my favorite movies of 1971:

(1) A Clockwork Orange

(2) The Last Picture Show

(3) The Emigrants

(4) Bananas

favorite of 1971:

A Clockwork Orange

(Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.)

After a gang leader (Malcolm McDowell) is convicted of atrocious crimes, the government offers an experimental alternative to his prison sentence: aversion therapy, with the aim of conditioning him to have a disgust response to violent or prurient thoughts.

In one memorable scene, he’s aghast that the Beethoven symphony being played during the treatment could also be conditioning him to find his favorite music intolerable, so he begs the government scientists to stop the treatment:

You needn’t take it any further, Sir! You’ve proved to me that all this ultra-violence and killing is wrong … terribly wrong! I’ve learned my lesson, Sir! …

No, no … you really must leave it to us, and be cheerful about it! In less than a fortnight now, you’ll be a free man.

Stream A Clockwork Orange on these sites.

2nd favorite of 1971:

The Last Picture Show

(Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, Ellen Burstyn. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich.)

This movie set in a small town in northern Texas in 1951-52 has been called an “aching portrait of a dying West,” and a “hushed depiction of crumbling American values.” Pauline Kael said (New Yorker link — clicking on that might limit your articles if you don’t subscribe): “Concerned with adolescent experience seen in terms of flatlands anomie — loneliness, ignorance about sex, confusion about one’s aims in life — the movie has a basic decency of feeling, with people relating to one another, sometimes on very simple levels, and becoming miserable when they can’t relate.”

All of that makes The Last Picture Show sound well-done, but relentlessly depressing. Those descriptions leave out the movie’s low-key sense of humor, which I could see inspiring The Office’s focus on cringe-inducingly awkward moments.

Bein’ married always so miserable?

No, not really. About 80% of the time.

Stream The Last Picture Show on Amazon Prime (leaving after December 2024) or these sites.

3rd favorite of 1971:

The Emigrants

[Swedish: Utvandrarna]

(Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Monica Zetterlund, Allan Edwall. Directed by Jan Troell.)

Folks in the 1840s leave their home in rural Sweden and come to America.

The Emigrants is an epic drama, but there’s a moment of levity when the Swedish characters arrive in New York City and try to make sense of the rich and poor people they’re seeing:

You said people aren’t divided into gentry and commoners here in America!

Um, I only said they weren’t divided into different classes. … There are two kinds of people in America: those who’ve been here so long that they’ve gotten rich, and those so new here they haven’t had time to get rich.

UPDATE: I’ve chosen the sequel, The New Land, as one of my favorite movies of 1972.

I don’t know anywhere to stream The Emigrants, but you can buy the Criterion blu-ray or DVD set of this movie and its sequel through the Barnes & Noble 50% off sale on all Criterion movies every July and November. Amazon sometimes lowers prices at the same times. 

4th favorite of 1971:

Bananas

(Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Howard Cosell, Sylvester Stallone. Directed by Allen.)

You’re not supposed to take Bananas seriously — it’s utterly silly. And yet … I did get something meaningful out of how this movie shows a relationship between a woman who’s passionate about political causes, and a man who cares about those causes only if it’ll help him get into bed with her. (They’re played by Woody Allen and his real-life ex-wife at the time, Louise Lasser.)

Bananas morphs from romantic comedy to political satire/farce when the man’s bumbling attempt at activism in New York City somehow causes him to get thrown into the middle of a dictatorship vs. rebels conflict in a fictional country. The New York Times 1971 review summed up Woody Allen’s character:

Here is no little man surviving with a wan smile and a shrug, but a runty, wise-mouthed guy whose initial impulses toward cowardice seem really heroic in the crazy order of the way things are.

The bits at the beginning and end of the movie, with Howard Cosell playing a newscaster reporting live on the scene, were prescient about the idea of media intruding into the most personal times of some people’s lives.

Stream Bananas on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.