By James David Patrick
Over the course of 2021, I’ll call out the Underseen and Underappreciated films from the year’s big anniversaries—10, 20, 30 years ago… you get the picture. Meanwhile, over on Twitter, I’ll send a monthly message calling for recommendations. That list made from your suggestions will inspire an upcoming episode of the Cinema Shame Podcast, where I discuss five new first-time watches. This month, it’s time to fire up the flux capacitor and travel back in time to 1981.
I’ve let myself down. Without a doubt or any shred of evidence, the 1980s are my most-watched decade of cinema. As I gathered my major unseen movies from 1981, the watch-pile swelled, threatening an avalanche of supposedly essential titles I’d just avoided or overlooked. I felt the oppressive weight of all the Cinema Shame. No longer could I lord my expertise over friends and family (okay, that’s a lie) because 1981 had arisen as such a blind spot. I tore off my 1980s merit badges but reserved their place on my sash.
I would bring 1981 into the fold along with all the other years of the 1980s. I was the master of their universe. By the power of Grayskull, I have the power… to rent a whole mess of 1981 movies.
The filmmaking mischief of the 1970s lingered into the early years of the decade—art house epics and auteurs raging against the twilight of the New Hollywood years. As Heaven’s Gate (1980) decimated an entire studio and George Lucas and Steven Spielberg brought escapist adventure serials into the blockbuster age, Warren Beatty still found a way to make a three-hour romantic epic about socialism in the United States and the Russian Revolution. On Golden Pond (1981), a story of familial love and marriage starring Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda made an incomprehensible $120 million at the box office, finishing the year between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Superman II (1980). I’m struggling to name anything close to a contemporary comparison. Adjusted for inflation, On Golden Pond would have earned a domestic box office roughly equivalent to Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse (2019). An adult melodrama capable of that kind of cultural saturation speaks volumes about the 1981 cinematic landscape. Prepubescent boys and your parents really could co-exist at the multiplex. ‘Twas a beautiful thing—a kind of bankable variety we’ll never see again.
1981 Box Office:
1. The Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. Superman II
4. Arthur
5. Stripes
My Subjective Top 5 from 1981 (alphabetical order)
1981 turned out to be my most rewarding single-year Cinema Shame experience. Many of the movies I’d put off turned out to be some of my favorite first-time watches of the year to date. I already know I’ll linger here even after I’ve moved on to my preparations for 1971.
I dub thee, 1981, the most underrated and underseen year of the ‘80s.
Underrated Films of 1981
Looker (1981)
If Looker is known for anything, it’s the novelty of being the first commercial film to create a three-dimensional computer-generated and shaded model of the full human body—months before Tron light-cycled into your local multiplex. The effect isn’t much; it’s merely a model on a CRT television screen. Ten years later, James Cameron released Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1999). Every T-1000 needs a few baby steps. Looker, meanwhile, is vintage Michael Crichton. It’s a high concept with little concern for anything but sustaining a high-wire act through sleight of hand and gee-whiz spectacle: beautiful girls, gadgets that go pew pew pew, and Albert Finney—the ladies’ man plastic surgeon P.I., flat-footing it around 1980s Los Angeles while a mustachioed killer with reflective sunglasses stalks his every move.
Albert Finney plays a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon puzzled by a string of already “perfect” models requesting minor, imperceptible facial adjustments. When these models begin to die one by one without explanation, he steps up his curiosity and clumsily investigates his way to the door of an advertising firm called Digital Matrix, run by smarmy, corporate-suited James Coburn. Digital Matrix creates scans of their female models to study their visual perfection. Their computer analyzes their features and grades them according to their impact on a television viewer. When the models/actresses can’t live up to their performance standards, Digital Matrix goes one step further by animating the scans and removing the human imperfection from the equation altogether.
Despite all its sci-fi hokum, Looker, which Crichton also wrote, creates an alarmingly prescient vision of the advertising and filmmaking future. Crichton wasn’t in the business of making great movies. He put ideas on screen. This one has aged better than others. The silliness entertains, and his ideas about media manipulation hit disarmingly close to home all these years later.
