1981 - THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR, a story of obsessive love

Francois Truffaut's story is about a very obsessive love affair to put it mildly.  This film features two big French stars, a skinny Gérard Depardieu and Truffaut's love interest in real life, Fanny Ardant.  The film's basic plot is about these two people who were involved in an intense relationship six years earlier. Now married to different people, they find themselves  improbably living next door to each other in a small French town.  Of course they resume their affair two timing their respective spouses.   The film chronicles their descent into madness and death in their obsession with each other.

I'm not giving away the plot here since the film opens with an ambulance racing through the town from  which it can be easily surmised that this story will end in tragedy.  For the most part the film is well directed by Truffaut.  One of his strong points as a filmmaker was getting good performances out of his actors and employing his knowledge of film making technique to tell a story.

 

However it seems that while Truffaut knows how to present their intense love story it just doesn't seem like the characters are a twosome the viewer can feel much sympathy for.  It's seem clear that their relationship was basically about having sex since we never see or hear them talk about their emotions or feelings for each other.  It doesn't help that their respective spouses seem like very reasonable and for the most part nice people compared to them.  Their ultimate tragedy almost seems like a relief since we no longer have to seem them inflict emotional warfare on each other when they are not sliding into bed.

 

Sadly this was the second to the last film from Truffaut who died of a brain tumor about three years later.  His final film with Fanny Ardant was a silly Hitchcock like comedy thriller.  Still Truffaut's overall filmography is very impressive.

The film was written by Francois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel, the running time is 106 minutes.

1981 - ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Carpenter's cult classic

Recently saw this as a revival in one of those upscale theaters that serves booze and delivers pizza to your seat as you watch the film. The digital copy looked fairly decent and it was sort of a relief not to have the film bathed in pink on an old 35 mm print when I saw this film a couple of years ago.

It always appeared to me that John Carpenter was trying to make a "B" movie action type of picture when this first came out.  As I recall a lot of the critics weren't very impressed with the film.  What were they expecting Wild Strawberries?

The film played fairly well, some of it was a little dated particularly the screenplay which chose 1997 as the date that the United States sealed off New York City and turned it into a maximum security prison.  Carpenter had worked with Kurt Russell before and choose him to play Snake Plissken an ex special forces guy.  Russell kind of channels him as a variation of Clint Eastwood for better or worse.

 

Carpenter also put together an entertaining cast starting with Donald Pleasance, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Lee Van Cleef and Adrienne Barbeau as the big breasted girl. In keeping with the tone of the film it's a cast straight out of a "B" movie.  Carpenter's direction is good, he was in his prime as a film director.  He and his associate Alan Howarth created the effective pulse pounding score.

The cinematographer  Dean Cundy had been working with Carpenter since Halloween and he went on to an impressive career working on films like Jurassic Park, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Carpenter's The Thing.  Escape From New York still entertains because it never pretended to be more that what it was an entertaining summer action film.

The film was written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle, the running time is 99 minutes.

1981 - CONDORMAN, another mediocre live action Disney film

My survey of live action Disney films continues with this "thing."  Condorman was an attempt by the Disney Studio to up their game with a bigger budget and better behind the camera talent.  In this case stunt arranger Remy Julian was responsible for the chase scenes and Henry Mancini did the music and it looks like a lot of the film was actually shot in Europe instead of Disney's back lot.

The cast is certainly a bizarre one.  British actor and singer Michael Crawford plays an American (?) comic book artist called Woody Wilkins. Wilkins helps the CIA  smuggle a Russian defector played by Nicaraguan actor Barbara Carrera out of the Soviet Union.  Apparently there were no Eastern European performers available to play the femme fatale so the production cast someone from South America.  James Hampton is Crawford's friend he's about the most relaxed person in the film.  But talk about really weird, I never thought I would see British actor Oliver Reed as the chief bad guy in a Disney film.

 

Condorman is James Bond lite for most part.  Crawford has a series of Bondian gadgets to use against the bad guys and Barbara Carrera was supposed to supply the sexy "Bond girl" stuff for this film.  However this is a Disney film and be assured that Carrera did not trot out her sensual girl spy persona, in fact she's actually kind of a nothing character

 

In spite of the presence of Remy Julian smashing cars up and down a mountain and even with the larger than usual budget, this is still a very lame film.  You know you're in trouble when the best part of the film is the credit sequence.  A constant theme that runs throughout these live action Disney films are the very poor scripts that got approved.  Condorman is no exception to the substandard screenplay rule of these films.

The film was written by Marc Stirdivant and not very well.  The running time is 90 minutes.  I suppose indiscriminate children might enjoy this film with all of the silly comedy and stunts although I kind of doubt it.

