OVP: Absence of Malice (1981)

Film: Absence of Malice (1981)

Stars: Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Wilford Brimley

Director: Sydney Pollack

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Actor-Paul Newman, Supporting Actress-Melinda Dillon, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Sally Field: click here to learn more about Ms. Field (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

During the early 1980's, Sally Field became what she'd clearly always dreamed of becoming: a serious actress.  We talked last week about Norma Rae, the movie that launched her onto this platform, and won her her first Oscar, against actresses like Jane Fonda & Jill Clayburgh who were taken more seriously than the former Flying Nun.  Field kept the pedal-to-the-medal on trying to change her image in the coming years, appearing in commercial fare (Hooper, Smokey and the Bandit II), movies that upended her cutesy image like the hard-swearing Black Roads with Tommy Lee Jones, and more dramatic roles.  She would win a second Academy Award for her work in Places in the Heart in 1984, when she'd infamously utter the lines "right now...you like me!"...lines that would come to haunt her & in many ways underline the spunky actress she was trying to shed.  During this time, one of the dramatic films that she made was Absence of Malice, a serious film starring one of the biggest names of the era, and a guy who (unlike Field) was still in the hunt for his first Oscar: Paul Newman.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows newspaper reporter Megan Carter (Field), who is given a tip from Rosen (Balaban), who works in the US Attorney's office that they are investigating liquor wholesaler Michael Gallagher (Newman) for the disappearance of labor leader Joey Diaz (never seen, but if you can't tell they're making him seem like a Jimmy Hoffa-type figure during this time frame, you need to study your history more).  Carter publishes this based on a file on Rosen's desk, which was clearly planted for her to publish, but it upends Gallagher's life.  They don't actually have any evidence of the connection, but with the paper now saying "he's connected," he can't get out of it.  Gallagher is the son of a former crime boss, but is generally living a clean life...until Carter forces him to act dirty.  This comes to a head when Teresa Perrone (Dillon) provides an alibi for him-that he was taking her to a doctor to have an abortion.  But Perrone is devoutly Catholic, and when Carter's bosses insist they have to publish her name & that she had an abortion, Perrone kills herself.  This sets off a chain-of-events where Gallagher shows he learned something from his father, using a romantic relationship with Carter and implicit bribery of a US Attorney to get off...and to get their careers fried in the process.

Absence of Malice sounds better than it actually is when I describe it above.  It reads like an ambitious, greedy reporter wanting to make a name for herself, who sacrifices her soul and in the process has a man who had lived an honorable life go back to his criminal roots to punish her and those around her who destroyed the life of Teresa, the only truly innocent person in the picture.  That's not what it is though.  The writers desperately want us to care about the romantic relationship between Field & Newman, but you don't...because you realize that Megan is not a good person, even if she's played as bubbly & sweet in Field's hands.  The film could've ended on Megan admitting she was involved with Gallagher but knew nothing about him, but instead ends on a conversation between the two, potentially setting up a reconciliation.  But why?  They should hate each other, particularly him hate her...what's there, given so much of what came before was fake?

This hurts the performances.  Field is badly miscast here .  Field was in that "I can do anything" part of her career in 1981, but she is not right for this-you need an actress who can play fragile-but-brittle, and she is not a brittle performer (you kind of think someone like Susan Sarandon might've been better off with this part).  Newman is better, but again-this is a great character until the writers come in the way (you see hints of what might've been decades later when Newman would play a similar character in Road to Perdition), and you feel like you only get half a performance.  Melinda Dillon got her second-and-final Oscar nomination for her work here, and she does create a shadow over the film (her confession scene, where she tries to convince Megan not to publish that she had an abortion, knowing that she'll end up killing herself if she does but not having the guts to say it, is really well-done); again, though, much of the work in the back-half of the film takes air out of her performance by cheapening it.  Wilford Brimley, honestly, is pretty good in his one extended scene, giving the film some life, but at that point, it's too late-the script has already wrecked the promising premise.

