1974, the year before I was born.
A heavy year for film, but those who explore it will be stronger and wiser for bearing the weight!
Here are my top five films from this year :
1. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola) –
“I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder.” Rarely has a thriller ever been wrapped so tightly around a single character’s paranoia. Rarely (even in Hitchcock) has that character’s soul been so deeply plumbed even in the midst of the mounting suspense. In this character, we have a dizzying picture of a master professional whose brilliant work seems inextricably wedded to the evil of the world around him. Here we also see the cost of surveillance, the cost of willful obliviousness, and ultimately the cost of isolation. (Also see my earlier comments on The Conversation in the middle of page 2 of this thread.)
2. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes) –
The key to understanding this movie is to know that it is not only about a woman. It is chiefly about a woman and a man, Mabel and Nick. It is a story about a marriage. The way Cassavetes and the actors are sensitive to that profound truth about the story rescues the film. It rescues it from being the kind of mental-illness movie that is merely good for society, good for us, and good for winning Oscars. I had to watch the movie a second time to fully appreciate this element, because the first time my attention was so focused on the woman who I assumed was the center of everything. The first time, I had expected that this movie was simply going to be about Mabel dancing to Swan Lake (a lovely reference in this context, by the way). No, it is actually about Mabel and Nick dancing on a tightrope in their marriage, and ever so close to teetering off one side or the other. Ever so close to destroying everyone in sight. The movie gains power only when we realize this.
Is there any hope for Mabel and Nick? This is an interesting question to ask in this 1974 movie year. 1974 was a year of great films, but these films as a group have barely a spark of hope to rub together. A Woman Under the Influence is just as dark as all the other Big Films we remember from that year (Godfather II, The Conversation, Chinatown), and perhaps the hardest to watch of them all. (It is the hardest to watch because its pain is not refracted through any familiar genre, but rather comes to us through characters who seem to be living in our own non-movie world.) However, this film is the only one of those dark films to allow for anything even close to hope in its closing moments. Here are Mabel and Nick – wrecked, but not destroyed.
3. Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins) –
Among all the movies that I watched from 1974, this is undoubtedly the most remarkable and successful Big Experiment film. This movie is many things, but it is at base level a narrated documentary of the famous painter’s life layered over a collage of images, sounds, music, conversations, and wrenching in-process depictions of Munch’s heart being etched into the canvas. (The way all of these elements overlap and comment on each other leaves you sure that, yes, the young man who went on to make Days of Heaven and Tree of Life must have seen this movie.) Through it all, in almost every scene, we see the face of actor Geir Westby as the artist. We rarely hear the actor speak a word, yet there he is staring at the camera as if to ask us what we think of his life and his world. There is his face quietly observing all that goes on around him, trying to make sense of the two competing tensions on the map of his life : the unchecked libertinism of his artist friends and the rigid but (seemingly) joyless religious faith of the father who raised him. You can almost feel his dissatisfaction with both of these worlds, his sense that both are a dead end. He seems hungry for something, but cannot articulate what it is. When I watch him in this movie, I think of Chesterton’s famous statement that “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God”. It is sad that Munch does not appear to have come close to sating that hunger in his life. The way the film shows us his hunger for this ineffable something, though, cuts the viewer to the heart just as Munch cuts and scores his canvas.
4. Chinatown (Roman Polanski) –
Pauline Kael called The Godfather Part II “an epic vision of the corruption of America.” It is indeed, but I think Chinatown the greater of these two 1974 epics of corruption.
-One reason is that Chinatown is even more impressive in the way it embeds this epic in the form of a genre film, a film noir. Consider for a moment how difficult it is to make a great, tight noir film. Then consider what an accomplishment it is to make this great genre film resonate with profound echoes of corruption that reach far beyond itself. (Godfather Part II does of course land in the gangster genre, but it is a far less traditional genre film than Chinatown.)
-2nd reason : Noah Cross, in the final scene in the film, gives us an even more profound picture of evil than Michael Corleone at his most treacherous. His words and actions in that scene are among the most haunting of this film year.
(Question for all : which is the greater, Chinatown or Godfather Part II? Give reasons!)
5. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese) –
Because I was only a little boy in the late ‘70’s, I was not aware that this movie had been adapted into the sitcom Alice until after I’d seen the film. I was not surprised to learn this, though, as the film itself has the rapid-fire comic one-upmanship and the out-of-nowhere happy ending of many sitcoms. I know this does not sound promising J. However, pause for a moment and imagine Martin Scorsese melding his usual intensity and prowling camera to a sitcom of crackerjack wit. Such is the charm and undeniable spectacle of this film. Also fascinating is this : when or where else have you seen Scorsese apply his talents to a story of such “ordinary” people wrestling with “ordinary” life? Maybe never. Maybe nowhere. Final thought : As much as I may laugh buckets watching Gene Wilder doing the hand-coffin routine or shooting ‘em down as the Waco Kid, this movie is funnier for me than Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. A matter of taste, I know, but who would have suspect Scorsese in the ’70’s was cutting his comic chops so sharply? 😉