Let’s talk Hal Needham and auteur theory. That’s something you probably didn’t expect to read today. Needham made a specific type of picture. I’d wager that more people could correctly identify, sight unseen, a Hal Needham car-crash epic before a Jean-Luc Godard film. Curiously enough, the intersection of these disparate filmmaking ideologies might be Needham’s Hooper (1978). Discuss within.
You don’t even have to like Cannonball Run to love Cannonball Run. You can acknowledge that it tries too hard and has no real reason for existing other than nudging, winking, and watching cars go fast and crash. Cannonball Run stands as one of the greatest examples of a movie as a clown car. Gag after gag after gag falls out, and some of them are funny, and others are funny because the movie wears you down and diminishes your intelligence. And none of this would have worked without Burt Reynolds’ mug shepherding all the chaos.
Needham made The Cannonball Run in three weeks (and it feels like it), eliciting improvisation and—what he does best—shooting people driving cars. The cross-country road race genre didn’t originate here, as some might think. Arguably superior, 1976’s The Gumball Rally, dropped five years earlier and didn’t have to indulge star egos or personalities. It’s a proper movie about a manic, no-holds-barred race across the country. Then again, no small portion of Cannonball’s appeal is the parade of the famous and the famous playing off their well-established big-screen (and small-screen) personalities. Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Jackie Chan, Jamie Farr, Terry Bradshaw, etc. etc. It’s a bunch of friends hanging out and making stupid movies. That’s either infectious or irritating. The more super-serious popular cinema I’m forced to watch, the more I appreciate movies like Cannonball Run, filmmaking fueled by candor, alcohol, and various illegal substances.
Slipping in a 007 title because the tired anti-Roger Moore sentiment has gone too far. Even among those that accept Roger Moore, most still claim he made one good movie, and the rest were bottom-tier James Bond. Admittedly, Roger Moore’s Bond run wasn’t exceptional. The scripts grew increasingly childish, and maybe he hung onto the hand cannon a little too long. He tried to walk away in 1983 before Octopussy, but the James Bond production team didn’t want to compete against the unofficial Connery Bond in Never Say Never Again (1983) with a new actor.
For Your Eyes Only, a deliberate reaction against the critical failings of 1979’s Moonraker returns Bond to Earth in a more grounded plot concerning a missing British missile command system (aka the MacGuffin) and a woman (Carole Bouquet) seeking revenge for the death of her parents. John Glen aimed for gritty with a side of levity. Not only does For Your Eyes Only feature one of Bond’s most ruthless kills, a thrilling rock-climbing finale, and a steamy love affair with a woman of mostly proper age, but also hockey-goon assassins and a biathlon fight scene with an East German Olympian.
In many ways, it’s the Bond series at its most serious and silly. The great moments far outweigh the mild groaners. If you can only watch one Roger Moore Bond movie, make it The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). If you can pick a second, For Your Eyes Only shows what Moore could have done in the role given the opportunity to be less clown and more proper dangerous agent of espionage.
Cheech and Chong were a moment. It’s hard to imagine their comedy existing at any point before or since. After the box office success of Up in Smoke (1978), Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie (1980) and Nice Dreams (1981) followed in short order, aiming to capitalize on the original movie’s surprising $104-million box office. Having burnt their joke to the bud after one movie, it’s hard to imagine how they made more. Regarding the duo’s Next Movie, Roger Ebert said, "This movie is embarrassing. There's no invention in it, no imagination, no new comic vision, no ideas about what might be really funny—instead of just dope-funny, something to laugh at if you're in the bag anyway.”
In making Nice Dreams, the duo aimed for something a little higher in concept. Cheech and Chong are getting rich selling marijuana out of an ice cream truck and dream of buying an island and getting away from the things of man. To date, they’ve managed to evade the DEA, but Sgt. Stedenko (Stacy Keach) continues to stalk them while chasing the big fish, a drug kingpin named Mr. Big. To catch the stoners, he becomes one—smoking so much marijuana that he starts to turn into a lizard.
