A Sense Of The Real World

1990 was a pretty good year, at least if we’re just talking about the releases of GOODFELLAS, GREMLINS 2 and TOTAL RECALL. But that’s what wearing rose colored glasses gets you. Other parts of the twelve months didn’t go so well but I don’t want to talk about family memories and let’s also not bring up certain SUNY schools, especially if they’re located in Purchase. But we may as well move on from that for the time being. In June of that year things were looking up when I was hired on a major film shooting nearby but that wasn’t such a great experience either and I wound up working less than a week on it. The film, for anyone who remembers it, was Paul Mazursky’s SCENES FROM A MALL starring Bette Midler and Woody Allen. Detailing the satirical destruction and reconciliation of a marriage all within the confines of the enormous Beverly Center, the film was shot in several places to accommodate leading man Woody Allen who was making this rare starring appearance in a film he didn’t also direct and, of course, he didn’t like traveling too far from New York. There was location work at the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut (that’s where I worked) which has a decent similarity to the real thing, extensive studio work at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens as well as a little bit of exterior filming at the actual Beverly Center in Los Angeles so they at least got Woody out there for a few days. Simply put, this is a film mostly set in one location that was shot in three states and runs under 90 minutes. Which may be a more interesting fact about the film than my briefly working on it.

It would make sense to say that I don’t have particularly fond memories of the experience, but to be honest enough time has passed that I honestly don’t have a lot of memories of it at all or maybe I’ve just blocked much of that time out. No reason to dwell on things after a certain point. The experience of being present for the filming of an early parking garage scene is still vivid in my mind and when I watch that extended dolly shot (which begins at 13:53, in case you have your copy of the film handy) the sensations of that excitement come rushing back. Also, Woody wanted Snickers bars in his dressing room. But a lot of it is a blur to me now, lost to time, and the fact that it wasn’t the greatest experience doesn’t really matter anymore. Even the few names I can recall of the people I was working under aren’t listed in the credits and I’m certainly not, even with the surprisingly large number of production assistants in the end crawl, so it’s almost like it never happened. In a way, the film itself now seems a little like something that never happened, partly because of one of the names above the title but also because it’s one of those Paul Mazursky films that has been forgotten about by the entire world all these years later anyway. But all this is in the past. And, for the record, I don’t have any animosity towards the director. He had other things going on. The film doesn’t really come together in the end partly because of its own slightness, a concept for a film that in the end maybe wasn’t enough of one. Still, you don’t get films like this anymore, a dialogue heavy, character-based comedy-drama about actual grownups released by a major studio made by an auteur in the style he specialized in, even if the resulting film isn’t his best. The more that time goes by, it feels kind of amazing how we ever got films like this at all.

Sports lawyer Nick Fifer (Woody Allen) and wife Deborah Feingold-Fifer (Bette Midler), a well-known marriage psychologist whose new book has just come out, have just seen their two kids off on a ski trip for the holidays and are ready to celebrate their sixteenth wedding anniversary with a dinner party that night. Heading out to the fashionable Beverly Center to get some quick shopping done and exchange their anniversary gifts, over some frozen yogurt Nick reveals news of the affair he recently had to Deborah. She reacts with understandable anger and declares their marriage over, but they soon reconcile and are ready to start celebrating again. But just as they’re beginning to relax, Deborah reveals a surprise to Nick about her own recent past and her own secrets that she’s been keeping from him.

The satire found in the films directed by Paul Mazursky feels so specific to the time when they were made that addressing this becomes unavoidable when revisiting them. No matter how good BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (great) and BLUME IN LOVE (not quite as great, with an extremely problematic plot development) are, each film is so fixed in the time it was made during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s they almost feel like they’re set on another planet now when compared to what the world has turned into. But not only does this add to their effectiveness in portraying people who are trying to understand the moment they’re living in, the films are still so sharp and funny in their characterizations that they remain fascinating and at their best feel true. Mazursky’s AN UNMARRIED WOMAN released in 1978 is very much locked into the time and place it was made but still plays beautifully, a portrayal of loneliness that comes out of betrayal fighting to break through to the other side that may be his best film. His 1986 comedy DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS, both funny as well as a monster hit at the time, is much broader and doesn’t feel like it has much to say outside of the immediate 80s context but there’s still a lot in there to enjoy. Like that film, SCENES FROM A MALL, which opened in February ’91 (one week after THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS; it came in sixth), is also a Touchstone comedy starring Bette Midler set in, or at least near, Beverly Hills around the holidays, but this one tales a more serious, low-key approach to what it’s looking to make fun of.

Written by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky, all these years after SCENES FROM A MALL was made it feels like a look at a married couple who are more well-off than they ever want to admit, stranded at the beginning of the new decade in the middle of all their wealth in a marriage that seems perfect at first when we meet them and they’re alone together, but of course it isn’t and the truth is eventually going to come out. They’re trapped in their own insular world, the only political references they make feel out of the distant past as if the ‘80s has made them not pay attention to any of that anymore, and the only solution is to keep shopping while waiting for the next calamity to occur, unaware of any of troubles in the city to come over the next few years. I haven’t stepped inside the Beverly Center in a long time and never liked it very much anyway but here it’s the hot spot in town, a stopping point for every possible type in the city and where countless people working retail jobs can only hope they don’t get in the middle of all this.

SCENES FROM A MALL got pretty much dismissed at the time and didn’t even reach $10 million at the box office. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything good about the film, but the real problem now is that it only seems half-formed. The joke of the two main characters admitting their indiscretions, splitting up and getting back together multiple times over the day, unable to leave this massive place, is the basic ‘Bergman but funny and in a mall’ idea of the whole thing which feels a little forced and though each of the two leads do some surprisingly good, natural work within their inherently unlikable characters the material never really becomes strong enough and begins to feel like the same beats happening again and again. The funny stuff needed to be funnier and more biting, the serious stuff needed to be more dramatic and believable so what’s there falls into a no man’s land somewhere in between, missing a joke that something like the Steve Martin vehicle L.A. STORY which opened just a few weeks earlier seemed to pull off maybe because it was going for broader laughs and the social commentary could come naturally out of that. The continuous jokey nature of Woody Allen, of all people, praising L.A. over New York/wearing a ponytail/saying "ciao"/carrying a surfboard/shouting “Where’s my fucking Saab?” is a little thin to base an entire characterization on but looked at now everything involving Woody that doesn’t have the feel of some sort of in joke, like him obsessing over the color of his stress gum or the way he harangues a stranger into buying a copy of his wife’s new book, plays much more naturally.

The film keeps a bemused distance from its characters but also appears to understand them even as it thinks they’re being silly, buying and re-buying that sushi for their big dinner party over and over again, going from one place to the next in the mall as if living several entirely new versions of their marriage all in the same day, the idea being that Midler’s psychologist can approach the idea of what happens to a marriage analytically but when confronted with the emotions of her own life she’s at a loss. It’s all part of the natural way of things when living in L.A. according to this film, just not the one that I’ve ever known. Some of the moments that work best are mainly in a naturalistic way that comes out of the flow of their conversations but not enough of this sticks the way it should, there are moments where it feels like the film might be building up to something, whether a joke or maybe some sort of dramatic revelation but all they do is talk some more, no big laughs and no particular biting drama so it feels like a sketch of a movie.

Everything the two of them might possibly want is right in front of them to purchase and they still can’t figure out what they really need from each other so the mall feels like a version of purgatory that they can’t leave, going from one store to another, one restaurant to another for more drinks and it probably was what the Beverly Center was like then but still reminds me how the place always seemed kind of dull. I always preferred the outdoor Century City mall back then (totally redesigned some years back and it’s horrible now), which had a better vibe, better movie theater, better celebrity watching, even the food court was better. Set during the holidays with lots of decorations and Christmas music heard all around the mall so let’s call this a Christmas movie, but the portrayal of the Beverly Center just feels too mild although the two-level set filmed at Kaufman Astoria Studios is extremely impressive and likely very expensive. It does come off a little as a record of what L.A. was like then, even the extras seem to have the right look to them, but it’s all done in a way that feels too listless so it’s not a particularly interesting record of the time and even the opening shot of Los Angeles looks like an overcast early morning that could itself be a comment on what the town really looks like or they just didn’t want to wait for a nice sunny day to film it. The multiplex at the mall has PREDATOR 2, ROCKY V, THE GODFATHER PART III plus SALAAM BOMBAY! which is playing to a nearly empty house in its third year, so I guess the topical humor is that everything is either a sequel (Disney wouldn’t let Mazursky use their own THREE MEN AND A LITTLE LADY?) or an arthouse film which is about as mild a satirical comment as you can get, on the level of the overall “It’s L.A.! Everyone has car phones!” take the film has on the city. Incidentally, the movie theater at the Beverly Center, which had many more screens than portrayed here and is now long gone, was lousy too.

