Movie Reviews - 1980s posts

A confused man walks out of the American desert. How did he come to this state? That's a driving force of the film.

WARNING: SPOILERS

How long has it been since I’ve seen this film? This long: I thought it was the one where Nastassja Kinski was married to John Savage. That’s “Maria’s Lovers.” This is the one where she’s married to Harry Dean Stanton.

The confusion makes some sense. Both are independent films, released in 1984, from foreign directors. Andrey Konchalovsky, a Russian, directed “Maria’s Lovers” while here it’s Wim Wenders of Germany. That might make a good filmfest, by the way: movies set in America, with American actors, directed by foreigners.

A lot of “Paris, Texas” went over my head when I first saw it in 1984. It’s a story of a crazy, maddening love, and I hadn’t experienced my own crazy, maddening love yet. It’s about a responsible man trying to save his ne’er-do-well brother, and that would’ve fallen on deaf ears for me back then. Now it resonates too deeply. 

I’d forgotten it won the Palme d’Or. I’d forgotten it was written by Sam Shepard—though much of the dialogue seems improvised. Watching it the other night at SIFF Egyptian, a 4K rerelease on its 40th anniversary, I kept liking it, and liking it, and then Nastassja Kinski shows up looking more beautiful than any woman has a right to … and it kind of dragged for me. Apparently Shepard was on set and adapting the story as it went along but he couldn’t be there for the final scenes in Houston. It shows.

Red cap, shirt, car, sweater
Does the opening resonate more in 2024 than in 1984? Out of the American desert, a confused man emerges wearing a suit and a bright red baseball cap. Unlike most of the MAGA crowd, though, this guy is all but mute. (Stanton doesn’t say anything for the first half hour.) He collapses, is revived by a doctor, keeps going. He’s not so much wandering as making a beeline for something and somewhere.

From the scraps of paper on his person, the man who revives him, the Pennsylvania Dutch-looking Dr. Ulmer (Austrian actor Bernhard Wicki), calls his brother, Walt (Stockwell), in LA, who flies out to get him. His wife Anne (French actress Aurore Clement) asks what they should she tell their son. Walt says to say he’s away on business but the wife nixes that idea. Then just tell him the truth, Walt says. It takes a while for this conversation to make sense.

When Walt arrives at the makeshift desert hospital, which looks like a sad little motel, his brother Travis has already flown the coop and Walt is left to pay for his belongings. Then he tracks him down in the desert—no mean feat. Then he coaxes him into the car. He goes to buy him clothes but Travis bolts again. One wonders what Travis is thinking. Does he just need to keep moving? Away from his past maybe?

This scenario repeats itself several times: Walt as responsible but exasperated adult, Travis as blinking, innocent troublemaker. They’re going to fly to LA but Travis suddenly can’t stand being in an airplane. They’re going to drive but Travis wants the exact same rental car they had before. Eventually they make LA, where Travis is greeted warmly by Anne and warily by their son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, son of co-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and actress Karen Black). Hunter turns out to be Travis’ son.

The middle of the movie is whether father and son can reconnect. There’s a heartbreaking scene where Travis waits on the corner opposite Hunter’s school to walk him home, but Hunter is with a friend, is embarrassed by the old man, and gets into a car with his friend. When admonished by his parents, he says “Nobody walks.”

Eventually he warms to the old man. The family watches Super 8 footage of all of them, plus Hunter’s mom, Jane (Kinski), from a trip five years earlier. Despite the difference in ages (35 years separate the actors) and looks (he’s normal, she’s Nastassja Kinski), Jane and Travis seem in love. Everyone seems so happy. So what happened? How did he become the confused dude in the red cap in the desert? That’s the question we wonder throughout. It’s like the shark beneath the surface in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”

I assume Anne tells Travis about the money they’ve been receiving from Jane—via a bank in Houston—because she’s worried they’ll lose Hunter and she wants to push Travis toward Jane. It works, but not in the way she wants. Now Hunter wants to go with him—and does. And the camera follows them. And we don’t see Walt and Anne again. Shame. Something goes out of the movie when they go out of the movie.

The bank in Houston turns out to be a drive-thru, but they know the day she makes her deposits and stake it out, with walkie-talkies, like kids in a caper. The red of his cap reappears in the red shirts father and son wear, and in the red compact car Jane drives. They follow it to a sketchy section of town.

I’ll cut to the chase: She works at a peep show, like in the Madonna video “Open Your Heart,” where men watch women in different fantasy outfits and settings (nurse, waitress), the women can’t see them, and the men talk through a phone. Travis orders up a blonde with short hair, gets the nurse, tries another booth, and bingo, there she is. He asks several halting questions, she attempts to take off her sweater and he stops her, then leaves. At his earliest convenience, he goes to a bar. Hunter tells him he reeks and walks out. The kid is the adult in the room.

But Travis returns to the peep show, gets Jane again, and this time, without specifically telling her who he is, he tells her who he is. This is the moment we’re supposed to get the shark from “Jaws” but it turns out to be a big fish. He relays a story about a man so crazy in love with a woman that he couldn’t leave her alone to go to work, so he kept quitting his jobs, and then getting another when he needed money again. Over and over. Then he began to drink, and get mean, and he tied a cowbell to her ankle so he’d always know where she was. And it’s a long, drawn-out monologue. And throughout, there’s a dawning look of realization on her face. Then it’s her turn for a long drawn-out monologue. The climax of their intermingling stories is when he wakes up and finds himself on fire. She’d set fire to their trailer home and left with the boy. And in a way he remained on fire. How she began working in a peep show, who knows.

It's an ending that peters out. The mystery was better as a mystery.

Widening gyre
You’ve got to hand it to those Henderson brothers, though. They look like Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell but somehow managed to land Nastassja Kinski and Aurore Clement. Nice work, boys. 

As a 61-year-old—older Harry Dean in the movie—I liked it better than I did as a 21-year-old, and Wenders has some nice moments in those peep show rooms, where Trevor’s face is silhouetted by her head, and vice-versa. I like the detail of the exposed insulation on the woman’s side of the one-way mirror, too.

But it’s not top-tier for me the way it is for some. I’m remembering this period now. I was coming of age into a time when popcorn movies became a little dumber, and important movies became a little more boring. That center, where we’d get a good movie with a story that resonated, wasn’t holding.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Most critics at the time, Dad included, wrote that Neil Simon’s “Seems Like Old Times” was an homage to screwball comedies of the 1940s. The plot specifically recalls the 1942 Cary Grant vehicle “Talk of the Town”: falsely accused man hiding in the home of a judge about to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court—that old gag—except in the updated version the guy is hiding in the home of his ex-wife whose husband is in the running for attorney general of California. The ex-wife, a public defender, winds up repping the man in court while hubby prosecutes him. So toss in “Adam’s Rib.”

It was a true tribute to those old movies, Dad wrote, because it stunk: “Watching it makes us long for the original, most of all when Chevy Chase is trying to be Cary Grant.”

Yeah, it’s not a good movie. It actually reminded me less of 1940s screwball comedies than 1960s sitcoms—particularly “Bewitched”: Oh no, the boss is coming over to dinner and … you know, chaos. Followed by flustered attempt to keep the chaos in the kitchen. 

Dogs + minorities
This is one of those rare Neil Simon-penned screenplays written straight for the screen rather than adapted from one of his plays. So it’s odd that most of the action takes place in one location. We can’t get away from the home of Glenda and Ira Parks (Goldie Hawn and Charles Grodin). Odder? That’s its main problems—that we don’t leave there. Or that he doesn’t leave there.

Nick Gardenia (Chase) is a writer staying at a friend’s home along the California coast when he’s kidnapped one afternoon by two men who force him to rob a bank. Why do they pick Nick? Never answered. But he’s photographed by bank cameras, has a drug charge against him already, and goes on the lam.

Why does he pick his ex-wife’s house to hole up in? Because he’s injured and it’s nearby? Or because he knows she has a thing for strays?

Her strays include dogs (the family has six) and former clients (the family has three). Chester (T.K. Carter) acts as chauffeur while Thomas and Robert (Joseph Runningox and Ray Tracey) are … gardeners? I forget. Is it problematic that the people strays are people of color? Dad thought so. “The film is full of stereotypes—Indian car thieves, uppity blacks—that seem designed to show that charity is wasted on undeserving minorities,” he wrote in 1980. Oh, and the Hispanic maid, Aurora (Yvonne Wilder), disappears just when the governor is coming to dinner for her famous chicken pepperoni dish. You can’t count on these people for anything. 

But the movie's biggest problem is Chase. Nick never has our sympathies because he seems less terrified man on the lam than privileged SOB poking at other privileged SOBs while trying to get into his ex-wife’s pants. “He seems to have two basic schtiks,” Dad wrote: “a dopey-looking deadpan that barely conceals a smirk, and a propensity for pratfalls, including one tumble down the side of a California cliff.” And most of these pratfalls are now done by stuntmen.

For some reason, we’re supposed to cheer him on. He’s the star, Glenda’s current husband is uptight, so we’re supposed to want her to wind up with Chase. We don’t. I didn’t anyway. Watching, I begged Neil not to do it.

Does he? Well, first there’s a trial before Judge John Channing (Harold Gould), who can’t fathom how interconnected everything is. Then it becomes more so. Those two bank robbers? They try the same stunt with Aurora but don’t get far, so they’re in the courtroom, too, and confess to doing the same thing to Nick. Freed! Outside, Nick kisses his counsel, long and slow, in front of Ira, leaving her dazed. Then Glenda and Ira are heading out on vacation, it starts to rain, he crashes the car to avoid a cow and breaks his leg, she runs through the rain to a cabin. The door opens and she smiles. The End.

If that’s Nick, that’s a helluva coincidence. Also: ick.

Old shtik
“Old Times” is the first and only feature film directed by Jay Sandrich, who came to prominence directing some of the most beloved sitcoms of the ’70s and ’80s: “Mary Tyler Moore” (119 episodes), “Soap” (54 eps.) and “The Cosby Show” (100 eps.). There’s hardly a sitcom during this period he didn’t touch, and he seemed happy doing them, so why did he do this? Who knows. But you get why he didn’t do it again. Reviews were meh, and while box-office wasn’t bad ($44 million, 15th for the year), both stars, that same year, appeared in movies much more acclaimed, lucrative and long-lived: for Hawn, “Private Benjamin,” which grossed $70 million, sixth-best in 1980, and garnered Goldie her only lead actress nomination; and for Chase, “Caddyshack,” where his smirky rich-guy persona fit in better.

At this point, Simon was coming off some of the best years a writer can imagine. He’d been nominated for Oscars in 1975 (“The Sunshine Boys”), 1977 (“The Goodbye Girl”), and 1978 (“California Suite”), which coincided with being nominated for Tonys about every other year since the late ’60s. He was hot. And then not. On Broadway, he’d still do “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers,” and on television “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but he never got another Oscar nom, and his movie output became increasingly less relevant and popular: “Only When I Laugh” ($25m, 31st for the year), “I Ought to Be in Pictures” ($7m, 80th), and “The Slugger’s Wife” ($1.8m, 143rd). I didn’t even know “Slugger’s Wife” was his.

Only two years separate “Old Times” and the original Hawn-Chase team-up, “Foul Play,” but that one felt very ’70s while you can almost taste the coming Reagan years in this one. The ’70s smart ass was still the hero, but nonsensically. His shtik was old and there was work to be done.

Here's Dad’s review. 

WARNING: SPOILERS 

After watching the Steve Martin doc a few months back, I wanted to revisit some of his movies and this seemed a good place to start. With the deep dive I’ve been doing into old films, I assumed I’d recognize more of the clips than I did back in the early 1980s when I first saw it. And I do … it’s just fewer than expected. It doesn’t help that the movie is a spoof of the 1940s hardboiled detective genre rather than ’30s gangster, and that it’s Universal rather than Warner Bros. But we still get Cagney and Bogie. Several Bogies, actually. 

