March 1980 brings weirdo comedies, Steve McQueen's swan song, Max gets mad, and a COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER

Plus way more Jan-Michael Vincent than you would expect for a single month

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…

MARCH 1980

John Wayne Gacy was found guilty of 33 charges of murder by a jury in Chicago.
On a Friday night, much of America was shocked to their core when J.R. was shot on Dallas. And in Washington, people scrambled for cover when Mount St. Helens
went active for the first time in 123 years.

When you’re nine years old, much of what you watch is determined by what your parents watch. I was lucky because my parents had the movie-going habit and they took us often. They would frequently take us to see things that were only marginally appropriate because they wanted to see them. They could be oddly lenient about ratings at times, but inconsistently so.

Coal Miner’s Daughter, for example? Big deal in my house for a variety of reasons. My parents were old-school country music fans, and Loretta Lynn was definitely part of the firmament. So was Sissy Spacek because of her work in Carrie, which my mom apparently loved. They not only took us to see this in the theater, but it also became a home-video staple in the house as soon as it became available.

When there was something aimed directly at a family audience, we took full advantage. My parents raised us in the Church of Disney, and many of my childhood memories from Florida revolve around Walt Disney World. At this point, my parents saw it as a big deal every time one of the animated classics was re-released, and we definitely took the opportunity to see Lady and the Tramp, one of the few super widescreen efforts from the animated team, on the biggest screen we could find.

To show you just how strange my moviegoing diet was at this point, the same month we went to see Lady and the Tramp, we also went to see Little Darlings. I have no idea how I talked them into it, but I remember I was the one who really wanted to see both of them. Tatum O’Neal was one of my first big movie crushes and I must have seen The Bad News Bears a half-dozen times by that point. I had some big questions for my parents afterward, especially since I was headed to sleepaway camp for the first time later that summer. My love of Bad News Bears backfired on me, though, when I went to see Little Miss Marker. I was just starting to assert my own sense of what I did or didn’t like and I wasn’t shy about it when I felt let down by a movie. I took it personally, like the filmmakers were trying to pull something off at my expense.

They didn’t take me to everything, though, and part of my film fandom at that age was just soaking up posters or reviews for things I wasn’t allowed to see. I can’t even explain the hold some of that artwork had on me. The Mad Max one-sheet was at the theater we went to most often, and they had it up for months. Every time we’d go, I’d stop and check it out, trying to imagine the film that went with it. The poster for Serial promised something wacky and dirty and it took me almost twenty years to see if the actual film was a letdown by comparison. At nine, I was still wrestling with my interest in horror films versus the intense way they worked on me, and I thought the poster for The Changeling was terrifying. I would avoid looking at it whenever I had to walk by it.

I heard “no” a lot this month, and this was about the time I started keeping lists. Lists of what I’d seen, lists of things I wanted to see, and lists of things to learn about before deciding which list to put something on. I found myself curious about anything my parents specifically went to see without us, and this month’s release of Tom Horn was clearly a big deal to my dad, even if I had no idea who McQueen was at this point. I was already a fan of Saturday Night Live, and I’d managed to see Foul Play with my parents, but they were very nervous about my budding fascination with grown-up comedy. I begged to see Gilda Live, but it was never really an option.

Some of these are films that only really became important to me later, and part of the fun of the VHS era was wandering shelves and picking stuff because of the box and discovering something even crazier than it looked like it could be. You can’t imagine what it’s like stumbling over The Visitor or Forbidden Zone with no warning whatsoever. It’s both deeply wonderful and utterly disconcerting. When I look at the diversity of the titles released this month, it only makes it feel more disheartening to see how homogenized today’s studio offerings really are.

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MARCH 7

The American Success Company
Jeff Bridges, Belinda Bauer, Ned Beatty, Steven Keats, Bianca Jagger, John Glover, Mascha Gonska, Michael Durrell, Eva Marie Meineke, Gunter Meisner, David Allen Brooks, Marie Bardischewski, Sebastian Baur, Peer Brensing, Judith Brown, Michael Burger, Andrew Burleigh, Claudia Butenuth, Peter Capell, Lloyd Catlett, Peter Cheslom, Conrad Dechert, Eunice Dechert
cinematography by Anthony B. Richmond
music by Maurice Jarre
screenplay by Larry Cohen
story by Larry Cohen and William Richert
produced by Daniel H. Blatt and Edgar J. Scherick
directed by William Richert
Rated PG
1 hr 31 mins

A young executive for a megalithic credit card company creates an alternative tough guy identity for himself to handle his boss, his wife, and his co-workers.

It took me quite a bit of energy to try to figure out how to sum up the overall oddity of this film in that synopsis line, and I think that’s an accurate description of the plot of the film. It doesn’t really convey how strange the movie is, though. Larry Cohen’s scripts from this era were mostly oddball genre efforts, movies that played as smarter-than-average exploitation. This is something very different, and Richert, who only made a handful of films, seems to be the kind of guy who is only truly satisfied when he’s bristling at authority.

The film went through a lot of hands before it landed with Richert, and I can’t help but wonder what the Peter Sellers version would have looked like. The film was made in Germany, and that may be part of what makes it feel so surreal. It’s a comedy, but very strange and dark and pointedly satirical, and the cast plays it real, which only makes it weirder. Jeff Bridges stars as Harry Flowers, and when he finally snaps from all of the disrespect and abuse he’s taking in his life, the personality he creates is a big bag of fascinating choices. He names himself Mack and he becomes a bully, a misogynist, a creep. But it makes sense when you see the world he lives in. He works for his father-in-law’s company, and it’s a disgusting, predatory exaggeration of a credit card company, designed to drive every customer to collections. Actually… did I say exaggerated? I mean “completely realistic even though this was 30 years ago.” When a tourist couple is trapped in Germany because they’ve overspent and their card gets cut off, Bridges tries to help them out, and it gets him in trouble. He doesn’t get any relief at home, either, because his wife is a freak who spends all her time in some strange haze, dancing or dressing up, and usually spending some significant time with a mirror.