Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen DELAYED REACTIONS MY TEN BEST FOR'81 I ADMIT it's a little late, but I've decided to announce my ten-best list for 1981. Actually, it's a little late for me to do any ten-best lists, ever,...
...A pump-action shotgun works here, and violent death is, like everything else, messy...
...S.O.B...
...Body Heat...
...To a degree my admiration for the film is simply technical, because of the superb job Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne have made of adapting his novel to the screen...
...Outland...
...And De Niro and Duvall give the story the performances that it needs, thus achieving something extremely rare, at least in my experience: a first-rate movie based on a novel that is itself first-rate...
...Heartland...
...This is what Outland suggests, anyway, with a great deal of conviction and urgency...
...Even the beautiful, talented wife played by his real wife is seen to be a scheming rat in the end...
...This is not one of those interstellar spaces where people get shot with paralyzer rays the way they did on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet...
...I' m not sure which one he has in mind here...
...Both survive by remaining vaguely detached from the constant crises going on around them...
...The grafting of the past onto the future is pleasing as a conception, and Hyams does some wonderful things with it...
...If you gave this film only one award, as the National Society did, then Robert Preston was the person to give it to...
...The merits of these films will no doubt be news to those poor, ill-informed souls who are my regular readers: • All Night Long...
...True Confessions...
...The realization that as many as ten good films had actually been made took me so completely by surprise, I felt I should say something about it...
...Yet one suspects that Edwards sees himself now as being somebody more like the doctor played by Preston...
...I did at least mention, in my review of Body Heat, how good True Confessions is...
...Here were yet more examples of my dilatoriness, my procrastination, my shameful irresponsibility...
...This Hollywood doctor does rather more successfully what the filmmaker-hero of S.O.B...
...that writer-director Blake Edwards actually seems to have based on his personal experience is that of the filmmaker, played by Robert Mulligan, who becomes suicidal when the studio tries to dump a turkey he's made starring his own wife (Julie Andrews...
...Dunne has created such a moral and emotional deadlock in the book that there's no believable way out...
...Have you ever noticed how you always feel dirty after a few hours on an airliner, even though you've been in one of the most filtered and sanitized of human environments...
...In the process of grappling with the problem, however, I realized that, despite the overwhelming preponderance of lousy movies last year, there had been a few good ones as well...
...With much of the tortuous twisting and turning of Dunne's original gone, the relationship between the two brothers, one a monsignor and the other an L.A...
...is a very cynical movie, a black comedy loaded with all the venom and vengeance that, as one can well imagine, a battle-scarred veteran like Edwards has stored up over the years...
...The only difference is that the doctor dispenses his opiates through a hypodermic instead of a camera...
...was a good movie, but that I had never written about it...
...My first instinct in looking back over the year was to select the ten worst films, but I couldn't get that list down under one hundred titles...
...What follows, then, is my ten-best list for 1981, in alphabetical order, along with my belated remarks on some of the inclusions...
...cop, becomes purified in a way that makes it more compelling...
...My somewhat uncertain plans for this project were finally jelled when, at the voting meeting of the National Society of Film Critics, the award for best supporting actor went to Robert Preston in S.O.B...
...The longer it goes on, the better it gets, but also the more irresolvable...
...Atlantic City...
...its major problem is drug addiction, and this is not the only way in which it resembles an urban ghetto on earth...
...Raiders of the Lost Ark...
...The reason for these omissions was, usually, that I hadn't caught up with the film until it was no longer first-run...
...That's how Hyams makes life in his space colony feel - clammy, icky, unclean...
...So I at once made a new year's resolution to do a better job of keeping up with the movies this year...
...Dunne's novel, wonderful as it is, is all atmosphere...
...Only two characters manage not to be tainted by it all, and I take each to be an aspect of Edwards's own feelings about himself...
...They remain rather insensitive to such commotion...
...Each has a mirror-mirror quality that makes it revealing...
...Their script accomplishes everything that Pinter's for The French Lieutenant's Woman, being too gimmicky, too clever by half, does not...
...Blake Edwards's own wife is Julie Andrews, and the turkey he made with her in it was either Darling Lili or Star...
...Although he was only a supporting actor, the role he played was central to the film...
...More important, the honoring of Preston reminded me not only that S.O.B...
...came out seemed a kind of sardonic last laugh at the movie's own comedy...
...is trying to do: give the people what they want...
...The role in S.O.B...
...The people are unshaven, the bars sleazy, and the bad trips freaky (the film opens with a scene in which a worker who has o-d-ed hallucinates spiders...
...Peter Hyams wrote and directed this remake of High Noon set in a space station and with Sean Connery in the role originally played by Gary Cooper...
...S.O.B...
...Another pleasant surprise, since I can't remember when I last agreed with a choice made by my colleagues...
...Any movie about moviemakers appeals to me in the same way that self-portraits by photographers do...
...The brave new world he creates is far from other-worldly...
...It seems that what truly inheres in the civilization of high technology, our civilization, is a certain grubbiness, a kind of physical and social deterioration that man will take with him wherever he goes...
...Its ending is its weakest section, partly because we want it never to end, and partly because it has no way to end...
...Stevie...
...Blow-Out...
...By simplifying the story and relying upon the performances of Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, the film becomes more credible as a narrative...
...In pondering what should appear on my ten-best list, I noticed that there would be several films which I hadn't written about...
...One of these characters is the doctor, and the other is a director played by William Holden, whose death not long after S.O.B...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Actually, it's a little late for me to do any ten-best lists, ever, since the last time I did one was ten years ago...
...Unfortunately, the first column I wanted to do on a few film will have to wait...
...I think I should first make some amends to the good films I never got around to last year...
...Several late-breaking developments have encouraged me to take this almost unprecedented step...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 2