OVP: An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Film: An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Stars: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne, John Woodvine

Director: John Landis

Oscar Nomination: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Makeup*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

While both 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and the original Planet of the Apes won special Academy Awards for Makeup, the category wasn't competitive until 1981.  This was the result of complaints that The Elephant Man (and the extensive work that the artists on it did to John Hurt's face) wasn't going to be honored, and so the category was formed in 1981, despite makeup being quintessential to filmmaking as far back as the Silent Era.  Horror films should be a mainstay for this category-when you think of horror movies, whether it's Boris Karloff's bolted face in Frankenstein or Robert Englund's burned visage in Nightmare on Elm Street, the most iconic movie makeup frequently comes from movies that go bump in the night.  But it's actually relatively rare to see horror movies nominated in this category, which is extra bizarre because the first year of the category, the shiny gold man went to a horror movie.  An American Werewolf in London won Rick Baker his first of seven Academy Awards for Makeup, and would become a groundbreaking film in terms of its makeup.  However, headed into the picture, I knew nothing about what I was getting into and honestly...left kind of surprised at the tone the film takes.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two graduate students David Kessler (Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Dunne) who are from New York but backpacking through northeastern England.  They come across a pub with some satanic signs on the walls, and are warned by the pubgoers to stick to the road if they leave.  Of course, because this is a horror movie, they do wander off of the road, and are attacked by a wolf of some sort...one that right before David blacks out, seems to have turned into a bloody, naked man.  When David awakens in a hospital, he is told that he was attacked by a rabid man, not a wolf or dog, and that Jack was killed.  He insists otherwise, but the hospital says this isn't true, and when he is visited by the ghost of his dead friend Jack, he is told that he is a werewolf.  He starts dating a nurse named Alex (Agutter), and tells her about the werewolf theory, but she thinks he's just delusional from the attack.  As the film goes on, of course, he is not, in fact, lying, and goes on a murderous rampage before ending up in the wolf cage at the London Zoo.  He is eventually shot by the police during a second rampage (unable to figure out how to kill himself in time), a tearful Alex seeing him revert to human form before the end credits.

Here's the deal with An American Werewolf in London.  What I just described is a pretty generic werewolf picture...you could put Lon Chaney's name on it, and you'd basically have the plot of any Universal werewolf picture from the 1930's or 40's.  But the difference is that the 1981 film is genuinely funny.  The movie is less scary than you'd think, and more about gallows humor.  There's a scene where a dead Jack, now a ghost of sorts, introduces David to the people he killed the previous night while they are at a pornographic movie theater, an adult film playing in the background.  This is the kind of juxtaposition that makes this movie stand out.  It's also weirdly progressive when it comes to nudity.  Horror films have a lot of misogyny when it comes to nudity (women are frequently running around topless while the men are fully-clothed), but that is not the case here.  You will see all of David Naughton in his splendor in this movie (there is full-frontal), and a realism given the character is supposed to be naked most of the movie (or in various states of undress).  Kudos to John Landis on that one.

The film's makeup & visual effects are extraordinary.  Much of the work here, and what won Baker the Oscar, is the result of the transformation scene, which honestly...I'm not entirely sure how he pulled it off without CGI.  There are scenes where his actual spinal column expands, cracking and curving.  It's gross, but totally realistic and ingenious.  The bigger question isn't why it won the Makeup Oscar, but why it didn't also get a citation for the Visual Effects Oscar, as they should've gone hand-in-hand.

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, The Changeling, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

OVP: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Film: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Stars: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, Terry O'Quinn

Director: Michael Cimino

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction...though at the 1981 Oscars, not 1980)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While we didn't start this season with John Wayne (I wanted to pick a month with five Saturday's for Wayne given how important he is to the western genre), I made a point of covering The Big Trail this year, which was not the first Hollywood western, but it was the first one to be playing in the field of "epic tale of good-vs-evil" that would be a hallmark of the genre for the next fifty years.  Even after the collapse of the studio system, the western survived well into the 1970's, in some cases because people like Wayne continued to be profitable even as other Golden Age actors fell.  But in the same way that The Big Trail was a landmark for the western but not the first, Heaven's Gate was not the epitaph of the western...but it did mark the end of it as a major, consistent presence in Hollywood.  Michael Cimino's follow-up to his acclaimed (and commercially successful) war film The Deer Hunter was a gargantuan bomb, one of several that would happen throughout the 1980's, and would become synonymous with flops, to the point that when Kevin Costner's expensive failure Waterworld came out, it was nicknamed by the press "Kevin's Gate."  Unlike Waterworld, though (which actually made a lot of money, just not enough to recoup its budget), Heaven's Gate has a weird second life in the decades since, hailed by many as a masterpiece, in some ways akin to what Cimino achieved with The Deer Hunter, and I have spent much of this year looking forward to it, though a little concerned by the 219-minute run time (not a typo-this film approaches Gone with the Wind-levels of patience).  I was curious what the "last" Hollywood western would have in store for me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an epic tale focusing on the real-life Johnson County War that took place in the 1890's in Wyoming.  Despite a gigantic, long story, you can actually summarize it pretty quickly.  We have at its core Averill (Kristofferson), who starts the film a promising young man at school, but in a flash forward we understand he's now a grizzled marshall, someone who has seen too much of the world, and is employed in Johnson County, which is seeing a battle between the cattle barons of the region and the burgeoning immigrant population trying to find a hold in the West.  The barons are angry about the immigrants, and want to pin a series of cattle thefts on them, and quickly decide to put bounties on the heads of 125 different immigrants in the area, in hopes of killing them and driving the remainder out.  The rest of the film centers around this conflict, and eventually involves a wide array of figures, including a bordello madam named Ella (Huppert), who is caught in a love triangle with Averill and a hired hand for the cattlemen named Champion (Walken), before culminating in almost everyone involved dying...but the immigrants likely being able to carry on in their homes.  Averill survives in the end, living on a yacht in a proper life that feels unfulfilling...a sign that he left his spirit in the West, never to be reclaimed.