Martin plays a private detective named Rigby Reardon. At first glance, that seems an odd spoof on the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes of the world, but there’s a method to it. In “The Bribe,” Robert Taylor played a man named Rigby, and in “The Killers” Edmond O’Brien played an insurance investigator named Reardon, and both movies keep showing up here—particularly “The Bribe,” which includes the island of Carlotta, which is key to everything. So: Rigby Reardon.

But Martin is kind of wrong for the role, isn’t he? At the time, he was known as a wild-and-crazy guy, but subsequent roles, not to mention time, have revealed him to be its opposite: more lonely guy than anything. He’s a man who yearns to be in love. He's not hard-boiled at all. He's soft-boiled. He's runny inside. 

He’s also very, very right for the role. Because he’s very, very funny.

Tie-less
Example: When Alan Ladd shoots at him, Martin contorts his body, over-dramatically, to dodge the bullet, and I burst out laughing. I don't see anyone else doing it that way.

Some of my favorite moments are interactions Martin has with the classic movie stars—where he needles them in by-the-way fashion: telling Bogart to put on a tie rather than that “dumb way of wearing your shirt buttoned”; offering Alan Ladd a cookie and then seeing him nibble one in the clip: “Good, aren’t they?” Or this exchange with Charles Laughton at a tropical bar:

Laughton: We know who you are, Mr. Rigby.
Martin: I'm interested. Who am I?
Laughton: You could be a guy who collects 10,000 dollars just to leave this stinking town.
Martin: I could, could I?
Laughton: You know who I could be?
Martin: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame?

The plot is as convoluted as any plot in the genre—just slightly sillier.

Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward at her va-va-voomiest) shows up at Rigby’s office with a low-slung Ingrid Bergman hat and her low-slung voice. Her father, Dr. John Forrest (George Gaynes of “Tootsie”), “philanthropist and noted cheesemaker,” is dead, and she thinks it’s murder. In Dr. Forrest’s lab, Rigby finds two lists—Friends of Carlotta and Enemies of Carlotta—and an autographed photo of the singer Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). But then Alan Ladd pulls a gun on him and takes the list. Ah, but some of the same names are scrawled on a dollar bill left on the underside of a cookie jar at “Lost Weekend” Ray Milland’s place.

The movie keeps doing that. At one point, Rigby tracks down Kitty Collins, and we get the brooch-in-the-soup bit from “The Killers,” as well as the death of Burt Lancaster’s Swede Anderson from same. There’s stuff about a cruise ship, Juliet keeps showing up, and after trying to get several blondes (including Veronica Lake) to meet Fred MacMurray at the “Double Indemnity” grocery store, Rigby goes in drag.

Recurring bits: Rigby keeps getting shot in the arm, and he goes nuts when he hears the words “cleaning woman.” It’s a bit tired, but winds up essential to the plot.

The deus-ex-machina comes from Rigby’s mentor, the tie-less Marlowe (Bogie), who tells him that Carlotta isn’t a woman but a place—an island off the coast of Peru. There, he finds Dr. Forrest alive but held captive by Field Marshall VonKluck (writer-director Carl Reiner) and his band of renegade Nazis, who want his top secret cheese mold for bomb-making. One bomb goes off, eliminating Terre Haute, Indiana, which made me flash on Steve Martin’s “feud” with the city; and just when all seems lost, Juliet gets VonKluck to say “cleaning woman” and Rigby cleans their clocks.

Kinda fun, kinda clever, kinda meh. 

Further removed
There’s some good lines: “I planned to kiss her with every lip on my face.” And I loved Ward’s parody of Lauren Bacall’s famous whistle line:

If you need me, just call. You know how to dial, don't you? You just put your finger in the hole and make tiny little circles.

You know who really made me laugh? Reni Santoni as Carlos Rodriguez, the police officer Rigby meets in Carlotta. That whole pyjamas thing. Maybe the movie needed fewer ’40s clips? Here’s what in it:

After this, Reiner and Martin would team up on a spoof of ’50s schlock-horror, “The Man With Two Brains,” and it kinda was meh, too, and I’m wondering if Reiner was attempting his own series of genre satires the way Mel Brooks did with westerns, horror, silent, etc. Either way, it was the next Reiner-Martin collaboration, “All of Me,” where Martin finally broke through with both critics and audience.

The most dated aspects of the film, interestingly, aren’t the classic clips but the Martin-Ward “present.” When Juliet first arrives in his office, for example, she faints, and wakes up to Rigby molesting her. He claims her breasts shifted out of whack and he was merely adjusting them. The funny part is when he holds up his hands, as if in anticipation of them tumbling again, and says “There,” but today we wouldn’t get to the funny part. None of it would fly. All of which underscores the fact that we are now further removed from “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (42 years) than “Dead Men” was from the oldest film it used (41 years).

Va-va-voomiest

WARNING: SPOILERS

Apparently this is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite movies. Back in the day, it was one of three movies he’d show women to see if it might work out between them.

Quentin: It never would’ve worked out between us.

Twoish?
I’ve watched “Blow Out” three or four times now, but my opinion is the same as when I saw it in theaters in 1981. It’s got beautiful shots, great atmosphere, a star turn from John Travolta, and a political thriller plot that mixes elements of the JFK assassination and Chappaquiddick into a storyline that’s basically “Blow Up” for sound engineers. It should work.

But it’s just too stupid.

We get competence from nobody: cops, newsmen, our hero. Even Burke, the superefficient assassin (John Lithgow), keeps screwing up. Doesn’t he have Sally (Nancy Allen) on the waterfront, with no one around, and suddenly he’s dragging her up the stairs overlooking the Liberty Bell Parade in downtown Philadelphia? Why? For the American flag backdrop? Or to give our hero a chance to regroup, since, like an idiot, he drove his jeep maniacally through the parade, crashed into a window display in slow motion and knocked himself out? For how long—10 minutes? Half hour? Long enough, anyway, for EMTs to extricate him and put him in an ambulance and hook him to an IV. And in that entire time, the assassin, whom we’ve seen kill two girls in seconds takes forever to kill Sally. Oh, and he only killed the first girl because he thought she was Sally—so he screwed up right from the start. Oh no, I’m stuck in a Hitchcockian/De Palmian nightmare-scape full of sexy doppelgangers! Should’ve been his first clue. 

The whole movie is framed around incompetence. It begins as a movie-within-a-movie, a low-budget slasher skinflick called “Co-Ed Frenzy” in which our point-of-view is the slasher spying on girls dancing in nighties, masturbating and fucking, until he finally gets to the girl alone in the shower, raises his long hunting knife, and she screams. Kinda. It’s a weak scream. It dribbles out. The sound man, Jack (Travolta), laughs, the producer (Peter Boyden) says we need to fix it, and it becomes this film’s running gag. The producer auditions three girls who don’t cut it. We see two girls pulling each other’s hair trying to dub it. And at the very end what does Jack use? The very thing that haunts him: Sally’s scream as she’s about to be killed by Burke. It’s the oddest of endings: shoehorning horror and tragedy into the running gag. Is it supposed to be funny? Poignant? It just lands sideways. It dribbles out.

It also means that these low-budget filmmakers can’t get a girl to scream right in a slasher flick. WTF? Jack has reels and reels of sounds but none for a scream? Better, after the screw-up is revealed, what is the producer’s directive to Jack? I didn’t like the wind noises you used. Get me more wind noises. Sure thing, Godard. So that’s why Jack is standing outside recording sounds when we get the titular blow out.

Is the incompetence purposeful? A feature rather than a bug? Because it’s everywhere. The highly placed political enemies of Gov. George McRyan, the man poised to be the next president of the United States, decide to catch him in flagrante, so they hire … local scumbag Manny Karp (Dennis Franz)? Then one of their members, Burke, goes rogue with his assassination idea. 

We do get one bright, shining moment of competence. A local anchorman, Frank Donahue (Curt May), does some digging and discovers that: 1) Jack thinks McRyan’s tire was shot out, and 2) Jack has a recording of it. Hey, Donahue got all the facts right! And he’s ready to listen to the story Jack has been trying to tell for half the movie! So of course, at this point, Jack pushes Donahue away. And when Jack finally decides to talk to him, it’s now Donahue's turn to be an idjit. This is his actual quote: “Great. Look, can I give you a call this afternoon sometime?” Think about that for two seconds. You’re a reporter tracking down evidence that the next president of the United States was assassinated, and one guy is ready to give it all to you, and your response is: “Twoish?”

But of course it allows Burke to do his Burke thing. Which leads to more incompetence. Burke, pretending to be Donahue, sets up a meeting with Sally (to kill her), Jack doesn’t like the smell of it, so he calls Donahue back to check on the details. Kidding, that makes too much sense. Instead, suspecting Donahue, he puts a wire on Sally so they’ll get the exchange on tape. “This is just like the police incident that turned me into a guilt-ridden hack, but let’s give it another go.” Meanwhile, waiting to kill Sally, Burke passes the time by killing another hooker. I guess he’s establishing a fact-pattern for the cops. Or writer-director Brian De Palma had a few more Hitchockian homages he just had to give us.

And after all of this incompetence, do you know who, besides Jack, is left standing? Dennis Franz. A true testament to our world. 

Loose ends
If none of this bothers you, I get why you’d like “Blow Out.” I love the gritty location shots around Philly, Travolta’s Sweathog charisma, Lithgow’s low-key villainy, the split-screens, the beautiful foregrounding profiles (owl, Travolta). But the other stuff bothers me too much. I also don’t dig Nancy Allen’s Sally. Apparently she envisioned her character as a rag doll? It shows.

I’ve long had a problem with movies—like “12 Monkeys”—where, when the male hero is shot down, the story basically ends. Everything the girl knows is about to die if the bad guy gets away, but no, cry at the body of the hero instead. Well, this is the other side of the same coin. Everything is about saving the girl, and when she dies, that’s all, folks. The cops conclude that Sally killed Burke while being strangled from behind by Burke. But is the story over? Donahue, you assume, would still be interested in the story—more so now that Sally has died. Manny Karp lives. And shouldn’t all of them be worried for their lives? Aren’t they all still loose ends?

Instead: “It’s a good scream. A good scream.” The ending that dribbles out.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Every once in a while I give this movie another shot because I want it to to work, it feels like it should work, and everyone else seems to think it works. It’s got a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.3 on IMDb, and in 2006 Premiere magazine voted it one of the 50 greatest comedies of all time.

So we watched it again the other night.

It doesn’t work.

Welcome back, Palumbo
It’s a great idea. In 1954, comedy writer Mel Brooks tries to keep fallen movie star Errol Flynn in line and away from booze and women so he can appear on the hit weekly series “Your Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar. Look at that. How fun should that be? And it was Brooks himself who suggested the story—Brooks at or near his comedic heights.

It's a roman a clef, of course: Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) tries to keep fallen movie idol Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole) away from women and booze so he can appear on the hit weekly series “Comedy Cavalcade” with King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna).

And it’s not funny enough. Linn-Baker isn’t funny enough for someone playing Brooks, Bologna isn’t funny enough for someone playing Caesar, and the movie, from first-time director Richard Benjamin, often goes too big to make up for its lack. 

Is the script not funny enough? It’s written by Norman Steinberg, whose name is on “Blazing Saddles” but not much else—a crapfest of ’80s comedies that didn’t work: “Wise Guys,” “Johnny Dangerously,” “Funny About Love.” His co-writer is Dennis Palumbo, who did ’70s sitcoms that didn’t work: “The McLean Stevenson Show,” “Flying High,” “Flatbush.” At one point, the showrunner Sy Benson (Bill Macy) tells his writers “Up your hole with a Mello Roll,” and I was like, “What’s that a riff off again? Oh right, ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’ Nose/rubber hose.” Palumbo wrote for that, too.

OK, the screenplay is definitely lacking. The cute girl, K.C. (Jessica Harper), asks Benjy if there are funny and not-funny people, and he says definitely, and divides the world thus:

On the funny side there are the Marx Brothers, except Zeppo; the Ritz Brothers, no exceptions; both Laurel and Hardy; and Woody Woodpecker. On the unfunny side, there’s anybody who has ever played the accordion professionally.

