April 1981 features one of the year's best, one of the worst, and the first of two great werewolf movies

We've got Susan Sarandon, Kim Basinger and Jan-Michael Vincent, and Jerry Lewis

The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.

Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…

APRIL

The first confirmed diagnosis of a sexually transmitted disease causing Kaposi’s sarcoma was made by Dr. John Gullett in San Francisco.
The first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle Columbia, was launched from Cape Canaveral at 7:00 AM EST.
John Kennedy O’Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut, the amazing, remarkable A Confederacy of Dunces a full 12 years after he killed himself because he was despondent that he couldn’t get the book published.

And the very first test drive of Bigfoot, the very first monster truck, took place in a field near St. Louis, Missouri. And, oh, yes, shit was crushed.

Do ratings mean anything to kids anymore?

I genuinely don’t know. My kids have a particular relationship with MPAA ratings because my wife made a very big deal about them in a way I disagreed with, and that disagreement often got quite heated. In my house growing up, my parents also often disagreed with one another, and I was not above exploiting their fundamental differences in what they thought was acceptable in order to see as many films as possible.

This was a landmark month for me. I had seen R-rated films a few times with my parents by this point. It wasn’t a regular thing, but it happened. Mainly, it happened when there was something they really wanted to see and it was cheaper and easier to take me than it was to get a babysitter. This month, though, was different. This month, I started winning my wars to see the things I wanted to see, and it was because I started playing divide and conquer.

For example, I figured my dad would have zero patience for Excalibur, but I knew I had at least a chance of getting my mom interested in it. Sure enough, when I started telling her about it, she seemed very curious. When I told her it was a King Arthur film from the person who made Deliverance, that did it. She took me to see it in the theater in Chattanooga, and I remember how shockingly adult it seemed. Part of that is because of the way John Boorman makes movies in general, and part of that was the nudity and the very frank violence.

Meanwhile, it was the exact opposite for Nighthawks. That one looked like it had my dad’s name written all over it and I got him to take me on a Sunday afternoon. I loved every single second of the experience, especially because of how wild it was. It felt like a harder, crazier version of the kind of thing we watched together on television, and I loved seeing Sylvester Stallone in a different role than Rocky. That was one of many films that my dad and I agreed not to discuss in front of my mom, something that made them feel special.

Both films expanded the envelope of what was considered acceptable. It wasn’t just about getting my parents to take me to see an R-rated movie. It was about talking to them afterward and making sure they didn’t see it as a mistake. There were still plenty of things I wanted to see that didn’t require a negotiation… or at least, not because of the rating. It took quite a bit of begging to get my mother to sit through Caveman, and in the end, she took a book and read the entire time it played. Same thing with Going Ape! Same thing with Hardly Working. I don’t blame her, frankly, looking back at all of them now, but it speaks to the way my parents had already started to lean into my mania.

I give them a lot of credit for indulging me. I know I saw more movies than any of the other kids I was friends with, and it left me frustrated a lot of the time, trying to find someone to talk to about these things. I had different friends for different kinds of movies, the only way I could work out all of the different feelings I had. One friend, in particular, had an older brother who was a maniac for horror films, and he was willing to help us make massive mistakes in judgment. One of those mistakes was either this month or in May when he took us to see The Howling in the theater. I could barely make it through the opening scene of the movie, and when we got to the big transformation scene in the middle of the film, I was so freaked out that I stood up and went and stood by the theater doors, ready to run. I found the experience haunting, and it was definitely because of the size of the imagery. There was no escaping it, none of the safety of watching something on TV with commercials to interrupt or an off switch if I was too scared.

The worst part about making a mistake like that? I couldn’t tell my parents why I was shit-scared at every little thing for the next few weeks for fear that they would prevent me from hanging out with my friend and his brother. I had to deal with the consequences of my own choices, and it taught me… well, actually, it taught me nothing. I made the exact same mistake the following month, which we’ll talk about when we get to May.

