Newman plays cop, Bakshi gets ambitious, and Jamie Lee Curtis heads down under in 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…

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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?