May 1980 gives us Kubrick horror and the best STAR WARS film of all time

Plus Martin Sheen and Dennis Quaid in some oddball obscurities

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…

MAY 1980

The NBA delivered a major upset when Larry Bird was voted rookie of the year over Magic Johnson.
At the Cannes Film Festival, both All That Jazz and Kagemusha won the Palme d’Or.
Mt. St. Helen’s kept erupting while Love Canal, NY was evacuated,
and in the biggest disaster of all, Peter Criss quit the band Kiss.

There are certain moments from this decade that happened to me in movie theaters that left deep, permanent marks, and it’s not often two of them were in the same month.

Even before these two events, it was a good month of moviegoing for me. School was wrapping up for the year and I was counting down to my tenth birthday. May is always a big movie month for me. That’s when the first Star Wars came out, and it was the start of the still-new summer movie season. It always felt like a party they were throwing just for me.

Just to show you how frequently Disney sent classics back to theaters, not even a month after Lady and the Tramp was in theaters, we had the chance to see the practically-perfect-in-every-way Mary Poppins, a chance my parents happily took. We also made a beeline to Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown, as safe a brand as there was at that point. My younger sister was five years younger than me, so anything we went to as a family had to be suitable for a very young viewer, something I found frustrating on a regular basis. I was starting to get interested in the difference between grown-up movies and movies for kids, and I felt like once I hit double digits, I should have been able to watch films for adults.

I remember how hard it was to talk them into The Nude Bomb, and once we finally went, everyone was disappointed by how innocuous it was in different ways. The film was hugely important to me, and not because of the promised nudity, but because it featured a prolonged sequence on the Universal studio backlot tour. I didn’t care if the film was good or not; it was just amazing to me to get that glimpse of the tour and to see what the back lot looked like. It was much easier to talk my parents into talking me to see The Gong Show Movie, something we all regretted later.

The big moments that month were as big as any I’d had so far, and it’s interesting how each of the experiences marked me. My parents were well aware of Friday the 13th for some reason, and they were adamant that I was not going to get a chance to see it. My friend’s older brother saw it and recounted the entire film to us in explicit detail, inventing kill scenes that weren’t in the film and describing something so insane and pornographic that it is small wonder parents were afraid of it.

We had to travel that month for some reason, and while we were on the road, I saw the paperback for The Shining everywhere we went. It was the yellow movie tie-in edition, and it creeped me out deeply. One of the stops in our travel, my parents left us with an older teenage girl, the daughter of someone else who was there at the same conference or business trip or whatever it was. She was given money for food for us, and the adults went out for a full evening. The older girl knew full well what she wanted to do, and as soon as the adults were gone, we made a beeline for the theater that was across from the hotel.

I was not ready for the experience of The Shining in a movie theater. The soundtrack alone felt like an assault. But the entire thing was just so overwhelming, and at the same time, it was so interesting that I wanted to see it again immediately, hoping it might somehow rob the film of some of its power. I managed to keep the secret about having seen the film for a grand total of seven hours, spilling the beans at breakfast as I told my parents how amazing the movie was.

The film haunted me. For years, there were images and scenes that made regular appearances in my nightmare rotation, and yet I loved it immediately. There was something about how strange and alien the entire thing felt that appealed to me deeply, even if I couldn’t find the words for it at that time.

Meanwhile, I found plenty of words for The Empire Strikes Back. That’s all I talked about, and that’s pretty much all I cared about. Sure, I went to see some other movies that month, but that’s only because The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t open yet. The five or six days before the film actually opened, I was insane. I was pretty much out of my mind with anticipation, a new experience for me. I’d never seen a sequel to something that was so important to me, and it felt impossible that there was going to be more Star Wars. This was the start of me hunting down movie magazines, looking for every new still, desperate for information about the film. I bought the paperback version of the comic book adaptation, and I bought the Donald Glut novelization as well. And toys? Lord. There were so many toys, and for each one I did buy, there were at least five I couldn’t afford.

This was also the moment where the film actually measured up to the hype, something that was not always the case in the ‘80s. Empire wasn’t just good; Empire was so good it broke the franchise. Since May of 1980, every film in the saga has had to stand up to Empire, and it’s a brutal comparison. I feel lucky that I was turning ten just as the film came out. It felt like so much more than just a movie, and listening to audiences gasp at the big reveal about Darth Vader was something I’ll remember until I am old and gray.

Or more gray than I am now, anyway.

