My Take: The Positive Movies

This movie was re-released to theatres in 1984 as one of the "Lost Hitchcocks." My familiarity with this director's reputation began with PSYHCO (1960) and ended with THE BIRDS (1963). I was fifteen years old in 1984, and all ready in the well-advanced stages of knowing everything, if you understand what I mean. My aunt and uncle took me to see this film at the Dundee Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska. The Dundee, if you're not aware, is an art-house theatre; a brand of cinema that I'd only heard of, but had never experienced. There wasn't much of a call for arthouse theatres in West Texas, where I'd been raised. Art-house theatres existed, I'd imagined, in major cities like Dallas or San Antonio, maybe Lubbock. Metropolises, all of them. Superman flew there. What a shock it was then when I entered the Dundee and saw black-and-white posters of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Lauren Bacall. There was an old-fashioned popcorn machine. Here was a vintage poster from IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). It was not a show palace, the Dundee; no chandeliers and faux-art deco, just a tiny single-screen cinema that resembled so many of the theatres I'd known back in Texas. To me, nonetheless, the place was magic. There was not another teenager in sight, nothing but grown-ups. It was the first time in my life that I felt as if I'd been allowed access to mingle with royalty. This, I imagined, is where smart people come to watch movies. And if that was so, it followed, then the movies themselves must be smarter. A heady feeling, I admit. And now, I was here, too. (This feeling of uniqueness, alas, would diminsh as I grew older, but experiencing it here for the first time was, I admit, quite enchanting.) I remember watching THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH with rapt interest, something I would have never done if we'd seen the film at a mall. The Albert Hall sequence was, to me, one of the most exciting bits of filmmmaking ever shot, and it still is. In the following years, I would see almost all of Hitchcock's movies, and some were probably better films than MAN. None, however, matched the excitement I felt while visiting the Dundee. It was a rite of passage, that visit. Audiences matter. They do. So do the theatres. I was never again able to quite enjoy watching movies at a stripmall after that night.

I suppose the Women's Rights Movement was on the downswing by the time PRIVATE BENJAMIN was released in 1980. I'd heard of the ERA and had even seen commercials for those Jill Clayburgh and Marsha Mason movies, but never had any interest in seeing them. Those were "women's" films and I wanted nothing of them. I was twelve years old when BENJAMIN came to my hometown. To me, it was a comedy about a stuck-up girl who joined the army, and nothing else. All those jokes about Jewish-American Princesses, Albert Brooks, and the French were lost on me. Much like NINE TO FIVE, which was released two months after BENJAMIN, it never occurred to my twelve year-old mind that these movies were anything but what they appeared to be. Subtext, as you can imagine, was years ahead of me. It took years before I realized there was a lot more going-on in BENJAMIN than I'd first imagined. A whole lot more, in fact. A second viewing in my early-twenties caused me to re-evaluate my memories of this film. PRIVATE BENJAMIN was the first time I realized I'd entirely missed the point of a movie due to my naivete and inexperience. It wasn't the story of a stuck-up girl who joined the army, but instead the story of one woman's gradual realization of her own self-worth. It was a Women's Rights picture, and I never had a clue til then. As much as I profess to hate Message Movies, realizing this made the picture better, not worse. BENJAMIN remains, to this day, one of my favorite comedies of all time.

I have no memory of having seen HEAVEN CAN WAIT in a theatre, although I do remember the TV ads, vaguely. I also remember the billboards in Dallas as we drove to Six Flags. Huge, they were. Until then, I hadn't realized that billboards also advertised movies. And wasn't that wonderful? I was ten years old in 1978. STAR WARS, SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS occupied much of my imagination. It must have been 1979 or 1980 when HEAVEN premiered on HBO that I finally watched this Warren Beatty film. It was the first time in my life that I realized some movies do indeed have a perfect closing line before the credits. ("I would love to have a cup of coffee with you.") In fact, to me, the last 20 minutes of this film are wonderful because the major plot points are resolved in a heartfelt and bittersweet manner. At that young age, I wasn't even aware that movies could have such powerful endings. It's so hard for most movies to stick the landing, much less have a great closing line. It's easier to simply fade to black. After HEAVEN, I realized that closing shots matter. The final image (and line) is sometimes the most important. It says something that I considered this a better ending than the destruction of the Death Star. Was I becoming more mature? Probably not. More likely, this is where I first became a sucker for sentimentality. For years, HEAVEN has been the high-water mark against which I compare other movie's endings. It's rarely been matched.

