Paul Newman gets earnest to kick off February 1981
Plus we get very uncomfortable about a Peter Ustinov movie
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
Joseph Gordon Levitt and Paris Hilton were both born on the same day.
Frank Sinatra was finally cleared of longstanding charges that he had ties to organized crime, allowing him to once again operate a casino in Las Vegas.
And Richard Petty pulled off a stunning upset when he went from fifth place to win in what would become his final victory at the Daytona 500.
Part of this project is autobiography, and part of this project is encyclopedia.
That’s a weird combination. I want you to be able to take these newsletters and use them as an actual reference source regarding each and every film of the ‘80s, and I put a lot of work into making sure that the information here is accurate and that I give each film its due. However, part of the process of doing all this research and writing is a feeling of being unstuck in time. When you go through all of these things in the same context you first experienced them, it’s like you’re Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, wrapping yourself in the artifacts of an era so completely that you basically travel there.
I remember the beginning of 1981 vividly. As with January, I was still coasting on my love of some of the big Christmas releases. I was always desperate for new movies, and at this point, I was in that mode where I bought every movie novelization I saw, no matter what the film, which is why I read Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen before I saw the film. Why any normal ten-year-old would buy a novelization of that movie is beyond me, but I did, and I read it.
This was also the age where I started really bristling against the restrictions of movie ratings and I started getting sneaky as a result. There was a movie I really wanted to see in a theater this month and I ran an active campaign to get in. Again… if I had to tell you why ten-year-old Drew was intent on seeing American Pop, I couldn’t, but I was sure that all of my hopes and dreams depended on me getting into that theater for that movie. The best weapons I had at that point were the older brothers of some of my friends. They were willing to facilitate some of my more ambitious movie requests, but only if they were interested in the film. Getting them to go see a multi-generational look at the American immigrant experience seen through the prism of shifting genres in popular music was pretty much impossible, and the night I made my biggest push to make it happen, we ended up seeing My Bloody Valentine instead, which I paid for with several weeks of very bad dreams.
For the most part, this month was a non-starter, a warm-up for the movie year ahead. March always meant spring break, which meant a trip to my grandmother, and it always felt like March was packed with new releases. But at this point in the decade, the studios and the indies alike basically abandoned the first few months of the year to the kinds of films that had been collecting dust on shelves or that they knew simply didn’t come together. It’s a motley line-up, dented and weird and half-cooked, and we might as well jump in with the first weekend, which included the film version of that book I still can’t explain why I bought…
FEBRUARY 6
Cabo Blanco
Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Dominique Sanda, Fernando Rey, Simon MacCorkindale, Camilla Sparv, Gilbert Roland, Denny Miller, James Booth, Jorge Russek, Clifton James, Ernest Esparza III, José Chávez, Carlos Romano, Martin LaSalle, Conrad Hool, Stephen Peck, Manuel Martin, Aldo Sambrell, José Carlos Ruiz, Carlos Bravo, Anna De Sade, Pedro Damián, Gerardo Zepeda
cinematography by Alex Phillips Jr.
music by Jerry Goldsmith
screenplay by Mort Fine & Milton Gelman
story by James Granby Hunter & Milton Gelman
produced by Lance Hool and Paul A. Joseph
directed by J. Lee Thompson
Rated R
1 hr 27 mins
An American ex-pat living in Peru becomes embroiled in a hunt for Nazi treasure.
Charles Bronson stars as Giff Hoyt, an American who disappeared to a tiny village on the coast of Peru at the end of WWII, and if he had his way, he would stay completely off of everyone’s radar forever. At first, it seems like a promising fit for Bronson, but you expect Giff to eventually have to become the kind of man-of-action Bronson was known for playing. That’s not this movie, though, and I’m at a loss to imagine what it was that drew either Bronson or director J. Lee Thompson to this stiff.
Considering the set-up here, audiences would be forgiven for expecting something they don’t get. The title evokes Casablanca, and so do some of the choices regarding the village and the supporting cast, but there’s absolutely nothing about this that approaches that film’s stylish highs. I get wanting to make a throwback to that kind of big Hollywood dramatic thriller, but this cast never gels as an ensemble, and there’s absolutely no energy to any of this. You’ve got Fernando Rey as the corrupt local law and Jason Robards plays a Nazi official who retired with a bunch of stolen wealth to a big mansion. When a British ship sinks off the coast while looking for a legendary Nazi wreck that supposedly carried millions in gold, it is the opening shot in a flurry of (not quite) action all focused on finding all that German loot.