1981 - HEAVY METAL, the adults only animated film

A series of animated science fiction and fantasy stories based on stories from a magazine called Heavy Metal.  The quality of the animation is extremely variable but the look of the film is interesting for the most part.  The film ties together nine stories with some sort of interconnecting theme of a mysterious green orb that has the power to do evil things or something like that.

Heavy Metal has a lot of vocal talent but it's chief interest for me were some of the performers of the SCTV TV show contributing to the various episodes.  I identified John Candy with his distinctive voice in three of the episodes, Joe Flaherty, Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy are in a couple of the stories.  "Dean Wormer" himself, John Vernon from Animal House and the writer Doug Kenny of Animal House and Caddyshack fame are also in the film.  This casting is probably unsurprising since one of the producers of the film is Ivan Reitman who went on to have a fairly successful career with films like Ghostbusters, Stripes, Twins and Kindergarten Cop .  Reitman had been associated with most of these performers off and on during their careers.

 

OK back to film.  Heavy Metal's reputation rests chiefly on it's blend of nudity, sex and violence.  So if your tolerance for this kind of stuff, particularly in a cartoon format is low, this film is probably not for you.  As I said the film does look interesting and you have to give the production and animation team points for making something different.  

The film has a rock score from Black Sabbath, Blue Oyser Cult, Sammy Hagar, Cheap Trick  DEVO, Journey and Nazareth but I don't recall any of the music particularly standing out.  Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein of all people provided the symphonic score.

 

Heavy Metal has a series of writers and directors but the writer Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Total Recall) is the only person who I recognize.  The running time of this film is 90 minutes which is just fine as a little of this cartoon sex and violence stuff can only go so far in an animated film.

1981 - THEY ALL LAUGHED, attempt at a sophisticated romantic comedy.

One of the better efforts from Peter Bogdanovich who had a long dry spell after his early successes.  They All Laughed is about the romantic adventures and love lives of some rather inept private detectives working in New York City.  The film follows the detectives around while they try to determine if some married women may or may not be cheating on their husbands.

Although this film wants to be a rather sophisticated farce somewhat like the films  Max Ophuls directed, what this film really is about is girl watching.  Bogdanovich has loaded the film up with lots of hot women as they say.  Audrey Hepburn is one of the women being followed by Ben Gazzara, unsurprisingly Gazzara falls in love with her.  Model Patti Hanson is a cab driver, Bogdanovich has her imitating Lauren Bacall in To Have And Have Not.  Playboy model Colleen Camp is one of Gazzara's ex girlfriends.  Camp is basically the stand in for the Katherine Hepburn character from Bringing Up Baby.  Bogdanovich could never resist copying his mentor Howard Hawks.

 

John Ritter who was probably a stand in for Bogdanovich in this film is in love with Playboy model Dorothy Stratten in a thinly disguised version of the Bogdanovich/Stratten love affair which ended very tragically.

 

The film always kind of had a black cloud hanging over it.  Dorothy Stratten's death seemed to end the commercial possibilities for a decent release.  No studio would pick up the film when it was completed.  Bogdanovich spent his own money attempting to release the film on his own.  His plan failed and sent him into bankruptcy.

For all that, They All Laughed is a good romantic comedy.  The film was shot on New York locations and as I said before, if you are looking for a film with a lot of good looking women in it, this show is probably for you.

Bogdanovich wrote the screenplay along with Blaine Novak, the running time is 115 minutes.

1981 - VICTORY aka ESCAPE TO VICTORY

Probably looking for a commercial hit, John Huston one of the old guard Hollywood directors got himself involved in this film.  Huston's heart didn't really seem to be into the film, it's filmed in a professional but not really involving manner.

The film is about an Allied prisoner of war camp during World War II.  To entertain themselves, the British play football (soccer).  This comes to the attention of one of the German officers who arranges for a football match between the German soldiers and the British prisoner of war soccer team.  Frankly this film is about as big a fantasy as Quentin Tarantino's fantasy World War II epic, Inglourious Basterds.

Huston and his production team put together a decent cast of British and German actors.  The leads were Michael Caine as the British soccer coach, Pele, one of the greatest players in the game, Max Von Sydow the Swedish actor playing a German yet again and Sylvester Stallone as the goalkeeper.  Apparently Stallone and Huston didn't really get along very well during the filming.  The film is also loaded with soccer stars from England.

 

The last part of the film is given over to the big game and for the most part it's fairly exciting.  The film as a whole is decent if undemanding entertainment.  An OK time killer at best.

 

Written by Evan Jones and Yabo Yablonsky, the running time is 117 minutes.