I know, I know. I lose all credibility with this single entry, right? Everyone has a cinematic Achilles Heel. Mine involves all-star casts meeting gory deaths, one by one, for my ghoulish amusement. I don't care if they're traveling on passenger airlines, commercial cruise lines, trapped in burning buildings, or fleeing killer bees and volcanos. Just line 'em up and hand me the bloody darts. I love this stuff, okay? I turn myself in. What kerosene-soaked cloth tied round my head caused me to choose WHEN TIME RAN OUT for this list? Why not THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, for goodness sake? Here's the rub: WHEN TIME RAN OUT was the first disaster movie I ever saw in a theatre. I was an impressionable eleven year-old. All the rest from this genre, I watched on TV; even, alas, the wonderfully-goofy THE CONCORDE: AIRPORT '79. (If I owned a Tardis, I would travel back in time and correct this, my own cinematic short-sightedness. I did, however, read the novelization on a swinging bench in Stamford, Texas, so that scores me some points.) It's one thing to see Paul Newman battle a towering inferno on your 12-inch Panasonic. It's quite another to see 73 year-old Burgess Meredith doing a high-wire act atop a collapsing bridge over a river of flowing Hawaiian lava on a 40-ft screen. Baby, there ain't no comparison. I walked home from the theatre, balancing myself like a trapeze artist on the train tracks, and recreated my favorite scene with delight: Mr. Meredith, carrying that kid on his back across the lava bridge. Forget STAR WARS. I have never pretended to be Han Solo as many times as I have Burgess Meredith, that savvy, old joker. Nowadays, I am in my 40s and sometimes, when I know no one's looking, I still gingerly place one foot in front of the other, and pretend to cross that savage fire pit. Most times, however, I purposely dump the whiny Hawaiian kid off my back. It's just another ghoulish amusement of mine.

I have a sense of humor. An odd one, therapists would surely tell me. How else can I describe the absurd delight I experience when watching this, Peter Sellers' final film, and the one that's almost universally agreed-upon to be among his worst? From the opening image of Sellers' at the pipe organ to the out-of-left-field musical number that ends the film ("Fu Music!"), I cannot recall another comedy that brings me more joy. No, not even AIRPLANE! This is a terrible movie, and yet, it holds an eerie fascination for me. The brilliance of FIENDISH PLOT is not apparant. It forces you to search for that brilliance. I have certain friends who believe they're smarter than me; poor, deluded souls. They probably are, but I get great pleasure in telling them otherwise. They sometimes test my patience by asking me to watch movies they know will make me feel stupid. Not because the movies themselves are that smart, but because they indeed know that I am that shallow, and they want to prove they have taste; something I've never been accused of having. They force me to watch movies like MULLHOLLAND FALLS or THE THIN RED LINE, for example. (Note: Please do not contact me with your explanation about what happened in those films. IMDB has millions of other people you can pester. Start searching. My mind, alas, has reached the limit of its ability to appreciate ennui.) In turn, I recommend they watch FIENDISH PLOT, and we later compare notes as to who feels dumbest. (Read: Superior.) This is how revenge works. Old as the Bible, I'm told. I have no idea why. Most never make it past Helen Mirren's rendition of "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow." Everyone’s brain eventually reaches a level at which it can no longer process stupidity. There's good reason why FIENDISH PLOT has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray. This is the first--and only---film for which I would eagerly shell $100 to purchase a 3-Disc Criterion Collection Collector's Boxed Set.

