Elvis (1979)

          Predictably, a TV movie dramatizing Elvis Presley’s eventful life emerged not long after the King’s August 1977 death. In February 1979, ABC broadcast Elvis, starring former Disney child star Kurt Russell and directed by, of all people, John Carpenter, whose breakthrough film Halloween (1978) had been completed but not yet released at the time he shot this gun-for-hire project. A sanitized overview of the title character’s life through 1969, when Presley completed a major comeback by returning to the live concert stage, Elvis doesn’t reveal much that casual fans don’t already know about the subject matter—Elvis was sweet on his mama, Gladys (Shelley Winters); he fell hard for a young woman named Priscilla (Season Hubley); and he gave his manager, Col. Tom Parker (Pat Hingle), too much leeway—but the story unfolds smoothly.

          Key events depicted onscreen include Elvis’ childhood fixation on his stillborn twin brother, the singer’s excitement at scoring his first recording contract, Elvis’ bumpy transition to acting, and the King’s descent into isolation and paranoia once he reached unimaginable heights of fame. Because this project treats Presley’s image gingerly, there’s no Fat Elvis excess, and a scene of the King shooting a television is about as deep as the filmmakers go into depicting Presley’s eccentricities. Despite its homogenized vibe, the movie boasts an energetic, Emmy-nominated performance by Russell, whose boyish persona captures young Elvis’ aw-shucks appeal. That Russell mostly overcomes the distraction of the dark eyeliner he wears throughout the picture—as well as the inevitable problems of imitating Elvis’ iconic sneerin’-and-struttin’ persona—speaks well to the sincerity of his work.

          Acquitting himself fairly well, Carpenter complements the project’s workmanlike storytelling with a minimalistic shooting style, and whenever he lets fly with a lengthy master shot or a slick tracking move, he does a lot to maintain the flow of his actors’ performances. Most of the time, however, one must struggle to spot signs of Carpenter’s distinctive cinematic style. That said, it’s interesting to watch Elvis and realize how quickly Carpenter and Russell locked into each other’s frequencies, because just a short time later they embarked on a great run with Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

          Incidentally, this project was a family affair for Russell, because his dad, Whit Russell, plays Elvis’ father, and Russell later married his onscreen bride, Hubley. (They divorced in 1983.) As for the film’s accuracy, Priscilla Presley reportedly vetted the script, which might be why Elvis often feels like a hero-overcomes-adversity hagiography with musical numbers. (Instead of the vocals from Presley’s original recordings, singer Ronnie McDowell’s voice is heard on the soundtrack whenever Russell lip-syncs.) FYI, a truncated version of Elvis was released theatrically overseas, though the original two-and-a-half-hour cut that was broadcast on ABC is still widely available.

Elvis: GROOVY

1980 Week: The Fog

          Note: Settle in and enjoy a double-dose of 1980 titles for the next two weeks, beginning with a modern-classic horror picture just in time for Halloween . . .

          More than any other of the films he made during his peak period of the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s, The Fog subsists on the special nocturnal vibe that only director John Carpenter could create. Filled with atmospheric shots of killers emerging from shadows, kicky effects depicting the influence of supernatural forces, and the pulsating rhythms of a great synthesizer score composed by Carpenter himself, The Fog is vibe personified. When the movie clicks, which happens a lot, the sheer mood of the thing is intoxicating. And every so often, the picture fulfills its raison d’etre by providing genuine scares. So even if the picture is ultimately quite disappointing, thanks to a anticlimactic ending and the failure to fully utilize a fantastic cast, The Fog is very much a part of the John Carpenter mythos. Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982) are scarier, and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Escape from New York (1981) are more exciting, but The Fog comprises 89 minutes of pure Carpenter style.

          Set in a small town on the California coast, the picture opens with a creepy vignette of crusty senior Mr. Machen (John Houseman) reading a ghost story to kids sitting around a campfire on the beach at night. It seems that an otherworldly fog once crept over the waters near the town of Antonio Bay, claiming the lives an entire ship’s crew—and legend has it that 100 years later, the fog is due to return. That time, of course, is now. Its creepy context established, the picture then gets down to the business of introducing various characters doomed to face the fog: radio DJ and single mom Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), who broadcasts out of a decrepit old lighthouse; easygoing local Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) and sexy hitchhiker Elizabeth Soiley (Jamie Lee Curtis), who become a couple while traveling together; uptight town official Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh); angst-ridden priest Father Malone (Hal Holbrook); and so on.

