Randomness... 1983

by Nathaniel R

RETURN OF THE JEDI

As noted last week we’ve been feeling some 1980s nostalgia of late. So we’re indulging in the "Totally Awesome 80s" this month. Most cinephiles I know keep their own top ten lists (those that don’t – weirdos! I kid I kid. To each their own.)  Sometimes these lists aren’t beholden to the Oscars or release dates but to copyright dates or first screenings somewhere even if they weren't "premieres"  (i.e. following  letterboxd, imdb listings). We stick to calendar year of US releases when we can just because it’s more fun for us to compare to the Oscars. In the event that the release was spread over years and confusing or maybe never got a US release we pick a year (usually the premiere year).

Herewith a 'top ten list' from 1983 which was made in the early Aughts based on childhood memories and some adult screenings. It’s occasionally been updated or altered by rewatches or first time viewings since. So let’s keep that 80s party going and talk 1983...

NATHANIEL'S 1983 FAVOURITES

alphabetically... and when he first or law saw them

• The Fourth Man (Paul Verhoeven)
One of those movies that straddles release years. It premiered in a lot of places in 1983 and was submitted for the 1983 Oscars (but only in International Feature). When it was actually released in the US (in 1984)  it made some top ten lists but was not submitted for Oscar consideration even though it would have technically been eligible in other categories if it had. I didn’t become a fan of Verhoeven until Showgirls (1995) and started looking back at the filmography. I wonder if this holds up or if I only loved it for the titillation factor since aggressively homosexual screen moments were super rare until the 2000s. Or later actually; they're still rare.

• The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)
Most people consider this 1982 but that’s ONLY because they didn’t live through the 1980s and that's how websites list it. IMDb and Wikipedia suggest that this movie had one 1982 screening (in Iceland!) though I can’t find any references to that actually happening. All first-run reviews are from 1983 and it competed at Cannes in May of 1983 and was eligible in 1983 for all the big film awards (only BAFTA embraced it giving it 5 nominations and a screenplay win). It’s widely accepted that The King of Comedy was misunderstood in its time but it holds up well today. I don't remember when I first saw it but it remains one of my top five Scorseses. And bless the National Society of Film Critics, the only group wise enough to honor Sandra Bernhardt’s incredibly in-your-face performance. 

NEVER CRY WOLF

• Never Cry Wolf (Carroll Ballard)
The only PG rated family film with full frontal male nudity! My parents took me and my brothers when it was released and we all loved it. Rewatched in college and still enjoyed. The beautiful cinematography won some critics awards at the time but somehow the film only scored with the Oscars in Best Sound. Carroll Ballard had a fairly unique career in that he was a serious quality director that almost exclusively worked in movies aimed at the whole family. See also: The Black Stallion, Nutcracker, Fly Away Home. 

• The Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand)
One entire wall in my childhood bedroom was devoted to this sequel. It was the last year of totally pure  Star Wars obsession (for me at least). As an adult the movie has a lot of obvious problems but the first act with Jabba the Hut and Princess Leia in the metal bikini still slays. Since The Empire Strikes Back was my earliest actually vivid moviegoing memory, Return of the Jedi became, quite naturally and sequentially, my earliest memory of the agonizing wait of knowing a movie is coming years before it arrives and then counting down to its release. Something that thankfully still happens to this day as love for the cinema has never waned. 

• The Right Stuff (Phillip Kauffman)
I was too young for this in 1983  but when I finally got around to it in college --well, it's impressive. Great cast. Why did Philip Kaufman's career peter out so quickly at the turn of the century? He had rangey good run from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) through Quills (2000). People don’t talk about this astronaut drama today but it won half of its eight (!) Oscar nominations which is quite something.

SILKWOOD.
• Silkwood (Mike Nichols)
The best movie of 1983. Upsetting that this didn’t manage a Best Picture nomination along with its other five nominations in its day. Why were Academy members resistant? If anyone who was paying attention back then could enlighten us, that'd be lovely. I have seen it a few times but not in quite a long while (rewatch is due). It’s Meryl Streep’s best performance and Mike Nichols best film. Bold claims twice over, I know. Fight me. 

• Star 80 (Bob Fosse)
Utterly shocking when I first rented it but I was probably too young (at least the first time). But this thing lingers and Eric Roberts is amazing in it. He wasn’t Oscar nominated though he did score two honors: a Globe nomination and a Best Actor win from the Boston Society of Film Critics. Bob Fosse was such an incredible director and a couple images from this remain embedded in the memory though I’ve only seen this twice and the last time was in the mid 1990s. Time for a rewatch!

• Terms of Endearment (James L Brooks)
I have almost no memory of this one – which was the second biggest blockbuster of the year (after Return of the Jedi) back when non-genre stuff could still fascinate the moviegoing public in droves and droves. I loved it when I first saw it a couple years after its release. Just that once! People seem to have a low opinion of it now. Is it not good or is the fall from critical grace purely based on the fact that it’s so female focused?

How incredible is this poster?

• The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir)
Another film like The King of Comedy that is considered 1982 online but no one actually saw it then beyond (in this case) select lucky Australians who hit the movie theater in late December. It spread to the rest of the world including Cannes competition and US movie theaters in 1983. I have only two memories having only seen it once in (I think, the early 90s?): One, being mesmerized by but undecided about how much I actually liked Linda Hunt’s Oscar winning performance; Two, the scorching onscreen chemistry between Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver who were each just a short step away from superstardom when this film arrived.

