The FilmNerds Blog

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

As our epic journey through the far, far away galaxy of the 1983 cineplex, we come to the year’s most successful box office hit (by far) and easily the most enduring cultural landmark of 1983 cinema. Return of the Jedi marked the conclusion of George Lucas’ groundbreaking sci-fi/adventure franchise known as the Star Wars trilogy…or so we thought back in 1983.

Lucas’ multiple reincarnations of the franchise, whether through the reviled “Special Edition” re-releases of the original films or the equally reviled prequel trilogy, have had perhaps more HTML dedicated to them than any other subject in the internet era. Fans have endlessly debated whether Lucas has destroyed his once great creation with his later work but in this post, I want to keep the discussion of what Lucas did later to a minimum. Today, I want to focus on a time in which the Star Wars films were still a pure, unadulterated work of unfathomable imagination and unparalleled creative depth. A time in which the release of a new Star Wars film brought with it the promise of new adventures with Luke, Leia and Han, new bizarre and alien creatures that were unlike anything we’d ever seen before, and to a lesser extent a long-awaited resolution to a rather compelling and surprising storyline. That time was 1983.

OK, perhaps I’m overly romanticizing how great everything was on Skywalker Ranch back in 1983. Yes, Lucas had suffered a run-in with the Directors Guild of America (it involved philosophical differences over Lucas’ decision not to include opening credits in The Empire Strikes Back) that prevented him from hiring his producing partner and good friend Steven Spielberg to direct the third installment of his mega-hit franchise. In fact, because the production would now be non-union, it wasn’t just Spielberg who wouldn’t be available to direct but most other proven directing talent in Hollywood as well. Lucas approached a couple of up-and-coming filmmakers with solid pedigrees, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, but both ultimately turned down the job to pursue passion projects (and yes, it ultimately worked out in both men’s favors). Eventually, Lucas hired little-known Welsh director Richard Marquand, a relatively inexperienced filmmaker who had absolutely zero experience working on a project of the scale and budget he would have for Return of the Jedi. There are varying reports of exactly how much of the directing Marquand did but for the sake of this post, let’s assume it’s somewhere in the middle with Marquand handling the day-to-day duties of directing but Lucas holding overall creative control.

Then there were the disputes over the story and how it should ultimately end. Lucas had a very difficult time deciding exactly how to handle the closing chapter of the trilogy and began pre-production on the film without a finished screenplay. There were reportedly some fairly heated disputes with both screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who along with Harrison Ford felt that having Han Solo die a heroic and sacrificial death would add great gravitas to the film, as well as his producing partner Gary Kurtz, who ultimately walked away from the project when he felt Lucas’ storytelling had become tainted by his consideration for things like merchandising and toy sales.

In the end, a script was settled on and while some have remained critical of the film’s tidy happy ending, there are more than a few sequences in Return of the Jedi that hold up today as absolute classic moments of 20th Century Hollywood.

Return of the Jedi will always be remembered first and foremost for the incredible, funny, dark and thrilling opening scenes of the film that center around the rescue of Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt’s palace. The character of Jabba had already been mentioned throughout the first two films and Lucas had been warning the audience that he was a bad dude who was not to be trifled with but it wasn’t until we saw him in all his disgusting and hedonistic glory that we could truly understand what Lucas had in mind when he was speaking of this intergalactic crime lord. Jabba is a combination of a Roman aristocrat and a Mongol warrior king. He eats small rat-like creatures alive whenever he gets a craving. He keeps a herd of dancing slave girls around that he either licks or feeds to his monster, whichever he feels will be more amusing at the moment. He’s a truly revolting character, almost to a comedic extent, and the visual presentation of him has a lot to do with his effectiveness.

Jabba was, and remains to this day, one of the most complex and expensive puppets ever built. Designed by the brilliant Phil Tippett, the Jabba puppet cost over a half a million dollars to construct and weighed over a ton once completed. It was operated by as many as six puppeteers at a time, some inside the puppet, some behind the puppet and some off set using radio control devices. What Frank Oz did with his magnificent performance as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back is equalled here by his Jim Henson Company cohorts with their work on Jabba. What’s most astonishing to me so many years later is how wonderful and real these puppet characters feel, not just Yoda and Jabba but all the peripheral make-up and latex creations that fill the edges of the room in Jabba’s palace.

I know I said I wasn’t going to talk much about Lucas’ later work but when it comes to puppets, I think Return of the Jedi has a lot to teach all of us today, not just Lucas, about the power of using real things over computer generated images today. As many of you know (especially if you are a nerd like me) George Lucas’ rationale for adding CGI effects to the “Special Edition” re-releases of the original films was that had he possessed the technology at the time, he would have used CGI instead of practical effects. In fact, Lucas states in his audio commentary on the 2004 DVD release of Return of the Jedi that whether a character is created via puppet or CGI, it will always be “fake” since they are both artificial and that if anything, the CGI character is more real since it can do things that a puppet cannot do, such as walk. This is where Lucas and I disagree vehemently. I think a piece of meticulously painted latex is VERY real and real in a way that a computer generated image could never be. Computers can do a lot of impressive things, sometimes things that no practical effect could ever do, but when it comes to creating a character, computers will never be able to duplicate the distinct movement of a living being, the “essence of life” if you will, in the way that a skilled puppeteer can. I won’t second-guess everything Lucas did with computers, but I’ll never understand why anyone could prefer a computerized Yoda and Jabba to the original puppet creations.

Among the other things Lucas got so very right in Return of the Jedi was the interplay between Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and the evil Emperor Palpatine. While the Emperor was referenced in earlier films and even made brief appearances, he was never truly brought to life as a character until Ian McDiarmid took over the role and played him in person for the first time in the series. We saw McDiarmid earlier in Back to the Movies in a small but interesting performance in Gorky Park, in which he portrayed a creepy forensic scientist. Here McDiarmid takes that creepiness and adds a healthy dose of pure evil to it, overshadowing Darth Vader as the ultimate villain of the piece and giving Vader and his son Luke some common ground for the first time in the series.

Other than the typically cranky Vincent Canby and the notoriously nasty New York Post reviewer Rex Reed, most critics loved the film and while many felt it wasn’t as strong as the first two installments of the franchise, they were still blown away by its originality and pure entertainment value. In his 1983 review, Roger Ebert talked about the “density of the canvas” shown to us in Return of the Jedi, referring to the abundance of originality and imagination pouring out of Lucas and his team. Ebert was fascinated with the sheer volume of new and fresh ideas present on screen, even if they were mentioned only for a moment of referenced in a single shot.

It’s easy to take for granted today how rich and fresh these films must have felt when they were new. I don’t know if it’s really possible to go back and view these films with that same sense of newness, since so many things that have come since then have been so deeply influenced by them, from the Lord of the Rings films to Saturday morning cartoons. As you’ll hear in the podcast included below, even a first-time viewer of these films in 2011 can’t view them with the same fresh perspective as a 1983 audience would have since they have become so deeply ingrained into our popular culture today. Even if you don’t see these films, you can’t help but be exposed to references to nearly every individual scene within them just by being out there and consuming the entertainment.

