As we’ve already seen, the late 60s and early 70s are a stark transition period in movie history. The studio system is in decline and independent film is ascending; the death of the Hays code has opened up new storytelling possibilities; and the old guard of actors and directors has given way to a new generation - the “New Hollywood,” dominated by figures that were totally unknown in the mid-60s but would come to define cinema for decades to come. As a result, we find ourselves very suddenly talking about a whole bunch of new people: in fact our last ten Moonlight nominees (five each in ‘69 and ‘70) were all made by directors whom we’d never nominated before, many of them on their first-ever feature film.
That trend is going to continue as we get further into the 1970s. This year, 1971, we’re going to hear lots of new names: directors like Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin, and actors like Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, and Malcolm McDowell. But the old guard hasn’t given up yet: 1971 also brings us Death in Venice, a late masterwork by Luchino Visconti, and Murmur of the Heart, our first encounter with Louis Malle since 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. And straddling the old guard/new guard line - towering over it, really - is Stanley Kubrick, back again with A Clockwork Orange and looking to become just our second three-time Moonlight winner.
To identify the Best Picture of 1971, 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
When it comes to critical acclaim, 1971 was a stronger year than its predecessor - but that’s mostly because of A Clockwork Orange, which is frequently ranked among the ‘best’ films of all time. (Though it's rarely cited as the best Kubrick film - a testament to Kubrick’s reputation as a director.)
Even beyond A Clockwork Orange, though, 1971 has a lot to be proud of. The year’s Oscar winner, William Friedkin’s The French Connection, still holds up nicely, sneaking onto a couple top-100 lists; and Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show, with its stellar cast of fresh faces, landed on the American Film Institute’s list of the best films ever made in the U.S. Then there’s Robert Altman, last year’s runner-up with MASH, back again with McCabe and Mrs. Miller: it didn’t make the AFI’s cut, but it did land a conspicuously high place on the BBC’s list of the greatest American films of all time.
Here’s a list of 1971 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound directors (2012): A Clockwork Orange (T75)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): A Clockwork Orange (70), The French Connection (93), The Last Picture Show (95)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): A Clockwork Orange (76)
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): A Clockwork Orange (35)
BBC American (2015): McCabe & Mrs Miller (16)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): A Clockwork Orange (47), Dirty Harry (85), The French Connection (90)
That's the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, by the way: 1971 got shut out in the updated 2022 list.
One other film gets mentioned that we haven’t discussed yet: Dirty Harry, which completed Clint Eastwood’s ascendance as an action hero in addition to a Western star. Dirty Harry was directed by Don Siegel - not commonly ranked among the greatest directors, but already a Moonlight nominee for a very different film, 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (Actually I’m not sure how different those two films are, come to think of it.)
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 nineteen films from 1971:
(77) A Clockwork Orange
(189) Death in Venice
(206) McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(309) The Last Picture Show
(318) Harold and Maude
(346) A Touch of Zen
(450) Two-Lane Blacktop
(478) Out 1, Noli Me Tangere
(540) The French Connection
(575) La Région Centrale
(612) The Devils
(712) Walkabout
(727) W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
(749) Dirty Harry
(822) Two English Girls
(859) Fata Morgana
(904) Duel
(974) Get Carter
(977) The Go-Between
Surprising no one, A Clockwork Orange comes out on top here too - though it’s only the fourth-highest ranking Kubrick film, behind 2001, Dr. Strangelove, and Barry Lyndon. (The Shining also makes TSPDT’s top 100, at number 84. Bergman, Fellini, and Hitchcock all place four films in the top 100, but Kubrick’s the only director with five.)
Even without Clockwork, though, 1971 gives us a fine crop of films. There are McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Last Picture Show near the top again, with French Connection a little further back and Dirty Harry sneaking in - but we also see Visconti’s Death in Venice in a surprising second place, plus a strong showing from Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude. (Something about older folks loving young boys, I guess.)
And they won’t make our cut this year, but note Fata Morgana and Duel down there near the bottom - our first encounters with Werner Herzog and Steven Spielberg, respectively. We’ll see them again soon.
