The following things happened in 1974:
- The F-16 Fighting Falcon was flown for the first time.
- Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
- People magazine was published for the first time.
- Charles de Gaulle Airport was opened in France.
- The final episode of The Brady Bunch aired.
- OPEC ended its oil embargo against the United States.
- The UPC (Universal Product Code) was introduced in the United States.
- U.S. President Richard Nixon announced his resignation.
- The skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy") was discovered.
- The Rubik's Cube and the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game were invented.
Linked entries were viewed in their entirety on YouTube.
Excellent
1. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw and Jerry Stiller (!) star in this thriller centered around a group of armed men hijacking a subway train. Whoever wrote the script did a masterful job, and the direction is also very concise. My favorite thing about this movie is the way it ends. Most movies would have progressed onward to "consequences," but this movie, aware of such tropes, doesn't do that.
Fun Fact 1: This movie has been remade twice, in 1998 as a TV movie and in 2009 as a feature film.
Fun Fact 2: "Borough Commander Harry" look familiar? That's Kenneth McMillan, who'd go on to play Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch's Dune.
2. Hearts and Minds
Brilliant documentary on the Vietnam War. There's plenty of footage from Vietnam, alongside interviews with people on both sides of the conflict. I found the ending hard to watch, but yeah, it's a great movie. In 1974 it was high time to reassess U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and this film does a thorough job of that. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1975.
Weird Enough To Be Worth It
1. Phantom of the Paradise
Phantom of the Opera meets Faust in the deepest, most rockin' part of the 70s. As far as 70s rock operas go I don't think this movie holds a candle to Tommy, but it's still delightfully weird and has aged extremely well. Director Brian De Palma's skill with a camera is evident throughout.
Fun Fact: Jessica Harper, who appears in this movie as the Phantom's muse, would go on to star in Dario Argento's Suspiria.
Some Good Ones
1. The Front Page
Walter Matthau (again) and Jack Lemmon star as two newspapermen chasing a story, with Susan Sarandon (!) as Lemmon's fiance. It kind of creeps along, and resembles too closely the play that inspired it, but I can't fault the performances. Director Billy Wilder clearly knew what he was doing, but I think this movie's humor will be lost on most modern viewers.
2. Mr. Majestyk
Charles Bronson stares down a hitman while fighting for - or at least marginally supporting - the rights of migrant workers. It takes a while to get going, but the ending makes it all worth it. Elmore Leonard wrote the script.
Fun Fact 1: Gary Oldman's character in True Romance either references this movie or the character of the same name in Elmore Leonord's novel The Big Bounce. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the script for True Romance, is a big fan of Elmore Leonard.
Fun Fact 2: Villain Al Lettieri look familiar? He played Solozzo (the guy that Al Pacino kills in the Italian restaurant) in The Godfather, which came out the same year as Mr. Majestyk. He'd die of a heart attack in 1975.
3. Animals Are Beautiful People
Documentary in which we see the cute side of African animals. The director, a South African, would go on to direct The Gods Must Be Crazy in 1980. Some criticized this movie for its "staged" scenes, but they're so obviously staged that I can't figure out why anyone would complain about that.
4. Black Christmas
A killer invades a sorority house. In this kind of movie there are always two critically important things: 1) how the camera moves (or doesn't move), and 2) the sound design. Black Christmas gets both of these things very, very right, and the result is a suspenseful movie highlighted by a great performance from Margot Kidder. She really could have been a much bigger star than she was. The camera loved her.
Fun Fact 1: Star Olivia Hussey signed on to this movie after being told by a psychic that she'd make "a film in Canada that would earn a great deal of money."
Fun Fact 2: Andrea Martin's character was almost played by Gilda Radner. Radner ended up passing on this movie in favor of Saturday Night Live.
Fun Fact 3: This movie was a huge influence on John Carpenter's Halloween.
5. Death Wish
Two fun cameos in this movie: Jeff Goldblum as a thug and Christopher "Spinal Tap" Guest as a patrolman. One is the reminded of the long, hard road between some people and "being somebody" in Hollywood.
That said, Death Wish is a more nuanced film than its reputation would have you believe. It has room to question the right to bear arms. It has room to question the racial aspect of crime. It has room to question the nature of justice, and how politicians might find it more expedient to look the other way when someone is walking around New York with both a grudge and a loaded pistol.
Charles Bronson (a.k.a. Charles Dennis Buchinsky) stars as an architect whose wife and daughter are assaulted, and even though this movie does nothing to dispell rumors that he was a limited actor, he was well cast in the role. Death Wish is a very entertaining movie, and moreover a film very much in touch with social concerns of its time.
Fun Fact: They finally did a remake in 2018 with Bruce Willis in the lead. Just about everybody hated it. It's still a great idea for a movie though. In the right hands it could be brilliant.
Bearded dude and his pet bear roam around the mountains befriending other animals. (Except rabbits. Rabbits = food.) This movie would pair well with Animals Are Beautiful People above. It would also pair well with a generous helping of marijuana. Like both The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Trial of Billy Jack (below), this movie was a big hit, and its popularity would give rise to a TV series.
French film in which a young boy is confronted with a choice: either enter the world of adulthood or remain a child. It's a very understated movie, and in a weird way it reminded me of certain 80s movies wherein boys ride bikes around and embark upon adventures. The director, Jean Eustache, had a short but memorable career.
Long before Christine, long before The Car, an irradiated bulldozer was terrorizing a construction crew on a remote island in Africa. I think it's fair to say that both Christine and The Car are much better than Killdozer, in part because the authors of those stories did away with Killdozer's more science-y explanation for the homicidal machine's rampage. Even so, Killdozer isn't bad. It manages to generate a fair amount of tension, and I liked the music. My biggest complaint is that parts of it are very dark. It's hard to see what's going on.