There are things that are less amazing and fascinating in Return of the Jedi, whether it’s the slightly-too-cute Ewoks or the cluttered space battles or repetitive Death Star destruction sequence, but this film has more originality and creativity in its little finger than most sci-fi/fantasy films from the last 30 years could ever dream of having. It’s a clear reminder of a time when George Lucas wasn’t a figure that inspired cynicism. He was one of the great creative minds working in Hollywood.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Return of the Jedi (with special guests Chris Rosko and Jason Roche)

Next Up: We take a look back at some of my favorite films, performances and moments from this epic journey through the films of 1983.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

There are a lot of things about Terms Of Endearment that make it a unique Best Picture winner and indeed unique in the history of American film but I think fearlessness is the trait that sticks out the most. Cynicism and emotional distance are pretty much the norm when it comes to mainstream American film in the last 30 years in particular. To make a film so unafraid of talking about the parts of life that are the most difficult to think about takes a certain amount of fearlessness and James L. Brooks takes on each of these difficult emotional minefields with no fear of coming off as sappy or manipulative.

For audiences, there was no controversy or divided opinions. It was a runaway hit, the likes of which have rarely been seen for any film that bears any resemblance to Terms of Endearment. After opening nationally on November 25, Terms of Endearment kept on chugging at the box office, grabbing the No. 1 spot at the box office in seven different weekends (not all consecutive either). It remained in the top five at the box office all the way until March 16th of 1984, by which time it made over $88 million. The film eventually topped out at $102 million domestically and with a production budget of $8 million, it remains one of the most profitable films ever made.

To some critics in 1983, however, the sappy and manipulative labels were used to help them explain the seemingly inexplicable runaway success of Terms of Endearment. Brooks at one point felt the need to defend the film from such criticism, despite his movie’s overwhelming success with both audiences and most other critics, with a passionate yet reasonable explanation of what it truly means to be “manipulative” in your filmmaking:

“Okay, so what’s manipulative? This woman gets ill. That’s a manipulation? No, because we don’t ask anybody to feel the things you usually ask an audience to feel by virtue of that. We don’t ask them to feel sorry for anybody. We don’t jerk tears. And it’s not sugar-coated either. I think we serve truth, and I think we serve comedy. Truth first, comedy second. If you talk to five people about this picture, they end up talking about themselves; that’s how unmanipulated they are, there’s room for them to put their own lives and their own history in it. I don’t respect the thought process that comes up with an easy word like manipulation. There are shots to take at this picture. Not that one, though.”

Brooks is, of course, correct in his portrayal of his film as both deeply emotional but not sugar-coated. The emotions displayed by the characters in Terms of Endearment are unpredictable yet understandable, just like real emotions. You never quite know how you are going to feel about a given situation until you are living through it yourself and how these characters react to things like age, infidelity and death are not quite the reactions that you see in most movies, but neither are the reactions of most real human beings to similar situations.

Our two leading ladies are Aurora and Emma, a mother and daughter pair played by Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger respectively. From the opening shots of the film it’s made clear that they have a bit of an unusual relationship as far as mothers and daughters go but it only seems unusual to us because the characters themselves are a bit odd. Brooks has become known over the years for making his characters a tad overly quirky but I think while Emma and certainly Aurora could be accurately described as eccentric, neither of them are too over the the top in their quirkiness.

The film spans a pretty considerable period of time, at least ten years, in the lives of these two women and shows us their individual struggles as well as the development of their relationship with one another. Emma runs off to marry a dopey English professor named Flap (Jeff Daniels) and soon has a gaggle of children with him while the widow Aurora attempts to find love and happiness in her advanced years. Without question the Aurora storyline is the more light-hearted and comedic half of the film, thanks in large part to the Oscar-winning performance of Jack Nicholson as Garrett Breedlove, Aurora’s amorous ex-astronaut neighbor.

As a 2011 viewer, Nicholson’s performance feels like a lot of other Nicholson performances. It’s Jack being Jack, the slightly drunken cad who does and says as he pleases even if it’s shocking to others. That said, this may be a case of a film establishing an idea that later became a trope and we certainly can’t fault a film for being endlessly copied later. At this point in Nicholson’s career he was one of the most respected dramatic actors in the business, just a few years removed from a terrifyingly intense performance in The Shining. Seeing Nicholson’s confidence and arrogance incorporated into a comedic character was a relatively new idea (he did it in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but that’s not an entirely comedic performance and he was a much younger actor). I believe Terms of Endearment may have been the very first instance of Nicholson becoming the persona that he is today: the sunglass wearing, hard-partying, sharp-tongued playboy we’d come to see in many of Nicholson’s later roles, including Brooks’ As Good As It Gets.

Nicholson gets to play all his scenes opposite the film’s other Academy Award winner, Shirley MacLaine who is absolutely exploding with emotion in nearly every scene. She plays an irrational woman but a woman who simply embraces her intense emotions and runs with them.

And while MacLaine brought home the gold, her co-star and competitor in the Best Actress race in 1983 Debra Winger packs no less of an emotional punch as a woman who faces everything from poverty to homesickness to a cheating husband and eventually cancer and does it all without losing her sense of humor or her appetite for life. Winger’s Emma is an enormously complex woman but not complex in a dark way. She is in no way a perfect person, particularly as a mother. She takes care of her kids but doesn’t seem overly concerned with their emotional or psychological well-being. It’s almost as if she’s dragging them along with her through her life, another challenge to be overcome with her boundless optimism.

That said it’s hard to dislike anyone with as positive an outlook as Emma. Even when things are at their most dire, such as the heart-wrenching scene in which she tells her two older sons goodbye for the last time from her hospital bed, she never seems as though the troubles of her life have gotten the best of her.

There are later scenes during the portion of the movie focused around Emma’s illness that quickly switch between deeply sad and lighthearted, even funny. That shift in tone is what makes Terms of Endearment feel so much more like real life than most films of its ilk. People react in many different ways to difficult times, including using humor or trying to change the tone in the room. Brooks allows his character to experience their emotions but like any of us would want to in that situation, he shows them doing their best to maintain their dignity and composure.

There are a few supporting performances worth noting here as well, particularly the Oscar-nominated performance of John Lithgow as Emma’s kind-hearted and downtrodden Midwestern lover. His sad predicament is almost darkly funny though we certainly aren’t meant to feel anything but sympathy for him. Danny DeVito is also brilliant as a strange little character named Vernon, one of a group of older men who seem to hang around Aurora hoping to win her affection.

Terms of Endearment felt special and even revolutionary to audiences in 1983 because, like many of the greatest films ever made, it seemed to re-create life in a way other films hadn’t before. That’s a quest that filmmakers have always been on and continue to strive towards today but not all of them are able to achieve it while still maintaining their entertainment value. Terms of Endearment is the rare film that both entertains us and touches on something truly authentic.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Terms of Endearment (with guest Ben Flanagan)

Next Up: We end our Back to the Movies journey by partying with the Ewoks! It’s Return of the Jedi.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

By far the most baffling title in the top ten list from the 1983 box office, Flashdance became a massive commercial success and remains to this day a major cultural touchstone in spite of being an absolutely, unequivocally awful movie. It was trashed by nearly every critic upon its release in April of 1983 and from the few reviews I’ve read, the critics back did nothing but point out the obvious: that this is a poorly directed weak script performed by mediocre actors. And yet the movie prevailed at the box office, not just as a surprising sleeper hit but as one of the most spectacular success stories of the early ’80s, hauling in almost $95 million domestically. That’s the equivalent of a 2011 film grossing $205 million – and we’re talking about a dance movie!

I should clarify what I mean by dance movie, since there’s not really a generally accepted name for this subgenre of movies that was essentially started by Fame in 1980. My best attempt at a description would be to say a dance movie is a film about professional dancers and plays out in a plot structure similar to that of sports movies, only in this case the sport is dance. The difference is that rather than trying to “win” at a sport, the characters in dance movies are striving to express themselves or achieve some kind of personal milestone through dance. A few good examples of this genre would be Footloose, Dirty Dancing and more recently movies like Center Stage and Step Up.

