What We Missed: 1970
I guess people were really mad about Vietnam.
ICYMI: the five films nominated for Best Actor Oscars from 1970 were Five Easy Pieces, The Great White Hope, Love Story, Patton, and I Never Sang for My Father. The links provide the trivia write-ups on those films while this post discusses what else was happening in the movies that year.
1970 Best Picture winner: Patton. It checks a bunch of Academy bait boxes: big scope, good performances, obvious commentary on current issues. It beat out Five Easy Pieces, Love Story, and two other films. Let’s start by discussing M*A*S*H.
M*A*S*H is a comedy about a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit during the Korean War (though, like Patton, it’s thematically about Vietnam). Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould were “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper John” McIntyre, two womanizing surgeons up to no good, while Robert Duvall played their nemesis, Frank Burns. The film was directed by Robert Altman; while we won’t be watching any of his films in this column, he’ll show up in the Wrap-Ups a lot.
M*A*S*H’s biggest legacy is that it spawned the TV show “M*A*S*H” (1972–1983), which replaced the leads with Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers. (The only major actor from the film to star in the show was Gary Burghoff, who played Radar O’Reilly.) The first couple of seasons of the show have a lighthearted, Marx Brothers-esque vibe, a change from the film’s mean-spirited and unpleasant brand of humor. You’ve also gotta know the song “Suicide Is Painless,” used in the film and repurposed as the theme song for the show.
The other Best Picture nominee was the second-highest grossing film of 1970…
1970 highest grossing film: Love Story, but popcorn disaster flick Airport was close behind. Airport was based on an Arthur Hailey novel and it’s delightful competency porn. A hijacker’s bomb causes a crisis in the air and a bunch of competent airport dudes (including the airport manager played by Burt Lancaster and a pilot played by Dean Martin) have gotta do a bunch of competent stuff to save the day.
Like Patton, Airport was up for ten (!) Oscars, but while Patton took home seven, Airport only got one (for Helen Hayes’ supporting role). Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising—Lancaster called the film “the biggest piece of junk ever made.” Still, it was a cash cow and spawned three sequels: Airport 1975 (1974), Airport '77 (1977), and The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979). Only one actor, George Kennedy (who we saw in Cool Hand Luke as Dragline) was in all four.
Best Actress Oscar race: Two of the nominees were Jane Alexander for The Great White Hope (whoa, really? terrible choice) and Ali MacGraw for Love Story (sure, whatever). The other three were women we haven’t seen yet in this column.
Glenda Jackson, who won for Women in Love. “Women in Love” is D. H. Lawrence’s sequel to “The Rainbow.” (We’ve seen one adaptation of Lawrence’s work already in this column: Sons and Lovers.) The film’s screenwriter was Larry Kramer, better known for the play “The Normal Heart” and founding the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). We’ll see Glenda Jackson in a film next year, so stay tuned for that.
Sarah Miles in Ryan’s Daughter. Ooh, this is another David Lean film! It started as an adaptation of “Madame Bovary,” but David Lean thought France was boring and moved the setting to Ireland during WWI. (He was right, France is boring.) The film maintained the central “housewife has affair” plot from the book, with Miles’ character messing around on Robert Mitchum. Note that Sarah Miles was married to Robert Bolt, who wrote the Ryan’s Daughter screenplay (along with A Man for All Seasons and Lawrence of Arabia).
Carrie Snodgress in Diary of a Mad Housewife. This one also has a housewife having an affair, but, like, she’s more mad?
Relitigating the Best Actor race: yeah, give it to George C. Scott for Patton. Scott’s fine, but mostly, the rest of the performances up for the award were, uh, not great.
Quick Hits
Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman. A revisionist Western where the U.S. Cavalry is the villain and the climax is the Battle of Little Bighorn. Hmm, what was happening in the U.S. from 1968 to 1973 that might have spurred the creation of a bunch of anti-establishment films, I keep forgetting. Anyway, this film is also known because Chief Dan George received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the first Indigenous North American actor to be up for an Oscar.
Tora! Tora! Tora! This film is about the attack on Pearl Harbor, shown from both the Japanese and American sides. “Tora” literally means “tiger” in Japanese, but it was also used as an abbreviation of the words for “lightning attack.” The film ends with Admiral Yamamoto realizing that, oops, maybe he shouldn’t have bombed the U.S. He says, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant.”
The Aristocats. About the Parisian cat Duchess (voiced by Eva Gabor) and her three kittens (Toulouse, Berlioz, and Marie) getting kidnapped by butler Edgar, who seeks to steal Madame Bonfamille’s fortune. The pampered kitties are led home by alley cat Thomas O’Malley. You might be interested to know this one is gonna be remade live-action as Disney continues its quest to squeeze every last dime out of its IP.
Quicker Hits: Scrooge, a musical with Albert Finney as the title miser…Barbara Loden, called “the female counterpart to John Cassavetes,” put out Wanda, about a woman who falls for a criminal…The Molly Maguires, with Sean Connery and Richard Harris…the Clint Eastwood films Kelly’s Heroes and Two Mules for Sister Sara…the John Wayne flick Rio Lobo…Mexican acid Western El Topo…The Boys in the Band, one of the first movies about gay characters (remade with Jim Parsons in 2020)…the Roger Ebert-penned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls…Rod Steiger as Napoleon in Waterloo…music documentaries Gimme Shelter, Let It Be, and Woodstock…The Landlord…Melvin Van Peebles’ only studio film, Watermelon Man…The Out-of-Towners, which portrayed New York City like Fox News does…Lovers and Other Strangers, about one couple tryna get married and another tryna get divorced…the film adaptation of Catch-22, which we discussed briefly here and which is a much, much better film than M*A*S*H.
Trivia Questions
The quiz below serves as a refresher for some of the material covered in the five posts on 1970 films. The answers can be found in the footnotes.
What early country music star had hits like “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and “Stand by Your Man”?1
What Polish composer’s tragic love affair with feminist author George Sand is captured in the film A Song to Remember (1945)?2
What series of six concertos from J.S. Bach shares a name with the modern German state that surrounds Berlin?3
Who created “Mark Twain Tonight!” and starred in it for over 60 years?4
What boxer was known as “Kid Blackie” and “the Manassa Mauler”? He defended his heavyweight title five times, including against the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” Luis Firpo.5
In the 1938 “Fight of the Century,” “Brown Bomber” Joe Louis won a rematch against which German boxer?6
What 1973 film starred Ryan O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal?7
What collection of poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning includes Sonnet 43, which begins “How do I love thee? let me count the ways”?8
What Robert Browning poem about a silk-winding girl has the line, “God’s in his heaven— / All’s right with the world!”9
What final five-star general was known as “the G.I.’s general” or “the soldier’s general”?10
What man is known as the father of the modern Olympic games?11
What horseys from the Spanish Riding School take their name from a town in Slovenia?12
What 1939 comedy starred Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas?13
What battle, fought May 4–8, 1942, is remembered as the first aircraft carrier battle?14
Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, is on what island?15
And we’re off to 1971! Next week’s film is a 10/10, get excited.
Tammy Wynette.
Frédéric Chopin.
Brandenburg Concertos.
Hal Holbrook.
Jack Dempsey.
Max Schmeling.
Paper Moon (1973).
“Sonnets from the Portuguese.”
“Pippa Passes.”
Omar Bradley.
Pierre de Coubertin.
Lipizzaners.
Ninotchka.
Battle of the Coral Sea.
Guadalcanal.