General Audiences
But which films from 1971 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 1971, according to IMDB (as of November 25, 2022):
A Clockwork Orange (828,242 votes)
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (202,667)
Dirty Harry (157,737)
The French Connection (123,791)
Diamonds Are Forever (107,563)
Harold and Maude (77,986)
Straw Dogs (60,912)
THX 1138 (52,066)
The Last Picture Show (48,850)
Fiddler on the Roof (43,958)
Hello and welcome, George Lucas.
Once again, A Clockwork Orange is our runaway winner, with four times as many votes as second-place Willy Wonka; it’s also the seventh-most watched film of the entire decade - and the 40th-most watched film of the entire century. (Among IMDB users, at least.)
And again, there’s some overlap between IMDB’s top ten and the critics’ picks: in third place is Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s most enduring film of the ‘70s, and in fourth place is The French Connection, with Harold and Maude and Last Picture Show also cracking the top ten. (And let’s not sleep on Willy Wonka: it didn’t make any of our critics’ “best” lists, but its legacy has certainly endured with moviegoers as well.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1971 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
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.)
A Clockwork Orange (9) 169
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (7) 124
The Last Picture Show 107
Death in Venice 106
The French Connection (2) 104
Klute 97
Harold and Maude (1) 75
Walkabout (2) 60
Dirty Harry 47
Murmur of the Heart 46
Straw Dogs 41
Diamonds Are Forever 29
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1) 27
Get Carter 27
Carnal Knowledge 20
My Uncle Antoine 17
Shaft 14
Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song (1) 14
Taking Off (1) 11
THX 1138 11
Four Nights of a Dreamer 8
A New Leaf 8
The Merchant of Four Seasons 7
Duel 6
Punishment Park 6
The Emigrants 5
Vanishing Point 5
Fiddler on the Roof 4
Short Night of Glass Dolls 3
A Touch of Zen 2
Family Life 1
A Clockwork Orange completes the trifecta, taking first place with our panel as well as critics and moviegoers. The last two films to accomplish that feat? Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, both Kubrick's. The last non-Kubrick film to do it? Singin’ in the Rain, all the way back in 1952. Stanley Kubrick has now directed three films that won all three of our categories; no other director has done it more than once.
Behind Clockwork, we have a strong second-place showing for McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which won nearly as many first-place votes as Kubrick. Trailing just behind McCabe is a block of four films - including Klute, which we haven’t mentioned yet but does surprisingly well with our panel. On the flip side, Harold and Maude gets a first-place vote but finishes a disappointing seventh, and Dirty Harry and Murmur of the Heart trail even further back.
And seventeen films got write-in votes, an indication of just how many films from the year remain relevant more than 50 years later. Blaxploitation classics Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song didn’t get enough critical acclaim or general-audience votes to make our shortlist, but they got love from several of our panelists, including one first-place vote for Sweetback; another panelist wrote in a first-place vote for Miloš Forman’s Taking Off. Our top write-in, though, was Carnal Knowledge, an early Jack Nicholson starrer that Roger Ebert described at the time as “clearly Mike Nichols’ best film” - which was saying a lot, since Virginia Woolf and The Graduate were already long in the can.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
A Clockwork Orange is a lock, of course, but after that it gets a little trickier. We can rule out Willy Wonka, which hits with moviegoers but not with critics or scholars; likewise, we can rule out Klute, which did well with our panelists but not with anybody else. You can make a stronger case for Dirty Harry, which performs better across the board, but it won’t make our top five either - and neither will Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, despite its two first-place votes with our panel.
That leaves five contenders for our final four nominations: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Last Picture Show, Death in Venice, The French Connection, and Harold and Maude. All five play about equally well with critics: French Connection trails a bit further back on TSPDT’s top-1000 ranking, but it’s also the only one of the five to make more than one top-100 list. With general audiences, French Connection comes out on top, with strong showings for Harold and Maude and Last Picture Show; McCabe and Venice trail well back, in 25th and 26th place for the year respectively. But with our panelists, it’s McCabe that rises to the top, and Harold and Maude that brings up the rear. Which film gets the ax?
We’ll give nominations first to The French Connection and The Last Picture Show, which perform well across all three of our metrics. McCabe and Mrs. Miller gets our next nod; it doesn’t hit as well with general audiences, but we can’t ignore its strong showing with our panel.