Although, since it’s part of that sequence, if you want to see Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater where the film being shown just had a Criterion 4K announced and is directed by the mother of the leading mayoral candidate for New York City, this is the film for you. SCENES FROM A MALL is almost entirely a two-character piece, with the closest thing to a third being the running joke of an ever-present mime played by Bill Irwin, so a certain amount of repetition is unavoidable, with some phone calls to never seen characters breaking things up. Their kids are only seen at the start and pretty much every single other person with dialogue is a bit player at the mall. Oh, and Fabio is in there too. If anything, a Paul Mazursky film like this can at least be separated from all the other (less personal, more profitable) wacky comedies that came out during the heyday of Touchstone Pictures with a little more individuality and compared to anything now this one almost feels like an art film plus it’s definitely more expensive than something like this would be today. Removed so far from its context, the result is not at all uninteresting, just a little too slight and feeling in need of another rewrite to get some more laughs as well as some truly insightful observations mixed in there along with the therapy speak and rationalizations, the talk that leads to more talk as these two try to figure out why they even got together in the first place. Some of the dialogue does catch the rhythm that can only happen between two people who are very familiar with each other and its portrayal of the mall as a microcosm for all of life in this upscale world isn’t a bad one so I suppose I can admire the film’s purity, to steal a line from Ian Holm in ALIEN, but it’s not enough. The script isn’t on the level of Mazursky’s best work even if it does fit in with the other versions of foreign films that he spent some of his career making (like WILLIE AND PHIL, also not one of his best), digging into his own version of Bergman along with fanciful moments like Woody Allen emerging from smoke wearing a snazzy Italian suit as the Nino Rota theme from Fellini’s AMACORD plays, a moment that could just as well have come from one of Woody’s own films, just like the Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong selections that also play on the soundtrack. The film even opens and closes with an iris in the shot, which feels like a possible Jacques Demy tribute.

Maybe the Paul Mazursky aesthetic made the most sense from ’69-’78, where it felt in tune with the cultural wave of either New York or Los Angeles so the slightly shaggy and loose nature of his plotting fit in perfectly with the time but here it never feels connected enough to the real world. The two leads actually do have chemistry and when they fight it’s believable, it’s just the material comes off as a little too surface level so the end result plays like it’s caught between what wants to be an introspective, if comical, examination of a relationship and the Bette Midler laff riot that the studio most likely would have preferred. Mazursky made a surprising number of films that touched on infidelity, yet his own marriage lasted over sixty years, his wife is even in this one playing a woman at an information desk, although this is one where both halves of the couple are responsible not just George Segal or Michael Murphy. The shot near the end where after a public fight between the two everyone in the mall crowd walks off until it’s just the two of them standing there which really says it all in a much more concise, and cinematic, way showing how in the end it’s just the two of them to work out their own problems like it or not and even though the film goes on for a few minutes longer it feels like the proper concluding point to make.

In addition to wishing the writing was even sharper or maybe that something else would happen and if there was a way to get around the inherent repetition in things like the two of them fighting while going up one escalator then fighting while going down another, it didn’t happen. Another character appearing would help break up the monotony and it would make sense for them to run into someone they know but most likely the decision was made that the film really had to be just about just the two of them which makes sense but for a movie that runs only 87 minutes, with end credits that roll earlier than that, it feels longer. To be completely honest, I don’t mind the film as much as I did then, maybe because I can appreciate what it’s going for and can understand the idea of a fight that never ends a little better. If Woody was going to do a movie for the paycheck, which from various accounts is what was happening here, he could have done a lot worse. The film almost becomes an artifact of a much earlier age the way BLUME IN LOVE feels now but the material doesn’t stick as well and there’s a hollowness to the whole thing. The real joke of the film is about how thinking that simply talking out the problems can make them go away but sometimes you’re just stuck with each other, nothing to do but keep talking but it all leads nowhere since you’re going to stay together anyway, so what’s the point. It’s a healthy way to look at things, but not enough substance for a film to get to the ninety-minute mark.

It's still a little surprising that Bette Midler never appeared in an actual Woody Allen film but here they go together extremely well, with chemistry that does feel effortless. The material is a more naturalistic key for Bette Midler to play in than in some of her other Touchstone films at the time, but that broader tone comes out when she screams at her co-star, especially with a lot of people crowding around. And up against that Woody’s own performance plays surprisingly naturalistic now, seeming willing to play the material that goes against his persona so the way he says the name ‘Springsteen’ sounds surprisingly genuine coming from him and he brings the right energy to the ongoing argument. When the two of them stand together silent near the end it really does look like a married couple who know everything about each other and the only thing they can do is stay together.

The prominence of the Beverly Center in the city likely lasted until around 2002 when The Grove opened up nearby, right next to Paul Mazursky’s beloved Farmer’s Market. Feeling more like Disneyland than a regular mall, since The Grove was outside it was a much more pleasant place to be and except for during the holidays when it gets really crowded doesn’t have the same feeling of being trapped like in the Beverly Center. Besides, when you’re in southern California don’t you want to be outside anyway? Maybe the much lower-budget version of this film made today would be set in a nice house with everything just getting delivered by Amazon and nobody else being bothered. The Stamford Town Center has, no surprise, gone through its own tough times recently but is now apparently the largest indoor pickleball center in the country which sounds like something that Paul Mazursky would utilize in a film if he were still around to make it. The later COAST TO COAST, actually Mazursky’s final film which he made for Showtime in 2003, is largely a more interesting version of what SCENES FROM A MALL explores, written by TWO FOR THE ROAD and EYES WIDE SHUT’s Frederick Raphael and though it’s hampered by a moderate budget forced to present a road trip across the country filmed entirely in Toronto, the marital drama between stars Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis has a good amount of bite to it. It can be found for free on some of the streaming sites, so keep an eye out. Years later when attending a career tribute that was likely Paul Mazursky’s final public appearance, I found myself thinking that it was very possible I was the only person there who had been on the set of this film, however briefly. Much of his career was spent taking a bemused look at the tensions between couples that are always lying under the surface, like it or not, but he understood the strength that enabled such people to stay together if they could accept certain things about each other. The films remain interesting even, maybe sometimes especially, with their flaws, but at their best those tensions have a real spark. SCENES FROM A MALL may be part of a bad memory for me and the film is never good enough to overcome that but I suppose we all need some of those memories since they helped make us what we are and what we want to be. Just like some of those relationships do.

How Far You Want It Bent

It’s now well over thirty years since the blockbuster success of THE FIRM, which seems crazy to think about both in terms of how much time has gone by but also how a film like this was once the big July 4th weekend release, June 30, 1993 to be exact. And when it was made, THE FIRM was clearly designed to be a hit. An adaptation of a runaway best seller, the biggest star in the world, a respected director, some of the best character actors around plus a crew of screenwriters who were likely punching below their weight considering the material and anything less than a giant smash would have been considered a failure. For the now much-missed director Sydney Pollack this was his follow-up to the colossal failure of 1990’s HAVANA, a movie that no one has ever had much excitement about, then or now. But in response to what happened there he clearly recognized that what he needed to do was get back on the horse and make a movie that people wanted to see, doing the things that he did, if not best, then at least very well. 1993 was a big summer with JURASSIC PARK plus the likes of SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE and IN THE LINE OF FIRE but THE FIRM was bigger than all the ones without dinosaurs, at least until THE FUGITIVE opened a month later, marking the start of the run of John Grisham adaptations to follow over the next few years. Francis Ford Coppola’s film of THE RAINMAKER may be the best of that batch, finding a surprising amount of pure emotion and empathy in the material but THE FIRM is very likely the most purely enjoyable in a Chinese takeout sort of way. And I suspect the people who made THE FIRM knew that it was Chinese takeout but they made it really good Chinese takeout, at least for the night you watch it, preferably with some really good Chinese takeout which seems fitting considering how much the two lead characters yearn for their days back in Boston when they used to order Chinese takeout. Now I’m in the mood for some Chinese takeout, maybe to eat while watching THE FIRM again.

