Briefly On a Very Good Year for Movies, 1982
Which Challenges the Thesis that the 1980s weren't good for American Cinema
Lately I have been watching all of the acclaimed movies from the early 1980s, going through each year one by one to make Oscar-revisionist videos.
The main question I’m asking in goes like this: what for example was really the Best Picture of 1981?
I think we can all agree that it wasn’t Ordinary People, which is what won back then.
So now, I’m onto the 1983 Oscars, which featured eligible releases from 1982. And I’ve got to tell you, this is one remarkable year. With a plethora of recommendations for viewing that I’m going to give you below!
But it’s not just because of Spielberg’s smash-hit E.T. The Extraterrestrial. It’s also not because of the sprawling-epic Gandhi, which won Best Picture but also might be a total historical lie.
It’s really because of a plethora of very good films, so many that they overturn the thesis that the freewheeling, auteur paradise of the American 1970s died instantly with the November 1980 box-office bomb of Heaven’s Gate and the demise of the United Artists studio. It also overturns Tarantino’s thesis that the 1980s were a bad decade for film, relatively speaking.
In short, I don’t think the New Hollywood period had died just yet, though it might’ve died around this time, and even in 1982 — with Francis Ford Coppola’s box-office bomb One for the Heart.
Anyway, let’s glance at the 1983 Best-Picture nominees, which again were released in the calendar year of 1982:
Gandhi
E.T.
Missing
Tootsie
The Verdict
Now, I strongly believe that I could make a better Best-Picture nominee list out of just science-fictional movies that weren’t even nominated. That should be pretty easy considering that nobody knows or remembers what in the world the movie “Missing” even is. Here goes:
Blade Runner
The Thing
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan
Tron
Ask yourself whether you’d watch that list above or the Best-Picture nominees. I’d bet a majority of my subscribers are picking this science-fiction-laden list. Shoot, I even hate Tron’s execution of its story, but I’ll take it!
(However, side note, I am cheating a bit. “Blade Runner” in its theatrical release is not that good, not with that lousy voiceover narrator the studio forced on it. And nowadays, with five cuts of the movie or more, you’d have to pick which one counts in this retro-Oscar contest. Back in 1983, they only knew about the theatrical cut.)
I also contend that I can make a better Best-Picture list out of the unsung great films from this year. Some of these, I’m guessing, you’ve never heard of. I’ll make a brief case for each of them below.
Das Boot
Deathtrap
Fitzcarraldo
Lola
Moonlighting
One from the Heart
In the end, this might even be my own 1983-Oscar Best-Picture nominee list. I’d have to cut one out to make the number of five, but I don’t know which one to cut. Here goes my promotion of these films.
Whoever hasn’t watched this and yet likes good war movies, good adventure movies, tense claustrophic movies, and so on, this is your first recommendation.
Wolfgang Petersen made a very-bold revisionist movie about Germans in World War 2 that — *gulp* — sympathizes with the Germans. And yes they are Nazis. But the submarine-based Germans in this movie do not really like their government or the war. They are, as it goes, just doing their duty.
And they are doing their duty in the tiniest quarters: a submarine. For my money, this still stands as the best sub movie yet made, a fantastic example for claustrophobic-films to come that range from half of Christopher Nolan’s films to anything horror.
Rare is it that I am fooled by a “whodunit?”, because with time and experience, you figure out how to game the story and predict the killer.
But “Deathtrap” is a murder-mystery that messes with you. It even talks about its own plot unfolding as it goes, the kind of delightful postmodern exercise that gives me pause whenever someone harangues postmodernism. It’s not all bad! And when it’s good, it’s really fun.
Sidney Lumet directed this, and interestingly, he was Oscar-nominated for another movie this year, “The Verdict.” I like “Deathtrap” a lot better. It’s perfectly cast. The acting by Dyan Cannon, Michael Caine, and — incredibly to me — Christopher Reeve is outstanding.
This one went instantly on my “movies to recommend to everyone list.” Lumet is, as always, a master craftsman.
Werner Herzog’s South-American odyssey, starring Klaus Kinski. It’s typical Herzog: a visionary who is a madman, who is a visionary — because madmen and visionaries go together — decides to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.
Okay, what? And Herzog has his character pull a giant boat up a very steep hill, in the hot jungle, with wood and ropes.
This was so amazing that there was a documentary made about this movie, “Burden of Dreams,” that is just as harrowing as the movie. And Herzog proves he himself is actually the madman who is the visionary.
Rainier Werner Fassbender made an absurd amount of movies in a short time, yet a good number of them ended up being very good. “Lola” is among them.
At the end of the time, 'Lola" might end up being the only film ever to be entertainingly humanistic about building contractors and building inspectors. Their world in the film, 1957 Germany here, isn't one of dull meetings and unreadable contracts. It's candy-colored, and filled with prostitutes.
I say the movie is humanistic because — and this is a rarity these days — it treats its characters all as complex humans. None of them are just types, even though they are types.
Anyway, read my longer writeup in the link above. This one is for adults.
Another adult movie, but that’s mainly because it’s political content needs to be understood before viewing. I mean it would be helpful if you had prior knowledge of Poland’s communism circa 1981, labor politics in England, and the general problems of the Cold War.
Once that’s known, this movie is beyond excellent.
"Moonlighting" vaulted to the top of my list for movies about laborers and their employers, who are their masters, as well as commercialism and greed, communism and oppression, immigrants and their troubled relationship to their host country, and much more.
As with most great movies, “Moonlighting” is full of complexities — combining so many diverse aspects of life — that I could see it ten times and not exhaust what I could find. All in a 95-minute movie.
I mentioned this as a box-office bomb above. It was also a critical bomb as well, with critics deriding it for stale characters.
I strongly believe they miswatched it. This is Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to ‘Apocalypse Now”, and it’s completely different except for the go-for-broke bombast of his artistic aspirations.
You watch “One for the Heart” and you can tell it’s trying to be the Citizen Kane of romcoms.
I think it almost succeeds, and I can’t believe what I saw in it, art-wise. If you thought “La La Land” was awesome, you ought to try this movie. (Only be warned: it’s for adults.)
Also, you’ve got to like Tom Waits, who not only composed the soundtrack but is singing over the visuals throughout. Since I adore Tom Waits’ voice, that’s no problem for me.
Time has proved Coppola right. A hundred directors have watched “One from the Heart” and were so inspired by it that they alluded to it, imitated it, paid homage to it. I have heard that “Joker 2” takes strong inspiration from this movie, weirdly enough.
No director reminds me more of a Renaissance artist than Coppola, and that’s proven more in “One for the Heart” than almost any of his films.
Now you have recommendations for a month. And I strongly believe you will like half of the six movies I named above.
And also, I’m not done with 1982. My list still has ten unwatched movies from this year, possible good ones.
Which proves that if you are down on new releases today, there are no end to the treasures from past years. If they stopped making movies today and forever after, we would still have a lifetime’s worth of great ones to watch and live by.