Leave Yesterday Behind (1978)

          Tempting as it is to romanticize Carrie Fisher’s career in the wake of her shocking death at age 60, the truth is that outside of Star Wars movies, she was far more successful as a writer than she was as an actress. In fact, she didn’t properly lead the cast of a feature film until the obscure 1989 indie She’s Back, and most of her major screen credits are secondary roles as best friends and love interests. Acknowledging that drug problems and typecasting contributed to Fisher’s marginalization, it’s interesting to look at one of her first significant performances after the release of Star Wars (1977) to examine the question of whether Hollywood failed to understand her gifts or whether her gifts simply took time to mature. (Lest we forget, Fisher was only 19 when she first ventured to a galaxy far, far away.) In the respectable romantic telefilm Leave Yesterday Behind, Fisher plays a woman whose devotion helps a young man conquer emotional difficulties following an accident that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down.

          Occupying the leading role is the versatile John Ritter, then riding high on the success of his dopey sitcom Three’s Company and undoubtedly eager to display his dramatic chops. Within the film’s predictable and sentimental rhythms, he comes off quite well, conveying anguish and rage and vulnerability in a number of convincing moments. Fisher isn’t given nearly as much room to shine, since most of her repetitive scenes involve expressing sympathy, and she doesn’t elevate the material the way Ritter does. So while it’s likely Hollywood didn’t know what to do with the precocious starlet whom audiences first encountered in Shampoo (1975), it also seems fair to say Fisher hadn’t yet found the right balance between her innate qualities of humor and toughness. In Leave Yesterday Behind, she’s appealing and formidable in some moments, forgettable and shrill in others. As for the movie itself, it’s watchable as far as this sort of thing goes.

          Directed without much passion or style by Richard Michaels, the picture overcomes a choppy opening sequence to settle into a straightforward pattern of vignettes displaying the leading character encountering—and occasionally surmounting—obstacles. After losing the use of his legs because of a fall during a polo match, Paul Stallings (Ritter) becomes depressed and embittered, wreaking domestic havoc on his grandfather, Doc (Buddy Ebsen), whose sprawling farm provides a quiet sanctuary while Paul adjusts to life in a wheelchair. Marnie (Fisher) practices with her horse on the farm, so eventually she has a meet-cute with Paul. Discarding her boyfriend, David (Robert Urich), Marnie spends lots of time with Paul, quickly escalating from friendship to romance until Paul pumps the brakes out of fear he won’t be able to perform sexually. Meanwhile, Doc gives no-bullshit life lessons that force Paul to overcome self-pity so he can explore his potential. This stuff isn’t anywhere near as saccharine as it sounds, but it’s not profound, either. Still, alongside a minor role in the 1977 made-for-TV adaptation of William Inge’s play Come Back, Little Sheba, this humble telefilm is, by dint of her scant credits during this period, Fisher’s most substantial ’70s performance beyond her first appearance as Princess Leia. So there’s that.

Leave Yesterday Behind: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Blues Brothers

          The first and arguably best movie derived from Saturday Night Live characters, The Blues Brothers is a gigantic 10-course meal of a movie. It’s an action picture, a comedy, a musical, and a social satire. Yet the film, which was written by star Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis, is hardly to everyone’s taste. Those who quickly lose patience with car chases, for instance, will find some scenes interminable. For viewers who lock into the movie’s more-is-more groove, however, The Blues Brothers is a nonstop parade of bizarre sight gags, ingenious character flourishes, and vivacious musical numbers.

          Best of all, the title characters translate to the big screen beautifully, because Aykroyd employs the same gift for imagining the universes surrounding his creations that he later brought to Ghostbusters (1984), which he cowrote with Harold Ramis. Instead of pummeling one joke into the dirt, the sad fate of most recurring SNL characters given the feature-film treatment, Aykroyd uses the main gag of the Blues Brothers sketches as the starting point for a proper story that’s populated with fully realized supporting characters. The Blues Brothers might not be great cinema, per se, but it’s made with geunine craftsmanship.