I confess I’ve always had a tough time understanding the appeal of this genre, though it’s clear to me that there’s a huge portion of the population that absolutely can’t get enough. I asked a friend of the FilmNerds crew, Suzanne Flanagan (who works with the famed Martha Graham Dance Company in New York and also happens to be the sister of FilmNerds contributors Graham and Ben Flanagan) for some insight into this subgenre, of which she admits to being a big fan:

“I think dance movies have wide appeal because their story lines are highlighted with raw talent. Like any sports movie, you’re getting that ‘wow factor’ mixed in with the American dream. Often, these movies are about characters defying the odds, and proving someone wrong. This scenario is the perfect recipe for a montage- which are always my favorite scenes.

I like dance movies because I like dance; it’s plain and simple, I love to be entertained. Dance is an expressive extension of the excitement and drama that we crave when sitting still for a movie.”

Suzanne also explained that as a fan of dance in general she enjoys watching older dance films to see the evolution of choreography over the years, certainly a scholarly pursuit that I have respect for although I don’t believe most fans of Flashdance appreciate it for its value as a historical document of early ’80s choreography.

One thing that Suzanne touched on there that I think is a very big part of this movie’s success (as well as the success of the genre as a whole) is the prominent role of musical montages in the film. Many critics (including Roger Ebert who absolutely excoriates the movie in his original review here) pointed out that the film seemed to be a series of loosely strung together musical montages that seemed more focused on fast-paced cutting, flashy imagery and music than on advancing the story or developing the characters. While I’d hardly want to call Flashdance a misunderstood film, I do think the critics at the time were incorrectly perceiving this clearly intentional directorial choice as unintentionally bad directing and editing work.

Two years before Flashdance hit theaters, MTV hit the airwaves and redefined the way American teenagers experienced music. Dance became a much bigger part of the music industry as it was very commonly featured in early music videos and I believe director Adrian Lyne’s experience as a commercial and music video director led him to immediately see the potential connection between what MTV was doing and what the viewers of a movie like Flashdance would like to see. Fortunately for Lyne, he had quite an impressive soundtrack to pull from for his self-contained music videos within the movie.

The Flashdance soundtrack album, composed largely of songs written by pop songwriter Giorgio Moroder (whose work we’ve already heard in Scarface and Superman III) was one of the first examples of a soundtrack and a film working in synergy to help drive sales for one another. Moroder’s title track “Flashdance…What a Feeling” performed by Irene Cara won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1983 and helped lead the way for the soundtrack album’s stunning 700,000 sales in the first two weeks of release. The soundtrack actually spawned a second Oscar nominated song, Michael Sembello’s mega-hit “Maniac”, but the song was later disqualified after it came to light that the song was written years before the film was even in production.

Most of the songs are used in sequences involving either star Jennifer Beals rehearsing or auditioning or one of her fellow “exotic dancers” at the nightclub she works in performing for the patrons. One of the major points picked on by many critics was the fact that this so-called strip club named Mawby’s features girls doing very intense dances on staged essentially fully clothed (meanwhile down the street the “evil” strip club features actual nudity). It’s an utterly absurd plot point but in a movie with so many other absurdities (like the fact that an 18-year-old girl has a job at a steel welding factory), it’s only a drop in the bucket of madness.

As self-contained music videos, many of these sequences are pretty impressive to look at, particularly the ice skating sequence about halfway through the film set to Laura Branigan’s pop hit “Gloria”. Lyne shows off his mastery of the frenetic filmmaking that had become so popular in commercials and music videos of the day and although the sequence has essentially nothing to do with the rest of the movie (the ice skater herself is a completely pointless character who has no impact on the life of our lead heroine) it does oddly grab my attention.

Probably the most famous sequence from the film, Alex’s rehearsal for the prestigious conservatory she’s been trying all these weeks to get into, was embroiled in a bit of controversy in the years following the film’s release when it was learned that Beals did very little of the actual dancing. In fact, three separate body doubles (including a man named Crazy Legs) substituted in for Beals during the more intense dance moves and the editing of the sequence, again criticized heavily by most critics, was almost completely geared toward trying to conceal the faces of the body doubles rather than being a creative choice by Lyne.

Despite the film’s overwhelming success at the box office, almost none of the participants went on to reach the heights they reached in Flashdance ever again, with the exception of Lyne who scored another massive and Oscar-nominated hit in 1987 with Fatal Attraction and two other popular sexy thrillers with Indecent Proposal in 1993 and Unfaithful in 2002. Beals made very little impact in the years following Flashdance and recently had a bit of a comeback as a TV star on Showtime’s The L Word and a handful of other rather unremarkable TV shows. Her male co-star Michael Nouri had an even less remarkable post-Flashdance career, starring mostly in TV movies and soap operas.

Sequel plans never materialized and even a recent attempt to create a Broadway musical based on the movie with music by Moroder couldn’t get off the ground. I think the weakness of the story has essentially kept the film from taking life in any other form but the phenomenal popularity of the music and the iconic dance sequences within the film will ensure this film’s long-term status as a cultural phenomenon of its time and a perfect time capsule of 1983 American pop culture.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Flashdance (with guest Francesca Scalici)

Next Up: Jack Nicholson and Shirley McClain attempt to wring tears from my stony face in Terms of Endearment.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

Comedy is tricky territory when taking on films from another era. While it certainly is possible for comedy to stand the test of time and remain equally funny to subsequent generations, I don’t think it’s necessarily a judgment on a film to say that it doesn’t affect audiences in the same way on the day it’s released as it does 30 years later.

There are lots of different ways to make people laugh and one of those ways involves being right on top of a highly relevant social or political issue. Timely comedy is important and can make people laugh by allowing them to make light of something bad going on in the world around them. Timely comedy does, however, have a tough time remaining fresh as the years go by. Looking at the highest-grossing comedy of 1983, John Landis’ Trading Places, it’s clear that in ’83, audiences responded to comedy about the current conditions of the world at the time. Going down the list of our Top 50 countdown, the comedies that stand up best today, by and large, don’t show up very near the top (with the exception of National Lampoon’s Vacation). The highly nostalgic A Christmas Story is quite possibly the most well-known film comedy on this countdown today in 2011 but barely made a blip at the box office in 1983. Others on the list that I think would be particularly well-received today include the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Easy Money and Richard Pryor’s standup comedy film Here and Now, neither of which cracked the Top 25.

Trading Places had quite a lot going for it to help make it the most successful comedy release of the year. For one, the release was perfectly timed by Paramount, opening opposite Superman III and at a time when the rest of the nation’s screens were still being taken up by the behemoth that was Return of the Jedi. The only other comedy released in remote proximity of Trading Places was Steve Martin’s offbeat entry The Man with Two Brains, which despite scoring big with critics didn’t finish in the Top 50 in 1983.

That’s not to say Trading Places succeeded just because it was the only game in town. Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy were easily two of the hottest young names in comedy in 1983. After leaving Saturday Night Live in 1979, Akroyd quickly established himself as a rising film comedy star with The Blue Brothers film in 1980. Murphy meanwhile was still at the height of his popularity on SNL though he too had begun the transition to full-on movie star after the huge success of 48 Hours in 1982.