Heaven's Gate became a flop for a couple of reasons.  First, the production is the stuff of legend, with Cimino allegedly having something of a God Complex (it was the 1970's, and we were entering the saturation point of auteur theory between this and Apocalypse Now!'s sprawling location shooting).  He went over budget, and months over deadline.  According to legend, one of the films stars (John Hurt) was able to shoot his Oscar-nominated turn in The Elephant Man during production of Heaven's Gate, it took so long to make.  Cimino would tear down sets for no reason, and the film basically ruined his career two years after being crowned the toast of Hollywood at the Academy Awards.  The film also destroyed United Artists, and caused it to be sold to MGM in 1981 during the tumultuous Kirk Kerkorian years for the studio.  The movie's budget basically made anything short of a Star Wars-style payday to be a flop, and on a $44 million budget, it barely cracked $3 million at the box office (a loss of $74 million when adjusted for inflation).

It's easy to see why the public didn't like the movie.  It's long, and while I saw the longer director's cut, it also doesn't need to be if you solely focus on plot.  There's not a lot here.  The tropes of a western (good vs. evil, the little guy being overtaken by a powerful government, a love triangle between a sex worker and two lawmen with different ethos) are all there, but in the 1950's you could get that done in 100 minutes...and Heaven's Gate does.  In the remaining 2 hours, you largely just see a really beautiful reconstruction of the West.  No extra plot, just pretty pictures.

There's a trend in recent years to only focus on the plot, to the point where many people who are against sex scenes in movies use "is it relevant to the plot?" to argue against certain scenes in movie (we saw that earlier this year with Oppenheimer).  But Heaven's Gate is a solid explanation as to why you shouldn't do that.  Because Heaven's Gate is a good movie almost entirely because of how it looks.  Film is a visual medium first-and-foremost, and Cimino definitely gets good use out of bankrupting a studio.  You see every penny of his work in the production design, costumes, & cinematography, all first-rate and glorious on the screen, with entire towns built from scratch and giving us a lived-in look at the west.  The film's fatal mistake (other than its accounting) is that it casts our star (apologies to Kris Kristofferson, who has had a rough month with me in terms of reviews) incorrectly.  Kristofferson is handsome & genial, but he's not Clint Eastwood or John Wayne-he doesn't have an automatic connection with the audience, and he's too reserved as an actor for us to invest four hours into his character.  It's easy to see years later, when he's now a legend, but Jeff Bridges (who plays a smaller role in the film) would've been perfect for the lead, and Kristofferson would've been a good fit for Bridges' less showy part, but in 1980 that wasn't the star structure that was in place.  Heaven's Gate would change that.  While Bridges would go on to fame, glory, & an Oscar in the decades that followed, Kristofferson would essentially be banished from the A-List after this movie, forced into character parts.  We'll get to one of his most notable ones, and the final western of 2023, in our season finale next week.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Film: The Evil Dead (1981)

