1973 Best Supporting Actor: My Choice

The time has come to weigh and evaluate the performances for 1973's Best Supporting Actor. Did the Academy get it right or wrong this time?

Once again, the nominees were:

• Vincent Gardenia as Dutch Schnell in Bang the Drum Slowly
• Jack Gilford as Phil Reeves in Save the Tiger
• John Houseman as Prof. Charles W. Kingsfield in The Paper Chase
• Jason Miller as Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist
• Randy Quaid as Seaman Larry Meadows in The Last Detail

The Academy's Choice: John Houseman

Weighing the Performances:

Some have called this a weak year for the Academy in general, and frankly I can understand that. It's not that there isn't some real gold from this year (Paper Moon, The Exorcist, The Sting) but there's also some genuinely forgettable stuff that no one would even care about from a historical standpoint but that it won or was nominated for Oscars.

Vincent Gardenia in Bang the Drum Slowly

And with that, we lead off with Vincent Gardenia, giving a completely competent performance in an undemanding role that any character actor could have played just as easily, and probably in very similar ways. I'm not kidding; I don't think there would have been an appreciable difference in performance if Gardenia and his co-star Phil Foster had switched roles. The role of suspicious coach Dutch could have been just as competently played by Jack Warden, or Charles Durning, or heck, even Tom Bosley, Ed Asner, Tom Poston or just about any crusty, middle-aged character actor from the 60's. And they likely would have played it just the same. He's not even the most memorable performance from the film! While Robert De Niro's Bruce Pearson is probably the second lead (he was billed first, but did win the New York Film Critics Circle award for Supporting Actor), his role was more of a stretch for him and probably a lot more difficult to play, plus I've already said that Phil Foster was at least as memorable as the assistant coach eager to scam "fish" out of their money with his "Tegwar" playing "skill". Even Tom Ligon and Tom Signorelli, as two of Pearson's fellow players, had more memorable parts. And this isn't even to mention that this was not that lean a year for solid supporting performances; Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, Robert Shaw in The Sting, Dustin Hoffman in Papillon, Michel Lonsdale in Day of the Jackal, Charles Martin Smith or Paul LeMat in American Graffiti, Martin Balsam in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (have never seen it, but he did score a Golden Globe nod), possibly even Carl Anderson in Jesus Christ Superstar (by Academy standards, at least, he could qualify as "supporting"; more on this in a bit). So, no, by no stretch is Gardenia the winner here.

Jack Gilford in Save the Tiger

Almost on the same level, but a bit more understandable, is Jack Gilford as the sad, tired, desperate business partner in Save the Tiger, a man just slightly more determined to hold on to his principles than his partner Harry (star Jack Lemmon), but his own fraying conscience gets thinner as the film goes on. Gilford is effortlessly likeable (in fact, he once played a character called "Simon the Likeable" in the TV series Get Smart, a villain working for KAOS who it was literally impossible not to like, enabling him to commit his crimes with ease) but much like Gardenia, it's hard to imagine that this part was much of a stretch for him, and his nomination was likely due to the scenes where he and Lemmon play off each other and really do seem like two middle-aged men who've been working together for years. Lemmon, of course, was famous for his many pairings with Walter Matthau, mostly for comedic roles, but one wonders if Matthau could have played this part just as effectively (or would casting him have made people think this was a comedy, and would their dramatic scenes together be too distracting?) but as I said, name an even mildly well-known middle-aged actor from the 70's and they'd likely be just as good in this role.

John Houseman in The Paper Chase

Then there's John Houseman, playing the imperious contract law professor, Charles W. Kingsfield, in a movie we primarily remember because of his performance. While it's definitely a supporting performance, you know audiences walked out of theatres talking about the guy that played the professor. He's very good, and I mean very, but one gets the impression that he was cast because the role suited him to a T. He wasn't even the first choice; Edward G. Robinson and James Mason were both offered the part, but Robinson wasn't long for this world at the time and Mason turned it down. Houseman uses his natural accent and his role consists essentially of posing challenging questions to his pupils and then making sarcastic comments when they don't give him the answer he was looking for. Like I said in the initial review, he seems like the kind of professor you want to impress even as you hate him. Houseman was primarily a writer and producer, with acting being something he kinda did on the side, and really, this was practically his film debut (see the review of the film where I talk about this), and this likely heavily played into the amount of Academy members who voted for him. But was he really the best? Or just the most memorable? And is that really the qualifier?