While the screenplay for Trading Places was initially envisioned as a project for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, the unavailability of Pryor led to Murphy landing the role of Billy Ray Valentine and out of a desire to avoid looking like he was trying to become “The Next Richard Pryor”, Murphy requested that producers re-cast the part of Louis Winthorpe, the over-privileged white commodities broker. Akroyd has always been notable for his plasticity as a comedy actor, which I’m sure is a big reason he was chosen as one of the founding members of Lorne Michaels’ sketch comedy troupe, and here he showed audiences that the man who played the epitome of cool, calm and collected in The Blues Brothers could just as easily pull off uptight and neurotic.

Murphy was a known quantity by 1983 but still hadn’t quite gotten the message out to mainstream American audiences that he was a man of many faces and voices. Billy Ray as a character is rather similar to the confident, quick-witted Reggie from 48 Hours but here Murphy gets a few opportunities to show off his ability to inhabit multiple roles within the same movie, something he would become known for and indeed something that became expected of him as his career went on. In the scene below, we see Murphy begin to play with the concept of inhabiting alter egos in his film roles and giving the audience not just one but multiple performances to chew on.

The premise of the film is two-fold: the first half of the film is a rather interesting social parable involving two wealthy commodities traders (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) who are having the classic argument about Nature vs. Nurture. To settle the argument, the two decide to swap the life roles of two men, one being their well-bred and wealthy protogé Winthorpe (Akroyd) and the other a street urchin and con-man named Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy). The argument for Nurture seems to win out as Winthorpe falls to pieces without all the advantages of wealth while Billy Ray becomes an overnight success at the commodities firm.

It’s at that point that the film switches gears and becomes a film not about that philosophical argument anymore but essentially about the two heroes getting revenge on the rich old villains who used them as guinea pigs. This half of the film as a premise feels a lot less thoughtful and a lot more geared around rather unoriginal and tired jokes involving bad things happening to the bad guys including, in the case of the right hand man of the two Duke brothers, being violated by a gorilla. Har har.

The movie certainly has its moments, most of them coming from simple performance touches by Murphy and Akroyd. At the absolute low point of Winthorpe’s downfall, Akroyd sneaks his way into the company Christmas party dressed as Santa Claus to plant drugs in Billy Ray’s desk but before he does that he decides to stop by the buffet to grab some much-needed free food. The ensuing scene of Winthorpe drunkenly stuffing smoked salmon through his beard is hilariously pathetic.

(Apologies for the low quality clip – it’s the best I could find)

The film concludes with a rather confusing scene involving Winthorpe and Billy Ray somehow tricking the Duke brothers into losing millions of dollars in the frozen concentrated orange juice market. It’s still unclear to me as to what is actually happening (even Murphy has admitted in interviews that he didn’t understand what he was supposed to be doing in the scene) but I guess it’s sufficient to know that the Duke’s lost money in the end and the heroes got their revenge.

The film was overwhelmingly praised by critics in 1983, including a glowing review from Roger Ebert as well as high praise from Janet Maslin of The New York Times who called Trading Places the film that Preston Sturges might have made “if he’d had a little less inspiration and a lot more money.” That’s extremely high praise for John Landis as a director but also for writers Timohy Harris and Herschel Weingrod who went on to co-write such mega-successful comedies as Brewster’s Millions, and Kindergarten Cop in the years that followed.

It’s clear that Trading Places was an undisputed comedy hit in its day and that it remains so in the minds of many who saw it then. Watching it now, I find it to be light on laughs in comparison to what most audiences today expect of their film comedies. That’s not to say it’s not a smart film or a film with no laughs – just to say that if you showed this film in 2011 to an audience full of people who had never seen it before, I don’t believe the laughs would be very frequent, at least not as frequent as you’d hear in a typical contemporary comedy hit. That probably says a lot more about the way comedies are made today than it does about the quality of Trading Places as a film but it’s still worth noting. As I mentioned at the start of this review, I believe comedy is a very temporal and fast-moving animal and it’s rare to ever find a comedy that remains funny to audiences more than a few decades separated from it. Trading Places is a good movie but I’m not totally sure the laughs hit as hard today as they did in 1983.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Trading Places (with guest Jason Roche)

Next Up: Jennifer Beals and Cynthia Rhodes star in the iconic dance movie Flashdance.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

As an American born in 1983, I’ve been fortunate enough to live the vast majority of my life without the shadows of the Soviet Union hanging over my head. For Americans who were born before that year, even as late as the late 1970s, the Cold War was a very real force in their lives for a very long time. It’s something that someone my age takes for granted, the idea that for nearly half a century part of being American meant living in fear every day that the second-most powerful nation in the world might get an itchy trigger finger and blow every living thing from New York to California right off the map. One imagines that there’s only one way to live under such conditions and that’s simply go about your life trying not to worry about it, which is exactly what most people did. In the meantime, however, the constant threat of such overwhelming violence can’t help but color the way people of that time think about everything, from global geopolitics and war to personal relationships.

We’ve encountered a handful of films already that address the Cold War directly at least briefly (Gorky Park, The Dead Zone, The Right Stuff, Uncommon Valor and Octopussy) but no other film from 1983 addresses Cold War angst as directly as WarGames does. But what makes John Badham’s thoughtful and, at times, emotionally wrought Cold War thriller a timeless classic is that unlike some of the aforementioned films, WarGames brings those often buried emotions about the Cold War and brings them to the forefront, exposing what must have been some fairly raw nerves and dealing with them in a direct (though some might say on-the-nose) manner.

The film has a long and convoluted history, beginning its life as a screenplay by Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, two Yale-educated screenwriters who were fascinated by the fast-growing world of computers and the people who lived in that world. Parkes and Lasker started out writing a story about a Stephen Hawking-like scientist trying to pass on his knowledge to a young punk genius. As the years went by, the script was slowly updated to incorporate the concepts of computers and hacking, which also brought in ideas like computer simulations and game theory.

The film essentially tells two intertwining stories. One involves computer scientist Professor Falken (John Wood), a brilliant mind who became disillusioned about the world after the death of his wife and son and eventually convinced the military to fake his death so he could live out his remaining days in isolation on a wooded island. The second story, which takes place years later, centers on a young computer hacker named David (Matthew Broderick) who uses his then-rare skills to make mischief and impress girls. In an attempt to get early access to a new computer game, David accidentally finds his way into a military computer system that goes by the name Joshua and unknowingly activates a war simulation that could accidentally lead to a real nuclear war.

As the film balances between these two storylines, it also balances between two distinct tones: a light-hearted and somewhat mischievous tone that dominates the story of David and his girlfriend Jennifer (played by a young and wonderfully charming Ally Sheedy) while the other is a gravely serious and often dark tone dealing with NORAD and the imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust. This tonal shift is in part accidental due to director Martin Brest being fired just a few weeks into production and being replaced by Badham, who had a much lighter vision for the film. Take a look at these two scenes, one that seems to belong in a fast-paced action drama and another that clearly seems to belong in a straight comedy.

While sometimes these two tones seem to conflict with one another, that conflict is part of this movie’s brilliance and poignance. On the one hand, it shows us that nuclear peace in the world of 1983 hangs by such a thin thread that even a trouble-making computer hacker could potentially set off the chain of events leading to Mutually Assured Destruction. On the other hand, David and Jennifer’s emotional breakdowns after learning what’s going on show us one of the great tragedies of the Cold War, the havoc that the constant threat of violence can play on the minds of young people old enough to understand what’s happening in the world. 16-year-olds should be worried about making good grades and who they are going to ask out this weekend, not whether or not they’ll ever live to be 17.

We’ve dealt with teen angst in our countdown thus far on a number of occasions (All the Right Moves, Valley Girl, The Outsiders, Risky Business), enough to know that it was clearly a theme that resonated with 1983 audiences. It’s a theme that remains popular today, though it takes a different form, but I wonder if that angst wasn’t perhaps at least exaggerated by the fact that teenagers in 1983 had something deadly serious to be anxious about as a part of their day-to-day lives.