The Hunter S. Thompson riff feels plucked from a proper drug-addled mind. Tommy Chong did direct—if you can call it that. Despite rudimentary technique, it’s a remarkably fun trip with fits of cleverness and the same old Cheech and Chong charms. Even Janet Maslin had positivity to spare: “These are high spirits that don't have to do with being high.” Unfortunately, Nice Dreams has been cast aside among the other less inspired (sometimes painfully so—see 1985’s The Corsican Brothers) Cheech and Chong outings. That’s unfair. Any movie featuring pot-smoking lizard people deserves proper attention.
Underseen Films of 1981
Prince of the City (1981)
Sidney Lumet was a craftsman. He brought a specific set of tools into each film he directed. Realism fueled by honest dialogue. Tension and conflict brought about by disparate wants and collision of viewpoints.
Danny (Treat Williams) and his fellow drug enforcement and special investigations officers have been given unlimited power to tackle New York City’s drug problem. They supply drugs to informants, skim money, and abuse the system. After beating up a junkie to steal drugs for an informant, Danny’s conscience intervenes. He confronts internal affairs with the condition that neither he nor his friends get hurt in the process of the investigation. The institution cleaves away his moral protections until he undermines and alienates everyone he tried to protect.
Lumet provides a platform for Treat Williams to set a scene. As the entire film filters through Danny’s viewpoint, he vacillates between stoicism and paranoid mania. Prince and the City, however, is less about individual performance and more about the landscape that Lumet created. The dark underbelly of the City laid bare—the harsh realities of a society teetering on a precipice or moral bankruptcy. And yet, the safeguards have not failed; they’ve protected the institution at the expense of the individual.
Few give this remake of the 1946 noir classic a chance. It’s as if Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice occupies sacred ground and wasn’t itself second to the party after Luchino Visconti’s 1943 Ossessione. They’ve all adapted the same James M. Cain source novella. I’d argue, in fact, that Garnett’s version is the weakest adaptation of the four—no less entertaining, but the one that conveys the narrowest range of emotional exploitation.
As you might expect, Rafelson amplifies the sexual chemistry between the leads, which in this iteration is Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Lana Turner (star of the 1946 version) chimed in about the production, saying that she didn’t plan to watch the remake because the studio “turned it into such pornographic trash.” Even though she based her entire opinion about the film on little more than a trailer, Lana’s not entirely wrong—but she and the majority of contemporaneous critics weren’t all that right either. The film’s marketing clearly attempts to conjure terms like lurid, sordid, illicit, but The Postman Always Rings Twice doesn’t feel out of line with something like Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat; both are cut from the same year and neo-noir cloth, and both are a steam bath of erotically charged crime stories. Oddly enough, it’s Rafelson’s film that does more teasing, filling the frame with sexual aggression rather than nudity.
Nicholson’s the right amount of desperate menace. Lange’s the right amount of manipulative femme fatale. The whole production comes together imperfectly, but not without its share of big-screen spectacle. It’s still Cain’s potboiler, just updated for the 1980s and willing to indulge the seediest side of Cain’s well-established narrative.
When the critical mass singles out a film for accolades, it receives an unwarranted amount of attention from armchair critics. Consider the case of Vertigo (1958), which supplanted Citizen Kane (1941) as #1 on the Sight & Sound film list. Mass disapproval rained down upon Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller. It became fashionable to ding the film for its sexual politics, casting choices, and relative status against other Hitchcock classics. It did not receive such acclaim upon its release. Many critics cited its slugging pacing, sexual deviancy, and “weirdness.” Audiences, too, stayed away because Hitchcock had abandoned his run of popular romantic thrillers. The Academy Awards nominated it twice—but only in technical categories, sort of an also-ran booby prize.
Film appreciation ebbs and flows. New audiences and new generations react to the predilections of the prior generation. Social media further accelerates reaction and counterreaction. New lists create new controversy. Conversely, a film like Warren Beatty’s 1981 romantic epic Reds, which received 12 Academy Award nominations (winning three) and received near-widespread acclaim upon its release, has become a relative footnote. Who talks about Reds? I suppose, if we’re being technical, I am right here, but it feels like low tide for one of the truly exceptional movies of the decade.
