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1971
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Filmsite's Greatest Films
of 1971
Actor:
GENE HACKMAN in "The French Connection",
Peter Finch in "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", Walter Matthau
in "Kotch", George C. Scott in "The Hospital",
Topol in "Fiddler on the Roof"
Actress:
JANE FONDA in "Klute", Julie Christie in "McCabe & Mrs.
Miller", Glenda Jackson in "Sunday, Bloody Sunday",
Vanessa Redgrave in "Mary, Queen of Scots", Janet Suzman
in "Nicholas and Alexandra"
Supporting Actor:
BEN JOHNSON in "The Last Picture Show",
Jeff Bridges in "The Last Picture Show",
Leonard Frey in "Fiddler on the Roof", Richard Jaeckel
in "Sometimes a Great Notion", Roy Scheider in "The
French Connection"
Supporting Actress:
CLORIS LEACHMAN in "The Last Picture
Show", Ann-Margret in "Carnal Knowledge",
Ellen Burstyn in "The Last Picture
Show", Barbara Harris in "Who is Harry Kellerman,
and Why is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?", Margaret
Leighton in "The Go-Between"
Director:
WILLIAM FRIEDKIN for "The French Connection",
Peter Bogdanovich for "The Last Picture
Show", Norman Jewison for "Fiddler on the Roof",
Stanley Kubrick for "A Clockwork Orange",
John Schlesinger for "Sunday, Bloody Sunday"
 'Old'
and 'New' Hollywood clashed with two biggest rivals in the
Best Picture competition:
- director Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the
Roof (with eight nominations and three wins
- Best Cinematography (Oswald Morris), Best Sound, and
Best Scoring (this was the first of numerous Oscar wins
for film composer John Williams) - the lavish film adaptation
of the long-running, hit Broadway musical was based on
the Yiddish stories of Tevye the Dairyman, written by Sholem
Aleichem
- the other was the year's innovative Best Picture
victor - The French Connection (with eight nominations
and five wins), a semi-documentary film and exciting
cops and drug dealers action thriller, based on two real-life
New York narcotics squad officers (detectives Eddie 'Popeye'
Egan and Sonny Grosso, portrayed by Hackman and Scheider),
who seized a 120 lb., multi-million dollar shipment of smuggled
heroin (from Marseilles to NYC) in 1961 in a transported
car.
The winning film had more wins than any other
picture of the year: Best Picture, Best Director (young 32
year old William Friedkin), Best Actor, Best Screenplay Adaptation
(Ernest Tidyman), and Best Editing (Jerry Greenberg) for the
memorable, nerve-wracking, edge-of-your-seat auto chase pursuit
sequence through New York's busy city streets). Following after In
the Heat of the Night (1967), it was only the second Best
Picture in Academy history to showcase a police officer as
its central character. And it was the first R-rated film to
win Best Picture since the institution of the MPAA rating system.
The other three Best Picture nominees also displayed
the rift between traditional and edgy pictures were:
- Stanley Kubrick's stylized, provocatively-brilliant
but ultra-violent black comedy A
Clockwork Orange (with four nominations and no wins)
set in Britain's near future - the originally X-rated adaptation
of Anthony Burgess' controversial novel [the only other X-rated
Best Picture nominee was Midnight
Cowboy (1969)]
- the overlong costume drama of the lives of
the last Czar of Russia Nicholas and his wife and family
in Nicholas and Alexandra (with six nominations and
two wins - Best Art Direction/Set Decoration and Best Costume
Design) - its director Franklin J. Schaffner was NOT nominated
as Best Director
- emerging director Peter Bogdanovich's The
Last Picture Show (with eight nominations and
two wins - Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting
Actress), the excellent black and white film adaptation
of Larry McMurtry's coming of age novel about the loss
of innocence and a boy's rites of passage in a small,
1950s Texas town that is about to close its cinema
The Best Director award was presented to William
Friedkin (with his first nomination and win) for his
first major feature The French Connection -
a tough, suspenseful crime film that preceded the similar cop
film Dirty Harry by a few months.
