1974: The Motion Picture Industry’s Miracle Year

For many cinephiles, 2024 marks the Golden Jubilee of 1974, the greatest year in movie history. It’s hard to argue with that assessment. In terms of quality, genre diversity, enduring impact and just down-the-line engaging entertainment value, there has never been another year like it.

In celebrating, let’s skip past two of the finest films ever made that sprang from this stardust-sprinkled year: Francis Ford Coppola’s incredible double punch “The Godfather Part II” and the subtle, powerful The Conversation, more relevant than ever in our age of anxiety about information privacy. These masterpieces have already received their due. So too Roman Polanski’s beautiful moody atmospheric Chinatown, and comedy legend Mel Brooks’s influential and irreverent  box-office pairing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

This quintet for the ages was just the starting five for 1974. What really makes the year spectacular is the overachieving bench it bequeathed. It’s as if the Jordan-era Bulls brought in LeBron’s Miami Heat and the 1980s era Celtics and Lakers as back-up. Even the year’s flops like Zardoz, the ponderous enormous flying stone head sci-fi flick by John Boorman, featuring a ponytailed onesie wearing Sean Connery  are intriguingly terrible.

So, in no particular order, we present lesser-lauded but still not-to-be missed credible movie candidates for 1974’s coveted 6th man/movie of the year award. All are still relevant or reverberating some 50 years later, and Hollywood is in the process of remaking some.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

This is tortured romantic director Sam Peckinpah’s most personal film. The weathered and worn-down Warren Oates stands in for Peckinpah as a pugnacious louche lounge piano man with a past. This low-rent Bogart “started playing in the Black Cat in T.J. Now that was a nice place. Classy people came in there…”  Not anymore. Bennie’s gone considerably downmarket since his Black Cat days. He’s near bottom when an opportunity to receive a fortune presents itself. With his prostitute girlfriend Elita (Mexican film star Isela Vega) by his side, Bennie embarks on an odyssey of Malcolm Lowryesque proportions through “the soul of Mexico.”

Leave it to Peckinpah to turn the last half of the film into a bloody buddy movie fever dream revenge flick where one half the combo is a ripening severed head with a halo of flies buzzing around in a burlap bag. “C’mon Al … we got a long way to go.” Pure Peckinpah.

A Woman Under the Influence

Living with crazy. “Cinéma vérité,” the opposite of escapism, is the goal in John Cassavetes’s grim granular depiction of incipient madness and family dysfunction set against a moody, Didionesque, strangely cloudy California. Channeling Lauren Bacall on edibles laced with ecstasy, Gena Rowlands as Mabel Longhetti gives a once in a lifetime performance. Peter Falk plays her hardly-better husband Nick. The opening sequence where Mabel picks up a man at a local bar and takes the hapless guy home while Nick is working nights and the kids are away runs totally against expectations and never once takes the easy route. It’s a subtle triumph for all concerned. The movie is filled with these sorts of emotional surprises. Cassavetes’s unadorned documentarian style replete with off-kilter uncomfortably long extreme close ups of his emotionally fragile characters is an acquired taste.

This may well be great cinema and a learning experience that increases understanding ,but it’s not pleasant. It also features a soundtrack that throws together Swan Lake and kazoos.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The title says it all. The birth of the charnel house and abattoir approach to cinema. The final girl. The other endlessly repeated tropes so aptly parodied in Cabin in the Woods (2011). It all started here. Directed by Tobe Hooper, TCM cost less than $140,000 and made more than $30 million the year it was released. That’s about $200 million in today’s dollars.

Harry and Tonto

Director Paul Mazursky’s gentle charming little Oscar bait film is edgier than you might expect, topped off by some excellent performances and good writing. Art Carney stars as Harry Coombes, a 72-year-old widower and retired teacher on a cross country trip of discovery. His Sancho Panza is an aging, strong-willed ginger tabby cat named Tonto, a wily scene-stealing advocate of the less is more school of acting. After many adventures and encounters with disappointing offspring and colorful characters, Harry settles in L.A. just as the ever faithful Tonto falls ill and leaves this world. Tonto’s sad departure sets the scene for one of the most touching animal death sequences in cinema. Vaudeville aficionado Harry sings Harry Lauder’s hit “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” one last time to his faithful little guy through the bars of an animal hospital cage.

The awards season for 1974 would see Carney snatch the best actor Oscar out of Tonto’s deserving paws. Though, to be fair, Carney was pretty good.