If nuclear angst is a part of the equation here, another major part is angst over the rapid development of technology and the fear that it could perhaps “outrun” humanity. The idea that Joshua the computer is actually learning, and not just learning data but learning complicated concepts that involve the value of human life, seems ridiculous to us today but it plays on the fear that computers might become so advanced that they’ll begin to make decisions without us. It’s the same idea that drove the still popular Terminator franchise and WarGames simply deals with it on real-world terms rather than science fiction terms.

On top of asking all these complex philosophical questions, which puts it light years ahead of the game when it comes to most blockbuster hits, WarGames also happens to be a terrifically well-made film. Badham’s direction of the handful of action sequences in the film are crucial to keeping the tension high during this very talky film and the performances by the entire cast, in particular Dabney Coleman as the sleazy-yet-sympathetic McKittrick and Barry Corbin as the cartoonish General Beringer, are strong.

The movie is also peppered with some nice smaller performances, including a somewhat ridiculous comedic performance from character actor Irving Metzman (a Woody Allen stock player in the ’80s) as a nebbishy computer scientist responsible for updating NORAD (and the audience) about what’s going on with Joshua. There’s also the memorable opening sequence featuring younger versions of two actors who would become quite well known in the ’90s as flawed members of a nuclear missile launch crew: Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs) and John Spencer (The West Wing).

It’s not a surprise that audiences responded so well to WarGames but perhaps what is surprising to me is that a movie that seems to have been so timely in 1983 still feels so effective today, despite the fact that it features outdated technology and speaks to international relations issues that haven’t existed for nearly 20 years. Perhaps growing up in the era of September 11th has given me a parallel to draw on (I was nearly the same age as David when the attacks occurred). Perhaps it’s simply a movie that draws on human emotions that every generation feels: the idea that technology is moving too fast for us, no matter how much we think we know about it; the idea that war or nature or viruses or any number of things out of our control could wipe us off the earth at any moment; and the more optimistic idea that a group of smart people in a room can solve even the most urgent and dire of problems. These are all things we still feel today and even though the Cold War dynamic is long gone from the world, it’s possible that the emotions tapped into in WarGames still exist in the American audiences of 2011.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – WarGames (with guest Sam McDavid)

Next Up: Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd star in the most successful comedy of 1983, Trading Places.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

As regular readers will know, Octopussy is the first of two James Bond films released in 1983, with the second being the Warner Bros. produced Never Say Never Again released in October of ’83 (you can read more about that film and why it was made at the same time as Octopussy in my post on Never Say Never Again). Before Sean Connery made his triumphant return to the role, Octopussy saw Roger Moore, now in his mid-50s, pick up the mantle of James Bond once again. Unlike Connery later in the year, Moore’s Bond film had all the trappings of a classic Bond flick, all the little details that make it the comfortable and reliable franchise that we love: the delightful Desmond Llewelyn as Q, the phenomenal score from John Barry, and perhaps most importantly the budget to pull off some garish and extravagant action sequences and set pieces.

Octopussy opens with a typically absurd Bond action episode that features James destroying a Soviet military base in Cuba and flying away gallantly in a rocket power jet that emerges from a hidden chamber inside a horse trailer (complete with mock horse ass). As expected, a corny joke leads us into the opening title sequence, a staple of any real Bond film. In this particular case, we’re treated to a particularly putrid ballad written by Barry and oddly songwriting legend Tim Rice. The song, called “All Time High”, basically has nothing to do with the film and makes almost no references to danger or evil or any of the things we typically see trickle their way into Bond themes. Instead it works as kind of a stand-alone ballad that could have been the lead single on any number of forgettable pop albums in the early ’80s. Barry does incorporate the main theme of the song nicely into the score throughout the film and it seems to work better in that context but as a song, it falls pretty flat particularly in comparison to some of the other great Bond themes of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

I won’t take you through the enormously twisting plot that covers everything from a group of murderous circus performers to a Soviet plot to take over Western Europe but let’s just say that the majority of the film takes place in India and revolves around the theft and recovery of a Fabergé egg, a classic and typically swanky James Bond MacGuffin. The parties involved in competing for said egg include Bond, a renegade Russian general (Steven Berkoff), a middle Eastern prince named Kamal Kahn (Louis Jordan) and the film’s title character, a beautiful cult leader/circus performer/master thief named Octopussy (Maud Adams). Octopussy predictably becomes involved with James as a love interest and ends up being a much more suitable, believable and age-appropriate love interest than Kristina Wayborn’s Magda, whom Bond beds earlier in the film.

The hijinx surrounding the egg take us through a car chase through the streets of India, a game hunt (a la “The Most Dangerous Game”) through the jungles and through more than a couple of fight sequences set inside Indian palaces and we often forget why anyone is even bothering to attack Bond other than their status as “bad guys”. What appears to set everything into motion is an early scene that shows us a trope we see in almost every Bond movie ever made, dating back to the very first Bond film, Dr. No. It involves Bond sitting across from an obviously cheating Kamal Kahn and besting the villain at his own game, thereby turning the conflict between the two from a mere business rivalry into a personal one. We see an almost identical scene later in the year in Never Say Never Again that involves the two characters playing a high-tech video game but here the game is a simple backgammon tournament.

Louis Jordan doesn’t have a lot to work with in terms of clever dialogue but his over-the-top performance makes him an entertaining Bond villain and a recognizable face in a movie that has almost a dozen more characters than feels necessary. There are so many villains in particular that it’s easy to lose track. There’s Mischka and Grischka, the knife throwing circus performers we see at the beginning and end of the film. There’s the turban-wearing lead henchman who seems very fond of karate chopping people at unexpected moments. Then there’s a street urchin brought in later in the film who uses the very specialized (and very impractical) weapon that resembles a buzz saw crossed with a yo-yo. What’s most amusing about this weapon is the fact that it can only be used if you are at least one story above your intended victim, making open foyer’s a very dangerous place to hang out.

As a whole, the film doesn’t make a ton of sense and it’s largely just a thinly strung together group of scenes that could be interchangeable with similar scenes from any other Bond movie. That said, a lot of those scenes are pretty darn entertaining, particularly the final car chase scene in Germany as Bond speeds toward a ticking bomb and the spectacular final stunt sequence in which Bond hangs onto a plane as it takes off and flies over a mountain range. Yes, there are terrible, eye-rolling moments like Bond’s chase through the jungle in which he swings on a vine while an audio sample from the original Tarzan films plays on the soundtrack. But those moments are fewer and farther between than in a lot of other Bond films, including a lot of the Pierce Brosnan films which frankly were about as loaded with double entendres as the corniest of Roger Moore’s films.

The audience and critical response to the film were both largely positive. With a final tally of $67.8 million, Octopussy became, at the time, the second-most successful Bond release ever and critics, while divide, were largely in agreement that this was at least a passable and entertaining Bond film (click here to see Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert debate that point on At the Movies, review starts at 4:35). Over time, Octopussy has earned a reputation as one of the cheesier, cornier installments of the franchise but as is the case with almost all Bond films that had any measure of success at the box office, this is a movie that was able to correctly identify what its audience wanted and give it to them in large amounts. The Bond series is nothing if not populist.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Octopussy (with guest Lucas Pepke)

Next Up: We enter the Top Five with one of the most memorable blockbusters of the early ’80s, WarGames starring Matthew Broderick.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

If you look at Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact as an attempt to tell a story, it’s a failure in every way. The plot is nowhere near cohesive or linear, the characters are so paper thin it’s hard to tell the victims from the villains (or even the heroes for that matter), even the title doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual content of the story. Yet in almost every other way, critically, financially and popularity-wise, the film is a success. It finished with $67.6 million at the box office (making it the highest grossing of the five Dirty Harry films) and it did relatively well with critics (positive reviews from Roger Ebert and others, though not from the notoriously crabby Vincent Canby). It gave the people exactly what they wanted in 1983, which means that while it provides us today with a perfectly preserved time capsule of the nation’s attitude in 1983, it is a movie that is far too “of the moment” to stand up well and resonate with a modern audience.

