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 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.

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.

Calculating inflation with box office grosses isn’t really an exact science since they don’t really factor in studio expectations at the time (which is why you won’t hear me mention inflation very often in this series) but in actual dollar amount, $25 million in 1983 equates to about $55 million in today’s money, certainly a respectable amount for a studio film with a moderate budget. I bring this up because Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s classic young adult novel The Outsiders is the first movie on our countdown to cross the $25 million threshold. There’s nothing official about that number as a dividing line but it’s safe to say that from here on out, every movie we’re dealing with can be considered a legitimate hit and probably made a dent in the popular consciousness in 1983.

While The Outsiders is a film that seems to hold a lot of sway in today’s popular culture (can’t tell you how many of my friends told me to “do it for Johnny!” this weekend when I mentioned I’d be watching this film), at the time of its release the film didn’t seem to make quite as big an impact. It opened in second place behind our last film on the countdown, Spring Break and never led at the box office through its entire run. Critics were mixed on the film (Roger Ebert flat out didn’t like it) and many pundits began to question whether Coppola was still the same filmmaker who took the 1970s by storm with The Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.

There’s a pretty obvious reason why the film is viewed far more favorably today and that’s the cast. In 1983, the cast list for The Outsiders carried almost no cache whatsoever and audiences responded accordingly but in the eyes of today’s audiences, the film looks like one of the most star-studded affairs of the ’80s. Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio and Diane Lane. What sound like Dream Team, slam dunk casting choices today were bold and insightful moves by Coppola in 1983 and as the cast members went on to become huge stars in the following years, the film has enjoyed a huge boost in public perception.

When it comes to the screenplay, I have to say I share the feelings of many of the critics of the day. There’s not nearly enough action in the film’s 91 minute running time and what action there is doesn’t feel very cohesive. It feels like a string of rather unrelated, arbitrary events rather than understandable actions leading to inevitable consequences. As is the case with any adaptation, I’m sure some folks will say Coppola was simply being faithful to the source material but that’s never a valid excuse for a movie that doesn’t work. A movie has to work as a movie and stories don’t always work the same in print as they do on screen. That’s the challenge any screenwriter faces when adapting written material into a film and Coppola bears the sole responsibility for this clumsy adaptation (while Coppola wrote the version of the screenplay used during the production, Kathleen Rowell received the writing credit due to some confusing Writers Guild issues).

The story follows two groups of teenagers in an Oklahoma town, one group called the Greasers from the poor side of town and another group called the Socs (which is inexplicably pronounced “soashes” in the film). Poor kids vs. rich kids, pretty basic stuff. The conflict between the two sides defines some of the troubled teens who revel in the prospects of rumbling in the streets while others somberly wax on about how much better the world would be if there were no Greasers or Socs and we could all just get along. It’s a fairly obvious allegorical tale that is tailor-made for 8th grade English classes and in fact it was a letter from a class of junior high students who had read the book that spurred Coppola to make the film in the first place.

I don’t mean for that last paragraph to sound negative. There’s certainly a place for young adult fiction both in print and indeed in film. I feel pretty confident this film would be fairly effective for a junior high English class getting their first taste of ideas like teenage angst, classism and prejudice, and perhaps on a somewhat deeper level the tragic theme of fading youth and lost innocence.

Coppola’s treatment of that last idea is what nearly takes the film into a level of maturity that adult film lovers can appreciate. With a carefully balanced color palate of reds and golds, Coppola builds a running motif of sunsets in the film, playing off the film’s themes of the beauty of youth tragically fading away from these characters as their hope for a brighter future vanishes. Coppola’s work here behind the camera with cinematographer Stephen H. Burum (The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible) is a perfect counterpoint to his work with his brilliantly dark and shadowy work with Gordon Willis in The Godfather.

It’s a great-looking film enhanced even more so by the consistently solid performances Coppola is photographing throughout the film. Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe all grab your attention when watching the film but the truth is their roles are very minor in the film. This was the first major feature film job for all three men and each would later rise to prominence in star roles in films released later that same year.

The five performances that really drive the film come from actors who would see a similarly meteoric rise in the coming years, though none would reach the superstar status that Cruise, Swayze and Lowe would reach at their respective peaks. C. Thomas Howell and Ralph Macchio, each in his first major big screen role, lead the film as the sympathetic heroes Ponyboy Curtis and Johnny Cade (respectively). Both actors show an awful lot of the likability and boyish vulnerability that led them to stardom the following year (Howell in Red Dawn, Macchio in The Karate Kid).

Matt Dillon had already been on the scene for a few years but his performance as Dallas in The Outsiders helped solidify his bad boy image that became his trademark in the ’80s.

The real discovery of the film comes from the only prominent female performance in the film. Diane Lane (aged 18 here) stars as Cherry Valance, the Soc girl with a heart of gold who befriends Ponyboy. Lane had a little more film acting experience than her co-stars at this point but was still far from a household name. Her confidence is evident here as she seems to rattle off her dialogue as though it were totally improvised in some of the early scenes in the film. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s stunningly beautiful here and stands out to me so far as one of the real stars in the making in 1983 along with Lea Thompson.

Probably the most fun performance of all for me is Emilio Estevez, who plays Two Bit, an energetic and playful Greaser with a penchant for Mickey Mouse cartoons. Like his fellow cast members, this was a big-screen debut for Estevez and while using his family’s real last name to avoid riding his father’s coattails was an admirable move, there’s no chance anyone who was familiar with Martin Sheen would ever fail to notice how much Estevez resembles him both in appearance and personality. Watching Martin Sheen earlier in this series in his phenomenal performance in The Dead Zone, his on-screen presence and confidence are present in every way in his son here.