The sense of class and quality that Sydney Pollack generally brought to his films feels like a lost art now, even when they don’t come together. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of all of them and maybe I shouldn’t discuss my true feelings about Best Picture winner OUT OF AFRICA, not to mention HAVANA. But even in cases like these, there’s a feeling of pure craft to his body of work and a sense of careful consideration brought to the material that’s undeniable. No one trying to make an equivalent of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR these days is doing it as well as he did. THE FIRM definitely isn’t THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but it is an enjoyable popcorn movie with just enough depth to give the drama some teeth. With his films, no matter what the ostensible plot is, the director almost always seemed most interested in the relationship between the man and the woman at the heart of it all, as if to say that if Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in CONDOR weren’t going to connect to each other then there was no reason to ever care about the CIA coverup of oil shortages, that if Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange weren’t going to walk off arm in arm at the end of TOOTSIE then that entire scheme for dressing up as a woman wasn’t going to mean anything. Through each of these films he was always more interested in the people than the plot, that’s the sort of conflict he excelled in exploring. While THE FIRM always knows that it’s the thriller element which everyone is interested in, Pollack uses the love story between the two leads as a sort of north star to always circle back to and locate an emotional center. It may be something that sets the film apart from the source material but the basic idea behind that does give it a needed emotional heft. That sort of human connection is why Sydney Pollack was hired for these things, after all. And the film is still a well-crafted piece of work. Which, along with being a big box office hit, I guess you could say is all it was ever supposed to be.

Harvard Law student Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is at the top of his class and being recruited by all the top firms around the country but the one that really catches his eye with their offer is the smaller Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis. Convincing his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) that this is a place where they can make a life together, the two are soon moving to Memphis where they’re greeted by a new house and car plus long hours for Mitch as he studies for the bar exam under the tutelage of mentor Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) but Abby can’t shake this feeling that there’s something off about the whole setup, especially when a few associates of the firm are killed in a boat accident down in the Cayman Islands. Mitch is suspicious enough to hire a private detective who once served time in prison with his brother Ray (David Straihairn), who he keeps secret from his new employers, to investigate. But it all comes to a head when the FBI approaches Mitch with the truth about the firm, that it is a front for the biggest mob family in Chicago. Mitch tries to figure out what to do but when he is shown photo evidence of a tryst that he had with a beautiful woman down in the Cayman Islands as a threat he realizes that he and his wife’s lives are in danger so he soon begins to take action, devising a plan for the two of them to escape free and clear.

Is this the film that introduced the world to the concept of Tom Cruise Running? There’s probably some earlier photographic evidence, but I can’t think of a film where it seemed as crucial as it does here here, whether chasing after his wife Abby or racing away from the bad guys, a few sequences that feel like the key visual images of the film so maybe this is the birth of the defining image of Tom Cruise, Movie Star. And this feels appropriate since it’s the breakneck pace of THE FIRM that always comes to mind, a film which moves so fast that it feels like it was made by people who never got a chance to sit down. THE FIRM began shooting in November of ‘92 and wrapped in March before its release at the end of June, and even if that schedule didn’t inform the pace of the film, it still feels like it always wants to keep moving nonstop. That short schedule was part of the reason for the lengthy running time of 154 minutes and even with how much narrative ground the film is trying to cover summer movies in 1993 were almost never this long. At the time of release Sydney Pollack was even quoted as saying, “It’s like the old line, ‘I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time.’ If I had had another two months, I would have made a shorter picture.” Plot points go by quickly, dialogue is spoken at a rapid pace and it’s always racing forward to the next moment as if you’re going to miss something if you look away.

But it’s the director’s awareness of what each scene needs to be and how the story needs to keep the film moving that holds all this together even when it’s not always clear just why something is happening or who is being talked about. An underrated part of Sydney Pollack’s skill as a filmmaker was how he used the anamorphic frame, especially in something like THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR which is very likely even better than you remember, a film where every shot becomes something intricately connected to the whole and it all flows beautifully. He backed away from the widescreen style in the ‘80s to a standard 1.85 ratio which I always imagined had to do with getting annoyed at seeing something like TOOTSIE panned and scanned on TV. I still think a wider frame would have lent some extra cinematic juice to OUT OF AFRICA, not that it mattered with the Oscars, it would have helped HAVANA, it would have helped his remake of SABRINA. It was like if Sydney Pollack wasn’t shooting a film in Scope, that somehow robbed him of the key inspiration for how to stage each scene leading to a dullness to each shot so it all just becomes a version of bad television. It would also have helped THE FIRM but it doesn’t feel like this matters as much since the film always feels like it’s fighting against this, to keep things continually moving even when the scene is just a few characters sitting in an office. It’s a good-looking film photographed by John Seale, with even a few split diopter shots tossed in, but it’s never trying to be an elegant looking one, maybe because instead of trying for intricate composition it’s a case of using the frame to tell the story in the cleanest way possible. One of the best purely visual moments of the film is locked in with that suspense, which has hitman Tobin Bell running, again with the running, after the monorail where he has already spotted the unknowing Cruise during the Mud Island sequence (out of curiosity, I looked the location up to find out that this monorail hasn’t actually operated since 2018 and likely won’t again which is too bad for anyone looking to take THE FIRM tours in Memphis), a nicely done beat of suspense that becomes not only about the chase but about the location being utilized as well.

For that plot which never wants to rest, (screenplay credited to David Rabe and Robert Towne & David Rayfiel, based on the novel by John Grisham) the film takes what might have been pages of droning on about tax law which it turns into dialogue that it manages to make colorful and to the point, as if what’s needed is to find just the right amount of crackle to keep the scenes engaging. The film clearly knows that it’s really about Mitch and Abby from the start when the first thing he talks about in his interview with the firm is his wife and the plotting is canny even in small ways like how it delays Gene Hackman’s entrance later than you’d expect so he’s not first seen as just one more face in a crowd of lawyers. Since all this moves so fast it feels like a valid question just how much sense the plot actually makes but it sure seems active enough to make us think it does. Forgetting the novel, which I read decades ago and I’m not reading again now, I’m not sure why a law firm inexorably tied to the mafia would need to go to the extra trouble of overbilling clients as well but, of course, I’m not a lawyer so I’m not the person to answer this question but it’s clear that the reason it’s there is to give the main character a way out when he needs to think of one. When asked about why he became a lawyer in the first place, Mitch McDeere talks about being afraid of what the government can do to anyone so along with what the mob can do makes this film that much more about one man looking out for himself and his wife which is a theme but not one the film spends much time on.

The book ends with the main character blowing up everything he’s been running from and fleeing with the money, holding onto a few key secrets but leaving his life behind. The movie, looking for relatability to characters who are put in impossible situations, is about regaining his life of normalcy and finding “a way through” as opposed to a way out as he puts it, regaining the trust that was lost in the marriage and by following the letter of the law which is the greater victory. Does this change the book? Yes. Do I care? Not really. This isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald, after all. It’s not even Tom Wolfe. At the end Mitch McDeere declares that all this got him to think about the law again, which sounds good for a completion to his character arc but there was never much evidence that it was something he forgot about during all that studying for the bar exam anyway. The real goal of the film is finding a way for the two main characters to rediscover how much they mean to each other so the piano that is prominent in the David Grusin score can reach its crescendo and we know they’re going to be ok.