Vincent Canby’s review makes him look awfully ahead of his time, or perhaps completely out of touch with his own time. He berates the film and Eastwood calling the screenplay “ridiculous” and Eastwood’s direction “primitive” and most importantly expresses disgust at the film’s morality, which amazingly was not a popular opinion in 1983. Roger Ebert takes a more lighthearted approach to the film, almost ironically appreciating the complete and utter disregard for human life and law and order displayed in the movie. Criminals are shot in broad daylight and essentially left where they fall and never mentioned again. There are easily more people killed in the film at the hands of Eastwood’s rogue cop Harry Callahan than by any of the so-called “bad guys” and yet audiences didn’t seem to feel any moral equivocation about this in 1983. On the contrary, they couldn’t get enough of it.

Sudden Impact began its life as a screenplay designed to be a vehicle for actress Sondra Locke, a name that doesn’t register to most movie fans today but who was a fairly well-known name in 1983. Locke burst onto the scene as a 17-year-old phenom earning an Oscar nomination for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968. For most of the ’70s and ’80s, Locke was perhaps most well known as the romantic partner of Clint Eastwood, starring alongside him in several of his biggest movies during that era. This screenplay, built around a controversial revenge tale of a woman hunting down and killing the group of men who raped her and her sister, would give Locke a starring role in what would be a unique take on the vigilante justice genre.

In the meantime, Warner Bros. was in the midst of conducting some research in preparation for what many believed was a pretty tricky move: the marketing of Never Say Never Again. Warner Bros. was looking to see just how popular Sean Connery still was and how strong an impression he had made on contemporary audiences. As a part of that research, Warner Bros. asked audiences about some other well-known male film characters and were shocked to discover that Dirty Harry came back with one of the strongest and most positive responses. Upon seeing these numbers, Warner Bros. approached Eastwood about the possibility of making another Dirty Harry movie, reviving a franchise that had been dormant since 1976. Warner Bros. essentially threw themselves at Eastwood, offering him an almost absurd 60% of the total profits to act and direct in a new Dirty Harry movie.

Eastwood decided to kill two professional birds with one stone and adapted Locke’s rape-revenge project into a Dirty Harry script. On the surface, it seems like a pretty good fit, as Locke fills the role of a female counterpoint, a “Dirty Harriet” if you will, that takes on the same kind of vigilante attitude that audiences loved so much about Harry Callahan.

Watching Locke blow away her victims in cold blood (and regardless of the crimes they committed, they are victims in this situation), I can’t help but think that I’m having a completely different reaction to this film than the average 1983 audience member would have had. From what I’ve seen elsewhere in the ’80s (including moments in Psycho II), there are signs that indicate a prevailing feeling that the justice system was inherently flawed, protecting criminals more than innocent citizens and victims. The Dirty Harry series was always built on that premise but Sudden Impact takes the idea to a new level and takes the solution (i.e. Callahan’s willingness to shoot criminals rather than arrest them) to new heights as well.

In the middle of what is perhaps the most violent scene in the film, a robbery that takes place early in the movie in a diner, Callahan utters the film’s most famous line and indeed one of the most famous and oft-referenced lines in all of movie history: “Go ahead, make my day.” It’s so well-known today that the line has almost no impact when 2011 ears hear it but in the context of the film, it actually sums up the film’s irresponsible attitude toward crime and punishment. The line is said to one of the robbers as a sort of dare for the robber to shoot the hostage he is holding at gunpoint, I guess with the implication being that if he shoots the hostage, Callahan will not only not care but he’ll actually be pleased because he’ll then be justified in shooting the robber. This is a horrifyingly callous approach to take for someone who is supposed to be a hero and it illustrates that Callahan is essentially a murderer who happens to work for the good guys.

Yes, I am oversimplifying and over-moralizing a movie that is not intended to be taken seriously, at least not fully. This is escapist entertainment designed to stir those ultra-conservative passions and frustrations that so drove the public’s thinking in the Reagan era. Is my view on this movie the product of political correctness seeping into the culture for the last 30 years? I’m sure it is, but I’m also pretty sure that’s not always a bad thing. Movies like this not only show violence in a positive light but they also just aren’t very good movies. Sudden Impact isn’t a mystery film that asks us to follow around a violent character who uses any means necessary to get to the bottom of the crime. It’s not a mystery because from the very beginning of the film, we always know exactly who the criminal is – and we’re asked to root for her! Instead, Sudden Impact‘s thrills come not from story revelations but from a series of loosely strung together episodes of Callahan and Locke shooting criminals in variously uncomfortable parts of their anatomy.

When I say “loosely strung together”, I mean that in between scenes of violence, we are treated to an almost innumerable list of scenes of various police authority figures (most notable Pat Hingle who played Commissioner Gordon in the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher Batman films) wagging their fingers at Callahan and stereotypically reprimanding him for all the mayhem he causes while simultaneously praising him for his results. It’s unbearably trite today and was probably unoriginal even in 1983.

If the film has any effective moments, they can be found in Locke’s storyline which at times is a truly disturbing and even horrifying subplot. Locke’s rage motivating her killings is illustrated to us in the form of quick and startling flashback shots of the terrible gang rape that she and her now-catatonic sister suffered as teenagers. I find Locke herself to even be slightly disturbing to look at in this film. Her wide and dark eyes, pale complexion and thin build make her a convincing psychotic killer, though it doesn’t help me to see her as a legitimate romantic lead for Eastwood.

Over the course of this project I’ve encountered a number of films that work extremely well in 2011, probably as well or even better than they did upon first release in 1983. Sudden Impact is unquestionably at the other end of the scale, a movie that clearly made a huge impact on audiences in 1983 but is almost incomprehensible to a modern viewer. It’s almost as if the film were made in another a language and in a way it was. It speaks to an American culture and attitude that simply doesn’t exist anymore. In this writer’s opinion, that’s a good thing.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Sudden Impact (with guest Ben Flanagan)

Next Up: We’ve seen Sean Connery as James Bond in 1983, now it’s Roger Moore’s turn at bat in Octopussy.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

The power of the sequel was evident to the major studios in 1983, with eight (by my count) sequels finishing in the top 25 at the box office that year. All of those eight are unqualified financial successes though most of them were critical failures, so much so that some of them (like Superman III and Jaws 3-D) effectively ended their franchise’s ability to continue making successful sequels. It’s a sign that to me shows that the sequel game was still in its infancy in 1983. Sequels to great movies are almost always going to succeed financially but people are only willing to be burned once.

As sequels go, Staying Alive, which is the sequel to the iconic 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, doesn’t quite fit the mold of many of its other critically disastrous sequel brethren. For one thing, it has remarkably little to do with its predecessor. Yes, both movies heavily feature music and dance and follow the cocky, hot-headed Tony Manero (John Travolta) on his quest for stardom but aside from that, Staying Alive doesn’t really feel like it’s even attempting to recapture the things that made Saturday Night Fever such a hit with audiences and critics. While the original film attempted to capture the electric atmosphere of the disco scene, Staying Alive moves away from that world entirely and follows Tony into the world of Broadway dancing as Tony tries to breakthrough as a chorus line dancer.