Stars: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly

Director: Sam Raimi

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

We are well past the halfway point of our marathon right now, and so it feels fitting that we get to one of the last "horror icons" of this era in terms of direction.  When you think of horror from the 1970's through the end of the 1990's a few names come to mind.  John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George Romero, and today's director, Sam Raimi, are arguably the most influential filmmakers of the genre during this time period.  While all of the other directors have dabbled in other genres, none of them approach Raimi in terms of future box office success.  Sam Raimi started his career as a director in 1980's horror films, the most famous of which is the movie we're profiling today, The Evil Dead.  But in the years that followed, Raimi's career took an unexpected twist into the commercial, with him becoming the mastermind behind one of the most influential films of this century: Spider-Man.  Along with the X-Men franchise, Spider-Man launched the present comic book omnipresence that Raimi is still associated with, making Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness earlier this year.  But I had never seen any of Raimi's films from the beginning of his career, and while I knew what I was getting in for (I knew what would be considered a "signature" Sam Raimi picture), that still did not prepare me for the shock of The Evil Dead.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is light on plot, but essentially we have five college students, the most important of which is Ash Williams (Campbell) headed to a secluded cabin in the middle of the forest.  As soon as they come, strange things start to happen, including Ash's sister Cheryl (Sandweiss) hearing the voices of demons.  When they find a book that claims to be the Book of the Dead they instinctively decide to read it, assuming that it's just a joke or a prank of sorts in the basement.  This turns out to not be the case, and soon the women of the cabin are finding themselves possessed, one by one, by demons, while the men are debating whether to kill them or escape.  In the end, the only one who ends up surviving is Ash after he throws the Book of the Dead into the fireplace...except the ending implies there's one last demon for Ash to fight as it sneaks up behind him before the credits roll.

The most shocking part of The Evil Dead isn't the demons, but the makeup & effects team.  Clearly made on a shoestring budget (if there aren't scenes that are clearly filmed with a standard portable camcorder, I'll be stunned), the film invested a lot of work into truly inventive prosthetics, frequently borrowing and then exceeding what the makeup team was able to achieve with a film like The Exorcist (I literally texted afterward to a friend "what in the Linda Blair is this movie?").  The makeup and visual effects are gruesome, gross, and putrid, as if you can almost smell through the screen the burning flesh and decaying body parts.  It's not for the faint of heart, and there were times I was wincing from behind cupped hands.

The movie also infamously has a scene (though I didn't know headed into it that this scene was coming) where one of the actresses, Sandweiss, is brutally raped by a demonic tree.  This scene hasn't aged well, both in the sense that generally assault is handled more carefully onscreen now, but also because it isn't remotely important to the story, and feels like a "rape as shock" situation.  I try to judge movies based on the time period they're from, so I'm not going to dock too much for this happening, but it has to be mentioned that it is genuinely disturbing, and probably should've been lifted in the remake.

Overall, I will give this 3-stars.  I didn't like it because it was too gross and far too focused on making the audience uncomfortable than genuine frights or story, but I understand that this is a good movie, and well-constructed on a tiny budget.  Campbell is fun as Williams-he is ridiculously hot in the lead role, his dark hair & bright eyes a potent combination for a "final girl" onscreen, and the chills are real.  I just don't need to ever see this again.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Amityville Horror, When a Stranger Calls, Friday the 13th

Roar (1981)

Film: Roar (1981)

Stars: Noel Marshall, Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, John Marshall, Jerry Marshall

Director: Noel Marshall

Oscar History: No nominations...I honestly don't think it was eligible as this was a straight-to-video release in the United States initially despite Hedren as a star & the film's extravagant budget.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Tippi Hedren-click here to learn more about Ms. Hedren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Tippi Hedren would spend much of the late-1960's & early-1970's struggling to find a foothold in Hollywood.  After working with Hitchcock & Chaplin, she never again would get lead roles from directors of that caliber, and would talk later about how she was upset she couldn't make a lot of major movies as she moved into her early 40's.  This is where Roar comes into place for Hedren.  Filmed over a five-year period, Roar is maybe Hedren's best-known role outside of Hitchcock, and it certainly is a film she's well-associated with today.  Hedren and her husband Noel Marshall started living with an actual lion in the early 1970's, and when there were complaints from neighbors, they moved their family to a ranch where they raised myriad big cats.  This is the setting of Roar, our film today, and one of the most infamously troubled film shoots in Hollywood history.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is weirdly short on plot, but I'll try to ground you in what it attempts at least.  Hank (Marshall) lives in a giant "preserve" which is really a giant house filled with lions, tigers, panthers, cheetahs, & leopards.  He is trying to stop a local ordinance that would allow local hunters to kill these animals, as they are viewed as dangerous even though Hank believes in them.  While he's battling this, his family, including his estranged wife Madeleine (Hedren) and his precocious daughter Melanie (Griffith) show up, and are stunned to find a house filled with ferocious beasts, ones that they assume will kill them.  The remainder of the 98-minute film is largely just a litany of encounters between the animals and the real-life actors, fighting regularly with them (for those curious about the plot, the hunters are killed by the animals, and the family lives happily ever after).