But the film remains enjoyable, as well as rewatchable, partly due to the pace, partly due to the colorful dialogue and how it moves the plot forward in ways that are both active and suspenseful, even as it rushes through plot points that come from the book it can’t dispense with, the way Gary Busey is eliminated almost immediately after he’s been introduced. The Memphis flavor of the setting feels a little obligatory but it’s there, with the location filming, the tangent about Holly Hunter’s ex-husband Elvis and all those ribs being barbecued at the welcome party. A few points when Mitch admits certain things to certain people before you’d expect him to give the impression of stuff happening but also feel like they’re trying to keep a character being played by Tom Cruise proactive through all the plot machinations as much as anything. He also does a series of somersaults with a kid on a colorful Memphis street and no one seems to think this is at all strange but of course it’s obviously there to set up his skill at being able to escape when he’s on the run later on, so presumably he spent time in gymnastics in addition to pre-law, not that it ever feels like it mattered. Either way, the film moves so fast that even at this early stage there’s barely a second to even think about it. Even the sense of weather that goes all through the film, the feel of passing seasons add just the right texture to each of these settings so whether it’s the fall leaves in Memphis, the snow in DC or the lush nights in the Cayman Islands it all works.

Sydney Pollack also finds ways to give each of these actors their own moments so they stand out, the way Gene Hackman gets one of the best speeches in the film about tax law which he practically just spits out without effort, which doesn’t really have much to do with anything but it does make us think that serious matters are being discussed. Even when they just get a few minutes the actors have a chance to make an impression, like Holly Hunter’s terror when she seeks Mitch out, the way Hal Holbrook isn’t playing the head of the firm as a bad guy at all, the bluster of Ed Harris threatening Mitch but especially the amazing scene of Wilford Brimley’s firm security chief playing against type to let his folksy demeanor become instantly terrifying as he lays down the law for Mitch, showing him the photos taken when he made love to the girl on the beach, using the phrase “kind of intimate acts, oral and whatnot” to describe their activities which alone probably justifies the film’s entire existence. There’s still the sense that all this barely holds together. What is the time frame of the movie once Mitch and Abby move to Memphis? Months? Weeks? This doesn’t really matter either.

There’s the feeling that the people making this movie were so infused with the idea of bringing quality to what is basically an airplane potboiler that you imagine them spending a few days trying to decide if there was a way to get around the hero cheating on his wife only to finally decide the plot depends on that. In the book Mitch never tells Abby about the woman on the beach, played enticingly by Karina Lombard, but in the film about bringing the two of them together it feels necessary. The rush to get the film done in time for the summer release makes it feel like some of the pacing didn’t quite get perfected, the way some scenes feel like they’re cut away from before actually finishing so actual human interaction gets lost at times. For one thing, after so much time spent on whatever is going on between Abby and Avery Tolar, it feels like there needs to be a final moment with Gene Hackman when he’s last seen but the film doesn’t pause for that beat. That piano-heavy score by David Grusin probably seems even more eccentric now than it did at the time but it adds immeasurably to both the pace and the mood of the film, giving the film its own personality with the main love theme almost making you think that this could have been in a ‘70s Sydney Pollack film as well as keeping the mood of conspiracy in the air. It’s all a reminder that in 1993 it was still possible to for a film like this to have a score that had some actual personality to it, thanks to all that piano along with one suspense track clearly modeled after the John Williams “The Conspirators” cue from JFK which was all the rage in any sort of action/thriller during that decade.

That music is a key part of the last hour’s excitement with all that running around and when Tom Cruise finally hits Wilford Brimley repeatedly with his briefcase (well, there’s a symbol) it’s hard not to wish he’d do it a few more times. Tom Cruise also plays the big scene with Paul Sorvino that follows as if he’s exhausted from all that running but can still hold the scene together so what he says seems to make sense. Maybe I still have some questions, but the film seems confident that all this will work out. The way the film comes back to the two leads at the very end makes it clear that it was always about a guy who wanted money and the life that comes with it but then has to realize none of that matters if he doesn’t have the woman he loves, which isn’t anything particularly revolutionary but it gets the job done. The final lines between Cruise and Tripplehorn do feel a little like of one of the esteemed writers working on this, whether Towne or Rayfiel, pulled it from a file of unused romantic dialogue that they always liked but it turns the moment into a relatable scene of connection for two people who came close to losing each other and realized how much they didn’t want to. It keeps that sense of class and respectability going until the credits roll. THE FIRM is a thriller with less substance than it maybe wants to admit but it becomes a movie about a man who rediscovers the two things that matters the most to him, his wife and the law, taking his life back and becoming a person again instead of the yuppie asshole that the world wanted him to be. It feels like the right ending and a reminder that THE FIRM isn’t close to being the best movie that Sydney Pollack ever made but, looking at it again right now at this point in time, it does feel like a movie.

It’s also a Tom Cruise movie and his performance becomes all about his eagerness to achieve this life with his naivete front and center until he realizes that he’s in over his head which of course turns into that very Tom Cruise-like determination to overcome all this. If the film can’t take a breath, then he can’t either, convincingly charging through all that rapid-fire dialogue as fast as possible that always holds the focus of the film together. In the case of Gene Hackman, at the time of release the thing that was talked about was that his name didn’t appear on the poster since Cruise was the only one who could be above the title; he does get above the title billing on the actual film. Looking at it again now it feels like this has been hiding in plain sight as one of his most underrated performances with the way he brings a confidence and looseness to the character in order to find the humanity in this material that no one else is looking for, cutting deep to find the real emotional damage within that he would never admit. When Hackman says, “That’s even better than getting even with him,” it’s the best moment in the film. Jeanne Tripplehorn, the one he’s talking to there, brings just enough of an edge to what is of course basically the wife role on paper and the way she grounds each of her scenes gives it the relatability it needs, playing it so you believe she makes that trip to the Cayman Islands. She’s also the one with the lines that matter near the end and because of her the moment works.

It always felt like each John Grisham adaptation was cast like a disaster movie filled with recognizable faces and this is one of the best including Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Wilford Brimley, Tobin Bell, Jerry Weintraub, Karina Lombard on the beach, the uncredited Paul Sorvino and probably somebody else I’m forgetting. LAW & ORDER star Steven Hill, one of the leads of Sydney Pollack’s first feature as director THE SLENDER THREAD in 1965 and very well-cast here as someone who doesn’t seem intimidated by Tom Cruise in the slightest, appears as FBI Director Denton Voyles and this was his last film appearance. The voice of Sydney Pollack himself is heard briefly on a phone call, not exactly his performance on the phone as Faye Dunaway’s boyfriend in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but it was a nice surprise to discover this recently.

THE FIRM was a summer movie featuring adults which, believe it or not, still wasn’t an entirely strange thing at the time it was released, so don’t tell me we haven’t been going backwards. It wasn’t even a prestige film going for Oscars so the two nominations it got were Supporting Actress for Holly Hunter and David Grusin’s score. If he hadn’t just won the previous year for UNFORGIVEN, it’s not a stretch to imagine Gene Hackman getting in there as well. And I keep thinking of this as a summer movie, a summer movie that I wish still existed, the sort where two people see it in an air-conditioned theater, enjoy themselves, then go off to have dinner where not much time is even spent talking about the movie. Of course, movies like this can be made but it doesn’t mean they’re going to which, if you ask me, is a problem even if Sydney Pollack sadly isn’t around anymore to make them. Feeling more like a popcorn movie than anything else he made in his career, Sydney Pollack knew not to make The FIRM more than it is, but he did bring it just enough class and intelligence to make it more than it might have been, the sort of film that once regularly got made and now no longer is. It’s still nice to remember that it happened.

What Man Can No Longer Afford

The 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival was way back in April which feels like a long time ago by now, but it would be nice to go back for a few minutes. Finding yourself in the middle of that festival can be like residing in a very relaxing bubble, giving you a chance to do nothing for a few days but focus on going to the movies. And the vibe seemed a little different this year, more crowded than usual whether it really was or not, as if with the way things are in the world right now people wanted to forget about things more than ever and spend a few days just seeing great films with other people who feel the same way. Or maybe people just needed a few days of fun. There was the opening night screening of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK with George Lucas in attendance, a special presentation of WE’RE NO ANGELS shown in actual VistaVision, the great Joe Dante introducing THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, restorations of films like the noir classic THE BIG COMBO as well as GUNMANS’ WALK which I’d never heard of but turned out to be an excellent western directed by Phil Karlson starring Van Heflin and Tab Hunter. And a lot more, of course. It’s difficult to name one specific highlight from the festival just like every year, there’s so much going on.

