1971's Best Movies: 50 Years Later

In keeping with previous polls, I've gone with the contenders in the top 2,000 films, but they now offer the entire starting spreadsheet. Here are the titles that carry through through the top 5,000 films ever.

Cuadecuc, vampir	Portabella, Pere	Spain	2037
Mon oncle Antoine	Jutra, Claude	Canada	2056
Merchant of Four Seasons, The	Fassbinder, Rainer Werner	Germany	2142
Traffic	Tati, Jacques	France	2151
Daughters of Darkness	Kümel, Harry	Belgium	2189
Let's Scare Jessica to Death	Hancock, John D.	USA	2191
Vanishing Point	Sarafian, Richard C.	USA	2241
Pink Narcissus	Bidgood, James	USA	2312
Shaft	Parks, Gordon	USA	2433
Ceremony, The	Oshima, Nagisa	Japan	2450
King Lear	Brook, Peter	UK	2464
Grissom Gang, The	Aldrich, Robert	USA	2481
Last Movie, The	Hopper, Dennis	USA	2559
Bang Bang	Tonacci, Andrea	Brazil	2573
Emigrants, The	Troell, Jan	Sweden	2578
Taking Off	Forman, Milos	USA	2584
Bay of Blood	Bava, Mario	Italy	2587
Canterbury Tales, The	Pasolini, Pier Paolo	France	2620
Bananas	Allen, Woody	USA	2625
Salamandre, La	Tanner, Alain	Switzerland	2653
Du côté d'Orouët	Rozier, Jacques	France	2667
Trial on the Road	German, Aleksey	USSR	2792
Quick Billy	Baillie, Bruce	USA	2824
Numéro zéro	Eustache, Jean	France	2828
Carnal Knowledge	Nichols, Mike	USA	2831
They Call Me Trinity	Barboni, Enzo	Italy	2920
Anand	Mukherjee, Hrishikesh	India	3109
Moon and the Sledgehammer, The	Trevelyan, Philip	UK	3126
Emitaï	Sembene, Ousmane	Senegal	3130
THX 1138	Lucas, George	USA	3154
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets	Terayama, Shuji	Japan	3251
Summer of '42	Mulligan, Robert	USA	3371
Byelorussia Station	Smirnov, Andrey	USSR	3427
Szindbád	Huszárik, Zoltán	Hungary	3498
Omega Man, The	Sagal, Boris	USA	3608
Max and the Junkmen	Sautet, Claude	France	3643
Last Run, The	Fleischer, Richard	USA	3694
Fiddler on the Roof	Jewison, Norman	USA	3736
Music Lovers, The	Russell, Ken	UK	3792
Carriage Trade	Sonbert, Warren	USA	3889
Family Life	Loach, Ken	UK	3903
Evdokia	Damianos, Alexis	Greece	3912
Punishment Park	Watkins, Peter	USA	3921
Panic in Needle Park, The	Schatzberg, Jerry	USA	4232
Macbeth	Polanski, Roman	UK	4323
Melody	Hussein, Waris	UK	4417
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman	Pereira dos Santos, Nelson	Brazil	4486
Man of Violence	Walker, Pete	UK	4527
Raphael, or the Debauched One	Deville, Michel	France	4564
Decameron, The	Pasolini, Pier Paolo	France	4605
Confessions of a Police Captain	Damiani, Damiano	Italy	4659
Rendez-vous à Bray	Delvaux, André	France	4703
Nacht von Lissabon, Die [TV]	Brynych, Zbynek	West Germany	4814
Bleu Shut	Nelson, Robert	USA	4871
Mangue Bangue	de Almeida, Neville	Brazil	4887
Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The	De Sica, Vittorio	Italy	4944

Phenomenal year, but probably choosing from these five:

THE DEVILS (Ken Russell, UK) [#612]
FATA MORGANA (Werner Herzog, West Germany) [#859]
HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, USA) [#1995]
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (Robert Altman, USA) [#206]
A NEW LEAF (Elaine May, USA) [#1218]

Torn between the two classics of toxic masculinity

There's more than two of those above, fwiw.

The two I'm referring to are Wake in Fright and Straw Dogs but yeah

Agreed it's a great year, there are 4 or 5 that will be on my all time ballot when I eventually send it

Was even thinking three of the ones in my shortlist probably qualify under the toxic masculinity banner.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Merchant of Four Seasons
Death In Venice
Walkabout
Fata Morgana

in that order, for me

Some of these are hard to find. I’ve wondered about The Devils for a long time but have never seen it

The Devils was on Shudder or Criterion (or both) for awhile last Halloween season.

If you're region-free, BFI did a 2-Disc DVD of the British 'X' cut with a bunch of extras that's still in print.

