Best Supporting Actor 1971

[mlrg]

If nothing else these threads allow me to re-visit films I haven't seen in decades.

I have the exact same feeling!

[Reza]

If nothing else these threads allow me to re-visit films I haven't seen in decades. I'm now going to ensure I review Carnal Knowledge after Mister Tee's mention of it below. I saw this years ago (but many years after it originally came out) only to basically check out Ann-Margret's Oscar nominated performance and her nude scene. I barely remember the film. So it's high time I revisit it.

[Mister Tee]

I went back and looked at my notebooks from 1971, and found that I had actually nailed Sunday Bloody Sunday as the lone director. It really fit that profile beautifully: an extravagantly critically praised art film with a British pedigree that was more respected than loved. I was deep in studying playwrighting at the time, and marveled at the film's design and structure (I even bought a copy of the script). But it was kind of a bloodless thing -- something you admired as an objet d'art -- and it wasn't much of a money-maker. Which again pointed to lone director status.

French Connection, Last Picture Show, Clockwork Orange and Fiddler on the Roof all seemed sure-fire best film nominees to me. The first two were obvious strong contenders. Clockwork had the NY Critics' imprimatur, and no English-language film with that honor failed to get an Academy best film nod till The Player in 1992 (that the voters weren't actually that wild about it was only apparent in the omission of McDowell under best actor). As for Fiddler: just look at all the film versions of Broadway musicals that got best picture nods in the decade preceding. Such projects were Oscar's bread and butter in that era. And Fiddler was, along with My Fair Lady, viewed as the cream of that stage crop, for both critical approval and long-run success (West Side Story had only been a middling hit onstage; its later reputation was significantly enhanced by the film version). As long as the film got decent reviews (and it got better than that), it was surely in. (Cabaret the following year was a bit more of a surprise. There weren't many expectations about that film, in a era when the genre was dying, and it might be the only Broadway adaptation in that period that got nominated 100% on its merits)

To show I wasn't a full-on Oscar savant back then, my pick for that fifth spot was Carnal Knowledge. This no doubt seems ridiculous in hindsight, given that the film was limited to one mention; its subject matter/tone clearly put off the perennial old-timers' crowd. But at the time I saw a film that had been very well-reviewed and was a major hit -- it did easily the gross of Clockwork and Last Picture Show, way more than Nicholas and Alexandra. Nicholas was, as the critic at the now-defunct Chicago Daily News put it, a sop to something that didn't even really exist anymore: a white elephant epic of the sort that had also dominated the Oscars in the 60s but was now a hopeless throwback. I'm proud not to have seen it coming.

[Big Magilla]

By the way, Going Home is showing tonight (or more exactly, tomorrow morning at 4 A.M, EDT, 1 A.M. PDT) on TCM.

The film is a bit of a mess, but Jan Michael Vincent is very good, as is Brenda Vaccro in this Robert Mitchum film about Mitchum's chacter returning home after serving a prison sentence for killing his wife. Vincent plays his son, Vaccaro his new girlfriend.

[Big Magilla]

I think by the time the nominations were announced, The French Connection had emerged as the one to beat for Best Picture, but both A Clockwork Orangeand The Last Picture Show were still in the race. Best actor was considered a dead heat between Gene Hackman and Peter Finch, although Sunday Bloody Sunday's shut-out of the Best Picture nominations in favor of Nicholas and Alexandra should have been the tip-off that Hackman ws the likely winner.

In retrospect given the Best Picture nods for Anne of the Thousand Days; Hello, Dolly! and Airport, we shouldn't have been surprised that the elaborate and expensive Nicholas and Alexandra would edge out the British drama.

[Sabin]

John Schlesinger got a DGA nomination alongside Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Kubrick, and Robert Mulligan for the lovely Summer of '42. It won the now-defunct Golden Globe for Best English-Language Foreign Film, but was only additionally nominated for Peter Finch. From what I understood, the Globes weren't the harbinger of things to come until the 80s.

It would seem to me that it was strongly in the running. The French Connection and the Last Picture Show look like the strongest bets at the time. I can't believe that A Clockwork Orange was necessarily a lock, but Kubrick does have a strong record and the precursor love is there. The New York Film Critic's Group was strongly behind it, and back then that did mean quite a bit. So, that's three. Fiddler on the Roof looks like an incredibly good bet by today's standards, and it was a huge hit back then. It looks made for awards. I think conventional wisdom is that Nicholas and Alexandra "robbed" Sunday Bloody Sunday, but Franklin J. Schaffner fresh off his Patton win directed it and Sam Spiegel produced (who produced three Best Picture winners). It makes sense over the gay British film.