The plot is not the point of Roar, even if it might've been for Hedren & Marshall at the time.  Roar is instead a truly bizarre film where we see dozens of big cats, each able to take down a grown man, maul at screen icon Tippi Hedren and her daughter Melanie, who within a few years would become one of the most famous actresses in America.  Watching this happen in real time is like watching a snuff film less than a horror film (it plays like a horror movie in my head, but it's meant to be a fun action-adventure movie as directed).  There's no real plot, just the family fighting these lions & tigers...before in the end deciding they love them despite them putting each other in mortal danger the whole film.

Roar was not a CGI fest like it would be today, nor is it a feat of a slew of well-trained animals creating grand illusions on set.  By most accounts at least 70 cast-and-crew were injured on the set of Roar, including Marshall, Hedren, & Griffith, all of whom had to have surgery done at some point to repair injuries.  This makes scenes like Tippi Hedren literally having honey licked off of her by a panther feel all the more shocking, knowing that she was doing this at great personal risk.  It also makes the film next-to-impossible to give a grade to-it's certainly entertaining in a morbid sense, but also you cringe the whole runtime.  I'll go with two stars as it's not a good movie even if it's an engaging one.

This film was not a success.  Self-funded and made with non-union crew (with the exception of cinematographer and future director Jan de Bont), Hedren & Marshall couldn't get it into theaters domestically, and it wouldn't be seen in theaters in the United States until 2015.  The movie did, however, spark a lifelong love of animals for Hedren, who would create the Roar Foundation/Shambala Preserve and is still the president of this animal sanctuary in California which is home to a number of large cats that are at least partially tame (discarded animals from circuses or private owners who no longer want to house animals, such as Michael Jackson's two Bengal tigers).  Hedren's legacy therefore is one of animals rights in the years that have followed, and outside of Hitchcock's films with her, this is what she's best known for today.  However, Hedren did keep working (almost exclusively in the decades that followed to fund her preserve), and we will get to one final performance from her next Saturday as we close out our Tippi Month.

S.O.B. (1981)

Film: S.O.B. (1981)

Stars: Julie Andrews, William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Robert Webber, Robert Vaughn, Larry Hagman, Marisa Berenson, Stuart Margolin, Loretta Swit, Shelley Winters, Robert Loggia

Director: Blake Edwards

Oscar History: The film has a weird awards history, getting nominated for a WGA Award, a National Society of Film Critics prize for Preston, and a Globe for Best Picture, but also being cited for a Razzie for  

Worst Director & Screenplay.  Oscar didn't want to get its hands on such a polarizing picture & skipped it all-together.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we took a look at what would become a major cinematic renaissance moment for Julie Andrews, teaming up with her husband Blake Edwards for the smash-hit 10.  This would become a recurring theme for Andrews for the next several years, regularly leading Edwards films.  We've talked about a few of these on the blog (or some I've seen & not discussed...I watched movies before I started writing this blog, I have to admit).  The best and most successful of these films was Victor/Victoria, where Andrews plays a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.  The film was a critical & commercial smash, and won Andrews her third (and to date, final) Oscar nomination.  But as we only watch film I'd never seen before, we're going to talk a different film from this era, the movie that tried the hardest to crack the veneer of Andrews' squeaky clean image: S.O.B.

(Spoilers Ahead) S.O.B. is a pretty cruel sendup of the Hollywood machine.  We have Felix Farmer (Mulligan), who has produced what is sure to be a major flop called Night Winds after an unparalleled string of successes, many alongside his wife Sally Miles (Andrews), an, Oscar-winning angelic figure for the movies who is in the middle of trying to leave him, as Felix has gone mad while producing the movie. The first third of the film Felix tries to commit suicide, frequently to comic effect (at one point he falls on Loretta Swit's brassy gossip columnist & puts her in a full-body cast for the remainder of the picture), until it occurs to him-if they recut Night Winds, they can make it pornographic and play off of the public's titillation if Sally goes topless.  After Felix buys back the film from the studio, Sally has no choice and does, indeed, go topless.  Afterward, though, the studio realizes that this gimmick might work & go behind Felix's back to get the movie back, driving him mad, and leads him to standing up the studio with a toy gun...after which, in a shock, he is killed by real bullets from the police.  Felix is therefore dead, but the movie thanks to all of the publicity becomes a huge hit, with Sally winning another Oscar for the film.

