1974 in the Movies: 30 Recommendations

Immortal American Cinema:

• The Godfather: Part II | The greatest sequel of all time, not just because of its potential artistic superiority to the original (ask me a different day, I’ll have a different opinion on which film is better), but because of how it uses its sequel-ness. Rather than try to just play the hits of his instant classic, Francis Ford Coppola told us the story of what happened before the events of The Godfather as well as picking up later and contrasts the morality of young Don Vito against the emerging amorality of Don Michael to create a powerful discord, but the real contrast is in how Michael’s story feels different than the original film. In the first, we immediately sympathize with the Corleone family as they face threats from the other families of New York, but it becomes increasingly hard to do so with Michael as he ascends into a new stratosphere of wealth and “legitimate” business but sacrifices his soul. It’s gorgeous, tragic, aching, infuriating, a little confusing, and stunning.

• Chinatown | If there was no Godfather: Part II this year, this would be my runaway favorite film of the year, and that debate remains alive even 50 years later. Director Roman Polanski (who it should be noted, remains outside the U.S. after he pled guilty to sexual assault in 1978) expertly brings this ‘30s-set story to life by filming it in a contemporary style. As such, it doesn’t just fit in with film noir – albeit with a license for graphic and profane material that wasn’t available previously – but works alongside the great paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the age. As dark as The Godfather: Part II gets, this film might be the even blacker representation of a greedy America that has sacrificed its soul. However, rather than watch that decay occur, we stumble into it alongside our protagonist on a journey that is perfectly constructed in its twists, dialogue, and tragedy, all found in the perfect screenplay.

• The Conversation | If Chinatown dabbles in paranoia, this film jumps in and sinks deeper.  I can only imagine what it must have been like to see this (then) modern portrait of a society under constant surveillance then opening the newspapers the next day to see which of Nixon’s associates was arrested for having done the same thing. This film, with its contemporary setting, a sleekly paranoid style to match, small cast, and comparatively small stakes feels like the opposite of The Godfather: Part II, but in a way the films are also paired. Gene Hackman’s asocial Harry Caul may be quite different than Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, but the two men find themselves equally lonely as they engage in work that destroys, and potentially ends, the lives of unsuspecting strangers. That Coppola made two unimpeachable films in the same year is quite something.

• A Woman Under the Influence | John Cassavetes and his frequently collaborating troupe of actors worked independently of the Hollywood studio system, with the proceeds from his acting career (Rosemary’s Baby, The Dirty Dozen) providing the funds for his films. I was blown away and a little shaken by the power of this film, and it’s going to last in my mind for a long time. The entire cast is terrific, but everything you may have heard about Gena Rowland’s legendary turn is true and then some. Although the story features her character’s mental illness placing a strain on her family and marriage as well as near-hysterical confrontations, the performance itself never feels anything less that natural. Cassavetes’ near-documentary style of filmmaking enhances this while also being beautiful in its own right; it is a titanic achievement of independent cinema.

Immortal International Cinema:

• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul | This is the only of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s prolific and varied work that I’ve seen, but it’s hard to imagine his more sprawling productions exceeding the emotional power of this small but mighty one. A story of an old German widow who unexpectedly falls in love with a young Moroccan mechanic, this movie is an exploration of how a toxic society can poison even the purest of love when it reaches across a line that society can’t accept. The relationship at the movie’s center, in contrast to the attitudes of its principals’ friends and families, is so wonderfully sweet as to nearly conjure tears. And just when it threatens to become too treacle an experience, the film shows how the incessant bias of the rest of the world begins to eat away the purity of that relationship with a power that’s just as likely to draw tears.

• Scenes from a Marriage | Doing projects like this is such a treat because it’s a reason for me to check out one of the most celebrated films of one of the most celebrated filmmakers of all time – in this case, it’s Ingmar Bergman who edited down his six-part miniseries from the year before into this seminal masterwork. Featuring his recurring collaborator Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson as the couple whose titular marriage messily disintegrates in front of our eyes, this film is devastating in all the right ways. I can only imagine what it must have been like to check in on this couple, week in and week out, as they converse, reason, act immature, act extremely mature, plead, argue, reconcile, and re-estrange each other not just across the arc of the years-spanning story, but over the course of each “episode”. It’s an exquisite but agonizing watch.

