Too soon old and too late (if ever) wise
Oct 16 '03 (Updated Apr 12 '06)
The Bottom Line Growing up and growing old both look very, very tough in the best 1980s movies. Check 'em out!
Beyond writing comments, the appropriate reaction to disagreeing with someone's "best of ____" list is to make your own. Discomfited by some all-American "best movies of the 1980s," I thought about a counter-list with no American movies on it, but as I looked back at the 1980s, I ended up with a mix of movies made outside America and American movies made by European directors.
Before getting to the list, I want to mention some thoroughly American 1980s movies that impressed me during the 1980s. including four middle-period (stageplay-adaptation) films directed by Robert Altman:
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Streamers (1983)
Secret Honor (1984)
Fool for Love (1985)
Plus
the first half of Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Shrader, 1985)
Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988) [thanks for the reminder, Jack!]
Running on Empty (Sydney Lumet, 1988)
Pennies from Heaven (Herb Ross, 1981)
Tootsie (Sidney Pollack, 1982)
The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)
Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
Prizzi's Honor (John Huston, 1985)
The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984)
Blow-Out (Brian de Palma, 1981) [thanks for the reminder, Jack!]
Raging Bull (Martin Scorcese, 1980)
I seem to be one of few with fond memories of the British Olympic movie "Chariots of Fire" that won the Academy Award for best picture of 1980. I'm sorry that two of its stars didn't live longer and that Ben Cross had fewer good roles than he deserved.
I though Milos Forman's Oscar-winning "Amadeus" was entertaining and sumptuous with superb lead performances by Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham, though the premise of the Peter Schaffer's play is absurd.
And there are some acclaimed 1980s films I have not seen, including - "Sasameyuki "(1983), Kon Ichikawa's film of Tanizaki's masterpiece The Makioka Sisters,
- L'Argent (1983) Robert Bresson's final film,
- Krystzof Kieslowski's (1988) "Decalogue,"
- "Jésus de Montréal" (1989)directed by Denys Arcand,
- Where The Green Ants Dream (Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen, 1984) directed by Werner Herzog (without Klaus Kinski),
- and "Frantic (1988) directed by Roman Polanski with Harrison Ford, after the disastrous "Pirates").
THE LIST is in somewhat topical order. It's especially hard to compare comedies to dramas, but the rank-ordering numbers follow brief comments on my choices.
I liked the small-scale, small-budget Japanese comedy, Tampopo, that amused audiences around the world was the "noodle western" Tampopo directed by Itami Juzo 's (1986), followed by the same irrepressible actress (Itami's wife, Miyamoto Nobuko as "The Taxing Woman." It is the runner-up the to the list.
I prefer Pedro Almodovar's flamboyant 1980s movies to his more somber recent work. At the time "La Ley del deseo" (Law of Desire, 1987) seemed the boldest Almodovar movie, but "Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios" (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988) was the most popular in part because it was very, very funny. The plot is hilariously involuted and the movie has the most memorable pitcher of gazpacho ever refrigerated. (10)
Louis Malle's (1987) "Au revoir les enfants" is Malle's greatest film of the 1980s, a remembrance of hiding Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of France of Malle's youth. My own favorite for very personal reasons (it was the occasion of the first date with my life partner) is Malle's 1980 Atlantic City. It may not be a great movie, but has very sweet performances from Burt Lancaster as an aging organized crime flunky who believes his past was far grander than it was and from Susan Sarandon who aspires to be a croupier. There is a plot involving drugs and an ex-husband, but it is the aging galant and the hopeful youth who stick in my memory.
(13)
(For valedictory performances, there is also the 1989 film of Carlos Fuentes's novel The Old Gringo directed by Luis Puenzo with the not-quite final screen appearances of Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. I seem to be one of the few fervent admirers of "The Old Gringo.")
