Majboor ('Convulsed') (1974)

Ravi has a mother, sister, young brother, and a love interest we get to know, first, watching their jolly good times at home and at the beach; time is also spent establishing the kidnap and murder case Ravi is involved in as a witness; he then develops and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; dying, he concocts a plan to falsely confess to a kidnap-murder and claim the reward money for his family; then comes an operation - miraculously - that cures him; and it is only after all this convoluted set-up - a perfunctory first hour and a half (perfunctory despite brightly coloured Bollywood music-and-dance set-pieces) - that the mystery thriller can start: poor helpless and alone ("majboor"), Ravi's only way out of the death penalty is to go on the run and find the real murderer.

★★★☆☆

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Death Wish (1974)

For one brief moment, Charles Bronson's Dr Paul Kersey - an architect whose wife is killed and daughter raped by gangbangers (one of them a young and lanky Jeff Goldblum) - steps out onto a NYC rooftop and surveys the city from above, and this vigilante may as well be in Gothan in a mask and cape, or, come to think of it, perhaps he's more like Victor Zsasz because it's a pretty unpleasant, unrewarding, socially troubling revenge he metes out.

★★★☆☆

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All the Kind Strangers (aka 'Evil In The Swamp') (1974)

A group of scowling kids inhabit a farmhouse and scout potential new fill-in 'parents' using a murderous recruitment process, in this made-for-American tv movie starring Stacy Keach as the latest mark to fall into the kids' trap, but the movie never really makes the most of its well-ahead-of-its-time 'Speak no evil' plot - there's no apparent reason for Martha to be mute, for example. 

★★☆☆☆

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Black Christmas (aka 'Stranger In The House') (1974)

This 1974 movie starring Margot Kidder continues a long tradition of suspense movies about women (usually one, but here a whole sorority houseful) threatened by - but safe inside from - a lunatic, eventually realising the danger comes from inside, not outside, the safehaven (The Spiral Staircase, When A Stranger Calls, for example) and it is an exceptionally effective, intelligent horror thriller: well-acted, with a large number of characters all fleshed-out and strong; rich in detail, and with some good humour which helps make, by comparison, the last twenty minutes especially deranged and terrifying!

★★★★★

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The Conversation (1974)

In writer, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed 1974 mystery thriller, lonely and anonymous Harry Caul, a man extremely protective of his own right to privacy and secrets, ironically works as a wiretapper able to listen in on the conversations of others no matter what barriers - walls or crowds or bodies of water - stand between him and them; when his work for a shadowy someone surreptiously recording a couple's private conversations looks like it is going to abet violence, he is troubled because of his complicity, of course, but perhaps troubled mostly because the situation accentuates for him the fact that even the latest hi-tech bugging equipment - voice actuators and enormous reels of tape - can't overcome his remove from others.

★★★★★

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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

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Murder On The Orient Express (1974)

Given it is essentially a string of twelve or thirteen dialogues between Hercule Poirot and one suspect after another aboard the snowed-in Orient Express, scene of a ghastly murder, it is surprising how engaging Sidney Lumet's 1974 film version of Agatha Christie's book is, helped of course by its all-star cast and the fact the story is inspired by the real-life Lindbergh kidnapping, a crime that captivated and so outraged the world one suspects it would have even turned Agatha Christie's world famous eggheaded Belgian detective into a revenge-murder conspirator.

★★★★☆

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The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

There's a long stretch in the middle of this ninth James Bond movie, the second starring Roger Moore, that plays out like the Dukes of Hazzard with a car doing a loop-the-loop over a bridge complete with zany popwhistle sound effects while a Boss Hog character gets hot and bothered in the back seat, and other stretches of the movie, which features Nick-Nack the "midget" butler, Miss Goodnight the Bond Girl and Mr Scaramonga the assassin with a superfluous nipple and a golden gun, resemble Fantasy Island and the old tv The Avengers, but not much of it feels like quality James Bond with the movie erring on the side of camp parody.

★★☆☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None) (1974)

An Agatha Christie adaptation, Ten Little Indians (or less controversially, And Then There Were None) has ten individuals including Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, and a singing, piano-playing Charles Aznavour gather in a remote Iranian desert mansion (not the book's island off the Devon coast) summoned by a mysterious host and, from their first tension-filled dinner, these guests are picked off one-by-one by a killer whose identity and motives are the surprise revelation at film's end.

★★★★☆

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Chinatown (1974)

This Roman Polanski classic, a sumptuously filmed neo noir mystery, opens with private investigator, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) being hired by a woman to investigate a cheating husband but very quickly Gittes finds himself embroiled in something much more complex and more sinister than a mere affair.

★★★★★

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

A group of five whiny, screaming youths get brutally picked off with a whiny, screaming chainsaw, one after the other, in monotonous fashion (in fact, the first three pretty much identically), making this foray into filmmaking-on-the-cheap loud, brutal, monotonous and repulsive.

★★☆☆☆

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