What’s the best year a single director has ever had? Victor Fleming had a pretty good 1939, co-directing Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz back-to-back. Preston Sturges wrapped up The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels in the same year, 1941. Ingmar Bergman dropped The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries in 1957. Jean-Luc Godard won his Moonlight for Pierrot le Fou in 1965, the same year he made Alphaville. And of course Steven Spielberg’s 1993 was fairly memorable, with Jurassic Park in the summer and Schindler’s List a few months later.
And then you have 1974, a year with not one but two iconic directorial double whammies.
This was the year Mel Brooks changed the comedy game, releasing Blazing Saddles in February only to come back with Young Frankenstein in December. There had been style parodies in film before, of course, but they were rare, and rarely good; prior to Brooks’ 1974 double punch, the apex of the genre might have been Bugs Bunny. (Or Dr. Strangelove, I guess, but doesn’t it feel wrong to call that a style parody?)
But as great a year as Mel Brooks had, Francis Ford Coppola may have had an even better one. His opening salvo was The Conversation, an eerily prescient exploration of paranoia, mistrust, and panoptic surveillance that came out in April - the same month a special prosecutor subpoenaed incriminating tapes of recorded conversations in the Nixon White House. It was Coppola’s best film of the year - at least until December, when The Godfather, Part II hit theaters and made the world safe for “II,” “III,” and “IV” films forevermore.
One of those two directors would have to win this year’s Moonlight, right? Not so fast: 1974 was also the year of Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s bleak masterpiece that’s often cited as the greatest noir film ever made and the greatest screenplay ever written. Polanski didn’t make a second movie that year like Brooks and Coppola did - but when your first effort is Chinatown, maybe one is enough.
To identify the Best Picture of 1974, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
Unsurprisingly, when you ask film critics to list the greatest movies of all time, Godfather II and Chinatown show up all over the place. The American Film Institute ranked them both in their all-time top 40, and The Hollywood Reporter and the BBC both ranked them in their all-time top 25. Empire magazine snubbed Chinatown but loved Godfather II; Entertainment Weekly snubbed Godfather II but loved Chinatown.
But the voters in all those rankings were predominantly American (and British), and Godfather II and Chinatown are both very American movies. What changes when you widen the scope? Not much, as it turns out: Godfather II and Chinatown also show up in Sight & Sound’s much more global critics’ survey, though some other films also enter the fray.
Here’s a list of 1974 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Godfather II (T31), Chinatown (T78), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (T93)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Godfather II (T30), A Woman Under the Influence (T59), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (T75), Chinatown (T91)
Sight & Sound critics (2022): Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (T52), Celine & Julie Go Boating (T78)
Sight & Sound directors (2022): A Woman Under the Influence (19), Godfather II (T26), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (T53), Chinatown (T72), The Conversation (T72)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Chinatown (21), Godfather II (32)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Godfather II (12)
Leonard Maltin: Godfather II, The Conversation, Blazing Saddles
National Society of Film Critics: Godfather II, Chinatown
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Godfather II (7), Chinatown (21), Young Frankenstein (72), Blazing Saddles (74)
BBC American (2015): Godfather II (10), Chinatown (12), A Woman Under the Influence (31), The Conversation (33)
BBC Foreign (2018): Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (66), Celine & Julie Go Boating (81)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Chinatown (31)
Sight & Sound’s voters love Godfather II and Chinatown (though both films got snubbed in their most recent critics’ list), but they’re not alone! There’s also a lot of support for Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpiece about class, race, history, and the German guest-worker program - and John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, featuring unforgettable performances by Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk as a pair of damaged souls trying to love each other and not always succeeding. Also cited: Jacques Rivette’s wild and magical Celine & Julie Go Boating, a film that does eventually contain a boat.
Beyond that, it’s mostly just Godfather II and Chinatown - though The Hollywood Reporter also cited Mel Brooks’ two classics on their all-time top-100 list, and the BBC agreed with Sight & Sound on Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Celine & Julie, and A Woman Under the Influence.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes 20 films from 1974:
(31) Godfather II
(71) Chinatown
(77) A Woman Under the Influence
(105) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
(143) Céline and Julie Go Boating
(151) The Conversation
(173) Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(499) The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
(519) Alice in the Cities
(552) Je, Tu, Il, Elle
(603) Edvard Munch
(655) Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(666) The Phantom of Liberty
(692) Lancelot du Lac
(760) Young Frankenstein
(764) Phantom of the Paradise
(834) We All Loved Each Other So Much
(888) Female Trouble
(896) My Little Loves
(950) Arabian Nights
There are all our favorites near the top, with Godfather II just ahead of Chinatown and A Woman Under the Influence also sneaking into the top 100. Trailing slightly behind are Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Conversation, and Celine & Julie - and one more film, the low-budget horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In a mild surprise, Mel Brooks doesn’t do too well here: Young Frankenstein is there, but well behind the other leaders, and Blazing Saddles doesn’t make the top 1000 at all. (Only two Mel Brooks films are on TSPDT’s list: the other is The Producers, about 75 spots behind Young Frankenstein.) Brooks isn’t the only provocative comic director out there, though: there’s Luis Buñuel just ahead of Frankenstein with The Phantom of Liberty, and John Waters’ cha-cha heels dancing onto the list with Female Trouble.
