The Godfather: Part II
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
★ 9.8
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1974
Showing 63 works across all media from 1974
Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
1974
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
★ 9.4
The Power Broker
Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
1974 · 1246 pages
Robert Moses was never elected to anything and remade New York for forty years, throwing up bridges and expressways and flattening the neighborhoods in their way. Caro shows exactly how it was done.
★ 8.9
No Woman, No Cry
1974 · From Natty Dread
Marley credited it to Tata Ford, whose Trenchtown soup kitchen the royalties kept running; the title means woman, don't cry.
★ 8.9
Sweet Home Alabama
1974 · From Second Helping
An answer record to Neil Young's "Southern Man," riding Ed King's riff and a name-check for the Muscle Shoals Swampers.
★ 7.8
Court and Spark
1974
Mitchell hired a working jazz band to back her and made the best-selling record of her life without simplifying a single thing.
★ 7.7
The Conversation
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Written years before Watergate and released at its climax, it looked like prophecy: a surveillance expert starts hearing something terrible inside his own recording, and his paranoia does the rest.
★ 7.7
Young Frankenstein
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks has called it his best film and he shot it using the original 1931 laboratory equipment: black and white, played completely straight, and funnier for the discipline.
★ 7.6
Time (Pink Floyd)
1974 · From The Dark Side of the Moon
Alan Parsons taped antique-shop clocks as a quadraphonic test; Mason's rototoms follow, and the alarms still land like panic.
★ 7.5
Lady Marmalade (Labelle)
1974
The Meters on rhythm at Sea-Saint, Toussaint producing, and Patti LaBelle singing a French hook she did not understand.
★ 7.3
A Woman Under the Influence
Directed by John Cassavetes
1974
Cassavetes mortgaged his house to finance it, and Gena Rowlands gives the most exposed performance in American film: a marriage where love and damage cannot be separated.
★ 7.0
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence · 1974
Blazing Saddles
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks spent years saying it could not be made today and has since changed his mind: a Black sheriff arrives in a frontier town built on racism, and everybody gets hit.
★ 6.9
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
1974 · 430 pages
Seventeen days on a motorcycle carry a father and son from Minnesota to California while he works out what Quality means and recovers the man he was before electroshock erased him.
★ 6.9
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
1974 · 400 pages
Pulled out of retirement, George Smiley hunts a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence, working from old files and older grudges. Le Carré makes treason a matter of friendship and marriage.
★ 6.8
All the President's Men
1974 · 361 pages
Woodward and Bernstein worked doorsteps, phone books, and a source who met Woodward in a parking garage, tracing campaign money into the White House. Journalism has measured itself against this reporting ever since.
★ 6.8
Take Me to the River
1974 · From Al Green Explores Your Mind
Baptism imagery over Willie Mitchell's Memphis groove, and Hi Records never bothered to release Green's version as a single.
★ 6.6
Help Me
1974 · From Court and Spark
Her only American top ten hit, cut with Tom Scott's L.A. Express as she swung folk toward jazz.
★ 6.6