lee j cobb deserved...
a best supporting actor nomination.
shareHe was really great in an unusually understated way. He added the calm and humanity to the film.
shareOne of the problems with The Exorcist versus the other two "superthrillers" of its era -- Psycho and Jaws -- is that it didn't have much humor to leaven the horror.
Maybe it couldn't -- when the subject of all the torture and horror is a young girl, you can't be too funny about it. But with Ellen Burstyn having to play the distraught mother at the highest reaches of hysteria and soaked-face crying jags start to finish well...no fun at all. Even her early joke about the movie she's making "the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story" sounds like a bad sitcom joke.
Meanwhile, Father Karras is tortured, poor, burdened with a dying, grasping mother(not nearly as fun as Mrs. Bates in Psycho)...MORE no fun at all.
And into this movie of miserable characters ambles ...Lee J. Cobb, quiet and thoughtful and trying to maintain "the reality principle" as the cop on the case.
His lines aren't all that good either(I blame Wiliam Peter Blatty, who won an Oscar for this screenplay but wasn't very good with the regular dialogue.)
But he "wins by a process of elimination." Cobb himself said that he was always approached by people who would tell him he was the one comforting person in The Exorcist, they thanked him for saving their sanity.
An Oscar nom would not have been out of the question.