1981 - TIME BANDITS, cult fantasy film.

Terry Gilliam and some of his Monty Python pals dreamed up this fantasy film about some dwarfs who steal a map that allows them to travel through time.  The map belongs to the Supreme Being who is after them to get it back.  The dwarfs hook up with an 11 year old boy with their plan being that they will ransack different periods in history for gold.

This is Gilliam's idea of a family film, people are shot, blown up and the film ends with the boy's parents getting blasted.  The film is infused with the Monty Python humor since it was written by Gilliam and Michael Palin and there is plenty of that twisted absurdist goofiness.  Gilliam always had a strong visual sense, especially when it came to fantasy and the film looks very cool.

 

The film has a lot of recognizable English actors, John Cleese, Sean Connery, Ian Holm, David Warner (very amusing as the Devil), Sir Ralph Richardson (as the Supreme Being) and Peter Vaughan.  A couple of of American actors show up as well Katherine Helmond and Shelley Duvall. 

 

The running time is 113 minutes.

1981 - AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, a horror/comedy film

The big deal on this film was the actual physical transformation of a man into a werewolf courtesy of special effects artist Rick Baker and his team.  The Howling had apparently beat An American Werewolf In London with the same type of physical effects earlier in the year.  Still this was a milestone in film effects which were eventually superseded by computer generated imaging.

The writer/director John Landis had a fondness for this genre and since it was the 1980's he updated it with a lot more violence, blood and of course sex.  Landis cast a couple of unknowns in the main roles and the rest of the cast was made of up British actors.

The film is effective in parts but I think a big issue with this film was the story.  Landis was good at writing the set pieces but he really didn't have much of a plot to tie them all together. Even the character development is on the weak side.  Exactly what does Jenny Agutter see in David Naughton anyway? When you got down to it, even at 97 minutes the story kind of dragged.  If you saw one werewolf killing with someone getting their throat ripped out, you kind of saw them all.

 

In the end the film comes down to watching Rick Baker's monster makeup.

Running time,  97 minutes.

1981 - RACE FOR THE YANKEE ZEPHYR, passable action flick time killer.

There's a missing World War II plane.  It was full of gold.  It landed somewhere in the wilderness of New Zealand. Goofy drunk Donald Pleasence and his buddy Ken Wahl have found it.  Along with Pleasence's daughter played by Lesley Ann Warren the chase is on as they try to avoid a gang of evil guys lead by George Peppard. And so it goes.

This a seen it all before film. Pleasence plays another one of his oddball characters, Ken Wahl was a TV actor whose career never really took off on the big screen as they say and Lesley Ann Warren who was primarily a singer and a dancer is improbably cast as Pleasence's daughter. George Pepppard is also in this film for some reason camping it up as the head bad guy.

 

I guess if you are trapped in your house on a Saturday night and can't find anything to watch this will probably get you by.  The action is OK and there is a lot of it. The film's chief selling point is the on location filming in the wilds of New Zealand.

The film runs 91 minutes and was written by Everett De Roche. 

1981 - THIEF - outstanding crime drama.

Michael Mann at the peak of his abilities as a filmmaker with this film.  Thief is an excellent crime/noir film.  James Caan is a top professional thief trying to go straight and even adopt a more normal life as a married man with a family.  Tuesday Weld is his girlfriend/wife.  The actor Robert Prosky is the Chicago mob boss who thinks he has Caan under his thumb.

The film was photographed in Chicago with lots of Chicago actors.  The photography by Donald Thorin is very dynamic especially the night scenes.  Thorn did a lot of work in the 1980's and 90's but is probably his best effort.   

 

Besides Mann's stylish direction Thief has an interesting score by Tangerine Dream before they became kind of a music cliche.

 

Mann wrote the screenplay the film runs 123 minutes.

1981 - CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, another love story

The idea appeared to be to put John Belushi into a love story playing a tough Chicago report who falls in love with a scientist studying eagles near Mt. Rainer.  The screenplay was by the then wonder boy writer Lawrence Kasdan.

Continental Divide is not a good love story.  Belushi and Blair Brown the female lead have absolutely no chemistry.  But the bigger problem is Belushi's inability to act.  John Landis probably used Belushi best in the movies.  In Animal House Landis barely let Belushi talk.  This film shows that while he was a good sketch comedian, he simply could not build a character.

Frankly the love scenes are embarrassing to watch.  I don't think I will ever be able to get the picture of a shirtless Belushi mauling Blair Brown in bed.  It was very painful.

The film has some nice shots of Mt. Rainer but that's about it.

103 minutes.

