Can’t ALWAYS Nail It: Spielberg Summer 2 Concludes!

When one reviews Steven Spielberg’s chronological filmography, 1989 stands out as a particularly significant year.

The end of the 80s provides us the first year to contain two Spielberg movies, although it certainly wouldn’t be the last: 1993 would yield both JURASSIC PARK and SCHINDLER’S LIST, 1997 would bring us THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK and AMISTAD, 2002 generated MINORITY REPORT and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, 2005 was home to both WAR OF THE WORLDS and MUNICH and 2011 launched THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN and WAR HORSE.  This quirk in Spielberg’s oeuvre is notable, both for how often it happened, as well as how these bespoke double feature almost always paired entries that were so different from each other, perhaps an indication as to his under-appreciated range in genre.

So it goes with 1989’s INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE and ALWAYS.  The former was the latest (and temporarily final) entry in Spielberg’s throwback homage to the adventure serial, which ended up being a majorly successful endcap to his defining franchise.  The latter was a passion project for both its director and its lead, borne both from the love of the same movie and a desire to pay tribute to the old-timey war pictures of the 1940’s.  That one…well, that one was fairly less successful, both at the box office (74 million versus 474 million for INDY 3) and critically…well, at least in the eyes of this critic.  

Let’s wrap up Spielberg Summer 2 with one of his more obscure works, the first without-a-doubt “one for me” film, one perhaps most remembered for it being a Hollywood legend’s swan song more than anything else ... .it's time for ALWAYS!

ALWAYS (1989)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Brad Johnson, Audrey Hepburn

Written by: Jerry Belson, an uncredited Diane Thomas

Released: December 22, 1989

Length: 122 minutes

ALWAYS throws us into the world of aerial firefighting, as Pete Sandich (Dreyfuss) continuously shows off his propensity for flying recklessly into fires, unsettling both his best friend Al (Goodman) and his girlfriend Dorinda (Hunter).  Over the course of the movie’s first hour, Dorinda finally gets Pete to hang up his wings and move into more of a mentor role in another town, to finally settle down and get married.  Alas, before they do, Pete gets called in for one last job, and…well, you can probably guess what happens next.

As Pete awakes from the wreckage and finds himself now in the afterlife, he’s tasked with mentoring another young aerial firefighter, the brash Ted Baker (Johnson), a duty that goes awry when Ted ends up beginning to woo Dorinda.  As Dorinda also begins to fall in love with Ted, Pete has to start asking himself, how long can he keep himself from moving on?  At what point do you say in death what you never could in life, then allow the normal course of history to move forward?

It’s all very sweet in an old-fashioned way, which is completely by design.  The impetus for ALWAYS getting made in the first place was Richard Dreyfuss and Steven Spielberg filming JAWS and bonding over a 1943 Dalton Trumbo-penned film called A GUY NAMED JOE.  It turns out both men have an intense relationship with the movie, with Dreyfuss claiming to have seen it at least 35 times, and Spielberg crediting it as one of the films that inspired him to become a director in the first place (ever the lost child, he found a throughline between A GUY NAMED JOE and his own WWII veteran father).

So, the impulse to remake it makes all the sense in the world.  More to the point, Spielberg had clearly reached the point of his career where he could start making movies that were purely “just for him”.  He could have just as easily not made ALWAYS; it’s fairly definitively the least remembered film released during his prime years.  Yes, it made 74 mill off of a 30 mill budget, and received some pretty decent reviews, all of which is preferable to being a public disaster like 1941.  But after three INDIANA JONES movies, E.T. and major Oscar contenders like EMPIRE OF THE SUN and THE COLOR PURPLE (with major hitters like JURASSIC PARK and SCHINDLER’S LIST on the horizon) it’s odd that ALWAYS is just sitting there.

But it’s a movie about planes and WWII and (spiritually speaking) old Hollywood.  It’s a project he got to work on with a cherished collaborator.  So ALWAYS was made.  Why not?  It’s Steven Spielberg.  And ALWAYS is a comfortable movie, both confident and competent in equal measures, and, when working through his filmography from start to finish, there’s admittedly something to be said for landing on such a small-feeling movie after a run of monumental blockbusters and awards fodder.

But, none of this really helps remove this basic fact…I didn’t like ALWAYS that much.

Yes, it’s a movie that gets accused of overt sentimentality (Leonard Maltin diagnosed it as having “a Case of the Cutes”, which, lol), and it’s not an incorrect criticism.  But, even by 1989, we’ve basically reached a point in Spielberg’s career where that’s just kind of his thing.  The cheese sometimes gets to be too much in ALWAYS, but I also went in expecting that.  At the end of the day, it has its heart on its sleeve just as much as E.T., it’s just way more upfront about it. 

No, my main issue with ALWAYS is that I just don’t buy the main romance, nor do I really buy Dreyfuss and Hunter together.  I understand that Dreyfuss is kind of part and parcel with this project (it likely doesn’t exist without him), but he’s an odd fit for an everyman love interest role.  What made his character work in Dreyfuss’ other Spielberg collaboration (JAWS) is that he was both the smartest guy in the room, and also fairly anti-social.  Even when he was right about his assessment of things, it was fun to watch Quint laugh in his face and tell him to sit down.  Dreyfuss is simply more effective when he’s high-strung.  He’s not exactly ideal for a roguish flyboy who is humbled in the afterlife.

As for Holly Hunter, she’s just one of those “I’ll take your word for it” actresses for me; she’s never actively frustrated me, but I also feel alienated by those that adore her.  I’ve always found her a little cold and distant, which can admittedly pay off in some roles.  But in a sweeping old-fashioned romance?  She just doesn’t work for me.  Put Hunter and Dreyfuss together and you get a couple who sometimes seems shocked to be in the same room at the same time.

The problem is that ALWAYS absolutely hinges on you being invested in these two.  The whole thing depends on it.  And if you don’t…well, ALWAYS just kind of lies there, especially in its first hour, which is constantly laying the tracks for these two characters to reach their tragic separation, a move that you frankly can see coming a mile away.  And that predictable plot doesn’t necessarily need to be a problem in a love story; it could even be a benefit in drama if done right.  Consider that the play Romeo & Juliet opens with a prologue that tells us they’re going to die.  Yet, in the hands of a pair of great actors with strong chemistry, this tip-off has you on the edge of your seat, begging for the finger of fate to point elsewhere, just this once. 

But Pete and Dorinda, alas, are no Romeo and Juliet.  You just don’t believe they’re in love, or at least I didn’t.  One has to wonder if a complete casting change at the top would have gone a long into making ALWAYS special.

Hunter and Dreyfuss aren’t the only weird casting fits.  Another odd casting choice is that of Brad Johnson as the dashing Ted Baker.  Johnson was apparently a former Marlboro Man making his film debut, and he’s definitely fine, if unremarkable.  But it’s the type of role that demands a star-level presence to justify the threat Pete feels towards him, as well as (again) to buy the blossoming romance between Ted and Dorinda.  Baker just didn’t move the needle for me.  Allegedly, at one point in the films’ decade-long development period, Ted was going to be played by Tom Cruise, which…hell yeah, 80’s era Cruise!  Now we’re talking.  I think if Cruise were able to tap into his charming and raw, in-need-of-mentoring persona from THE COLOR OF MONEY, I think that would have given ALWAYS the little extra boost it needed.

ALWAYS is not all bad.  John Goodman is his normal fun self in the “best friend” role, and Marg Helgenberger briefly livens things up in a pair of scenes.  But nothing can really overcome the fact that, for as near and dear to his heart this source material and filmmaking style is to him, Spielberg is kind of on auto-pilot here.  The opportunity to see him cut his teeth on a smaller budget again, after a decade of skyrocketing fame, should have allowed him to infuse the screen with some passion and intimacy.  Instead, ALWAYS often resembles an over-long episode of an anthology series. 

Of course, the most famous thing about ALWAYS is the fact that it wound up containing the final film performance for one MS. Audrey Hepburn, a legend with a filmography that’s somewhat briefer than it might feel (27 movies in all, and a few of the early ones are really glorified bit parts).  Yet, her career manages to speak for itself all the same: nobody can argue the legacy of a woman who starred in SABRINA, ROMAN HOLIDAY, FUNNY FACE, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, fucking CHARADE, MY FAIR LADY, HOW TO STEAL A MILLION and (one of my sneaky favorites of her career) WAIT UNTIL DARK.  It’s a career worthy of a retrospective all its own (and in fact, in a previous iteration of this blog, I dedicated a whole month to her work).  So it’s hard not to get swept up in the moment of her showing up on screen for the last time, chronologically speaking.

And, look, even at the age of 59, she has that undeniable, one-in-a-lifetime screen presence that elevates even the thinnest of roles, and there’s something kind of sweet about the idea of being greeted in heaven by Audrey Hepburn.  But…if you remove all of that, it’s hard to square the fact that her role is…deeply strange?  Like, who is she, really?  Is she an angel?  Is she God?  Why is she giving Pete a haircut?  It feels for all the world like the goal here was just to give this vague role to a Hollywood superstar and hope nobody asks any questions.  It almost works, an indication of pitch-perfect casting.

Anyway, Audrey’s great in this, and she single-handedly provides some historical importance to ALWAYS (as well as a solid, definitive reason to watch it), a movie that otherwise might have faded away entirely.  It’s not a disaster, and I’m not surprised by the occasional hot take online singing its virtues.  However, you’re not likely to see one of them fired off by me.

That said, ALWAYS is a good example of this Spielberg Summer project’s appeal for me.  There is a very real chance I would have had no other incentive to check this one out, and I was finally able to check this one off the list.  There will eventually be no new Spielberg movie for me to finally see; thus, I may as well cherish the ALWAYSes of his filmography while I have them.

Anyway, that’s a wrap on Spielberg Summer 2.  Next time we pick this project up, I’ll be diving into his 90’s output, including some of his biggest movies ever.  I can’t wait!  I hope you can’t either.

INDIANA JONES’ First LAST CRUSADE: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

Back when I was a kid, when there were a meager three Indiana Jones movies, I had to reckon with a simple fact…

…I had always found myself a little bored with INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE.

In some ways, the movie never had a chance.  I had seen RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK in an actual movie theater, and it was one of those formative moments for me as a blossoming movie guy.  I had caught INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM sleeping over at a friend’s house as a kid, which turned out to be a delirious experience, especially having only seen RAIDERS up to that point; every scene seemed to be crazier than the last, but it was so late at night that the movie felt like it was somehow four hours long.  If you had told me I had dreamed the whole thing, I likely would have believed you.

Finally, a couple of years after that, I procured a three-tape VHS collection of the entire Indiana Jones trilogy* and it was finally time to see the story capper, the third and final Indiana Jones tale, the absolute last one we’ll ever get (it’s in the title, after all!).

*Along with a bonus fourth tape containing an episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.  I…never watched that one.

I put it on one night and watched it with my mom.  And…I thought it was just okay!  I didn’t hate it or anything, but, to be honest, I felt a little underwhelmed by it.  Maybe it was because it felt a little too similar to the first one, maybe it’s because I watched it in the comfort of my own home instead of literally anywhere else, causing the moment to blend in with the infinite amount of times I had watched a movie on the family TV, but…LAST CRUSADE just didn’t stand out to me in any way, and it comfortably existed as my least favorite Indiana Jones movie.

Of course, it turns out you’re really stupid when you’re a kid.  Returning to this one a couple of times over the past few years has revealed to me one of the more comfortable third entries in the history of franchise filmmaking, even as I still feel its active hesitance to do anything too alienating.  Oh, and it’s also really, really funny.  Like, easily the funniest of the five Indy films.  

As we inch closer to the end of Spielberg Summer 2, let’s take one LAST CRUSADE with Indiana Jones this year!

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Julien Glover, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody, John Rhys-Davies

Written by: Jeffrey Boam (screenplay), George Lucas & Menno Meyjes (story)

Released: May 24, 1989

Length: 126 minutes

This time, we catch up with everyone’s favorite archeologist in 1938, and this time, he’s on the case to find two treasures.  First, he’s after the Holy Grail, the famous cup that Jesus drank from during the Last Supper.  Second, and more importantly, he’s also on the hunt for Henry Jones Sr., his father who has gone missing during his own pursuit for the Grail.  Along the way, Indiana Jones will meet back up with old friends like Marcus Brody and Sallah, as well as face new adversaries, like the treacherous Elsa Schneider, the Nazi-sympathizing Walter Donovan, and maybe…just maybe…Adolf Hitler himself.  What a fitting last crusade this is shaping up to be!

As alluded to in the intro, there’s a strong element of apology weaved into LAST CRUSADE’s fabric in the wake of the controversy surrounding the darker and more violent content of TEMPLE OF DOOM five years prior, with as many references and structural similarities to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK thrown in as it could fit.  Indiana Jones teaching a classroom full of love-smitten girls*!  An adventure to recover a crucial Christian architect!  The return of Marcus Brody!  The return of Sallah!  The return of Marion Ravenwood….iiiinn the next one!  Hell, they even bring back that famous “moving thick red line on a map to indicate the characters are traveling!” thing that was missing from the last one.  

*And, to my eyes, at least one male?  Don’t get me wrong, I get it.  I was just surprised, is all.

In many ways, there’s a logic to this mea culpa philosophy, a line of thinking that can best be described by the “Sorry.  Im sorry.  Im trying to remove it” dril tweet.  TEMPLE OF DOOM has a more-or-less redeemed reputation nowadays, and it did make a ton of money (although, crucially, less than both RAIDERS and LAST CRUSADE), but it was also at the center of a firestorm regarding the content in movies “these days” and basically kicked off the PG-13 era of Hollywood.  I get that, now that Spielberg and Lucas were in better head spaces at the end of the decade, there would be a desire to go back to what worked.

In other ways, though, this has always made me feel bad for LAST CRUSADE.  I don’t like when movie franchises feel the need to apologize for big swings taken by previous installments*, if only because it always comes off a little desperate.  Movie sequels do this kind of thing all the time, burning valuable screen time evoking the original movie (the most egregious example is Jack Sparrow’s very first line in the second PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, a hamfisted redo of the “why is the rum gone” joke that everyone liked in the initial film).  I never like it!  TEMPLE OF DOOM is easily my least favorite of the first three Indy movies, but that’s only because of a crucial failure in casting, not because of its shift in tone and mood.  Redirecting in the face of controversy would suck some of the ambition out of the Indiana Jones franchise from then on (although Four and Five would admittedly take some big swings of its own; aliens and time travel, anybody?).

*It should be noted, though, that viewed through this prism and this prism only, the original three INDIANA JONES movies resemble the philosophical arc of the STAR WARS sequel trilogy: an initial movie that makes a big splash, a follow-up that goes in a completely different direction, followed by an endcap that tries to resemble the first movie as much as possible under threat of execution.

It even feels like it’s apologizing for TEMPLE OF DOOM’s refusal to act like a proper prequel.  This time, LAST CRUSADE does that “long-running franchise” thing of going back to the past and showing us how our main character became who he is, the main pitfall TEMPLE OF DOOM avoided for the most part.  We get an extended prologue of young Indiana Jones (played by 19 year old River Phoenix!) on his first little adventure, gaining his famous hat and fear of snakes along the way.  By all accounts, this is a sequence that should cause major eyerolls for me, it standing for everything I find very exhausting about sequels and all.

But…I kind of like it.  I mean, yes, finally learning how Indiana Jones got his fucking hat* is of no interest to me and never will be, but I think this opening chapter is actually quite fun, full of energy, full of that patented Spielberg-ian storytelling-through-action style.  Yes, all that “oh, he’s using the whip for the first time!” stuff is there if that’s what you’re interested in, but the whole thing is really more in service of establishing something that hadn’t even been hinted at in this series up to this point: Jones’ relationship with his father.  Speaking of….

*It turns out…someone gave it to him.  Whoah!

I feel like I’m in no real danger of putting too fine a point on this next statement: Sean Connery as Indiana’s father is one of the most inspired pieces of casting in the entire franchise.  He fits into the series so well, to the point where it’s hard to imagine any Indiana Jones movie without him (although most of them don’t).  Connery was in an interesting period of his career, having recently come out of a two-year exile after the production frustrations with his off-the-books James Bond comeback, 1983’s NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN.  He was riding the wave of films like HIGHLANDER and THE UNTOUCHABLES, the latter of which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  It seemed the perfect time for Spielberg to get as close to a life-long dream (directing a Bond film) as he will likely ever get; directing the guy who defined the role for many generations.  

He’s so fucking good in this.  I dunno.  It’s hard to put it in any other words than that.  He’s warm and funny where he needs to be, vulnerable in other moments and, most importantly, is able to exactly equal Harrison Ford in screen presence without ever upstaging him.  It’s a remarkably comfortable performance from someone who would sometimes be unwilling to give his best towards the end (compare him in this to something like LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, where he is providing third-rate material a performance it deserves).  Hell, one of the funnier lines in the movie (“She talks in her sleep”) was apparently an ad-lib from Connery himself, a testament to how open he was to being playful with this role.

Speaking of funny lines and moments, I think the most remarkable thing about LAST CRUSADE is how funny it really is.  I suspect this was a conscious choice, a further attempt at distancing itself from TEMPLE OF DOOM.  But, it’s one thing to decide to be light and funny, it’s a whole other thing to actually achieve it.  LAST CRUSADE contains two whole scoops of bits and business, and they pretty much all work.  Henry Sr. accidentally shooting the airplane tail.  Harrison Ford doing a fucking Scottish accent.  Indiana ending up with a genuine autograph from Hitler himself.  My two favorite moments, though, consists of one I had always remembered, and one that I hadn’t.

1. One I remembered: as Henry and son end up in the clutches of the Nazis, there is this beautiful build-up from (and zoom-in on) Indy about how Marcus Brody, intrepid and loyal friend, is in custody of the diary pages they seek, how he’s too far ahead of them, too connected, too smooth, too familiar with any and all local customs, and will be able to disappear before the Nazis ever know what’s happening.  The cut to Brody lost in the streets of Alexandretta, just kind of wandering around, is maybe the funniest moment in a Spielberg movie.

2. One that I hadn’t: there’s a moment where Indy and Henry are being chased through an airport.  As we watch their assailants run through the station, we eventually pan over to two people rather conspicuously holding up newspapers in front of their faces.  “Aha! That old trick”, we think to ourselves.  As they run by, we assume Indy and Henry are now in the clear.  And they are; the reason we know this is because they emerge from the staircase behind these two newspaper guys, who end up really just being two guys reading newspapers!  It’s such a dumb joke, but it’s also so delightfully playful.