Audiences in 1983 may have flocked to theaters the first few weekends but after that the film quickly fell off the map as fans of the original film, a movie that defined a subculture to the rest of the world, realized that the sequel didn’t have what they were looking for. Critics blasted the pic, with Roger Ebert calling it “a big disappointment” and commenting on how little the film cared about the characters or story and instead was intended to be little more than “a Walkman for the eyes.”

Like most bad sequels, Staying Alive was the result of nearly everyone from the first film re-assembling for the sequel – except of course for the most important person from the first production, director John Badham who had moved on to directing a slew of critically and commercially successful movies by now, including 1983 hits Blue Thunder and WarGames. Returning for Staying Alive off-screen was offbeat screenwriter Norman Wexler (click here to read his bio and understand why he might not be the guy you want to hang your hat on for emotional realism in a film) and producer Robert Stigwood. In the process of putting the project together, Stigwood supposedly saw Rocky III on a plane and had the epiphany that Sylvester Stallone, who had directed two of the most financially successful sequels of all time in the second and third Rocky films, would be a perfect choice to handle what Stigwood hoped would be a big money sequel to a critically-acclaimed and iconic ’70s film.

The choice of Stallone was the first move in what I believe was a domino effect of failure. While Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever was an uneducated, emotionally stunted young man, he was by no means an uninteresting person to listen to. His dialog is remarkably clever and interesting and it reveals a lot to us about his character. I believe in Stallone’s tinkering with the screenplay on Staying Alive, he attempted to turn Manero into a bit of a Rocky Balboa type figure, a man almost completely incapable of expressing himself and even when he does doesn’t really have much interesting to say. On top of that Stallone decided that instead of heavily featuring the Bee Gees, the group responsible for making Saturday Night Fever‘s soundtrack the best selling soundtrack album of all time (a record that still stands), he would instead feature his brother Frank Stallone who was attempting to launch his own pop/rock career. Frank’s song “Far From Over” is featured heavily in the film, including in the opening credits sequence shown below, and while it went on to earn multiple award nominations and score big on the pop charts, it’s a song done in that typically overdramatic ’80s rock style that just doesn’t have anywhere near that same evocative feeling that the Bee Gee’s monumental string of hits brought to the original film.

While Travolta has his moments, I frankly found him a lot more likable and charming in Two of a Kind, probably a result of the fact that unlike that film which paired him with Olivia Newton-John, Travolta has no chemistry with his co-stars in Staying Alive. Singer/actress Cynthia Rhodes plays good girl Jackie and while she’s likable enough, the movie gives us no real reason to root for Tony to end up with here. Meanwhile femme fatale Laura is played by British-born Finola Hughes who received a flood of criticism for her work here as a highly unlikable and bitchy dancer who for some reason continues to attract Tony despite her vicious attitude towards him.

The single-biggest issue that makes Staying Alive difficult to sit through is the interminable musical sequences, the aspect alluded to by Ebert in his “Walkman for the eyes” comment. The movie features no fewer than five (there could have been more) sequences that showcase an entire song, uninterrupted from start to finish. Most of them are built around highlighting the dancing but some, such as two different duets sung by Cynthia Rhodes and Frank Stallone, are literally just extended scenes of two people playing and singing a song on stage while Tony watches from the floor. It’s a lack of understanding about what the audience liked about Saturday Night Fever and even the visual fireworks Stallone attempts to inject, like in this remarkably absurd super slow motion dance scene, can’t keep us from nodding off and wondering when we can get back to the story.

There are a lot of film nerds out there, including quite a few who contribute to this site, who feel that there’s something inherently wrong with making sequels in the first place. I don’t always agree with that provided that you attempt to take what worked in the original film and add to it and expand on it in interesting ways. What Staying Alive does is abandon almost everything that made Saturday Night Fever great and include a few spare parts to justify calling this a sequel.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Staying Alive (with guest Francesca Scalici)

Next Up: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in the fourth installment of the Dirty Harry series, the 1983 smash hit Sudden Impact.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

It’s easy to scoff and laugh off Mr. Mom as a relic of early ’80s American culture, an artifact from the days when feminism seemed novel and subverting gender roles was still actually had some shock value to it. It’s true, the basic premise of Mr. Mom, the massively successful comedy starring Michael Keaton as a “stay-at-home dad”, wouldn’t be considered very fresh or novel today. And yet recent reports have MGM planning a remake, not so surprising in an age where just about every film successful or otherwise gets remade but noteworthy enough that it’s worth considering why MGM feels this premise still has some relevance to 2011 audiences.

Mr. Mom was one of two extremely successful screenplays in 1983 from a then largely unknown John Hughes (the other being National Lampoon’s Vacation) and while Vacation’s screenplay became a somewhat twisted, highly irreverent movie, the similarly family-oriented screenplay for Mr. Mom became a much more family friendly finished product. While Mr. Mom doesn’t exactly fit in with the teen-oriented films Hughes would become known for in the years following, there are a lot of similar themes in Mr. Mom including the basic idea of exploring the stresses and anxiety that come along with traditional domestic life in America. While the trials and tribulations of upper-middle class white teenagers doesn’t seem like compelling drama, it’s something that audiences (particularly the ones that went to the movies a lot) could identify with and the same is true for the audiences that shelled out $64.7 million to see Mr. Mom in 1983. Despite the sometimes wacky nature of the comedy here, there’s something that resonated with what audiences were going through in their own lives.

It’s a recession-era story (another thing that makes it play well in 2011) about a Detroit auto engineer played by Michael Keaton who loses his job. He and his industrious wife (Teri Garr) both set out to find jobs and she happens to find one before he does, a pretty good job in fact that’s capable of supporting the family. Keaton’s character Jack suffers the predictable indignities of domestic life as he learns to take care of cooking, cleaning and taking care of their three kids but deals with a couple of other less predictable obstacles as well. For one, Jack’s neighbor Joan (Ann Jillian) is attempting to seduce him and while Jack’s a good guy, her advances start to get to him before long, culminating in a fun dream sequence that mixes Jack’s personal fears and desires with his new obsession with soap operas.

Jack’s marriage faces a threat on the other side of the aisle as well (though not much of one) in the form of his wife’s creepy boss played by Martin Mull. In the race for the top “’80s douchebag” of the year, Mull’s character here makes a compelling case as he walks the fine line between legitimate threat to Jack’s manhood (as seen in the scene below) and creepy mustachioed lecher as we see later in the film.

As you would expect with a major studio comedy, the film is littered with nice supporting performances, including Jeffrey Tambor as the bumbling executive at Jack’s auto company, Christopher Lloyd in a very brief role as a co-worker of Jack’s and character actress Miriam Flynn (who steals the show as Cousin Eddie’s wife Catherine in National Lampoon’s Vacation) as one of Jack’s female neighbor friends.

