A Landmark Year: 1974 in Film

Over the past 12 months there has been a lot of discussion online about whether 1994 or 1999 was the better year for cinema as they celebrated their 30th and 25th anniversaries respectively. Are you Team ‘94 with the likes of Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Clerks, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump in your corner? Or are you into the more angsty last hurrah of the 20th Century with Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty, Office Space, and Being John Malkovich? Each has its merits (I’m more ‘94 myself) but I’m here to argue the case for an even better year for celluloid that unfurled half a century ago. Yes, 1974 is my pick for cinema’s greatest – and here’s the evidence:

Francis Ford Coppola’s Double Whammy

What do you do if you’ve just directed one of the greatest gangster movies of all time, a film that has smashed box office records and taken Best Picture at the Oscars? If you’re Francis Ford Coppola, the answer is you make a sequel that is bigger, broader in scope, and even more Awards-friendly than its predecessor. Personally, I prefer the relative simplicity of The Godfather, but I can see why many people consider The Godfather Part II superior. This was reflected when the Oscars rolled around again with Coppola’s mob epic hoovering up six gongs (compared to the original’s three) including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro) and Screenplay. 

In between, Coppola also found space in his calendar to make The Conversation, a paranoid mini-masterpiece that reflected the scepticism that was creeping across the United States at the time. In many ways, it was the inversion of his sprawling gangster sagas, a tightly-wound conspiracy thriller centred around Gene Hackman’s masterfully withdrawn performance as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who believes he has stumbled upon a murder plot. The washed-out contemporary setting is a world away from the elegant hues of The Godfather and the innovative sound design puts you right inside Caul’s suspicious headspace.

Post-Watergate Classic Thrillers

With America’s disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War wheezing to its conclusion and the Watergate Scandal unfolding, distrust of the government crept into many Hollywood pictures during the early-to-mid-70s. Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown may have been set 40 years earlier but it was very much a film about its time, with Jack Nicholson’s private eye catching a glimpse of the gross corruption at the heart of society and deciding unhappily that he can’t do a single thing about it.

With its contemporary setting and just six years out from the Robert Kennedy assassination, Alan J. Pakula’s steely conspiracy thriller The Parallax View is even more chilling. Warren Beatty is terrific as a news reporter who delves into the shadowy titular corporation, only to discover he is being lined up as the next lone gunman in a political killing.

While not as overtly political, both The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Death Wish were both very much evocative signs of the era. Joseph Sargeant’s hard-nosed subway heist thriller showed a troubled New York City and its ailing mass transit system at its gritty ‘70s best, and Michael Winner’s irresponsible revenge thriller struck a chord with audiences at a time when violent crime was on the rise. As a result, it rattled cages and became a big hit despite (or perhaps because of) its dodgy pro-vigilante message.

The Roots of Modern Horror

One thing that sometimes gets overlooked about the American New Wave is that it was also a period when horror movies started gaining respectability and were taken more seriously. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the genre was often maligned as hokum, and there certainly was plenty of B-movie trash to support that opinion. Things began to change with Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and, five years later, The Exorcist would become the first horror film to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

Perhaps more than any other genre, horror evolves quickly and 1974 gave us two movies that would have a mighty influence on the predominant subgenre of the following decade, the slasher flick. First out of the gate was Tobe Hooper’s grisly The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Based loosely on the ghoulish exploits of Ed Gein, Hooper’s macabre film isn’t anywhere near as gory as the title suggests, but it is still one of the most gruelling horror movies I’ve ever seen.

This is a film that you can almost smell, and the director mercilessly creates an atmosphere of sweaty claustrophobia and nerve-grating insanity. It’s not a movie I choose to revisit very often, simply because it is so effective.

A few weeks before Halloween, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas opened north of the border in Canada. We’ll take a closer look at the seminal Yuletide shocker more closely in our retrospective, but suffice it to say here that it is often regarded as the original slasher movie before John Carpenter’s Halloween sent the subgenre stratospheric.