Dominique Sanda shows up, clearly searching for the treasure, and all the players who are already in Cabo Blanco begin to circle her, determined to uncover her secrets, especially if they’ve got something to do with the treasure. That sounds like it could be promising, but this thing just limps along. There’s no real chemistry or friction between Bronson and Rey or Bronson and Robards, and the film has no idea how to create any of that. The Mexican locations are fine, but it’s not an especially good-looking film, which seems to miss the entire point of shooting something like this on location in the first place. More than anything, trying to suggest some kind of kinship to one of Hollywood’s greatest films with your title when you’ve made a film this inert feels like hubris, not homage.
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
Peter Ustinov, Lee Grant, Angie Dickinson, Richard Hatch, Brian Keith, Roddy McDowall, Rachel Roberts, Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Ryan, Johnny Sekka, Bennett Ohta, David Hirokane, Karlene Crockett, Michael Fairman, James Ray, Momo Yashima, Kael Blackwood, Jerry Loo, Laurence Cohen, Robin Hoff, Kathie Kei, James Bacon, Frank Michael Liu, John Hugh, George Chiang, David Chow, Alison Hong, Dewey Yee, Joe Bellan, Garrick Huey, Duane Tucker, Don Parker, John J. Fox, Kenneth Snell, Nicholas Gunn, Don Murray, Kai J. Wong, Miya, Gerald Okamura, Lonny Carbajal, Peter Michas, Vic Hunsberger, Larry Duran, Kay Kimler, James Winburn, Molly Roden, Pavla Ustinov, Trevor Hook, Paul Sanderson
cinematography by Paul Lohmann
music by Patrick Williams
screenplay by Stan Burns & David Axlerod
story by Jerry Sherlock
produced by Jerry Sherlock
directed by Clive Donner
Rated PG
1 hr 35 mins
The iconic detective is called back into action to solve a series of baffling murders with the help of his bumbling grandson.
Before we even get into the Peter Ustinov of it all, here’s a question: would this movie be entirely fixed simply by casting an Asian actor in the role of Charlie Chan?
The answer is a resounding no. This is a broken movie at every level, and the profound racial insensitivity of the various choices made by the filmmakers are only part of the problem. The real question here is why are you bringing the character back? What opportunity is there to tell a story that makes canny or interesting use of this icon that is, by the time they started production on this film, decades past its prime? It’s the kind of question that anyone who is trying to revitalize a long-dormant property should ask themselves before they do it. The producers here weren’t sure if they were making an homage or a parody, and those two things don’t necessarily work in tandem.
Ustinov was more of a character actor than a movie star, but he was having a moment right around this point in time. He had just played Hercule Poirot for the first time, and maybe that was the thinking when producers hired him to play Charlie Chan. He gives the exact performance Clive Donner hired him to give, and it is indeed wildly, almost breathtakingly racist. I don’t think it’s malicious, but that kind of casual “we didn’t mean any harm” racism is still kind of remarkable to behold. Charlie Chan is the smartest, most capable person in the film, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still incredibly insulting to listen to Ustinov’s pidgin English and the kindest description of his make-up would be “unfortunate.”
The film is actually largely focused on his grandson Lee, played by Richard Hatch, who is determined to become a great detective just like his grandfather, and the big joke is that Lee is a total klutz. Both his grandmother (Lee Grant) and his fiancee Cordelia (Michelle Pfeiffer) support Lee, even though he’s a walking disaster zone. Roddy McDowall has a major supporting role, and it’s grim stuff watching him run through Donner’s shoddy idea of slapstick set pieces. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better during her brief time onscreen. If you thought the opening scene of Superman III was the height of ‘80s comedy, then I think you’ll love what Clive Donner’s putting down here, but considering his film right before this was The Nude Bomb, I’m pretty much allergic to his entire idea of funny.