Although his film was not nominated for Best
Picture, British director John Schlesinger was nominated as
Best Director for his dramatic, sexually-oriented adult drama Sunday,
Bloody Sunday (with four nominations and no wins) about
an unusual menage a trois between a homosexual, a heterosexual
woman, and a bi-sexual artist (the object of the other two's
desire). And Peter Bogdanovich was nominated for his deft direction
of the episodic story The Last Picture
Show (his second feature) - it was probably his finest
directorial effort throughout his entire career. Norman Jewison
was nominated for his effort in bringing the musical Fiddler
on the Roof from Broadway to the screen, and master filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick's graphic, sci-fi cult film A
Clockwork Orange was dazzlingly unsettling - but unforgettable.
Gene Hackman (with his third career nomination)
won the coveted Best Actor award (his first Oscar) for
his star-making role as obsessed, foul-mouthed, violent, short-tempered,
bigoted, hard-nosed, dedicated, and world-weary undercover
narcotics cop Jimmy Doyle (alias 'Popeye'). [Hackman had been
twice-nominated in the past as Best Supporting Actor (for Bonnie
And Clyde (1967) and the previous year for I Never
Sang For My Father (1970)).]
Other Best Actor nominees included:
- Brit-born Peter Finch (with the first of two
career nominations - he won Best Actor for Network
(1976)) as Dr. Daniel Hirsh - a middle-aged, homosexual
doctor involved in a three-sided love story in the British
film Sunday, Bloody Sunday
- George C. Scott (with his fourth career nomination)
as Dr. Herbert Bock - an embittered chief surgeon in a New
York medical center in the black comedy and expose The
Hospital (with two nominations and one win - Best Screenplay)
with Paddy Chayefsky's Oscar-winning screenplay
- Topol (with his sole career nomination) as
Teyve - the proud Jewish father and zesty, likeable milkman
who clings to the old ways in Fiddler on the Roof
- Walter Matthau (with his second of three career
nominations - he previously won Best Supporting Actor for The
Fortune Cookie (1966)) as Joseph P. Kotcher - a feisty
senior citizen in Kotch (with four nominations and
no wins) - Jack Lemmon's sole directorial effort and debut
film.
Anti-Vietnam War activist Jane Fonda (with her
second career nomination and first Oscar win) won the
Best Actress award for her performance not as Klute (that was
the name of the private detective played by Donald Sutherland
who hunts down a deviant killer) but as Bree Daniels, a classy,
highly-paid, cynical, sexually-disturbed and threatened call-girl
stalking victim in Alan Pakula's stylized 70s film noir Klute.
Jane Fonda was the first of the famous Fonda movie family
to win an Oscar!
Fonda, the only American actress in the
race, defeated fellow nominees, all foreign-born competitors,
including:
- Julie Christie (with her second career
nomination following her Best Actress win for Darling
(1965)) as Mrs. Constance Miller - an opium-smoking brothel
madam and McCabe's business partner in McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (the film's sole nomination) - Robert
Altman's bleak, deglamourized western set at the turn-of-the-century
Northwest
- Glenda Jackson (with her second consecutive
nomination after a win in the previous year) as Alex Greville
- a heterosexual divorced woman involved in a complicated
set of relationships in Sunday, Bloody Sunday
- Vanessa Redgrave (with her third of
six career nominations) in the title role as the headstrong
Catholic queen in director Charles Jarrott's Mary, Queen
of Scots (with five nominations and no wins)
- Janet Suzman (with her sole career nomination)
as the Russian Czar's wife - Empress Alexandra in director
Franklin J. Schaffner's Nicholas and Alexandra (with
six nominations and two wins - Best Art Direction/Set Decoration
and Best Costume Design)
There were a total of four nominees (two were
victors) in the supporting acting categories from Bogdanovich's
film The Last Picture Show:
- Ben Johnson (with his sole career nomination
and sole Oscar win) who was a former rodeo star and
veteran Western actor from director/mentor John Ford's stock
company, won the Best Supporting Actor award as ex-cowboy
Sam the Lion, the philosophical owner of the decrepit movie
theater/cafe/pool hall in the bleak, declining 50s northwestern
(fictional) Texas town of Anarene
- Cloris Leachman (with her sole career