          Carpenter and cowriter-producer Debra Hill never quite figure out how to manage the sprawling cast, because even though tasty glimmers of backstory and characterization appear here and there, individualization gets lost when people are transformed into potential victims during elaborate fight scenes. Similarly, the mythology behind the fog and its connections to Antonio Bay is both frustratingly unclear and overly simplistic. As a result, The Fog is much more a collection of cool scenes than a properly constructed narrative. That said, cool scenes are the coin of the realm in horror cinema, and The Fog is full of darkly entertaining passages. The eerie assault on a fishing boat. The tense race to save a child from a house that’s being smothered by the fog. The final siege on the lighthouse.

          Abetted by his best cinematographer, master of darkness Dean Cudney, Carpenter generates one menacing image after another, and he punctuates the film with his signature sardonic wit. Barbeau is great, especially considering she performs so many scenes alone (nothwithstanding wraithlike attackers), and it’s fun to spot so many players from previous Carpenter films: Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Curtis, Darwin Jostin, Nancy Loomis. (Carpenter missed an opportunity by keeping real-life mother and daughter Leigh, of Pyscho fame, and Curtis mostly separate, but their appearance in the same film is notable in a Trivial Pursuit sort of way.) The Fog was remade in 2005 amid a rash of new versions of Carpenter classics, and the remake was a critical bomb despite scoring at the box office. 

The Fog: GROOVY

Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) & Elvis on Tour (1972)

          By the late ’60s, rock legend Elvis Presley’s long run as a movie star seemed like it was over, as evidenced by the failure of Change of Habit (1969), a musical comedy the King made for Universal. Rather than accepting defeat, however, Presley’s home studio, MGM, tacked in a new direction by commissioning a documentary about the singer’s return to live performance after a seven-year hiatus. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Denis Sanders, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is captures the King at the beginning of his self-parody period, introducing such tropes as the sequined jump suit, the exuberant karate moves, and the cheesy onstage patter (“Thank you, thankyouverymuch”). Yet for every example of excess—bloated arrangements, syrupy ballads—there’s something redeeming, like a flash of Presley’s thunderous vocal power every now and then. Therefore, this record of the King’s blockbuster residency at the International Hotel in Las Vegas is consistently compelling.

          In the best sequence (Presley rehearsing with his band), the singer is loose and playful, digging into killer grooves like a version of “Little Sister” that segues into a cover of the Beatles’ “Get Back.” And while there’s plenty of bad-Elvis sludge in That’s the Way It Is—Presley does a half-assed version of “Love Me Tender” as he trolls the lip of the stage and kisses female audience members—the film is a fascinating artifact. This is especially true of the re-edited version that premiered on Turner Classic Movies in 2000. Sanders’ original cut was derided for including pointless secondary material, such as interviews with fans and hotel workers. The 2000 version excludes the superfluous material, features a slightly different song list, and offers stronger momentum during the second and third acts, which simulate one full concert even though footage was cobbled together from six different evenings. Both cuts of That’s the Way It Is benefit from crisp, dramatic concert photography by the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who shot The Wild Bunch (1969) and other classics.

          After That’s the Way It Is did well, MGM commissioned a second concert documentary two years later. Elvis on Tour records Presley’s first concert trek in a decade. Although the movie drags at times—partially because Presley’s starting to look bored, heavy, and silly onstage, and partially because the filmmakers include drab offstage bits like shots of roadies moving cases around empty amphitheaters—Elvis on Tour has incredible moments. For instance, the movie shows Presley singing his last significant single, “Burning Love,” a song so new he reads lyrics off a sheet of paper. It’s striking to see an artist crafting a fresh hit almost 20 years after his first Number One song. Elvis on Tour also features a terrific gospel-music jam session between Elvis and his backup singers. This sequence lets viewers watch Presley enjoy his talent in a (mostly) private way. Elvis on Tour lacks the dramatic build of That’s the Way It Is, particularly since Presley’s climactic cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” appears too early, but it’s worth watching all the way through just to hear these immortal words: “Elvis has left the building.” Elvis on Tour was the last film of Presley’s career, and though he enjoyed one more showbiz triumph afterward—the famous TV concert Aloha from Hawaii (1973)—health problems took the King’s life in 1977.