I think this willing levity is why LAST CRUSADE is able to get away with stuff that normally grates me when they appear in other films.  Yes, it’s trying to get the taste of the last one out of its mouth, and yes, it provides hamfisted lore drops* because that’s just what you do in a franchise.  But (and this is crucial), it’s done in the spirit of fun, as opposed to abject reverence towards the property.  It’s not trying to deify the character of Indiana Jones, it just wants people to have fun with him again.

*Another one that makes me kind of roll my eyes….Indiana Jones’ dad is scared of rats.  This is in juxtaposition, you see, to Indiana Jones’ famous phobia of snakes.  LOL!

And, as it happens, LAST CRUSADE is a lot of fun!  Mission accomplished there.  Of course, there’s something a little deflating about watching a movie called LAST CRUSADE, with a story that is already lightly hinting at the idea of Indiana Jones hanging up the whip (an early scene has a villain implying that he is the one that belongs in a museum now), one that ends with Jones riding into the sunset, the ultimate hero’s ending, and remembering “oh yeah, there’s two more of these now”.  You do wonder if the 21st century has sapped some of this film’s power, now that it is no longer a series capper, but instead a midpoint.  

I understand the constant temptation to return to the well when it comes to successful film franchises, and although we’ll talk about INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL in this space two years from now, I feel like it’s worth mentioning that I thought INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY was a good-enough “official finale” for the series.  But I’ve always felt like Lucasfilm has forgotten the lesson Indy learns at the end of INDIANA JONES’ first finale…

…his quest for the Grail leads to him “choosing….wisely” and drinking from the chalice, granting him immortality.  Immortality, of course, comes at a price, as the Grail’s current keeper informs him.  Once he leaves the confines of the temple in which it resides, he will be immortal no more.  His only task he can have as an unkillable being is to stay in this one room, keeping watch over the Grail.  Obviously, a life with no end that comes with such restrictions is no life at all.  Jones chooses to take off into the sunset with his father and friends instead.

At least the character does.  His eponymous movie franchise, on the other hand, appears to have chosen to stay inside the temple, keeping guard over a property and extending its life into the infinite.  It’s too bad.  Had the INDIANA JONES series enjoyed its mortal life, the last image of him riding into the sunset might have been the perfect note to go out on.

But, you can’t always stop the keepers of a billion dollar franchise from choosing…poorly.

Steven Comes of Age With EMPIRE OF THE SUN: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues

For most people, childhood is a silo.

An adult raising a child has many jobs, but one of the most important ones that come up over and over again is the protection from the harsh reality of the world surrounding them.  I was a 90’s kid, growing up in a decade that is being looked back on lately with rose-colored glasses by essentially every single person my age.  This is in spite of several turbulent events: the Columbine school shooting, the killing of Matthew Shepard, the impeachment of the President of the United States, the tumultuous murder trial of a famous football player, riots in Los Angeles, the bombing of a federal building…and that’s just keeping the focus on things stateside.

But I didn’t really care, and truly barely knew, about any of it at the time.  I was too busy reading Calvin & Hobbes and watching Animaniacs and drawing shitty pictures, as a child is supposed to do.  Pretty much all of my peers were.  We had our own internal battles to fight, to be sure, but we were siloed from the horrors of the outside world, even in a (relatively) stable era.

Of course, that loss of innocence, that “coming-of-age” moment, when the silo breaks and the outside world finally leaks in, that moment arrives and you’ve now been altered forever (for most of us, that was probably September 11th, 2001).  Unless you’re overwhelmingly lucky, it’s a period of life that is usually inevitable, and it’s ultimately a necessary one.  Coming to terms with the fact that the world can be arbitrarily cruel, that sometimes people just suffer, that your parents aren’t always going to be there to help you swim through the murky waters of the chaos….it’s painful, but it’s needed.

Those types of moments in life tend to form the backbone of most Steven Spielberg movies; it’s no accident they often feature kids separated from their parents.  The universality of those periods of life allows it to be applied to just about any kind of setting: 1930’s Cairo, 70’s Middle America, the far distant future, a theme park filled with dinosaurs…this period makes any imaginable world instantly recognizable, because we all go through it.

Of course, because of this, the exploration of this crucial chapter in everyone’s life served Spielberg well when he returned to the historical time period that captivated him as a young lad, barreling towards his own silo-bursting: World War II.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Joe Pantoliano

Written by: Tom Stoppard

Released: December 11, 1987

Length: 154 minutes

EMPIRE OF THE SUN tells the story of Jamie Graham (Bale), a British schoolboy living a very posh, and extremely privileged life within the Shanghai International Settlement in the early 1940’s.  This cushy existence is maintained even as World War II rages on in the background, and Japan continues to ratchet up its invasion into China.  The bubble gets forever burst once Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War officially begins.  As people begin to evacuate, Jamie is separated from his parents and this upper-crust kid is now left to figure out how to navigate an uncertain world on his own.  As the movie goes along, and Jamie finds a kind of bespoke father figure in a thief known as Basie (Malkovich), the question becomes: what kind of man will Jamie be?

The first thing about this I wanted to mention: my knowledge of history is weak enough that I always love it when a movie teaches me about something that I ought to have known about already.  I had no idea about the Shanghai International Settlement, nor that it existed for as long as it did (first established in 1863!).  Whenever something from world history gets depicted in a major film, I automatically assume that everybody else just already knew about it.  However, if you didn’t know about this particular piece of it…well, hey, you oughta check out EMPIRE OF THE SUN!

The second thing to mention: EMPIRE OF THE SUN was initially conceived as a possible David Lean picture!  Yes, after original choice Harold Becker dropped out of the project, Lean was brought in to adapt the J.G. Ballard novel, with Spielberg producing.  However, Lean just never developed a connection to the material, and he eventually passed the project along to Spielberg, who secretly wanted to direct it all along.  And, look, you can definitely see a lot of Lean in this visually (and that’s probably no accident; Spielberg is an avowed fan, citing BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI as one of his favorites of all time).  At the end of the day, though, EMPIRE OF THE SUN is unmistakenly a Spielberg movie.  We’ve got lost children, found fathers, World War II, a reverence for aviation, swelling music…you couldn’t miss his fingerprints on this picture if you tried. E.T. was definitely his “divorce movie” up to this point, but you can’t help but feel like he heavily reflected on the separation of his parents when reading the novel.

These Spielbergian hallmarks also help make EMPIRE OF THE SUN feel kind of comfortable in its own little way, at least in the way it communicates its story and themes.  The set up for Jamie Graham, the character in which we view the entirety of the film’s events, is particularly satisfying.  As mentioned, he’s a boy who’s been placed inside a bubble, both functionally and metaphorically, by virtue of living within the confines of the Shanghai settlements.  To him, the biggest issue he faces is whether the maid will allow him to have his favorite buttered biscuits before bed or not.  He lives wrapped up completely in a cloak of privilege he (understandably) has no awareness of*.  This is exemplified perfectly by the Graham family’s early trip to a lavish party across the city.  The commute to the party leads them through a chaotic and overcrowded Shanghai street.  Pressed faces, hustling children, bloody food wares streak across the passenger side window.  They’re right there, right in Jamie’s face, yet cannot touch them.  He can observe them, but he’s not affected by them.  

*Although not from lack of trying by his parents.  His dad reminds Jamie in the beginning, who becomes fixated on a homeless guy right behind their wall that they have more luck than most, and the homeless guy still has more luck than some.  It’s a nice moment of humanity from a character that could have been really nasty.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN continues the exploration of the role of a father that THE COLOR PURPLE began.  Once Jamie is separated from his actual dad, the movie involves Jamie trying to find new parental figures to latch onto, and boy, does he find a complicated one in Basie.  He’s a transient sailor, a thief and an opportunist in every sense of the word.  Although Basie is comfortable having Jamie tag along once they happen to cross paths (via his compatriot Frank, played by Joe Pantoliano), he also makes it very clear through his actions that he will bail on this orphaned kid if he feels like he needs to.  Hell, on the first day they meet, Basie gives a good try to sell Jamie off to some strangers.  This makes for an interesting turn when the two of them (plus Frank) end up rounded up by the Japanese, into a holding center, officially hostages of a foreign government.

In the hands of Malkovich, Basie becomes a great piece of the thematic bricks that EMPIRE is built off of.  He’s the type of adult you tend to meet over and over again once your world expands beyond the confines of your own home.  As it turns out, many human beings end up existing for themselves, even when they turn out to have something of value to teach another person.  Jamie does pick up some legitimate street smarts from the guy, which is invaluable for his survival (and, in some cases, even thriving) in the camps.  However, this sort of mentorship doesn’t actually translate into any sort of love.  In one of the more heart-breaking moments of EMPIRE OF THE SUN, Basie gets selected by the Japanese to be transferred from the holding center to an official camp.  Despite his loud pleas to be brought along, Basie puts his head down as he climbs into the truck and pretends not to notice.  The Tom Stoppard-penned script can’t help but twist the knife here: Jamie ends up also getting chosen to be transferred, and they both have to sit there in that truck, knowing how Basie really feels.

That is the purpose of a “coming-of-age” story, though, that change from a child to something resembling an adult, and there’s no more profound moment in life than realizing that, oftentimes, you’re on your own.  So it goes for Jamie: the only reason he gets chosen for transfer is by annoying his way onto the truck, pestering the driver into letting him give more appropriate directions to where they’re headed.  In a moment of crisis, he’s now proven to be self-reliant.  Perhaps he’s grown beyond Basie entirely.

I should point out here that, yes, EMPIRE OF THE SUN details a very harrowing and grueling story, involving a lost child forced to grow up in the crucible of government occupation and captivity.  But Spielberg’s direction does keep things from feeling too heavy, often to the film’s benefit.  There is a fair amount of whimsy throughout, best exemplified by a scene halfway through (in some ways, it feels like an Act One finale).  Something that we know about Jamie consistently throughout the story is his obsession with the act of flight and the craft of an airplane (another way the director is undoubtedly infusing himself into this tale).  An early moment involves him sitting in the cockpit of a long-since-wrecked plane, imagining himself as the hero of one of his beloved magazines.  At one point during his tenure in the Japanese holding cell, however, he stumbles across a team of pilots fixing up a fleet of fighter jets.  The sparks of the soldering irons feel something like fireworks, as Jamie becomes captivated, seeing an airplane in person for the first time.  Although he gets yelled at by a general to get back, the pilots seem a little more amenable; as Jamie salutes in reverence, and the John Williams score swells*, they salute back.  As it turns out, nothing can bring two enemies together like a shared love and interest.

*You’ll never believe it, but John Williams did the score to this Steven Spielberg movie.

Yes, I know that Spielberg’s handling of darker materials at this stage of his career is something that has been questioned, but I maintain that moments like this work really well, possibly because it’s a story being told from the perspective of a twelve-year old, as opposed to an adult.  That said, Spielberg does, alas, push the whimsy just a tad too far at places.  There’s a moment in EMPIRE OF THE SUN that, had it been written as a vicious Spielberg parody, would have had not a single syllable altered.  Late in the film, Jamie watches as an ailing fellow prisoner, Mrs. Victor (Richardson), passes away in the middle of the desert.  As she dies, we suddenly see the fallout of the Nagasaki bombing off in the distance.  Jamie, in his childlike innocence, believes the fallout to be Mrs. Victor’s soul flying away to heaven.  Woof.  

Still, the film gets away with these saccharine moments, because the performance at its center is so good.  Take it from me: I am a fairly avowed Christian Bale skeptic.  He’s not the most irritating actor on my enemy list; he actually has a handful of adult performances that I think are pretty good (I think the “Batman voice” meme has overshadowed just how strong his Bruce Wayne is in the Nolan DARK KNIGHT trilogy!).  However, he’s one of those guys who has a whole “method acting” hype machine behind me that makes any potential criticism of his work instantly invalid in the eyes of many a fan, in both online and real life spaces.  “How can you say Christian Bale isn’t a great actor?  Didn’t you see how much weight he lost for THE MACHINIST?”  “How can you say he’s overrated?  Don’t you know how seriously he takes his roles, even in shit like TERMINATOR 4?”  Cool!  Good for him!  I never realized that acting could be quantified by the amount of interesting behind-the-scenes facts you can regurgitate about someone*.  Here I thought I was just alienated by most of his work.  I’ve seen the light!

*You absolutely do not want to start the Daniel Day-Lewis conversation with me here.

ANYWAY, that said, imagine my surprise when I found his lead performance here, at the age of 13, to be easily the best thing I’ve ever seen him do.  Jamie is an enormous role that requires a lot of emotional range, coupled with the normal pitfalls that come with hinging the success of your entire film on the shoulders of a child.  In this sense, Bale is great.  In the beginning, he’s entitled without being annoying.  By the end, he’s confident without being precocious.  He has a remarkable amount of self-control, considering, again, he’s a teenager.  I truly, truly kept waiting for him to piss me off.  It never happened.  One can only imagine what his performance would have been like if he had known to gain thirty pounds first.

Putting EMPIRE OF THE SUN in context with his complete filmography, it becomes clear why it’s become the ultimate “underseen and underrated” Spielberg film.  Despite its relative high quality, it’s flanked by too many all-time Hollywood classics: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTIAL.  The one-two punch of SCHINDLER’S LIST and JURASSIC PARK a few years later.  It just never hit the zeitgeist the way many other Spielberg movies did.  Although it earned six Oscar nominations, they were all in technical categories, and resulted in zero wins.  EMPIRE OF THE SUN probably just got overshadowed by another big historical epic from a legendary director that year: Bertolucci’s THE LAST EMPEROR.  Hell, even the name is pretty similar.   

It’s also not one of his very best.  But I do think, were you to watch it, it would become an easy answer for you the next time someone asks you for a film recommendation.  If nothing else, it makes you reflect on the way we ultimately have to navigate a sometimes-scary world, how to navigate trusting another person, how to grow into yourself, how to connect with the things you love, even when gatekept by an enemy.

Oh, and a young Ben Stiller somehow appears in this very briefly.  That definitely makes for a fun fact at a trivia night, if nothing else.

Steven Grows Up With THE COLOR PURPLE: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

I often find myself struggling with movies about human misery.

For a couple of reasons, I hesitate to make reference to “message movies”, as these types of films are often called.  For one, I kind of think all movies are “message movies”; what is a film if not an artist communicating with people, even if what they’re trying to communicate is “seeing hot people try to defuse a bomb is cool” (in the case of Jan de Bont’s SPEED) or “I’m a fucking freak” (in the case of Dan Aykroyd’s NOTHING BUT TROUBLE).  But for two, the term “message movie” has always felt pejorative to me, the unspoken implication being “a movie is trying to open my mind to something, oh no!”  That said, there’s no precisely correct way to teach an audience anything, and I think the pitfalls to getting it wrong is what causes some people to get bumped, including myself.  

There appears to be two main ways a movie teaches us about human misery.  It can go for a glossy Hollywood style, where emotions are cued with swelling & active scores, and the screenplay lands itself on some kind of inspiring, if not precisely happy, conclusion.  The tradeoff with this style is that you’re still providing the audience their most common aim of watching a movie in the first place (to get swept away from reality for a while) without risking alienation, but are not precisely providing…well, reality, defeating the purpose of the intense subject matter in the first place.  So, you can instead go for stark, relatively uncompromising realism.  In that method, you remain blunt and truthful, but at the risk of closing yourself off from wide swaths of potential ticket-holders (not everyone feels like watching something that bleak).

In THE COLOR PURPLE, you feel a movie that seems to be vacillating between both styles, unsure of how to exactly find the marriage between the two.  And I suspect this may be because Steven Spielberg himself was aiming to go for the second style, while ultimately feeling more comfortable with the first.

It makes for a fascinating, not wholly bad, viewing experience.  We’ve reached a Spielberg movie I had never seen!  Always exciting.  Let’s talk a little COLOR PURPLE!

THE COLOR PURPLE

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Margaret Avery, Adolph Ceasar, Rae Dawn Chong

Written by: Menno Meyjes

Released: December 18th, 1985

Length: 154 minutes

Adapted from the 1982 Alice Walker novel of the same time, THE COLOR PURPLE tells the epic story of Celie Harris-Johnson, a woman born into a horrifying world; by the time she’s a teenager, she’s already lost two children fathered by her dad.  Not long after, she’s married off by the same dad to another abuser, a man known as “Mister”.  The only shining light in Celie’s life is her younger sister, Nettie.  Seeking refuge from their dad, Nettie ends up living with Celie and Mister, an arrangement that collapses after Nettie refuses to let him rape her.  From there, it becomes a film-long quest for Nettie and Celie’s paths to hopefully once again unite.

THE COLOR PURPLE is a real fun time, as you can see.  However, it should be said that, although the subject matter remains serious throughout, there are many moments of life.  And light.  There’s song and dance and genuine displays of love (and, yes, the color purple), just like there is in even the darkest parts of lives.  But the dark realities of Celie’s life, as it is for so many of those in marginalized communities, both then and now, always seem to boil back to the surface.

The cast is interesting, especially considering its lead is someone we don’t really associate with drama these days.  This was more or less Whoopi Goldberg’s screen debut*, and she’s done serious roles over the decades, for sure.  But I’m guessing most people my age associate her as one of the rotating Oscars hosts in the 90’s and 00’s, or as one of the hosts of THE VIEW, which has made her a regular source for dumb culture war controversy (not helped by her penchant for making statements that don’t always make a lot of sense).

*Unless one counts William Farley’s 1982 indie flick CITIZEN: I’M NOT LOSING MY MIND, I’M GIVING IT AWAY.

Anyway, she’s pretty good in this, and is putting in the type of performance whose power doesn’t really hit you until after you’ve watched the movie and sat with it for a few days.  It’s a performance fueled by repression, which means it’s robbed of the ability to be showy, like others in the movie get to be.  But Goldberg doesn’t need to be showy here anyway; she’s able to absorb the series of blows that Celie’s life takes and is able to get us to track her emotions even when she’s silent.  It’s the type of performance in the type of high-profile performances that practically guarantees someone an Oscar nomination (and, lo, she was).

I had two other standouts.  For one, Danny Glover does an incredible job with a difficult role.  Mister is one of those characters who is, for 97% of the runtime, just a bottom-of-the-barrel scumbag, not so much wanting a wife as a slave, all the while openly lusting after another woman, Shug Avery, the proverbial One That Got Away.  He’s miserable all the way through.  There’s a very real risk of a character like this serving nothing but a stone over the neck of the movie; can you really watch a guy traumatizing everyone around him for two and a half hours?

But, Glover is successful in making him seem…almost charming at first!  To be clear, there’s nothing charming about the system of marriage as depicted in the movie (guy walks up to another guy and says “I wanna marry your daughter”, thus opening up formal negotiations).  But there’s just enough of normalcy about him, even a nice smile, at the beginning that you trick yourself into thinking this may work out for Celie.  Crucially, you also buy why a woman as self-assured as Shug might bother wrapping him around her finger for as long as she does.