The movie is vicious in the way it skewers Hollywood, oftentimes watching people stripped of their humanity as they try to find some way to scrounge a buck on a picture.  No one, not even Andrews' Sally, is a saint in the movie, though she does come the closest of the bunch.  The film is very funny, filled with black humor, and Preston & Winters provide the best comic relief of the bunch (both are terrific as soulless figures that know their way around the edges of Tinseltown).  Andrews in the center is hardly at her best, even if she's clearly playing a fictionalized version of herself (she's called "Peter Pan" quite often, perhaps to make it seem like she might be Mary Martin or Cathy Rigby, but, come on...she's Mary Poppins), but she's good.  The movie is good.  It's not great (it's meandering & a bit too long at parts), but it's not Razzie-worthy in any respect.

Andrews would continue to make movies and is still quite active today, nearly 60 years after she became America's Sweetheart.  A botched vocal surgery would rob her of her brilliant voice, but an appearance as Queen Clarisse in 2001's The Princess Diaries revived interest in the actress, and since then she's been playing some version of the Julie Andrews persona in everything from Shrek to Despicable Me to Bridgerton for a new generation.  She, like many of the women we've profiled in recent months, was able to escape Hitchcock's shadow & is hardly considered part of his legacy by modern audiences.  That will not be true on Monday, when we start our penultimate star of the year, a woman who would be defined by Hitchcock...but a star who would have more to say about Hitchcock's modern legacy than any of his leading women.

OVP: Ragtime (1981)

Film: Ragtime (1981)
Stars: James Cagney, Brad Dourif, James Olson, Mary Steenburgen, Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Elizabeth McGovern, Donald O'Connor, Pat O'Brien, Mandy Patinkin, Debbie Allen, Norman Mailer...as well as very early performances in small roles from the likes of future stars Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, & Samuel L. Jackson
Director: Milos Forman
Oscar History: 8 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Supporting Actress-Elizabeth McGovern, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score, Original Song-"One More Hour")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There are very few films remaining that have been nominated for 8+ Oscars that I haven't seen (the stats are harder to find than you'd think).  It's an even shorter list if you don't count movies that weren't cited for Best Picture...in fact, it's now a list that doesn't exist at all.  Only five films have received over eight nominations for the Academy Awards at the Oscars without a Best Picture citation, and with today's review I've seen them all: They Shoot Horses, Don't They (the only one to get 9 nods), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dreamgirls, The Dark Knight, and 1981's Ragtime.  Based on the celebrated novel by EL Doctorow, this movie is a gigantic, all-star extravaganza linking together historical figures with fictional characters so unknown they don't have names, and kudos have to go out to the casting director for putting a number of future superstars onto the call sheet.  But the question is-why did a movie get this kind of adoration but (despite having a very prestigious source material & director), didn't get a nod for Best Picture?  Let's take a look, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) I have never read Doctorow's novel (shame on me, I know), so I don't know if this is faithful or not, but the movie is largely a tangled historical web that eventually settles on one storyline in the back-half of the movie.  Essentially we have a lot of figures, some real-life (McGovern as famed model Evelyn Nesbit, Cagney as Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo), and other characters, major characters in the film, who don't actually get names (Dourif plays "younger brother" while Steenburgen plays "Mother").  The film shows racism, as well as classism at the turn of the century, with newsreels featuring figures such as Harry Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt, and Stanford White (played by Mailer in the movie) to give us a sense of time (and its passage), while checking in on the lives of the main characters in the movie.  The back-half of the film, however, focuses almost exclusively on Coalhouse Walker (Rollins), a fictional figure who is a black man who has made something of a career for himself as a musician, but will not forgive a group of firefighters who destroyed his car while he was driving down-the-road.