• Celine and Julie Go Boating | In the circles of people who care about this sort of thing, Jacques Rivette is one of the unsung heroes of the French New Wave, and deserves to stand alongside the likes of Godard, Varda, Bresson, Truffaut, and Rohmer – to the credit of those filmmakers, they insisted this was the case. This is a fascinating film that takes the cinema verité approach common to the French New Wave and applies it to a story of magical realism. The titular Celine and Julie, mysteriously linked, uncover the secret of a domestic melodrama that leads to murder in a semi-alternate universe set out to rescue a young girl. The way that this story cuts between our two heroines reconstructing this story, jumping in and out of it, commenting on it, is cinematic euphoria.

• Je, Tu, Il, Elle | Chantal Akerman was never one to shy away from provocation in her exploration of gender dynamics and sexuality and was at the forefront of the feminist Avant Garde. In this slight but personal story, she casts herself as Julie, who spends a significant amount of the runtime lounging in progressively less clothing in her apartment, eating sugar, and mourning a relationship. Eventually, she returns to her female lover and reconciles via a protracted and explicit sex scene. If that’s not your cup of tea, I get it; if you’re willing to embrace this subject matter, you’ll find a richly layered experience that is more of a philosophical exercise than a story in the traditional sense, but for all its headiness it’s still the product of a titan in the history of feminist and queer filmmaking.

Glorious Grime:

• Foxy Brown | Last year, I dipped my toe into the Pam Grier Blaxploitation waters, and am happy to have done so again. Despite her being named “Foxy”, this entry was less salacious and brutal than its predecessor, but far more pointed in its social commentary around race, drugs, and who really profits off black addiction. As such, it’s also much more pointedly overwritten than Coffy was, leading to its well-observed points occasionally clashing with some of its tonalities. All that said, if you’re looking for a slightly naughty and guilty fun time that was also raising alarms on the disparate impacts of drugs long before mainstream (white) society was ready to listen, Foxy Brown is as good a time as any.

• Arabian Nights | This movie did win the Grand Prix Special Prize at the Cannes film festival, features a score by Ennio Morricone, and is recognized in certain critical circles as the most accurate interpretation of its source text, so putting it in this category might not have been right. Pasolini wades into the knotty themes of gender, power dynamics, sexuality, love and everything else that the original text explores and shares its erotic, humorous and occasionally violent lens. However, this film went on to inspire low-budget and non-artistic pornographic knockoffs that Pasolini himself disavowed, though this work features enough sex and nudity to pass as one of those; it also contains a hypnotic level of artistry that I’m sure those films don’t.

• Caged Heat! | Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that this low-budget piece of “Jailsploitation” featuring a women’s prison where nearly every speaking character gets naked onscreen is “art, actually”, but I was surprised with how much artistry debuting director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense, Philadelphia) showed in his telling of this tale. There are genuine psychological and psychosexual depths to all the characters, especially genre queen Barbara Steele’s wheelchair-bound repressive Warden, as well as stray commentary on wrongful imprisonment. In doing so, he both critiqued the genre he was working in while meeting its expectations and paving the way for more elevated stories of this type.

• Zardoz | To put it short, this is one of the most infamous film disasters of all time. John Boorman, who had just been nominated for Academy Awards after directing Deliverance, teamed up with a post-Bond Sean Connery to tell a post-apocalyptic mystery that touches on the nature of humanity, immortality, gender/power, religion, and complex ethics involving all of those. At times, Boorman’s filmmaking and the acting of those involved is enough to involve a viewer despite the stupidity in the execution of the premise. But friends, the execution is just so, so stupid. The stakes are constantly changing, the plotting is quite odd, and nothing adds up story-wise despite the story being easier to follow than this movie’s reputation suggests. A cult object to be sure.

• Death Wish | After his wife and daughter are brutally assaulted in their apartment Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey eventually becomes a gun-toting vigilante, prowling around and murdering any wrongdoers he comes upon attacking others or attempt to harm him. The movie is dubious of Paul’s journey to this point, as he’s inspired to do this after a trip to Arizona where he sees a live “Wild West” stunt show at a tourist trap old-timey town that’s sometimes used for movie shoots. It’s an interesting and self-aware note about how films might inspire, or embolden, the violent among us, but this movie gets out of control when it’s revealed that Paul’s killings have had a positive effect on the city. If this is little more than a lean, mean piece of moviemaking that serves as the bridge between Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver, so be it, but this film is a little more thoughtful than its detractors give it credit for.

• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia | Sam Peckinpah, chaotic lord has arrived. The director of The Wild Bunch specialized in telling nihilistic tales of morally compromised men running roughshod in their pursuit of wealth, often leading to exhausting and bloody gunfights featuring rapid-fire editing and mixing slow motion with regular speed to create an effect that is disorienting yet coherent. This is a story of an American expat living in Mexico who hears of a bounty on another man – specifically, his head as a proof of death and sets out with his girlfriend to acquire it. Peckinpah’s hero, tale, and setting is among his most low-slung but its overwhelming moral bleakness as a union between technical mastery and storytelling thrust is exquisite.