[Greg]

The mentions of Murray Head reminds me that Sunday Bloody Sunday, while not nominated for Best Picture, did receive nominations for its director, screenplay, and two leads. Does anyone around and aware of the Oscars at the time know if Sunday Bloody Sunday was regarded as another one of those movies that was a big surpise when it came up empty for Best Picture despite all the other major nominations it received?

[Sabin]

Always love reading Tee and Magilla's time capsule summations of the race, because on paper this looks like a mighty strange lineup outside of Bridges and Johnson, and I suppose Bridges' nomination had to be considered a coattail one. The Golden Globes only cited Johnson, with Paul Mann's Lazar Wolf from Fiddler, Jean-Michael Vincent from Going Home which I've never heard of, Art Garfunkel from Carnal Knowledge, and Tom Baker from Nicholas and Alexandra.

I have only missed Jaeckel, and even though I'm reading some very positive things about him here, I'm going to take the opportunity to wrestle with the decision to either cite the very deserving Ben Johnson or my only possibly opportunity to vote for Jeff Bridges. Johnson gets the speech, but ultimately I don't think Bridges needs it. He's just excellent throughout the wonderful film. He gets my vote.

[Reza]

My picks for 1971:

1. Ben Johnson, The Last Picture Show
2. Jeff Bridges, The Last Picture Show
3. John Hurt, 10 Rillington Place
4. Murray Head, Sunday Bloody Sunday
5. Dominic Guard, The Go-Between

The 6th Spot: Roy Scheider, The French Connection

[Mister Tee]

Like Magilla, I have alot of alternates I'd have put on the slate, though not all the same he'd choose.

At the time, I was very enthusiastic about the film version of Little Murders, and particularly loved Donald Sutherland's wedding monologue. I also liked Vincent Gardenia's father character. It's entirely possible a re-viewing after all these years would bring me to a different opinion.

I, too, would submit Art Garfunkel in Carnal Knowledge. Given the film's great critical and box-office success, I thought actor/supporting actor/screenplay nods were in the bag...but apparently older voters deeply despised the film, and kept it out.

Considering the overall attention the film got, I expected Murray Head might crack the list (he had an unusually broad breakout year, as he'd also been the lead on the blockbuster Jesus Christ Superstar album). But, truth be told, I found his character a bit of a cipher: Gilliatt seemed to understand her two older protagonists, but didn't give Head much definition beyond his catalytic bi-sexuality.

As to the actual nominees: I wonder if hindsight is making many folk see virtues in Roy Scheider's performance that weren't apparent at the time. Scheider was a completely new face to me, and, when he was announced as nominee, I literally couldn't call up a single moment of his performance. The nod seemed totally a best picture fringe benefit. Perhaps if you go in knowing him it's a different experience.

I mentioned under 1970 how much I liked Leonard Frey in Boys in the Band. Italiano is probably right that the aura of oddness about him in that film reinforced mainstream stereotypes about gays at the time. But it's also true that the just-emerging-from-the-closet gay people I knew at the time loved the play/film (much as black people in the 50s/60s admired Sidney Poitier, however vaguely embarrassing some of his credits may feel in retrospect). You really can't separate work from its context -- especially if you experienced it in real time.

As for this nomination: I, too, see it as make-up a la Paul Giammatti -- "Stick to nicer, more traditional stuff and we'll reward you for it". Frey never figured in the race.

Sometimes a Great Notion is one of my favorite novels -- I think it's far more exciting than Cuckoo's Nest. The movie version fell short on many levels -- for openers, it changed the key moment in the brotherly confrontation. But one thing it got right was the casting of Richard Jaeckel in the role of Joe Ben, and the sure-fire slow drowning scene he shared with Paul Newman. It was a bit of a surprise Jaeckel was nominated, given the film's overall failure, and Magilla may be right that long-time career affection was at work (Jaeckel went back as far as Guadalcanal Diary 3 decades earlier). But by me he was the most deserving of the non-Picture Show nominees.

Hindsight may also be affecting evaluation of Jeff Bridges. As with Scheider, this was the first time most of us had seen Bridges, and though he was certainly quite good, he didn't knock everyone out enough to become a front-runner. In fact, his nomination was in the grey area.