          Whereas on SNL the Blues Brothers mostly just performed soul tunes with accompanying physical-comedy shtick, The Blues Brothers gives the characters backstories, distinct personalities, and a mission. A mission from God, that is. Soon after fastidious Elwood Blues (Aykroyd) picks up his slovenly brother, Jake Blues (John Belushi), from prison after a three-year stint for armed robbery, viewers discover their shared history. The brothers were raised in a Chicago orphanage overseen by stern nun Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman), and the orphanage’s kindly custodian, Curtis (Cab Calloway), taught the boys to love black music. Upon reaching adulthood, Ellwood and Jake formed a hot band, but the group fell apart when Jake went to jail. Upon reuniting with Curtis and Sister Mary, the brothers discover that the orphanage will close unless back taxes are paid, so Elwood and Jake contrive to reform their band for a benefit concert. That’s easier said than done, since the musicians have started new lives.

          Additionally, the Blues Brothers gather enemies at every turn, pissing off a country-and-western band, a gaggle of neo-Nazis, a psychotic mystery woman (Carrie Fisher) who uses heavy artillery while trying to kill Jake, and the entire law-enforcement community of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Sprinkled throughout the brothers’ wild adventures are fantastic musical numbers featuring James Brown, Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, to say nothing of the Blues Brothers Band itself, which features real-life veterans of the ’60s soul-music scene. Landis treats this movie like his personal playground, throwing in everything from mass destruction to ornate choreography, and his affection for the material is contagious. (A few years later, in 1983, Landis reaffirmed his musical bona fides by directing Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking “Thriller” video.)

          What makes The Blues Brothers so unique is its three-pronged attack. In addition to telling an enjoyable men-on-a-mission story (the source of the action scenes), the picture delivers innumerable gags as well as the aforementioned musical highlights. Each element receives the same careful attention. For instance, The Blues Brothers features so many quotable lines (“How much for your women?”) that it’s easily one of the funniest movies featuring actors who gained fame on SNL, which is saying a lot. There’s even room in the mix for wry supporting turns by John Candy, Fisher, and Henry Gibson, as well as wink-wink cameos by movie directors including Frank Oz and Steven Spielberg. Speaking of cameos, try to name another movie that features both Chaka Khan (she’s one of Brown’s backup singers) and the future Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).

          Long story short, if you can’t find at least one thing to enjoy in The Blues Brothers—if not a dozen of them—then you’re not looking hard enough.

The Blues Brothers: RIGHT ON

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (1979)

          As one of the architects of Saturday Night Live’s early years—he wrote the very first sketch broadcast on the show—Michael O’Donoghue occupies an important place in the history of counterculture comedy. His work was consistently deadpan, pitch-black, and satirical. It turns out, however, that O’Donoghue’s style loses its potency upon extended exposure. After working on SNL’s first three years, during which he occasionally performed as the onscreen character “Mr. Mike,” O’Donoghue got the go-ahead from NBC to produce a special that was supposed to air while SNL was on hiatus. Predictably, O’Donoughe generated something so acidic, deviant, and strange that NBC balked. Yet because O’Donoghue (and executive producer Lorne Michaels) enlisted famous members of the SNL family to appear in the project—titled Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video—a minor theatrical release was arranged in 1979, with the program’s brief running time padded by the addition of a short featuring SNL’s long-suffering Claymation character Mr. Bill.

          Seen in its currently available form, a 75-minute show with built-in commercial breaks, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video feels like what it is—an all-O’Donoghue episode of SNL, hosted by the project’s creator in his Mr. Mike persona and featuring a combination of fake ads, faux newsreels, running gags, short films, sketches, and weird interstitial bits. Everything in Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video is either deliberately gruesome or deliberately odd, but very little of the material is funny. (During his onscreen introduction, O’Donoghue promises “an odyssey of aggressive weirdness,” featuring “the cheap thrills, the shabby secrets . . . blue water/white death in search of Michael Rockefeller.”)