Elvis: That’s the Way It Is: GROOVY

Elvis on Tour: FUNKY

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

          It’s tempting to say that Eyes of Laura Mars would have been a better movie if its original writer, horror icon John Carpenter, had also been the director—but then again, the central conceit of Carpenter’s story is so goofy that it’s possible even he would have encountered difficulty in making the narrative believable. The gimmick is that a fashion photographer becomes psychically linked to a serial killer, “seeing” murders as they’re committed. This makes her and all the people she knows suspects, and the premise inevitably leads to a showdown between the photographer and the killer.
          Journeyman director Irvin Kershner got the job of filming the story (David Zelag Goodman rewrote Carpenter’s script), and he delivers a diverting but somewhat forgettable thriller whose glamorous textures accentuate the lack of narrative substance. For instance, the main character’s photos were taken by real-life provocateur Helmut Newton, so the “shoots” depicted in the movie feature lingerie-clad models juxtaposed with gruesome backgrounds (e.g., car wrecks). Sensationalistic, to be sure, but not necessarily meaningful.

          Faye Dunaway stars as Laura Mars, a super-successful fashion photographer whose life unravels when she starts “seeing” murders. Laura soon meets Detective John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), who is understandably skeptical about her insights. As Neville investigates the people around Laura, he and Laura become lovers. The movie gets formulaic during its middle section, with various characters in Laura’s life presented and dismissed as possible suspects, and whenever the movie needs a jolt, Kershner has Dunaway slip into a trance while he cuts to hazy point-of-view shots representing the killer’s perspective during a murder.

          The movie actually loses credibility as it progresses, and the ending is so trite it’s almost campy, but Kershner benefits from a strong supporting cast. In particular, Rene Auberjonois, Brad Dourif, and Raul Julia invest small roles with color and dimensionality. Unfortunately, the leads don’t fare as well. Jones does his standard early-career taciturn-stud thing, glowering through rote scenes as a cynical investigator, and Dunaway plays the whole movie a bit too broadly—by the time she’s cowering in her bedroom while the killer confronts her, she’s using hand movements so operatic they recall Barbara Stanywck’s performance in the 1948 potboiler Sorry, Wrong Number. In fact, it says a lot about Eyes of Laura Mars that the most memorable thing in the movie is Barbara Streisand’s overwrought theme song, “Prisoner,” which plays at the beginning and end of the picture. Fittingly for a movie set in the fashion industry, it’s all about the packaging, baby.

Eyes of Laura Mars: FUNKY

Dark Star (1974)

          Ambitious USC film student John Carpenter did such a bang-up job on his 45-minute thesis film, a 2001-inspired sci-fi comedy called Dark Star, that producer Jack H. Harris gave him a few extra bucks with which to shoot another 40 minutes of footage so the picture could become a theatrical feature. The resulting movie didn’t make much noise upon its initial release, but once Carpenter achieved stardom by making Halloween (1978) and other pictures, Dark Star was rediscovered. Given this context, it’s surprising that the movie is much more deeply infused with the personality of Carpenter’s principal collaborator on the project, fellow USC film student Dan O’Bannon. The two wrote the script together, O’Bannon plays the lead role, and O’Bannon both edited the film and supervised the picture’s resourceful special effects.

          Although all of Carpenter’s movies have mordant wit, he tends toward succinct irony. By contrast, the late O’Bannon tended toward overt comedy—so instead of Carpenter’s sly asides, Dark Star has motor-mouthed verbal gags and lots of outright slapstick. In fact, one reason the movie isn’t more effective is that Carpenter’s visual style of deep shadows and wide frames, which was already fully formed at this early stage, drowns the jokes in too much brooding atmosphere.

          That said, Dark Star has a trippy concept and many amusing scenes. The story concerns a space vessel called Dark Star, which zips through the universe blowing up planetoids that stand in the way of man’s development. The crew comprises shaggy hippies who bicker and joke like frat boys, and one of them is a ’70s stoner type who spends all his time in the ship’s observation bubble, silently blissing out on celestial panoramas. Crew member Pinback (O’Bannon), is in charge of feeding the ship’s mascot, a mischievous alien portrayed as a beach ball with feet, and a great deal of the movie concerns Pinback’s comedic misadventures with the critter. As silly as this material is, it’s executed professionally, and O’Bannon shows an appealing flair for physical comedy.

          On a deeper level, the movie riffs on 2001 by depicting a sentient bomb that gets annoyed each time it’s mistakenly pushed out of the ship for dispersal, and then pulled back in once the error is corrected. In the film’s funniest sequence, one of the astronauts gets into an argument with the bomb about the nature of existence as a means of dissuading the bomb from detonating.

