most controversial movies ever made. It was banned in numerous countries, with Ireland not lifting their ban all the way until the New Millennium. Many critics lambasted it for its showcasing of ultraviolence and how it might inspire copycat attacks and for being morally bankrupt. My favorite is Pauline Kael criticizing the film for dehumanising Alex’s victims by making him the focus which honestly says more about her and her interpretation of the film than the film itself.
        Per the copycat complaint, this gets into a chicken-and-egg dynamic of how much movies and pop culture inspire violence in the world or if there’s more socioeconomic and cultural reasons for the crime wave. This in turn would define many of the culture wars revolving around movies and pop culture for the next 40 years. Parents and censorship advocacy groups would be eager to lambaste movies, music, video games etc. about how they’re warping the minds of impressionable youth. Though the counterargument to this is asking what the Hell the parents are doing by letting them see these works, especially after the ratings board was instituted. If your kid ends up watching an R-rated movie, that’s on you. Furthermore, by all historical accounts, crime and violence in America was much higher in the 19th Century than the 20th, before movies were invented, further hollowing out this complaint.
        Regardless, 1971 is notable for just how violent many of these movies were. Gore and sex had been a major bread-and-butter appeal of a lot of the exploitation pictures and the floodgates had been opened by Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and furthered by Soldier Blue (1970). Still A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs and The Devils are all notable for just how blunt the violence was. In one scene in Straw Dogs, a character gets shot in the foot with a shotgun and you actually see the gnarled mess that his foot turns into afterwards. At least three of these movies contain on-screen rape (A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs and The Devils) and another has it heavily implied (Dirty Harry).
        The world was changing in a bad way in the new decade but I think this is a case more of the movies reflecting the times than the other way around. While I don’t dispute that criminals probably would take lessons from movies to commit their crimes, I don’t think anyone who is normally a non-violent individual will suddenly be inspired to commit violence just from watching movies. In the wise words of Scream (1996): “Don’t blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos, movies make psychos more creative.”***
        This leads to another trend in movies, and most art, that goes back to the dawn of criticism. Stories that tend to push the most boundaries will, ipso facto, be the most likely to live on through the years though that means that people at the time will be more likely to be offended by it. This is a trend in critical and Academy circles that lead to countless snubs throughout the years, as we have seen and will come to see. Though, in this case, A Clockwork Orange wasn’t completely shut out. It was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing, winning none of them.
        While that’s all well and good, A Clockwork Orange was still snubbed across the board for many of the technicals. Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Sound and Best Art Direction are all pretty hard to argue against. This is one of the best-looking films ever made as you could take almost any single shot from A Clockwork Orange, have it framed and mounted on your wall. Similarly, the soundtrack and sound effects sound so ethereal and otherworldly that they just emphasize the dehumanised world that Alex resides in.

This opening shot alone should've been enough to win Best Cinematography. A Clockwork Orange wasn't even nominated and the winner was Fiddler on the Roof, a pretty solid-looking movie to be sure, but nowhere near this evocative.

        Whether or not A Clockwork Orange is a better movie than The French Connection is debatable and pointless to argue. I personally do think that A Clockwork Orange is the far more technically complex film and could’ve been easier to go awry but this is not a case where it was snubbed for a “safer” film that took no chances. The French Connection still features a pretty morally grey protagonist who hurts innocent people in his quest for justice. While A Clockwork Orange would be added to the pile of the long list of examples of Stanley Kubrick never once winning the Oscar for Best Director in his life, the quality gap between the two movies, if there is one, isn’t so steep to really call this a snub. Though, on the other hand, during his acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Director, William Friedkin stated that he thought that Kubrick was the best director in the world so take that for what it’s worth.
        The bigger thing to critique here is that the New Academy of the New Hollywood crowd still demonstrates a clique-ness that shows that while they were more serious about considering challenging films than the 60s Academy, they still really only considered films that were in the New Hollywood groups. Comparing these films, The French Connection and The Last Picture Show were made by New Hollywood directors; Dirty Harry, Shaft and A Clockwork Orange were not (while Kubrick is nominally considered part of the New Hollywood wave by historians, he wasn’t a featured member of the parties and outings that dominated the Los Angeles scene of the era; in fact, around this time he moved with his wife to England where he would stay for the rest of his life). By this point, with so many great movies coming out, the Academy should’ve voted to restore the Best Picture nominee list to a full top 10 to acknowledge all of the great movies coming out and give more serious considerations from other parts of the culture. Especially because of the Best Picture nominees, at least 2 of them (Fiddler on the Roof and the overly-long and boring epic Nicholas and Alexandra