The movie's focus on Coalhouse was probably inevitable, but arguably the wrong decision for the movie as it's more interesting in the first half of the movie.  The vignette-style stories almost have a Terrence Malick "figure out the plot" kind of coherence to them.  It's not remotely as arbitrary or abstract as Malick, but I quite liked the idea that we were getting a series of short stories rather than one larger narrative, but the Coalhouse plot, which ties together all of the loose figures in the film, almost feels anti-climactic compared to the looseness to Forman's approach to the movie.  It seems impossible that an anthology tale would have been greenlit in 1981, but it's where the movie works best.  When it focuses on Coalhouse it becomes more predictable, and more reliant on the actual figures at-hand, and the acting is a bit over-the-place here.

McGovern & Rollins got the Oscar nominations, and they do have the showiest parts (though it was Steenburgen who scored at the Globes, and it was Randy Newman's score that most deserved the AMPAS recognition), but Ragtime is a movie that doesn't really allow for standouts in the traditional sense, and I left wanting more from both actors.  McGovern plays Evelyn Nesbit as somehow a dope and a brainy girl, someone who knows how to manipulate every situation but doesn't always know that she's doing it (a girl too pretty to lose), but it only sometimes works when McGovern makes Nesbit in on the joke.  One wonders if this nomination was in part due to McGovern's shocking display of nudity about a third of the way into the picture, where she nonchalantly sits on a 100-year-old couch with her breasts on full-display.  It's better than the meek-and-mild Steenburgen (who adds little to her character) or Patinkin's overbearing director, but it's an ingenue part that probably needed a more seasoned actress to make it work.

Rollins grounds his character a bit more, but honestly I left this performance with something to be desired as well.  His righteous anger is warranted, but you can't quite compromise the man we initially meet who quickly becomes a doomed vigilante within Rollins work.  He seems to only know how to reason in Shakespearean speech, so often out-of-place with the rest of the cast's more naturalistic performances, and you don't leave understanding enough of his motives.  The Academy could have done worse here (considering it was the sentimental 80's, a nomination instead for Cagney's humorous but one-dimensional fire commissioner could so easily have been cited instead), but I left the performance wishing for more, and glad that ultimately the Oscars picked John Gielgud in Arthur, a more fully-realized creation.

The Road Warrior (1981)

Film: The Road Warrior (1981)
Stars: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Mike Preston, Max Phipps, Vernon Wells, Emil Minty, Kjell Nilsson
Director: George Miller
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I sometimes have to remember that while I am at heart a film fan more than a literary fan (it's just a fact), I do love books, and perhaps most importantly, came to them first.  As a result, I will probably always be a bit more driven by story than I am by visuals onscreen, more awash in what is happening that what it looks like.  Don't get me wrong-I'm as big of a sucker for visuals as the next guy, and occasionally there are people who can push me past narrative structure being loose or nonexistent (looking at you Terrence Malick), but if there isn't enough plot in a film, I tend to lose interest even if what's happening onscreen is arresting.  This was the case with The Road Warrior, a film that is impossible to deny its importance even if I must confess I didn't love it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in the wake of the previous film's events, with Gibson's Max (now armed with the memory of a dead wife & child) roving across the outback in a hyped-up death mobile, living off of scraps and whatever spare gasoline he can find (while still looking very much the impossibly handsome movie star).  He chances across a man who leads him to an oil refinery that is being watched by a group of nomads (because apparently in the apocalypse people largely forgot how to speak English), who are at war with the Marauders, headed by Lord Humungus (Nilsson) and his psychotic henchman Wez (Wells, who is clearly intended to be gay even if that's not mentioned as he's obsessed with his silent partner The Golden Youth, a leather-clad twink).  The film progresses with Max convincing the people to let him take on Lord Humungus, and in a series of battles we see him do just that, with Wez & Humungus both dying at his hands before he rides off into the desert, never to see the tribe again.

The movie itself has less narrative structure than the first film (as if that were possible), with Max getting little in terms of character progression other than what he came armed with from the first film.  This causes you to really just want to invest in the actual visuals of the picture, which are arresting.  Each character comes with a distinctive motif, but rarely do we learn anything in terms of back story, instead forced to fill in the story for certain characters.

This leaves us with a lot of surface-level pleasures, as there are wonderful car chases and inventive action sequences, and Wez in particular is a horrifying, unknowable villain in the best sense of the word.  But we also don't care enough about the main characters themselves.  Villains can get away with ambiguity, but you need someone to ground the film in some capacity, someone knowable for the audience to relate toward.  This isn't intended to be Max, though, as he has entered cinematic myth at this point rather than being a character we should understand (like Furiosa in the future Fury Road, still my favorite installment in the series, who grounds Hardy's unknowable Max).  Without that central figure, one who can appear human to the audience, I feel like this just becomes a visual feast, something that would almost work better as a silent film.  It's impressive, but I didn't really connect with the movie, so I'll land on 3-stars as I respect what is happening here even if it wasn't for me.