Fort Apache the Bronx
Paul Newman, Edward Asner, Ken Wahl, Danny Aiello, Rachel Ticotin, Pam Grier, Kathleen Beller, Tito Goya, Miguel Pinero, Jamie Tierelli, Lance Guecia, Rony Clanton, Clifford David, Sully Boyar, Michael Higgins, Rik Colitti, Irving Metzman, Frank Adu, John Aquino, Norman Matlock, John Ring, Tony DeBenedetto, Terence Brady, Randy Jurgensen, Marvin Cohen, Paul Gleason, Reynaldo Medina, Daryl Edwards, Donald Petrie, Thomas A. Carlin, Frederick Allen, Dominic Chianese, Mike Cicchetti, Apu Guecia, Kim Delgado, Reyno, Dadi Pinero, Cleavant Derricks, Dolores Hernández, Santos Morales, Ruth Last, José Rabelo, Gilbert Lewis, Lisa Loomer, Sandi Franklin, Eric Mourino, Jessica Costello, Gloria Irizarry, Manuel E. Santiago, Joaquin La Habana, Frederick Strother, Sylvia Kuumba Williams, Patricia Dratel, Thomas Fiorello
cinematography by John Alcott
music by Gary Green and Jonathan Tunick
screenplay by Heywood Gould
based on the experiences of Thomas Mulhearn and Pete Tessitore
produced by Martin Richards
directed by Daniel Petrie
Rated R
2 hrs 5 mins
Two cops in one of New York’s roughest neighborhoods try to find a way to genuinely do good in a broken system.
Our first Daniel Petrie movie of the decade was Resurrection, which was the beginning of a creative rebound for him. A Raisin in the Sun was a strong early entry in his filmography, but he labored in obscurity for a good chunk of the ’60s and early ‘70s. Resurrection is an odd film but it earned some awards attention and it gave Petrie a boost in the industry overall.
This was a hot project when Petrie signed on, but by the time Fox put it out, it had become a huge publicity headache for them. Residents of the areas depicted in the film disrupted and protested the production, and the studio felt compelled to add a disclaimer to the start of the film to try to placate them. Beyond that, the origins of this film were controversial thanks to a lawsuit filed post-release by Tom Walker, a police officer who wrote about his time at the 41st precinct and published it as Fort Apache in 1976. He was convinced the producers of the film used his book as source material and sued them, eventually losing his case because the court ruled that the situations that the film and the book had in common were “too stereotypical” to be considered cause for action.
That is not a compliment, and it is about as concise a review of the film as you might need. Paul Newman and Ken Wahl star as Murphy and Corelli, two officers in the 41st Precinct, and for a good stretch of its running time, the film is like a slightly more R-rated episode of Hill Street Blues, a slice of life look at this bombed-out section of New York. Clearly, not everyone living in the Bronx was a criminal, and not every neighborhood in the city was dealing with the same degree of gang activity or drug dealing or unemployment or garbage. But when you look at movies shot in the city at that time, movies like this or Wolfen or My Bodyguard or Times Square or Maniac or any of a dozen others, what you see is so authentically and catastrophically seedy that it’s amazing that the city survived. Considering how real the locations are, it’s frustrating to see the way the script leans on cliché so heavily. Ed Asner plays a new captain assigned to clean up the notoriously dangerous precinct, and tensions eventually build to a sustained riot sequence, during which Murphy and Corelli witness a murder by several cops.
Rachel Ticotin does nice work with a disappointingly written role as a junkie nurse who Murphy’s dating. There’s a subtle version of their story that would have deserved the work that Ticotin’s doing here, but this isn’t it. I get the idea of what Newman’s playing as Murphy gradually starts to question the idea of the blue code, but the script never figures out how to make the moral outrage dramatically interesting or engaging. There’s something pedantic about the film, and it feels like it is only pretending to be character driven. People do things because of the plot or to make thematic points, but not because they are behaving like actual people. Murphy’s asked to carry too much, too many different moral crises in one film, and it makes it feel silly instead of sincere. Pam Grier does interesting work, but again, the script isn’t as good as she is.
By the time they get to the moment where Newman has to deliver a baby, I find myself rolling my eyes, annoyed by the weird dissonance between the patently phony and the honestly observed. It ends on a truly goofy note, and there’s little about it that actually sticks. Newman’s good, but he’s doing all the heavy lifting here, and the few things the film gets right aren’t worth sitting through this much familiar and fake.
Our next weekend is a doozy. Six movies and they’re all over the place. Do you want to see young William Hurt in his second movie throwing heat at young Sigourney Weaver? You want to see that Ralph Bakshi film I couldn’t convince anyone to take me to see? How about a gnarly slasher film or young Chris Walken at his spookiest? I’ve got you covered.
All you have to do is be back here in five days as we continue with February 1981…
Was My Bodyguard a New York movie? I thought it was Chicago...