I was also really taken by, of all people, Oprah Winfrey!  She’s been known my entire lifetime as this person that’s just always been…around, first as a television personality (there appeared to be some unwritten, but fully abided, law in the 90s and 00s that at least one TV set in every American suburban household had to have The Oprah Winfrey Show on, even if nobody was actively paying attention to it), then as this figure people get either aggressively defensive, or aggressive, about.  Oh, and I suppose she’s responsible for platforming a half dozen of the biggest dipshits to ever live, one of which is currently in charge of your parents’ healthcare.  But…um…it’s easy to forget she has something like a dozen genuine film roles as well!  That’s pretty cool!

This was also her film debut and I think she probably gets the splashiest role, and arc, as Sofia.  She gets to play a steadfast, confident woman in the beginning, with some genuine comic moments (one of the funniest moments in a movie designed to not have many involves everyone realizing she’s about to beat the shit out of someone at the jook joint), and then we go through the brutal process of seeing that confidence and independence stripped away from her, never to be returned, in the hands of white people both actively brutal, and self-assuredly “helpful” (more on Mrs. Millie in a bit).  Much like Glover, Oprah does a striking job selling us on both ends of Sofia.  By the time we reach the end, when she’s become this physically and spiritually beaten husk, you just want to crawl into a hole somewhere.

There are a lot of interesting thematic elements to THE COLOR PURPLE, the most compelling one being that of the role of a father.  Shug (Margaret Avery) insists at one point that the best thing for a child is to have both a mother and father in the household.  This is in spite of all evidence to the contrary displayed throughout the movie; Celie’s father is maybe the biggest monster in the whole story, kicking off a lifetime of trauma for her and Nettie.  Mister is a miserable and inattentive father himself; all of his children grow up to be lost and immature adults.  Through the prism of fatherhood, we even get some insight into what made Mister the way he is.  His dad (played by the great Adolph Caesar) enters the story from time to time and is brutally honest with his son, in his own unique way that is neither precisely honest nor helpful.  He recognizes the nasty qualities that Mister now displays in his adult life, but isn’t able to fully diagnose it, implying the women around him are to blame.  One has to wonder how much better the world of THE COLOR PURPLE might have been had we been able to fully test Shug’s theory.

Another element that may take some who haven’t seen the movie or the book by surprise: the monsters and villains in this movie about Black pain are not just an interchangeable roster of racist white folk.  (Some of the scariest people in this movie are, in fact, Black men, a fact that would earn it a good degree of controversy and, perhaps, cost it even a single Oscar win).  That said, there are deeply racist white people in this movie, but the one that sticks out in my mind as the most sinister is Miss Millie, the wife of the mayor that attempts to hire Sofia on as a maid.  She sticks in my craw so intensely because she’s a white character that, in her mind, is being helpful!  She’s giving this poor colored woman a job (as if she had asked in the first place).  Even though Sofia refuses, Miss Millie ends up getting her way; Sofia’ refusal gets her beaten by a mob and arrested.  When she’s finally released, it’s into the custody of…Miss Millie, who’s delighted to now have someone who can teach her to drive.  She commoditizes a Black body to feel better about herself.  It’s a profoundly evil character, and she doesn’t even know how evil she is. 

I do think Miss Millie is representative of Spielberg’s discomfort with some of the material.  Millie is given some weird comic material to play; her aforementioned inability to drive causes crowds to start bolting when she hops into a car, which is funny.  But it’s a broader joke that we see anywhere else in THE COLOR PURPLE (and plays out in juxtaposition to a concurrent serious moment), perhaps an attempt by Spielberg and screenwriter Meyjes to find the audience some comic relief.  It’s a good instinct, but it’s acted on in an uncomfortable way.

Spielberg’s discomfort comes out in other, more active ways.  One of the biggest blunders Spielberg makes with THE COLOR PURPLE (and he’s fully aware of this) was the decision to de-emphasize the gay relationship Celie and Shug begin developing.  It’s important to remember this was dead-fuck in the middle of the 1980’s, where homophobia was actively accepted, and a federal government was mitigating an AIDS crisis essentially by pretending it didn’t exist.  In that specific context, it’s a reasonable business decision for Spielberg to have made, especially when you consider he wasn’t yet known as a “social issue” filmmaker in 1985.

However, it’s a lousy creative decision, especially since that relationship is one of the most interesting and emotionally surprising things to happen in THE COLOR PURPLE’s entire runtime.  Considering how much the two characters’ lives have been altered by the same abusive, arrested man, and how limited the role of a woman could really be in that place and time, Celie and Shug coming together in a romantic way feels actively defiant.  But, besides that one scene, it doesn’t get referred to much, or even all that alluded to, although it hangs over the second half of the movie.  I haven’t seen the 2023 musical adaptation, but it apparently features the lesbian relationship with a fuller chest, which makes me intrigued.  One wonders how far into it Spielberg would go if he had it to do over again. 

Anyway, Spielberg’s official response to this softening of the queerness inherent to THE COLOR PURPLE’s text is thus (from a 2011 Entertainment Weekly interview):

There were certain things in the [lesbian] relationship between Shug Avery and Celie that were finely detailed in Alice’s book, that I didn’t feel could get a [PG-13] rating. And I was shy about it. In that sense, perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters between Shug and Celie, because I did soften those. I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism for that.

He stopped just short of saying he would change it, saying the kiss was “tonally consistent” with the rest of the movie, which I would agree with.  But this leads us to the $1,000,000 question about THE COLOR PURPLE: was Steven Spielberg the right person for this movie?

Not to immediately retract from that intriguing, if very loaded, question, but I should mention that I am neither Jewish, a woman, or black, and thus, a lot of my insights to those particular identities are inherently going to be lacking in fundamental, inalterable ways.  I also haven’t read Alice Walker’s book, although by all reports, it is a much lusher text in novel form than a movie can inherently provide.

What I can point out is that this question is not borne from the very sticky, ongoing conversation we seem to be having in modern times about “who gets to tell what stories?”, with great concern over certain types of movies being better served in the hands of underserved demographics (a line of logic I essentially agree with in terms of intent, but which inevitably leads to blatantly unenforceable philosophies of thought such as “gay roles should only be played by gay actors”).  This was a genuine controversy even in 1985; the NAACP protested THE COLOR PURPLE at the time, with most of their ire pointed at its depiction of Black men, who are, as mentioned, complete dolts at best, if not active monsters.  There was real concern that THE COLOR PURPLE was doing more harm than good to the culture’s depiction of Black people, especially when wrapped in the Hollywood Spielberg “feel-good” formula.

For what it’s worth, both Oprah and Whoopi have aggressively backed Spielberg on this, with Goldberg saying he made “a damn fine film”, and Winfrey allegedly saying she wished people would “shut up about it”.  And I will say, it’s possible a stronger, more real, more truthful movie would have been generated from a Black director.  When you view THE COLOR PURPLE as an adaptation of a seminal text, you do have to wonder if something was left on the table.

But…if you view it as a building block in Spielberg’s filmography, it feels like an essential piece of the puzzle.

One can perhaps view this section of his filmography as “the ramp-up to SCHINDLER’S LIST”.  After the visceral propulsion and non-stop thrills and chills of THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, THE COLOR PURPLE slows things down and really analyzes the effects that bodily and mental trauma takes on a person.  It feels like Spielberg is beginning to grow up just a tad, as well as reflecting on his own family and people’s history.

In that same 2011 interview, he stated that he’s never trying to make intellectual career decisions; he just responds to what he responds to and makes his next movie based off of that.  I take him at his word on that one, which begs the question: “what did he respond to in the text of THE COLOR PURPLE”?  To this reviewer, one has to wonder if he connected with the idea of looking back into the past, depicting a world where our ancestors are trapped in a system of abuse, with no legitimate way out or forward, and trying to reckon with that pain (even if, in 1985, that reckoning meant depicting a finale of redemption and reunion).

To be clear, it’s my belief that Spielberg ultimately does a good job with guiding and shaping this film, and I personally feel like a starker version of THE COLOR PURPLE might have been unbearable.  The ending beat, where an older, lonely Mister sees the errors of his ways and facilitates Celie and Nettie’s reunion, feels like classic Spielbergian emotional manipulation, but I also needed it.  I needed to believe there was a world where abusers can rectify their sins, cause it doesn’t happen very often in reality.  I needed that escape.  But, admittedly, not everyone is that needy as an audience member, and would rather have reality depicted back at them.  In that case, Spielberg is absolutely the wrong guy for this job.  It just kind of depends on what your particular mileage is, I suppose.

THE COLOR PURPLE’s ultimate legacy is going 0/11 at the Academy Awards, which seems weirdly fitting.  Good enough to be in the running for all kinds of accolades, but with just enough flaws and questions that you can’t quite justify declaring it a winner in any category.  Still, it serves as an important station in Spielberg’s career and filmography, and one that will inform the rest of the 80s, and beyond.

In that sense, THE COLOR PURPLE is a full victory.

THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and the Art of the Unintuitive Sequel: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

I’ve mentioned it many, many times before in this space, but sequels are as hard to make as they are commonplace.

When you’re suddenly tasked with quickly following up a surprisingly successful movie that you spent years of your life crafting, the temptation is so, so high to just repeat the beats that got you the success in the first place.  The example I always think of is the AUSTIN POWERS trilogy.  The first one?  A perfect combination of silly, smart, and stupid comedy, as well as a vessel for Mike Myers to simultaneously spoof the 60s spy movies he grew up loving and to cram in as many peepee, poopoo and penis jokes as he could manage.  The two sequels?  Save the introduction of Mini-Me in the second and a star-studded opening in the third, it’s…largely more of the same!  It’s the same jokes repeated (sometimes over and over), with the hope of recapturing the magic.

Of course, your other option is to go the entire other way from the original in order to try to create something new once again, at the risk of pushing away the audience that made your original a hit.  The two movies that come to mind are 1986’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 and 2017’s STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.  The former followed up one of the most iconic horror movies of the 70s (as well as one of the most unnerving films to ever dig underneath my skin, pun only sort of intended) with a bunch of 80’s bloody, dark comedy, featuring a scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper front and center.  The latter launched a schism within the Church of Star Wars by asking bold, controversial questions that thrilled some audience members and alienated others (questions such as, “What if a 21st century STAR WARS movie had a story?”).

If the snark wasn’t obvious, I love both of those movies, just as much as I don’t really like the two Austin Powers follow-ups.  I’m an “unintuitive sequel” kind of guy.  My simple demand for any entry in a franchise is that you keep trying to surprise me, which sort of goes against what a Part 2 typically consists of.   How can you keep me on my toes when you’re just playing the hits in a higher key?  Sometimes, you just gotta play a different song and hope people stick with you.

Which brings me to INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, maybe the most famous "unintuitive sequel” that takes America’s favorite archaeologist, the enemy of Nazis and a man who believes artifacts should be sought for preservation and not for power, and puts him in a fight against an evil Indian cult, in pursuit of fame and glory above all.  Oh, and it’s set a year earlier than that RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK movie, with approximately zero of the characters you grew to love returning.  Where the first one had some wonder, this one is grim and dour.  It’s about as unintuitive a sequel as you can get.

It…split audiences at the time!  It even freaked some people out, launching a whole new type of movie rating!  It may not surprise you, then, that I’m largely a TEMPLE OF DOOM guy, even if I think it has one major, catastrophic flaw.  It’s probably the one you’re thinking of.  

Let’s dig into the TEMPLE OF DOOM!

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM 

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth

Written by: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz 

Released: May 23, 1984

Length: 118 minutes

There are so, so, so many wild decisions made in the creation of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM that make it a really fascinating watch.

First of all, the movie provides a logical answer to the question that plagues all sequels: “how do we continue the original story, one that was crafted as definitively stand-alone?”  The solution: make it a prequel!  This time, we’re in 1935, one year before RAIDERS, and Indiana Jones is not quite the man of historical ideology as we previously knew him.  This time around, he’s less motivated by “this belongs in a museum” than he is “let’s do this to be legends”.  The objects he seeks are shiny, and that’s enough.

He also has a sidekick in tow: the young boy Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), who splits his time between being a precocious child in danger, and a legitimately helpful fighter and member of the team.  I say “team” because there’s a third person in the mix:  a clueless nightclub singer named Willie Scott (Capshaw) that enters into the fold mainly by accident; she escapes from the opening skirmish at Club Obi Wan only with the unexpected help of Jones himself.

The notable thing about TEMPLE OF DOOM being a prequel is that it’s the kind of move that a franchise usually only makes in order to “fill in” mythology gaps (how did our main characters become the people that we know them as?).  Here, though, if anything, TEMPLE OF DOOM actually somewhat confuses Indiana Jones’ history; he seems fairly protective of Short Round in 1935, so one has to wonder why they’re no longer hanging out by 1936*.  Besides providing us a little bit of an arc as to how Indiana became a little less self-centered (which felt more like an excuse to allow Ford to play Jones a little gruffer this time around), there’s really no connective tissue to RAIDERS here at all.  Really bold!

*Yes, I know there’s an extended universe explanation, that they send Short Round off to boarding school.  My problem with it is that I don’t care.

The official primary motivation for Spielberg and Lucas setting TEMPLE OF DOOM a year prior to RAIDERS was to avoid using Nazis as the primary antagonists again, which…fair enough, I suppose.*  This does wind up with them successfully avoiding that temptation to repeat the beats of the first movie, magnifying it to 120%, then calling it a day.  The eventual departure of Lawrence Kasdan from the project (more on that in just a sec!) opened the door to new collaborators: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also worked with Lucas on AMERICAN GRAFFITI.  Although there was an initial plan to bring Marion Ravenwood back for this one, that obviously didn’t end up occurring.  It appeared to be fated by the gods that INDIANA JONES 2 was going to be markedly different from INDIANA JONES 1.

*If only God had tried to avoid the same with the 21st century.

Of course, Lucas and Spielberg were in a mood when they made this, too, which undoubtedly contributed to its different feel.

That’s the second bold swing for TEMPLE OF DOOM; its tone.  Where RAIDERS has an old-fashioned, bright-eyed sense of adventure, in the spirit of Buck Rogers, or those old jungle serials of the 30s and 40s, TEMPLE OF DOOM is dark and dour, often crossing the line into actively mean-spirited.  RAIDERS has a very real deference to other cultures (at least, for an 80s movie set in the 30s), with the story delving into Christian theology without ever getting too judgy.  Jones finds friends, well-wishers and collaborators as he hops across the globe just as often as he finds burly men with swords.  The only group RAIDERS suggests is to be avoided at all costs are Germans.

TEMPLE OF DOOM, on the other hand, assumes a worldview that everyone is an evil piece of shit, and continued human interaction is unwise.  India is especially suspicious: its religious cults involve human sacrifice, child slavery, and the ripping out of still-beating human hearts.  Its high society eats a fine-dining meal consisting of scarabs, giant snakes (filled with smaller snakes), eyeball soup, and chilled monkey brains.  Even Jones himself becomes a scary antagonist for about a reel, the victim of mind-control.  The tone was abrasive enough that it convinced Kasdan, writer of RAIDERS, to drop the project altogether, stating “it’s so mean [...] there’s nothing pleasant about it”.  

Oh, and TEMPLE OF DOOM isn’t crazy about women, either.  Where RAIDERS provides us a spunky and capable heroine in Marion (even if, to be fair, she’s also constantly getting kidnapped or defeated in a fight), TEMPLE gives us Willie, a privileged and vacuous nightclub singer who never accepts reality for what it is, assumes a desolate and decimated Indian village has a telephone available for her to use and…just…never…stops….screaming.  Basically, ever.  

So.  To back up just a bit, I actually find its dark and bitter worldview to be really fascinating, even if only because it’s a case of a movie fully assuming the mood of its creators.  As it happens, both Lucas and Spielberg were going through major changes in their relationship status.  Although Steven was about to meet his future wife (Kate Capshaw, who plays Willie), George was in the process of divorcing Marcia Lucas, with whom he had adopted a daughter.  The bitterness and pain of this, along with Lucas’ natural desire to make second installments darker (see: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), informs why TEMPLE OF DOOM is so acidic.  Hell, it may explain why Willie is such a buffoon; there’s a real hatred behind Capshaw’s character in this movie.

This takes me to my major reservation towards TEMPLE OF DOOM: I cannot bear Willie.

It’s not an original observation (people have been nailing the movie for this character for decades), but it’s one I desperately wish I could buck.  I’d love to watch TEMPLE OF DOOM one time and realize “hey, Willie Scott isn’t so bad!”  But it’s been almost forty years and it hasn’t happened yet.

Don’t misunderstand me: I understand the idea of Willie.  She’s obviously an extension of the “don’t do RAIDERS” again ethos, in the sense that she’s the complete opposite of Marion Ravenwood: she’s incapable, she’s loud, and she doesn’t appear to have any chemistry with Indiana Jones, nor does she have any interest in developing any.  In theory, she should be another fun obstacle in a whole movie made up almost entirely of obstacles for Jones to figure out.  I think the structure of Willie Scott as a character is valid, even smart.

But, the truth of the matter is….Kate Capshaw’s performance is grating.  And annoying.  And persistent.  And not fun for even a second.  And I think that’s the issue for me.  If Willie was a fun snobby, clueless rich girl, we might have had something.  But she’s not.  She’s just shrill, actively trying to keep the movie from moving forward at all times.  I don’t even think she pulls off the “sub-par nightclub singer” aspect to Willie all that well in the opening scene.  Yes, kicking the movie off with a vaguely lame musical number, sung in a different language, is a big swing, and part of the point is that Willie isn’t all that good.  But performing badly on purpose is a unique skill set that is arguably even harder that performing well on purpose (the master of this was probably Lucille Ball).  Capshaw doesn’t appear to possess it.  So, instead of thrillingly terrible, she’s just kinda awkwardly average.

So anyway, I just cannot warm up to Capshaw in this.  And that makes her the single most catastrophic change from RAIDERS to TEMPLE OF DOOM.

The good news, though, is that it’s pretty much the only change from RAIDERS that doesn’t work for me.  Even its frenetic pace, which constantly threatens to be way too much, never quite becomes exhaustive.  Seriously, it’s hard to overstate how fast TEMPLE OF DOOM moves once it begins.  In just the opening reel alone, we get a shootout in a nightclub, a car chase, Indiana Jones and co. hopping out of a crashing plane in a slowly inflating liferaft.  Before it ends, we get a mineshaft roller-coaster ride, a full-on brawl inside a temple, collapsing rooms with spikes and bugs, and a precarious chase on a rope bridge.  It just goes and goes and goes, with just a couple of pitstops for some exposition along the way.  