But one point where the bubble of the festival felt like it was being penetrated just a little by the outside world of what 2025 has become was for the screening of COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT, a film I had long been curious about but had never seen. The TCM Festival screening was this year’s Craig Barron-Ben Burtt presentation where the two Oscar-winning special effects legends take a close study at how an effects-driven film was made and their screenings of films like THEM! and WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE in past years have been highlights of the weekend. Sporting a 1969 copyright date and first released in 1970 under the simpler title THE FORBIN PROJECT for its initial New York opening, COLOSSUS is a film that really does straddle the two decades with the clean-cut look of the previous era combined with the more fatalistic viewpoint of the decade to come. Science fiction during that time often feels like it’s about whatever horrible end that the world is unavoidably hurtling towards, likely inspired by whatever feeling that was in the air of how things didn’t seem like they were going to go on for much longer. This dark approach to the genre went away eventually but right then as the ‘60s were ending the future seemed to be in question. And based on how it was portrayed in both movies and tv shows it was clear that the ongoing development of computers was not going to lead to anything good either. In this sense, the movie has aged just fine.

A cult item at most and still deserving of wider appreciation, COLOSSUS feels like an important part of this post-2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY cinematic period, bringing the particular conflict of intellectualism between man and machine that began with HAL down to Earth and the result holds up extremely well, a film showing in stark terms what there was to fear and now maybe is once again, for all new reasons. The talk before the film discussed the history of computers in films and TV at that point along with a close look at the Albert Whitlock matte work displayed in shots that show off the sheer size of Colossus plus the use of the vocoder, a voice synthesizer that was even used for encrypted messages during World War II, to create the unnerving voice of the computer with the involvement of Paul Frees, a valuable introduction to what was exactly the sort of film you want to discover for the first time at this festival.

The newly designed supercomputer Colossus is activated and ready to take control of American defense thanks to its creator Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) with the President (Gordon Pinsent) fully embracing this new technological step to protect the country and remove such crucial decisions from the possibility of human error. But when it goes online, barely a few minutes have elapsed before Colossus declares the existence of “another system” which turns out to be the Soviet’s own supercomputer named Guardian. When the two systems become linked up everything at first appears to be normal, but it soon becomes clear that Colossus and its counterpart have their own plans to continue the peace along with demanding exactly what the systems require to maintain control. Dr. Forbin’s close involvement turns out to be a key part of this, forced by Colossus to serve as the main communication point while always being monitored by the computer. In response to this edict, Forbin comes up with a plan to get Colossus to allow him private communication with one of the scientists on his team, Dr. Cleo Markham (Susan Clark), while trying to figure out a way to do something about the system’s growing power. Meanwhile, the two governments initiate a plan to regain control before Colossus becomes too powerful for them to stop.

For a long time not easy to see and the only decent home releases don’t seem to have even happened until the Blu-ray era, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT is an extremely well-made film that takes a largely sober, serious approach to its subject with a crisp sense of direction brought to it by Joseph Sargent that is always active in a way that moves the story forward with the strength brought to it by the actors a key part of what the film achieves. Sargent is maybe best known now as the director of the great THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (there’s also WHITE LIGHTNING, the early STAR TREK episode “The Corbomite Maneuver” and, um, JAWS THE REVENGE) and COLOSSUS contains what could be called a similarly punchy style that always keeps the momentum of the story moving even as as it seems to be spread out on only a handful of sets and there’s not an uninteresting shot in the entire running time with a skillful approach that always finds a way to move the story forward. The ambitious and continuous use of TV monitors in the frame to represent video phones as the characters communicate with each other makes one wonder what John Frankenheimer, who loved this sort of thing, would have done with the material but the film maintains its own striking tone that helps it feel completely unique. Many Universal films of the period have a similarly drab look that feels like an insistence on the studio house style, an expectation that COLOSSUS always feels like it’s fighting against, with a strikingly naturalistic flow to scenes helped by the use of overlapping dialogue and a sense of gravity felt all the way through. It’s not just about the performances but about the faces that are always there and how these people react to this unexpected threat that they played a part in creating and it adds to the sense of humanity in the face of this technological takeover.

With a screenplay by James Bridges (later the writer-director of THE PAPER CHASE, THE CHINA SYNDROME and URBAN COWBOY plus personal favorite MIKE’S MURDER) based on the 1966 novel “Colossus” by D. F. Jones the film explores the unavoidable result that comes from the casualness of how people are allowing this new technology to simply happen and take control, without ever trying to understand the full nature of what they’ve created, made during a time when people seem to have thought that computers were nothing more than “souped-up adding machines” as they call them here all of which leads to the folly of the belief that humans can’t be trusted with such decisions and only something that apparently possesses a greater intelligence can. The question this leads to is that if something like Colossus gets programmed to keep the peace, if that’s what the people who created it want, what won’t it do to achieve such a goal? And if that something, human or not, decides it will be a God, what will stop it? The novel was apparently set in the future, changed to the less expensive present in the film which still manages to incorporate a design that feels like a sharp combination of futuristic tech and things that are familiar, with written messages to Colossus even typed in on what looks like a normal typewriter. The film’s approach is so skilled that the imposing character of the titular computer becomes convincing right away so very quickly the insistent messages it displays become extremely unnerving.

The way the story is developed, the actual physical location of the giant computer is removed as a factor almost immediately, situated in a Colorado mountain and blocked with a radiation belt with the detail of a lookout point from far away becoming a tourist attraction that becomes a recurring, haunting image through the film, feeling more ominous each time we return to it. This also allows Colossus to hover over everyone in the film like a ghost as it makes its presence known, lending things a sense of distance that infects the entire film and though the tech is of course dated it still looks pretty cool. Even the presence of Colossus grows throughout so when his voice is finally activated late in the film it feels more chilling than if it had been there from the start. At first there’s the feeling that the plot structure might echo the one continuous sequence feeling of DR. STRANGELOVE and FAIL SAFE but the plot expands beyond that, giving it time for the people to realize the true danger of what is happening as the script continually turns its cards over carefully as things get worse and worse and the power of Colossus grows.

The film’s main character Forbin is more sympathetic than he might be portrayed now, a supposedly brilliant scientist who almost seems surprised by the power that the computer he is responsible for is able to achieve and instead of defending his creation even when it goes totally haywire the way an expected mad scientist might, the focus becomes on the growing realization of what he has created. It almost feels surprising how little internal conflict there is between the characters as they address the problem compared with how this would be done now and even when there’s debate about what to do everyone seems to trust each other, a little surprising considering how much Forbin could rightly be blamed for what’s happening and the President himself could be criticized for allowing all this in the first place. You’d think more people would be angrily confronting them with what’s been unleashed and while the title scientist spends the film addressing the problem any feelings of responsibility for his Frankenstein monster don’t come up until late. Whether or not ‘artificial intelligence’ was a phrase used at all in 1970, the term is never spoken here but this is essentially a film about the automatic assumption that this computer will solve all the world’s problems only to create all-new problems and a worse world along with it, a true form of AI that manages to feel like we’re currently living in our own version of a prologue to this film. Or maybe for us it’s already begun.

Much of the narrative stays confined to a back and forth between the President’s war room and Forbin’s own programming center, each presented with stylish production design tied into intriguing location work done at Berkeley, always filmed in a way to make each sequence compelling along with the ongoing thread of the military trying to figure out how to disarm their own missiles without Colossus noticing. To draw a comparison to Sargent’s own THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE, this film also has people working together to solve a problem in an engagingly naturalistic way, the actors working off together well with dialogue as humorous as it would be in real life and the messiness adds to the feeling of actual humanity, each of those personalities having an effect so it remains compelling and suspenseful all the way through. The varied and intriguing score by Michel Colombier adds to this feeling as well, some of it sounding like PLANET OF THE APES or just a general Jerry Goldsmith-type flavor in its futuristic style but always engaging in how it connects to the momentum. The pacing offers chances to breathe in the middle of the tension, expanding beyond the main few locations at times with a section where Forbin travels to Rome so he can meet with his Russian counterpart allowing for a change of scenery from the claustrophobic tension which also smartly divides the two halves of the film even if the detour doesn’t feel as necessary or connected to the overall aesthetic.