Mel Brooks: Farting Cowboys & Lovely Knockers

Jim Carrey famously had a massive career breakthrough in 1994 with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber propelling him towards becoming one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars of the ‘90s. 20 years earlier, Mel Brooks had a pretty great year for comedy too, celebrating both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein cleaning up at the box office. 

Brooks started out as a Borscht Belt comedian before working his way up through TV comedy shows in the ‘50s and ‘60s, earning Emmy nominations for Caesar’s Hour and Get Smart, as well as a few Grammy nods for his work with Carl Reiner. He broke into movies in 1967, writing and directing The Producers. It earned him an Oscar win for Original Screenplay (and a Best Supporting Actor nod for Gene Wilder), but it wasn’t a huge hit at the box office. Neither was his follow-up, Twelve Chairs (1970).

With Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, however, Brooks landed on a winning formula: spoofing popular genres with his typical blend of bawdy humour, sight gags, and silly wordplay. His close-to-the-bone western satire made almost $120 million vs a budget of $2.6 million, while his affectionate spoof of vintage Universal horror took $86 million from a similar outlay.

Brooks would essentially stick to the format for the rest of his film career (High Anxiety, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men In Tights, etc.) but he would never again reach the same heights as his two widely-loved 1974 hits.

Powerhouse Performances

When it comes to 1974’s best turns, the big headline acts were Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. They appeared in The Godfather Part II without sharing a scene due to their separate timelines, but both received Oscar nods. De Niro took home his first Academy Award for his portrayal of a young Don Corleone while Pacino, now fully invested as a Shakespearian heir to the Godfather’s throne, needed to wait almost 20 years before he finally received a gong for Scent of a Woman. Oscars aside, both stars gave the kind of towering yet nuanced performances that made them two of the best actors the ‘70s had to offer.

As brilliant as De Niro and Pacino are, arguably the best performances of the year came in the Best Actress category. Gena Rowlands, directed by her husband John Cassavettes, is simply astonishing – if exhausting – in A Woman Under the Influence. It’s a full-throated portrait of a frazzled wife and mother folding under the pressure of day-to-day life, consoling herself with booze and pills, and surviving through a breakdown.

She would have been nailed-on for the Oscar that year if it wasn’t for Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, making good on her exceptional talent after previous nods for The Last Picture Show and The Exorcist. Her wonderfully rounded performance as a single mum seeking a better life for herself and her young son is certainly less abrasive than Rowland’s tour de force, which may be why she edged it come the Academy Awards and took home Best Actress.

Burstyn also popped up in Harry and Tonto, a largely forgotten road comedy about a retired teacher crossing the United States with his cat. The film was mostly remarkable for its star, Art Carney, upsetting the odds and beating the big-hitters of Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Albert Finney to the Best Actor Oscar.

Emerging Talent

The 1970s in general is lauded for the outstanding gallery of directorial talent that came to the fore in the early part of the decade and played a major role in the New Hollywood movement - Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, Bogdanovich, Lumet, etc, etc.

In 1974, some other hungry young helmers got their start. After cutting his teeth in TV, notably directing the first episode of Columbo and performing a gripping dry-run for Jaws with Duel, Steven Spielberg made a convincing theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express. The crime thriller starred a young Goldie Hawn and also marked Spielberg’s first collaboration with John Williams, who would go on to score all but five of the director’s movies.

Elsewhere, Michael Cimino made his writing and directing debut with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a lightweight crime comedy starring Clint Eastwood and fresh-faced Jeff Bridges. At a little under two hours, it feels like a short film compared to his masterpiece The Deer Hunter (184 minutes) and era-ending Heaven’s Gate (219 minutes). John Carpenter announced himself as a multi-hyphenate director to watch out for with the release of Dark Star, and future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme graduated from the Roger Corman school of filmmaking with women-in-prison flick Caged Heat.

Oscar-Nominated Little Grey Cells

Kenneth Branagh and his moustache put together a stellar line-up for his version of Agatha Christie’s most famous (and arguably hokiest) novel, but it paled in comparison to the incredible cast assembled for the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express. Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Martin Balsam, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Richard Widmark, Michael York, and Jacqueline Bisset were all onboard for Sidney Lumet’s solid murder mystery which relies on good old-fashioned star power rather than CGI avalanches for its kicks.