Touching audiences everywhere was the 1988 Italian movie Cinema Paradiso in which a film director recounts how he fell in love with cinema when he was a child in a small Sicilian town under the tutelage of a projectionist played by Phillipe Noiret. Writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore more recently made one of the best films of this millennium, Malena. That film is also touching and amusing, though it becomes devastating enough to share company with many of the films on my best of the 1980s list. (Phillipe Noiet was also at the center of another contender "Coup de torchon (1981), directed by Bertrand Tavernier.) (4)
Another widely embraced film about children was the last film directed by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman Fanny & Alexander (1982). My memory of it is a bit hazy, though I remember that it had one of the succession of religious fanatics from Bergman's oeuvre, but that the children were too exuberant to be crushed by dour Scandinavian Protestantism and that it is one of the light Bergman masterpieces (with Smiles on a Summer Night and The Magic Flute), closer to Fellini's "Amarcord" than to, say, "Cries and Whispers." (5)
In contrast to those long and nostalgic films about childhood, going beyond "Au revoir les enfants" were two documentary-looking movies about the desperate plight of homeless slum children: Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco" (1981), directed by Hector Babenco on the streets of Saõ Paulo and Salaam Bombay! (1988)directed on the streets of Bombay (now officially Mumbai) by Mira Nair. I've opted for the former with the grisly tale of youth detention, torture, murder, and escape. The final shot is ineradicable and made more poignant still by the knowledge that the boy playing the title character did not live through his teens. (6a,b)
The version of Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) that was released during the 1980s was cut to the degree that it made no sense. Like the first Godfather movie and Atlantic City, it is about aging and the relentless, inhuman "logic" of capitalism. (Come to think of it, the same could be said of Leone's 1968 masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in the West" with Jason Robards as the aging exploiter.) Even the four-hour version lurches. It shows (again) that a great movie is not always a well-made one. (12)
The adaptation by Christopher Hampton of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by (Brit) Stephen Frears has American stars (Glenn Close and John Malkovich in the cynical leads, Michelle Pfieffer and Keanu Reeves as the innocent youth plus the great John Ford-stalwart Mildred Natwick in one of her last roles) performing very well. It looks very good (cinematography by Philippe Rousselot who later shot "A River Runs Through It") and does not defang Choderlos de Laclos's great novel. (Annette Benning is the only reason to see the later Milos Forman version, released as "Valmont.") (3)
Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor is both well-made and in my opinion great. As in other Bertolucci films, Vittorio Storaro's cinematography is so gorgeous that the people don't matter. " However, I think John Lone was exceptionally good as the fairly ordinary man in a series of impossible positions across the set of disasters that were 20th-century Chinese history. Peter O'Toole provided some comic relief, and the fine score by Ryuichi Sakamoto bears mentioning. (7)
Zhang Yimou has made a series of films that also show ordinary Chinese lives swept away in the tumults of the twentieth century. "Ju Dou" was not released here until 1990, followed by "Raise the Red Lantern" (Da hong deng long gao gao gua, 1991) and "To Live" (Huozhe, 1994) I'd like to stretch all the way to "Raise the Red Lantern," but will include Red Sorghum (Hong gao liang, 1987) as a harbinger of the even better Zhang films that followed. "Red Sorghum" already has Gong Li in the lead. Of course, it is a tragedy, set against a shorter span of history (the Japanese invasion and the warlord era before it). (9)
The other emerging Chinese master, Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, Life on a String) also made his first mark on the international cinema scene with a harsh historical anti-epic, Yellow Earth ((Huang tu di, 1984) for which Zhang Yimou was the cinematographer, so I'm including these two breakthrough films as a harbingers of the masterpieces of the 1990s. (8)
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), directed by
Nagisa Oshima is searing and shows how "Bridge on the River Kwai" should have been done, showing far more clearly the Japanese contempt for those who surrendered. The main antagonists are played brilliantly by singer David Bowie (as the Christ-like Jack Celliers) composer Ryuichi Sakamoto as Captain Yonoi, the commander of a prison camp and a complete martinet. (11)
Bergman planned "Fanny and Alexander" to cap his career. The greatest master of all, Akira Kurosawa, had difficulty financing the capstones of his great career despite the international success of his Siberian movie "Dersu Uzala" (which won the "best foreign film" Academy Award for 1975). Some of Kurosawa's American admirers (Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas) put together financing of Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior, 1980) with Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Hidetora Ichimonjiand the thief who was his double and was engulfed by the role. The scene in which he must sit still atop a hill to inspire the clan's troops makes me gulp and shudder even in memory. The battle scenes surpass even Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky." The compositions and cinematography are ravishing. (2)
The costumes and compositions and battle scenes in Ran (Chaos, 1985) match those of "Kagemusha." King Lear is widely considered the Mount Everest of roles for an actor and Tatsuya Nakadai rises to the challenge. This is the ultimate story about aging and making bad decisions (something of a leitmotif). The cataclysm is filmed in the most vivid colors. "Ran" is the ultimate Kurosawa film. After that he doodled—interesting doodles, but there is nowhere to go after Lear. (1)
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So, you don't agree? Make your own list!
There were some other 80s' lists with some of these films. For more geographically balances lists, see those of
Bradywahl,
janesbit, and
WilliamJones.
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I have also posted lists of
the ten best movies ever,
my favorite films,
best non-English-language movies by country,
best noirs,
romantic movies with happy endings,
best romantic movies in which the lovers do not end up together because one or both are dead, best romantic movies in which the lovers are separated by someting other than death
best westerns not set in the American west,
best religious movies celebrating a religious figure,
best movies portraying the dark side of religion,
best holidaze (Christmas and Thanksgiving) movies,
best rock-n-roll movies,
best gay feature film,
best gay documentary film,
best cult movies,
best black comedies,
best World War II movies,
best post-WWII German films,
best epics,
and best anti-epics,
best movies of the 1940s,
1939, 2000, and 20001.
and my favorite tearjerker songs.
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