Body Heat (1981)

Film: Body Heat (1981)
Stars: William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Richard Crenna, Ted Danson, JA Preston, Mickey Rourke, Kim Zimmer
Director: Lawrence Kasden
Oscar History: Turner received a Best New Star trophy at the Golden Globes, but otherwise the only awards for this movie were green (box office).
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.


We will conclude our look at the film noir classics (I've never seen) with 1981's Body Heat, a neo-noir thriller that is most well-known today for launching Kathleen Turner from virtual unknown (this was her film debut, if you can believe it) to movie star overnight.  By 1981, the noir had almost completely disappeared from the film market, as we were seeing more action-adventures and slapstick comedies becoming the norm in theaters, which is why it's relatively surprising that this was a big hit back in 1981, making three times its budget and getting Turner Globe & BAFTA nominations.  Also, like all films of the 1980's, when they tried to reinvigorate classic Hollywood formulas that appeared long dead, the film's reliance on sex is omnipresent, showing nudity that would have been impossible in the heyday of Gloria Grahame and Gene Tierney.  As a result, the noir likely could never be the same again, which makes it the perfect close to our series.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Ned Racine (Hurt) a hapless lawyer who starts a steamy affair with Matty (Turner), the married trophy wife of businessman Edmund Walker (Crenna).  Early on in the movie, he hits on a woman named Mary Ann Simpson (Zimmer, in a rare pre-Reva Shayne role), which feels odd at the time but becomes crucial later in the film.  In a plot plucked out of Double Indemnity, Matty & Ned scheme to murder Edmund (she can't divorce him or risk losing the cash in a prenup), and Ned does this by meeting with Teddy (Rourke), an explosives friend who helps coordinate a bomb that can make it look like arson; Teddy tries desperately to convince Ned not to do this.  He does anyway, and after a clear series of missteps that feel perpetrated by Matty herself (where she basically was setting him up, upon the advice of a lawyer that hated Ned & thought he had some comeuppance coming for screwing him over), Ned is basically implicated in the crime by two investigators (Danson & Preston).  Ned's last shot at redemption goes up in smoke when Matty is supposedly killed in a boathouse explosion that was intended for Ned (or so we think at the time), sending him to jail.  From jail, we learn that Ned is convinced Matty was not Matty at all, but the real Mary Ann Simpson, who had taken on Matty's identity to marry Edmund for his money, and that the actual Matty Tyler (who is the Mary Ann Simpson we met at the beginning of the film) died in the boathouse explosion.  A look at her yearbook confirms this, and we see in the final closing moments of the film that Matty is now on a beach, her entire scheme working perfectly.

The film strays from the traditional noir trope in a couple of ways, almost entirely because of the lack of censors.  The film's sex scenes are extensive (though apparently they got even more lascivious in the initial cut of the picture), as we see both Hurt & Turner in various states of undress (they make a point, in a nod to Chinatown, to pronounce the weather being perpetually hot, matching the attitudes of the already randy leads).  Perhaps more damning is that Matty/Mary Ann gets away with everything.  In the days of Phyllis Dietrichson and Kathie Moffat, she'd either need to die or go to jail, but we aren't living in that world and as a result the film noir trope gets totally upended because the villain (though by far the film's most interesting character) is able to skate out of the room with no bruises, just a pile of money and a sexy new man next to her on the beach.

Turner owns the picture.  Hurt, Danson, Crenna, they're all good, but they don't come close to what she was doing here; about the only male cast member who comes near her is Rourke in a bit role, playing an undeniably sexy arsonist who is also the film's best voice-of-reason (that, because he's a convicted crook, no one listens to).  Turner would spend the next decade alternating between marital discord films like Peggy Sue Got Married & The War of the Roses and straight-up romantic comedies like Romancing the Stone & Jewel of the Nile, but she may never have been as good as she is here, playing Matty as the ultimate, successful femme fatale.  William Hurt never stood a chance the second she coyly jumps onto the screen-it's entirely her picture, and she nails a debut that hallmarked her as one of the 1980's most important screen idols.

Previous Films in the Series: The Long Goodbye, Sweet Smell of Success, The Killing, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep