Thus far in this project, one of our most consistent findings has been that the opinions of film critics and ordinary moviegoers don’t diverge from each other as much as conventional wisdom would have you believe. They may disagree at first, but over time both groups will eventually tend to gravitate toward the same films - perhaps nudging each other along the way - so that after fifty or sixty years, you’ll see most everyone sharing the same basic preferences.
But it takes a little while for that consensus to emerge - so we can expect that as we get closer to the present day, we’ll see more and more examples of films that regular folks love but scholars mostly ignore, or films that scholars love but regular folks have never heard of. As we’ll see, that’s definitely the case with 1973. But are there any ‘73 movies that cut across those lines, that appeal to ordinary film lovers as well as the esteemed critics and scholars? And if so, is that consensus strong enough to win a Moonlight?
To identify the Best Picture of 1973, 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
There aren’t very many 1973 films that still resonate in pop culture, but you don’t have to have a doctorate in film studies to recognize some titles: The Exorcist, The Sting, Enter the Dragon, American Graffiti, Disney’s Robin Hood, James Bond’s Live and Let Die, and maybe Mean Streets or Serpico or Papillon or Magnum Force if you’re into the gritty crime thing.
Those, however, aren’t the ‘73 films that showed up in Sight & Sound’s prestigious decennial “best films of all time” survey of critics and directors. Sight & Sound’s voters loved 1973, but if you’re not a film expert, you can be excused for not recognizing any of these: Jean Eustache’s three-hour drama La Maman et la Putain; Senegalese classic Touki Bouki; or The Spirit of the Beehive, a “slow-paced, thinly plotted and ‘arty’” flick about life in Spain under Franco’s fascist regime. (If you’re a Pan’s Labyrinth fan, though, you’ll at least want to check out that last one: Beehive was a direct influence.)
But critics also cited some more populist ‘73 flicks on their “all-time best” lists as well. Sight & Sound’s list also includes Badlands, Terrence Malick’s debut film that helped launch the careers of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, and Don’t Look Now, frequently ranked among the greatest early horror movies.
Here’s a list of 1973 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): La Maman et la Putain (T59), Spirit of the Beehive (T81), Touki Bouki (T93)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Amarcord (T30), Badlands (T67), La Maman et la Putain (T91), Don’t Look Now (T91)
Sight & Sound critics (2022): Touki Bouki (66), Spirit of the Beehive (T84)
Sight & Sound directors (2022): Don’t Look Now (T46), La Maman et la Putain (T53), Touki Bouki (T72), Spirit of the Beehive (T72)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): American Graffiti (62)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): The Exorcist (88)
Leonard Maltin: Mean Streets
National Society of Film Critics: Enter the Dragon, The Exorcist
BBC American (2015): Mean Streets (93)
BBC Foreign (2018): Spirit of the Beehive (27), Touki Bouki (62), Scenes from a Marriage (92)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Mean Streets (7), American Graffiti (71), Scenes from a Marriage (82)
No love for The Exorcist in Sight & Sound’s ranking, but our friend Pazuzu does show up on a couple of “all-time best” lists, most notably Empire magazine’s 2017 ranking of the 100 greatest movies ever made. Other films with multiple citations include George Lucas’ nostalgia trip American Graffiti; Ingmar Bergman’s miniseries Scenes from a Marriage; and Mean Streets, not quite Martin Scorsese’s first film but certainly his first mature one. (In 2013, Entertainment Weekly ranked Mean Streets as the seventh greatest movie ever made, far outpacing every other Scorsese film - a surprise for a flick that’s often described as a sort of rough draft for Taxi Driver and Goodfellas.)
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 21 films from 1973:
(70) Amarcord
(103) La Maman et la Putain
(105) Spirit of the Beehive
(128) Don't Look Now
(136) Badlands
(208) The Exorcist
(245) F for Fake
(270) Mean Streets
(305) Touki Bouki
(412) The Long Goodbye
(449) Day for Night
(457) Scenes from a Marriage
(542) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(645) The Wicker Man
(795) The Last Detail
(809) Paper Moon
(829) The Holy Mountain
(909) American Graffiti
(933) Enter the Dragon
(948) O Lucky Man!
(975) Ludwig
Leading the way is a film we haven’t mentioned yet: Amarcord, Federico Fellini’s own nostalgia trip about growing up in 1930s Italy. Amarcord did make Sight & Sound’s top 100 back in 2012, but got dropped from the most recent 2022 list.
Just behind Amarcord are two Sight & Sound faves, La Maman et la Putain and The Spirit of the Beehive - with Touki Bouki also present a bit further back. Our two horror classics, Don’t Look Now and The Exorcist, both rank highly, with Badlands in between. We also see a few other films we’ve mentioned already, like Mean Streets, American Graffiti, and Enter the Dragon. And there are several others worth noting as well - especially Orson Welles’ sort-of documentary F for Fake, which ranks here above Touki Bouki and even Mean Streets. (Nobody tell Entertainment Weekly.)
General Audiences
But which films from 1973 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 1973, according to IMDB (as of February 20, 2023):
The Exorcist (414,362 votes)
The Sting (266,049)
Papillon (132,644)
Robin Hood (130,433)
Serpico (125,903)
Mean Streets (111,738)
Live and Let Die (109,956)
Enter the Dragon (106,386)
American Graffiti (92,204)
The Wicker Man (83,319)
Here’s where we start to see the divergence between critics and general audiences: The Exorcist is solidly in first place, Mean Streets hits well, but otherwise there’s not much overlap between these movies and the ones most often cited by film experts as the ‘best’ of 1973. (That’s even true of The Sting, which swept the Oscars and still plays well with ordinary moviegoers - as far as Redford-Newman flicks go, I personally think it’s better than Butch and Sundance - but never got a mention in any of our critics’ lists.)
Even so, there’s still some overlap here worth noting: in eighth, ninth, and tenth place respectively are Enter the Dragon, American Graffiti, and The Wicker Man, all of which made TSPDT’s top-1000 list. (Badlands, also beloved by critics, is just behind in 11th place.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 19 films from 1972 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.) Ordinarily we try to keep our list to around 15 - but with the relative lack of overlap between critics and general audiences, there were more films to choose from this time around.
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.)
Badlands (7) 135
Mean Streets (2) 95
The Exorcist (3) 84
Day for Night (1) 82
Don't Look Now 81
Amarcord (2) 79
Scenes from a Marriage (1) 78
American Graffiti (1) 74
Spirit of the Beehive (2) 59
The Sting (1) 56
Serpico (1) 55
Paper Moon 42
Touki Bouki 39
Enter the Dragon (1) 37
Papillon 21
The Long Goodbye (1) 18
The Holy Mountain 14
The Wicker Man 14
Robin Hood 12
The Last Detail 12
La Maman et la Putain 11
O Lucky Man! 8
Distant Thunder 6
Black Caesar 5
Love and Anarchy 4
Sleeper 4
The Baby 3
Day of the Jackal 3
F for Fake 3
Sisters 2
Westworld 2
The Castle of Purity 1
Badlands is the runaway winner with our panel, racking up seven first-place votes and outpacing second-place Mean Streets by 40 points. Beyond that, though, there’s a remarkable lack of consensus - a record-setting lack of consensus, in fact. Twelve different films got first-place votes; that’s a new record, breaking the old mark of 11 that had been shared by 1961 and 1969.
Despite all that disagreement, we can still glean some important points from these results. Behind Badlands, our second- and third-place films here are Mean Streets and The Exorcist, the same two films that also managed to score well with both critics and general audiences. The Exorcist leads a pack of six films that are all nearly tied - including critical darlings Don’t Look Now, Amarcord, and Scenes from a Marriage. American Graffiti is in that pack as well; that film keeps showing up across all our metrics, never near the top but always getting love across the board. We haven’t yet mentioned Truffaut’s Day for Night, but it got high marks from our panel too.
What doesn’t get high marks from the panel? La Maman et la Putain, most notably: the critics at Sight & Sound may think otherwise, but Maman placed dead last with our panel - behind even two write-in films, The Long Goodbye and The Last Detail. (Not to mention Robin Hood, which isn’t exactly one of the most critically beloved Disney flicks.)
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
First, we can lock in the two films that score well across all three of our metrics: The Exorcist and Mean Streets. Badlands is also an obvious lock, given its impressive performance with our panel; it doesn’t hit quite as well with general audiences, but even there it’s in a respectable 11th place for the year.
That leaves just two nominations left - and a whole mess of films that could claim them.
First, let’s consider the five films that trail just behind The Exorcist in our panel vote: Day for Night, Don’t Look Now, Amarcord, Scenes from a Marriage, and American Graffiti. All five are essentially tied with the panel - but we can rule out Day for Night and Scenes from a Marriage, since they score behind Amarcord and Don’t Look Now with both critics and general audiences.
That leaves Amarcord, Don’t Look Now, and American Graffiti as possible nominees. You can make a strong case for any of them, but we’ll give the edge to American Graffiti and Don’t Look Now, which have a slight advantage over Amarcord with general audiences. (More to the point, Fellini already has four Moonlight nominations and a win for 8 1/2, while George Lucas and Nicolas Roeg would be first-time nominees. Roeg in particular is deserving at this point: we already snubbed him for Performance in 1970, and this is probably his best remaining shot.)
But is there another film that deserves a nomination ahead of American Graffiti and Don’t Look Now, even if it didn’t score as well with our panel? Not really: Spirit of the Beehive hits with critics but doesn’t rate with general audiences; The Sting and Serpico hit with general audiences but get no love from critics; and while Enter the Dragon plays well with both critics and ordinary moviegoers, our panelists largely ignored it. The Wolfman and that creepy dwarf lady are safe.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1973 are:
AMERICAN GRAFFITI
BADLANDS
DON’T LOOK NOW
THE EXORCIST
MEAN STREETS
Amarcord is our honorable-mention film this year: Federico Fellini’s not likely to get another shot, so he’ll end his career with a very respectable four Moonlight nominations and one win. This is only the third time the highest-ranking movie on TSPDT’s critical aggregate failed to get a nomination; the other two such films were 1951’s The River and 1957’s Wild Strawberries. (And Wild Strawberries’ snub was a special case: it had earned a nomination, but so had The Seventh Seal, and we wanted to avoid doubling up on Ingmar Bergman that year.)
Our five nominees from 1972 included just two American flicks, ending a run of years dominated by the New Hollywood movement, but it looks like that was just a one-time thing: four of our nominees this year are American, with the only exception being the British Don’t Look Now. And since we’re still very much in the New Hollywood era, it’s fitting that four of this year’s directors are first-time nominees - including soon-to-be legends George Lucas, Terrence Malick, and Martin Scorsese, all on the cusp of their careers. The only previous nominee is The Exorcist’s William Friedkin, who also got a nod for The French Connection in 1971.
As far as actors go? This crop of nominees gives us our first official encounters with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek (Badlands); Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets); Linda Blair (The Exorcist); and Harrison Ford and Ron Howard (American Graffiti). And Graffiti’s Richard Dreyfuss too, if we don’t count his bit part in The Graduate.
Also worth noting: 1973 is a great year for horror, with The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now both earning nominations. That’s only happened in one other year: 1968, when Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby made our top five. We’re in the middle of a great period for horror films, as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, Suspiria, Halloween, and Alien are all on deck. (We’re also, as it turns out, in the middle of a great period for movies set in Venice that end with the demise of a major character: between Don’t Look Now and 1971’s Death in Venice, it’s a wonder their tourism industry managed to stay afloat.)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This one’s a toughie, but we can narrow the field down pretty quickly. Don’t Look Now and American Graffiti earned spots in our top five, but they don’t score as well across our metrics as the other three nominees. We can eliminate Mean Streets next: while it has a slight edge over The Exorcist with our panelists, The Exorcist clearly outpaces it on all our other metrics, most notably with general audiences.
So it comes down to two films: Badlands, which won our panel vote by a South Dakota mile, or The Exorcist, far and away the most influential ‘73 film in popular culture (and likely the only ‘73 film many ordinary folks have seen). You can make a strong case for either, but in this case we’ll let general audiences be the decider: Badlands scores well with critics and scholars but doesn’t hit with today’s moviegoers, whereas The Exorcist scores highly across every metric and is the runaway favorite with the masses.
And so: congratulations to The Exorcist, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1973!
With apologies to Terrence Malick, but he will have another shot in 1978 with Days of Heaven.
One interesting stat about The Exorcist’s win: it earns acclaim across the board, but it was only the third-highest ranking film with our panel - and while that’s not bad, it’s also rare for a film to win the Moonlight without at least ranking in our panel’s top two. In fact the last film to do it was It’s A Wonderful Life, all the way back in 1946 - and the only other films to do it before that were 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein and 1945’s Children of Paradise. (This may become more common, though, as we get closer to the present day and opinions begin to diverge.)
You’d be excused for thinking The Exorcist is the first horror flick to win a Moonlight - but it’s actually the third, joining Bride of Frankenstein and 1960’s Psycho. (And 1966’s Persona?) We may not have long to wait for our next horror winner, though: Jaws is just around the corner in ‘75, and while Apocalypse Now is likely the favorite for ‘79, Alien may have a few things to say about that.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1974:
ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL
CHINATOWN
THE GODFATHER, PART II
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
With honorable mention to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. We have a general rule that individual directors should only get one nomination per year, and obviously Godfather II is the one you have to choose here, but The Conversation is also one of the highest-scoring films of 1974. Coppola had a pretty good year, to say the least - perhaps the best year ever for one individual director. (Mel Brooks also had a pretty good year: we’re going with Young Frankenstein, but Blazing Saddles also came out in ‘74 too.)
Snubbing The Conversation does allow us to honor Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who gets his first (and maybe only) nomination for the lesser-known but eminently worthy Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Mel Brooks is also a first-time nominee, having just missed the cut with The Producers - but otherwise these directors are all returning veterans, including Chinatown’s Roman Polanski, who’s now a three-time nominee with Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1973? Who should win the Moonlight for 1974? Join our community and weigh in!
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