In terms of more recent acclaim, the AFI named it among the Top 10 American “epics”—specified as a “genre of large-scale films set in a cinematic interpretation of the past”—and the top 100 love stories. I am not opposed to either declaration when discussing Reds; however, these two “accolades” won’t serve to expand its audience or create curious would-be viewers. I’d argue that calling Reds a “romantic epic” suppresses viewership. Without notoriety outside genre labels such as these, Reds feels like a cousin to Out of Africa (1985) or kin to Titanic (1997), a movie that unfortunately resides ahead of Warren Beatty’s masterpiece on both of the aforementioned AFI lists.
The two films share a wonderful metaphorical and structural symmetry, and it would be a subject fit for a truly epic formal study. In one, the ship is literally sinking. In the other, an idealist struggles to promote American socialism in the wake of the Russian Revolution and fails to see that the hull is beyond repair.
In the time and space allotted to me for DVD recommendations, I will go as far as saying that Titanic feels featherweight in comparison to the social and emotional lifting done by Warren Beatty in Reds.
Beatty’s film taxed me emotionally. It challenged my spiritual drive to create, to change, to impact the world as I see it around me. Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson conjure vivid characters with idiosyncratic needs and scattered frames of reference. They weave in and out of each other’s lives, forging the incongruous, unpredictable, and painful reality of our human existence. Honestly, if you haven’t seen Reds (and if three-hour movies don’t send you into irrational cold-sweat hysteria), I’d move that right to the top of your queue.
If Jason Bourne were older, French-er, and Matt Damon did every one of his own “stunts,” you’d have something akin to Georges Lautner’s The Professional, a messy, fascinating genre movie that simultaneously considers genre a false construct and tone a spectrum that’s as broad as a Jerry Lewis marathon.
Lautner’s thriller is a half-somber, half-goofball espionage thriller starring main attraction Jean-Paul Belmondo as Josselin Beaumont, a French secret service assassin sent to kill a politically problematic foreign dignitary. When the politics shift mid-mission, the French sell out their most dangerous weapon as a sign of good faith, leaving Joss to be captured, tortured, and trotted out on television as a symbol of dominance over a Western power. Joss escapes, makes his way back to Paris, where he’s intent on carrying out his original mission and making a mockery of the secret service that left him out to dry.
The film’s inability to commit to one tone makes the film feel loose and frisky even though darker themes simmer underneath. The Bourne films follow a similar blueprint for building suspense: Build the character up with speeches about his unequaled training and lethal combination of guile and physicality and then unleash him upon bad men that deserve what’s coming to them. As a star vehicle for 48-year-old Jean-Paul Belmondo, the viewer must suspend some disbelief when the aging French superstar flies into a series of modest roundhouse kicks. Lautner embraces Belmondo’s limitations by upping the foley effects on every punch and kick. If Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) hadn’t turned the sound of an Indiana Jones punch into an iconic sound bite, we might be talking about how the punches and kicks in 1981’s The Professional sound like slapping a sack of live fish.
Surface-value pleasures dominate the film. Belmondo’s swagger. A steady stream of beautiful women. Fistfights and clever turns of phrase (hopefully not all lost in translation). The execution embraces the film’s tonal duality. Breezy entertainment segues almost seamlessly into heavy politics and the weight of the fated, inevitable future.
Cinema Shaming:
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll continue to watch films recommended to me by the Twittersphere. I’ll record an upcoming episode of the Cinema Shame Podcast to discuss my findings. Subscribe to Cinema Shame presented by DVD Netflix on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, and Amazon Podcasts.
What’s your favorite movie from the year 1981 that people just don’t talk about enough? I’ll watch at least 5 new-to-me flicks and talk about them on an upcoming @CinemaShame podcast presented by @dvdnetflix. I’ll go first… Herbert Ross’ PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981) pic.twitter.com/A5njaVWApz
— James David Patrick (@007hertzrumble) July 14, 2021
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.