• Yentl (Barbra Streisand)
This is the last of three movies on this top ten list that I actually first saw in movie theaters (the others being ROTJ & Never Cry Wolf). My family were never movie people per se but being Mormons they did like musicals. It was a treat to revisit Yentl for an episode of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” two years ago. It holds up well! It's 100% Streisand’s best self-directed effort even if critics are weirdly most deferential to Prince of Tides (I've never understood that - explain it to me if you can, seriously). I was surprised to discover in 2022 that it felt less like a soaring romantic epic (how I'd remembered it!) and more like an intimate quiet drama of self-realization.

Finis.

All that said, I’m admittedly weak on the early 80s. A lot of “gold” to still discover, surely, including a few key Oscar titles. I'd love to hear your favourites from 1983 in the comments. Have at it. 

Comments

[Finbar McBride]

1983 Top Films

The Bill Chill
That opening scene was revolutionary in 1983. Sarah (Glenn Close) watches while her husband Harold (Kevin Kline) washes their kid in the bathtub. Men then simply didn't do that parenting task in movies. Our eyebrows rose as we realized this was a movie that was going to nonchalantly blow up our preconceptions. No joke landed harder that the organ at the funeral service playing You Can't Always Get What You Want as the exit music. A classic film that simply doesn't have the cultural power it had in 1983.

Fanny and Alexander
The finest film ever made. Watch it for the mysticism or the tip of the hat to classic theater or the pain of the loss of childhood innocence or the beauty of a Scandinavian Christmas.

Risky Business
That classic dance moment is the clip of 1983. They will play it when Tom Cruise is given his honorary lifetime Oscar.

Silkwood
Cher tells the story of attending a screening of the trailer in Westwood. Audiences laughed at her name in the credits. She weepily called the film's director Mike Nichols. He listened and replied, "They won't be laughing when they see you in the movie." And we didn't.

Terms of Endearment
Every actress in Hollywood was mentioned as a lead in this James L. Brooks classic. Jennifer Jones originally owned the property. At one point I recall a fuss for Elizabeth Taylor and Sissy Spacek. Burt Reynolds declined the role of Garrett Breedlove to make Stroker Ace. Can anyone imagine this melodrama without the comedic levity brought by Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger to lighten the mood?

Yentl
The stories of on set sexual harassment by Mandy Patinkin toward Barbra Streisand in her recent autobiography were so shocking. I rewatched the classic and found that the knowledge of the unacceptable behavior did not dim Streisand's achievement. I now wonder how the film would feel if Patinkin's had not prompted Streisand to rewrite a key moment in the film.

Zelig
Before the worldwide fervor for Forrest Gump, Woody Allen inserted his image into vintage footage to tell the story of Leonard Zelig, a human chameleon. This mockumentary is a throughly entertaining comedy exploring identity.

[TOM]

I scanned through the films released in 1983 and there’s, surprisingly, nothing I’d like to rewatch or revisit from that year. In no particular order, here’s my Top Ten of ‘gold’ that I never got around to renting at my neighborhood video store, but still want to see. I couldn’t even round up 10 selections from that year…

-The Dresser (BP nominee, two BActor nominations),
-The Hunger (Susan Saradon, Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie),
-Jaws 3-D (had the original Jaws been re-formatted as 3-D, who wouldn’t want to see a shark with its mouth open pop out of the water, stomach content tossed at you when a shark’s belly is getting sliced open, underwater beach footage of ‘Jaws’ scoping out a victim or that cage scene where a head appears). Jaws-3/D probably would’ve lured me into the movie theater with false promises. Still want to see what I missed and how the franchise derailed.
-Bad Boys (Sean Penn-still never saw his follow-up to Fast Times),
-Without a Trace (Kate Nelligan) and
-The Lonely Lady (Pia Zadora). Just reading the logline of this Razzie (?) nominee/winner, made me curious about the entire plot….

[Edwin]

Sticking to movies that were Oscar-eligible in ‘83, my top 10 would be:

Christine
A Christmas Story
Fanny and Alexander
The Hunger
The King of Comedy
Koyaanisqatsi
Psycho II
Rumble Fish
Valley Girl
Videodrome

I think this is handily the weakest year of the ‘80s, although granted, I still have yet to see Silkwood.

[Cláudio Alves]

I tend to go with the first public screening as the arbiter of a film's year because I watch many festival films, especially Portuguese ones, whose only public screening is that singular world premiere. And I'd like to count such films just the same. So, I had THE KING OF COMEDY on my 1982 top ten. Still, I understand why you go by Oscar eligibility. Indeed, on the giant "My Oscars" Excell spreadsheet, I have three columns: the ballot according to Oscar eligibility, the ballot according to American release (basically Film Bitch or Team Experience Awards), ballot by year of world premiere.

Anyway, going by world premiere, my top ten for 1983 would be...

BORN IN FLAMES, Lizzie Borden
CARMEN, Carlos Saura
L'ARGENT, Robert Bresson
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, Nagisa Oshima
NOSTALGIA, Andrei Tarkovsky
PAULINE AT THE BEACH, Éric Rohmer
SANS SOLEIL, Chris Marker
SUGAR CANE ALLEY, Euzhan Palcy
THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA, Shohei Imamura
VIDEODROME, David Cronenberg

Honorable mentions to THE TERENCE DAVIES TRILOGY, Kurys' ENTRE NOUS, and Nichols' SILKWOOD.

However, if I go by Oscar eligibility, I guess my top ten would look like...

CARMEN, Carlos Saura
FANNY AND ALEXANDER, Ingmar Bergman
KOYAANISQATSI, Godfrey Reggio
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, Nagisa Oshima
PAULINE AT THE BEACH, Éric Rohmer
QUERELLE, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
SILKWOOD, Mike Nichols
THE KING OF COMEDY, Martin Scorsese
THE NIGHT OF VARENNES, Ettore Scola
VIDEODROME, David Cronenberg