Death Wish

The first salvo in a genre, the ultimate bored dad’s male fantasy, starring Charles Bronson in his signature role. Bad guys wiped out my family? Now I get to go on an ultra-violent righteous revenge spree!  Finished 9th in the 1974 box office. Several countries actually banned director Michael Winner’s film out of concern that it promoted vigilantism; Bernie Goetz says “No way!”

California Split

Following fast on the heels of their brilliant partnership in the much misunderstood The Long Goodbye (1973) Robert Altman and Elliot Gould team up again with a game George Segal for the comic compulsive gambling buddy film California Split. There is absolutely nothing forced or stagey about Altman’s work. Nobody does abundant jazz like adlibs, flowing continuous camera shots and overlaying conversations like Altman. And often the guy doing some business in the back of the room is as interesting as the movie stars. Altman’s exploration of professional gambling is an immersive, almost claustrophobic, experience. You can feel the characters crowding into the frame breathing down your neck and elbowing you out of the way. Gould and Segal have a terrific chemistry and you can see why a still-stuffy Hollywood system’s insurers demanded the troublesome Gould’s sanity be verified before filming commenced.

The Yakuza

Sydney Pollack’s excellent, often-overlooked neo noir benefits from an excellent screenplay by just-getting-started screenwriting legend Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) and the one and only Robert Towne. The film first and foremost is a tale of giri, the Japanese concept of obligation, and secondarily of the Yakuza the rough Asian equivalent to the Western mafia.

In The Yakuza,  Robert Mitchum stars as Harry Kilmer, in over his head in Japan. Kilmer is a private detective who in an earlier life served in the military police during the postwar occupation of that country. A complex web of relationships and obligations from that time reach into the present to draw him back to the Island Kingdom. As  the web of giri  becomes even more complex,  it threatens the lives of all involved.

The art direction in The Yakuza is second to none. The telltale Yakuza tattoos in the title sequence are stunning. Filming on location, Pollack does a nice job of integrating Japan’s unique graphic sensibility adding to the visual richness of the film. Includes a standout scene at a Kyoto temple where amidst the gently falling snow a monk with a large basket covering his head wanders by playing a flute. 

Phantom of The Paradise

Brian De Palma ups the weirdness quotient in this searing sendup of the music business and Gaston Leroux’s classic 1909 novel Phantom of the Opera. Lots of split screens, great colourful art direction, rampant silliness, cynicism and enjoyable over the top acting make this a memorable view. Smallish Paul Williams as Swan oozes oleaginous music industry executive evil as only one who has interacted with these near-human hominids could do. Should have had more legs as a cult classic, but never caught on like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Towering Inferno

“The tallest building in the world is on fire. You are there with 294 other guests. There is no way down. There is no way out.”

An engaging well-packaged ensemble cast entertainment adapted from the kind of middlebrow blockbuster paperback novels  that don’t exist anymore. Audiences lined up to see whose eyes were bluer, Paul Newman’s heroic architect Doug Roberts or Steve McQueen’s cranky fire chief Michael O’Halloran. William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, O.J. Simpson, Jennifer Jones, Robert Wagner, Robert Vaughn and a cat named Elke (who survives) fill out the cast. Director John Guillerman helms multiple terrific action sequences including a fantastic scene with a Navy helicopter attempting to attach a safety line to a hanging by a thread packed scenic elevator.

Audiences were also treated to selfish mobs trying to save themselves and elevator doors opening with a wall of flames only to reveal its toasted occupants. The Towering Inferno is a film full of satisfying villains and ordinary-person heroics. No surprise, it was the highest grossing film of 1974 and nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture. It won three, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Song.

The Parallax View

Well earned 70s paranoia over the deep state never looked so good.  Warren Beatty plays Lee Carter, an investigative reporter digging a bit too deep.  Great action sequences and plotting keep this underrated political thriller humming. Recommended viewing for what is sure to be a–not without reason–conspiracy-theory-soaked election year.

Other Still-Significant Films Made in 74

The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg)

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese)

Lenny ( Bob Fosse )

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino)

Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet)

Seizure (Oliver Stone)

Uptown Saturday Night (Sidney Poitier)

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)

Dark Star (John Carpenter)

Swept Away (Lina Wertmuller)

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Ted Kotcheff )

Scent of a Woman (Dino Risi)

The Four Musketeers (Richard Lester)

Female Trouble (John Waters)

Gone in 60 Seconds (H.B. Halicki)

Foxy Brown (Jack Hill)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent)

The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton)

The Gambler (Karel Reisz )

Lords Of Flatbush ( Martin Davidson, Stephen Verona)

The Longest Yard (Robert Aldrich)

Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme)

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani)

That’s Entertainment (Jack Haley Jr.)

Benji (Joe Camp )