I wait for the payoff and get the accordion line. And the first part is just a laundry list. And no exceptions on the Ritz Brothers? Please. Benjy’s response is like the movie in microcosm: a wasted opportunity.

Even so, give those lines to funny people and it sometimes works. The scene where Benjy takes the gentile matinee idol to visit his very Jewish family in Brooklyn isn’t bad. Lainie Kazan as his mom makes me laugh. Lou Jacobi as Uncle Morty really makes me laugh. They also do a nice bit with one of the show's writers, Herb Lee (Basil Hoffman), supposedly based on Neil Simon, who merely whispers his devastating ripostes to fellow scribe Alice (Anne De Salvo), who says them aloud. I just wish they were more devastating.

We do get this nice exchange when a very drunk Swann stumbles into the bathroom only to be met by Lil (Selma Diamond):

Lil: This is for ladies only.
Swann: [unzips fly] So is this, ma’am, but every now and then I have to run a little water through it.

But even this didn’t come from Steinberg/Palumbo. It’s a well-known Hollywood tale about John Barrymore and a wardrobe girl in 1939. Barrymore gets no writing credit.

Lundy’s complaint
O’Toole was Oscar-nominated for his role and deservedly. He’s great. You get a sense of the sad soul trapped within the fame and addiction, not strong enough to shed either, relying on both. You also get a sense of his inner swashbuckler even before he displays it at the 11th hour.

There’s a subplot about a Jimmy Hoffa-like figure, Karl Rojeck (Cameron Mitchell), taking exception to Kaiser lampooning him as Boss Hijack, and sending mob/union guys to take care of him, which they attempt to do on live national television. This is the 11th-hour thing. Swann has already run away, panicked by the prospect of a live audience. He says he’s not the hero he so often played and Benjy buoys him by telling him he is; he had to have that in him to be able to portray it so convincingly. So Swann comes to the rescue. He swoops in like Captain Blood (or “Captain from Tortuga”), and together he and Kaiser vanquish the baddies and everyone in the live studio audience stands up and applauds wildly.

And it’s just stupid. What did the people in that studio audience watch? A Boss Hijack sketch in which Kaiser fights some guys and then Swann swoops in and fights some guys, and they win. It's nonsensical. No one says a line—funny or not. But somehow it gets this roar of approval. And it's the movie’s great climax. And it gives Swann the courage to visit his estranged daughter in Connecticut.

You know what I don’t get? Richard Benjamin’s career. They kept casting him as the lead in movies based on bestselling Philip Roth novels that wound up bombing at the box office; and after a decade of that, and his own forgettable ’70s sitcom (“Quark”), he began his directing career. This was his first feature film. It’s also his highest rated. I look at his CV and wonder how he kept making movies. He kept getting big stars and he kept making bad movies. Here’s his Rotten Tomatoes numbers:

• 22%: “City Heat”
• 60%: “Racing with the Moon”
• 50%: “The Money Pit”
• 20%: “My Stepmother is an Alien”
• 57%: “Little Nikita”
• 74%: “Mermaids”
• 31%: “Made in America”
• 12%: “Milk Money”
• 15%: “Mrs. Winterbourne”

And then scene. Mercifully.

Anyway, I keep wanting to be wrong about this movie.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Do not read this review fast.
It is never right to read movie reviews fast.
— A.O. Scott Joplin

E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime”is one of my favorite novels, Milos Forman is one of my favorite directors (“Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Hair,” “Amadeus”), so it’s a shame Forman’s adaptation of Doctorow doesn’t quite work. It’s a tough ask. The novel is so sprawling in its use of fictional and historical characters, and so precise in its writerly voice, its ironic, class-conscious narrator skewering the age, that I don’t know how you’d get it all on screen. 

It’s mostly historical characters that get glossed over. There’s no J.P. Morgan or Henry Ford, let alone Emma Goldman, while the Great Houdini is relegated to newsreel footage. The storyline of Father (James Olson) accompanying Perry to the Pole is completely cut, which makes sense to me, since it seems superfluous. Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern) is expanded in terms of overall real estate but she’s reduced by becoming a shallow, comic figure. In the book she’s sadder and deeper. The best of her—the love she feels for Tateh’s daughter—is ignored for comic nude scenes and catty eye rolls. The fictional Tateh (Mandy Patinkin) is also reduced. The depths of his Old Testament despair, with his hair and beard turning white, gets truncated, as does riding the trolleys to the end of the line—and there’s nothing at all on the 1912 Lawrence textile strike—so selling the picture book on an early morning in Philadelphia isn’t this glorious moment of redemption and release. It’s just sorta nice.

I like that, early on, Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Howard E. Rollins Jr.) plays piano to accompany newsreel footage. It’s a good way to both introduce our most important character and include some historical figures. It’s also an anachronism. Newsreels weren’t a thing in 1906.

Handsome as fuck
The movie mostly reduces Doctorow’s myriad storylines into two. The first is the real-life murder of architect Stanford White (Norman Mailer) by Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh (Robert Joy), which was huge news at the time. Newspapers called it the Crime of the Century, to which Doctorow reminds us “…it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.”

The murder was over a woman, of course, Nesbit, a model/chorus girl/actress who had originally been wooed by the superrich White and wound up married to Thaw, the scion of a coal and railroad baron. Neither man is an angel. White was 30 years older than Nesbit, and he possibly drugged her for their first sexual encounter, but he’s generally regarded as a kind man. Thaw was a horror show. He whipped Nesbit for sexual pleasure. Doctorow describes him as having “the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

The flashpoint in the movie is that White places a statue of Diana atop Madison Square Garden (1890-1925), which he designed, and rumors swirled that a naked Nesbit was the model. This is barely mentioned by Doctorow, and historically impossible, as that particular statue of Diana, by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was unveiled in 1893, when Nesbit was 9 years old. Nevertheless, in the film, Thaw demands its removal, White ignores him, and in June 1906, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Thaw shoots White three times in the head. The scene is graphic. I flashed on the JFK assassination.

The second storyline, the main one, concerns the rise and fall of Coalhouse Walker, Jr.

Shortly after we’re introduced to the family—Father, Mother (Mary Steenburgen), Mother’s Younger Brother (Brad Dourif), and the boy (Max Nichols)—basically the narrator of the novel but a nonentity here—the family maid finds a Black baby crying in their garden in New Rochelle, NY. After the police are called in, we get the racism of the day. “These niggers drop babies like rabbits,” says one official, and in the background, you can tell, they lose Mother’s Younger Brother, who is lonely, moody, and fairly progressive. They lose Mother, too, who is simply kind. In the novel, Father is away on the Perry expedition so Mother is forced to make decisions on her own. Here, she takes control in front of him, which, given the times, I don’t buy—particularly since she decides they should keep the baby. When Sarah (Debbie Allen), the half-mad mother, is discovered nearby, the family takes her in as well. And eventually Coalhouse, the father, shows up.

When I first saw “Ragtime,” I assumed Howard E. Rollins Jr. was going to be a big star. He’s handsome as fuck, with large, expressive eyes and cheekbones you could cut glass on, and he embodies the rectitude and righteous anger of Doctorow’s character. Three years later he starred in Norman Jewison’s “A Soldier’s Story,” where I thought the same thing: star. Never happened. One assumes he encountered the racism of our day. Or maybe the homophobia of our day? A cocaine addiction didn’t help. I didn’t see him again until four years later when turned up as Virgil Tibbs in the TV version of “In the Heat of the Night,” opposite Carroll O’Connor. By then, he was no longer handsome as fuck. Eight years after that, he died of AIDS-related lymphoma, age 46. It was Denzel, the villain of “Soldiers Story,” who became the star.

I do think the movie lets off Coalhouse too easily for abandoning Sarah and the baby. “I wasn’t living any kind of life I could ask a woman to share with me,” he says. Right. So he drives her to such despair she abandons the baby in a garden? In the novel, she actually buries it. Their relationship is a bit odd, too. He’s smart, she’s not; she crumbles quickly, he never does. But joy flashes in his eyes when he’s with her so we don’t question it. He plays piano for the family and they don’t question it, either. I wish Coalhouse had called out the titles of the songs, as he does in the novel, followed by “… composed by the great Scott Joplin,” but Joplin gets no such namecheck here. The scene is still great: Coalhouse gently chastising the family by telling them the piano is in need of tuning; the look of fondness in his eyes as he plays and the look of amazement in theirs; how his music is taken over by the soundtrack, which wells as he ascends to the attic room to reconcile with Sarah.

The connection between our two storylines is Mother’s Younger Brother. He winds up the unlikely paramour of Evelyn Nesbit during Thaw’s trial, and the unlikelier sixth member of Coalhouse’s gang after the firehouse incident; after he tells the gang: “I can make bombs.”

I should mention a couple of the movie’s edits—one good, one bad. Here’s the bad. After the reconciliation, Coalhouse invites the family (including Mother’s Younger Brother) to his wedding the following weekend. Then we cut to Mother’s Younger Brother making an embarrassing, last-ditch effort to see Evelyn Nesbit in New York City, which seems to take place later in the week. Then we cut to the incident with Wille Conklin (Kenneth McMillan) and The Emerald Isle Volunteer Fire Company. Except that’s in New Rochelle, Coalhouse only visits once a week, and he’s obviously returning from visiting Sarah. So wouldn’t that have been his wedding day?

It’s a horrific incident. The firetrucks are horse-drawn, Coalhouse has a brand new Model T Ford with a custom PANTASOTE top, and the firefighters resent him and it. So they block his way. When he goes to get a police officer, they defecate in the front seat. When the police officer (Jeff Daniels) arrests him instead, and he spends the night in jail, they take the time to destroy the car. His search for satisfaction—from white bureaucrats to Black lawyers—leads nowhere. Then Sarah tries to help. Teddy Roosevelt’s vice-president, Charles Fairbanks, comes through town on a whistlestop campaign tour and she tries to speak to him on Coalhouse’s behalf. She’s beaten by cops. In her attic room, wounded, Coalhouse visits and they talk quietly of their wedding, then we hear church music and cut to a church service. As the camera pans down, we see it’s not Sarah’s wedding but her funeral. That’s the good edit.

How about a shout-out for the casting director? A lot of the minor characters here went on to great stuff. Coalhouse’s gang consists of Dorsey Wright, who played Hud in Forman’s “Hair”; Calvin Levels, who has only 32 credits but seems familiar to me (that “M*A*S*H” episode, maybe?); Frankie Faison, the future Commissioner Burrell of “The Wire”; and a baby-faced Samuel L. Jackson in one of his first feature films. Among the policemen in the film we get Jeff Daniels, John Ratzenburger/Cliff Claven, and Andreas Katsulas, who became the one-armed man in “The Fugitive.”

And, of course, James Cagney.

Top of the world
Cagney had unofficially retired from the movies in 1961, after a bad experience on Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three,” and he more or less stayed that way. He did some narration in lesser stuff (“The Ballad of Smokey the Bear,” “Arizona Bushwackers”), mostly as favors for friends, but that was it. In 1974, he was feted by the American Film Institute and published his memoir around the same time. He was done. So how did Forman talk him out of retirement?

He was a neighbor of the Cagneys, and one evening during dinner he was discussing Doctorow’s novel, which he’d optioned. “As he did,” John McCabe writes in his Cagney biography, “Jim, because of growing sciatica, was sitting with his head slightly lowered, listening, and whenever especially interested, he raised his leonine head and looked intently at the speaker. Forman saw him do this several times and said to himself, ‘My God, if I could get him interested in the film…’” Cagney’s wife, Willie, was interested—she thought it would be good for her husband’s health—so eventually he signed on to play Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo. It was huge news. A last hurrah for a Hollywood legend. 

“Fire.” “Sir?” “Fire.”