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APRIL 3

Atlantic City
Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, Sean Sullivan, Wallace Shawn, Harvey Atkin, Norma Dell’Agnese, Louis Del Grande, John McCurry, Eleanor Beecroft, Cec Linder, Sean McCann, Vincent Glorioso, Adèle Chatfield-Taylor, Tony Angelo, Sis Clark, Gennaro Consalvo, Lawrence McGuire, Ann Burns, Marie Burns, Jean Burns, Connie Collins, John Allmond, John J. Burns
cinematography by Richard Ciupka
music by Michel Legrand
screenplay by John Guare
produced by Denis Héroux and John Kemeny
directed by Louis Malle
Rated R
1 hr 44 mins

A young woman training to be a casino dealer and an aging gangster are thrown together when her estranged husband shows up with some stolen drugs he needs to sell.

There’s something perfect about the collision between John Guare and Louis Malle, two artists with radically different sensibilities. Malle started directing in the ‘50s in France, and his early work was both political and aesthetically experimental. He stood apart from a lot of the French New Wave, both in form and content. His 1958 film The Lovers was the focus of an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, inspiring the famous line from Justice Potter Stewart defining obscenity as “I know it when I see it.” He courted controversy with films like The Fire Within, Murmur of the Heart, and the still-shocking Pretty Baby. John Guare’s early plays were absurdist humor with streaks of huge heartfelt humanity running through them, and his breakthrough hit, The House of Blue Leaves, is a beautifully oddball piece about two deeply broken people struggling towards a kind of love.

I’m sure many filmmakers could have made a good film from Guare’s screenplay for Atlantic City, but Malle’s European edge and the melancholy that exists in even his most optimistic work turned out to be exactly what was needed to make a classic, one of the year’s best films. By this point, Malle had already worked with Susan Sarandon, and she had recently left her husband to live with him. He was one of the first filmmakers to really understand her appeal and give her great material to play, and this was easily the best role she’d had up to that point. He also cast the legendary Burt Lancaster, giving him the chance to play one perfect swan song role that felt like a summary of everything we loved about him as a movie star in the first place. It’s a film that is long on mood and character and short on plot, and I love it for that. It was a film that felt like a mystery to be solved when I was ten, and each time I’ve returned to it with more age and experience under my belt, I have been more impressed by what it’s saying and by the way it says it. It is a lovely film that was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and while it didn’t win any of them, that raised the film’s profile and pretty much gave Malle the rest of his career. It was one of his biggest hits, critically and commercially, and it also raised Guare’s profile in a major way.

It all started because of a tax fund that existed to finance French-Canadian co-productions. Malle was approached with the opportunity to make anything he wanted as long as he made it before a certain date. He had no idea what to do with it until Sarandon hooked him up with Guare, who was fascinated by the way the real Atlantic City was falling apart. They all developed the script together and the movie happened quickly. Part of what makes Malle’s film so haunting is the way it captures a city that is in a transitional moment. The old Atlantic City is being shed like a skin by this new city built on gambling, and Malle takes full advantage of it, grounding his story of losers struggling to dig their way out of the lives they’ve been leading in this decaying urban landscape, this place built for fun and relaxation stripped down to a skeletal suggestion of itself.

image courtesy of Paramount Pictures

When I saw Atlantic City as a kid, I didn’t know that Louis Malle was in a relationship with Susan Sarandon, but looking at the film now, it is crystal clear how infatuated he was. She has never been more beautiful in anything, and it helps sell just how much Lou (Lancaster) is smitten by her. One of the film’s most indelible images comes at the end of each work day when Sally gets home from her job at the oyster bar. She uses lemons that she rubs on her skin to get rid of the smell, and each night, Lou watches her. When I was younger, I saw Lou as pathetic, but the older I get, the more I empathize with the sadness that hangs around him like a cloud. Lou’s not a has-been. He wishes he was a has-been. He’s something far worse, a never-was, a guy who was just mixed up in things enough to call himself a gangster, but who knows in his heart of hearts that he was barely involved. He’s barely alive, to be fair. Both of them live in this apartment building that feels like it’s barely hanging on, of a different era, surrounded by nothing but construction and demolition as they wipe the old city away around them. Lou is the old Atlantic City, as is Grace (Kate Reid), a widow who also lives in the building. She depends on Lou for everything, including her own sexual needs. She pays him just enough to keep going, but not enough to ever get free of her, and Lou works a crummy numbers gig to make whatever other money he needs. Sally, glimpsed each night in her window, is the promise of that new Atlantic City, and the film is all about the tension and the desire between the two of them. There’s a scene where Lou finally confesses to Sally that he’s been watching her, and it remains one of the most frank and powerful erotic images in ‘80s film because of the performance from both of them. Lancaster sells it, and Sarandon is well aware of her own iconography and her own sexual power.