) have no business being there ahead of Dirty Harry, Shaft and some of the aforementioned comedies.
        But I digress. Debating which of these films was truly the best picture of 1971 is pretty pointless. Honestly, so many great movies came during the 1970s that I think we might’ve lost our raison d’etre for the next few installments; I can only think of 2 or 3 Best Picture winners during the 1970s that were actual clear snubs. For now, and for the rest of them, this series will just be a nice little retro critique of some pretty cool movies that you might want to check out if you love movies and want to see some great ones from the decade when cinema truly ruled the world.
        With all that said and done, calling The French Connection the best movie of 1971 was a…


SUCCESS!


***While I don't think movies make the world more violent, one thing that I do think movies have affected the public in an adverse way is with romantic relationships and how they train audiences to think that they’re owed a boy/girlfriend. Watching many of these movies from the auteur era, the way that women and sexual violence are portrayed by the male directors is downright appalling at times (even more so than movies from the 20s-40s) and, after this, you would get the teen movies of the 80s/90s where the nerdy, shy guy would get the hot cheerleader by simply being a good person and never working on his actual flaws. In addition, there’s also been long psychological studies done about how modern generations usually miss out on good relationships because they’re expecting some grand, movie-like romance instead of steadily putting in the work to build a healthy relationship. The ultimate difference here between romantic movies doing more damage to the world than violent movies is that most people don’t want to hurt or kill someone unless they already have a screw loose while dating and romance is something that just about everyone will do in their lives. In addition, movies and pop culture I think can make general audiences more or less racist in how they portray people of different ethnicities and cultures but this is something that we’ve already analyzed here.

Personal Favorite Movies of 1971:

• A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
• Bananas (dir. Woody Allen)
• Bedknobs and Broomsticks (dir. Robert Stevenson)
• Diamonds Are Forever (dir. Guy Hamilton) 
• Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel)
• Harold and Maude (dir. Hal Ashby) 
• Play Misty for Me (dir. Clint Eastwood) 
• Shaft (dir. Gordon Parks) 
• Summer of '42 (dir. Robert Mulligan)
• The Andromeda Strain (dir. Robert Wise)
• The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich) 
• The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin) 
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (dir. Mel Stuart) 

Favorite Heroes:

• Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)
• Dr. Herb Bock (George C. Scott) (The Hospital)
• Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen) (Bananas)
• Georgie Soloway (Dustin Hoffman) (Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?)
• Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) (Dirty Harry)
• Inspector Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) (The French Connection)
• James Bond (Sean Connery) (Diamonds Are Forever)
• Ms. Price (Angela Lansbury) (Bedknobs and Broomsticks)
• Officer John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) (Shaft)
• Tevye (Chaim Topol) (Fiddler on the Roof) 

Favorite Villains:

• Alexander DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) (A Clockwork Orange)
• Arthur Slugworth (Gunter Meisner) (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) 
• Chief Guard Barnes (Michael Bates) (A Clockwork Orange)
• Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter) (Play Misty for Me)
• Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) (A Clockwork Orange) 
• Jonathan Fuerst (Jack Nicholson) (Carnal Knowledge) 
• Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd (Bruce Glover and Putter Smith) (Diamonds Are Forever)
• Mrs. Chasen (Vivian Pickles) (Harold and Maude) 
• Scorpio (Andy Robinson) (Dirty Harry)
• The Father (John Meillon) (Walkabout)

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