Now we come to the entry I think is going to be the longest, because before I talk about the role and the actor, I first need to talk about a little thing called category theft.

In Oscar history, category theft is a sort of unofficial term among people like me who like to follow and predict the nominations/winners through the years, and look back at the Oscars of the past. It's what we call it when an actor is nominated in a category we don't think they belong in; a supporting performance that gets placed in the lead category, or much more commonly a leading performance that gets nominated as supporting.

The causes for category theft are numerous, but they mainly boil down to the studios behind that actor's campaign thinking the performances are more likely to be nominated and/or win if they shoot for supporting instead of lead. In the case where it's the other way around, an actor's name power or the dominance they're perceived to have over the film play into them being thought of as a lead role whereas almost any other role that size would automatically be considered supporting.

But to really get at the heart of what makes a nomination true "category theft", the question should be asked: what constitutes a leading performance vs. a supporting one?

It's not always that obvious. Many times people have shouted "category theft!" because the supporting nominee has a significant amount of screen time. Is screen time the deciding factor in whether or not a performance can be considered lead or supporting? It's certainly part of it, but not the whole. After all, two Oscar-winning Best Actor roles, Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (played by Marlon Brando and Anthony Hopkins, respectively) are actually on screen for less than half their films' runtime (in Hopkins' case, less than half an hour!) yet we recall both of them as being their film's lead actor, mainly because their characters dominate their films even when not on screen. For that matter, performances like Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and numerous others probably should be considered supporting, and other such roles with comparable focus and screen time have been, but due to various factors like star power or role dominance were nominated for, and in Fletcher's and Douglas's cases, winning. There are numerous other examples of a film having two top-billed performers where one is clearly not the focus but does get a lot of screen time, and are campaigned for lead instead of supporting.

Once in Academy history it was so not obvious that the actor in question was nominated in both categories! No, seriously, at the 1944 Oscars, Barry Fitzgerald managed to be nominated both as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor (winning for the latter) in Going My Way because up until then the Academy had never thought about having a rule that you couldn't be nominated for both and voters were confused about whether or not he was co-lead to Bing Crosby (who won Best Actor) or a supporting player.

And the confusion just gets worse the more questions you ask. What if the film has two or even three lead characters of the same gender? Do you gamble on campaigning them all for Best Actor or Best Actress, thereby lessening any of their chances of getting nominated at all? Or do you shunt one or two of them to supporting? Is the biggest name among them actually the lead, or is the focus of the film more on a character played by the lesser-known, second- or third-billed performance (like the examples I gave above)? What if the actor or actress is very young, even a child? It's pretty rare for children, or teenagers, or even people in their early 20's, to be nominated in the leading categories, deserving or not. Sometimes they're nominated for support even if they're the co-lead, but when they're undeniably the lead, such as Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild, Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name or Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider, they can, and sometimes are, nominated for leading, though more often they're just snubbed.

There are lots of ways to approach it. Perhaps it's an ensemble piece where everyone is technically supporting. Perhaps one can argue that there is no such thing as a "third" lead and that such roles should automatically be considered supporting. Others would suggest that a film's villain should automatically be considered a supporting role, even if they have more screen time than the hero. Still other say sizable roles that are the most memorable of their films are automatically leads.

A fairly extensive list of actors nominated in "the wrong" categories can be found here, but I'm not sure it's exhaustive and some of them I don't even necessarily agree with. If an actor has a great amount of screen time and it's arguable that they're the main focus, or part of the main focus, of the film, I'd say they're unquestionably leads. Whereas even if they have a lot of screen time, if there's another character who's the true focus of the film and this other sizable role is mainly there to support that character, it's a supporting performance. Defining it like that, any number of nominated and/or winning performances qualify as category theft, almost enough to say that it happens every year.

Jason Miller in The Exorcist

This, by the way, is also what I meant about Carl Anderson probably being considered a supporting player in Jesus Christ Superstar by Academy standards, because between he and Ted Neeley, in the title role, he'd be the one shunted to supporting, despite having comparable screen time and as much
or more focus.