Growing up as a pre-teen in the late 70s and early 80s was a grand time because I loved horror and genre films. Those years coincided with what has become known in certain circles as the "Rise of the Slasher Film." Those same years were also the height of the horror sequel. Sure, Regan MacNeil and Damien Thorn had returned to the screen in the late 70s, but I don't recall seeing those films in theatres, only on cable TV. It's hard to imagine now, what with every film seemingly becoming a franchise and every DVD seemingly released as a Director's Cut, but back in the early 80s, sequels were a big deal, particularly to teenage boys whose bedroom walls were not surrounded by black-and-white images of Frankenstein, Dracula or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but were instead decorated with gory photos from movies by John Carpenter, George Romero, and Tom Savini. Hint: If you just read those three names and didn't lean forward in your chair, then you were probably non-existent in 1981, unless you were inclined to see artsy movies like CHARIOTS OF FIRE or THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, in which case you were also non-existent, if you know what I mean. Those men were icons, all of them. Anyways, I had barely turned thirteen years old in October, 1981; no longer a boy, now officially a teenager, and the thought of seeing HALLOWEEN II filled me with dreadful delight while, at the same time, reminded me that being a teenager in no way guaranteed I'd freak-out any less than when I was a kid, and that just would not do. I had no intention of seeing HALLOWEEN II unprepared. How ingenious it was that the bookstore in the Mall of Abilene carried the film novelization and spared an embarassing blow to my ego by selling me a paperback copy, a mere hour before I saw the movie. Your estimation of my character will not be enhanced if I admit that, yes, I cheated by reading the ending of the book before purchasing my ticket, because I was a little worried I'd make a fool of myself otherwise, apologizing to the older teenagers seated ahead of me every time Michael Myers jumped into frame and I blew my Coke-flavored Slurpee in their direction. HALLOWEEN II was the first horror sequel I recall seeing in a theatre. Even better, it opened at the exact moment that 1978's HALLOWEEN had ended, with Dr. Loomis blasting Michael Myers off the balcony, Laurie Strode cowering in the corner and John Carpenter's theme music spooking the devil out of me. Having seen so few sequels, I naively believed that all movies with Roman numerals in their titles began this way, right at the moment where the first film had stopped; a practice that should be observed more often by modern filmmakers, if you ask me. Was HALLOWEEN II a great film? Probably not, but for a sequel, it was a good ride, what with all those creepy hospital hallways and explosions and stuntwork, and if something had to give, well, a high-minded script was the first thing this sequel could do without, and that was fine with me. In 1981, I didn't go to horror movies to see madmen recite Wordsworth. At some dumb, fundamental level, I simply liked watching clueless people getting jumped from behind, even if it did cause me to blow my Slurpee. Thirty years later, the idols may have changed, but the idea remains the same: I double-dare horror movies to scare me.

It's hard to believe in today's Internet-addicted, celebrity-rehab world but, once upon a time, it took actual work for a twelve year-old boy to see a sex film, even one as popular and talked-about as THE BLUE LAGOON. In 1980, Brooke Shields was at the height of popularity and, even though I had never seen a single picture of hers, I knew precisely who Brooke was. There was no moss growing on my twelve year-old fantasies. You see the ads for an R-rated movie like this, read the chatter in magazines about its sex scenes, and you know, intuitively, there's no point in asking your parent's permission to see anything with BLUE in its title. Some grown-ups, alas, are clever. It ain't gonna happen, kiddo. Instead, like a soldier infiltrating Nazi-occupied Poland, you learn how to plot. THE BLUE LAGOON was the first time in my life that I realized just how good of a plotter I was destined to become. (A talent that has served me well in succeeding years.) Did I sneak into the theatre, you ask? Not at all. I waited until it premiered on HBO. It took some major organizational skill, I remember, re-arranging all that living room furniture and big-screen TV into a Bat-cave in the far corner of the room. In those days, R-rated movies screened on HBO in the evening. Sexy films, like LAGOON, around 10:00 p.m. Fortunately, my grandparents went to bed around that same time, always after the News. "What are you watching tonight?" my grandmother asked before retiring. "Legend of the Lone Ranger," I answered, like the all-American angel I was. Tee-hee-hee. Was BLUE LAGOON worth all that trouble? Was it a good movie? Who cares, that was never the point. I got away with something. I didn't get caught. Hard to believe, all these years later, the ballyhoo surrounding this film's subject matter. Seen by today's standards, it's quaint; very few Good Parts. And yet, the movie holds a certain charm in my memory of childhood. A rite of passage, it was. I almost feel sorry for today's younger generation who have it so easy.

ORDINARY PEOPLE is my favorite film of all-time, even moreso than anything by Lucas, Spielberg, or any heroes of my generation. This was the movie that beat RAGING BULL for Best Picture in 1980. For that reason alone, I understand many people dislike this, Robert Redford's directorial debut. I disagree with those people. To me, the better picture won. How, you ask, does a film about an upper-class Chicago family coping with death somehow become my favorite all-time movie? My 23 year-old aunt dragged me to see ORDINARY PEOPLE in 1980. She was a psychology major whose favorite literary character was Nurse Ratched. It made sense that she'd want to see this film, but no sense why she'd drag me, her eleven year-old nephew, into this funfest. The woman tricked me, plain and simple. She used psychology to her advantage, damn her. She told me ORDINARY PEOPLE was a horror movie. I spent two hours in grueling suspense, hunkered down in my seat, waiting for Mary Tyler Moore to carve a path through her family with a butcher knife. When the lights came up, and she hadn't, I breathed a sigh of relief. And yet, despite the low body count, I was never bored.

