We’ve reached the beginning of a new decade, and after all the tumult of the 1960s, the film world in 1970 is experiencing a sort of rebirth. The New Hollywood movement has taken over in just a few short years, placing a new generation of young wunderkinds at the forefront of the industry. Over the next few years, we’re going to have our first encounters with the actors and directors who will come to dominate cinema for decades: Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Pacino, DeNiro, Nicholson, Streep, and on and on. 1970 is still a bit early, and the peak of the movement is yet to come - but who leads the avant garde?
To identify the Best Picture of 1970, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
As we’ll see, 1970 is a lean year in movie history: with the odd exception here and there, very few of this year’s films are still talked about much today. It’s not as dire as 1947, where we couldn’t find a single film that made any critical “all-time best” list - but it’s close.
The most notable exception comes not from Hollywood, but Italy: The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci’s first masterpiece. (Not part of the New Hollywood movement, but part of the same generation: Bertolucci was just 29 at the time.) The Conformist snagged a spot on Sight & Sound’s 2012 ranking of the 100 greatest films; it also landed on the BBC’s 2018 ranking of the top 100 foreign-language films.
After The Conformist, though, the pickings are slim. Sight & Sound also gave a nod to Husbands, John Cassavetes’ follow-up to 1968’s Moonlight nominee Faces; the classic rockumentary Woodstock landed on Entertainment Weekly’s 2013 top-100 list; and the American Film Institute recognized MASH - our first encounter with another future directing legend, Robert Altman.
Here’s a list of 1970 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound directors (2012): The Conformist (T59), Husbands (T75)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): MASH (54)
BBC Foreign (2018): The Conformist (77)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Woodstock (89)
The 2022 version of Sight & Sound’s list (released after we compiled the data for this year) also includes Barbara Loden’s low-budget indie classic Wanda, replacing Husbands; The Conformist dropped to 93rd.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes seventeen films from 1970:
(87) The Conformist
(219) Performance
(299) Husbands
(300) Wanda
(400) Tristana
(430) Five Easy Pieces
(546) Gimme Shelter
(580) The Red Circle
(708) The Wild Child
(768) Claire's Knee
(7930 Dodes'ka-den
(817) Deep End
(911) MASH
(918) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(963) The Hart of London
(969) Le Boucher
(988) Zabriskie Point
The Conformist is the clear leader, but there are several other films worth noting. Wanda cracks the top 300, just behind Husbands - and since TSPDT’s ranking uses Sight & Sound’s poll as one of its metrics, Loden will likely leapfrog Cassavetes in their next update. Slightly further back is Five Easy Pieces, the first of many films we’ll encounter that feature Jack Nicholson in the lead (after his supporting turn in 1969’s Easy Rider). And Mick Jagger shows up twice, first as an actor in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, then as himself in Gimme Shelter - which, as 1970 rock docs go, gets more love here than the conspicuously-absent Woodstock.
1970 is a time when new filmmakers are rising to the fore and older filmmakers are fading, but several long-established icons are represented here: Luis Buñuel (Tristana), François Truffaut (The Wild Child), Akira Kurosawa (Dodes'ka-den), Billy Wilder (Sherlock Holmes), and Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point). The old guard hasn’t given up yet.
General Audiences
But which films from 1970 do general audiences still watch?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger than average and more likely male, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1970, according to IMDB (as of October 20, 2022):
The Aristocats (104,661 votes)
Patton (102,446)
MASH (73,456)
Kelly's Heroes (50,025)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (47,417)
Five Easy Pieces (37,487)
Little Big Man (35,665)
Tora! Tora! Tora! (34,671)
Love Story (34,627)
The Conformist (30,766)
We’ve repeatedly found that critics and general audiences tend to converge over time, and 1970 is no exception: generally speaking, both critics and moviegoers are unimpressed with the whole year. The Aristocats, hardly an A-level Disney film, leads the way with only about 105,000 votes, the lowest total to lead a year since 1956. (It’s also the first animated Disney movie to lead its year since Lady and the Tramp in 1955 - and after this year, there won’t be another one.)