          Dark Star drags because of the feature-length padding, the continuity is glitchy, and the visuals are grungy because the picture was shot on 16-milimeter film. But as a snapshot of where the collegiate head was at during the early ’70s, and as a footnote to one of cinema’s most interesting directing careers, Dark Star is a valuable artifact. Plus, it even has an amiable theme song: In addition to creating his first musical score, beginning a tradition that continued throughout his glory years, Carpenter penned the music for the country-and-Western ditty “Benson, Arizona,” which plays over the opening and closing credits.

Dark Star: FUNKY

Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

Even though the made-for-TV thriller Someone’s Watching Me! debuted in November 1978, director John Carpenter actually filmed the picture prior to making his breakthrough hit Halloween, which debuted in theaters a month before Someone’s Watching Me! reached the airwaves. In nearly every possible way, the telefilm is, at best, a footnote to Carpenter’s storied career. A forgettable suspense flick in the Hitchcock Lite mode, Someone’s Watching Me! bears relatively few of Carpenter’s stylistic and thematic signatures, even though he wrote the script in addition to directing. That said, the project hews to Carpenter’s early-career trope of strong heroines: Model-turned-actress Lauren Hutton plays a woman who realizes she’s being ogled from afar by a dangerous admirer, then fights back. As for the plot, the premise tells the whole predictable story. Stalker notices girl, girl begins to suspect something is amiss, close encounters hint at looming danger, and finally a confrontation happens. Along the way, there’s a whole lot of voyeurism, but because the project was made for television, none of the Brian De Palma-esque kinkiness teased by the setup materializes. It’s all quite bland, as is Hutton’s star turn. Occasionally, Carpenter eschews flat camera coverage for imagery that’s outside the TV-movie norm—tracking shots down corridors, vignettes in cramped spaces, and so forth. Better still, Carpenter’s dialogue has flashes of sardonic bite. Yet the realities of the project dim any hopes for bravura storytelling. Adhering to the boxy visual style of ’70s TV prohibits Carpenter from creating his usual widescreen artistry, and it’s a drag he didn’t score the piece himself, since the minimalistic synthesizer music he composed for his early pictures was a major part of his fearmaking toolbox. As a cinematic experience, Someone’s Watching Me! is thoroughly underwhelming. Yet for the perspective it offers on a filmmaker’s development, the picture is mildly interesting. It was also the first collaboration between Carpenter and actress Adrienne Barbeau, who plays a supporting role. She later appeared in Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York (1981), in addition to becoming Mrs. Carpenter from 1979 to 1984.

Someone’s Watching Me!: FUNKY

Halloween (1978)

          Filmmaker John Carpenter secured his legendary status with this brutally efficient thriller, which reigned for several years as the most successful independent film of all time, turned Jamie Lee Curtis into a movie star, and established the slasher movie as a major force at the box office. After Halloween, the formula of horny teenagers getting stalked by mystery men wielding butcher knives became a gruesome cliché, but it Carpenter’s deft hands, the original movie is a merciless exercise in audience manipulation. Co-written by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill, the movie opens with a famously lengthy point-of-view sequence depicting the first horrific episode in the career of demented killer Michael Myers. (If you don’t know the kicker to this vignette, I won’t spoil it for you.) The film picks up years later, when Myers escapes from a mental institution and returns to his hometown for a murderous rampage. Meek babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and haunted psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) stand in his way, so the harrowing narrative asks whether Strode and Loomis can stop Myers’ killing spree before becoming victims. Much has been written about the deeper psychological implications of the movie, and the film is crafted with such a Spartan approach to characterization that it’s tempting to play critical-interpretation games.
          But even without the justification of higher purpose, Halloween is a must-see for its minimalistic style. Cinematographer Dean Cundey uses huge anamorphic-widescreen frames to lend grandeur to simple locations like suburban streets and the interiors of teenagers’ bedrooms; Carpenter creates disquieting atmosphere with simple devices like having the killer enter the soft-focus backgrounds of shots; and Carpenter propels the film with the beloved synthesizer score he composed and performed. Speaking of the music, the main-title theme alone, with its relentless rhythm track and brooding melody, is a huge component of the film’s elemental power. Whereas many subsequent slasher flicks substituted elaborate gimmicks for real inspiration, Halloween features just a few choice contrivances, like grimly artistic murder tableaux and Myers’ creepy disguise, a hood the filmmakers created by modifying a cheap William Shatner mask. Among the actors, Curtis hits all the right notes, moving from shy and sweet to terrified and tough, while Pleasence is entertainingly deranged (“Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.”). An unforgettable demonstration of what a visionary director can accomplish by locking into the right subject matter, no matter how meager the available production resources, Halloween comprises equal measures of high art and low sensationalism. It’s also, not coincidentally, a great ride.