When PROPHECY came to my hometown, all the boys in my 5th grade class lost their minds. Going into the theatre, we were the very model of decent Christian children; coming out, we were savages to the core. PROPHECY was a PG-rated horror movie, and it delivered on the bloody good stuff. The scene where Mama Bear crunches on the head of that guy in the jeep became, at least to us pre-teens, an instant classic. And how about that scene with the exploding sleeping bag? Another gruesome moment we will forever remember, gleefully. For those of us raised on a vegetable diet of Walt Disney movies and the occassional Bigfoot documentary, it was carnal stuff; practically X-rated. I've read about kids in the 50s, terrified by Mars invaders, blobs, creatures from beneath the sea, and pod people. Every generation, it seems, has its own terrors. In 1979, ours was getting decapitated in the dark woods by an overgrown monster with bad acne. For the next week, we re-enacted that head-chomping scene during PE class in the school yard so many times that, Mrs. Rattefeller, a math ogre who wouldn't be caught dead reducing fractions at something called PROPHECY, punished us by sending the whole gang to the vice-principal's office. It was the first time in my life I'd ever gotten into trouble at school because of a movie. It was worse than getting caught cursing by your parents. I remember all of us standing there, cloaked in gloom, waiting to be called into the office, fully expecting to be expelled, and mentally preparing the perfect lie to save our own skins. These were, after all, school authorities, the higher-ups, the big enchiladas. We may have cried a bit. We were kids, and we were scared, and the idea that a silly monster movie had defeated us was shocking the pretty fool out of our minds. PROPHECY was a traitor and a Judas, and none of us were going to graduate 5th grade because of it. Did we eventually get paddled or sent to detention? No, not at all, but it was a near thing. To this day, I believe the vice-principal felt pity for us, perhaps knowing that eleven year-old boys were supposed to behave like savages, and possibly agreeing with our tribal assessment that all teachers named Rathefeller were part of a dark coven. We were returned to our classrooms without bruises on our hides. Wanna know the funny part? Mrs. Rathefeller actually winked at us in the school yard several days later. It was the wink of a pod person. Despite PROPHECY, she remains one of my favorite teachers of all time.

This has always been my favorite of all the Disney live-action movies. I'm a sucker for sentimentality, as I've mentioned. The closing scene of this film with Julie Budd singing "Roses and Rainbows" as the camera swirls around her is, at least to me, one of the best musical moments ever captured on celluloid, and that says something, considering it's a song I'd never heard. When this movie premiered on HBO, I spent $20 on a VHS tape so I could memorize the words to that song. It was the first time in my life that I'd ever taken time to watch a specific scene, over and over, until I knew the song lyrics by heart. More than three decades later, I cannot recite the entirety of any track from THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, or GREASE, but I do remember the theme from THE DEVIL AND MAX DEVLIN.