Fun Fact 1: Theodore Sturgeon wrote the novella that inspired this movie way back in 1944. The backstory in the novella involves and ancient empire at war with beings of pure energy. These beings of pure energy were able to take over mankind's machines and turn them against their builders.
Fun Fact 2: There was also a Marvel Comics adaptation, and the rock band Killdozer took its name from this movie.
9. Thieves Like Us
Three bank robbers roam around the South. This is one of director Robert Altman's less famous movies, featuring actors (namely Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall) that he'd work with in better-known movies. I can't say it's as good as McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville but it's still good.
WTF Did I Just Watch
1. Sweet Movie
Please believe me when I say I've seen some weird movies in my time. Sweet Movie "out weirds" most of them. Just don't ask me what it's about, because I'm still not sure. I suppose that instead of attempting to describe the plot I could list the transgressive acts present in this film, but honestly that seems a bit dismissive, and somewhat lazy. Those venturing into this kind of movie will either see it through to the end or abandon ship in the first ten minutes. I'll only say that a certain part of this movie made me want to puke, and whether that desire to vomit came from moral or physical repulsion I'll leave to your imagination.
You could in some ways view this movie as a precursor of A Serbian Film, which also tries to get a point across by shocking its audience. I'm not a huge fan of either Sweet Movie or A Serbian Film, but I have to say that Sweet Movie is a more studied affair, and perhaps more desrving of further investigation. The director of Sweet Movie, Dusan Makavejev, was celebrated in the art house circuit during the late 60s and early 70s, and he put a lot of thought into his films.
2. Phase IV
Mankind vs. hyperintelligent ants. The science-y conversations in this film are hilarious, and it's hard not to find both the animated sequences and overuse of insect footage thoroughly charming. "Bug movies" were almost a genre unto themselves in the 70s, and Phase IV is one of the best (and worst) examples of this near-movement in film.
Fun Fact: The guy who shot the insect footage for this movie also did so for The Hellstrom Chronicle, another ridiculous film about bugs from the same decade.
Not Exactly Entertaining, but Indicative of the Time Period
1. Emmanuelle
Sylvia Kristel and her bored, rich, French friends fuck each other. In sexual terms Kristel has never done anything for me, but I did enjoy seeing what Thailand looked like in 1973 and 1974. The director, Just Jaeckin, would go on to do The Story of O in 1975.
And I'm probably overanalyzing Emmanuelle, but I think "Mario" misses the point. Does fear create a false morality? Certainly. But so does wealth. And beauty. If you have an extraordinary amount of any valued commodity society will let you transgress within certain bounds. Doing so and getting away with it doesn't make you braver or better than other people, it just means you're lucky - or careless - depending on how far you take it. The other members of Emmanuelle's circle, regardless of how you view their morals or the lack thereof, might have good reasons for their sense of discretion, and these reasons might not be fear and hypocrisy.
Fun Fact 1: Marika Green, who plays "Bee" in this movie, is Eva Green's aunt.
Fun Fact 2: Sylvia Kristel was almost in so many more famous movies. The Tenant, Once Upon a Time in America, Superman, King Kong, Logan's Run, Caligula, Body Heat, Blade Runner, Scarface, Dune, Body Double and Blue Velvet - the list of movies that could have launched her into another level of superstardom is truly impressive.
Some Bad Ones
1. The Odessa File
Jon Voight stars as a German reporter infiltrating a group of ex-Nazi conspirators bent on destroying Israel. It starts out well, but grows increasingly implausible as the plot wears on. Why would Voight's character go into the house if he knows the assassin is waiting for him there? Why try to sneak in? Why start a fight? Why confront Roschmann in the end, if he's so determined to bring him and others like him to justice?
Voight's German accent is also terrible. At times it's so bad it takes you right out of the movie.
Fun Fact 1: Derek Jacobi is in this. It was his sixth film.
Fun Fact 2: Voight's character's mother is played by Maria Schell, sister of Maximilian Schell, who plays the villain.
Fun Fact 3: Angelina Jolie Voight, known to most of us as Angelina Jolie, would be born to Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand during the following year.
2. Dark Star
I liked the ending, but up until that point it's very boring. I suppose you could watch it if you were curious about what John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon did in film school, but aside from its value as a piece of trivia it has little else to recommend it.
So Bad It's Good
"Go ahead, do one of your fancy kicks!"
I saw the first one, and this sequel is even preachier. Billy Jack goes to the slam after... whatever happened in the first movie (I can't remember), and the school marm from the first film chatters on about how her school's going to change the world. You can tell they had more money to make this installment, and it was more professionally done (Elmer Bernstein!), but it spends so much time stroking itself over various social injustices, and the righteousness of its youth-centered causes, that it forgets its purpose is to tell a story. This story, threadbare in the extreme, could have been told in a much smaller time frame, and with a lot less preaching.
Even so, The Trial of Billy Jack is very representative of the time period. The commune-type school with its focus on yoga, the Native American imagery, and even Billy Jack himself, who represents some weird ideal of manhood that was never going to work on a larger scale. The Trial of Billy Jack is very much a product of the late 60s and early 70s, and for this reason it may be of historical interest for those born later on.
And let us not overlook the fact that at one point in this movie Billy Jack quite possibly SLAPS JESUS IN THE FACE. Vision quest or no, cultural appropriation be damned, this film is chock full of truly weird moments.
Unasked-for Advice: Be careful of ridiculing this movie in front of older, hippyish types. They might take it personal.
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