Is it much of a hurrah? Cagney was 81 at the time, and, along with the sciatica, suffered from diabetes and the aftereffects of several small strokes. He has trouble turning his head, some of his lines appear to be dubbed, and his sight is diminished—meaning his long-standing acting motto (“Look in the other actor’s camera eye and tell the truth”) doesn’t serve him well. Overweight, and with a handlebar moustache, I’m reminded less of the young, rat-a-tat Cagney, that firecracker of an actor, than Burl Ives’ snowman in the Rankin-Bass “Rudolph” special. There's something swaddled about him. 

It was still a good idea. Not only had Cagney lived through the ragtime period, he kept returning to it in film. “The Public Enemy” began in 1909, the brunt of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” takes place in the aughts, while two of his lesser-known films—“The Strawberry Blonde” and “Johnny Come Lately”—were set in this exact year: 1906. Put it this way: Cagney read “Ragtime” less for its acclaim than because he’d actually known Evelyn Nesbit. That blows my mind.

Did they expand the role for him? Rhinelander Waldo wasn’t much of a character in the book—he’s just mentioned in passing after Coalhouse’s gang takes over the J.P. Morgan Library in Manhattan. This is after they attack the Emerald Isle Volunteer Fire Company to get Conklin. He’s not there, so he becomes part of the demand: Coalhouse’s Model T returned to him in its original condition, and the life of Conklin for the life of his Sarah. They attack other firehouses, too. Why the J.P. Morgan Library? In the novel it’s a bit of a mix-up. They plan is to hold Morgan, the richest man in the world, hostage in order to get Conklin, but they go to the wrong place—his library rather than his residence—and anyway Morgan was abroad; so instead they just hold his priceless artifacts hostage. The hostage negotiator in the novel is New York D.A. Charles S. Whitman, who has presidential ambitions and decides “he had a few minutes to take care of this matter of the mad coon.” Things don’t go well. 

Neither here. Conklin is found, and brought before Waldo, red-faced and sweaty, and Waldo toys with him a bit. Other negotiators are brought in: Booker T. Washington (Moses Gunn), and Father, fresh from Atlantic City, where the family, with Coalhouse’s baby, is recovering from the press attention. Eventually Coalhouse sees there’s no out for him, so he switches demands. Forget Conklin. He wants the Model T and the life of his men. Let them go free. Waldo agrees, since he figures it won’t be hard to track five Black men in a marked Model T. He doesn’t know about Mother’s Younger Brother (now adeptly called Younger Brother by Doctorow), who, several blocks away, takes the wheel, and they give the cops the slip. It’s the best bit that’s not in the novel.

Coalhouse’s surrender to the cops resonates even more today than when it was made. Leaving the Morgan Library, unarmed, with hands raised, he’s cut down—like Charles Kinsey, Jonathan Price, Terence Crutcher, countless others. In the novel, it’s a volley of shots, a regular shooting gallery a la “Bonnie and Clyde.” Here it’s just one shot from one cop—at the command of Rhinelander Waldo. That resonates in a different way. Cagney, the original gangster shot dead in the streets in “Public Enemy” and “The Roaring Twenties,” orders the same for the century’s first black revolutionary. After the shot rings out, Coalhouse pauses, then keeps walking forward, hands still raised. For a second you wonder if he’d been hit. Then he crumples on the stairs like Cagney did in “Roaring Twenties.” He’d just been too stubborn to fall. But there’s no one there to say, as Gladys George did for Cagney, “He used to be a big shot.” Instead, we get a few notes of ragtime, played plaintively on the piano by Randy Newman.

Telling the cop “Fire” is the last line James Cagney will ever say in a feature film. 

Like something closer to America
So the movie has moments but it’s not on the same level as the novel. I don’t think any cinematic depiction will ever be on the same level as the novel since you can’t capture that authorial voice on screen. The best attempt would be a miniseries. That might allow for the novel’s many interweaving storylines. I could see HBO having a go someday.

I knew about Cagney, of course, but I was surprised to see his Irish mafia pal Pat O’Brien playing Harry K. Thaw’s lead attorney. Like Cagney, it was his final film role. O’Brien and Cagney made eight movies together between 1934 and 1940, so it’s a shame they don’t get any scenes together. Cagney does have a scene with Norman Mailer’s Stanford White. At least White introduces the police commissioner to Harry K. Thaw, but it’s separate shots so one assumes they were filmed on separate days. Even so, Norman Mailer introducing James Cagney is a true colliding of my worlds. I was tickled just seeing it.

Beyond Rollins and McGovern, who were both nominated for supporting Oscars, there are standouts in smaller roles. I like Moses Gunn’s authority as Booker T. Washington, Ted Ross saying “I can’t taste it” as the Black lawyer, the privileged insanity of Robert Joy’s Harry K. Thaw, and the great, huffing, without-vanity performance of McMillan. Olson as Father is underrated: He brings a quiet humanity to the role. And it’s always a pleasure to see Brad Dourif. He had a moment when movies mattered.

Forman leaves a lot of loose ends that Doctorow ties up. In the novel, after their escape, Younger Brother travels south and becomes a revolutionary with Zapata’s army, where he’s considered brilliant but reckless. He dies within a year. During the Great War, Father is selling the armaments Younger Brother devised to Great Britain, but he’s aboard the Lusitania when it’s torpedoed by the Germans. Widowed, Mother marries Tateh, who has gone from picture-book making to film making. That’s what he’s doing in Atlantic City when he first meets the family. Doctorow has them move to Southern California, nascent Hollywood, where one day, watching Mother’s gentile son and Coalhouse’s Black son and his Jewish daughter playing together, he comes up with the idea for the “Our Gang” comedies. That’s cute but ... a bit overdone? I like that Forman and screenwriter Michael Weller let us connect the dots. Father doesn’t die, Mother simply leaves him for Tateh; and as Father watches from behind a lace curtain, we see the new family drive off—Jewish, gentile, Black. It feels like something closer to America.

Robert De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a bounty-hunter who is offered $100,000 by his bail bondsman (Joe Pantoliano) to bring in Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin). Unfortunately Mardukas embezzled $15 million from noted wiseguy Jimmy Serano (Dennis Farina) and is in hiding. Walsh has his own past with Serano, which we learn by and by, but he tracks down Mardukas fairly quickly. The trouble is transporting him from New York to Los Angeles. Mardukas refuses to fly--has a phobia--and after an incident the two board a train. Good thing, too: since the bondsman's phone has been tapped (by the FBI) and his assistant is a fink (for the mob), both the FBI and the mob were waiting for them at LAX. Meanwhile, the bondsman, worried because he hasn't heard from Walsh, sends another bounty hunter after them--John Ashton as the hilariously dimwitted Marvin Dorfler.

Misadventures multiply. Mardukas keeps initiating dialogue, hoping to get to know Walsh. Walsh, of course, wants part of no conversation, and De Niro and Grodin play off each other hilariously here. One of my favorite moments is Walsh on the phone threatening the bail bondsman. “If I find out you sent (Dorfler) after me I'm going to break Mardukas' neck and throw him in a swamp where no one will ever find him!” Mardukas, next to him, gives a start, but Walsh shakes his head slightly, scrunching his nose. Beautiful.

There's great support, not only from Ashton but Yaphet Kotto as FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, whose badge Walsh has swiped. Kotto plays it straight, as a competent officer who is repeatedly made to look the fool by Walsh. His “slow burn” is one of the best in recent years.

Grodin is the real find: the way he balances the inner-strength of his character with his almost womanly predicament--not to mention the lackadaisical, humming way he pesters Walsh. De Niro is De Niro and gives us--even in a comedy!--another uncomfortable, seat-shifting scene. Penniless and on the lam in Chicago, Walsh is forced to revisit his ex-wife whom he hasn't seen in nine years. While they argue, his daughter shows up, looking thin and vulnerable, very much an adolescent girl. The mother goes to get money and car keys and Walsh and the girl are left to fend for themselves. “So what grade are you in now?” he asks. “Eighth grade,” she tells him. “The eighth grade, really,” he says, nodding, before lapsing into a most uncomfortable silence--interminable for all that is left unsaid.

-- March 26, 1999

WARNING: SPOILERS

There is no question mark in the history of movies more unnecessary than the one that pops up before the end credits to Dino De Laurentiis’ 1980 flop, “Flash Gordon.” You know the bit. The story is done, the villain vanquished, and “The End” appears on the screen. But wait, who’s that picking up the villain’s ring? And laughing like the villain? And that’s when the question mark is added:

The End?

No, honey, this is really the end. There won’t be any sequels to this fucking thing.

There is also probably no DVD bonus feature in the history of DVD bonus features more mislabeled than the interview here with screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. Someone in PR called it “Writing a Classic” and for a moment that got me excited. Wait, is Semple really going to argue that “Flash Gordon” is a classic? I gotta hear this!

Yeah, no. Semple is defensive throughout:

I don’t remember having a single meeting with anybody except Dino. In my opinion, it could’ve used some criticism. There’s no question the script would’ve been better. ... Even though it may sound a dream, “Go write it and we’ll shoot it” is not a terribly good idea.

Semple spoke no Italian and De Laurentiis spoke little English, so a woman who worked for DDL translated the script for him. Except, says Semple, her English wasn’t great. She once showed up at his house, saw his cat, said “Nice dog.”

It gets better. During filming, De Laurentiis told Semple to visit Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione for ideas. He did. He saw him in his London mansion with a couple of Penthouse pets. “It was idiotic and insane,” says Semple, “the idea of going to Bob Guccione for ideas.”

The coup de grace: “Obviously,” Semple says, “people at Universal read the script, and nobody said it was awful.” 

Nobody said it was awful. PR-speak for: “Writing a classic.”

‘We couldn’t figure it out’
Going in, I assumed watching this on the heels of watching the original 1936 version with Buster Crabbe would make it better—the way that, say, watching the 1966 “Batman” on the heels of suffering through the 1949 “Batman & Robin” serial made it way, way funnier. Nope. Doesn’t help at all. The ’36 version actually comes off good in comparison.

I assumed this, by the way, without even knowing that Semple, who wrote “Batman ’66,” also wrote this. So what happened? Was his sense of humor gone? Did it get lost in translation? 

“Star Wars” happened.

Originally, George Lucas wanted to remake “Flash Gordon” but he couldn’t secure the rights; so he made “Star Wars” instead. Once everyone saw how much money he made, they all scrambled to put together his original idea. Semple again:

I remember Dino said one day, “We run ‘Star Wars.’” He got a copy of it. “We see why everybody go see this movie.” But we couldn’t figure it out. “Star Wars” has a certain amount of ... I won’t say realism, but, I mean, it was treated as if it was really happening. And “Flash Gordon,” in my opinion, never appears as if it actually was really taking place anywhere. I mean, Mongo was more than mythical. I mean, Mongo is straight out of an Italian comic book.

My favorite line in the above? We couldn’t figure it out. Semple, Jr., 57, and De Laurentiis, 61, couldn’t figure out why a bunch of teenage boys like me were going to see “Star Wars” again and again. “Flash Gordon,” born of greed and jealousy, was created by old men attempting to emulate something none of them understood. 

“Star Wars” had a blonde lead? Here's one that‘s more handsome. 

“Star Wars” included a respected/Shakespearean actor? Here’s a bunch of them: 

• Max Von Sydow as Ming
• Timothy Dalton as Prince Barin
• Brian Blessed as Prince Vultan
• Topol as Dr. Hans Zarkov

This actually leads to a problem. In the ’36 original, the supporting players were bit actors who mumbled or hammed it up through their roles, while Crabbe’s Flash was earnest, athletic, dynamic. You could see why he was the star. Here, Sam Jones is fine as Flash, but he’s overwhelmed by the better actors. Ming is more powerful and more merciless; Barin is stronger, angrier, tougher. In the title song, Flash is repeatedly called “savoir of the universe,” but for most of the movie Dalton wipes the screen with him.