Halloween: RIGHT ON

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

The early days of John Carpenter’s career are sort of like the warm-ups to a great athletic feat: Each time he tried to leap his way into Hollywood, his attempt was more impressive until he finally achieved spectacular success. First came Dark Star (1974), a student film expanded to feature length, and the one that finally did the trick was Halloween (1978). But in between, Carpenter earned considerable acclaim, especially in Europe, for a nasty piece of work titled Assault on Precinct 13. An unabashed riff on the Howard Hawks classic Rio Bravo (1959), Assault is a deceptively simple piece about urban crazies laying siege to a police station the night it’s set to be decommissioned. Ostensibly motivated by revenge, the killers really represent a kind of all-encompassing nihilistic dread, closing in on a handful of virtuous characters as inexorably as the night itself. While that might seem like heady metaphorical stuff for a low-budget thriller, much of what makes Carpenter so interesting is his ability to infuse films with genuine menace instead of stock fright-show tropes. Assault also demonstrated that in his own perverse way, Carpenter’s a damn funny son of a bitch, because the picture is filled with humor so black it’s almost shocking. And then there are the  unequivocally shocking moments, like the notorious ice-cream cone scene. (You’ll know it when you see it, believe me.) Although the picture's characters are mostly ciphers, Assault includes a prototype for the sort of anarchistic loners that permeated later Carpenter films, because tough-talking convict Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) is like a rough draft for Snake Plissken, the tough-talking convict Kurt Russell played in Escape from New York (1981). Napoleon’s who-gives-a-fuck swagger is potent, his interplay with the unfortunate cop in charge of the police station is entertaining, and he gets some of the movie’s best lines (“Can’t argue with a confident man”). As did many of Carpenter’s early pictures, Assault features a minimalistic, moody score by the director himself, using a lonely electric piano and skittering synth sounds to envelop the whole story in an ominous cloud.

Assault on Precinct 13: GROOVY

Alien (1979)

          Writer Dan O’Bannon was a film-school pal of John Carpenter’s, but his career foundered after the duo expanded Carpenter’s thesis film into the commercial feature Dark Star (1974). While Carpenter was making the low-budget shockers that launched his career, O’Bannon was mired in stillborn projects like an unproduced version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, and at he ended up living on his friend Ron Shusett’s couch. Luckily, Shusett was an aspiring writer-producer intrigued by O’Bannon’s idea for a claustrophobic sci-fi/horror flick about an outer-space critter that preys upon a spaceship’s crew. (The concept borrows liberally from myriad sources, with the 1958 B-movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space often cited as a direct influence.) O’Bannon and Shusett fleshed out the story, which at one point was titled Star Beast, then sold the package to producers Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hil, whose new company Brandywine Productions had access to Twentieth Century-Fox. Giler and Hill, both screenwriters, did more narrative tinkering, but Fox didn’t get excited until the studio’s Star Wars (1977) exploded at the box office. Alien was the next outer-space picture on deck at Fox, so the project finally got momentum—and as more people joined the party, the level of artistic ambition continued rising.
          Ridley Scott, then a veteran of countless TV commercials but only one little-seen feature, was hired because of his keen visual sense. Just as importantly, Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who worked on the same stillborn version of Dune as O’Bannon, was recruited for creature and set designs; his creepy “biomechanics” style infused the resulting film’s alien scenes with perverse grandeur. Representing a rare case of the development process doing what it’s supposed to do, Alien kept evolving, rather like the creature in the story, until finally, on May 25, 1979, audiences got their first look at a perfect marriage of exploitation-flick elements and art-film craftsmanship. Scott fills every frame of the picture with meticulous details, building excruciating tension by keeping the titular beastie almost completely offscreen until the film’s finale. He also created one of scare cinema’s greatest jolts with the unforgettable “chest-burster” scene.
          So despite underdeveloped characters and an occasionally murky storyline, nearly everything in Alien works on some level, from the sleek title sequence by R/Greenberg Associates to the terrifying climax featuring Sigourney Weaver wearing the smallest panties in the known universe. The production design’s mix of utility and grime is utterly credible; the score by Jerry Goldsmith is eerily majestic; and the interplay between actors Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Weaver nails under-pressure group dynamics. The movie that O’Bannon and Shusett once pitched as “Jaws in space” sits comfortably alongside Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster as one of the most cinematically important horror shows ever made.

Alien: OUTTA SIGHT