At its centre is Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, a one-and-done performance in the role that earned him one of his five Oscar nominations. While David Suchet’s prissy perfectionist may be the definitive screen Poirot and Peter Ustinov’s avuncular interpretation appeared in more movies, Finney’s beetle-like creation is certainly the most striking. He plays the Belgian sleuth with a hunched gait and watchful cunning that are at once amusing and unnerving. Less flashy than Branagh’s version, Lumet’s set-up is basically a series of ding-dong interrogation scenes between Finney and the plethora of acting heavyweights in the cast. And all the better for it.

Irwin Allen’s Towering Triumph

Irwin Allen did many things during his lengthy career but he will always be remembered as the Master of Disaster thanks to his string of massive star-studded disaster movies in the ‘70s. He warmed up with The Poseidon Adventure before turning his attention to a film that is still synonymous with the genre: The Towering Inferno.

While Poseidon is more fun, Inferno is huge in every sense: Huge budget, huge effects, huge cast, huge egos. To begin with, Allen brokered an alliance between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox when the rival studios both bought the rights to novels about deadly blazes in high-rise buildings. Then he refereed a high-profile willy-measuring contest between his headliners Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. The latter demanded the same money, equal billing, and the same amount of lines to satisfy his inferiority complex.

Beyond the main stars, there are famous names all the way down the line: Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Fred Astaire, O.J. Simpson, Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Vaughn, etc., who all get their moment to shine in the near-three hour extravaganza of pyrotechnic peril. They don’t make ‘em like this any more.

Foreign Masters at Work

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a formidable and prolific talent who produced an incredible body of work before he passed away aged just 37. In 1974, he directed one of his best films: Fear Eats the Soul is a heart-rending interracial take on Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows.

Also hailing from West Germany, Wim Wenders released Alice in the Cities, the first part of his Road Movie Trilogy.

The First Female Action Hero?

Blaxploitation, which had burst into the mainstream a few years earlier with Shaft (1971), was in full swing by 1974. Yet while Richard Roundtree became a household name playing the hard-swinging private detective, Pam Grier was arguably the bigger star, a sex symbol and a forerunner for strong female leads in action movies. She had already paid her dues in a few women-in-prison flicks before showing her super-cool bonafides in Coffy (1973).

Then came her signature role in Foxy Brown, which made her an international star dubbed the “first female action hero.” That might not necessarily be true, but when you see what Foxy does to a guy’s meat-and-two-veg, nobody’s going to argue.

A Fine Year for Mavericks

The collapse of the old Hollywood studio system enabled the New Wave and allowed filmmakers to cut loose thanks to more relaxed attitudes towards sex, violence, and adult themes. It was a good time for maverick directors both old and new, as we saw in 1974.

From the old guard, fierce old Sam Peckinpah chipped in with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. It turned off a lot of audiences and critics with its violence and nihilism, but is now considered one of his most fascinating movies. Late-bloomer Robert Altman, who made a false start as a filmmaker in the ‘50s before becoming one of the most original and influential directors of the ‘70s, came up trumps with California Split. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs Miller, or Nashville, it is still a superb hangout movie and a surprisingly effective look at gambling addiction.

Elsewhere, yet-to-be-anointed Pope of Trash John Waters toned down the shock value after Pink Flamingos but still created another masterpiece of filth with Female Trouble, giving his muse Divine another supremely outrageous role.

Larry Cohen made the leap from Blaxploitation to horror, kickstarting his career as a cult director with the killer baby schlocker It’s Alive, while Brian De Palma beat The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the punch with Phantom of the Paradise, a deliriously campy rock musical. 

Lastly, Bob Fosse took a little time out from being one of the most influential choreographers of all time to prove himself as a film director of considerable talent, following up his Oscar for Cabaret (1972) with Lenny, a compelling portrait of controversial stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce.

What a year – imagine heading down to the multiplex today and having such a variety of quality flicks to choose from!

So there you have it, our case for why 1974 is one of the greatest years in cinema history. Do you agree? If not, what is your top year in film? Let us know!