1981 - INCHON, war movie from the Unification Church.

Inchon is the notorious war film financed by the Unification Church of Korea better known as the "moonies."  The film has gained a reputation as one of the worst films ever made.  After sitting through it I can report that it is not one of the worst films ever made.  In reality it is just another mediocre movie.

The story line is about General Douglas MacArthur's brilliant amphibious landing to retake the city and port of Inchon during the Korean War.  The move mixes the usual war scenes with some dreary romantic triangle stuff before the big battle.

The cast is certainly eclectic and somewhat notorious.  Laurence Olivier was hired to play Douglas MacArthur.  Ben Gazarra is his aide and the leader of a commando attack that saves the day.  Richard Roundtree is the token black guy and Jacqueline Bisset and her bosom play Gazzara's estranged wife.  Everyone is obviously here for the paycheck. 

The director Terence Young had seen better days directing the early James Bond films.  This was clearly a paycheck  job for him as well.

140 minutes screenplay by Laird Koenig and Robin Moore.

1981 - RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK , slick commercial Hollywood filmmaking at it's best

Obviously Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were the main creative figures behind this film.  However there were a number of top line professionals that made this film a success.

The cinematographer Douglas Slocombe had been working in films since the 1940's.  His very impressive list of films included, The Man in the White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Lion in Winter, the first three Indiana Jones films, and 2nd unit on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Apparently Slocombe barely used a light meter when he was shooting.

2nd unit director Mickey Moore had been staging action scenes in films like Patton, Gunfight of the OK Corral, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Man Who Would Be King, and the first three Indiana Jones films as well.  This guy worked into his 80's.

Spielberg's long time editor Michael Kahn had started out editing Hogan's Heroes and had worked on a number of blackploitation films which included Truck Turner, Black Belt Jones, and The Spook Who Sat by the Door.  He's still working with Spielberg at age 80.

115 minutes, written by Lawrence Kasdan.

1981 - SPHINX - HItchcock wanna be thriller and travelogue

Actress and model Lesley-Anne Down was fairly hot in the mid 70's.  Today I doubt most people would have a hard time even recalling exactly who she was and what she appeared in.  Down was chiefly known for appearing in the British upper class/lower class drama Upstairs, Downstairs.  That show was the Downton Abbey of it's day and was very popular on PBS, sound familiar?

Down tried to use her popularity on that show to jump into a film career. She did a number of supporting roles in films before she got her big break in the film Sphinx.  Sphinx was directed by a fairly decent director, Franklin J, Schaffner who had directed Patton and was based on a novel by the then hot writer Robin Cook.  Sphinx is a thriller set in Egypt about the illegal buying and selling of ancient artifacts,  Lesley-Anne Down plays a noted Egyptologist who just happens to look like a hot model.  She pretty much throws any credibility this film has into the garbage.

On the positive side for this film, it is extremely well photographed and is if anything a nice record of all the traditional tourist hot spots of Egypt,  the Pyramids, The Valley of the Kings, Cairo, etc.  On the negative side the plot has a lot of holes and coincidences that it really stretches credibility to the point of maximum tensile strength.  

Lesley-Anne Down couldn't carry this film and it was back to TV movies and mini series for her after Sphinx flopped at the box office.  Another film with a miscast actor that suffered from the miscasting.

118 minutes, screenplay by John Byrum.

1981 - CLASH OF THE TITANS, Ray Harryhausen's last film.

Ray Harryhausen's last film and in a lot of ways this is one of the last films to be made with "old fashioned"  Hollywood style special effects.  Star Wars essentially killed this type of film.

A very good print of this film shows the separation of Harryhausen's special effects and the live action footage shot usually on location.  Frankly at times the blending of the two films looks mighty bad.  Harryhausen's black and white films always seemed to match the two separate pieces of film together a lot smoother.

For a fantasy film, the producer Charles H. Schneer was able to rope quite a few "distinguished" British actors like, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and Susan Fleetwood.  The film also contains some odd shots of female nudity which was extremely atypical for these films.

Harryhausen retired after this film mostly due to "repetitive strain injury" and Hollywood's lack of interest in 3-D animation.  Clash of the Titans is fun to watch and it does have a couple of outstanding sequences.  Could have really done without the mechanical owl Bubo.

118 minutes, written by Beverley Cross.

1981 - THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER, western suck fest

As a large scale remake of The Lone Ranger prepares to rear it's ugly head this summer, it's time to have a look at the first attempt to bring the old radio serial and television show western back to life.