          Primarily shot on video, the picture charts its doomed course right from the first piece, an ersatz news report on a feline swimming school in Amsterdam; the piece culminates with an endless slo-mo montage of housecats getting thrown into a swimming pool. Soon afterward comes a long sketch starring Dan Aykroyd as a preacher in a church worshiping Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord. “We are all guilty in the eyes of Jack Lord,” Aykroyd exclaims. “Let him be your TV guide!” Beating the joke to death, in the grand SNL tradition, the sketch climaxes with a hula dancer performing a gospel song that features the lyric, “Were you there when they crucified Jack Lord?” And that, believe it or not, is probably the comic highlight of Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. Other random bits include “military test film” of the Laser Bra 2000, a vignette of Aykroyd showing off his real-life webbed toes, a quick scene of the Loch Ness monster being arrested for smuggling drugs, and a snippet of Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious singing the Frank Sinatra classic “My Way”—with the soundtrack obscured while a text crawl explains that the producers couldn’t get the rights to the song. (The Vicious clip was appropriated from the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, which reached U.S. screens a year later.)

          Aykroyd is the only SNL cast member to appear prominently, although Bill Murray is featured in a small running gang as a homeless man. Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner both pop up for one line each—alongside Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, Deborah Harry, and others—during a sketch about women explaining their attraction to tacky men. (“When I reach down and feel a full colostomy bag,” actress Jill Davis coos, “I know I’m with a real man.”) There’s a certain demented integrity to Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, and the project’s strange history lends it a smidgen of forbidden-fruit allure. Nonetheless, this pop-culture oddity is far more interesting as a concept than it is as an actual experience.

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video: FREAKY

1980 Week: The Empire Strikes Back

          Heretical though my viewpoint might be among old-school fans of a galaxy far, far away, I don’t subscribe to the belief that The Empire Strikes Back is a better film than Star Wars (1977)—even though, by most normal criteria, the second film in the Skywalker saga is superior. Yes, the acting is better, the dialogue is crisper, the narrative is deeper, and the storytelling is slicker. Even the special effects are more impressive the second time around. Still, two considerations always persuade me to keep the first picture atop the pantheon: 1) Empire doesn’t have an ending, because the resolution of the film’s plot doesn’t occur until the first 20 minutes of 1983’s Return of the Jedi; 2) By definition as a sequel, Empire cannot match the thrilling freshness of Star Wars. Ideas are only new once—even ideas like Star Wars, which was cobbled together from myriad preexisting influences.

          Having said all that, Empire is such an exciting, fast, intoxicating, romantic, and surprising ride that it’s unquestionably among the few sequels to match its predecessor in quality. One need only look at the precipitous drop from Empire to Jedi in order to understand how difficult it is to keep a good thing going.

          In any event, reciting Empire’s plot serves very little purpose, partially because the movie is familiar to most viewers and partially because the storyline will sound impenetrable and/or silly to anyone who hasn’t yet hitched their first ride in the Millennium Falcon. (See, we’ve lost the Star Wars virgins already.) Nonetheless, here are the basics. After destroying the Death Star, rebel forces decamp to the snow-covered planet Hoth, but the Empire’s main enforcer, Darth Vader, leads a successful siege. Escaping separately from the fight are wannabe Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker, who heads to the planet Dagobah for training with Jedi Master Yoda, and the duo of mercenary Han Solo and rebel leader Princess Leia. While Luke channels his abandonment issues into supernatural Jedi skills, Han and Leia wrestle with their burgeoning attraction—even as Vader conspires to capture the heroes.

