February 1980 features Richard Gere, Jodie Foster on the prowl, the debut of Michael J. Fox and a young Judy Davis!
Our second month of coverage stands on the cusp of two stylistic decades
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…
FEBRUARY 1980
Muhammad Ali toured Africa as President Carter’s official envoy.
The legendary nightclub Studio 54 held a giant party to celebrate its last night in business.
Afghanistan declared martial law.
And when the 13th Winter Olympic Games kicked off in Lake Placid, NY,
the US beat the USSR in the celebrated “Miracle On Ice.”
One of the objects of worship that mattered to me as a young fan was the movie novelization. It really didn’t matter what movie it was for… as long as a book was based on a movie, or had something to do with a movie, I wanted to own that book. I think the main part of that itch had to do with growing up in an era before home video. It was right around the moment I was starting to see VHS in people’s homes, but before you could have anything like a movie collection of your own. I wanted to have something at home, something I could use to relive the film.
That’s why soundtracks were important. I played every record that had anything even remotely to do with Star Wars until the grooves were simply worn smooth. It gave me a way to have something to hold me over until I could see the film again.
I was a crackhead, man. How big a crackhead? I had the novelization for Hero At Large. That’s how big. I remember buying it before I knew anything about the movie. All it took was seeing John Ritter in a superhero costume. Done. Purchased. In those early pre-critical days, I just read things. I don’t even know that I “liked” a lot of the film-related things I ingested. I just wanted to know. I just wanted to take everything in.
I wasn’t really paying attention to most of the movies from this month when they came out. I’d love to pretend I was the cool ten-year-old who had an opinion about the release of Cruising or American Gigolo, but I didn’t. I knew Gigolo was a thing. I saw the ads for it. The Blondie song “Call Me” was omnipresent and enormously catchy. I wasn’t unaware that any of these films existed. But my interests were pretty narrow. It’s funny… I think of a month where I “only” saw two films in a theater as a thin month. Even at ten, I had a very skewed sense of what was normal in terms of media appetite.
So many of these films had already had some sort of festival play or overseas release that it feels like a month that was largely dedicated to housekeeping left over from the last year of the ‘70s. And when you talk about the way the movies of the ‘70s kept trickling out into the start of the ‘80s, you also have to talk about the way so much of pop culture felt like the hangover from the sexual revolution. One of the major themes of this decade, Sex Is A Bummer, gets a serious kick-off this month, one of the ways you can tell the decade is already starting to define itself.
Speaking of that, when we talk about these movie decades, obviously we’re talking about larger stylistic movements and ideas, and those things don’t really care about the exact calendar dates. This month is a great example of that, with both Cruising and American Gigolo in theaters. Cruising is, in every way, a ‘70s film. Friedkin helped define that decade and he was clearly not done with what he was doing. Paul Schrader, on the other, may have made the first real ‘80s film with Gigolo, a film that is all about surfaces and the way things look and feel. This month stands on the cusp between these two decades, and you can feel the tensions between the very styles of filmmaking that were in theaters at the same time. One film is looking back and the other is looking forward, and it definitely feels like a shift is already starting to take place.
While we’re only reviewing everything released in the US, there are special conversations that are going to be worth having along the way. We’re going to discuss things that were coming out overseas at times, and we’re going to also highlight the way theatrical re-releases used to be far more prevalent.
FEBRUARY 1
American Gigolo
Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton, Bill Duke, Hector Elizondo, Frances Bergen, Carol Bruce, K Callan, Patricia Carr, Carole Cook, David Cryer, Brian Davies, Richard Derr, Nina van Pallandt, Tom Stewart, Robert Wightman
cinematography by John Bailey
score by Giorgio Moroder
screenplay by Paul Schrader
produced by Jerry Bruckheimer
directed by Paul Schrader
Rated R
I hr 53 mins
A hustler in Los Angeles believes that his independence is the most important thing, but a series of horrifying choices lead him into a trap that undoes all of the freedom he believes he’s earned.
Richard Gere is so fucking pretty.
I could leave it at that. The aesthetic surface of American Gigolo is slick, gorgeous, hyper-cool. Paul Schrader photographs Richard Gere as a sexual object, with absolutely no apology. That’s the point of the movie. Julian (Gere) has transformed himself into a fantasy, knowing the power that has when he walks into a room. No one could have played this quite the way Gere did, and part of the power of much of his earlier work comes from the feeling that you can’t trust a fucking thing he says. He seems to be nothing but surface, a mirror reflecting back desire because there’s no actual heart. It’s the eyes. Gere may say all the right things and make all the right moves, but those eyes are cold, always sizing up everyone else, always at a remove.
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