The Legend of the Lone Ranger was directed by a notable cinematographer, William A Fraker and photographed by Laszlo Kovacs another famous cinematographer.  It was filmed on location at various western location which included Monument Valley.  This film was an attempt to resurrect the famous character and the western film in general.  This film is very bad.

The decision to cast unknown actors in the lead roles was not a good idea, they do not deliver.  Klinton Spillsbury was so hopeless that his voice was completely re-dubbed.  The female lead Juanin Clay apparently didn't have much of a career either.

Another odd film making choice was Fraker and Kovac's decision to shoot the film with lots of diffusion to give it and old fashioned look.  This makes the film look like it's out of focus for most of the running time.
 
98 minutes. A lot of writers on this one a very bad sign, Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts,William Roberts,Michael Kane and Jerry Derloshon.

1981 - FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, on Blu Ray

Watching For Your Eyes Only after seeing the super serious and frankly not much fun Skyfall here are a few thoughts:

Roger Moore is actually pretty stiff when it comes to the action sequences.  Fortunately he was lucky to be directed by John Glen the ace editor and 2nd unit director who had worked under Peter Hunt the original editor of the Bond films.  Glen knew how to pace an action sequence.

Roger Moore finally figured out how to meld his personality into the Bond character.  He actually looked like he's worried a couple of times throughout the film.  Carole Bouquet was a good looking model who did a pretty good job in a serious role for a Bond girl.  This film had a decent cast, Topol, Lynn-Holly Johnson as a horny figure skater and Julian Glover as the main bad guy. 

The bottom line, everyone tried a little harder for a more realistic Bond film after the entertaining but excessive and out of control Moonraker.  Skyfall may be making the big bucks but it drained the fun out of the series.

127 minutes written by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson.

1981 - THE HOWLING, Joe Dante updates another old film genre

There just isn't much to say about this one.  The Howling is a typical Joe Dante film.  Some of the characters are named after old Universal studios horror directors.  The film has scenes from The Wolf Man scattered throughout the story and there are lots of references to wolves with jokes about dog food and eating rare hamburgers

Being that this is a 1980's film, no studio was going to finance a werewolf film unless it had lots of blood and sex which The Howling does.  Dante knows that if he wants to make his genre influenced films he has to play the Hollywood game.

The big thing in The Howling at the time was the actual on screen transformation of a man into a werewolf.  This prosthetic effect probably looked reasonably cool back in the 80's but now it's just a bunch of inflatable balloons attached to an actor's face.  This kind of thing is now done with computer effects these days.

This is an entertaining update of an old horror genre.

 91 minutes, written by John Sayles.

1981 - CANNONBALL RUN pretty bad but should be seen

There's got to be some place in film history for this terrible film.  Considering the cast, Hollywood in-jokes and driving stunts from the legendary stuntman tuned mediocre director Hal Neeham the film is some kind of milestone.

Burt Reynolds is the star of the film and Cannonball Run is really the end of his run as a major Hollywood star.  Too many bad films finally did him in.  Dino and Sammy show up dressed as a couple of boozing priests.  With the participation of these former members of The Rat Pack Cannonball Run is thematically linked to films like Ocean's 11 and Robin and the Seven Hoods.  These films are big Hollywood in jokes making money by ripping off the public pretending to be entertainment.

Since the film was produced by Golden Harvest the production company Jackie Chan was associated with.  The Chinese actor Chan is cast as a Japanese driver.  You get to see Chan speak in his original voice and beat up Peter Fonda reprising his original biker role of "Blues" from The Wild Angels.

Farrah Fawcett the eye candy in this film, she has absolutely no chemistry with any of the cast especially Reynolds.  Fawcett lasted one season on Charlie's Angels and tried her damnedest to make a career for herself as a serious actress with mixed results.  She looks and acts in the film like she would really like to be someplace else.  

The film also has one of the most bizarre supporting casts in the movies.   Mel Tillis doing his weird stuttering character, Jack Elam hamming it up mercilessly,  Jimmy the Greek Snyder,  Adrienne Barbeau and her breasts, Roger Moore in the Aston Martin, dumbbell ex football jock and NFL commentator Terry Bradshaw, game show host Bert Convey, Warren Berlinger star of many mediocre Disney films and George Furth who was frequently associated with Steven Sondheim

20th Century Fox forced theaters to take this film and it had a mass release in the summer of 81.  It made money but clearly everyone associated with it knew it was pretty bad.

The director Hal Needham was a buddy of Burt Reynolds.  Needham had been a stuntman and stunt coordinator for years, he knew how to stage car crashes and stunts but his direction was so pedestrian, the dangerous driving looks pretty unexciting throughout the film.

95 minutes, written by Brock Yates one of the actual creators of the real Cannonball race.