Sometimes, a single scene in a movie can be so memorable that it opens your eyes, perhaps for the first time, about an injustice happening in film, one you may not have even realized existed (or cared about), and makes you aware that your views can be shortsighted. There's a scene like that in GLORIA, a movie that arrived in my hometown with little fanfare in late-1980. The scene happens early in the movie. Gloria is on the run from the Mob, towing along a Puerto Rican boy whose family has just been massacred. A black sedan intercepts them on the New York sidewalk and, after a brief exchange with Mob members, Gloria reaches into her handbag and pulls out a handgun. As the car races away from her, she fires, again and again, until the sedan crashes and explodes. It's a simple scene, right? What's the big impact? You have to remember the times: I'd just lived through the 70s and tough female characters were few and far between, if any. Around me, Sally Field was rallying a union, Jane Fonda was preventing nuclear meltdowns, and Jamie Lee Curtis was fending off slashers. Were those strong female characters? Of course, no argument here. They were not, however, tough characters, and that's the difference. By tough, I mean Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen-tough. Before GLORIA, the toughest female character I'd ever seen was probably Tyne Daly as Dirty Harry's partner in THE ENFORCER. And even then, she died at the end of that film saving his life, which is what happened to tough dames, because that's the fate that always befell women who tried to behave as tough as men. I'm not certain where I learned this idiotic belief, but it must have happened at the movies. What about films like COFFY, you ask? Remember, I was twelve years old in 1980. The chance of seeing films like COFFY in a small Texan theatre were non-existent, at least in my hometown. GLORIA was the first time in my life I realized that I had a preconceived notion about the role of women in movies, and that those notions were silly. Women were damsels in distress, mothers, victims, or wives. They could be strong, loving, supportive, and many other things, but they were never tough, at least in my mind. Gloria, however, was a tough broad who didn't seduce men to advance the storyline, could fire a handgun, and not get a single hair out of place in the process. I fully expected her to go down in a blaze of bullets in the final scene, and when she didn't, I was dumbstruck. She was a female Dirty Harry, and it had never occurred to me that such a thing was even possible, much less so enjoyable. A year later, I would smile in amusement when Kathleen Turner got away with murder in BODY HEAT, but by then, my understanding of the role of women in films had changed. In the years that followed, I would see many more movies with tough female leads, particularly ALIENS, but none could hold the same impact as that moment when Gena Rowlands whipped the gun out of her handbag. GLORIA got there first.

Going in, I had no idea that DEATHTRAP was a murder-mystery, or that it was based on a famous Broadway show by Ira Levin, or even that it had one of those Agatha Christie-style plots that untangle like big balls of yarn. Not knowing any of these things, I suspect, probably made the movie a better experience for me. I’d seen the one-sheet, possibly a trailer or two on TV, and knew that it starred Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine, but nothing else. Truth be told, my mother had a huge crush on the Man of Steel, and it’s the sole reason that I found myself watching something called DEATHTRAP in the first place. Had it starred, say, Chevy Chase, would have resulted in my never seeing this film in 1982, at least not with my mother. If you’ve never seen the movie, I will not spoil the surprise. But let’s reveal there’s a plot twist so outrageous and crucial at its midway point that it forces you to reconsider everything you’ve seen til that moment. What a shock it was to realize that writers were able to reveal the ace up their sleeve so early in the game. Until DEATHTRAP, plot twists were saved for endings, not middles. Movies like PLANET OF THE APES and countless slasher flicks had reinforced this belief. Very disorienting, it was, to change the rules on me. It’s the first time in my life that I’d experienced a slap-to-the-forehead moment halfway though a movie. It changed my understanding of how movies are written, that they can toy with structure and story arcs. Are there better plot twists in other films? Of course. I’m not placing DEATHTRAP on this list because of the twist itself, but rather for unveiling that twist with an hour yet left in the movie. As a thirteen year-old boy, I was quite impressed. That the twist was a good one is gravy.

That a film like SUSPIRIA even played in my small Texas hometown in 1977 amazes me. That my mother took me to see it, even moreso. There's so much out there all ready written about this film that to summarize its plot is pointless. Here's the rub: Did anyone in 1977 imagine that SUSPIRIA would still be so heavily-discussed all these years later? I mean, how could anyone have known? I, for one, sure didn't. As a ten year-old, such thoughts never crossed my mind, especially considering that I couldn't pronounce the title, and never mind that it was Italian, which was the last thing I would have understood. For years, I believed the name of this film was TINTORERA, which is about a killer shark in Mexico, and which explains all you need to know about my pronounciation of foreign films. Not for nothing did I get a B in French, I'll admit. Languages are not my strong point. The scene in SUSPIRIA that haunted me for years involved that girl with the needles stuck in her face, bursting through the doors, and attacking Jessica Harper. Many a childhood night was spent cowering under my bedsheets, staring toward the closet doors, and mentally preparing myself for my inevitable demise by needlepoint. It was the first time in my life that an image from a film terrified me. Perhaps 20 years passed before I saw SUSPIRIA again, this time on VHS. It still got me, if you know what I mean. It remains, even today, one of my favorite horror films of all-time. Have there been scarier movies? Probably, and some were better than SUSPIRIA for reasons of their own, but very few of them have stuck with me for decades like this one. I'm glad that SUSPIRIA became a classic and is now considered by most critics as one of the best horror movies ever made. It's a worthy addition to those types of lists, no argument here.