Surprisingly, the film does lighten up for a stretch to keep things from being too humorless as Forbin is forced to adjust his living situation to the watchful eye of Colossus with the laughs that come in during the second half feeling like a welcome surprise as opposed to a jarring shift and even if it makes the film a little tonally uneven the switch works, with even the score taking on a jazzier Lalo Schifrin vein. Colossus’s response to the way Forbin makes a martini provides the biggest laugh in the film and the semblance of an odd sort of romantic angle between him and his fellow scientist played by Susan Clark adds humor as well but also a little more humanity, with the actress seeming to play it as if she’s in love with him anyway, as well as more than a little bemused by the whole thing. But bringing in sex, as well as the pleasure of a martini, into this very cold science fiction idea is all a reminder how much this is about a sort of lifeform that will never comprehend these things and no matter how much Colossus is an extension of Forbin’s own brain this is one thing the computer can’t be educated in and it feels like something the brilliant scientist is being reminded of. The time spent doing that makes his character more human, more willing to fight back plus the film getting lighter for a few minutes makes the surprises that are to come all the more shocking.

It becomes very clear that Colossus wants to rule through peace under the continual threat of war, its determination to remove what it calls ‘the emotion of pride’ from the human equation that comes out of freedom. This builds to is an ending which feels very much of the time the film was made, something that comes out of the human decision from all this and not the action taken as a result. It goes to a darker place than you’d expect while leaving things somewhat hanging, which makes it very much a part of the cinematic decade to come but is still less fatalistic than certain other science fiction films from around this period that likely starred Charlton Heston. And it feels like the right conclusion to see, especially at this moment in time when those in alleged power who might be able to fight back are steadfastly refusing. But then again, the film doesn’t consider the possibility that people would love what Colossus wants to do. After all, considering the final speech that the computer gives to the world, maybe it would just need its own nightly TV show to get everyone on its side. But at what point do you say that one word at the end that Forbin does? That’s the question posed at the end of COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT and these days it feels all too often the answer is that they won’t.

The buildup to that single last line includes Colossus stating that through its authority, “We can coexist but only on my terms” and the second half of the Barron-Burtt discussion followed immediately after but not before someone shouted, “Better than (Name Redacted)!” which there’s no point in dwelling on and certainly the two hosts didn’t want to, but the bubble had been punctured. Everyone in the theater was likely thinking this very thing anyway. The post-film talk featured lead actor Eric Braeden, maybe best known for his role on THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS (so I’m told, but I recognize him from playing John Astor in TITANIC) and he clearly got his role as the much more villainous scientist in ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES the following year based off his work in this film. After viewing the film in the audience, Braeden talked about how overwhelmed he was after seeing it again and his recollections included how the German-born actor was required by Universal to change his name from Hans Gudegast in order to get the part, flying in to audition from Spain where he was appearing in the western 100 RIFLES still under that name along with a cute bit that involved an ”appearance” by the voice of Colossus being reunited with the actor. During the talk Braeden mentioned that the young Steven Spielberg was on set shadowing Sargent during filming and it’s hard not to notice that the active direction here does feel like the beginnings of a certain kind of Spielberg aesthetic particularly in something like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. He also told a story about James Cameron quoting the film’s final line back to him on the set of TITANIC after a take, also a reminder of how much Colossus was clearly a forerunner of what became Skynet in THE TERMINATOR, just a few indicators of how much this film has been an influence over the years without ever being particularly well known.

The casting of Eric Braeden is a key part of that effectiveness and although big names like Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck were brought up during the casting process, as much as one of them might have helped it commercially in this case the lesser known Braeden not only adds to the verisimilitude as the threat grows, the intelligence he brings to things continually adds to the natural power of the film and his presence adds greatly to every scene. Susan Clark also brings a likable intelligence to her role and with each close-up you can see the character thinking things through. Gordon Pinsent is a believable President who also comes off as surprisingly human and the very familiar William Schallert as the CIA chief is likably cynical with his bemused disbelief at what Colossus might be capable of makes him maybe the closest thing the film has to an audience surrogate. Familiar faces in the cast also doing strong work in their smaller roles include Marion Ross and Dolph Sweet plus Georg Stanford Brown, James Hong and Robert Cornthwaite who are seen throughout as scientists.

There were so many good films shown this year at the TCM Classic Film Festival but COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT along with the Barron-Burtt presentation of it still seemed like one of the hidden gems, maybe because there’s never as much focus on the lesser known ‘70s titles. A few shown over the weekend from that decade included CAR WASH, SUPERMAN, a Technicolor dye transfer print of JAWS from the BFI, APOCALYPSE NOW in 70mm and nothing wrong with any of these but they are familiar, at least more than COLOSSUS ever has been. It’s a film that feels like an important part of the genre from the time when that genre didn’t get as much respect, even with PLANET OF THE APES and 2001, but still feels like it’s had a surprising amount of influence over the years including possibly being one of the inspirations for the Entity plotline in the last few MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films. But it’s all certainly a part of a message that feels necessary right now. The welcome chance to see COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT was a reminder of how surprisingly relevant a forgotten film can be to the current moment, especially when it’s as good as this is and it’s a film that feels difficult to forget about, I haven’t been able to shake it, even when the festival was already months ago. It really was nicer in that TCM Fest bubble, even with this reminder of the outside world. Sometimes films are used as an escape, to forget. But in a way, the very best films never let you forget anything.

Just This Darkness

Maybe 15 was too young to see BLUE VELVET. But that’s in the past. And I did see that David Lynch film when it came out, at Yonkers Movieland on opening weekend or close to it in the fall of 1986 and all this was at a point when I wasn’t having trouble getting into R-rated movies anymore. It’s very possible that first time was maybe the closest I will ever come to the feeling of seeing PSYCHO when it first opened back in 1960, like seeing into the possible future of what films might become, revealing something completely new and unexpected. I knew then that it was one of the best films I’d ever seen. I still know it now. Returning to the film each time places it once again in the context of David Lynch’s entire career and every time I revisit a David Lynch film it feels like the one that I’m watching is my favorite. But really, it’s probably BLUE VELVET. And MULHOLLAND DRIVE. And the entire run of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN. Regardless, every David Lynch film contains a power that can take me back to that certain time in my life I was first discovering it, the way every one of them causes my brain to explode to make it feel like I’m back in a time when I was first discovering certain films and wanted to do nothing more than talk about them endlessly. BLUE VELVET was one of the first of these for me, one of those key films that I saw around this time (BRAZIL was another about six months earlier) that made me think, ‘this is what movies are?’ and it came at an age when I was open to it as well as lucky I didn’t have parents who were against me seeing a film like this. Or more likely that they had other things going on and weren’t paying very close attention.

And now, in the present, David Lynch is gone. It still doesn’t seem right. Several days after it happened back in January, I was flying out of Burbank early one morning but first stopped off at Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake, so early the sun wasn’t up yet, to see the impromptu memorial that had sprouted there and pay my respects. Much of that week was spent thinking about all those ways his films mean so much to me, how much they affected me, how much they continue to stay with me. As awful as his passing was, the overwhelming response of pure love to that tragedy remains just about the most wonderful thing of this horrible year, a reminder of the beauty he inspires in people as things all around us drown in a sewer. That’s what he shows us. The beauty among the ugliness. The light seen in the dark. The love mixed with the hate. The whole world that’s wild at heart and weird on top. And we still see all that in our dreams.

But back to the past, which is also what BLUE VELVET gets me to think about. The town of Lumberton where it’s set feels like a sort of purgatory for its lead character. One of those periods when you’re not in high school or college, where you might find yourself stranded for some months when things haven’t gone the way you wanted, ready to start your life but you’re stuck there walking certain streets where you used to know people only by then they’re all gone. It all ends. The darkness falls. In your mind, in your memory, that town is always going to be the same. That’s how it is for me and the place where I grew up. To this day, it’s hard for me to ever think anything sexual about that place, it never seemed to exist there which maybe is what you’re supposed to think about the town where you grew up anyway. It’s supposed to be the beginning. Writing something on Facebook after he passed, I found myself typing out, “Seeing a David Lynch film for the first time was like seeing what the world could be.” Not should be. Not what it is. But what it sometimes feels like is there, some sort of power in the air that you weren’t aware of, waiting to be discovered. The world that we know is possible, much as we don’t always want to see it.