Sadly, the plot is pretty much the same. Yes, in the original, Mongo was going to crash into Earth, while here Ming simply toys with us from afar. He creates storms and typhoons and earthquakes, then sets Earth’s moon on a collision course with Earth. Dr. Zarkov recognizes this as an attack, and he’s planning to counterattack via rocketship, but, as in the original, his assistant flees. Which is when Flash and Dale (Melody Anderson) land near him by happenstance. Rather than agreeing to help, as in ’36, Zarkov simply kidnaps them. More exactly, he and Flash fight, but Flash’s crushing blow sends Zarkov into the big red button that starts up the rocket ship and takes them to their destiny. 

Of all the changes that happened in human history between 1936 and 1980, the most visible in the movie—more than atomic energy, computer technology and space flight—is the sexual revolution. In the original, Flash was stalwart; he wasn't interested in Princess Aura no matter how often she threw herself at him—or saved him. Here, from the get go, he's checking her out. So much so that Dale nudges him. “Hey, remember me?” she says. His initial “execution” is occultish, performed by men in metal masks and hooded cloaks that seem like extras from “Eyes Wide Shut." But he's saved by Aura ... who then seduces him.  

We keep waiting for the hero to emerge. Early on, there’s an absurd scene where Flash (a professional football player rather a polo player) is tossed a football-like object and is able—for the first time—to run rings around Ming’s men. It's weird—as if he needed the football to act. Without it, he’s not much. On a tree planet, where Barin acts like a tyrannical Robin Hood, Flash is lowered into a swamp and falls into quicksand, and in Vultan’s “Sky City,” he’s forced to duel Barin. This one he finally wins, then displays his true value by showing mercy. Everyone is stunned. Everyone except us, since it was telegraphed earlier:

Aura: Every moon of Mongo is a kingdom. My father keeps them fighting each other constantly. It’s really brilliant strategy.
Flash: Why don’t they team up and overthrow him?
Aura: Team up? What does that mean?
Flash: Why don’t I show you some time.

After the duel, he gets the air jetski thing, and helps lead the final assault on Ming’s castle. The good guys win, the bad guys are killed, and Barin is declared the new ruler of Mongo. Because what could be better than a tyrannical tree lord?

Barbarella II
I should add the special effects throughout are awful—recalling less 1977’s “Star Wars” than 1967’s “Barbarella,” which De Laurentiis also produced. But even with good effects, I’m not sure how you reboot “Flash Gordon” for the modern age. It’s really just a 1920s boys adventure story to the Orient (see: Ming), set in outer space. At least they left out the Shark King.

Van Sydow is the best thing in the movie. Early on, Zarkov is trying to reason with Ming and says, “We are only interested in friendship. Why do you attack us?” and Ming responds in that cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way of Sydow: “Why not?”  

But such moments are few. Director Mike Hodges made “Get Carter” in 1971 and “Croupier” in 1998, and not much of value in between. Semple, Jr. went on to write the Broccoli-less Bond flick, “Never Say Never Again,” and the jungle disaster “Sheena” with Tanya Roberts. De Laurentiis, with or without his translator, went on to produce some good movies (“Dead Zone”), one great one (“Blue Velvet”) and many disasters (“Dune,” “Maximum Overdrive,” “King Kong Lives,” “Body of Evidence.”). Via IMDb’s user ratings, “Flash” is considered his 101st worst feature film out of exactly 202. Its current rating is 6.5. Unbelievably, it has its fans.

The End?

WARNING: SPOILERS

Blame Hungary.

“Victory,” one of two films Sylvester Stallone starred in between “Rocky II” and “III,” was filmed in 1980 in Budapest, and, according to a July 1981 New York Times article, it made Stallone a “U.S. booster”:

Stallone came home from Hungary a flag waver. He says if everybody had to spend two weeks in a Communist country, “patriotism in America would reach epidemic proportions.”

“To this day, I believe all our hotel rooms were bugged,” he says. “If you had an amorous night with your wife, you’d walk downstairs next morning and everyone would be grinning. The police have keys to everyone’s house. They can turn off all the electricity in a city if they don't like what’s going on. And every couple of months the tanks run down the streets, just to remind people that they’re there.”

Without “Victory”—in which Allied prisoners symbolically defeat Germany in a soccer match—would we have had “Rocky IV,” in which the U.S. symbolically defeats the U.S.S.R. in a boxing match?

Fucking Hungary, man.

Change and change: What is change?
Here’s the joke from back in 1985: “This time Rocky beats up a big white guy.” But it was Stallone who laughed all the way to the bank. The movie was the No. 3 grosser of the year, after “Back to the Future” and “Rambo: First Blood Part II.” It was Stallone’s peak, top of the world, ma, but it was also the beginning of his end. His movies were becoming too stupid even for his fans.

What a dull mess this thing is. Unadjusted, it’s the highest-grossing “Rocky” but also the shortest (91 minutes); there’s not much there there. Paulie gets a robot, the Soviets enter professional boxing, Ivan Drago kills Apollo Creed in an exhibition bout, so Rocky goes to Russia to train and fight him. Cue: fight.

Poor and garrulous in the first film, Rocky has now become rich and taciturn. His mouth used to run a mile-a-minute as he struggled to entertain (Adrian), advise (little Marie) or explain (Gazzo). He wasn’t the brightest bulb (the locker combo in his hat just killed me), but he was sweet. He had charm. His charm was not knowing he had charm. Here, he’s kinda smart, counseling Apollo correctly, but he barely says anything in the second half of the film. He’s serious and charmless. I miss the old chatty Rocky.

We don’t even get impediments to the fight. In the other “Rocky”s, something always puts the fight on hold: He could go blind (“II”), he’s lost the eye of the tiger (“III”), he’ll die (“V”), he’s old (“Rocky Balboa”). Here, nothing. That’s why so short.

The movie continues the “Rocky” death cycle. We lost Gazzo after “II,” Mickey in “III,” and Apollo here. Actually, the one I miss most is Bill Conti. The emblematic “Rocky” score, as well as its signature song, “Gonna Fly Now,” is lost for some shitty ’80s songs by Survivor and John Cafferty: “Burning Heart” and “Heart’s on Fire.”  Apparently the theme is “heart.”

Wait, did I say there were no impediments to the fight? Adrian, in a thankless role, tries to be that (again). She tries to get Rocky to not fight, but it sets up an absurd contradiction. Here’s the exchange:

Rocky: We can’t change what we are.
Adrian: Yes, you can.
Rocky: We can’t change anything, Adrian!

Contrast with the speech he gives the Soviets after his victory:

During this fight, I’ve seen a lot of changing in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that's better than twenty million. I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!

So Rocky fights because we can’t change, but after the fight he tells everyone that we can change? In what round did he learn that lesson? 

Another one. In the first “Rocky,” it’s vaguely ominous that Rocky’s bout with Apollo Creed is seen as “a show,” that it’s just marketing, that it doesn’t mean anything. Of course, in the first round, Rocky disabuses Apollo of this notion. “He doesn't know it’s a damn show!” Apollo’s trainer says. “He thinks it’s a damn fight!”

In “IV,” Drago’s bout with Apollo is seen as “a show,” that it doesn’t mean anything. But in the first round, Drago disabuses Apollo of this notion. “What are you guys doing?” Apollo’s trainer yells. “This is supposed to be an exhibition!”

Rocky making the fight real in the first movie is a positive, but Drago doing the same in “IV” is a negative? OK.

Star-spangled shorts
I watch this thing now and think about how sad we were; what need we had.

We need to portray this Russian, and hence all of Russia, as stoic villains who would kill our heroes without a second thought (“If he dies, he dies.”). We need to portray ourselves as the underdogs, smaller and weaker, but naturally strong rather than chemically-enhanced. (They cheat). Then we need to show us going toe-to-toe with them for 15 rounds for the right reasons rather than their wrong reasons (Drago: “I win for me! FOR ME!”), and, as a result, not only do we win, but we win over the crowd, which chants “Rocky! Rocky!” like it’s Philadelphia rather than Moscow. (Question: Was “Rocky! Rocky!” the forerunner to “USA! USA!”? I’m serious. I’m curious.) We even get the Politburo to stand and applaud for us. But being us, we’re magnanimous in victory. We talk about change. Then we drape ourselves in the American flag. Because the star-spangled shorts just aren’t patriotic enough.

Oh, and all of this takes place on Christmas Day.

Fucking Hungary, man. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Who decided on the music? And how much did it harm the movie?

I’m not talking about the dissonant music we hear when the foreign journalists are in the clutches of the Khmer Rouge and fearing for their lives. That’s obtrusive but appropriate: time out of joint, life upended. I’m talking about the music we hear after Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S. Ngor, who won the Oscar for best supporting) somehow secures their release, and they return to the city proper, with its increasing lawlessness and triumphant teenaged soldiers, and our guys are pushing along a small white truck but the camera lets them push it out of frame while it holds on the mass of Cambodians being herded out of Phnom Pehn—prefiguring mass relocation, reeducation, and, for many, death. That’s when we get something out of western opera: medieval chants and bombast. At first I thought it was from an opera, but it appears to have been created for the soundtrack by Mike Oldfield. He was going old school, but old western school, which hardly seems appropriate. It’s so over-the-top, silence would have been preferable.

Worse, of course, is the last song we hear, but I don’t know if we blame Oldfield since he obviously didn’t write it. (According to IMDb.com, we blame producer David Puttnam.)

So after years in the countryside, hoeing mud and being subjected to dissonant loudspeaker propaganda, not to mention a constant threat of torture and death; and after escaping one misery only to tromp through the titular killing fields and then land in another, as a kind of au pair for a benevolent KR leader; and after fleeing that situation with several others, two of whom die on a landmine, Pran finally makes it all the way to Thailand. He’s working at a Red Cross station there when he’s told someone has arrived to see him. Confused, he goes outside, and sees, half out of a car, his old boss/mentor/friend, and the film’s co-star, New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterson, nominated, lead), who has been looking for him all of these years, plagued by the guilt that he didn’t insist Pran leave when he had the chance.

And what’s the music we hear during this powerful moment? “Imagine” by John Lennon.

Even when I saw the film as a 21-year-old in 1984, I all but slapped my forehead in disbelief. And that’s the mood you take with you from the theater. It absolutely ruins the feeling it's spent two-plus hours cultivating. 

They came from TV
I decided to watch “The Killing Fields” again after I saw the documentary, “The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor” at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. I thought it needed a rewatching. I remembered so little of it.

Mostly, I remembered that the movie was split into two parts: before the Khmer Rouge and after. A lot of waiting around in embassies in the first half, and the horror, the horror of the second. To be honest, in the rewatch, I fastforwarded through some of the second-half scenes of horror.

Is the first half more interesting because it’s ensemble? Because of its different tensions? Pran is almost in a servant role. He gets Schanberg into and out of places. Sometimes he wakes him up in the morning. Does he ever resent it? Is that what he and the driver talk about once they drop Schanberg off at his swanky hotel? And by the way: What happens to the driver? Does he make it out alive? Do we ever find out?

Back in’84, I liked the bored, soggy worldliness of the international journalists stationed in Phnom Pehn, and that feeling’s still there. John Malkovich is stellar as Al Rockoff, while Julian Sands is startling handsome (but not much of an actor) as Jon Swain. Spalding Grey is our U.S. consul, a government functionary trying to do the right thing, but, sadly, he’s not really that good, either. Is Craig T. Nelson as the stonewalling military attaché who keeps Schanberg from visiting Neak Luong, the site of an accidental U.S. bombing?

A lot of the principles came out of television. Director Roland Joffé had been directing British TV series when he got the gig, Waterson had been relegated to TV movies after the box office disaster of “Heaven’s Gate," Sands was in Brit TV.

Ngor, of course, came out of nowhere. The producers were looking for someone to play Pran and he was working at a medical clinic near L.A. and someone suggested him. He had the background (he’d escaped the Khmer Rouge himself) but zero acting experience. But he’s quite good. For some reason I thought Ngor didn’t really deserve his Oscar; back then, I’d been rooting for Adolph Cesar in “A Soldier’s Story.” But his performance anchors the movie.