And, you know what?  It’s great.  I know Scorsese made the infamous remark that Marvel movies were more like theme park rides than films to him, which I never took as fully negative (even though I think it was meant to be) or even really untrue.  But, to me, TEMPLE OF DOOM has always truly had the pace and rhythm of an exquisitely-made roller coaster, the true combination of theme park ride and film.

Also, outside of the aforementioned Capshaw, I think the main performances on display here are pretty great.  Ford playing a slightly more cynical and less-beaten-down Indy is a lot of fun, but it’s even more interesting to see glimpses of the man he’ll become down the line in his interactions with Short Round, as well as his indignity at the slavery of children.  Speaking of Short Round, Ke Huy Quan’s child performance is one of the more comfortable and natural ones in the history of the medium, with something like twenty simply perfect line deliveries.  The moment that I rewound over and over as a kid was him, though, doesn’t involve a line at all: it’s him at the maharaja’s palace, screaming and running away from the line of female dancers approaching him. 

I even think Amish Puri is one of the more underrated villains in the entire Indiana Jones filmography.  Yeah, Mola Ram is painted very broadly, but it’s a fun broad (standing in stark contrast to Willie Scott), an unrepentant leader of a human sacrifice cult, and boy does this guy like sacrificing humans.  Puri’s career was otherwise exclusively based out of India, but he made his name off of villain roles.  His particular skill there translates beautifully in TEMPLE OF DOOM.  He’s imposing, scary enough that it freaked me out just a bit as a kid, and you can’t wait for Indiana Jones to get the upper hand by the end.  If you’re not going to do Nazis again, how much more would you want than that?

The last major thing I love about this movie*?  The beautiful sets.  In particular, the titular doom-filled temple looks so tactile and real, even though it’s so clearly a movie set.  Don’t you want to just wander  around and start touching stuff, just to see what would happen?  Don’t you want to go exploring, just to see what you’d find?  This is an element of filmmaking that we’ve just totally lost now that we have blue-screen, green-screen, and The Volume, and it’s a fucking shame (it’s also a big reason why the fourth Indiana Jones movie is such a letdown, but we’ll talk about that in a couple of years).

*Besides Dan Aykroyd’s micro-cameo towards the beginning.

TEMPLE OF DOOM’s reviews were mixed at the time, although its reputation has improved enough over the years that its Rotten Tomatoes score currently sits at 77%.  No less an authority than Roger Ebert gave it a perfect rating, and, for what it’s worth, Pauline Kael preferred TEMPLE OF DOOM to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  But many, many others found it unpleasant, and too dark.  A lot of parents agreed, and Spielberg once again found himself at the business end of some complaints, alleging that the movie was too hard-edged for the PG rating it was given.

The thing to remember there is that, in 1984, the MPAA had only four possible ratings: G, PG, R and X.  Yep, there was no intermediary rating between the more family-friendly PG and the decidedly adult R.  We have Steven Spielberg and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM* to thank for the implementation of the PG-13 rating, which is now maybe the most crucial (and lucrative) rating a movie can get nowadays.  The course of Hollywood history was forever changed by the decision to run the other way (creatively speaking) from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

*As well as GREMLINS, which also came out in 1984 and received similar criticism about its content.

Spielberg himself has tended to distance himself from THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, stating that the “greatest thing [he] got out of it was that [he] met Kate Capshaw”.  I feel like he may be taking the wrong lesson out of the experience in many ways.  From here, he would enter a period of “responsible film-making”, and one has to wonder if back-to-back films that came with complaints as to its contents started getting to him.  It shouldn’t have.  Messing with ET twenty years later ended up being a big mistake, and I feel like downplaying the power and fun of TEMPLE OF DOOM is an equal error.  No, it’s no RAIDERS, and, yes, you desperately miss Karen Allen.  But it’s also one of the better pure adrenaline action films of the 80’s, with superior filmmaking on display to offset some of its more unpleasant aspects.

And even those unpleasant aspects represent the kind of risk-taking that more big budget sequels should have the guts to perform.  Even when it’s not fully working, the movie is never uninteresting, and that’s probably enough to put it in the top 10% of all sequels ever made.

Ultimately, you’d have to have your heart ripped out of your chest to not at least respect INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.

E.T. and the Light in the Darkness: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

E.T. represents something of a fulcrum point for Steven Spielberg’s career.

Depending on who you talk to, his 1982 sci-fi fable is typically viewed as either:

1. the masterpiece that cemented Spielberg as a generational filmmaking talent, a movie unafraid to use unusual story elements as a vessel to reveal emotional vulnerability

2. the movie that exposed him as a storyteller not so much intuitive as manipulative, a creator brazen enough to do anything to get you to cry, even if it means dousing his film with a healthy dose of saccharin.

In my experience, there is an equal chance of E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL being your favorite Steven Spielberg movie as there is of it being the movie that made you swear him off forever.  I truly know both types of people.

Regardless of which camp you reside in, though, it’s undeniable that E.T. was Spielberg’s legacy-maker; it was an overwhelming box-office success, smoking STAR WARS to become the then-highest-grossing film of all time, at over $350 million domestically and over $600 million worldwide.  It snagged nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director; it ended up winning four (Best Original Score, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects).  It helped boost the sales of Reese’s Pieces, turning it into the premier small round chocolate candy for at least a generation.  It forever cemented phrases such as “phone home” into popular culture.  

More than anything, it proved that, between this and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, Steven Spielberg was here to stay.  E.T. is an overwhelming success story.  It’s also a movie that I’ve always kept at a little bit of a distance.  It’s absolutely one that I watched quite a bit as a kid; it was almost impossible to miss.  But when I think of my favorite Spielberg movies, poor E.T. doesn’t really come to mind at first.  JAWS?  RAIDERS?  JURASSIC PARK?  A couple of 2000’s outliers that we’ll discuss a couple of summers from now?  Absolutely.  But not E.T.  It’s a movie that holds lots of great memories for me, but it’s never been a stone-cold favorite.

We’re going to try to unpack exactly why this week!  Because there are a lot of tangible things about E.T. that made it a little difficult to fully embrace as a kid, although they’re the exact same things that make it sort of admirable now as an adult.  But also…it’s genuinely hard for me to decide if the movie is fully sincere, or fully cynical.  After my first rewatch of it as a fully forged adult, I’m still not 100% certain either way.  It made for an interesting viewing, if nothing else!

E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Melissa Matheson

Starring: Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, Dee Wallace, Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote, C. Thomas Howell

Released: June 11, 1982

Length: 114 minutes

Even if you’ve managed to avoid it over the past four decades, you likely know the story of E.T. anyway: a visiting alien gets left behind by his family in their mad rush to avoid unwelcome government agents from descending on them.  He ends up hiding in a Los Angeles suburb, in the backyard of a child named Elliot Taylor.  Elliot quickly realizes he shares an emotional connection with the alien, who he names E.T. (an acronym for Extra-Terrestrial).  He slowly recruits his family members to help him escape from the government, as well as get E.T. back home.

One of the most notable things about the movie is just how much of it is shot in shadow, especially during its first forty minutes.  You expect this from the opening sequence, where E.T. gets lost in a forest while running for his life.  But, once we move to the Taylor household, the shadows remain.  His brother Michael conducts a D&D session in half-darkness.  The Taylors eat their dinner in half-darkness.  Elliot’s room is cast in half-darkness as he introduces E.T. to his action figures of Boba Fett.  His sister Gertie hides in a closet consumed by darkness (I guess that one makes sense).

This is a very intentional choice; E.T. stumbles upon a household that has recently been decimated by a divorce that feels both very recent and very raw.  Mary, their mother, falls to pieces after learning little details such as their father being in Mexico (“he hated Mexico”).  Just the accidental evocation of the split by Elliot is enough for Michael to switch gears from making fun of him to genuinely being mad.  This isn’t a family unit waiting to explode so much as one that is crumbling little by little.  Why wouldn’t there be an ever-expanding darkness in the house?

Of course, this isn’t the kind of thing you actively pick up on as a kid, even if you yourself are a product of divorce.  You can sort of grasp it as a story thing (“oh, Elliot’s sad because his dad is gone”), but you can’t really feel it until you’re an adult looking back, which is exactly what Spielberg was when he made E.T; his parents split when he was 19, which is such a weird, awkward time in your life for your mom and dad to get a divorce.  Although broken families have been a theme and feature in Spielberg’s work going all the way back to DUEL, this was the first time he actively dealt with the emotional fallout of divorce.  

But, I didn’t really clock any of that at eight.  I just knew that E.T. made me sad.  It was never so unbearable that I couldn’t ever watch it, and there was so much of it that I enjoyed; I loved the score, I loved the flashes of humor throughout (the top moment for me there was E.T. pretending to be a stuffed animal when Mom pops her head into the closet), I was weirdly fascinated by the design of E.T.; how he’s both grotesque and kinda adorable, a very very difficult trick to pull off.  More than anything, I was taken by the genuine displays of emotions the movie was filled with.  But it’s a movie that just kinda bummed me out.  It’s a feeling that stuck with me so hard that I felt weirdly bummed out by incidental E.T.-related property.  I remember going to Universal Studios one summer and going on the E.T. Adventure and getting a little moody watching the pre-show.  I was just never as much in the mood to watch E.T. as I was, say, JURASSIC PARK or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  So it goes.

But, the fact that it was able to evoke such a strong, foreign emotion as a child, the fact that the movie was sad, hopeful, bittersweet, even a little scary…I kinda love that upon reflection.  Here’s a movie that basically set the bar for what a “family film” could be, and it never really condescends to its young audience.  Melissa Matheson’s script assumes that the children in the theater will be able to handle themes like saying goodbye to loved ones, standing up for what’s right, other-ing things or people that are different than us.  Spielberg assumes the children in the theater will be able to handle actors their age genuinely crying, or getting hurt, or being threatened by adults*.

*Or at least, he assumed at one point in time.  More on that later.

Their assumptions appear to have been correct.  Yeah, I just got done talking about how E.T. bummed me out.  But that’s just my own personal reaction to its particular brand of sad whimsy.  I wasn’t inconsolable.  I wasn’t traumatized.  I don’t know anybody who was genuinely hurt by E.T.*  It was actually good for me to see movies that weren’t afraid to start putting into my mind some concepts that will eventually become realities as life started to truly commence.  This all cuts against the way we tend to treat kids’ media now, with few exceptions: keep it bright, keep it light, put in some pop songs and celebrity voices, and nothing too scary, they’re just kids!

*Unless it was something like “E.T. himself scared me as a kid”, which I get, but is also a different thing.

Of course, the movie isn’t all sadness and darkness.  Once E.T. fully enters the Taylors’ lives, and forges that literal connection with Elliot that causes one to feel the emotions of the other, the movie brightens up (again, intentional).  There are some beautiful moments filmed in complete brightness, the most iconic one probably being all the bicyclists launching into the sky.  My favorite on this rewatch, though, is the scene where Elliott gets drunk at school (thanks to E.T. discovering the power of beer when home alone).  Once he pushes through the phase where he’s falling asleep in class, he reaches a state of irrational bravery.  He can’t bring himself to chloroform the living frog they’ve been given to dissect, so he releases his, along with every other frog in the classroom.  As E.T. watches John Wayne kiss Maureen O’Hara in THE QUIET MAN, Elliot pulls the same confident move to his crush in class, a striking moment of romance in a movie that doesn’t dabble in that emotional realm much otherwise.

(We also get my favorite shot in the whole movie here: the slow scrolling shot of a girl frozen in fear in the middle of the classroom, holding two renegade frogs.)

There are some elements of E.T. that give me a little pause.  Like, I’ve never really known what to make of the Jesus metaphor at the center of it all, the fact that E.T. literally dies and gets resurrected, the fact that (as Spielberg biographer Joseph McBride points out) the film’s poster is literally evoking The Creation of Adam.  This is all very odd (allegedly unintentional!) imagery coming from a director who would very soon be dealing directly with his Jewishness in his work.  Look, I’m not the one to unpack any of this; as I explained in a previous iteration of this blog, when I broke down THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, I’m not exactly a practicing Catholic, nor am I remotely Jewish, so I’m not exactly offended by this possibly unintentional framework.  But…E.T. has always read to me as this lost puppy dog, full of love and wonder, showing up to a household suffering a severe lack of both.  So, when he rises from the dead and there’s this implication that maybe this puppy dog is also Christ, it always throws me.  I don’t know what to do with this.  That’s all. 

Also, it’s hard to be from a certain generation (millennials) and not associate E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL with one of the odder directors’ cuts of the 21st century.  For those who weren’t there: in honor of the movie’s 20th birthday, Spielberg concocted a revised edition of the film to run in theaters.  It was a big deal!  It had its own premiere and everything.  In some ways, the changes ended up being minor: a touched-up special effect here, a re-introduced scene there.  A reference to a Halloween costume is changed from “terrorist” to “hippie”, which seems arbitrary, but 9/11 had happened less than a year ago at that point, so chalk it up to a product of its time.  

In some ways, though, the changes neutered the very nature of the film.  The amendment that gained the highest profile was the decision to remove the guns from the hands of federal agents at the end and replace them with walkie-talkies, presumably to remove the very violent implied threat: that these grown men would shoot kids if duty demanded it.  It’s not easy to source down a contemporary justification for this, but Spielberg has stated that complaints of parents groups at the time weighed on him over the years.  It’s also not hard to assume that this change of heart was a product of the more “responsible” Spielberg that would begin emerging as the 80s marched on.  Kids are vulnerable in so many ways now; why threaten them with guns onscreen as well?

For those younger than me, it may be difficult (or literally impossible) to remember, but there was a very real debate being had at the end of the 20th century that boiled over into the beginning of the next: how much autonomy does an artist have once their art is released to the public?  It’s probably a conversation that goes back several centuries, but it only became serious business to us once it got filtered through the only art we ever seem to care about: the original STAR WARS trilogy.  In honor of that movie’s 20th anniversary, Spielberg’s buddy George Lucas started revising and revamping his magnum opus, replacing subpar special effects with modern ones, and inserting new scenes that he wished he had retained (such as that really horrible-looking Jabba the Hutt scene in A NEW HOPE.

This, of course, missed the point of why we return to older movies in the first place: the escape from the now.  I have my doubts that anybody has ever sincerely wished movies from the past could be updated to look like the present, but even if they did, it wouldn’t be a wish worth granting.  Lucas’ reputation began to erode after all this,* especially when it made it clear that these were now the definitive version of STAR WARS now.  Yes, younglings who now only know Lucas as this revered hermetic figure, there was once a very real hatred towards this guy for a very long time, a fire that was only accelerated once the prequel trilogy dropped and everyone hated it.  

*It should be noted, though, that these Special Editions made a fucking mint during their theatrical runs.  Lucas basically dared us to do something about it, and we responded by giving him money.  Who’s the joke on?

Anyway, it should go without saying that removing some of the danger the kids face in E.T. removes part of the film’s thematic richness.  The world is dangerous and a little scary, and adults don’t always have kids’ best intentions in mind.  Sanding off some of the movie’s edges removes an equal amount of its power.  More to the point…of all the things in E.T. that unnerved me as a kid, the presence of guns wasn’t one of them.  I never even really thought about it.

A pair of positive footnotes to all of this: to his immense credit, Spielberg expressed regret about the Special Edition almost immediately: the DVD release contained both versions of the film and he has never gone back to alter any of his work ever again.  Also, the Special Edition of E.T. is very hard to track down now; the original version is the default one you’ll see if you buy the movie on physical media or streaming, putting Spielberg in stark contrast with his friend George Lucas.  It does seem like Spielberg learned something about himself in the aftermath of this unforced error, and you have to genuinely give him credit for that.

The last thing I wanted to mention about E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL before I close out: the performances are almost uniformly stellar.  Of the adults, Peter Coyote’s “Keys” was the standout for me, elevating a character that really is barebones on the page (his name is only generated from the constantly-jangling “keys” on his belt, giving him the impression of an Old West villain) and turning him into…well, neither a good or bad guy, necessarily.  He really does try to save E.T., and tries to be as kind as possible to Elliott once he fails to (Keys himself was once a young boy who believed in aliens).  However, he ultimately can’t help but be accidentally destructive in the way only adults can be (much like Elliott’s unseen father).

Of the kid actors, the three central ones are shockingly good, and two of them tend to get all the ink; Drew Barrymore was a fucking natural in front of the camera at the age of seven, and Henry Thomas carries this entire movie on his shoulders.  His role is immense; if we don’t believe Elliot’s emotions at every turn, the movie could easily have collapsed, and felt a lot sillier than it ends up being.  But the one who I think gets forgotten about a little bit is Robert MacNaughton.  Maybe it’s because he’s the most obscure name of the three; as a result of him retiring from acting in 2002, his filmography is sparse*.  But his portrayal of Michael really stuck with me on this rewatch.  Yes, he does a great job in the earlier sequences, when he plays that needling, teasing older-brother role (he really is being kind of a penis-breath).  But he’s arguably even stronger when he buys into the reality of E.T. the alien, and becomes Elliot’s primary collaborator to get him home.  Maybe it’s because he’s such a pain to Elliot in the beginning, and such a disbeliever that anything was out there, that it hits so much harder when you see his eventual devastation at E.T.'s apparent death. 

*He did return to the business to do two movies in 2015.

So, there’s much to love about E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, even if it’s never quite been this overwhelming masterpiece for me, at least in comparison to other Spielberg joints.  I just don’t have quite the same emotional connection to it that others do (barring that aforementioned sense of forlornness).  The famous ending scene (where E.T. points to Elliot’s forehead and says “I’ll be right here”) never really makes me sad or happy, I just sort of sit there and appreciate the solid mechanics of it all.  And maybe that’s the thing that holds it back juuust far enough from being a five-star experience?  I’m focusing too much on how the movie is trying to make you feel things at key moments, instead of just feeling them?  Although I heavily disagree with the characterization of Spielberg as an emotional manipulator, there were moments in this rewatch that made me at least understand where people were coming from on that stance.

Still, at least we’ve kept access to a version of the movie that remains a little sad and a little scary, and is still unafraid to let a generation of kids know that, yeah, sometimes adults fuck up, and you’re going to be left to carry that burden a little bit.  But, even in a world of darkness, light can come when you least expect it, and that brief light may eventually extinguish, but the memories of it will be enough to help see you through anyway.  

And what else do you need to cement a legacy?

RAIDERS and The Lost Art of Action and Humility: Spielberg Summers Return!

Hello!  Last year, I began a series where I would be going through Steven Spielberg’s sizable filmography sequentially, one decade at a time, one summer at a time.  Last year, I knocked out his 70’s output, a series of films that took him from one of the most popular TV movies of all time (DUEL), to the first true summer blockbuster (JAWS), before finishing with his first major failure (1941).  

