1971: 100 Films from Cinema's Greatest Year

Everyone will have a different opinion about the greatest year for movies, but this book makes an impressive case for 1971. Directors at the top of their game (Spielberg, Kubrick, Visconti, Fassbinder, Truffaut, Losey, Roeg, Russell, Bergman, to name a few) were matched by the dazzling stars they deployed, including Wayne, Brando, McQueen, Beatty, Newman, Connery, Caine, Burton, Vanessa Redgrave, Kirk Douglas. It was a time of change as the British film industry lost its Hollywood subsidies, while Hollywood itself was moving away from the studio system and the country was on a political knife-edge after the assassinations of the sixties. 1971 launched two iconic cops, Harry Callaghan with the release of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, and also Gene Hackman's Jimmy Doyle in The French Connection. Comedy classics include Jacques Tati's Trafic, in which M Hulot's latest gadget-infested car suffers a series of mishaps, and Monty Python's And Now for Something Completely Different, a steep learning experience for the team who insisted on creative control in future. Carry on Henry is still a favourite with Carry On fans, though the camp, saucy humour never made the cut in the US. Get Carter, Carnal Knowledge and A Clockwork Orange tested the diminishing powers of theatre censorship, though Kubrick himself banned Clockwork Orange after it was blamed for influencing a murderous teenager. In the field of historical film, Spiegel's Nicholas and Alexandra was notable for the harrowing assassination scene, but there were tensions between producer and director and it failed at the box office. Mary Queen of Scots, with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, had a sumptuous score by John Barry and fared rather better, while co-stars included Trevor Howard, Ian Holm and Timothy Dalton, with whom Redgrave began a 15-year relationship. Straw Dogs, Hands of the Ripper, The Go-Between, Klute, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Devils, and The Andromeda Strain are just a few more of the iconic titles on the list. 320pp, filmography.