Obviously, the movie lives and dies with the casting of its two leads and I think with all due respect to Hughes’ screenplay, the movie’s lasting success today is owed almost entirely to Keaton and Garr. While Keaton had been working regularly in TV (including two starring sitcom roles) it wasn’t until 1982 that he really became a legit threat as a movie star with a breakout performance in Ron Howard’s offbeat comedy Night Shift. That role landed Keaton the lead role for Mr. Mom, a major opportunity for him and a role that ultimately catapulted him to becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood for the next ten years or so. As for Garr, she was already well established having made her name in a number of the biggest films of the ’70s and early ’80s, particularly the massively successful Tootsie the year before which dealt with similar themes of changing gender roles and women in the workplace and which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Garr is probably the most likable and believable comedic leading lady I’ve seen to date in 1983. Like most great leading women of their day, her combination of intelligence and general likability made her appealing to the female audience and while she certainly wasn’t a bombshell, she had the girl next door appeal (or in this case ‘wife next door’) appeal that made her a hit with men as well.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the comedy in Mr. Mom, though at the time I have to believe it was a pretty early example of a mainstream comedy (as opposed to a wacky, Airplane! style parody) using references to other fairly recent Hollywood films. The references to Jaws and Chariots of Fire, while both completely overdone and played out today, were pretty timely and fresh in 1983 and in fact the Chariots of Fire scene in Mr. Mom is one of the better comedic uses I’ve seen of that memorable Vangelis score.

The fact that Mr. Mom seems to work so well today despite the fact that there’s nothing particularly original or compelling about its premise along with the fact that director Stan Dragoti never really reached the same level of success again with his subsequent comedies like The Man with One Red Shoe or Necessary Roughness both speak to the fact that this movie’s success is all about John Hughes’ impressively sharp screenplay and the charm of its lead actors Michael Keaton and Teri Garr. If MGM does go through with its planned remake, the casting of those two leads along with the need for a smart, perceptive screenplay will be just as crucial to the movie’s success.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Mr. Mom (with guest Francesca Scalici)

Next Up: John Travolta is back as Tony Manero, only this time he’s wearing spandex. It’s the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, the 1983 hit Staying Alive.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

As we enter the Top Ten on our countdown of the highest grossing movies of 1983, we begin with a curious success story, a movie that’s both unique and perfectly definitive of 1983 pop culture. Out of the remaining ten films on our list, I would informally estimate that Risky Business is referenced in the pop culture of 2011 than any other film in the top ten with the possible exception of No. 1 (I’d call it a toss-up). What’s most impressive about Risky Business, the reason it was both a commercial success at the time and remains an effective movie today, is that while it’s built on paper like a typical Hollywood hit, it has the soul of an art film and really says something about life and about the world which its characters inhabit.

Before becoming a $63 million hit with almost unanimously positive critical reception, Risky Business looked like anything but a sure thing to most of the people involved in its production early on. The premise of Paul Brickman’s screenplay sounds like a pretty conventional teen sex comedy, similar to some of the earlier entries seen here on Back to the Movies: a rich teenager named Joel (Tom Cruise) loses his virginity to a beautiful young prostitute (Rebecca De Mornay) and the two ultimately decide to open a brothel catering to Joel’s high school buddies. Sounds like wacky antics will ensue and to some extent they do but the movie isn’t just about the crazy scrapes these characters find themselves in. There’s a great deal of subtext going on here as well dealing with the money-obsessed culture of the ’80s, sex and the loss of innocence, and even the suggestion that all forms of business are in essence equal to prostitution. Those points are made with varying degrees of effectiveness but the fact that a movie like this is even talking about those issues puts it into an elite stratosphere among movies that could technically call themselves sex comedies.

It’s those unconventional themes that also nearly kept the movie from being made in the first place. Studios were scared off by the idea of a “brainy sex comedy” as Porky’s seemed to have laid out the perfect blueprint for a successful sex comedy a year earlier and exploring themes of commercialism and sexuality were not exactly part of the formula. With the major studios passing, the film’s producers wound up turning to the fledgling Geffen Company, a startup studio founded the previous year by music mogul (and eventual Dreamworks co-founder) David Geffen. The Geffen Company had made a splash in 1982 with the well-reviewed box office flop Personal Best but with Risky Business, they saw an opportunity to make waves with both critics and audiences. It was a risk that ended up paying off in a big way for Geffen, who would end up producing films for the likes of Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton later in the decade.

Tom Cruise was without question the biggest breakthrough star of 1983 judging from the 40 films I’ve seen so far on this countdown. After making an early splash in 1981 with a small but memorable role in Taps, Cruise absolutely exploded in 1983, with a small supporting performance in The Outsiders followed by three starring roles: the sex comedy Losing It (which did not make the Top 50) which was released in April, then Risky Business in July and finally All The Right Moves later that year. Of those three starring roles, there’s no question that Risky Business was the moment that set Cruise on the path to becoming the Hollywood icon he would eventually become but Cruise’s ubiquity in theaters in 1983 was a big part of cementing that star status.

Cruise’s performance here is certainly worthy of the hype it ultimately created for him going forward and while the nuances of his performance in many key moments in the film are impressive, I think it’s ability to serve as a sort of broadly-drawn icon that makes this performance so memorable and effective. EVERYONE, whether you’ve seen this movie or not, is aware of the image of Cruise sliding around his parents’ empty house in his socks, underwear and a dress shirt playing air guitar to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”, perhaps one of the most over-parodied moments in ’80s cinema. But there’s another moment that I think was equally iconic for 1983 audiences, even if it isn’t as widely referenced or parodied today. In this scene, which comes about midway through the film when Cruise has decided to take on the ambitious goal of promoting and running a brothel out of his home while his parents are out of town, Cruise takes a quick turn from being a shy, awkward teenager to being a slick, polished and confident salesman. The Ray Ban shades Cruise dons throughout the sequence were a bit out of fashion at the time but many believe their sudden re-emergence on the scene in the mid-80s was directly attributable to Cruise’s use of them in the film to portray a classic image of Hollywood cool.

(Click image to view clip)

While Cruise is clearly the biggest name in the film today, he shared the bill in 1983 with fellow newcomer Rebecca De Mornay. Her performance received equal praise from Roger Ebert at the time who said she “somehow manages to take that thankless role, the hooker with a heart of gold, and turn it into a very specific character. She isn’t all good and she isn’t all clichés: She’s a very complicated young woman with quirks and insecurities and a wayward ability to love.”

The supporting performances are strong all around as well but Joe Pantoliano as Guido and Curtis Armstrong as Miles nearly steal the show in every scene they’re in. Something else that nearly steals the show: the soundtrack. As was the case with The Big Chill, the producers of Risky Business appeared to have run wild with their ability to secure a number of hugely popular songs and at various times those songs either work perfectly (“Old Time Rock and Roll”) or completely and inappropriately take over the scene (Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight” during a sex scene), though I should mention that the snippets of original music created for the film by Tangerine Dream are perfectly and fantastically “’80s” music.

These very high highs mixed with almost inexplicable mistakes are the common mark of a first-time director and while Brickman’s ambitious ideas weren’t all perfect, he shows a tremendous amount of promise and originality as a filmmaker in Risky Business. It’s a shame that he didn’t continue to hone his skills as a director as I believe he could have developed into a really impressive filmmaker with a unique voice. As it stands today, Brickman’s legacy is Risky Business and there’s certainly no reason to be ashamed of that. In that one film, Brickman helped mainstream audiences define cool in the ’80s, then asked them to think about the consequences of that coolness and ultimately helped capture the essence of the year 1983 in a way no other filmmaker did.

As a special bonus I’ll be recording podcast discussions with some of our regular FilmNerds contributors (as well as some special guests) on each of the final ten movies on the countdown. Click the link below to download the first episode in which I discuss Risky Business with FilmNerds contributor Graham Flanagan.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Risky Business (with guest Graham Flanagan)

Next Up: Michael Keaton does things a woman should be doing! It’s Mr. Mom.