Glorious Genre:

• Blazing Saddles | Sometimes one of the most acclaimed and beloved comedies of all time really is as great, and still entertaining, as everyone says: this is one of those times. This movie remains far more powerful than any attempt to “cancel” it, as it clearly places the butt of the joke on the idiotic white people who use slurs against black people. In doing so, it quite sharply indicts the Western genre that it spends its runtime lovingly sending up, but we needn’t concern ourselves with any of that. The chief reason that this movie remains undefeated is the total commitment of its wonderful cast, headlined by the singular talents of Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder.

• Young Frankenstein | Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t the only filmmaker cooking up two all-timers in the same year, and I was taken aback by Mel Brooks putting his artistic capabilities and heart on the screen far more openly in Young Frankenstein than in Blazing Saddles. There are some excellent laugh lines, outrageously funny innuendo, and some perfect sight gags, but the audience never feels anything less than pity for Peter Boyle’s lovable and clumsy monster. Could it be that this goofy, loose homage to the creature features of yesteryear is the truest adaptation of Mary Shelley’s totemic novel? Maybe.

• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre | This movie is one of the most famous and influential horror films ever made and remains one of the most successful low-budget movies, genre notwithstanding, of all time. To this day, the disturbing nature of Tobe Hooper’s vision remains uncompromised even though the film is far less graphic in its violence than any of its descendants, and people’s memory of this film as being ultra-violent is warped by the brilliantly off-putting atmosphere, sound design, and villain design/acting.

• Black Christmas | Compared to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this film has a much smaller reputation, but the movie fans who get it get it. The setup: a group of girls in a sorority house while Christmas break approaches have a party where one of their own goes missing after they hear a mysterious, disturbing, and potentially threatening phone call, while an unknown figure stalks through the house. If that sounds familiar, and the developments that one girl will survive or the call may have come from inside the house feel rote, it’s because this movie essentially invented them. Separate from its influence, it’s a remarkably patient and character-driven story that refrains from graphic violence, sex, or explanation.

Future Masters:

• The Sugarland Express | Having only directed episodes and movies for television (including Duel), this crime drama light on both crime and drama is the theatrical feature debut of Steven Spielberg. Much of the film plays as a slow car chase featuring dozens of police cars, requiring complex choreography and slick camerawork that Spielberg would continue to bring to bear in future action scenes. The movie doesn’t go very deep with its characters or emotions, beyond the basic motivations of its two heroes, which is something that Spielberg would improve on as his career progressed and he became a co-author of his projects.

• Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore | If his early masterpiece Mean Streets was the revolutionary “indie” hit that ensured him success, this was Martin Scorsese’s first taste of working for hire on a major studio budget, making a movie that would go on to respectable grosses and 3 Oscar Nominations, winning Ellen Burstyn a Best Actress Oscar she probably deserved more for The Exorcist. This film is an often-comic melodrama that is heavy at times and would make for an interesting companion piece to Je, Tu, Il, Elle as it’s a mainstream (heterosexual) version of a similar story about contemplating how one’s romantic relationships do or don’t define them. I found its second half to be utterly charming, though its ending potentially betrays its themes.

Mainstream Classics:

• The Gambler | I absolutely adored this hard-edged character study revolving around an equally (and typically) hard-edged performance by James Caan. As the story progresses, he must borrow from those he loves as well as compromise his legitimate employ as a professor by involving one of his students in his schemes. Where the movie really shows its teeth is when he refuses to embrace his victories, and we realize that this isn’t just a professional gambler who found himself in a corner, or a thrill-seeker with a bad habit, or even a tragically addicted soul, but someone on a near-suicidal death trip.

• California Split | Robert Altman’s story about a workaday man who develops a gambling addiction through his relationship with a charming degenerate is wonderfully watchable. This hang-loose movie can’t help but feel like a slighter entry in Altman’s prolific oeuvre, sandwiched between the iconic The Long Goodbye and Nashville, but we shouldn’t hold that against it. In typical fashion, he profiles a charming band of social outcasts who’ve created a tight-knit community for themselves. Despite its protracted climax of sustained successful gambling frenzy, Altman shows us that this world has a grimy underbelly without quitting on the perfect duo of Elliot Gould and George Segal.