General Audiences
But which films from 1974 do general audiences still watch?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger than average and more likely male, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1974, according to IMDB (as of February 28, 2023):
The Godfather, Part II (1,283,962 votes)
Chinatown (330,972)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (167,445)
Young Frankenstein (161,200)
Blazing Saddles (142,569)
The Conversation (114,414)
The Man with the Golden Gun (107,940)
Murder on the Orient Express (64,447)
The Towering Inferno (45,150)
Black Christmas (43,658)
At least in our top six, there’s quite a bit of convergence between critics and general audiences. As in our critics’ lists, Godfather II and Chinatown lead the way; in fact Godfather II is the third most watched film of the decade, according to IMDB, behind only Star Wars and Godfather I. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just behind, with The Conversation not too far back - and in between are our two Mel Brooks classics, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. (Our other highly-acclaimed film of the year, A Woman Under the Influence, is in 14th place.)
All of those are American films, though. Here’s where IMDB’s American bias really comes to the fore: the top non-English language film of the year is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, all the way back in 20th place. Here too, though, there’s consensus between critics and general audiences: IMDB voters may lean heavily toward English-language films, but they agree with critics that Ali is the top foreign-language movie of the year. (Not so much for our other critically-acclaimed foreign flick, though: Celine & Julie Go Boating lands in 65th place.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 12 films from 1974 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
Chinatown (9) 199
The Conversation (3) 150
Godfather II (5) 135
A Woman Under the Influence 97
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (3) 87
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (2) 79
Blazing Saddles 74
Young Frankenstein 66
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1) 53
Celine & Julie Go Boating 49
Lenny 14
The Phantom of Liberty 14
Lacombe, Lucien 11
The Parallax View 10
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia 9
Edvard Munch 9
Swept Away 9
Female Trouble 8
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 7
Bread and Chocolate 7
Alice in the Cities 6
California Split 6
Phase IV 5
Claudine 4
Going Places 4
The Night Porter 4
The White Dawn 4
My Little Loves 3
Murder on the Orient Express 2
The Gambler 1
The Watchmaker of St. Paul 1
A major upset here: Chinatown, not Godfather II, is our runaway winner with the panel, with nine first-place votes and 199 total points. That’s the third-highest point total we’ve ever seen, behind only 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Godfather.
And not only is Godfather II not the top-scoring film of the year: it’s not even the top-scoring Francis Ford Coppola film of the year. That’d be The Conversation, easily outpacing Godfather II in points despite two fewer first-place votes.
Behind those top three, though, the rest of the results are about what you’d expect. A Woman Under the Influence takes fourth despite no first-place votes, with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul just behind in fifth. Taking sixth is Werner Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: we haven’t mentioned it yet, but it also placed eighth on TSPDT’s critical aggregate and it’s IMDB’s second-most watched foreign-language film of the year (behind only Ali). Mel Brooks checks in at seventh and eighth, with Blazing Saddles slightly outpacing Young Frankenstein here. Finally, rounding out the top ten are Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Celine & Julie, albeit with fewer points than you might have guessed. (But neither film performs nearly as poorly as Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, which wound up trailing behind three write-in films.)
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There’s clearly a top ten from 1974, as evidenced by the wide gap between 10th and 11th place in our panel vote. Our panel’s top-ten list includes all of TSPDT’s top eight, all of IMDB’s top six, and IMDB’s top two foreign-language films. In 1973, we saw some divergence in our three metrics - but this year, critics and scholars and general audiences all seem to be roughly in agreement on which films best stand the test of time.
But we have to pick a top five, not a top ten, and that’s a little trickier.
Godfather II and Chinatown are obvious locks, for starters. The Conversation should also be in, but we may be able to make our task a little easier by applying our general rule: only one film per director per year. Godfather II is clearly the pick if we’re only choosing one Coppola movie, so we’ll leave The Conversation out for now. We can also drop Celine & Julie Go Boating from consideration: it barely registers with today’s moviegoers and it didn’t really hit with our panel either.
We can rule out one more film if we apply the Coppola rule to Mel Brooks: between Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, which one wins? Blazing Saddles performs slightly better with our panel, but Young Frankenstein has the slight edge with general audiences - and it’s the clear winner with film critics, according to TSPDT. Blazing Saddles is out.
That leaves five possible contenders for our three remaining spots: Young Frankenstein, A Woman Under the Influence, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Let’s lock in Young Frankenstein as our third nominee, since it also has the weight of Blazing Saddles behind it as well: you can make a strong argument that three other films are more deserving, but it wouldn’t be right not to include a Mel Brooks film in 1974. Having done that, we can officially rule out Kaspar Hauser, which trails both Ali and A Woman Under the Influence on every metric.