This summer, we’re going through Spielberg in the 80’s.  That’ll mean full articles on the first three Indiana Jones movies, E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, THE COLOR PURPLE, EMPIRE OF THE SUN and ALWAYS.  And maybe, just maybe, a couple of bonus articles to transition us into the spooky season.  But those are only if you’re good and say nice things about me on social media and tell your friends to read along.

Just kidding.  Probably.

Welcome to Spielberg Summer 2: E(igh)T(ies)!  Let’s roll!

Some movies are just so perfect, so tightly woven into the fabric of global popular culture forty-plus years on, that they actively defy any further discussion. 

Or, to put it another way…how the hell does one write an article about RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK in 2025?

I’m really asking.  What is left to say about perhaps the seminal summer blockbuster in the medium of film (besides maybe JAWS six years prior)?  In a lot of ways, the film’s analysis speaks for itself.  It’s a rollicking adventure that almost never stops moving, essentially from its first shot to its famous closing credits.  Even in its slower moments, every line contained within Lawrence Kasdan’s script is loaded with purpose, sneaking in mountains of exposition without it ever feeling like the movie is sitting you down to do so.  Best of all, it’s aged finer than pretty much any movie from its era: it’s just as thrilling now as it was in 1981, a nearly impossible feat.  Throw in a lead performance that shot Harrison Ford into the stratosphere, and you’ve got yourself one of the all-time greats.

Seriously, I could just stop here and hit “Publish”.  But I do want to start this run of summer Spielberg reviews with a little more effort, if not for you, dear reader, then for myself.  Indiana Jones would have done the same.

So…what to do?  Certainly, the temptation is high to break the film down, iconic moment by iconic moment (That big-ass boulder!  “Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip”!  “Why did it have to be snakes?”  The opening of the ark!  Indiana Jones bringing a gun to a swordfight!  “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage”!  “Top.  Men.”)  You could probably wring a 25-page article out of that.  But the initial Indiana Jones adventure has been such a ripe source for tribute and parody that, frankly, pretty much everyone knows it beat by beat, possibly even if they’ve never seen it.  Do we need one more person to gush over that legendary truck chase?

One could also talk about its unique path to the big screen, it being the other “Big Idea” from George Lucas (the STAR WARS saga being the first), a direct tribute to the adventure movie serials of the 30s and 40s that formed his taste in storytelling.  Or how Philip Kaufman was Lucas’ first choice to direct, before a long discussion during a Hawaiian vacation with his friend Steven Spielberg (taken to avoid what Lucas assumed would be bad critical and financial reception to STAR WARS) led to the duo’s first major collaboration.  Or how the original name for the character was going to be Indiana Smith (changed at the urging of Spielberg to avoid comparisons to the Steve McQueen movie NEVADA SMITH).  Or how Kasdan was the third cog in this dreammaking machine, redrafting the script over and over with Lucas and Spielberg until they landed on the version we all know and love (with many potential character quirks discussed and axed, including Jones possibly being an alcoholic or a gambler).

The stopping point for me there, though, is that there are a million articles and books all about those things and, frankly, they’re all written with more wisdom and skill than I would ever be able to muster.  Do we need one more person to point out that Tom Selleck was the first choice to play Jones?

What I do want to dig into, though, is why, even when knowing every frame of this movie backwards and forwards, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK still makes for an incredible rewatch, a film that continuously makes its case as perhaps the single most purely entertaining one ever made.

To be honest, my wife and I had just watched RAIDERS a couple of years ago, as we geared up to see what would happen when we turned the DIAL OF DESTINY (more on that when I do James Mangold Autumn later this year).  I was worried that not enough time had elapsed between screenings, that maybe its ability to thrill and surprise would be diminished.  I shouldn’t have worried; it’s as good as the first time I ever saw it, as a child on a big screen in an old revival house.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about why you could watch RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK over and over and have it feel like the first time, every single time (I know someone who watched it twice in one day a couple of years ago, mostly because he could).  And I think it comes down to two things: the crafting of Indiana Jones as both a larger-than-life action hero and a deeply relatable figure, as well as Spielberg regaining his action mojo after the letdown of 1941.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliot, Ronald Lacey

Written by: Lawrence Kasdan (Story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman)

Released: June 12, 1981

Length: 115 minutes

“I’m going after that truck.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.  I’m making this up as I go.”

Late in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, during a quiet moment before its gruesome finale unfolds, Indy makes a soft quip to Marion that ends up serving as one of the most famous lines from a script that seems almost exclusively made up of famous lines, as well as one of the most romantic moments in the entire Indiana Jones quintology: 

“It’s not the years, honey.  It’s the mileage.”

Indiana Jones’ relationship with Marion Ravenwood* is a tricky one to fully unwind, as it’s one forged from a slightly aged crucible.  With an established ten-year age gap between them, we learn fairly early on that Indy and Marion first entered into a relationship when she was just a teenager, which is one of those things that is functionally illegal in the modern era, but really wasn’t all that unusual in the era in which RAIDERS is set (technically speaking, my grandmother married my grandfather when she was a teenager, and there was ten years between them as well).  Even if it would have been a problem in 1936, the simple truth is that your heart can’t be bothered to care because the chemistry between Harrison Ford and Karen Allen is just so fucking strong.

*It should be said, by the way, that Marion Ravenwood might be one of the greatest movie character names of all time.  Every syllable is perfect.

Anyway, the reason I bring the “mileage” line up is because it cuts to the heart of what is so endearing about Indiana Jones as a character.  Even as Marion acknowledges that he’s changed in the years since he first broke her heart, Indiana knows only too well what has spurred that change.  It’s not his literal age so much as the wear-and-tear he’s put on his body, his emotions, his relationships.  There’s a tacit acknowledgement in the very text of the film that running around dashing away from poison darts and giant boulders comes with a cost.  Eventually, adventures catch up to you.

In essence, what this line has always meant, at least to me, is that Indiana Jones exists in the same plane of existence as the rest of us.  He’s human.  Which means he’s relatable.

This is a stunning conclusion to draw about a character who, at the age of 37*, is both a renowned globe-hopping adventurer and a tenured archeology professor.  He’s also as handsome as Harrison Ford was in 1981; if you didn’t know it, one only needs to look at the plethora of fawning female students that attend his lectures.  To a large degree, Indiana Jones resembles no human being you’ve ever met, and certainly not one you’ll ever be yourself.  

*His birthday is apparently July 1, 1899, as established on the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show.  RAIDERS takes place in 1936.  So, there ya go!

Despite these basic, incontrovertible facts, Indiana Jones also never feels too far away from us.  Unlike, say, James Bond (who most of the time is generally always cool and calm in the face of danger, just as likely to talk his way out of danger as he is to shoot his way out) or any number of CSI leads (whose powers of deduction are so strong that they’re able to anticipate an infinite amount of threats by observing one stray hair on the floor), Jones doesn’t always have the firmest grasp on what exactly to do next.  He wins fights, but he also loses them.  He does the death-defying stunt just in the nick of time, but he eats a fair amount of shit as well, forcing him to figure out a Plan B on the fly.  

This is, of course, the same magic trick that the best MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE entries managed to pull off with Ethan Hunt.  As chronicled in this space recently, the series cycled through a few different characterizations for Tom Cruise’s iconic secret agent (maybe he’s a paranoid computer guy!  Maybe he wears shades and a leather jacket!  Perhaps he’s a devoted family man!) before landing on the one that made the franchise a consistent success: Ethan Hunt is a man driven by purpose (that being to keep the world safe), but is often forced by circumstances to constantly improvise exactly how to follow through on that purpose.

Indiana Jones is essentially built the same way.  He’s driven to go out and throw himself into a pit of snakes, or throw himself from a horse to a truck, not necessarily because it’s his job to recover these ancient artifacts (it’s not even clear to me if he clears a check for doing any of this), but because he’s genuinely wants to see and preserve these amazing things.  That drive comes at a cost, as his villainous rival Belloq, working with the Nazis on the recovery of the Ark of the Covenant in exchange for power, successfully calls Indy’s bluff when he threatens to blow it up with a rocket launcher.  Belloq bets that he won’t bring himself to destroy something of such human value.  He bets that Indy also wants to know what happens when it gets opened.  

He bets correctly.  Indy lays down his arms.

It’s very arguable whether Indy does the right thing here!  Now, the problem ends up taking care of itself: the Nazis open up the Ark and their faces immediately melt off.  But, without knowing that…is declining to destroy a powerful artifact worth it if it means the fucking Nazis get to control it?  It’s a tough call, one I don’t necessarily have an answer to.  But that kind of human fallibility, which is woven into Jones’ very fabric, is what makes him so compelling to watch.  The thing is: you know how movies work.  Indiana Jones is not likely to die at the end of the movie.  But, because we know that he’s laying down the tracks of his plan after he’s already decided to move, because we’ve heard him admit offhandedly to his friend that he doesn’t have a plan, because he’s already expressed the change that comes with doing this shit all of the time, you continuously watch the action onscreen wondering, “how is he going to get out of this one?” 

Truthfully, though, even if none of that were true, the action onscreen is so top notch that it’s still worth the price of admission.  Both at 1981 and 2025 prices.

———

“We never seem to catch a break, do we?”

It’s really, really easy to take Steven Spielberg’s run in the 1980’s for granted.

I was born in 1988; I’m guessing most people reading this are within five years of that birth date in either direction.  There’s a good chance that Spielberg’s status as the premier director of our time, whose fingerprints were all over basically everything we consumed as children, whether it be movies, televisions, or even Saturday morning cartoons, was simply a matter of fact.  Of course Spielberg produced Animaniacs and Pinky & The Brain and Tiny Toon Adventures.  He’s the greatest director of all time!  Always has been since the dawn of time.

I’m not sure that kind of Holy Status was anywhere near a given in the time in which RAIDERS was made, however.  As discussed when we left off at the end of last year’s Spielberg Summer, 1941 was a high-profile, star-studded disappointment that ended this fairly impressive run (THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) the young director had been on since DUEL hit TV screens in 1971.  Spielberg was indeed fallible!  What made 1941’s failure even more notable is that the palpable sense for action and blocking appeared to completely elude him during the making of what turned out to be an overlong, leaden, somewhat desperate wartime comedy.  It’s not the worst movie he, nor his contemporaries, would end up making.  But it still represented something of a blow.  Who knows how a young hotshot recovers from here?

Luckily for us, Spielberg appears to have internalized the failures of 1941 and used them as sources of motivation.  Because what is so striking about RAIDERS, especially when coming off of 1941, is how clear and narratively driven basically every single action scene is.  It can also be a source of sneaking in exposition, using these action sequences as a way to establish the characters in our story.

The whole opening scene serves as a testament to that mentality, using action to establish story and character.  As Indiana and his weaselly guide Satipo (played by a very young Alfred Molina) go deeper and deeper into a Peruvian temple, we see the death and destruction that awaited people who have dared to explore in the past.  We get all that tactile goodness of this cool temple set; the spiky booby-traps, the sunlight triggers, the giant crevasses, all that stuff that undoubtedly sparked an idea for a Disneyland ride a decade later.  More than anything, we see Indy relying on his education to survive.  He has an established knowledge of where and when to anticipate these vicious traps, and is able to avoid them as a result, all the way to the end, when he’s finally able to snag the Golden Idol from its throne.  Indy knows that extraction will lead to another trap.  He even comes prepared; he immediately swaps the idol with a bag of sand that weighs about the same.

Even with his vast knowledge, though, Indiana Jones isn’t infallible.  The sand isn’t heavy enough.  Trap triggered.  Oops. 

From there, it’s a run back through everything we just saw a couple of minutes ago, only with more immediate danger.  Satipo betrays Indy in order to take the idol himself (only to reach a spiky death seconds later).  Indy mistimes a jump over the crevasse, crawling out with only seconds to spare.  Oh, and there’s that famous giant boulder coming down to mess everything up.  Indy now shifts gears to rely on his wits rather than his smarts.  Even though he’s ultimately successful, coming out alive with idol in hand, it’s for naught.  Belloq turned out to have the jump on him, taking the idol away from him, native army backing him up.  Even with all of his smarts and instincts, Indiana Jones can snag a defeat from the jaws of victory.

Jones is able to get away in the nick of time, hopping onto his getaway prop plane as it’s already getting ready to take off.  This, of course, leads to him discovering a snake in his seat, resulting in us learning that he’s terrified of snakes because of course this would be the one thing in the whole damn day that would cause him to completely fall apart (more character insight!).  We’ve opened the movie with an instantly iconic thrill ride and we’ve learned just about everything we need to know about how our new hero thinks and operates.  Masterful work from Spielberg and Kasdan here.

That’s a big moment, in a movie made up, essentially, of one big moment after another.  My favorite little moment to point to that illustrates how RAIDERS never misses an opportunity to keep the ride going is the whole “poison date” sequence.  Never forget that this whole section of the movie kicks off with the revelation that the previously-assumed-to-be-friendly monkey that had been hanging around Indy and Marion turns out to *gasp* secretly be a Nazi sympathizer*!  Now that the bad guys know our heroes are in town, someone takes it upon themselves to pour arsenic over a bowl of dates at their lodging.

*In the entire canon of movies that feature a Nazi monkey, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK almost certainly ranks near the highest.

Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before Indiana grabs a date, and it becomes this little metaphorical ticking time bomb on screen; he flips the date in the air, he flirts with taking a bite before suddenly having another thought, that sort of thing.  The scene is overall a small expository one, but Spielberg and Kasdan are able to turn it into this edge-of-your-seat ride; again, we know that realistically, our main character isn’t going to poison himself and die an hour into the movie.  But…it’d be so easy for him to do it.  We know something he doesn’t and, like, if I could just tell him…wait, no, don’t eat it!   We get sucked in despite all reason to the contrary.

Thankfully, that poison date doesn’t get eaten by Indiana Jones (that honor instead goes to that damn Nazi monkey, rest in piss bitch), and the movie goes on, filled with all of these elements that have stuck with me for essentially my entire life.  Karen Allen’s effortlessly charismatic performance as Marion.  John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah stealing every single moment he’s in (“Asps, very dangerous.  You go first.”).  Spielberg positioning the Nazis as both the biggest evil in the universe, as well as the dumbest sacks of shit alive, our earliest (but absolutely not the last) indicator of Spielberg engaging with his Jewish background.  I could literally list stuff all day.

All this builds the case for RAIDERS, not JAWS, as the purest Spielberg movie, one with all the thrills and action and humility that made him famous early on, with any of the more heart-tugging moments that would create a schism of opinion on his later work (is he manipulative, or a master of feelings?).  If I needed to sell someone on Spielberg as a director with one movie, this would likely be it.

It wasn’t a given. But it ended up being a hell of a way for him to kick off what would become his biggest decade by far.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and the Cost of Passion: SPIELBERG SUMMER Continues!

Welcome to Week Four of our first Annual Summer of Spielberg!  This summer, we’re working our way through the 70’s canon of Steven Spielberg and we’ve reached yet another notable film in his then-young career that warrants much discussion.

It’s an early Spielberg epic exploring humanity’s response to seeing colored lights in the sky, where people and animals begin disappearing from a sleepy town in Southwestern America, and true UFO believers become obsessed with proving their creeds to their families and loved ones.  It all ends, as you remember, with first contact officially being made, and the true intent of our alien visitors being revealed.

I speak, of course, of 1964’s FIRELIGHT.

It was technically Spielberg’s “first film”, a distinction that could just as easily be made about 1971’s DUEL and 1973’s THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS.  He famously made it at the age of 17 on a budget of $500, and even more famously turned in his very first profit after screening the movie for one night in Phoenix, AZ and making $501 at the box office (Spielberg figured in an interview with James Lipton in INSIDE THE ACTORS’ STUDIO that they got 500 people in the theater, charged one dollar a head, and someone must have ended up paying two, hence the profit).

The vast majority of FIRELIGHT is unfortunately unavailable to the public; something like three minutes of its semi-unfathomable 135-minute run time remains.  On the other hand, considering the cast was mostly theatre students from the local high school, as well as Steven’s sister Nancy, one has to imagine three minutes is more than enough to pull whatever you need out of what is ultimately a curiosity, the Steven Spielberg movie before there were Steven Spielberg movies.

Everyone seemingly moved on after FIRELIGHT’s one-night-only release date of March 24, 1964.  But Spielberg clearly never shook the idea of aliens visiting our world, a story borne from a lifelong obsession with unidentified flying objects and watching a meteor shower with his father.  The reason we know he never shook it is because FIRELIGHT more or less got remade as an actual Hollywood-backed film, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.  Only this time, there was way more pressure on Spielberg, who in the thirteen years since FIRELIGHT had made a genuine paradigm-shifting blockbuster in JAWS and was now being looked at to deliver once again.

And…he did!  Spielberg managed to match the lofty expectations generated from his water-bound blockbuster and made a film that is much bigger in scope that JAWS ever was.  It’s also much more melancholy in ways I had forgotten about.  Most importantly, it’s a movie that reflects more of its creator’s obsessions and state of mind than maybe was even intended at the time.

Let’s do it!  It’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS time.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut

Released: November 16, 1977

Length: 135 minutes (theatrical version), 132 minutes (special edition), 137 minutes (director’s cut)

As one might imagine in a movie entitled CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, Spielberg’s fourth feature-length film, like many classic sci-fi stories before it, asks what might happen in a world where extraterrestrial beings finally reveal themselves to Earth.  Its story consists of several threads that eventually weave together like a tapestry.  There’s the tale of Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), who almost literally crosses paths with a UFO and becomes compelled to find it again.  There’s Jillian Guiler (Dillon), whose little boy Barry is abducted by mysterious lights in the sky.  There’s Claude Lacombe (Truffaut, the seminal French New Wave director making an extremely rare appearance in an English-speaking film), a representative of the French government who finds himself collaborating with the U.S. government on something incredible: establishing first contact.  All parties will eventually find themselves in Wyoming, hoping to communicate with the aliens utilizing an established five tone sequence (you know the one, even if you think you don’t know it).

The most notable thing about taking CLOSE ENCOUNTERS sequentially is that, even though it’s not even close to being the first Spielberg movie, it may be the very first Genuine Spielberg Movie, one you’d be able to spot from a mile away.  It has all the hallmarks one expects from his classics: we’ve got a fractured family (the Nearys), a lost child* (Barry), the wonders of space and the great beyond, benevolent alien beings, shadowy faceless government enemies and vehicles, and, most important of all, the Everyman selected by his circumstances to become the hero of an incredible story.

*Although, something I haven’t yet noted: essentially every one of Spielberg’s films prior to this have also included a missing child in some way.  It’s more literal in THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (the Poplins are trying to regain custody of baby Langston) and JAWS (the death of Alex Kintner), while in DUEL, the loss is more implied (David Mann’s family life is on the rocks).  Steve’s been doing it from the beginning!

It’s all the more impressive that Spielberg was able to establish such a reliable template for himself when you consider how turbulent the movie’s creation really was.  JAWS has taken up all the oxygen when it comes to “troubled 70’s Spielberg productions”, but CLOSE ENCOUNTERS did not itself have much of a smooth birth.  Its initial conception goes back to 1973 as a film entitled WATCH THE SKIES, with Paul Schrader working on a first draft of the script.  JAWS pushed everything back a year or so, and a major setback occurred when it turned out Spielberg fucking hated Schrader’s draft, eventually referring to it as “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major film studio or director”.  Seems a bit harsh to me, but suffice to say, Spielberg and Schrader split over creative differences soon after.  After several rounds of rewrites from folks like John Hill, David Giler and Matthew Robbins, Spielberg began taking a crack at the script himself, using the famous Disney song “When You Wish Upon a Star” as influence.

A couple of years later, once JAWS was in the rearview mirror and Spielberg’s alien project was finally ready to go, its producing studio, Columbia, ran head-on into financial issues.  This already huge problem was exacerbated by the fact that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ budget grew exponentially.  Spielberg had quoted the studio about $3 million in 1973; by the time its filming was completed, it sat at about $20 million.  Lightning strikes and hurricanes destroyed much of the Alabama soundstages.  A producer, Julia Phillips, eventually got fired for doing too much cocaine.  Spielberg himself said the shooting experience for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS was “twice as bad” as JAWS, just to set the bar.

One of the seemingly biggest factors in the shoot being prolonged is the fact that Spielberg’s own vision for the film kept increasing in scope throughout the life of the movie, all the way up to and including its release.  The production schedule kept lengthening as new ideas kept generating in Spielberg’s head, and he had issues defining the movie’s “wow-ness” in various cuts.  Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond eventually had to drop out of reshoots due to other commitments (although a team including Douglas Slocombe took over, so perhaps everything worked out).

This all leads to one of the most famous aspects of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: the existence of several cuts.  The theatrical version was released in November of 1977, but Spielberg never seemed truly satisfied with the way it turned out.  Despite having final cut privileges and a request to the studio for six more months, Spielberg agreed to have the movie released as it stood, only later leveraging its success to make a director’s cut in 1980.  Famously, that director’s cut actually wound up being five minutes shorter, as he wound up going back and removing or shortening many other scenes (most notably the scene where Roy throws a bunch of bricks and dirt into the family kitchen), exercising an artist’s right to fuck with a completed work that his friend and colleague George Lucas would take to its absolute breaking point.

The Director’s Cut also features the addition of several minutes of footage, including an infamous, studio-mandated look at the insider of the mothership, a move that Spielberg regretted so much that it generated a third cut of the film, a VHS “Collector’s Edition” that included all the new and old footage, minus the mothership interior.  There actually appears to be a fourth recut version floating out there, a syndicated television edition that was available on a 1990 Criterion Laserdisc.  

(For what it’s worth, the version I watched was the theatrical version.  It may be the only version I’ve seen.  Maybe somewhere down the line, I’ll check out the other two versions just to say that I did.  The Director’s Cut has its ardent supporters, up to and including the late Roger Ebert who called it better than the original.  I just…man, Spielberg’s right, he shouldn’t have given in on the mothership interior.  It seems so anti-imagination and, thus, anti-Spielberg.  One of these days.)

The reason I bring all this extensive recut history up is that, whether he intended it or not, nothing could be more illustrative of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ main themes of single-minded obsession in the face of something extraordinary than this driving need for Spielberg to get the movie right.  One can easily imagine him sifting through the footage of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS at various points of his life and looking much like Richard Dreyfuss hovering over those mashed potatoes.  Hell, one can just as easily imagine him seeing that fateful meteor shower as a kid and getting that obsessive idea implanted in his head: “I have to tell this story.”  He tries it once with FIRELIGHT, he tries it several times over several decades with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, he comes back to it over and over in his filmography (picking it up next with E.T.).  He keeps plugging away at that five-toned tune, hoping to finally make contact.   

In that sense, you get more of Steven Spielberg’s psyche in Roy Neary than maybe he even meant to, which may be why subsequent editions tried to sand the edges off that particular storyline, even if said edges are just too jagged to ever be made smooth.

Oh yeah, that ending.  I guess we should talk about that ending.

What really struck me about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS on this rewatch is just…how kind of sad the ending is, even a little bleak.  Oh, sure, on the whole, the final half-hour or so is Spielberg firing on all cylinders.  Humans and aliens slowly and successfully communicating via the usage of simple musical tones is pure Spielbergian fantasy (I mean this as a compliment).  It’s thrilling and is perfectly paced, perfectly scored.  It’s maybe the most parodied and memorable part of the whole film.  Tonally and textually, the ending of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is quite the crowd-pleaser.

No, I mean the way Roy Neary’s story actually concludes.  Neary’s journey is, of course, the backbone of the entire picture.  To recap, he is a lonely electrician who is merely in the right place at the right time to get an up-close encounter with a UFO.  From then on, he becomes singular-minded and obsessive about an undefined shape.  He sees it in his pillows, he draws it on his work notes, he famously builds it at the dinner table with his mashed potatoes.

The shape is revealed to be Devils Tower in Wyoming, the agreed landing spot of our alien visitors, the area where first contact will officially be made.  Roy eventually begins to make his way over to Wyoming in order to fulfill his new destiny, but not before successfully scaring off his wife and kids.  Prior to his departure to Wyoming, a morning of throwing bricks and dirt into the kitchen is enough to cause his wife Ronnie (Garr, in peak heartbreaking form) to take the kids to her sister’s for a while.

As I had correctly recalled, the movie ends with Roy being chosen by our alien visitors to come back with them into space, where he’ll be able to embark on the most incredible adventure any human could ever imagine being on.  What I had forgotten, however, is that the scene of Ronnie leaving for her sister’s is the last time we see her or the kids in the movie ever again.  There’s no resolution beat at the end where Ronnie realizes her husband was correct, no cut to them catching up with this incredible event over the broadcast news, no nothing.  Frankly, positive resolution between Roy and Ronnie may not even be a realistic thing to hope for; I turned to my wife at the end of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and asked her, “if I had all of a sudden starting acting like a lunatic, obsessed with a location and convinced aliens are speaking to me until you literally left the house, would it matter at all if I was later proven to be 100% correct in my beliefs?”, her immediate answer was “no”.  It’s reasonable to believe Roy never sees Ronnie or his children ever again.

But then, such is the Great Theme of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, that of single-minded devotion and obsession, bordering on religiosity.  No matter what happened in their lives previous to the movie’s start, all of our principals have undergone a soul-rattling, magnificent experience.  From the second the spaceship first arrives, the lives of Roy, Claude, and Jillian (and many nameless others) have diverged from their relatively normal paths.  They are now responding to a higher calling, not unlike the many in history who have turned their backs on their loved ones and the lives they had built in order to better devote themselves to God, shaving their heads and vowing poverty and charity.

So, yeah, although it’s a wonderful and uplifting ending in terms of tone and texture, it’s difficult to call the conclusion of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS overall “happy”.  The lives of those left behind have quite literally been ruined, or at least altered irrevocably.  Subsequent editions have tried to trade out some of Roy’s crazier moments for scenes that play with more sympathy (like him breaking down inside his shower, for instance).  But, it’s hard to edit or tinker around the fact that Roy ditches his life and loved ones to pursue a higher calling.  It’s magical and devastating in equal measure.

In that sense, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS seems to be a story of emerging genius (and how closely it can be linked to genuine insanity), and I don’t think it’s an accident that this is the version of the UFO story that emerged once Spielberg took over the script himself.  It’s also not surprising to me that Spielberg seemed to struggle with articulating it all, going back and tinkering with it two or three times.  It’s sort of a movie about Spielberg at this time in his life, having changed Hollywood irrevocably and forging his path as an industry great while barely entering his thirties.  Not that Spielberg broke the hearts of all of his loved ones in order to make fucking JAWS or anything, but there’s the feeling of truth to how Roy is drawn by a higher power to this jaw-dropping turn in his life.

That’s the power of lights in the sky.  And meteor showers.  And getting all your friends together to make a too-long movie that earns your first dollar.  It just may trigger something in your brain and soul that kicks off a lifelong passion. 

And the world may change along the way.

JAWS REDUX: SPIELBERG SUMMER Continues!

Hello, friends!  Our little stroll through the Steven Spielberg films of the 1970’s resumes this week as The First Annual Spielberg Summer continues.

Today, we’ve reached the first truly bigger-than-life, overwhelming movie in his oeuvre.  JAWS is on the short list of most important movies ever made, even if you’re only measuring individual impact on the trajectory of Hollywood and filmmaking (and to be clear, JAWS stands on its own fins even when stripped of that context).  If you’re part of a certain generation of film fan, it’s almost certainly one of the movies that got you into movies in the first place.  

It’s possible some of you have been waiting for this article since Spielberg Summer began.  Perhaps you’ve been looking forward to a brief history of the famously-snakebitten production, and how Spielberg managed to turn chicken shit into chicken salad by allowing significant mechanical failures (say it with with me now, “they couldn’t get the shark to work”) to actually enhance the film’s drama, conflicts and terror, cloaking the titular beast in the shadows of the audience’s mind and imagination.  You likely are anxious to celebrate JAWS’ second-to-none cast, especially the main trio of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.  It’d be wise to talk about how fully developed Sgt. Brody really is, and how his fear of the water and his drive for integrity are constantly thrown into conflict by a never-ending set of exterior circumstances.  Hell, a good discussion could be had about how beautifully the largely land based first half informs the waterlogged second half, by establishing stakes and psychologies before sending everybody out to sea.

It’d be a good article to write this week.

Except, well….I’ve written it already.

Yeah, I’ve previously talked about JAWS, and it wasn’t even that long ago.  About two years ago, in this very (differently branded) space, I did a summer series on the entire JAWS franchise, including the famous 3D sequel, as well as the not-so-famous Italian knock-off sequel CRUEL JAWS.  I can’t speak to the actual quality of that article, although I was two years less good than I am now, so you can run your own math and make that determination for yourself.  My point is, what was created in 2022 is more or less the same article I would have written now.

It’s a mildly interesting conundrum I find myself in; this is the first time I’m writing a second article about a movie.  Obviously, I knew this was going to be a problem going into this first round of Spielberg retrospectives, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what fresh angle to take.  I tried to resist the idea of just rerunning that one under the Crittical Analysis brand, as that comes with an implied level of laziness there that I wasn’t ready to reconcile within myself.  But, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t coming up with a better alternative; after all, JAWS is a difficult movie to find new unique angles about fifty years later.  

But, then…the Monday before the Fourth of July, I had the opportunity to see JAWS in an actual, genuine movie theater for maybe the first time ever.  

And it was like seeing it for the first time.  

“Oh, new angle.”

This week’s article might be a little briefer than others in this series, and certainly a little different.  But my last experience with JAWS was a genuinely different one, and I would remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to document it.

So here it is.  JAWS!

JAWS (1975)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Released: June 20, 1975

Length: 124 minutes

The ability to watch a classic film on the big screen is one of life’s amazing little treats.  It can often feel like the difference between seeing the Mona Lisa actually hanging in the Louvre and looking at a photo of it on your phone.  You get the idea either way, but actually being in Paris, seeing it at its actual intended size, surrounded by other human beings, all there to do the same thing…it’s just a whole different experience.

Unfortunately, the ability to actually see classic films in a theater often depends on where you live.  If you live in a major city, or at least within the proximity of one, you’re usually in good shape.  You will likely have the ability to throw a dart randomly at the newspaper movie listings* and land on the opportunity to see one of the greatest movies ever made, usually well within driving distance.

*I know that there are no such things as “movie listings” or “newspapers'' anymore, but I don’t think the dart metaphor works as well with a laptop or phone screen.  Don’t want anybody cracking their screens, ya know?  You’ll just have to indulge me on this one.

If you live in a mid-to-small market like I do, however, you’re usually at the mercy of the small handful of revival houses that you have.  I can only speak for myself, but in Sacramento, CA, there are three places in town and one of them (The Dreamland Cinema) is teeny-tiny.  That leaves The Tower and The Crest for your revivals and that is literally it.  Oh, sure, we have lots of regular movie theaters, but most of the chain mega-plexes in town have stopped doing Flashback Features long ago.  So it’s just these three locations holding down the fort right now.  At least two of them feel under constant threat of closure.

Luckily, I live down the street from one of them (the Tower), and they seem to be relatively awake at the wheel.  Not only is there a consistent stream of repertory screenings throughout the year, they appear to be paying attention to the time of year in which they’re screening.  It’s how people in town can see a whole festival of Hitchcock movies in October.  It’s how my wife and I got to see WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… on New Year’s Eve last year.  It’s also what allowed us to see JAWS on a big screen the week of July 4th.

We had seen other classic screenings at this theater before, and we had never been in danger of being the only people there or anything, but it truly shocked me at just how many people showed up to JAWS that night.  It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise; after all, we’re talking about one of the most famous and popular movies ever made even to this day, the movie that more or less invented the “summer blockbuster”*.  But, really, I had never seen the Tower lobby that full before that night.  Again, this was a Monday night.  That was the first sign that we were potentially in for a special night.

*Yes, this means you can technically draw a straight line between JAWS and DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE.  Whether this is a mark for it or a knock against it, I’ll leave for you to determine.

The second sign that magic was in the air came relatively early on, when the entire town of Amity gathers in the police station following the gruesome death of little Alex Kintner, crowding around Sheriff Brody (Scheider) and Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), demanding an explanation and plan of action from their leadership.  As Brody struggles to wrangle the masses, the nasty sound of fingernails scratching across a chalkboard cuts through the din.  Everyone turns around to see the grizzled shark hunter Quint (Shaw).

The scene becomes dead silent.

In the movie theater, however, the room filled with the sound of something like four beers all cracking open at once.

The crowd was locked in.  Summer had begun.

It really is something to watch a classic crowd-pleaser work its magic and…well…please the crowd!  What follows is a list of just ten of the endless amounts of JAWS moments that absolutely crushed that night:

• Brody telling a fellow beach-goer “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

• The guy who exclaims “A whaaaaat?”

• The corpse popping out of the busted hull of that sunken ship (no, seriously, this one killed.  Screams in the audience and everything).

• Brody filling his glass near the brim with red wine.

• “Michael, did you hear your father?  Get out of the water now!”

• Quint crushing his beer can with one hand, followed by Hooper weakly crushing his styrofoam cup.

• Hooper screaming “aye aye” to Quint in that intensely sarcastic pirate voice.

• The USS Indianapolis speech (the room was dead silent, no beer cracking this time).

• “Smile, you son of a…” BANG

• Pretty much every Quint rendition of “Farewell and Adieu”.

It all reminded me of two things: one, I reflected back on the Big Important Issue in the far-away year of 2019, where Martin Scorsese declared Marvel movies as not cinema, but theme parks.  As you may remember, this triggered responses from James Gunn and Joss Whedon (back when Whedon felt compelled to make a statement about anything at all).  It also drew ire from superhero fans all across the Internet; it still appears to be a sore spot for some to this day.

And, look, I’m not here to re-litigate a wound.  Although I do find the reaction overblown relative to what is ultimately just a qualified opinion (as far as I know, Scorsese didn’t say “and you’re all dipshits for watching them”, he just said they weren’t cinema to him), I get that it can be annoying to devote your free time to something that gets dismissed so broadly by somebody with authority.  That said, speaking as someone who has found enjoyment in both the MCU and Scorsese films, the reason I never got worked up about Marty’s comments is because “theme park attraction” is neither an inaccurate description of what modern superhero movies ultimately are, nor does it need to be a pejorative term in and of itself, so long as the movie in question is a well-built and thoughtfully constructed roller coaster.

What are theme park rides, after all?  They are mechanisms for us to take a break from our lives, even if just for a little bit, in order to put ourselves in some artificial danger and generate some thrills and emotions together, even if we’re all walking in as strangers.  It’s something for us to enjoy together as people.  The best ones work even if you’ve ridden it over and over.  At their finest, movies are roller-coasters.  

JAWS is a pitch-perfect example of that.  On July 1st, 2024, a bunch of people filed into the main room of the Tower Theatre with just one commonality (“I wanna watch JAWS tonight!”), paying to see a movie we all probably already owned at home and had almost certainly all seen multiple times since childhood.  And, you know what?  The roller coaster was just as fucking good today as it was when we all first rode it decades ago.  In truth, it hits all the more when you have a forged, temporary community to ride it with.  

(Of course, JAWS isn’t just mindless thrills and chills, it’s also well-built in terms of setting up its characters and stakes, which makes us as an audience care, which makes the moments of action and terror hit all the more because we’re bought in, but now I’m getting into first article territory here.  I just bring it up because this is the element that some of the MCU movies lack, especially some of the latter-day ones, after characters got firmly established and the ability to coast on good vibes became available.  Again, just in my opinion as a fan.  Anyway.) 

That brings me to my second thing: it’s more fun to see a movie in theaters.  It just is.  And there so many things currently working against the in-person experience right now.  For one, watching movies at home has never become more technically convenient; even the ability to afford one or two streaming services gives you access to a never-ending array of movies of all types, age, and quality.  For two, movie tickets have obviously skyrocketed in price, just in time for inflation to grow out of control and wages to seemingly stagnate across the board, making a trip to the movies an easy luxury to cut in tough times (especially if you have a child or two).  

For three (and, I think, final…I know I’m currently in a numbered list within a numbered list, I promise I’m going somewhere), the in-person experience just may not be available depending on where you live.  Going back to the beginning of this article that is technically about JAWS, especially when it comes to classic cinema, you may just be completely fucked if there’s no house in town that screens them.  This can be especially brutal considering, if you run in any sort of cinephile circles for more than ten minutes, you’ll run into the common piece of wisdom that “if you didn’t see [insert movie], you didn’t see it right”.  It’s a frustrating thing to come across when your options are to watch a movie on the Criterion Channel at home, or not see it at all.

My point being…if you have the opportunity to see a beloved movie from any decade, and it even slightly works for you in terms of time, distance, and finance…grab it with all ten fingers and just do it.  You’ll be very unlikely to regret it.  JAWS on July 1st, 2024 was a good illustration as to why.  Here is a movie playing out in front of me, one that I had seen probably a dozen times in my thirty-six years on Earth, and it was like a brand new adventure.  People were screaming.  Hooting and hollering.  Cracking open their beers when something cool as fuck was happening.

There was nothing like it.  It was clear as day at that moment why JAWS and Steven Spielberg helped change Hollywood filmmaking forever.  

I can’t wait to do it again.  After all, the damn thing is turning fifty next year.

But until then….farewell and adieu.