Finally, let me just say that looking at this line-up, this feels to me like the actual start of the decade. Up until now, everything’s been either left over from the ‘70s, just looking for a time when screens were available, or anchored firmly in the ‘70s in terms of identity. There were a few glimpses of this new emerging identity before now, like American Gigolo, but this month feels to me like a turning point. Friday the 13th is one of the defining franchises of the decade, and even now, whenever anyone makes a sequel, the way they hype it up is by calling it the Empire Strikes Back of the series. If Star Wars started to make the industry crazy in 1977, Empire is the moment they pushed everyone over the edge.

So keep that in mind as you read this month’s breakdown… we’ve been revving up to it until now, but here’s where we begin our journey through what I would absolutely call “the ‘80s.”

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MAY 2

Eagle’s Wing
Martin Sheen, Sam Waterson, Harvey Keitel, Stéphane Audran, John Castle, Caroline Langrishe, Jorge Russek, Manuel Ojeda, Jorge Luke, Pedro Damián, Claudio Brook, José Carlos Ruiz, Farnesio de Bernal, Cecilia Camacho, Enrique Lucero, Julio Lucena
cinematography by Billy Williams
music by Marc Wilkinson
screenplay by John Briley
story by Michael Syson
produced by Ben Arbeid
directed by Anthony Harvey
Rated PG
1 hr 51 mins

A Native American warrior and a fur trader find themselves locked in conflict over ownership of a beautiful white stallion.

While it is undeniably problematic to see Sam Waterston star as a Native American, by and large, Anthony Harvey’s Eagle’s Wing is an elegantly-directed, well-photographed Western that doesn’t seem terribly interested in the conventions of the genre. I’m not sure I’d call it “revisionist” so much as “oddball,” and that is to the film’s credit.

The film all hinges on the possession of a white stallion called Eagle’s Wing, with Martin Sheen playing a fur trader named Pike and Waterston playing White Bull, who is leading a war party on a series of raids. As the film opens, Sheen’s actually partnered with Harvey Keitel, but Keitel’s out of the film early. Thanks to a series of violent encounters, this beautiful white stallion keeps changing hands, and Pike and White Bull keep getting pulled into one another’s orbits. The structure of the film allows Harvey to drop into a number of small discrete scenarios, painting a broad portrait of the American West that isn’t focused on gunfights and good guys and bad guys. The primary performances here are both largely non-verbal, although the film opens with narration by Sheen, a bold choice a year after Apocalypse Now. Sheen talks to his horse a bit, but for the most part, the film unfolds with long stretches of purely physical work from both actors.

image courtesy of VCI Entertainment

There’s a lovely running subtext here about ownership and appropriation and the cycle of violence, and the score by Marc Wilkinson is rich and expressive. I love Billy Williams as a photographer, and he did some truly great work on films like Women In Love, Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Silent Partner, and The Wind and the Lion. There aren’t a ton of British Westerns, and maybe that’s why this film feels like it comes at the subject from such a particular place. The collaboration between Williams and director Anthony Harvey manages to paint an original portrait of the subject. That’s not easy in a genre as deeply mined as this one, but Eagle’s Wing manages to emerge as something unique by virtue of so many solid craftsmen working on such an inspired level.

Gorp
Michael Lembeck, Dennis Quaid, Philip Casnoff, Fran Drescher, David Huddleston, Robert Trebor, Richard Beauchamp, Julius Harris, Lisa Shure, Deborah Richter, Rosanna Arquette, Dale Robinette, Mark R. Deming, Curt Ayers, David Birnbrey, Steve Bonino, Vincent Bufano, Otis Day, Rudy Diaz, Douglas Dirkson, Judith Drake, Robert Elston, Jim Greenleaf, Shirley Gunther, Fred Hinds, Peter Marc Jacobson, Bill Kirchenbauer, John Reilly, Pete Robinson, Janet Sarno, Four Scott, Marla Silverman, Glenn Super
cinematography by Michel Hugo
music by Paul Dunlap
screenplay by Jeffrey Konvitz
story by Jeffrey Konvitz and A. Martin Zweiback
produced by Lou Arkoff and Jeffrey Konvitz
directed by Joseph Ruben
Rated R
1 hr 30 mins

Counselors and campers alike create mayhem for the owner of a Jewish summer camp.

Joseph Ruben was already four films deep into his filmography when he made Gorp, but you couldn’t prove it based on this ragged, raunchy mess. Clearly inspired by the success of Meatballs, Gorp is set at a Jewish summer camp. That’s the entire hook of the movie, too, because there’s nothing else to distinguish it from the entire shapeless blur of the summer camp genre. This was one of the final films released by American International Pictures, and it feels like it.