The Nixon Doctrine
“The Killing Fields” is not a great film but it is a worthwhile film. The line of the movie belongs to Pres. Richard Nixon, whom Schanberg, back home, watches on a primitive VCR while “Nessun Dorma” (again with the opera) plays in the background. This is what Nixon says to the press, almost with a swagger, while explaining U.S. incursion into Cambodia:

Cambodia is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.

Truer words. Maybe a different John Lennon song should’ve ended the film: “How Do You Sleep?”

Nobody digs his music but himself? 

Last Thursday, P and I went to see a showing of Prince's “Purple Rain” at Central Cinema, a fun, dine-in movie theater in Seattle's Central district. It was part of the “Movies in Black & White” series that my friend Jason Lamb hosts in Portland and Seattle. And yes, “Purple Rain” is not in black and white (it's in purple), but that's not the point of the series. The point of the series is to screen movies that lead to racial discussions. Tough thing to do. There's always a lot of posturing in racial discussions. No one these days wants to be Bull Connor. Or even Laurie Pritchett. 

Anyway, I didn't really talk much during the post-screening discussion, which turned less on racial matters than gender matters. A lot of misogyny in the film: girls tossed in trash bins, hit, stripped, ignored, etc. This attitude, in fact, is the thing that needs to be overcome in the film. At least that's what the Kid needs to overcome in order to become a success. He's one of four acts at First Avenue in Minneapolis (the club I went to growing up), and he may be on his on his way out. As the club owner, a fat black dude wearing an ugly Detroit Tigers cap, tells him, “Nobody digs ye music but yeself.” But then the Kid opens himself up to collaboration with bandmates Wendy and Lisa, and he sings “Purple Rain,” which they wrote, and that brings the house down. And he finally becomes successful. 

Here are the two objections I have with that story arc:

• It's bullshit. The notion that becoming less selfish and more inclusive leads to success is a tired Hollywood trope that is rarely if ever borne out in reality.  
• The first song we hear the Kid play is “Let's Go Crazy,” which is one of the greatest rock songs ever written. It's also the music nobody digs but himself. Which is ... crazy. 
  

It's really the second objection that I could never wrap my mind around. Just how dumb is that club owner? How dense are the flat-footed kids of First Ave not to recognize one hellbent, balls-out, rock-n-roll song? 

Other thoughts on the film 31 years later:

• The First Ave in the film was a lot more racially diverse than the First Ave I went to in '83 and '84.
• A lot of early-MTV sexism. At the same time, Apollonia. Good god, girl.
• The only real actor in the film was Clarence Williams III, Link from “Mod Squad,” who played the Kid's father. He has a stillness to him. Everyone else was a B actor at best. But Morris Day was fun.

I do think it's funny seeing Prince all duded up—hair a tower of curls, shirt ruffled, suit as purple as the Joker's—tooling around the scabby Minnesota countryside on his motorcycle as if it's the most ordinary thing in the world. Naw. Minneapolis has a touch of the Amish in it. We look askance at anyone calling attention to themselves. We're Bud Grant on the sidelines, Garrison Keillor on the radio, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale coming in second and smiling in presidential races. Prince's outlandishness was probably in reaction to all that. No wonder he wanted to go crazy. 

Overall, the music still rocks but the movie hasn't aged well. It's kind of astonishing to remember that not only was it a huge box office hit—knocking “Ghostbusters” out of the No. 1 slot at the end of July 1984, and grossing a total of $68 million, or $165 million adjusted—but it was a huge critical hit, too. Both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel included it in their top 10 movies of 1984.  

WARNING: SPOILERS

They should remake this movie. We could use its message again.

An out-of work actor named Steve Nichols (John Ritter) takes a gig appearing as Captain Avenger at local cinemas to help promote the apparently dying superhero movie of the same name. He’s a generous personality, a gee-whiz Midwestern guy who helps fellow actors get jobs, and he likes the superhero gig. He’s kind of thrilled by it. One night after an appearance, wearing an overcoat over his red suit, he’s at a mom-and-pop grocery store in his Lower East Side neighborhood when it’s robbed. It takes a moment, but eventually he springs into action. He stands arms akimbo, annunciating like the character, and scatters the hoodlums—one of whom flees outright, the other after a 15-second fist fight—then turns to mom and pop, amazed at what he’s done, what he’s gotten away with, what acting he did.

The rest of the movie follows from this one act of daring and kindness. He appears four more times as Captain Avenger:

1. His life and career failing elsewhere, he attempts to remake the magic of the first incident but winds up with a bullet in the arm and a determination to hang up the cape and tights.
2. When Walter Reeves (Bert Convy), the PR firm representing Captain Avenger—as well as the Mayor in a tough reelection campaign—figures out who he is, they cajole him into an orchestrated elevated-train-robbery to make people feel good about the city again. It works, but Steve feels like crap afterwards. He knows it’s phony, he feels like a phony, and he’s determined to hang up the cape and tights.
3. Still, as agreed, he shows up at a rally for the Mayor, accepting a key to the city, then, apparently on his own, gives a “It’s not me, it’s you” speech to the cheering crowd. He talks about how there are heroes everywhere; he says we just have to pull together and care more about each other. It’s at this point, though, that an enterprising reporter, Gloria Preston (Jane Hallaren), exposes incident #2 as a fraud, which means Steve’s a fraud. The mob turns on him quickly. Fights break out. People don’t care again.
4. Ashamed, about to leave the city for good, he comes across a tenement-building fire (of course), with a kid trapped inside (of course), and the Fire Chief determined not to let any of his men risk their necks (of course). So he springs into action again as Captain Avenger. After he saving the boy, though, he needs saving. Which is what happens. Two burly local guys, one black and one white, along with the Fire Chief, run into the burning building to get him, thus proving the message in his speech. We are all heroes.

After that, he gets the girl, J. Marsh (Anne Archer), along with a happy ending, and the two walk along the streets of New York as the camera pans up and back. Fade out

We could use this message again.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
No, not the “We’re all heroes” message. Ick.

I’m talking about the movie’s tangential discussion on hero worship: our overwhelming, insatiable, juvenile need for heroes. You could really do something with that in this day and age. You could attempt to upend the genre with that.

“Hero At Large” was made at a time when the genre didn’t even exist. It opened on February 8, 1980, when only one superhero movie, as we now understand them, had been made: “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Before that, you had a few TV superheroes (Hulk, Shazam, 1950s Superman), a mess of Saturday morning cartoons, and the movie serials of the 1940s.

More, popular cinema was just beginning to switch from an era of gritty antiheroes, disappearing frontiers and depressing endings to the over-the-top heroics and ultimate triumphs of … take your pick. Luke Skywalker. Rocky Balboa. Indiana Jones. Maverick. John McClane. Superman. Batman. Spider-Man. Iron Man. The motherfucking Avengers. In its own way, despite its gritty New York locations and everyman message, “Hero” is trying to push us toward that future. It wants us to want heroes. It wants us to feel good again.

At one point, as New York City is going Captain Avenger crazy, a local TV host (William Bogert) talks up the phenomenon, then lets his two female panelists, journalist Gloria Preston and Dr. Joyce Brothers (playing herself), debate the matter:

Brothers: Who’s to say it’s unhealthy to admire a heroic figure?
Preston: Oh, I will. The next we’ll be doing is, uh, looking for genies in bottles or having our fairy godmothers take us to the ball.

The host then asks if the public response to Captain Avenger doesn’t indicate that people would like to have a hero. Brothers: “Of course they would.” Preston: “What happens when they find out it’s a joke?”

Preston’s assumption is incorrect at this moment. Steve hasn’t faked anything. He’s a legitimate nice guy and one-time hero. No, the better response is: “Of course people want a hero. Then what?” I.e., What happens when you buy into it as much as we buy into it? When you see it every weekend at the movie theaters? When you see it every night on TV? Do you begin to think we’re the heroes, that our powers are limitless, that happy endings are de rigueur? Do you transfer the tropes of the genre off the screen and into, say, the political realm? Do you see our country as the hero, stalking and routing villains, and then wonder where the happy ending went? Why it got so complicated? Do you have trouble dealing with complexity and relativity of the world? Do you have trouble seeing the world as it is? Do you assume absolutes? Do you yearn for a simpler time?

“We need our hopes, just as we need our fantasies,” Dr. Brothers says on the talk show, then turns toward the camera and speaks directly to Steve. “We need you, Captain Avenger, dream and reality. Keep it up!”

He does. We have.

Come and knock on her door
The rest of the movie is lukewarm romance: Steve inveigling his way into J.’s apartment and her life. It’s got a “Three’s Company” vibe—he’s often shirtless, or in a towel, and there’s sexual innuendo. J. isn’t interested in him until she is. Then she isn’t again. Then she is. It’s love.

Archer is both annoying and sexy, while Ritter is too emphatic, too pungent, in both his niceness and his pushiness. He seems to gulp things in. The acting from both actors feels like acting.

Steve is basically Clark Kent—Midwestern nice guy that nobody in the city believes can be that nice—while the back-and-forth with J. borrows heavily from “Superman”:

J.: Why do you do it?
Steve: Because of what happened. All of those people who called in and wrote letters. How often do you get to do something that’s really special?
J.: You really mean that, don’t you? You’re for real.

Later, when it all falls apart and he’s ready to leave city, still wearing his red suit and striped underwear, she gives him a pep talk:

J.: If you run away, the bad guys win.
Steve: They win anyway. They’ve got the numbers. … Nobody listens.
J. (quietly): I did.

So did Hollywood.

Captain Avenger to the rescue!

WARNING: SPOILERS

In every detail, “Superman II” directed by Richard Donner is better than “Superman II,” directed by Richard Lester. Particularly one.

Alright, so the ending still sucks. Turning back time again? But this is understandable. “I” was supposed to end with Lex Luthor’s nuke setting free the Krytponian supervillains Zod, Ursa and Non from the Phantom Zone (“FREEEE!”), with the title graphic announcing, “Superman will return in SUPERMAN II!” or some such. But they decided—rightly, if you ask me—that they needed a real end to “I,” and so Supes turns back time to save Lois’ life. Although even as a 15-year-old I wondered: Just how farback did he go? To before the nukes launched? To before the kryptonite and the dunk in the pool and the rescue by Miss Tessmacher? Before the kiss from Miss Tessmacher? Do you give up Miss Tessmacher or allow half of California to sink into the ocean? A true dilemma.

In the Richard Donner cut, pieced together by editor Michael Thau in 2005-06 after years of fanboy demand, they return to the original ending. Now Superman turns back time so Lois won’t be unduly burdened with the knowledge that Clark is Superman. But there are still problems:

1. It resurrects our three supervillains, who had died an icy death beneath the Fortress of Solitude. Meaning they could come back anytime and take over the world. Nice.
2. It makes the comeuppance of Rocky, the diner bully, nonsensical. Now Rocky never attacked Clark and thus deserves no comeuppance.
3. It makes the entire movie pointless. What we just watched never really happened.

Of course you can say this about the movies in general. What we watch never really happens. Yet we keep doing it.

If only we could turn back time.

Switching Dicks
Are you familiar with the backstory to the two versions? Donner was nearly superhuman in helping create “Superman: The Movie.” He cared about verisimilitude. That was his watchword on set. The cast loved him: Brando, Hackman, Reeve, Kidder. Producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind? Not so much. They liked spending money to make a splash—$3 million for Brando!—but turned off the spigot everywhere else. Their m.o. was to find a brand-name product, hopefully in the public domain, hire some big-name stars, and make a crappy movie out of it. Witness “Bluebeard” with Richard Burton in 1972; “Santa Claus” with Dudley Moore in 1985; and “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery” with Marlon Brando in 1992. Witness “Supergirl” with Faye Dunaway and Peter O’Toole in 1984. On second thought, don’t witness it.

The Salkinds also made the “Musketeers” movies in ’73 and ’74, directed by Richard Lester, and those were popular and came in under budget. And when Donner went over-budget while filming the first two “Superman” movies simultaneously—although he says he never had a budget—the Salkinds brought in Lester as advisor, most likely with the idea of having him replace Donner. Which is what happened after “Superman: The Movie” became a big hit. The Salkinds switched Dicks.