It’s tremendous fun watching all these future superstars collaborating in their early days (including an early cameo from Sophia Coppola who goes by the stage name “Domino” in the end credits) but as a film in and of itself, The Outsiders is only mildly effective. It’s function as a time capsule for the careers of these future stars is what makes it a compelling watch in 2010.

Next Up: Tom Selleck in the Indiana Jones knockoff High Road to China.

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.

While it’s still pretty far down the list of the top-grossing movies of 1983, I would say that All the Right Moves is the first relatively iconic film on our list. It seems to have grown in stature over time since its initial release, probably because of the eventual superstardom of its star Tom Cruise.

By the time All the Right Moves hit theaters in October of 1983 (one week before I was born, by the way) Cruise was already one of the hottest young stars in Hollywood thanks to the massively successful hit Risky Business released just two months earlier. In fact, most theaters were probably still showing Risky Business at the time that All the Right Moves premiered. Nearly every review written at the time mentions Risky Business so it was clearly a major cultural phenomenon that probably affected the way a lot of viewers approached All the Right Moves and almost certainly affected the film’s gross.

Cruise plays Stefen Djordjevic, a high school football player from the town of Ampipe, Pennsylvania (the town is named after the fictional American Pipe Company which employs nearly the entire town). The town of Ampipe serves as the villain of the film, essentially. It’s a depressed, stagnant Rust Belt town that represents the opposite of the cinematic American dream, a place where no matter how hard you work, you have no chance of making a better life for yourself. Stefen’s only way out is a college football scholarship, a longshot for him considering his diminutive stature and limited physical talent. But against the odds, Stefen has started to receive a little bit of attention from smaller colleges, though his desire to go to the best engineering school possible leads him to spurn an offer from an unnamed state school at the beginning of the film (the school’s recruiter is played by a very young Terry O’Quinn aka John Locke from Lost).

When Ampipe High School’s season takes a turn for the worse, the road to a college scholarship gets a little bit tougher for Stefen. The film follows the always-reliable dramatic path of tragedy unfolding from a series of misunderstandings, misdirected emotion and unfortunate coincidences. The series of events that leads to Craig T. Nelson’s Coach Nickerson jeopardizing Stefen’s college career never comes off as forced, since each character is given enough screen time for the audience to truly understand all of their actions and the motivations behind them. It’s a classic example of well-written drama, a scenario in which the characters end up hurting each other and themselves despite having the best of intentions at the story’s outset.

Nelson and Cruise both do a great job of adding real sympathy and emotional depth to their roles but it’s two supporting performances that gave the film its most interesting dramatic moments. Chris Penn is absolutely heartbreaking as Stefen’s teammate and best friend Brian, the team’s most talented player who is forced to turn down a scholarship to USC after impregnating his girlfriend. A lot of fans and critics went after All the Right Moves for wrapping up its story too neatly and happily but Penn’s character arc to me balances this out and gives us a taste of the tragedy Stef would face if he never got out of Ampipe. There’s a moment where Penn’s character is trying to enjoy himself at a party with his classmates just before heading off to his honeymoon in Pittsburgh and the look on his face as he tries to convince everyone that he’s happy with his situation is absolutely devastating.

The other real gem in the film is a young Lea Thompson, another bright young talent nabbed that this film caught just before she took off. Thompson’s resume was virtually blank coming into All the Right Moves but in the two years following the film she would star in Red Dawn and Back to the Future, two of the most iconic films of the 1980s, and it’s not surprising to see why her career took off after this film. She exudes girlish charm and while she’s a beautiful girl, she’s comes off as identifiable rather than intimidating. To apply my 2010 perspective, she reminds me a lot of Rachel McAdams, a girl that is certainly attractive enough to be a romantic lead but gets most of her appeal from her friendly, girl-next-door personality rather than raw sex appeal. Thompson’s role as Stefen’s girlfriend mostly reiterates the same themes present throughout the rest of the film (she wants to be a musician but can’t afford college) but the biggest asset she brings to the film is the addition of yet another pressure on Stefen’s life, the pressure of maintaining a relationship. She’s a supportive girlfriend to be sure but she has needs too and Stefen’s lack of emotional maturity creates more problems for him to deal with throughout the film.

Director Michael Chapman hadn’t done much directing before this film, and didn’t much after either, but real film nerds know him as one of the great cinematographers of the late ’70s and early ’80s. His work on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull put him in the pantheon of great DPs and though he didn’t continue to work at that level going forward in his career, it should be noted that when he took on All the Right Moves, he was at the absolute top of his game and I think it shows. Chapman had the foresight to hire a then-unknown Jan de Bont to shoot All the Right Moves and it’s interesting to see de Bont working with such subtle material knowing that he would later go on to become one of the leading names in blow-stuff-up-real-good filmmaking. The bleak, depressed setting of the film is crucial to telling this story and that setting is brilliantly synthesized by de Bont’s blue and gray-toned photography.

Is the ending of All the Right Moves ham-fisted and too convenient? Absolutely it is. It’s a little odd to see a film like this so hesitant to end things in a more logical, if more depressing, way particularly when it takes its inspiration so obviously from one of the most dark, depressing dramas of the 1970s, The Deer Hunter. I suppose in the end the fact that our subject matter is football rather than the Vietnam War probably led the filmmakers to opt for a happier ending. Still despite the rather gutless resolution, the film stands up today as a really effective portrayal of a classic story of teenage angst. It works particularly well set against today’s backdrop of economic depression and seemingly bleak outlooks for the future.

All the Right Moves might be remembered today because of the big names who got their start in the film but it continues to endure as a watchable film because of truthfully it depicts its characters and their hopes, fears and desires.

Next Up: Valley Girl starring Nicholas Cage.