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
Working
1974 · 589 pages
Terkel put a tape recorder before a gravedigger, a receptionist, a steelworker, and asked what the day costs them. Work is violence to the spirit as well as the body, he writes.
★ 6.5
Free Man in Paris
1974 · From Court and Spark
Mitchell wrote it for David Geffen after a Paris trip, then set his escape to Jose Feliciano's guitar.
★ 6.5
Natty Dread
1974
The first record after Tosh and Bunny left, with three women, one of them Marley's wife, singing behind him from then on.
★ 6.4
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
1974 · 103 pages
The tabloid Bild-Zeitung had branded Böll a terrorist sympathizer, so he answered with this: a quiet housekeeper spends one night with a wanted man and the papers take her honor apart.
★ 6.3
Dog Soldiers
1974 · 352 pages
Vietnam comes home in a suitcase. A correspondent buys heroin in Saigon and ships it to his wife in California, where the deal collapses into a chase through a country the war broke.
★ 6.3
Roll, Jordan, Roll
The World the Slaves Made
1974 · 823 pages
Life on the plantation seen from the slave quarters outward: Genovese shows how the enslaved turned the master's claim of paternal care into leverage and made Christianity mean what the master never intended.
★ 6.2
Anarchy, State and Utopia
1974 · 384 pages
Individuals have rights, Nozick begins, so a just state shrinks to police, courts, and defense. A million fans paying a basketball star a quarter gave libertarianism its sharpest weapon against redistribution.
★ 6.2
Return of the Grievous Angel
1974 · From Grievous Angel
A Boston fan's poem, reworked by Parsons, Emmylou Harris on harmony, and an album out four months after his death.
★ 6.1
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
1974 · 290 pages
For a year Dillard watches a creek in Virginia's mountains, where a giant water bug drains a frog to an empty skin. She wants to know what kind of God made this world.
★ 6.0
You're No Good
1974 · From Heart Like a Wheel
Ronstadt rejected the first take as the wrong groove; four days later Andrew Gold's solo sealed her only number one.
★ 5.9
Scarlet Begonias
1974 · From From the Mars Hotel
Hunter set his lyric in Grosvenor Square, and from 1977 the Dead ran it straight into Fire on the Mountain.
★ 5.9
The Killer Angels
The Classic Novel of the Civil War
1974 · 374 pages
Three days at Gettysburg from inside the men commanding it: Shaara has Longstreet pleading with Lee not to send infantry across open ground, and Chamberlain, out of ammunition, ordering a bayonet charge downhill.
★ 5.8
Heart Like a Wheel
1974
Ronstadt's touring band had already left to become the Eagles by the time this made her the biggest-selling woman in American music.
★ 5.0
Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. · 1974
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Directed by Joseph Sargent
1974
Tarantino took the color-coded aliases straight from this for Reservoir Dogs: four men hijack a subway car under Manhattan and Walter Matthau negotiates with them by radio, entirely deadpan.
★ 5.0
Rejuvenation
1974
Zigaboo Modeliste's drumming here has been sampled more than almost anyone's, because he leaves gaps where other drummers would put a beat.
★ 4.9