Apparently Donner finished 80 percent of principle photography on “II” but Lester, a Brit, who knew little of the Superman legend, and whose ouevre tended toward comedy (“A Hard Day’s Night”), camp (“The Three Musketeers”), and crap (“Butch and Sundance: The Early Days”), remade it in his image. Put it this way: “Verisimilitude” was not his watchword.  

Lester gave Superman and the Kryptonian villains powers they never had in the comic books. They point at people and lift them in the air. Superman shrinkwraps Non with a plastic “S” symbol. He kisses Lois and makes her forget he’s Superman. In the Donner version, we lose all of this crap.

We lose the candy-cane villainy of Zod, Ursa and Non on Krypton. Seriously, that was their crime? Breaking a candy cane in two? Man, that Kryptonian Council was uptight.

We lose Clark strolling into The Daily Planet in the middle of the day like he’s a slacker. We lose the awful, super-sensitive dialogue between Supes and Lois in the honeymoon suite at Niagra Falls. Ditto Superman flying around the world to pick flowers and groceries. And now he beds Lois before he loses his powers. For which, I’m sure, she’s grateful.

How about the worst contradiction in the movie? In the Lester version, when Supes loses his powers in the crystal chamber, he grimaces in pain and comes out exhausted. Yet when he reverses things so Zod, Ursa and Non lose their powers, they feel nothing until Superman crushes Zod’s hand. Which makes no sense. Even as an 18-year-old in 1981, my mind balked at the disconnect. In the Donner version, Supes losing his superpowers isn’t so painful, so it’s less of a disconnect when Zod feels nothing.

That’s what we lose. What do we gain? The greatest actor of all time.

The best lost scene ever
That was another thing with the Salkinds: they got sued a lot. And they were in litigation with Marlon Brando at the time “Superman II” was being filmed, or refilmed, and so, because of that, and because Brando was promised 11 percent of the profits from the sequel if he was in it, they simply excised him from the story. The Kryptonian Council stands alone without Jor-El. Kal-El now gets advice from his mother, Lara (Susannah York), who was silent throughout most of “I.” No wonder he screams “Fatherrrrrrrrrr!” the way he does. Daddy’s missing.

Seeing Brando restored in the Donner cut, you get the feeling that the filmmakers planned on extending the Christ metaphor. Superman wasn’t meant to be merely a superpowered being sent via star to a childless couple to show humans the light; there’s also death (losing his powers) and resurrection (regaining them by becoming one with the father). Shouting “Fatherrrrrrrrrr!” with arms spread wide is his version of “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”

But this isn’t the best part of the Donner cut. The best part of the Donner cut is how they open the movie.

In Lester’s version, Clark Kent strolls into The Daily Planet office at midday while others are working, then hears about the terrorists taking over the Eifel Tower, with Lois on the scene; so he runs and changes into Superman and saves the day, and sends the nuke into space (again), and yadda yadda. None of it is tight. None of it is funny. You wonder why Clark isn’t at work, why he doesn’t know about the terrorists, and why he keeps detonating nukes in space when his mother has already warned him against it in those Kryptonian lesson plans.

Here’s what Donner does. Clark strolls into The Daily Planet office, yes, but he doesn’t try to say “Hi” to busy people. Instead, while he talks to Jimmy, Lois, back from her adventures in California, looks at him, looks at the photo of Superman in the newspaper, and begins to draw a suit, glasses, and a fedora on it. Wah-lah! She ain’t dumb. She probably thought, “Hey, they’re both tall, arrived in Metropolis around the same time, and they’re the only dudes in the late 1970s who still use Brylcreem, so…” Here, with her doodle, she makes the connection. Here, now, she’s sure.

And what does she do with this information? She toys with him and teases him. It’s pretty cute. Perry calls both into his office and gives them an assignment to pose as a honeymoon couple at Niagra Falls to blow the lid off some scam there. She’s game. He’s worried. She talks about flying up there and pokes him in the ribs. “You know, fly?” she says after Perry’s left, then flaps her hands like a bird, like Jack Nicholson’s Joker would do in imitation of the Batman 11 years later. Then she opens a window and allows herself to fall out. “You won’t let me die, Superman!” she cries. He doesn’t. With superspeed, he races through the Planet office, papers and skirts flying, and onto the sidewalk below, slows her descent with his superbreath, unfurls an awning with his heat vision, and allows her to bounce, plop, from the awning into a nearby vegetable stand. The he races back and looks worriedly out the window. “Lois, what are you doing?” he cries. She faints.

It’s fun. It’s clever. It’s sexy. It’s got pizzazz. It’s like finding a great lost scene from “Casablanca.” It’s better than any scene in Lester’s version.

And it wound up on his cutting-room floor.

You want to call Superman. Because we wuz robbed.

What might’ve been
Who knows what might have happened if the Salkinds had stuck with Richard Donner for the second movie. Who knows how he and creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz might have shaped the movie and the ending. Maybe they would’ve realized, as Hollywood eventually realized, that you can have the secret identity revealed, and stay revealed, as it was in “Batman,” and “Batman Returns, and “Batman Begins,” and “Spider-Man 2,” and “Iron Man.” That it’s OK to deviate from the restrictive continuity of the comic book. That you’re in the movies now and it’s time to have a little fun.

Maybe they would have done all that.

But we can’t turn back time to find out.

Supercute: Lois and Clark in the best lost scene ever.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In “Superman: The Movie,” set in 1978, Superman (Christopher Reeve) brings a bit of old-fashioned conservatism (“I’m here to fight for truth, justice and the American way”) to a cynical, left-wing America presided over by Jimmy Carter. The result is charming.

In “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” set in 1987, Superman (same) brings a bit of left-wing idealism (“Effective immediately, I'm going to rid our planet of all nuclear weapons”) to a conservative, loutish America presided over by Ronald Reagan. The result is shit.

Why? The fourth “Superman” movie, and the sad, last chapter in the Christopher Reeve series, reverts the old saying about failure being an orphan. This failure had nothing but fathers. Most of them deadbeats.

Bow down before Übermensch
Start with the concept, which started with Christopher Reeve.

In the DVD commentary to the Richard Donner cut of “Superman II,” creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz talks about Reeve coming to him with this idea about nuclear disarmament for “IV,” and while he loved Reeve, “the most wonderful guy in the world,” he says, “so altruistic in so many ways,” he laid down the law:

I can tell you as a writer: Stay out of things that Superman can fix by himself … Don’t get into famine. Superman can feed the world. Just stay inside the character.

I’m reminded of that strip Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created for Look magazine in 1940, “How Superman would stop the war,” which was just two pages long. Superman blasts through German defenses, grabs Hitler, grabs Stalin, takes them before the League of Nations, where judgment is pronounced. Problem solved.

It’s similar here. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. are ramping things up, goosed by the yellow journalism of a Rupert Murdoch type, David Warfield (Sam Wanamaker), who now owns The Daily Planet. Then an annoying boy named Jeremy (Damian McLawhorn) writes a letter to Superman asking him to stop the arms race. He says all the kids are unhappy about it. “Superman can make sure we don’t blow ourselves up, quick and easy,” he writes, and Superman, or Clark, or Kal-El, treats this information like it’s news, like he’d never contemplated it before. It goes against everything he was ever taught, by both fathers, but he ignores their wisdom. Instead he goes to the U.N., where he gives this speech:

We can't live in fear, and I can't stand idly by and watch as we stumble into the madness of possible nuclear destruction. So I've come to a decision. I'm going to do what our governments have been unwilling or unable to do. Effective immediately, I'm going to rid our planet of all nuclear weapons.

Cheers go up and Superman goes on his way. There’s no debate. I’ve come to a decision and this is the way the world is going to be. It’s tyrannical but the movie doesn’t recognize its tyranny. What if Superman comes to other decisions? “Everyone must wear their underwear outside their pants like I do. Starting with you, Jimmy!” “No, Superman, no!”

Oddly, Superman only grabs the nuclear missiles once they’re launched. Do the U.S. and U.S.S.R. launch them as a favor to him? So he can round them up more easily? Or is he just stealing them? Either way, he collects them in a gigantic space net, then swirls this net around and around and into the sun. Problem solved. Now to get to work on that underwear-outside-the-pants thing.

Of course, in one of the missiles, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) has placed a hair of Superman, some protoplasm, a computer code, and some clothes, and all of this will lead to the creation of Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow, a Chippendales dancer), the villain of the movie. Which is such a dumb idea it makes the rest of the movie seem brilliant.

“I've come to a decision...”

You won’t believe that you once believed that a man could fly
It doesn’t help that the special effects suck. You get that fakey drop shadow behind Superman in flight, and he keeps having to steady his arms, as if he’s not used to flying. It’s like we’re back in the days of “Shazam!” or something. Even the opening credits look like cartoon versions of what came before. They look like placeholder credits.

Remember when we lost Brando in “II” and were stuck with Susannah York? I’d kill for her here. Instead, in the Fortress of Solitude, Kal-El gets advice from generic Kryptonian elders, heads floating in space. They come off like the League of Grumpy Old Men.

Chalk up all of this cheapness to three words: Golan and Globus. These two Israeli filmmakers, Monahem and cousin Yoram respectively, bought Cannon Films in 1979 and proceeded to make it, and themselves, synonymous with the cheapest, crappiest movies of the 1980s. They were all about quantity over quality. In 1987 alone, the year “Superman IV” was released, they produced 26 other movies, including “Over the Top” (Sylvester Stallone arm wrestles) and “Death Wish IV” (Charles Bronson kills). And that isn’t even the worst of their oeuvre. Think “Bolero,” the 1990 “Captain America,” and the “Hercules” movies with Lou Ferigno. Think “The Wicked Lady,” or “Death Wish III,” or any movie in which Marina Sirtis gets her clothes torn off. Think the worst devils of our nature.

And these are the guys who temporarily owned Superman. Oy gevalt.

The DVD commentary by screenwriter Mark Rosenthal is more dismissive of the movie than the harshest review from the most dismissive critic. It’s not a mea culpa so much as an eorum culpa. These are his first words:

You can tell from the very first credit, which says “Warner Bros.,” that something is terribly wrong in Metropolis. … When we sat and looked at these credits, which are more like graffiti on a black screen than the wonderful, and startling for their time, credits of the Dick Donner Supermans, “Superman I” and “II,” it was heartbreaking for everyone involved, who had so wanted to make this a return to the high-quality of the first two Supermans.

He talks about how, because the budget was cut in preproduction, Canon lost all the great technicians and effects people who had done the first “Superman” movies. Big scenes became small scenes. The global became local. A grand vision was replaced by the rinky-dink. It looked fake fake fake. You won’t believe that you once believed that a man could fly.

You won’t believe that you once believed that a man could fly.

Lois Lane, Superman’s mother
Plus, people just got old.

Reeve still looks good as Superman (although is he wearing a wig now?), and Hackman can still play Lex Luthor. (He was a year away from another Academy Award nomination for “Mississippi Burning.”) Otherwise….

Perry White has shrunk. (Did Jackie Cooper have cancer?) Jimmy Olsen is going bald. And Lois Lane looks less like Superman’s girlfriend than Superman’s mother. Margot Kidder, bless her, didn’t age well. I assume drugs. She was 39 but looked 49.

Thus the addition of a younger love interest: Mariel Hemingway playing Lacy Warfield, daughter of David, who starts out echoing her father’s bottom line, until, influenced by Clark, on whom she has a crush, she becomes a better person. “Daddy?” she says near the end when her father is still talking circulation numbers and profits. “Stuff it!” We’re supposed to cheer.

She thinks Clark should do a regular “On the Town” feature, and takes him to aerobics class, where he fumbles about, and she takes him weight lifting, where he can’t lift anything, ha ha, and somehow she organizes a double-date for her and Clark and Lois and Superman, which Superman isn’t smart enough to get out of. “Sorry, Lois, there’s a typhoon in Taiwan.” Instead, he keeps changing from one to the other, to be with either Lacy or Lois. We’re supposed to chuckle.

