The Boners: Volume Two

Tommy Smothers, Lee Majors and... Elvis Presley?!

You guys seemed to respond well to volume one of this grab-bag of titles that were left out of the initial emails sent to you when covering 1980 and 1981. There are six more films that I missed, and again, it’s a very strange assortment of things.

As a critic, I am most interested in context, setting a film into the proper framework so that you can judge it not in a vacuum but as part of a larger living, breathing ongoing conversation that is cinema. And, yeah, that’s a big word to use for some of these movies, but part of doing this project the right way is approaching all of these films equally. In rewatching everything in order, grouped the way they were grouped on release, you do see a larger story emerge. You watch the way success ripples through the years around it, and the same is true of failure. You watch careers rise and fall or sputter out before they really take off. I’ll always happily go back to correct a mistake in this newsletter because it means that the final version, the one that exists at the end of all of this, will be the best-researched and most comprehensive online resource about the film of the 1980s.

After all, if there’s something you wish you could read and it doesn’t exist, it’s up to you to make it happen.

Your ongoing support of this newsletter is an important part of the process, too, and if you aren’t already subscribed, it really does make a difference. Help me make it to the end of the decade this time.

That said, let’s jump right in with a movie that posed a difficult marketing problem for a distributor that believed wholeheartedly that they had a hit on their hands…

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1980

OCTOBER 31

Touched By Love
Deborah Raffin, Diane Lane, Michael Learned, John Amos, Cristina Raines, Mary Wickes, Clu Gulager, Twyla-Dawn Vokins, Clive Shalom, Jason Bates, Joseph John Bondok, Beverly Chapman, Jennifer Collins, Cathy Corns, Rhonda De John Hanif Mawji, Robbie Olisoff, Melissa Quigg, Darren Taylor, Sharlene Taylor, Darren Wall, Carla Wildeman, Gordon Bullivant, Darrel Beingessner, May Brackenbury, Lluella Dickson, Patti Gunther, Ruth Harwig, Margaret Kuyt, Juane Priest, Dorothy Shalom
cinematography by Richard H. Kline
music by John Barry
screenplay by Hesper Anderson
based on the book To Elvis With Love by Lena Canada
produced by Michael Viner
directed by Gus Trikonis
Rated PG
1 hr 35 mins

A new therapist starts working with a troubled girl and makes important breakthroughs, eventually helping the girl become pen-pals with Elvis Presley.

Deborah Raffin’s relatively thin theatrical filmography seemed to consist primarily of films that distributors weren’t sure what to do with.

We’ll get to the very strange Dance of the Dwarfs later, but as the decade began, she was on the cusp of actual movie stardom, and this movie was supposed to be the vehicle that took her there. Based on a memoir by Lena Canada, Touched by Love tells the true story of a therapist working at a school for disabled children who helps a girl with severe cerebral palsy connect to the outside world, in part through a pen-pal relationship with Elvis Presley. Raffin stars as Lena, and Diane Lane plays Karen, the teenage girl who Lena helps. It is a treacly movie, but it’s impossible to be upset by it. The film means well, and Raffin gives it everything she’s got. Raffin was a model first, but when her TV movie Nightmare in Badham County became an overseas theatrical hit, she had a moment of almost stardom. Touched by Love was her biggest shot at movie stardom, and it pretty much bounced right off the box office, even after she was sent to do one of the first major press tours for a movie by a Western star in China, where Badham County was a phenomenon.