And with that long-winded explanation, I come to Jason Miller in The Exorcist.

There's really no question that Miller is a co-lead here. Yes, there are long sections of the film that he's absent from, but this is also true of Ellen Burstyn, who was nominated for Best Actress for this film. For the first act, the action switches back and forth between the situation at the McNiell household and Father Karras's issues dealing with his dying mother, questioning his faith, seeing death omens everywhere, etc. and it's hard to really judge without getting out a stopwatch which of the two actors gets more focus in this part of the film. Once she contacts him, his screen time is absolutely the equal of hers, and once he begins working with Reagan, he pretty much is the lead from that point on.

But like I said, screen time isn't the only factor; focus is the big one. Well, I'd say he has as much focus as Chris MacNiell, absolutely. Again, we spend a lot of time with him before he is contacted by Chris, and his character has his own arc, his own issues to deal with, that have nothing to do with Reagan's demonic possession.

And to be frank, I think he carries the film. He spends a ton of time with Reagan and manages to not be upstaged by her. We recall his outwardly calm talks with her early on, and his increasing crushing grief as the demon in Reagan harms the poor, innocent girl's body, or pretends to speak in his mother's voice, causing him to question even further whether or not there's a God and if He cares. It's a remarkable performance, and I think he carries the film. Why was he nominated here instead of as Best Actor?

Well, probably it was because this was his film debut. Known mostly as a playwright at that point (meaning not known to the general public at all), if he had been campaigned for the Best Actor category, he would have been competing with some truly big names; Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, both Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting, Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard in American Graffiti, Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger, James Caan in Cinderella Liberty, Steve McQueen in Papillon, Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, Edward Fox in Day of the Jackal, George Segal in A Touch of Class, Al Pacino in Serpico, Ryan O'Neal in Paper Moon and Robert Blake in Electra Glide in Blue. Brando, Lemmon, Nicholson, Pacino and Redford actually got nominated. Think in that mixture of names, a little-known playwright in his film debut would have stood a chance? For that matter, he was billed last among the main actors in his film. Go look at the poster for its entry.

His competing in this category is likely what cost his co-star Max von Sydow (a true supporting performance, and a great one) a nomination. I do think Miller had more to work with and therefore turned in the more award-worthy performance, but that doesn't mean I think von Sydow deserved to get snubbed (and I understand it was a pretty big shock at the time that he didn't get it).

Randy Quaid in The Last Detail

Finally, let's talk about Randy Quaid. I still think this guy has had a very strange career. He started off essentially as a young, but very skilled and very prominent, character actor. I've already mentioned the number of Oscar-nominated films he appears in, but I didn't mention that he also appeared in a number of respected classic films, including The Missouri Breaks, Three Warriors, The Long Riders, and TV movies like LBJ: The Early Years (in the title role), Inside the Third Reich, Of Mice and Men (where he played the classic role of Lenny Small) and A Streetcar Named Desire, where he played the same role that won Karl Malden an Oscar for. But how do we usually remember him? As personal-boundary-invading redneck Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (he appeared in several other films in that series, but most prominently in Christmas) to the point where if you refer to Randy Quaid in public and people aren't sure who you mean, all you need to do is say "The shitter was full" or "That there's an Aaaaaaaar-veeee!"

Quaid never really stopped taking dramatic roles, or roles that required him to act rather than just be goofy, but we tend to remember him mostly for his goofier roles, in movies like Christmas Vacation or Caddyshack II or Quick Change. His role in The Last Detail is kind of a combination of the two; he plays lovable man child Larry Meadows, a giant of a man with the soul of a lost puppy and an unfortunate habit of compulsive thievary. He took a role that was supposed to be a little nerdy guy and made it his own, and had us laughing, crying, and genuinely hoping he wouldn't be sent to prison after all. For that, I'd say he earned his nomination.

But we must have a winner, and while John Houseman was impressive and Quaid was sympathetic, I've got to vote for the guy that should have never been in this category. I didn't let the wrong category stop me when I picked Wallace Beery in The Big House to win for 1929-30 (even though the right category didn't exist at the time), and I won't let it stop me here. He should have been nominated for actor, but he's unquestionably the best performance in this category this year.

My Choice: Jason Miller

Join us next time for a new category from 1973.