Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 13 September

Walkabout (Roeg, 1971) is streaming on Netflix and Prime Video

Hunting around for an “on this day” post I noticed that back on 13 September 2016 I appeared on Jesse Mulligan’s Afternoons show on RNZ to refute a claim made by English author David Hepworth that 1971 had been a great year for music but had not been a great year for movies.

It was a pre­pos­ter­ous state­ment and I wrote up my notes for an exten­ded sur­vey of 1971 films here:

Now, to be fair, I was only three years old then so my exper­i­ence was more osmot­ic than first-hand but I have to say that that is not how I remem­ber it.

So, I had a bit of a dig around to see how accur­ate my memory was. Here’s the res­ult of that research – anoth­er of our reg­u­lar chats with Jesse about the movies. We star­ted with the biggest box office suc­cess of that year, Norman Jewison’s Broadway adapt­a­tion, Fiddler on the Roof.

The 44^th Academy Awards took place on 10 April, 1972 and – as they still do – apply to films released in the pre­vi­ous cal­en­dar year. (Obviously it took them longer to count the votes back then.) Apart from The French Connection (9 Oct) tak­ing out the big award, oth­er nom­in­ees for Best Picture included Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (released on 19 Dec 1971), the afore­men­tioned Fiddler on the Roof (3 Nov), Bogdanovich’s sem­in­al The Last Picture Show (22 Oct) as well as the his­tor­ic­al epic Nicholas and Alexandra which had been released on 13 December.

The list goes on to include Carnal Knowledge, The Omega Man, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Get Carter, The Beguiled, Death in Venice, The Conformist and many more.

Down under, I men­tion Ted Kotcheff’s amaz­ing Wake in Fright (which will get a recom­mend­a­tion of its own here one day soon) and Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout:

New Zealand had no film industry to speak of in 1971 but Australia was think­ing about hav­ing one. In 1971 Australia became the sub­ject (before becom­ing the object later on) and Nicholas Roeg’s eer­ie Walkabout presen­ted The Railway Children’s Jenny Agutter in a whole new light and intro­duced the world to the phe­nomen­on that is David Gulpilil.

In Walkabout, two English chil­dren are aban­doned by their fath­er in the remote Australian out­back but form a bond with a young Aboriginal boy who helps them to sur­vive. Seriously, one of those films you have to see before you die.

It is stream­ing on Netflix and Prime Video here in Aotearoa.

Further reading

At RNZ Widescreen, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers makes it to the Sight & Sound Top 50 (equal 45^th with Barry Lyndon from yes­ter­day and North by Northwest).