When Dave (Robert Joy) shows up, Sally’s little sister Chrissie (Hollis McLaren) in tow, the film starts to spiral out of control. They ran away together, and it’s clear that Sally really doesn’t give a shit anymore. She doesn’t want Dave back. She’s not angry at Chrissie. She’s just annoyed she’s got to deal with the two of them. They both seem brain-damaged, drug-addled and stupid and only concerned with the next score. I love the way the back half of the film plays out the plot mechanics. You could easily turn this into a thriller, and the poster for the film kind of promises that’s where they’re going. That’s not the point of the film, though. Instead, this is really just a snapshot of a moment where Lou finally gets his chance to be the person he’s been pretending to be for all these years. He’s finally a gangster. He’s finally a tough guy. He’s finally got the girl. Even if it’s gone tomorrow, Lou’s fine. He got to be the man he always wanted to be, and there’s a beauty to that. John Guare sets it up, Malle lays out this beautiful frame, and then Lancaster just crushes it. Every performance is equally great, though, and that’s one of the benefits of Guare writing this thing. He approached it like a play, giving everyone something substantial, and I love things like the relationship that blooms between Grace and Chrissie once Dave turns up dead.

It’s one of the best films of 1981, no doubt about it, and a film that has aged beautifully. Collaboration is about the way you combine all of these artistic voices, and there was something about Guare and Malle in this moment that was absolutely inspired, pushing both of them to career highs. I worry that I oversell it, because it is a gentle film in many ways, quiet and intimate, but those are the exact strengths that make me love it so much. Guare could sometimes get too precious and cutesy, and Malle felt like an artist caught between several film movements who often lost the thread in his own work. But together? Complete heartbreaking bliss.

Christiane F.
Natja Brunckhorst, Eberhard Auriga, Peggy Bussieck, Lothar Chamski, Rainer Woelk, Uwe Diderich, Jan Georg Effler, Ellen Esser, Andreas Fuhrmann, Thomas Haustein, Lutz Hemmerling, Daniela Jaeger, Bernhard Janson, Jens Kuphal, Christiane Lechle, Kerstin Malessa, Christiane Reichelt, Kerstin Richter, Cathrine Schabeck, Stanislaus Solotar, David Bowie
cinematography by Jürgen Jürges and Justus Pankau
music by Jürgen Knieper
screenplay by Herman Weigel
based on the book by Kai Hermann & Horst Rieck
produced by Bernd Eichinger
directed by Uli Edel
Rated R
2 hrs 18 mins

A young girl becomes addicted to heroin and ends up involved in the sex trade on the streets of Berlin in the late ‘70s.

Someone once described Christiane F. to me as “the German version of Go Ask Alice,” but the biggest immediate difference between the two is that Go Ask Alice is complete bullshit while Christiane F. is grounded in uncomfortable reality. Everything about the way the film was made was devoted to trying to capture something honest and unflinching and the result is just as difficult now as it was then.

In reality, the girl who the entire thing is based on first caught the attention of a pair of journalists from Stern in Germany who saw her testify against a man who was on trial for having sex with underage girls. They were already interested in writing about what they saw as an epidemic of drug use among Berlin’s teens, and they set up an interview with young Christiane Felscherinow. That one interview turned into a series of interviews over several months and a whole series of articles in Stern. Those interviews were eventually expanded into a book, and almost immediately work began to turn the book into a film. Uli Edel was the second director on the film, but as soon as he came aboard, he started carving out a plan for how to make the film that bordered on documentary. He cast largely non-actors, real kids who just fit the part. They found the completely unpolished Natja Brunckhorst at a school, and part of the reason they cast her was because of how shocking it was to see her next to the rest of the cast. She looked like a baby, and when they made her up like a junkie, it upset everyone immediately. Her performance is raw and natural, and there is something profoundly disturbing about watching this child break down under the demands of addiction.