When his father is hospitalized, college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home to Lumberton, North Carolina to help and work at the family hardware store. One day after visiting the hospital, Jeffrey is walking home through a vacant lot when he discovers a human ear on the ground. Taking it to the police, he meets Detective Williams (George Dickerson) and soon visits him at home to learn more about the case. There he meets his daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) who tips him off about lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who may have a connection to what her father is investigating. Still curious, Jeffrey comes up with the idea to sneak into her apartment late at night to learn more and enlists Sandy’s help, but when he gets inside and encounters the woman, he discovers her connection to the terrifying criminal Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) who may be more dangerous than he ever imagined.

The thing is, so many films fade. You outgrow them, you disconnect from them, they don’t have the power over you they once did. Looking back at it now, 1986 feels like the depths of the decade that was the 80s, some of the biggest films released during that period are forever connected to the cultural rot of the time. BLUE VELVET feels like it’s an integral part of the ‘80s yet defiantly disconnected from the decade, in the dividing line between then and the ‘50s iconography that is there on the edges adding so much that maybe this is the film that should have been called BACK TO THE FUTURE. This is, after all, the film that really has something to say about how one affects the other, how the past wasn’t as sweet as we want to think it was and no matter what has happened since, the future still contains the possibility of hope. On a very basic level the thriller plot of the film is still so enormously effective but the power the entire film holds is so much more than that, still feeling surprising while going so much further than any other film that has tried to do the same and whether the moment becomes a sly joke or the most terrifying sight imaginable the frisson it provides is unlike anything else, all coming together as part of this strange world.

It always feels a little nebulous what stage of life Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont is in. Maybe that’s because he’s not sure either. If anything, he’s in a holding pattern, home from school, not sure if he’ll be able to ever go back. Viewing the state his father is in, he needs to suddenly become an adult for the first time and is still trying to put that off as long as possible with this new project he begins for himself. He really has no one to tell him otherwise. You’re older and you suddenly find yourself trying to talk to a father who can’t speak and can’t help while the mother stays focused watching a TV that always seems to contain some sort of noirish crime show playing on it, depicting a life that presumably is far away from the sort of place Lumberton is. And, of course, Jeffrey is bored, just as you’re going to be in a small town, stuck in a place that may as well be a black hole of darkness as seen in the cutaways to the empty sidewalk in front of Jeffrey and Sandy, the trees overhead, the nightmarish darkness of the quiet neighborhood stretching out in front of them forever. The house that he points out where a childhood friend once lived who moved away doesn’t seem to have someone new living there, it just looks abandoned. It’s the end of his childhood and the whole place looks dead to him so naturally he’s going to stumble upon a strange body part lying on the ground. The theme of discovering the ugliness that lies below a tranquil surface almost seems simple now all these years later but it’s something he becomes forced to learn. Maybe in places like that you need to be reminded. “Here’s to an interesting experience,” he says to Sandy as they drink their Heineken at the beginning of it all, when he has no idea what’s coming.

On a very basic level, BLUE VELVET remains an extraordinary film in everything it does, the terror and humor of the world it’s set in, the way things unfold and how far it wants to go. Of course, everything that happens feels like it has some extra level of meaning. At this early stage the idea of narrative is still very much a part of what Lynch is doing. This would become more fractured as time went on and something like LOST HIGHWAY may be a puzzle to decipher but it also is much less of a strict linear plot than this film is. One thing which sets BLUE VELVET apart from all sorts of other thrillers, besides how normal they all seem in comparison, is that Jeffrey Beaumont isn’t thrust into this world against his will. He’s not a Hitchcockian everyman on the run for something he didn’t do, but another Hitchcockian lead like the one in VERTIGO who gets drawn further and further into the story even before he realizes it. Jeffrey didn’t have to get involved with any of this and in that dreamlike way, no matter what he says, it all seems like he does it for some unconscious reason that can never be fully explained. It’s a tone where adhering to a strict version of reality is never the biggest concern so we don’t know specifically what malady befell Jeffrey’s father, we don’t need a scene with a doctor who explains he had a stroke and yadda yadda, just as we don’t know exactly what Frank is inhaling each time he comes into Dorothy’s apartment. We never even have Dorothy explicitly tell us things from her own point of view and how she feels about it. We know enough just from looking at her. It's the imagery and the feeling that matters, not the specifics of the language. And we don’t know why Jeffrey is doing this at first. Maybe he’s just looking for that interesting experience, maybe just wanting to get involved in a Hardy Boys sort of mystery while he’s bored amidst the cheeriness of that hardware store and sitting around at home. Eventually he does say that it’s because this is something that has always been hidden, he’s finding something more than what’s on the surface in his lazy small town where presumably everyone is smiling and cheerful. But he seems to know that the Deep River Apartments nearby over on Lincoln contains a darkness where he shouldn’t go, it’s like that feeling is already inside of him, he’s just never been able to see it up close. When he’s discovered in the closet and Dorothy tells him to get undressed, the framing places her within his raised arm so it’s like she’s already inside of him, and even though we don’t see the full extent of his reaction when Dorothy begins kissing him way down below still holding that knife in her hand ready to use it, we don’t need to. We just know. And she knows what he’s there for.

Dorothy Vallens looks right at home in the beautiful, haunting, alien set of the seedy elegance that is her apartment, where it all gets revealed just as the fantasy she presents singing at The Slow Club. She likes to sing “Blue Velvet,” taking the cheeriness of that song heard at the beginning and turning it into a dark entry for Jeffrey as he wanders into this world, Sandy glancing over at him as he gazes at the older woman, not knowing what he might be thinking, not knowing if he’s a detective or pervert. Whatever Dorothy is ever thinking about seems indescribable, wearing a wig that makes her seem slightly off no matter how much she appears to be the most beautiful woman in the world, absurdly and painfully beautiful, yet there’s something about her that makes you want to look away. Sandy, meanwhile, is the vision of light in another part of Lumberton, introduced emerging from the dark, still going to high school with a presumably normal boyfriend who plays football and for some reason has a Montgomery Clift photo on her wall, making me imagine him turning up on TWIN PEAKS at age 70 if he had lived that long. Sandy has her dreams of love and through that comes her very sincere belief that it can spread into the world but it’s not as easy as she ever thinks, her plan of honking the horn to warn Jeffrey in the apartment is a good one but she can’t warn him about what’s coming. He needs to enter that world on his own. Sandy is the light emerging from the dark, open and honest unlike the cryptic nature of the other woman, willing to fight her way through it and offer forgiveness. When Jeffrey finally hits Dorothy after her protests, it’s what she desperately wants, what she desires, and it turns the two of them into something else altogether. When she’s seen in the light, the only time she’s seen outside during the day, and she still seems unable to keep from thinking of the dark for very long, still forever haunted by what has happened.

Every shot in this film means something, frames of those images in every single scene deserve to be hung on walls, every moment has a power brought to it by Lynch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes that makes almost anything completely haunting, the most off kilter looks at someone’s face become surprising for reasons that are unknown, the most offhand cuts have an indescribably unnerving effect, how the ever-present sound work makes even the smallest things seem ominous, or just something random in the corner of the frame. Whether it’s Dorothy leaning back in ecstasy, everyone lined up in Ben’s apartment, the darkness of Dorothy’s hallway stretching out, all a part of this look at a small town in the service of this version of the time when some people thought American was something it isn’t now. Every look at someone seems to mean something more in particular when Lynch, just as he does in a few other films, gives us close-ups on someone that are almost uncomfortably intimate, in a way that no other director can pull off, and it somehow makes them more hauntingly beautiful than ever. There’s one brief close-up of Laura Dern like this when Jeffrey leaves for the apartment but also so many of Isabella Rossellini, so powerful that maybe they’re what the male gaze is really supposed to be in all its best ways, appropriate for a director who gives us female characters the way he does, accompanied by rumblings in the Alan Splet sound design that come from nowhere making the most beautiful image unnerving in itself just as the music by Angelo Badalamenti and his score gives the movie a soul, whether haunting or angelic, that is almost unexplainable.