Of the films that made TSPDT’s top 1000, MASH and Five Easy Pieces play fairly well with moviegoers - and there’s The Conformist sneaking into the top ten too, despite IMDB’s English-language bias. (Tora! Tora! Tora!, half in Japanese, also makes the cut - though it’s only the third-most popular World War II film of the year, behind Patton and Kelly’s Heroes.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 16 films from 1970 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. This time, Wanda was our snub: we do include every film that we find on a critics’ top-100 list, but we sent our shortlist to the panelists long before Sight & Sound released its 2022 poll.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
The Conformist (14) 168
MASH (3) 153
Five Easy Pieces 106
Claire's Knee (1) 83
Gimme Shelter (3) 83
Husbands 63
Patton 62
Tristana 62
Performance 60
Woodstock 60
The Red Circle 39
Little Big Man 38
Le Boucher 36
Wanda 24
The Aristocats (1) 22
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 21
Beneath the Planet of the Apes 13
El Topo (1) 13
Diary of a Mad Housewife (1) 10
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 9
Women in Love 9
Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion 9
Kelly's Heroes 8
Dodes'ka-den 6
Watermelon Man 6
The Honeymoon Killers 4
Lovers and Other Strangers 3
The Wild Child 3
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis 1
Multiple Maniacs 1
A landslide win for The Conformist with 14 first-place votes, tied with Modern Times and Citizen Kane for second-most all-time. (2001: A Space Odyssey got 17 first-place votes in 1968.) But second-place MASH is surprisingly close in points, because The Conformist turns out to be this year’s cult classic: 14 voters ranked it first, but five others left it off their lists entirely.
Beyond those two clear favorites, there’s no consensus among our panelists. Five Easy Pieces is solidly in third, albeit without any first-place votes; Gimme Shelter is tied with Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee in fourth; and then we have a virtual five-way tie between Husbands, Patton, Tristana, Performance, and Woodstock.
Among write-ins, Wanda did get a lot of support - and so did Russ Meyer’s camp classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, not to be found on Sight & Sound’s top 100. With 24 and 21 points respectively, these will be the second- and third-most popular write-ins of the entire decade. (The most popular write-in? I won’t spoil it, but it’s from 1972.)
On the flip side, getting no love at all is Kelly’s Heroes, which got shortlisted by virtue of its top-five IMDB ranking but manages only 8 points from our scholars. For the entire rest of the decade, there will only be two shortlisted films that perform worse with our panel.
My own opinion? I’m glad to see Beyond the Valley of the Dolls do as well as it did, but Multiple Maniacs needs a lot more love too.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
The Conformist, MASH, and Five Easy Pieces are clearly the top three. Those are the only three films on TSPDT’s critics’ list that also made IMDB’s top ten, and they’re also the top three films with our panel.
After that, we’ll throw our fourth spot to Gimme Shelter. It’s tied for fourth with our panel, along with Claire’s Knee, and it outpaces Claire with both critics and general audiences. (Gimme Shelter ranks 23rd for the year with IMDB voters; Claire’s Knee is slightly behind in 26th.)
That leaves one more spot and several possible contenders. Claire’s Knee is the leader with our panel; Performance and Husbands have the edge with critics; Patton is tops with general audiences; and you could also make a case for Wanda based on its Sight & Sound ranking. No obvious choice - but we’ll go with Patton, which probably has more recognizability in 21st-century popular culture than the other four films combined.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1970 are:
THE CONFORMIST FIVE EASY PIECES GIMME SHELTER MASH
PATTON
Gimme Shelter is the most historic nomination. It’s just our third documentary to get a nod, following Triumph of the Will and Night & Fog - and co-director Charlotte Zwerin becomes our fourth female nominee, alongside Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will), Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon), and Agnès Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7).
How much of a generational shift is happening at this stage in movie history? For the second year in a row, all five of our directors are first-time Moonlight nominees. Before 1969, that hadn’t happened in any year since 1933.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
We can rule out our Oscar winner first: Patton still resonates with general audiences, at least to a greater extent than most other 1970 flicks, but it doesn’t really hit with critics or scholars. After that is Gimme Shelter, a great documentary that scores well across all our metrics but doesn’t measure up to our top three. Solidly in third place is Five Easy Pieces, which outpaces Gimme Shelter but lags behind our other two.
That leaves MASH and The Conformist - a showdown between Altman and Bertolucci, two iconic directors who probably won’t have a better chance to win in any other year. You could make a strong case for either film - The Conformist is the critical darling, while MASH has more general-audience love (and secondhand influence from the TV show) - but in this case our expert panel makes it easy. The Conformist got more first-place votes than all but three of the films we’ve encountered in this entire project, dating back to 1930 - and there won’t be another movie from this decade that matches that number. Bertolucci reigns supreme.
So congratulations to The Conformist, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1970!
In an era dominated by the New Hollywood movement, The Conformist scores one for Europe: it’s the first Italian winner since 8 1/2 in 1963, and just the third Italian winner overall (with 1948’s Bicycle Thieves).
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1971:
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
DEATH IN VENICE
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
McCABE AND MRS. MILLER
For the first time in three years, we have directors we’ve encountered before - including MASH’s Robert Altman, who comes back immediately with McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Most notable here, though, is the return of Stanley Kubrick: not only have his last two films won the Moonlight, they’ve also both accomplished the rarer feat of finishing first with critics and general audiences and our panelists. No other director has done that more than once. Will Kubrick do it again with A Clockwork Orange? It remains to be seen.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1970? Who should win the Moonlight for 1971? Join our community and weigh in!
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