That leaves one more spot and two contenders: our two massive-age-gap romances, Death in Venice and Harold and Maude. You could go either way with this one - personally I prefer Harold, and I’d take Thomas Mann’s original Death in Venice novel over Visconti’s movie any day - but we’ll go with our panelists nonetheless and give the final spot to Tadzio. After all, who can resist?
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1971 are:
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE DEATH IN VENICE
THE FRENCH CONNECTION THE LAST PICTURE SHOW McCABE AND MRS MILLER
Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin are first-time nominees, but for the first time in three years, we do have some directors we’ve actually encountered before - including McCabe’s Robert Altman, who gets a nod for the second straight year, and Venice’s Visconti, also nominated for 1943's Ossessione and 1963’s The Leopard. Most notably, though, this is nomination number four for Stanley Kubrick, moving him into a nine-way tie for third: only Orson Welles (5) and Alfred Hitchcock (13) have more Moonlight nominations.
And apologies to Hal Ashby, whose Harold and Maude is our odd man out - but there’s a good chance we’ll see him again in 1979, when Being There comes along.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s not even close: congratulations to A Clockwork Orange, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1971!
In a year that saw the old guard rising back up to compete with the young hotshots, it’s fitting that the Moonlight should go to Kubrick, the director who straddles the line - a veteran filmmaker with a resume going back to the ‘50s, but clearly more aligned with the New Hollywood generation than the Hitchcocks and Wilders that came before. Come to think of it, there may be no better example of straddling that line than Clockwork’s “Singin’ in the Rain” scene, serendipitously improvised by Malcolm McDowell - which anchors the film firmly to movie history (a song from a classic movie about classic movies!) while gleefully subverting it, twisting it, and exploding it all at the same time. It’s Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, running his finger along his hat brim - cranked up to a level Godard never even imagined. (For better or worse.)
A Clockwork Orange is the clear winner, but who’s second? McCabe and Mrs. Miller did best with our panelists, but The French Connection probably has the best claim to the runner-up spot: it’s easily the favorite with general audiences, it made several critics’ “all-time best” lists, and it only trails McCabe by a handful of points with our panel. The Oscars did pretty well in this period, all things considered: The French Connection joins The Apartment, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and Midnight Cowboy as Oscar winners from the ‘60s and early ‘70s that still stand among the very best films of their year. (And that trend will continue: The Godfather I and II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, and The Deer Hunter are all coming in the next seven years.)
That aside, though, this year is all about Stanley Kubrick, who’s now won Moonlights for each of his last three films. With this win, Kubrick becomes just the second director to win more than two Moonlight Awards; the other is Alfred Hitchcock, with four. Will Kubrick match Hitch’s total? Maybe, but his journey is about to get tougher: Barry Lyndon and The Shining are both highly acclaimed, but The Shining will have to compete with Raging Bull and The Empire Strikes Back, and Barry Lyndon will be up against Jeanne Dielman, Jaws, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - not to mention Dog Day Afternoon, Mirror, and Nashville. 1975 was a crowded year.
But even if this is it for Kubrick, it’s already been an incredible run. Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange all finished first in their respective years with critics and scholars and general audiences, an extremely rare feat that Kubrick’s accomplished three times in a row. The only other films to win all three categories for their year? Modern Times, Bringing Up Baby, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Bicycle Thieves, The Third Man, and Singin’ in the Rain - so far, at least. We, uh, may be adding another one to that list fairly soon.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1972:
AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD
CABARET
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
THE GODFATHER SOLARIS
With apologies to Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, which came in a very close sixth. Remarkably, we’ve still only given Bergman two Moonlight nominations - but he’s won both times, for The Seventh Seal in 1957 and Persona in 1966. On the flip side, Luis Buñuel gets his fifth nomination for Discreet Charm, tying Orson Welles for second all time - but Buñuel still has yet to win a Moonlight.
There are three first-time nominees here, all legends: Werner Herzog for Aguirre, Bob Fosse for Cabaret, and of course Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather. As remarkable a run as Stanley Kubrick had from 1964-1971, Coppola’s about to match it: between 1972 and 1979, he’ll direct two Godfathers, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, so he may very well tie Kubrick with three Moonlights by the end of the decade. (Which director of the era had the best seven-year run? Before you decide, also consider Steven Spielberg: Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T., all between 1975 and 1982.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1971? Who should win the Moonlight for 1972? Join our community and weigh in!
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