nomination and sole Oscar win) won the Best Supporting
Actress award as Ruth Popper - the lonely and neglected,
sexually-deprived, aging wife of the football-basketball
coach who beds high school senior Sonny (Timothy Bottoms)
- Jeff Bridges (with his first career
nomination) as Sonny's friend Duane Jackson
- Ellen Burstyn (with her first of six
career nominations - her only supporting nomination) as Lois
Farrow, the mother of Duane's spoiled and rich girlfriend
Jacy (Cybill Shepherd)
The other nominees in the Supporting Actor category
included:
- Roy Scheider (with his first of two unsuccessful
career nominations) as Buddy Russo - Hackman's New York detective
partner in The French Connection
- Leonard Frey (with his sole nomination) as
Motel the tailor who is seeking a wife in Fiddler on the
Roof
- Richard Jaeckel (with his sole nomination)
as Joe Ben Stamper (Paul Newman's brother) who is pinned
in the water by a fallen tree in director/star Paul Newman's
film of Ken Kesey's novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (with
two nominations and no wins)
The remaining nominees in the Supporting Actress
category included:
- Margaret Leighton (with her sole nomination)
as Mrs. Maudsley (Julie Christie's mother) who disapproves
of the surreptitious tryst in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (the
film's sole nomination)
- one-time sex symbol Ann-Margret (with her
first of two unsuccessful career nominations) in a serious
actress role as sexy, vulnerable, contemptible mistress Bobbie
(Jack Nicholson's companion) in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (the
film's sole nomination)
- Barbara Harris (with her sole nomination)
as Allison - an aspiring singer (co-star Dustin Hoffman's
girlfriend) in Who is Harry Kellerman, and Why Is He Saying
Those Terrible Things About Me? [The film has the remarkable
distinction of having the longest title of any nominated
film in Academy history.]
Best Song award winner Isaac Hayes, for Shaft,
was the first African-American to win in that category.
82 year-old legend Charles Chaplin, with his
trademark hat and cane, received an Honorary Oscar, after an
over 20-year, self-imposed exile in Europe (Switzerland). It
was awarded for "the incalculable effect he has had in
making motion pictures the art form of this century." He
received a record 12-minute long standing ovation. In his entire
career, he had only received six Academy Award nominations:
Best Actor and Best Director (Comedy) for The Circus (1927/8),
Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for The Great Dictator
(1940), Best Original Screenplay for Monsieur Verdoux
(1947), and his only win, Best Score for Limelight (1972).
His best films in the sound era were neglected: City
Lights (1931) and Modern
Times (1936).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Other equally-impressive films not nominated
for Best Picture included director John Schlesinger's Sunday,
Bloody Sunday, director Alan J. Pakula's crime thriller Klute,
and director Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs.
Miller with
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as John McCabe and Constance
Miller respectively.
At least three films were completely devoid of
nominations: director Don Siegel's Dirty
Harry with Clint Eastwood as the definitive vigilante
cop Harry Callahan, Roman Polanski's Macbeth, and Nicolas
Roeg's provocative drama Walkabout with Jenny Agutter
as the coming-of-age 'Girl' in the Australian outback. In her
own self-directed tale, A New Leaf, about a near-sighted
heiress pursued by a gold-digging Walter Matthau, Elaine May
was denied an acting nomination.
Malcolm McDowell, the brilliant main character,
juvenile delinquent, Beethoven-loving, aversion-therapy patient
Alex in Kubrick's ultra-violent A Clockwork
Orange was not nominated, nor was Jack Nicholson for
his role as misogynistic Jonathan in director Mike Nichols' Carnal
Knowledge (with only one unsuccessful nomination), nor
was Jessica Walter as psychopathic fan Evelyn Draper in director/actor
Clint Eastwood's Play Misty For Me (without
any nominations), nor was Ruth Gordon as free-spirited, eccentric,
death-obsessed 79 year-old Maude in director Hal Ashby's Harold
and Maude. Cybill Shepherd was denied a nominated as the
flirtatious Jacy in The Last Picture
Show, as was Susan George as Dustin Hoffman's conflicted
wife in Straw Dogs.
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