          Fantastical sights and sounds abound. The floating Cloud City overseen by suave Lando Calrissian. The epic lightsaber duel that concludes with perhaps the greatest single plot twist in sci-fi history. And so much more. Although series creator George Lucas stepped away from the director’s chair for Empire, enlisting his onetime USC teacher Irvin Kershner, Lucas’ fingerprints are visible on every frame. Better still, cowriter Lawrence Kasdan (beginning a hot streak of Lucas collaborations) helps introduce grown-up emotions into the Star Wars universe. The principal cast of the so-called “original trilogy” reaches its zenith here, with Mark Hamill transforming Skywalker from a hayseed into a haunted hero, Carrie Fisher elevating Leia into a full-on field commander (albeit with a soft spot for the men in her life), Harrison Ford perfecting his charming-rogue take on Han, and new arrival Frank Oz contributing wonderful puppetry and voice work as Yoda.

          Nearly everything in Empire is so terrific, in fact, that a tumble into mediocrity was probably inevitable by the time Jedi came around. Thus, for fans who were kids when the first Star Wars was released (myself included), Empire represents the last moment when we believed Lucas could do no wrong—a galaxy of possibilities, if you will. To say nothing of outer-space badass Boba Fett. (Now we’ve really lost the Star Wars virgins.)

The Empire Strikes Back: OUTTA SIGHT

Shampoo (1975)

          Here’s just one of the many fascinating details about Shampoo: Although it’s rightly considered a pinnacle achievement for the New Hollywood, the principal creative force behind the picture is very much a creature of Old Hollywood. Warren Beatty, the film’s leading man, producer, co-writer—and, according to gossip that’s surrounded the project for decades, uncredited co-director—was groomed for greatness by the studio system, even though his star didn’t truly rise until the counterculture era. And, just as Beatty is an inherently complicated Hollywood persona, the vision of late-1960s America he and his collaborators present in Shampoo resists simple classifications.
          On one level, the story of a lothario hairdresser who gets away with screwing his female clients because their husbands think he’s gay is a satire of social mores during a period of shifting sexual identities. On another level, Shampoo is a savvy political story examining various attitudes toward Richard Nixon at the time of his 1968 ascension to the White House. And yet on a third level, Shampoo is an ultra-hip study of Me Generation ennui, because nearly ever character in the film experiences some degree of existential crisis. Furthermore, the execution of the film is as classical as the content is brash—director Hal Ashby relies on elegant camerawork and meticulous pacing, rather than the flashy experimentation associated with many New Hollywood triumphs, even though the brilliant script by Beatty and Robert Towne breaks one taboo after another. (Let we forget, one of the film’s most memorable scenes involves costar Julie Christie drunkenly slurring, “I want to suck his . . .” Well, you get the picture.)

          Beatty, who often cleverly capitalized on his personal reputation as a Casanova, plays George Roundy, a Beverly Hills hairdresser beloved as much by female clients for his way with their bodies as for his way with their tresses. At the beginning of the story, he juggles relationships with his long-suffering girlfriend, Jill (Goldie Hawn), and with a rich housewife, Felicia (Lee Grant). Eager to open his own shop, George uses Felicia to get to her husband, Lester (Jack Warden), a wealthy businessman—who has a mistress of his own, Jackie (Christie). Smart and strong-willed, Jackie beguiles George, who somehow imagines he can have everything he wants—Felicia’s support, Jackie’s affection, Jill’s devotion, Lester’s patronage.
          Woven into all of this sexual farce is a bitter thread of class warfare, with Lester representing the arrogance of financial power and nearly every other character representing the desperation of financial need; Beatty and Towne draw provocative parallels between the cynicism of Nixon’s politics and the way various characters pursue skewed versions of the American Dream. The people in Shampoo are players and strivers, right down to Lester’s adolescent daughter, Lorna (Carrie Fisher), who has been taught by the unforgiving world to embrace her sexual power at a young age.

          Shampoo has moments that some find screamingly funny, such as the scene in which Christie makes the aforementioned startling declaration, but this is character-driven comedy of the most brittle sort, riding the fine line between humor and pathos. And that, among so many other things, is what makes Shampoo endlessly interesting—the film captures myriad facets of a confusing time. How appropriate, then, that the unobtrusive score is by pop star Paul Simon, one of the most important musical voices of the ’60s.