• Murder on the Orient Express | Sidney Lumet, certainly one of the best directors who never won an Oscar, took a mainstream studio job with this film between Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon that isn’t his strongest work but is excellent popcorn moviemaking. To be clear, I think this film’s bracing opening and protracted closing revelations delivered by monologue and flashback to be sublime, but the initial time on the titular train and lengthy sequence of interviews after the titular murder are difficult for anyone to make truly cinematic. That said, Lumet smartly turns the keys of each scene over to the stacked cast, anchored by an iconic performance from Albert Finney.

• The Parallax View | I found the second of Alan Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” (Klute and All the President’s Men) to be the weakest in its plotting and tonally inconsistent but nothing less than stunning as a creative swing with some jaw-dropping sequences. In particular, the famous “test sequence” is one of the most bizarre and powerful things I’ve seen in a mainstream American film, essentially turning a 10-minute Soviet Montage of still images, words, and music into the central thematic thrust of this movie. It’s a dense, at times intentionally bizarre, and topically political piece of post-JFK filmmaking that fit like a glove in the golden age of paranoid cinema and still manages to excite today.

• The Great Gatsby | Though the casting of Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan is as perfect as those parts were cast in 2013, I really wasn’t into this movie. Its chief flaw is that the dialogue feels completely unnatural and is also desperate to explain the story’s themes, which is a product of too much fidelity to the source material and not enough adaptation. Further, though Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version is a little too energetic, this film was a bore – I thought Gatsby’s was where one goes to party! But, if you’re looking for excellent costuming and production design, those aspects are fittingly lovely.

• The Man with the Golden Gun | I’m a big fan of the original three Sean Connery Bonds, Goldeneye, and most of Daniel Craig’s output, but I get why these films have a compromised reputation. Setting this story mostly in Thailand gave the filmmakers an excuse to go there, but as you’d expect the treatment of this setting isn’t always the most delicate. Stereotypes, an inexplicable amount of kung-fu, dumb plotting, and a needlessly silly “evil device” all distract from what’s genuinely the best idea for a Bond villain: a super-skilled assassin who lives as a wealthy playboy and is the perfect dark reflection of what 007 is. And he’s played by Christopher Lee!

• The Towering Inferno | Before action spectacles like this became the Hollywood standard, the young “disaster flick” genre featured cutting-edge productions, bona fide movie stars, ensemble casts, and pulse-pounding thrills. The Towering Inferno has all this in spades, anchored by an iconic pairing of Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, flanked by supporting turns from Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and Fred Astaire. Though the visual effects, excellent at the time, haven’t aged tremendously, some of the miniature work is still as strong as it is in Star Wars, but the best aspects of this film haven’t aged a second: real fire on real sets and a genuine edge in how death is meted out. Major characters die unexpectedly and often brutally, creating a thrill ride that still has power.

• Thunderbolt and Lightfoot | If you’re like me, you like movies where dudes get together and steal stuff that doesn’t belong to them. If you’re like me, you like movies that feature beautiful scenery shot on location. If you’re like me, you like a good “hangout” movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously and allows the characters to breathe, ideally with a comedic bent. So yeah, I really enjoyed Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Watching this movie, you probably wouldn’t have guessed it’s directed by the same Michael Cimino who would go on to make The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate, but the context of those future epics makes this film’s slightness more refreshing, and even a little impressive.

• Lenny | In between Cabaret and All That Jazz, Bob Fosse teamed up with Dustin Hoffman to tell this story of controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. This film suffers from the same framing issues still plaguing our “high art” biopics today, in that we frequently cut back to interviews with Bruce’s wife and mother as well as some of Bruce’s later routines, though it’s enjoyable to see Dustin Hoffman throw himself into this role. Occasionally, this framing succeeds in giving us some insight into the real-life stories that powered Lenny’s routine, and how his set could be viewed as a confessional for his misjudgments, but the movie didn’t help me get to know the man despite its beautiful photography and performances.

Topical Documentary:

• Hearts and Minds | When he won the Oscar for this powerful documentary, co-producer Bert Schneider read a telegram from the Viet Cong ambassador thanking the team for what they had done for peace. After watching the film, it’s not hard to see why – dozens of interviews from American figureheads are contrasted not necessarily with war footage, but of the often-overlooked suffering of civilians on the wrong end of bombs, napalms, and chemical agents. This statement, dismissed by some critics as a propagandic hatchet-job, was clearly embraced by a mainstream (and other lauded critics) as the right movie for the moment. 50 years later, it’s a key artifact of one of the most polarizing moments in this country’s history.