Ken Russell came to town showing his print of The Devils, but it had sold out when I tried to get tickets, and I still haven't seen it because I don't want to go through the trouble and find I'm watching an edited version.

I've seen nineteen from the main list and sixteen from the list below, and would pick The Ceremony, The Last Movie, or The Canterbury Tales over the given selections. I'd like to stand up for W.R. because of the way it combines blatant propaganda with elusive mysteriousness, thanks to Makavejev's montage. My runner-up: Two English Girls is my favourite Truffaut, a very heart-sick movie.

haven't seen Two English Girls yet but it’s hard to imagine a more heart-sick Truffaut film than Jules and Jim

Well, it's from another book by the same author, also describing a love triangle, and the atmosphere of dread has overtaken the whimsical elements from the earlier film.

Voted for one of the two films by foreigners about Australia being a terrifying hellhole.

xp see that it's on HBO so will watch it

The message of Walkabout is that it's better in a hellhole!

i recall recently searching some streaming service for the orig straw dogs and only getting results for the remake & it occurred to me this is how culture just churns these days its wild

Don't blame me I voted for Touch of Zen

McCabe & Mrs. Miller just over The Last Picture Show, though I acknowledge A New Leaf and Minnie & Moskowitz as two especially glaring blindspots.

If I gritted my teeth through Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, are there likely any Cassavetes films I would appreciate?

Probably not.

You might like his early studio films, Too Late Blues (1961) or A Child Is Waiting (1963). I like them both and they are slightly off his usual groove. He made Too Late Blues not long after working on the Johnny Staccato TV show and it has a bit of that flavor - Bobby Darin is very good in it. A Child Is Waiting has Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland.

Of the Cassavetes™ movies, you could also try Love Streams, which has a whole lot less of the things I assume made you grit your teeth through Faces and Influence and a lot more resignation and warmth.

I’ve wondered about The Devils for a long time but have never seen it

People hint that SOMEONE at Warner specifically refuses to allow a Region 1 release of the original cut. So of course I'm all the more eager to see it. (Have read the book multiple times.)

Surprised Mon Oncle Antoine didn't get into the Top 1,000--I might have voted for that. Out 1 was the best kind of confounding the one time I saw it; hope I get one more chance to see the whole thing in a theatre. Same as crypto re A New Leaf and Minnie & Moskowitz, although I don't think of the latter as a blind spot--it just seemed really shrill to me.

So the default: McCabe. I'll be honest, though--it's the Leonard Cohen scenes I love, especially the last two minutes. The rest of the film, not as much.

I'd also consider Carnal Knowledge or The Hired Hand if they were on the list. My favourite bad movie ever came out in '71: The Love Machine.

Oh yes, the worst movie I've ever seen was from 1971: The Shooting Club, based on the book by Thomas McGuane and directed by Larry Peerce.

The Sporting Club, sorry.

I love the Leonard Cohen music. With a 1970s aesthetic interpreting a 1900 story, McCabe seems like a good example of a period film showing us both the era of the story and the era in which it was made

Cuadecuc, vampir has shot up to the very top of my to-watch list in the last year or so.

My top ten:

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)
The Emigrants (Jan Troell)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller Dir. Robert Altman.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger)
Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich)
Bananas (Woody Allen)
Duel (Steven Spielberg)
A New Leaf (Elaine May)
The Hospital (Arthur Hiller)
Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle)

The Conformist got a '71 release date here.

Always regarded The Hospital as the warm-up for Network, tho Scott is great in it.

the most Chayefsky-esque of actors

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Rating 'A Clockwork Orange' at #77 must be because Kubrick's admirers are deranged zealots.

I’m a Kubrick fan but A Clockwork Orange seems really nihilistic to me. It is memorable though - which at this point in my life counts for a lot

Agree with both of you: some memorable images, such a hateful, ugly film.

Choosing from:

The Beguiled
Dirty Harry
Two-Lane Blacktop
Wake In Fright

It's gonna be one of the bottom two, I think.

Two-Lane Blacktop was great, haven't yet seen Wake In Fright

Wake In Fright is amazing. It's one of those anti-tourism movies in that it will make you never ever want to visit Australia.

The Eastwood Beguiled is the better of the two film versions of that story.

I finally watched A New Leaf since this poll opened. Wouldn’t change my vote for McCabe but it’s still pretty great. In a better world, we would have like 20 more Elaine May films.

Went with Wake in Fright. Insane, brilliant film.

Very nearly went with Wake In Fright, which is burned into my brain from seeing it at the BFI on its re-release a few years ago.

Ended up on A New Leaf but this is some list.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.