Shampoo: RIGHT ON

Star Wars (1977)

           First off, the title of the damn movie is Star Wars, not Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. No matter how much writer-director George Lucas enjoys rewriting history, there was no way he could have known when he was shooting this film that he would get to make one sequel, much less two sequels and three prequels. Thus, despite its eventual status as the first installment of a long-running franchise, the beauty of the original Star Wars is that it’s a complete, self-contained statement about the thrill of a young man discovering his destiny—and one of the film’s many charms is the parallel between Lucas and guileless protagonist Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Just as Luke becomes an intergalactic hero by embracing previously unknown possibilities, Lucas changed the film industry by combining old-fashioned storytelling with groundbreaking FX.
          The basics of the story are familiar to most moviegoers: When agents of the evil Intergalactic Empire kidnap rebel leader Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), her trusty robots R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels) are sent to recruit aging Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) to rescue her. Circumstances instead lead the robots to young Luke, a restless orphan living with his aunt and uncle on a remote farm but dreaming of life as a star pilot, and eventually Luke delivers the robots to Kenobi and discovers their true mission. When soldiers from the Empire wipe out Luke’s family, he joins Kenobi on the quest to rescue Leia, and sets out on the path to becoming a Jedi Knight, which is sort of an outer-space samurai with supernatural powers. Viewers also learn about the Force, an energy field binding everyone in the universe together; Jedis get their powers by channeling the Force.
          The heroic crew soon expands to include self-serving smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his hirsute first mate, a gigantic alien called Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). Their journey leads them to the Death Star, a massive space station, where they must confront villains including the Jedi Knight-turned-bad Darth Vader (physically performed by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones). Along the way, Luke finds a surrogate father in Kenobi, a comrade-in-arms in Han, and a love interest in Leia. This is all fun stuff, of course, but the story is really just part of the appeal; with Lucas at the height of his visionary powers, the real magic of Star Wars is in the physical reality and the storytelling.
          At the risk of hyperbole, there’s simply no explaining what a thrill it was to discover this movie as a child of the ’70s. The production values were intoxicating, and the mixture of archetypes and classic themes made Star Wars feel like a tale that had existed for generations. Yet perhaps the sheer confidence of the filmmaking was the most overpowering aspect on first blush: Leaping from one colorful cliffhanger to the next, the movie was edited to travel as fast as any of the spaceships Lucas put onscreen. At the time, Star Wars hit youthful bloodstreams like a cinematic sugar rush, but with something deeper underneath.
          During my interview for the documentary The People vs. George Lucas, I was asked why I thought the first film had such an impact on kids my age. I noted that the mid-’70s was a murky time in American life, with Vietnam and Watergate topping the list of recent front-page downers, and Star Wars was a much-needed infusion of optimism. As a boy feeling the effects of social change (this movie was released around the time my parents’ marriage became a ’70s statistic by ending in divorce), I think I was primed for the hopeful idea that some Force for good existed in the universe. The movie’s staggering box-office returns, and the decades of devotion showered upon the Star Wars franchise by millions of Gen-Xers, indicate I wasn't alone in my reaction.
          You begin to see why it’s difficult to completely set aside larger examinations of this deceptively simple movie, since anything embraced by untold millions means something, whether good or bad—but beyond its pivotal place in ’70s sociology, Star Wars is simply one of the great rides in the history of popcorn cinema. The monstrous spaceship swallowing the tiny rebel vessel at the top of the movie. The otherworldly cantina. The outer-space dogfights. Han Solo’s last-minute heroism. Darth Freakin’ Vader. Escapist adventure doesn’t get any better, even if the actors (including the preceding plus Hammer veteran Peter Cushing) have to struggle through wooden characterizations and tongue-twisting dialogue. With John Williams’ indelible music giving coherence to all of Lucas’ mad-tinkerer ideas, Star Wars is pure cinematic pleasure from start to finish. And if it means something to you, as it does to me, then so much the better.

Star Wars: OUTTA SIGHT