On the Road with THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS: Spielberg Summer Continues!

Hello! All summer, I’ll be working my way through the five films Steven Spielberg directed in the 1970’s. Two weeks ago, we kicked things off with DUEL, and things continue forth this week! If you like what you read, stick around! More to come…..

As mentioned in the first installment of Spielberg Summer two weeks ago, one of the aspects of working through Steven Spielberg’s filmography I was most looking forward to was knocking out the not-insubstantial amount of his movies I hadn’t managed to watch already, especially the blank spaces from the twentieth century.  Yeah, obviously, I’m eager to revisit stone-cold classics like JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but each decade of his career contains at least one movie I just straight up haven’t seen, like little Christmas presents waiting to be opened.

Well, here we are, Week 2 of the First Annual Spielberg Summer and I’ve already reached my first first-time watch!

Up until about two weeks ago, I knew THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS primarily as that movie one sees in the form of clips near the beginning of any given Spielberg documentary or retrospective.  Operating under fifty years worth of hindsight, SUGARLAND EXPRESS feels like a movie hidden between Spielberg’s television career culmination in DUEL and his stratospheric jump into popular culture in JAWS.  It’s a film not talked about much in 2024 outside of the context of “Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical film”.  All I really knew about its story (again, just off of very brief clips) was that Goldie Hawn was in a car and she’s looking for…a baby, I think?  I presumed it was her baby?  I never ventured forth to find out.  There were just always bigger Spielberg movies to jump into or revisit, and the opportunity to knock this one off the watchlist never arrived.

It’s my pleasure, then, to report that it was a delight watching THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS with a clear heart and fresh mind (aka, what if I didn’t know this was directed by the man soon to become the most famous and powerful director of my lifetime?).  It turns out I was right about Goldie Hawn being in a car, and she’s absolutely looking for her baby, so I was off to a good start immediately.  What I hadn’t gleaned was that THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is a scrappy, sad, spookily prescient movie about America’s unique intersecting relationship with desperation, crime, and media, featuring a trio of lively and shifting performances from Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, and Michael Sacks.  What’s not to like about it?  Seriously, what?

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins

Starring: Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks

Released: March 31, 1974

Length: 110 minutes

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS tells the fairly straightforward story of the recently released Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) and the still-incarcerated Clovis Poplin (William Atherton).  One fateful day in Texas, Lou Jean visits Clovis at his minimum-security prison with a mission: their young son is being put into foster care in the town of Sugar Land, and she’s determined to get him back.  Following a relatively efficient break-out, almost nothing about this plan works out in any way.  After the elderly couple they’ve convinced to give them a ride get pulled over by Patrolman Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks), the Poplins are forced to commandeer the patrolman’s vehicle, as well as the patrolman himself.  As the three improvise their way towards Sugar Land, it’s up to Captain Harlin Tanner (Ben Johnson) to figure out how to guide this situation to a non-tragic conclusion, even as the Poplins’ increasing media profile (as well as the fact that - and this cannot be emphasized enough - they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing) and notoriety may prove that an impossible mission.

The first thing that leaps out about THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS after watching DUEL is that…hey, it’s essentially another car chase movie!  The scope has definitely increased exponentially; instead of one lone visible character, we have somewhere around ten speaking roles.  Instead of two vehicles, there are seemingly hundreds of cars getting demolished by the film’s end.  But, at its core, it’s another Spielberg movie exploring characters trapped in their cars trying to get from Point A to Point B in desolate America.  One wonders if those who had caught both movies at the time just viewed Spielberg as “that car chase guy” (as opposed to the smart person I would have been at the time; I likely would have walked out of the theater in 1974 and said something like, “I bet the fella that made that movie is going to do a shark movie that’s going to alter Hollywood forever, just you watch!”).

The second thing that leaps out about THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is how many other pieces of popular culture are conjured in the mind as its story unfolds.  In particular, the growing media scrum surrounding Lou Jean and Clovis lightly evokes Billy Wilder’s deeply cynical ACE IN THE HOLE (although Spielberg never gets anywhere as bitter or acidic as that particular Kirk Douglas masterpiece).  Of course, one cannot watch a pair of criminals running towards a tragic end without thinking of BONNIE AND CLYDE.  However, when you watch enough moments of people cheering Lou Jean on, imploring the young couple to not give up, of crowds gathering around the car with signs of encouragement…you can’t help but think about O.J. Simpson when watching SUGARLAND EXPRESS in the here and now.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the tale of Lou Jean and Clovis is based on the real story of Ila Fae Holiday and Robert Dent, although like all factual accounts in film, SUGARLAND EXPRESS understandably plays somewhat fast and loose with the details (Bobby never broke out of prison, for instance).  What does appear to be true, though, is the fact that they led a very slow-moving police chase through Texas, one that eventually caught the eye of local TV crews and bystanders.  For a brief moment, Holiday and Dent held court against the state, and everyone just…watched and rooted them on.  The O.J. story became a circus for a million reasons that are way above the weight of the Holiday/Dent story, but little forgotten sensations like theirs (and THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS) prove that, even if O.J. wasn’t a beloved athlete and pitchman,even if the country hadn’t been in the middle of yet another of its famous “racial reckonings”, even if the whole thing didn’t go down in Los Angeles (the epicenter of front-facing American scandals), people might have been sucked in anyway.   Folks love a good story, and they especially love an underdog  Besides, who can’t relate to a mother trying to reunite with their child?  Screenwriters Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins understood this even at the time, and their screenplay reflects that deep knowledge.

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is one of those movies full of interesting faces embodying interesting characters.  Consider the moment where the gas station guy whose store gets commandeered by the police and is implored to take it up with the captain, leading to him wandering in the background from car to car asking who the captain is.  It’s ultimately throw-away, only there to add to the chaos that surrounds the Poplins from the jump.  But it’s a moment so filled with life and relatability (how the fuck would he know who the captain is, anyway?)  The whole movie is like this; everyone is anchored in Spielberg-world as someone with feelings and perspective; even a character that could have been easily made a villain (the foster mom) ultimately ends up being sympathetic, capable of love, and worthy of protection.

However, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS lives and dies on the four performances at its center.  That brings me to the third thing that stood out to me about it: why didn’t any of you tell me William Atherton was in, like, every frame of this?  A long time menace in the minds of people my age and ten years younger/older as the dickless EPA agent in GHOSTBUSTERS, it was stunning to see him ten years younger and so human and sympathetic.  What struck me the most about Clovis is his dichotomy; he is alternately just as motivated to reunite with his child as he is terrified about the escalation of possible consequences if they move forward with their highly-improvised plan.

When I reflect on Atherton as Clovis, I think about maybe my favorite scene in the whole movie: Clovis and Lou Jean have holed up in a used car lot and begin watching a Wile E. Coyote cartoon playing at the drive-in theater across the street.  Although they have no sound, Clovis provides all of the wacky sound effects for Lou Jean.  As the cartoon continues, Wile E. makes one of his classic errors* and careens off a cliff.  As the woeful cartoon coyote makes contact with the canyon, Clovis stops making noises and just kind of takes it all in.  He seems to be relating to Wile E.’s plight and fate at that moment; the Poplins seem fated to crash and burn off the side of a cliff themselves.  

*Undoubtedly off the back of trusting his hard earned cash with the ACME Corporation once again, but never mind.

Ben Johnson and Michael Sacks are also quite effective in their respective roles as pseudo father figure and unexpected ally.  But it’s Goldie Hawn that was the biggest revelation at the time of release.  I’m not a Goldie scholar, although I’m aware that her early shtick was that of a dizzy blonde on projects like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and the film CACTUS FLOWER, which won her an early Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1969.  Her Lou Jean feels somewhat like a riff off that persona; Lou Jean is definitely excitable and highly naive, and one could argue her lack of any plan characterizes her as ditzy.  But there’s a real pain and emotion behind all the outer chaos that makes her quite compelling, and makes the SUGARLAND EXPRESS finale hurt all the more.  I thought a lot about a similar trick Paul Thomas Anderson pulled with Adam Sandler’s famous manboy act in PUNCH DRUNK LOVE.  In both cases, an inner humanity is found through a comedic persona.  To my knowledge, Hawn and Spielberg never worked again, and it’s a shame.  

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS also begins Spielberg’s ability to collaborate with major Hollywood talent, even at the unfathomable age of 27 (!).  The cinematographer for SUGARLAND EXPRESS was none other than Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the biggest keys to the way the New Hollywood movement looked.  The amount of major directors he shot movies for is staggering: besides future collaborations with Spielberg, he also worked with Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Peter Fonda, George Miller, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, Richard Donner, Woody Allen, Roland Joffe, Martha Coolidge and, of course, Kevin Smith.  With SUGARLAND EXPRESS, you couldn’t ask for a movie that has the texture and feel of a great 70’s American movie more; it’s equal parts dusty, melancholy, and bittersweet.

Zsigmond actually ended up being a key mentor to Spielberg, and was able to filter the young up-and-comer’s unique emotional style through good old-fashioned functionality.  In particular, Zsigmond would refuse to start shooting a particular shot until Spielberg could articulate from whose point of view it was meant to express (i.e. justifying the shot by saying “it looked pretty and interesting” wasn’t going to be acceptable).  To Spielberg’s credit, he accepted the on-the-fly mentorship.  In short, even if THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is a more minor film in the Spielberg canon, the things he learned throughout its creation would be indispensable in his approaches toward his own future masterpieces.

Then, of course, there’s that score.  Yes, perhaps the most consequential thing about THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is that it’s the first collaboration between Spielberg and John Williams.  By 1974, Williams was already a well-accomplished film composer in the 50’s and 60’s, having worked on projects as diverse as a handful of GIDGET flicks, William Wyler’s HOW TO STEAL A MILLION, the Peter O’Toole musical GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS and the infamous camp classic THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.  By 1971, he had already secured an Academy Award for Best Scoring off his work with FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.  However, his initial collaboration with Spielberg here would prove to be the start of a path that led to his Hollywood canonization. 

(As far as Williams’ specific score for SUGARLAND EXPRESS, it’s solid, although I couldn’t help but notice that the main harmonica theme sounds like somebody was trying to sneak in the melody to The Twelve Days of Christmas before chickening out at the last second.  Listen to it and decide for yourself, just as long as you understand that you’re going to think I’m right.)

Funnily enough, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS stands as the only movie Spielberg ever submitted for Palme d’or consideration, a ballsy move that I’m forced to extend my respect towards.  Alas, didn’t win (the 1974 Palme d’or went to THE CONVERSATION instead; whatareyagonna do?), although he, Barwood and Robbins walked away with a Best Screenplay award at that year’s Cannes festival.  That would do it as far as major awards.  As far as critical reception, reviews seemed mixed.  Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were individually low on it, while Pauline Kael was quite taken.  

As far as the general public, there weren’t a ton of people that showed up for it.  THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS only made about $12 million worldwide, which was anemic enough for Universal to call off the game and pull the film from theaters after only two weeks.  This seems unfair considering the movie was made for $3 million, but then I guess this is why I don’t make the big bucks.  One would imagine, in any other world, Spielberg’s goose might have been a bit cooked here.

Thankfully for the rest of us, we live in this world, one in which Spielberg’s next project for Universal was already underway and, in fact, had begun before THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS had even been released.  That project is a little beach movie called…..well, we’ll talk about it in two weeks.

(I like to imagine there’s a hypothetical reader out there who voraciously read an essay on THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS from start to finish but has managed to never hear of JAWS in any way, shape or form.  If you’re that reader, uh….spoilers, I guess.)

Driving Around With DUEL: SPIELBERG SUMMER Begins!

From the time I started writing about movies as a hobby, a thought had been rattling around in my brain.

How am I going to do it?

It’s one of the first things that crossed my mind after working my way through the filmography of Martin Scorsese during 2020, a project from an earlier iteration of this blog finally completed.  As I got to thinking of other legendary directors with a varied and rich body of work, I had to ignore the voice in my head that kept repeating a simple phrase.

You should do it.

I had brought up the idea to friends in the past, and they would say the same thing I had been telling myself for four years.

Do it.

Just do it.

So, fine.  I’m doing it.

Just like I’m guessing pretty much every film fan born between 1970 and 1990, Steven Spielberg was the first director whose work I fell in love with.  I have my mom to credit for that one; she made damn sure I was going to be growing up seeing stuff like JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and JURASSIC PARK.  I get the instinct; all three of those movies were and remain stone cold classics, the type of movies you’ve literally never heard anyone say a bad word about.  But, in truth, I think my mom has always pulled inspiration from Spielberg’s personal story: born into a family directly affected by the Holocaust, Steven had to rise above both antisemetic attacks in school and struggles with his faith by burying himself into his obsessions with watching and making movies.  I never suffered anything even remotely close to that in my own life, but considering I was a kid who sometimes felt aimless and anxious even at the age of nine, I think my mom found some sort of path forward with sharing Spielberg’s biography and career with me.  (Does this make me the Steven Spielberg of writing intermittently about movies?  Who’s to say?)

So okay, fine, I’m doing it.  But it didn’t solve the bigger issue….how do I do it?  As of this writing, Spielberg has made a grand total of 36 feature length films* which, by my math, is sixteen weeks shy of 52.  To tackle Spielberg’s filmography the way it deserves to be tackled (individually, week by week) would essentially make this a year-long project.  And that presumes I don’t get distracted by a shiny object somewhere along the way, and lord knows I have too much ADHD flowing through my veins for that.

*Yes, for the purpose of actually being able to get through this without running the risk of passing away before its completion, I’m skipping his episodic television work, as well as his producing credits, although I could likely do a whole year on just TINY TOON ADVENTURES, ANIMANIACS and FREAKAZOID alone.

But then, I realized….why not take it decade by decade?  After all, the last half century has yielded specific ups and downs in Spielberg’s career, and each individual decade has at least one masterpiece that will be a treat to revisit, as well as some less popular works I’ve never seen.  Why don’t we just slow roll this thing and dedicate the next few summers in this space to going through every Steven Spielberg movie ever made?  What are you going to do, fight me on it?

So…let’s do this!  I’m finally doing it.  I’m finally working my way through the works of Steven Spielberg.  Starting today, and every other week for the next ten weeks, we’re going to explore the five feature-length movies he made between 1971 and 1979!  For reference, we would begin with today’s subject, DUEL.  Following that will be THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and, of course, 1941.  Good times.

Even if we weren’t going chronologically, the seventies would make for an excellent and intriguing starting point for a Spielberg career retrospective.  It’s easy to forget, now that the Steven Spielberg Brand has been so well-established, but he was an important thread in the New Hollywood movement.  Of course, he was arguably an equally important thread in putting an end to what New Hollywood typically stood for.  By cutting his teeth on more character driven (and moderately budgeted) work such as SUGARLAND EXPRESS, Spielberg ushered in a new era of busting blocks and popping corn with JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.  By the end of the 70’s, Hollywood had seemed to form into something more populist.  As a result, it sometimes feels like Spielberg’s artistic integrity has been mildly questioned, as least in comparison to other seventies titans like Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes and Stanley Kubrick.

But, I would argue the reason “Spielberg” became a genre all its own is because he never lost that knack for character-driven drama, even amidst the spectacle of his most famous works.  Yeah, you show up to JAWS for the scary shark, but it’s the beautifully understated performance of Roy Scheider that stays with you.  It’s the persistent quest of Roy Neary that makes CLOSE ENCOUNTERS what it is.  It’s even, as you’ll see, the relatable loserdom of David Mann that makes DUEL so potent.  Although it’ll be interesting to track the quality of his output as we get closer to modern day, it seems to be that he rarely loses at least that key quality.

Taking his seventies’ work as a single set is to watch him navigate his inherent skills behind the camera, and his natural interests as a human, and filter them through an increasing scope before it arguably grows too unwieldy and blows up on him.  Needless to say, I’m excited.  I hope you are as well.

Welcome to SPIELBERG SUMMER: YEAR ONE - THE SEVENTIES!

DUEL (1971)

Starring: Dennis Weaver

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Richard Matheson

Length: 74 minutes (expanded to 90 minutes for 1983 theatrical run)

Released: November 13, 1971

I can’t say with any confidence how many people reading this have ever truly tried to commute within the confines of California.  What I can say, though, is that I spent four years of my life driving the 53 miles between Sacramento and Stockton twice a day, five days a week.  I don’t know that the entire 110,240 miles really looked like the stretch of road that serves as the setting for DUEL, but I promise that every miserable inch of that commute 100% felt like it.

Even if you’ve never seen DUEL, you’ve almost certainly heard of it, even if just as “Steven Spielberg’s first film!!”  You likely know it vaguely as “that movie where a guy gets chased around by a truck”.  If your awareness only runs that deep, then, you’ll be surprised to hear that DUEL is...a movie where…a guy gets chased around…

…by a truck.

It turns out that DUEL is a masterpiece in high-level summary.  It’s a TV movie made with all A-plot in mind; David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is a salesman who has hit the road in order to meet with a client.  His loping, winding, boring drive from Point A to Point B is interrupted when a truck allows him to pass through the one-lane highway they’re both on, only to immediately begin to try to run David off the road.  The aggressive driver is never seen, turning the truck itself into a character, one that billows enough smoke to connote the devil himself.  Along the way, David makes several pit stops, including a diner, a phone booth on the property of an exotic animal trainer, and an abandoned school bus.  By the end, either David or the truck driver will find themselves in a fiery inferno.  Who will it be?  Man or machine?

(You should know, by the way, that I resisted making that last sentence “Mann or machine?”, but only because I saw somebody else make that joke already.  Anyway.)

I remember seeing DUEL for the first time about twenty years ago when Universal first released it on DVD back in 2004.  Up to that point, I had known DUEL exclusively as that aforementioned mythical “first Spielberg movie”, the one that launched the wunderkind TV director’s career, the best TV movie of all time, the cult classic to end all cult classics.  To be honest, though, I don’t have much of a memory of that first watch.  It’s entirely possible I didn’t even finish it.  For better or worse, I found it to be the exact movie I was sold.  A guy is driving down the road and starts getting increasingly harassed by another guy in a truck.  Extend and escalate for 90 minutes, bada bing, bada boom, you’ve got DUEL.  As a (extremely relative) longtime Spielberg fan, I was glad I saw it.  But it was mostly a curiosity and nothing further.

DUEL, then, gains a ton of power as one marches into adulthood and you begin to realize how much of your life is spent sitting in a car, zoning out and winding through some unremarkable road or highway.  There are days when you reflect on your commute and wonder how you even managed to get home at all, for as little brain power as you were putting into it all.  Drive long enough, turn your brain down enough, and it’s entirely possible you could find yourself in a life-or-death struggle between you and some asshole in a truck.

As it turns out, the genius of the November 13th, 1971 ABC Movie of the Week is that the horror is plausible.  It could even happen to you later today.