The nomination everyone had anticipated was Ben Johnson's, given that he'd won important precursor prizes, and had years of grunt work backing up his candidacy. When I watched the film recently, I was surprised to find Johnson's role was relatively small: he's gone from the film pretty early, and doesn't have that many scenes while he's around. But the film deifies him. Everyone speaks of Sam the Lion -- before and after his death -- as the very soul of the dying town. And of course he's given that one beautiful monologue, in sanctifying close-up, that would get an Oscar nomination for any actor worth his salt. I'm not sure I'd go as far as dws to say that Johnson was a bad actor, but he was certainly an undistinguished one for most of his career. But here, significantly thanks to Bogdanovich & McMurtry, he shines, and deserves the Oscar he won.

[ITALIANO]

I wouldn't say that Ben Johson's career had exactly been of Oscar caliber when he won his trophy for The Last Picture Show, but he's very well - and intelligently - used in this movie, and his was the kind of turn, and the kind of film, that both the veterans and the young rebels of the time could certainly agree on. Today we can be less sentimental and admit that Jeff Bridges has rarely been better than in this movie, and that this is still his best Oscar-nominated performance. He's very believable, and, while very young, already so quietly charismatic. My pick, without a doubt.

Leonard Frey had been certainly effective in The Boys in the Band - though, I mean, that's the kind of gay man that heterosexuals are very happy to believe that can really exist - and this may explain why he was nominated for his small role in the much more successful, and mainstrean, Fiddler on the Roof. Richard Jaeckel certainly owed his nomination to his admittedly showy death scene, so my third choice would be the young Roy Scheider in The French Connection (very good, though I'm not sure that he would have been nominated if this hadn't turned out to be the movie of the year).

[dws1982]

I think Ben Johnson was a pretty dreadful actor overall, but he's perfectly cast in The Last Picture Show, and very effective in general--a very deserving winner. However, I think Jeff Bridges was even better, and he gets my vote.

[MovieFan]

I never really got the overwhelming praise for Ben Johnson if im being honest, I didnt think it was a particularly difficult role or that he did anything to elevate it. He's perfectly fine in it, but its a role that I could see many actors of similar stature pull of to the same standard. My personal choice would be Roy Scheider, it may not have had the dramatic scope of Johnson but he does exactly what he needs to do and supports Hackman, manages to make Russo his own individual character, and plays the perfect simmering and calmer intensity in contrast to Hackman's volcanic intensity

[Big Magilla]

Ben Johnson has this one in the bag. The former stuntman and double for John Wayne, James Stewrt and Gary Cooper had his best acting opportunity here and made the msot of it. No one else this year comes close. His The Last Picture Show co-star Jeff Bridges is the only other nominee who deserved to be nominated.

Leonard Frey's nomination was payback for being ignored for the previous year's The Boys in the Band. Roy Scheider's nomination was for holding his own in his scenes with Gen Hackman in The French Connection. Richard Jaeckel's was basically for being one of the nicest, most genuine guys in Hollywood, which is why he had almost 200 credits to his name from 1943 to 1994, after which he lost his money and lived as a recluse in the Motion Picture Home for the last three of his life. I doubt his drowning scene in Sometimes a Great Notion would have garnered a nomination for anyone else, but sometimes Academy voters do have a notion to grant a nomination to someone they genuinely like and don't expect to have another chance to honor. This was one of those times.

My choices for those three slots were Dominic Guard in The Go-Between; Murray Head in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Art Garfunkel in Carnal Knowledge with Jack MacGowran and Alan Webb in King Lear and Sam Bottoms in The Last Picture Show also coming under consideration. Timothy Bottoms, who had made his debut as the star of Johnny Got His Gun earlier in the year was the protagonist of The Last Picture Show and likely recived a few votes for Best Actor but not enough to earn a nomination with the stiff competition in that category.

[Precious Doll]

Whilst 1939 is generally regarded as the greatest year for (Hollywood) films, 1971 has always been the benchmark for me.

This is a good line up and it is really arguable if Jeff Bridges & Timothy Bottoms are lead or supporting. I think Jaekel's nomination may have to do with his death scene (I hope I'm not getting my actors mixed up here otherwise I have no recollection of Jaekel in the film). My choices:

1. Jeff Bridges for The Last Picture Show
2. Ben Johnson for The Last Picture Show
3. Michael Gothard for The Devils
4. Murray Melvin for The Devils
5. Murray Head for Sunday Bloody Sunday

And though I generally don't give a 6th I really hate leaving out Graham Armitage for The Devils.