So between Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, A Woman Under the Influence, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which one gets snubbed? No right or wrong answer here, so we’ll let our panelists decide: Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the favorite with general audiences, but it definitely lagged well behind with our panel (and it also trails the other two with critics).
Thus, with deepest apologies to Leatherface, our five Best Picture nominees for 1974 are:
ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL
CHINATOWN
THE GODFATHER: PART II
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
With an asterisk, because The Conversation should be here too. If we scrapped the one-film-per-director rule and included both Coppola movies, which one of these would get the boot? Probably Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which trails A Woman Under the Influence on every metric - so enforcing the rule allows us to make sure we recognize Fassbinder, a great director whose only other realistic shot at a Moonlight nomination would be in 1979 for The Marriage of Maria Braun. (That’s a great movie too, but 1979 also includes Alien, Apocalypse Now, Stalker, Being There, Life of Brian, Manhattan…)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Ask 100 people who they’d expect to win the 1974 Moonlight, and at least 99 of them would say Godfather II. You could list its accolades for hours: best gangster movie of all time, best sequel of all time, arguably even the best film of all time according to some. But our expert panelists clearly disagree - and these are all the same folks who gave Godfather I a runaway win in ‘72, so it’s not some irrational anti-Godfather bias at work here. Chinatown is just that good. (Bonus: I also prefer Chinatown myself.)
But is that panel vote enough to overcome all the other metrics? Probably not: Godfather II is the clear winner with critics and an even clearer winner with general audiences - and while it scores lower with our panel than you’d expect, it’s still solidly in third with five first-place votes. There have been three films that failed to win the Moonlight despite winning two of our three metrics - City Lights in 1931, The Rules of the Game in 1939, and Rear Window in 1954 - so a Chinatown win wouldn’t be unprecedented. But those three films lost to M, The Wizard of Oz, and The Seven Samurai, respectively, and those choices all make intuitive sense. Chinatown over Godfather II doesn’t pass the smell test, at least not to the same degree - and besides, with The Conversation also in the same year, it’d be
And so: congratulations to The Godfather Part II, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1974!
Godfather II wins despite finishing third with our panel. That’s not a bad showing, but it’s been rare for a film to win the Moonlight without placing in our panel’s top two. 1973’s winner, The Exorcist, also finished third with the panel - but prior to that, the only films to do it were Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, Children of Paradise in 1945, and It’s A Wonderful Life in 1946. (It’s A Wonderful Life actually finished fourth.)
Chinatown’s runner-up finish means Roman Polanski is now 0-for-3; he was also nominated, but did not win, for Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. (Repulsion was also our runner-up in 1965.) It’ll likely be a while before we see Polanski again - maybe not until we get to The Pianist in 2002. In the meantime, Francis Ford Coppola is now 2-for-2, with nominations and wins for both Godfather movies. He’s on a roll, and he’s not done: Apocalypse Now is just five years away, so there’s a good chance he may join Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock as our third three-time winner before the decade is out.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1975:
BARRY LYNDON
DOG DAY AFTERNOON JAWS JEANNE DIELMAN… ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
The Oscars got this year almost exactly right, as it turns out: those are four of the five Oscar nominees, and the fifth, Nashville, was an extremely close runner-up. Only one film kept us from replicating the Oscar nominations exactly: Jeanne Dielman, which just got ranked by Sight & Sound as the number-one movie of all time.
With Jeanne, Chantal Ackerman becomes our fifth nominated female director, joining Leni Riefenstahl, Maya Deren, Agnès Varda, and Charlotte Zwerin. Other first-time nominees are Jaws’ Steven Spielberg and Cuckoo’s Nest’s Milos Forman. Stanley Kubrick, meanwhile, collects his fifth nomination for Barry Lyndon, tying him with Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles for second all time. (Alfred Hitchcock is first with an incredible 13.) Kubrick’s first nomination was in 1957 for Paths of Glory - the same year Sidney Lumet got his first nomination, for 12 Angry Men. Dog Day Afternoon is his second.
We focus a lot on directors, but the New Hollywood era is also known for producing a great generation of actors, some of whom are also racking up numerous Moonlight nominations. Godfather I and II co-stars Al Pacino and John Cazale get their third nominations for Dog Day Afternoon; Cazale would have a fourth for The Conversation too, if not for our spread-the-wealth rule with directors. Jaws is the third Moonlight nominee to feature Richard Dreyfuss, along with American Graffiti and The Graduate, in which he has a brief cameo. (That film more prominently features another Jaws player: Amity mayor Murray Hamilton, as the spurned Mr. Robinson.) Cuckoo’s Nest is Jack Nicholson’s fourth nominated film, joining Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, and Easy Rider. Outside the New Hollywood movement, Delphine Seyrig already had nominations for Last Year at Marienbad and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie when she took on her towering performance in Jeanne Dielman. And finally, let’s not forget Marisa Berenson, who had a hell of a track record in the early 70s: Barry Lyndon was only her fourth film, but the other three included Death in Venice and Cabaret.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1974? Who should win the Moonlight for 1975? Join our community and weigh in!
Comments