The wind blowing in the curtains, resembling Dorothy’s blue velvet robe, makes us feel uneasy for reasons we can’t even express just as so many things in the film do and maybe to fully understand BLUE VELVET you would have to understand why Jeffrey wants to sneak into that apartment and hide in the closet to begin with. That place where he discovers Frank Booth, a nightmare who has come to life, an id, a demon and one who can only come alive in the dark, taking his neighbor out for a joyride. “This is it,” Frank says before a neon sign in the window reading exactly that is seen, one of my favorite offhand laughs in the entire film, and we can only imagine what his relationship with Ben is just as we can imagine the two of them going way back just as we can imagine Hopper and Stockwell knowing each other in Hollywood way back in the ‘50s only adds to this. No moment during the stopover at Ben’s feels in any way rational, just as it feels like the voice responsible for “In Dreams” can only come from the person who appears to be singing it even as we know it’s really Roy Orbison but it still feels possible right up until the spell is suddenly broken. Trapped in this place, it’s easy to believe that the worst can really happen. There’s no way to escape except to continue into the night with Frank and the jump cut removing them all from the frame on his laugh is just as terrifying as that thought. Maybe we all contain this darkness. If someone says they don’t, they’re probably lying. If someone says they don’t, maybe they have it more than anyone. “Now it’s dark,” Frank says so he can come alive. He lives in an industrial area that feels like the literal bowels of the town and even if he is briefly seen during the day, it’s impossible to imagine him or any of these people ever existing before nightfall. There’s so much plot stuff that the movie wisely skips over since we don’t need to hear it and Dorothy’s silent reaction to seeing her son during the “In Dreams” sequence makes it seem like Frank’s entire plan is simply to do the worst thing imaginable, causing a son to no longer love his mother. That’s where the real darkness is. “You’re like me,” which is maybe the most terrifying thing Frank says of all, as if suddenly realizing what Jeffrey is really doing there.

In some ways what the film does is a dry run for what became TWIN PEAKS, a comparison that was obvious when the show premiered and it was easy to imagine Jeffrey Beaumont becoming Dale Cooper, but it’s also a dry run for a lot of things including what kind of filmmaker Lynch was really going to be as the years went on, with the very idea of story mattering less in relation to what he wanted to explore in his art, an idea still developing here even as it feels totally crystalized. The running time of almost exactly two hours gives the impression there was a contractual element to keeping it at such a length but the film is so brilliantly paced and structured that there’s not a moment I would lose. The extensive deleted footage that has appeared on Blu-ray was a revelatory discovery when it first turned up, running about an hour long (the first rough cut was reportedly just under four hours), but as fascinating and as valuable as it all is there’s not a single moment that feels like it should go back in. The film that BLUE VELVET became as it was molded into that two-hour running time, one of the best such jobs ever with editor Dwayne Dunham presumably working closely with Lynch, turned it into exactly what it needed to be.

Even now, even after everything else I’ve discovered in all the years since, it's about as close to a perfect film as I’ve ever seen. The way the story unfolds, the most shocking moments are revealed in a way that lets the viewer find them and understand for themselves what they mean and though it’s also a perfect film to analyze in many ways what the film is also resists doing that since it’s so purely Lynch and what is going on inside his own head so why spoil all the fun. Even after he’s taken on the hellish joyride by Frank, Jeffrey is never really forced to confront all this until the very end when the horror of it all literally shows up in his front yard. On a structural level, when Jeffrey returns to hide in Dorothy’s closet one final time at the end it’s a brilliant way to return to where all this started but it can also be read as symbolic of so many things, a sort of womb to provide a rebirth as a way for him to enter this world that must retreat back to one final time so he can escape. Jeffrey didn’t have to do any of this in the first place, but in the end as he’s faced with the horrific imagery of that tableau of the bodies in Dorothy’s apartment and as the “Love Letters” montage, a love letter coming directly from Frank into the world, brushes past so much plot stuff we don’t need to know, he’s forced. There’s no other way out. In the end the film presents that interesting experience as something he needed to go through, something real which was entirely because of the dreams and desires in his own head. Moving past innocence is inevitable and necessary but it’s always going to be there as a reminder of what the world could be, as it was when we were still children. It’s there in the mirrored perfection of the two families at the end, the fathers and the mothers as well as the two children who are now together as a reminder of this. The robin with the bug in its mouth seen at the end and the strange world it wants to be a part of. Nothing about it seems real but anything from the past we grew up in long ago can be as real in our memories as we want.

Kyle MacLachlan, fully entering the David Lynch universe after his beginnings in DUNE, displays total confidence as Jeffrey showing him as curious and antsy, frightened and determined to enter this world. He’s an everyman eager for things to happen, with a look that makes it seem like he wants to be cooler than this small town drinking his Heineken, and he gets you to believe that he would really attempt to do all this. He carries the film and grounds it, becoming a perfect fusion with Lynch’s view of the world. And the way the phenomenal Laura Dern takes a character who is supposed to be the normal, dull one and gives her passionate life, bringing a level-headed focus that combines rationality and belief in the good. Because of this film and their other work with him, MacLachlan and Dern are like the avatars for the perfect Lynch couple, how he sees all the good in the world. They are the light.

But so much of the talk of the idea of performance here goes beyond simple acting, particularly the way Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy as haunted and otherworldly, the way she uses her body language, the way she leans forward and reveals her innermost thoughts just by a glance, always compelling, continually fascinating. When Dennis Hopper enters the film for the first time it becomes something else entirely just from the sound of his voice so where he takes this role becomes a place that feels truly demonic even when he suddenly quiets down and no other Hopper performance ever feels truly this dangerous as if the film itself didn’t know he would go this far. Once he’s there, the unexplainable shift that occurs when Dean Stockwell enters makes perfect sense and he clearly belongs near the top of the list of best one-scene performances of all time. Every performance here is a part of such a feeling, no matter how brief. Jack Nance, for the way he tells Jeffrey his name, and Brad Dourif are perfect just as Hope Lange and Priscilla Pointer are in their worlds as well, in each case you know who they are and what they represent immediately. As Detective Williams, George Dickerson underplays his role in just the right way and finds his cinematic immortality in the way he says, “Yes. That’s a human ear, all right.” It’s a steady presence and the sort of thing needed to believe that there might be someone willing to take charge, no matter what’s going on below the surface.

Just like films, memories fade. Some of them stay with you too and they’re not always the things you want to remember. I was lucky. I don’t usually think of my teenage years that way, there was too much to be depressed about a lot of the time and too much to want to escape, but it’s probably true. There was just a lot I had yet to learn. Seeing BLUE VELVET when it first opened all those years ago meant that it gave me plenty of time to think about what the film was, what it meant, plus I got to see it when it was an audience of people going to see the latest critically acclaimed art film, so they weren’t going to approach it with ironic laughter. Nobody told them that’s what people would eventually do, which is what it seems like I hear about every time the film plays in a theater somewhere and I’d rather not find out for myself. Maybe it’s my problem or at least the way my brain is wired so I never think of this film as merely camp and doing that just always seems wrong. Years after I first saw the film, there was the occasional Lynch Encounter around town from afar. A surprise appearance with Laura Dern after a screening of WILD AT HEART hosted by Edgar Wright at the New Beverly, certainly one of the greatest nights ever at that theater. Spotting him at Figaro on Vermont having dinner. Then one day some years back I was walking down Hillhurst, glanced across the street at some people walking into an ice cream shop and realized that one of them was absolutely David Lynch. I crossed the street, went inside and stood behind Lynch with his family as they ordered then got a chocolate cone for myself, thinking about how I had recently seen a 35mm print of DUNE but of course I didn’t say anything to him. I left them alone. And now David Lynch is buried at Hollywood Forever so of course as soon as that news was announced I went over to pay my respects and sit there for a few minutes. I’m sure I’ll stop by again soon. But so much is in the past and it continues to reach out to us. It should never be where we live today but it does help to hold onto that feeling, to remember that these things did happen. These films were made and still mean something to what we became. It's a strange world and it always will be. In the end, try to find love where you can. Find your way out of the darkness.