Lois isn’t completely forgotten. She shows up at Clark’s place while he’s wondering what to do about nuclear disarmament, and he takes her by the hand and jumps off his terrace, which looks a lot like hers from the first film, and then, while she’s screaming, boom, he’s Superman, but with Clark’s glasses on. After that, they go flying around the country. I immediately assumed dream sequence. At one point he drops her, laughing, and she screams, but then he catches her, ha ha, before it’s too late. Surely a dream sequence. Nope. Afterward, he asks for her advice, then he kisses her to make her forget who he is again (see: “II,” Lester). How often does this happen anyway? How often does he reveal himself, fly around with her, make her fall and scream, then kiss her to make her forget it all? Brutal. No wonder she looks old.

Old, old, worried.

Blue eyebeams
That’s probably the biggest problem with “Superman IV.” Misplaced idealism aside, crappy special effects aside, there’s too much stupid shit.

Is Clark going to sell the farm to developers? It’s introduced in the beginning and forgotten by the end. I assume it wound up on the cutting room floor.

Nuclear Man is made from the power of the sun, which is the source of Superman’s strength. So shouldn’t contact with him, I don’t know, make Superman stronger? Instead Nuclear Man scratches his neck and Superman develops a fever. The next time we see him, he’s gray and withered, having turned old overnight.  Except he’s in Smallville now. How did he get there from Metropolis? Bus? Plane? Look! In the sky! It’s … a really, really, really old and sick dude. But the green crystal at the family farm turns him back into Superman. As it always does. Me in 1987: “But didn’t he use up the last one in the last one? Or the second one?” Nope. It’s called the magic of movies.

When he returns to Metropolis, super again, he confronts Nuclear Man, who goes on a rampage. We watch 30 seconds of carnage: cars overturn, things blow up, etc. What’s Superman doing all this time? Just standing there. Because? Because the carnage. Which we have to watch. “But Superman—“ Sssh. “But he wouldn’t—”  Ssshhh. It’s OK.

They battle all over the world. Hey, the Great Wall of China! Hey, Nuclear Man knocks part of it down. And now Superman is putting it back together … via blue beams from his eyes? But he never—

Sssh.

When Superman figures out Nuclear Man’s vulnerability—absent the sun, he crumples like a puppet whose strings have been cut—what does he do? Lead him to the other side of the Earth, where it’s night? No, he traps him in an elevator. Which he then drags on the moon. Right! The dark side of the moon! Actually, no. In fact, a second later, the moon revolves, there’s the sun, and Nuclear Man wakes up and starts fighting again. He hammers Superman into the moon, then returns to Earth to get Lacy, for whom he has the hots. Why Lacy? Because he sees her picture in the newspaper. I mean, who’s he going to pick? Lois? She’s like 50.

Later, Superman moves the moon to cause an eclipse to cause the final death of  Nuclear Man. But wouldn’t such an action screw up the tides?

Sssh.

How to repair the Great Wall of China, step one.

I hate the ’80s
It’s not all horrible. I like this exchange Clark has with Mr. Hornsby (Don Fellows), his real estate agent in Smallville:

Hornsby: You be careful when you get back to Metropolis, Clark. It’s a long, long way from where you were born.

Clark: Yes, sir. I never forget that, sir.

Those are nice lines and Reeve has a good line reading.

I also like the homage in the Daily Planet headline when Superman initially doesn’t respond to Jeremy:

SUPERMAN SAYS ‘DROP DEAD’ TO KID

But mostly “Superman IV” is a crime. Besides all of the above, it reminds me of everything I hated about the 1980s: aerobics, hostile takeovers, new-wave hairdos, Reaganomics. In the nukes debate, the warmongers wanted to spend trillions to increase the number of times we could destroy the planet, while the peaceniks thought getting rid of nukes meant getting rid of the knowledge of how to make nukes. If we just disarmed we’d be safe. But we’d never be safe.

Seeing the film reminds me of our cultural regression. The first movie was set among adults, in a gritty world in which journalism mattered; “IV” is set among adolescents, in a fantasy world in which only profits matter. In 1978, it felt innovative that the star lifted weights to become the central character. By ’87, we all lifted weights. There’s a body consciousness here that permeates everything. Our bodies got hard and our journalism got flabby.

I’d anticipated the first movie for months but “IV” was in theaters before I knew it was being made. I saw the first at a packed, opening-night screening in which everyone applauded, while I saw “IV” in a multiplex, the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis, which was small and nearly empty. When it was over, we shuffled out of the theater in a gloomy silence.

Mark Rosenthal:

The movie for everyone became an emblem of greed and chaos on the part of people who were in over their heads, and an unfortunate—and really almost unethical—betrayal of Chris Reeve ...

The bad guys won.

I hate the '80s.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I always thought the steady drop in quality of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies was akin to the steady drop in their box office (in millions: from $134 to $108 to $59 to $15) but “Superman III” has it over “II” in this respect: Superman (Christopher Reeve) does his job. In the first half hour, he 1) saves a man from drowning in midtown Metropolis; 2) extinguishes a fire at a chemical plant by freezing a lake and flying it over the fire; and 3) stops a thresher from chopping up a kid in the middle of a wheat field. Interestingly, all of these heroics are necessitated by accidents. There is no Luthor or Zod plotting the overthrow of everything. Shit just happens.

Could you make an entire movie like that? Without a villain? What would our worldview be like if our wish-fulfillment fantasies involved accidents rather than machinations? Would we be less paranoid? Once the machinations begin here, for example, once billionaire industrialist Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn) uses the computer programming skills of Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) to corner the market on oil by turning off wells and sending oil tankers to the middle of the Atlantic, and we get long gaslines as we did in 1979, a blue-collar guy at a diner says the following:

Someone’s behind this. You can’t tell me there’s not more oil. You can’t tell me someone’s not getting rich off this. Someone’s always getting rich. And you know who suffers? The small guy.

Our movies are starter kits for paranoids.

More tar, less unknown
But the epic feel of “Superman” is long gone. It’s all rather small now. It’s all rather Smallville.

We get gags. Director Richard Donner steered the movie away from camp in the first film but director Richard Lester steered it right back in “II” and lets loose with both barrels in “III.” During the title credits we get a Rube Goldberg gag reel, one mishap leading to another, involving, at different points, a busty blonde, a blind man, a mime, and zero laughs.

We get evil Superman. Gus’ computer program breaks down the chemical composition of kryptonite but can’t isolate one element: 0.57% unknown, it says. So Gus looks at his cigarette pack and substitutes “tar.” This creates a movie version of red kryptonite, which turns Superman evil. Or at least mischievous. Or horny. Or dirty. He stops shaving and bathing and doing laundry. He rights the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the consternation of comic Italians, blows out the Olympic torch just as the games are about to begin, and creates an oil spill at the request of another busty blonde, Lorelei (Pamela Stephenson), who is working for Webster, so he can sleep with her. Which he totally does. Hey, apparently Superman can sleep with women! So why did his mother tell him otherwise in “II”? And why he isn’t with Lois? Doesn’t he love her? Didn’t he turn back time for her? Eventually he splits in two and battles himself at a junkyard (always a junkyard), and the good side wins. “The Enemy Within” is Proust in comparison.

We get an early ‘80s version of what computer programming is like. “How did you do that?” a teacher asks Gus. “I don’t know,” Gus replies. “I just … did it.” It’s like magic. It’s the only magic in the movie.

Most of all we get Richard Pryor doing bits. Here he does drunk, here he does “Patton,” here he does the bland white-guy voice. He plays at Superman, with a tablecloth as his cape, then skis off a high-rise and walks away, looking, not astonished at surviving a 40-story fall, but simply embarrassed. He looks embarrassed throughout. He should. Nothing he does is remotely funny. In the beginning he’s on the dole, 36 weeks, until his unemployment benefits are cut off; then he gets the computer programming idea from a matchbook. What does he do after receiving his first paycheck? Complains about taxes. But didn’t that just pay for his unemployment benefits?

Our movies are starter kits for libertarians.

Evil Superman: Doesn't shower, shave, do laundry or hide his brown roots.

Richard Pryor doing bits
The story? Clark returns to Smallville, ostensibly to write about how small towns are doing in the new economy (always the new economy), but mostly to romance former flame Lana (Annette O’Toole), who is a single mom. Lois Lane? She’s in Bermuda. Apparently Margot Kidder complained about working with Richard Lester so they cut her part to 12 lines. That’ll serve her for being right.

Elsewhere, a computer wizard is born. Gus hears of the rounding down of paychecks, the fractions of cents that don’t make it into our pockets, and he creates a program to gather these fractions for himself. His first supplementary check amounts to $85,000. I have to admit, I always remembered this part of the movie. I thought it was clever.

When Gus is caught, he’s put to work doing bad deeds, and comic routines, for Webster, and his nasty sister, Vera (Annie Ross), and Lorelei—who, in a bit that goes nowhere, is actually really, really smart. They’re like Luthor, Otis and Miss Tessmacher without the personality. In their employ, Gus destroys the Colombia coffee crop, corners the market on oil, creates fake kryptonite and designs a supercomputer, which, since computers are magic things we don’t trust, eventually comes to life and tries to destroy everybody. But at no point does he question what he’s doing. People are dying and all he wants is a raise.

In the battle with the supercomputer, there’s a good, scary moment when Vera is pulled in and Borgified but …. what happens to her? What happens to Webster and the blonde? We never find out. Superman blows up the computer, he and Gus exchange a soul-brother handshake in the rubble, then Gus is flown over trees and set down in a coalyard. He does another unfunny improv bit for the confused guys there, then walks away. He doesn’t even go to jail. Because he’s Richard Pryor, co-star.

Carrying Pryor throughout.

What part of ‘Superman’ do they not understand?
I was an usher at a second-run movie theater, the Boulevard I and II in south Minneapolis, where this thing played during the summer of ’83. I was still a Superman fan but I could barely watch it for all of the above reasons.

Things just bugged me. Minor details like logic. During the Rube Goldberg opening, Clark, still wearing a fedora, ducks into a street photobooth to change into Superman just as a kid (apparently the kid who played baby Kal-El in “Superman: The Movie”) plops in a quarter. The photobooth then captures Clark changing into Superman in four separate photos. Cute. But what’s the interval in photobooth pictures? A few seconds? How long does it take Clark to change into Superman? A tenth of a second? A hundredth of a second? Like that? Like you snap your fingers and you’re late? At best you’d get a blur in one photo and nothing in the rest. Don’t they know who their hero is? What part of “Superman” do they not understand?

The thresher scene is worse. Lana’s boy, Ricky, is unconscious next to a rock in high wheat. Threshers are bearing down on him. Clark sees all this, makes an excuse and changes into Superman.

• Cut to: the boy, unconscious.
• Cut to: the threshers, apparently, 50 yards away from the boy.
• Cut to: the threshers threshing as the music becomes pulse-pounding.
• Cut to: Superman flying toward the thresher.
• Cut to: the threshers from Superman’s perspective. He’s nearly there.
• Cut to: the thresher threshing.
• Cut to: the boy again.
• Cut to: the threshers again.
• Cut to: Superman again, still not there.
• Cut to …

It should take a second. You should snap your fingers and you’d be late. Instead, they lengthen it out to half a minute of screentime. Interminable.

“It took 30 seconds, Ricky, but I finally flew that 100 yards to save you.”

Not campy like TV's “Batman”
“Superman III” is just depressing. They take away Lois, sub in B-grade villains, and give a fading star (Pryor) plenty of room for his unfunny improv. Think of everything they could’ve done with this movie and look at what they did. Look at what they did to my boy.

When the Salkinds began “Superman: The Movie,” director Richard Donner’s on-set catchphrase was “verisimilitude.” He strove for the epic and heroic. Everyone did. No one wanted to make it campy like TV’s “Batman.”

I’m not suggesting that under Richard Lester’s direction “Superman” became campy like TV's “Batman.” TV’s “Batman” had the virtue of being funny.

Bits.