Needless to say, I found DUEL wildly compelling this time around.

———

By 1971, Steven Spielberg was already a director on the way up; after making his debut by directing Joan Crawford in the 1969 pilot of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Spielberg became a TV director for hire, working on famous programs such as Columbo and Marcus Welby, M.D., learning old-school techniques on the way, while also finding room to experiment where he could.  Eventually, his reputation was steady enough that Universal commissioned him to do four television movies, a deal that ended up yielding only three.  The second was 1972’s SOMETHING EVIL (CBS), the third was 1973’s SAVAGE (NBC).  The first, and easily most famous, was 1971’s DUEL (ABC).

It should be noted that the version of DUEL that aired in 1971 was a lean, mean 71-minute cut of the film, perfect for the 90-minute time slot it had been afforded.  The version of DUEL I suspect most people have seen is the 90-minute cut that was created for a 1983 theatrical run, a project commissioned off the back of Spielberg’s remarkable run in 1982 (his directing of E.T. and his co-writing and producing of POLTERGEIST).  Some of the extra scenes feel fairly obvious and perfunctory (I’ll talk about one of them in a second); some scenes surprisingly fit right in, the primary of which being a sequence with the broken down school bus.  People seem a little split on this part, with some characterizing it as too Disney-esque.  I actually kind of dug it, as it’s a moment where the unseen truck driver varies up their method of torture, shifting from aggression to something more beneath-the-surface sinister.  In this sequence, David is hesitant to help push the stranded school bus, not only because he’s in fear of his life, but because he’s not particularly thrilled about his hood getting scratched up.  When the truck reappears to continue chasing David, it takes a quick time out to pleasantly push the bus back onto the road.  For lack of a better phrase, David’s cucking is complete.

That’s another aspect of DUEL, by the way, that you just don’t get as a kid: how the main tormentor for David Mann isn’t the mysterious aggressor in the truck, it’s life itself.  

The obvious question regarding extending out the premise of DUEL more than a few scenes, let alone to ninety minutes, is “why doesn’t David just let this go?”  Yes, obviously, both he and the truck driver eventually reach a point of no return, where both pairs of heels have been dug in too far for this not to end in someone’s death.  However, the genius of the storytelling here is how deftly, but emphatically, it shows us just how powerless David really is in his day-to-day life.  His commute is constant and extremely boring.  His job is vaguely defined, but involves him selling something nondescript to various faceless clients.  It’s implied that his private life provides no relief, as he quips to a gas station attendant who just referred to him as boss, “not at home, I’m not”.

(It should be mentioned that the ninety minute cut makes a bigger deal of the home life thing, with an entire added sequence of David on a pay phone having a tense, emasculating conversation with his wife.  We get to see the wife and everything.  It’s filmed with competence and well framed, and if you’re trying to add 18 minutes to a movie, it’s a logical place to expand.  But…I don’t really like it.  The scene is proof positive that one need not visualize what can be expressed in a single sentence.  Sorry, I just wanted to vent about it.  Moving on.)

David is just kind of a loser, or at least (more importantly) he perceives himself as one.  So when a truck loping along the same stretch of road as him starts being kind of a dick, he decides to stand his ground for once and be a dick right back.  And, as it goes for most of us, this proves to be his folly.  It’s maybe the ultimate inciting incident for a story, one that makes you yell at the screen for a character to just drop it, while knowing deep down that you may have done something similar yourself.  It’s an understandable and recognizable human instinct and that’s why it’s so compelling.  It helps that Dennis Weaver plays David with such an Everyman quality; even when he’s panicking and making poor decisions, you can’t help but recognize parts of yourself within him.

There are issues with the script, a Richard Matheson adaptation of his own short story, the primary of which being the overwritten voiceover monologues for Weaver.  It’s got to be terrifying to write a script with almost no dialogue, and I’m sure it felt like there was a need to verbalize something about this crazy situation David finds himself in.  But the voiceovers are almost uniformly unnecessary, to the point where I was convinced these were additional theatrical cut extensions, meant to streamline the emotions of the picture.  Alas, no, they were there from the jump, an unusual misstep for an otherwise tight film.

One has to figure, though, that these voiceovers stand out all the more because there’s so much else right about DUEL.  The constant creativity; its sense of rapid, but never overwhelming, pace; its Hitchcock-ian sense of tension building (the best moment of the movie might be David trying, and failing, to track the type of boots his assailant wears).  A special note must be made of its sense of world-building, as well.  A key piece of exposition comes not from a David Mann voiceover, nor really from anybody talking to David at all.  It comes from the AM radio talk show David is listening to in the car.  It’s a bunch of dudes calling in talking about how they no longer feel like the man in their own homes.  It’s another reason why the added scene with David on the phone with his wife is so unnecessary; anything that sequence might have established, Spielberg and Matheson have already baked into DUEL, practically in the background.

———

So, where does DUEL stand in the greater Spielberg canon?  Well, it’s hard not to watch it without immediately reflecting on JAWS, a movie with the same general idea (swap out a truck with a shark and you’re already halfway there), although given the new brand of Hollywood polish that would go on to define the work of Spielberg and most of his contemporaries for decades to come.  Funnily enough, this was the movie that made Universal realize that he was ready for a movie with the scale of JAWS, although there’d be another theatrical movie in between, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, which we’ll break down in full in two weeks.

More to the point, however, is that DUEL’s major legacy is as Spielberg’s first major shot across the bow.  At just twenty-five years old, and after doing consistently solid work on television (including the first Columbo episode), he had shown that he was special in a way that not many others at the time were.  In a world where TV movies could be a legitimate launching point for major filmmakers (i.e. an extinct world), Spielberg completely took advantage of the training ground he had been afforded.  As mentioned, the only real issues with DUEL come from the script, and even those are easy to forget when taking the movie in totality.  From a directorial standpoint, Spielberg already had the steady hand of a seasoned pro, establishing a character expeditiously, then putting him through the ringer in the way any average reasonable person could relate to, heightening the stakes all along the way.  

All in all, DUEL isn’t quite a masterpiece, but it’s close.  As it turned out, it didn’t need to be anything more.

In two weeks: 1974’s THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS!

Jabbin’ About JAWS: A New Summer Series!

One of the strange, ironic anomalies about American film in the 1970’s is that, mixed in with some of the strongest and most daring independent voices Hollywood would ever produce, the decade includes the definitive starting data points of where the industry stands now, a sequel-and-IP-driven industry that has done a ton to choke out those very same independent voices.

The same decade that gave us ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, TAXI DRIVER, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, CHINATOWN, BARRY LYNDON, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and, oh yeah, the first two GODFATHER films also gave us THE EXORCIST, ALIEN and the very first STAR WARS. Through those kinetic crowd-pleasers, we can track the birth of the “blockbuster” all the way to today, where we are practically drowning in Marvel and Lucasfilm streaming content (to almost inarguably diminishing returns).

Of course, the first “real” blockbuster, at least the one that popularized the term for all intents and purposes is Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller JAWS. Based off the 1974 Peter Benchley novel, JAWS was an immediate sensation, making $472 million against a $9 million budget, made generations of people irrationally afraid of sharks (on the whole, not that interested in people!) and, most importantly, sparked a major change in movie studio priorities. Slow-burn, expensive character dramas were out. Populist popcorn flicks were in, the more special effects, the better.

This, of course, feels like the absolute wrong lesson for studios to have pulled from JAWS. This is because, nearly fifty years on, after the movie no longer has any ability to scare you, so familiar are its tropes and beats, Spielberg’s first major break still stands out due to the actual legitimate character work that it does, giving us three fully realized human beings as the stars of the film, as opposed to a shark that ominously (and accidentally) is rarely seen onscreen.

It’s a JAWS summer, y’all! Let’s dig in.

JAWS (1975)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Starring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary

Released: June 20, 1975

Length: 124 minutes

JAWS is a surprisingly difficult movie to talk about in 2022, if only because it feels like everything that can be said about it, has. It’s even a couple years older than the original STAR WARS, maybe the most single over-analyzed movie in the history of American film. JAWS’ troubled production history is well-documented, with its profound technical failures planting the seed for the movie’s single most important contribution to film: the ominous, minimalist score by John Williams serving as superior substitute for actually seeing the shark.

Compounding the issue, ironically, is the fact that JAWS still holds up! Oftentimes, big broad masterpieces like this speak for themselves, making it kind of difficult to break down what makes it fun without getting into the territory of the obvious (“the scene where the shark explodes was exciting!”). But I think it’s worth it to try, mainly since…well, I have to. It’d be profoundly weird to start a month-long JAWS series by skipping the one everybody has seen. But it’s also worth it to remind people that big ol’ blockbusters can still come with a considerable amount of craft behind them. JAWS also serves as a great way to advocate for arbitrary restrictions in film-making to allow for creativity to flourish.

JAWS is a movie that operates in two halves. The first half of JAWS feels like a broader character study of the psychological makeup of a small seaside town. Martin Brody (Scheider) is working his first summer as sheriff of Amity Island when he receives word that a young woman, Chrissy Watkins, has gone missing after going swimming. After her partial remains are found on the beach and a subsequent medical examination reveals injuries consistent with a shark attack, Brody finds himself in the middle of what is right and what is convenient. The beaches obviously have to be closed, but Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) stands in the way of this, since the upcoming Fourth of July weekend is the biggest of the year for the town’s economy.

The arrival of young oceanographer Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) adds to the tension, as he deflates the excitement of the recent capture and killing of a large tiger shark that seemed to put an end to the vicious threat. He asserts, judging from the bites on the bodies, that the town is being terrorized by a great white, and Amity now needs to figure out what it’s going to do. Do we keep the beaches open, or close them? How do we end our shark trouble once and for all? Local fisherman and Captain Ahab stand-in Quint (Shaw) offers his expertise and services to kill the shark….if Vaughn will put up $10,000 as a reward.

Of course, the parallels between Amity’s reaction to an unseen threat endangering the economy and “our current times” can’t be ignored. In fact, it’s already been discussed in some detail over the past couple of years. Suffice to say, however, government officials valuing the safety of the economy over its populace, the dismissal of experts as nerdy kill-joys, the belief that a natural threat can be negotiated with or is interested in working on a human timeframe….it all would be aggravatingly on-the-nose if JAWS hadn’t predated current reality by over forty-five years. So, yeah, the emotions and motivations being tracked amongst our principals in Amity 100% track.

Act I of JAWS contains most of the movie’s super-signature moments. There’s that famous dolly zoom on Brody’s face as Alex Kintner bites the dust. There’s the infamous “that’s some bad hat, Harry” line that should sound familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of House to completion. There’s that fisherman corpse jump-scare. And the scene where Brody pours himself an entire Collins glass of red wine. And that shot of Brody reading up on sharks, where we see him flipping through the pages via the lenses of his glasses, almost as if we can see him absorbing the information into his brain in real time. And, of course, we hear the iconic John Williams bass notes right in the opening seconds. On and on and on, it goes.

Although he didn’t get a Best Director nomination, there’s little flourishes like this that made it obvious the 26 year old Spielberg was someone to keep your eye on. And the movie often looks gorgeous. But it wasn’t just Spielberg that makes this first half sing. No, an equal amount of credit goes to the script, more or less cowritten by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Benchley did the first three drafts before tapping out and handing the script over to other screenwriters. He ultimately provided the plot’s structure and a lot of the “mechanics” of the sailing and oceanography. Playwright Howard Sackler (who was absolutely not one of those Sacklers, I already checked) did an uncredited rewrite, who focused in on characterization, including the crucial detail of Brody being afraid of water.

In an attempt to add some levity, Spielberg asked his friend Carl Gottlieb what he would change were it up to him. Three pages of notes later, he ended up becoming the primary screenwriter the rest of the way, with much additional dialogue pulled from improvisations generated from cast and crew dinners. John Milius provided some dialogue additions, and SUGARLAND EXPRESS writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood did some uncredited contributions.

But all this work, and facilitation of multiple contributors, paid off. Why the first half of JAWS works so well is because the script deals with the fallout of the shark’s destruction honestly. As just one example, both Mayor Vaughn’s early insistence on keeping the beaches open and Brody’s ultimate reluctance to stand up to him, have deadly consequences. The aforementioned death of Alex Kintner serves as the turning point for Brody (although, notably, not a turning point for Vaughn, who I am convinced eventually became the President of the United States in the JAWS-iverse). In the fallout of the tense, brutal, pulse-pounding death of Kintner, and as the subsequent capture of the wrong shark is being heavily celebrated by the town, the movie still adds a touch that most movies nowadays might have skipped altogether.

Brody is approached by Kintner’s mourning mother who has nothing but a slap to the face and admonishing words for the sheriff. He knew the waters were dangerous, and that a girl had already been killed by whatever it is out there. And he let the beaches stay open anyway. How could he?

I think this is a scene that would have been excised for being too “dark” or something if JAWS were made today. After all, it makes us directly question the integrity of our lead character, something that legitimately might be considered too complicated to get into now. Because the thing of it is….Kintner’s mom is right. She’s not just an unfair obstacle for us to get upset at. Brody fucked up. Yes, yes, there’s the reflex of saying, “it’s actually Vaughn’s fault! HE’S the one who was forcing him to keep the beaches open!” Which is true. But the buck falls on the man whose job it is to keep people safe. And Brody knows it.

That’s why the moment resonates so hard. And it’s part of what motivates him from here on out.

For all that, though, the second half is really where the movie shines, and the fact that it works so well is a testament to how JAWS bakes in its exposition and character building through action. Brody, Quint and Hooper all band together to take Quint’s boat the ORCA out to kill the great white once and for all. Simply put, there’s nothing for the movie to set up about these three once they get on the boat. We’ve learned everything we need to know while we were busy being scared in the first half. Brody is the lawman who hates the water, Hooper is a steadfast and sarcastic expert, and Quint is the eccentric wild-card.

Notably, there are a few things two of the three characters have in common; for instance, Brody and Quint are the adults on the boat, while Quint and Hooper have the maritime experience (and scars to show for it) that Brody simply lacks. Most telling of all, Brody and Hooper don’t have the personal connection to a rogue shark that Quint ultimately does. But there’s nothing to unify the trio as a team as we set sail.

The real bonding moment between the three is Quint’s famous speech detailing the real-life horrors endured by the members of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, a moment that many have identified as the true heart of JAWS. This monologue, delivered during an otherwise quiet dinner between the three below deck, sets up the true terror inherent in a shark, maybe more than any other moment, sequence or visual in the movie. For those not familiar, the U.S.S. Indianapolis was a naval ship that was returning from delivering the initial parts of the atomic bomb before getting nailed by a Japanese missile. Those who survived the initial blast, however, found themselves sitting ducks for a series of brutal shark attacks. Of a crew of about 1,000, only about 300 survived.

It’s a harrowing, fucked-up story that’s just as chilling when you remember that it’s 100% true (also, it feels notable that the script changes the date of the sinking of the Indianapolis from July 30 to June 29, the same day and date of the fictional death of Alex Kintner). Thus, the decision to anchor Quint’s character as having lived through this real-life horror show makes his quest to kill the great white all the more understandable, perhaps the ultimate example of “raising the stakes” for a character.

What punctuates Quint’s speech even further in JAWS, however, is how the scene slowly transitions back to the three of them having drunken revels, banging on the table, singing sea shanties, and forgetting about their trouble ahead. Then, BOOM! The shark has returned and is pounding on the side of the ORCA. The danger detailed in Quint’s speech starts flooding back to the characters, and us, and the cost of failure has never felt so high.

The second half is also where all those clever work-arounds to cover for the mechanical shark not working come into play. As alluded to previously, one of the biggest, most famous pains in Spielberg’s ass during the making of JAWS was the fact that, among other things, the big mechanical sharks that had been created (in place of an actual trained shark, which was the original plan, holy shit) kept getting waterlogged and short-circuiting. I’d argue that Robert Shaw getting wasted all the time was as big of an issue as the shark, but I understand that JAWS is a hard movie to film without, you know, Jaws.

Brody, Quint, and Hooper eventually realize attaching buoyant barrels to the shark is their only chance at being able to keep tabs on its location. It’s a logical decision by the characters, and you figure, for the filmmakers, it’s a hell of a lot easier to control a bunch of empty barrels than it is a giant mechanical shark. However, this decision also sets up the barrels as the real visual signifier for us in the audience. It’s always cool when a movie works it out so a normal, benign object all of a sudden becomes terrifying.

JAWS barrels towards its exciting and famous conclusion, and it struck me that the movie is so self-contained (and, like many movies that are over thirty years old, just ends once it reaches its natural stopping point! No prolonged wrap-ups of subplots, no set-ups for potential sequels…the shark dies, movie over!) that I don’t even think I realized there were sequels to JAWS until I was a teenager. And that’s the sign of a great one. You can get off here, or you can keep driving down the Highway of Diminishing Returns. It’s up to you!

So why does JAWS not receive the same kind of world-ending ire that some of its other early blockbuster contemporaries do? Well, part of it is that it hasn’t watered itself down as much over the years. Yes, up until 2002, there were just as many JAWS movies as there were STAR WARS movies, which is bizarre to think about. However, the non-serialized format of the JAWS series has left its sequels as more obscure and less popular than its original, which allows it to stand above the rest of the series. This stands opposed to STAR WARS, where at least one of its sequels is arguably more beloved than the original (that sequel being, of course, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER).

Also, for whatever reason, JAWS has never been a property that anybody has tried to reclaim as fresh IP. We had the three sequels, one unofficial international follow-up/ripoff (okay, there are actually hundreds and hundreds, but only one that anybody really cares about), and…that’s it. No Saturday morning cartoon, no legacy sequel, no limited series on Peacock (at least not yet). Hollywood has, for whatever reason, seen fit to leave JAWS be.

Finally, I think JAWS is arguably the strongest of its imitators simply because of all the work they did to focus on human characters, so that when the shark starts snacking, we’re invested. It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s the problem that a lot of the American GODZILLA movies fail to understand, and I see audience expectations shifting in kind; I hear a lot of people say, “who cares about the humans at all? It’s a movie called Godzilla!” Well, actually, the human stories are vital for us to have an entry point into the destruction, but so often, movie studios want to cynically half-ass that part. Maybe because it’s hard? Maybe because it’s easier to pour money into the CGI than the writer’s room? Regardless, it would suit most studios to go back to the basics for awhile.

It’s a shame that, in the wake of JAWS’ undeniable success, the instinct was to replicate, and expand upon, the fireworks and thrills WITHOUT including the exquisite writing that makes everybody involved feel like a recognizable human soul, which only helps to increase the stakes. After all, what good is a shark eating somebody if I don’t care about them?

Next week: Brody and Mayor Vaughn return for 1978’s JAWS 2!