FILM IN THE EIGHTIES : For Lovers of Film, a Decade of Little Hope and Less Glory

Backward glances are obligatory at this time of year, especially when we close out a decade, but this has not been a decade of movie memories to look back on with much more than growing hopelessness.

No wonder. What appeared on American movie screens reflected the country’s own dubious morality: the withering of its social conscience, its feel-good, guiltless preoccupation with surfaces, with dumb fun, with violence and rampant acquisitiveness.

This has been the decade in which our big moneymakers included “Porky’s,” “Police Academy,” “Flashdance,” “Rocky III” and “Cocktail,” and their profits blazed the trail for countless clones. If the titles of the dozens of movies about adolescent boys trying to score are missing, it’s only because after the 20th example, the mind is capable of rejecting an entire subset.

A few directors tried to make contemporary morality their point: David Lynch with “Blue Velvet,” Woody Allen with “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Oliver Stone with “Wall Street.” But you have to wonder, how many people found Gordon Gekko repulsive and how many daydreamed about being him? What’s a little moral vacuum in the Ronald Reagan-Ollie North decade?

Directors themselves were not having an easy time of it during this era. Major film makers of the ‘70s or before--among them Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, Michael Ritchie, Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer and Costa-Gavras--turned before our eyes from directors of urgency to directors for hire. And we were the losers.

As power shifted from directors and writer-directors to agents, producers and, if you can bear to think about it, development executives, we lived to see almost every worst-case scenario prosper. Not only prosper but become unwritten law: the necessary bankable actor, the packaged cast, the tyranny of the first-weekend’s grosses.

A film’s worth is now measured entirely by its receipts, not just a nice profit--which is not unreasonable--but a sprawling, outrageous one, which is becoming mandatory. An offbeat story idea has to make back its costs tenfold, beginning with that blockbuster weekend; if not, that’s held as proof of its essential worthlessness. Fortunately, “sex, lies, and videotape” didn’t cost that much to begin with.

The 1980s has been the decade in which the independent voice sang purely and strongly, and then very nearly petered out. Consider that banner year of ‘86, in which we had “Room With a View,” “Smooth Talk,” “Down by Law,” “Platoon,” “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Vagabond,” and “Mona Lisa.” Just now, as we round the end of the ‘80s, there is a sign that the spark has not been entirely lost: “My Left Foot,” “High Hopes,” “True Love,” “Powwow Highway,” “Some Girls,” “Henry V,” “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” “Mystery Train” and “Drugstore Cowboy” were enough to warm your hands over and feel immensely cheered about.

This overview is not a way to end a last look, however, unless one plans to go straight to the top of the Black Tower and jump. Let’s try one last hurrah for what was brave and beautiful about the ‘80s.

There were the inward looks: “Ordinary People,” “Accidental Tourist,” “Tender Mercies,” “Terms of Endearment,” “My Life as a Dog,” “The Makioka Sisters,” and in its own way, “Dead Ringers.”

There was a resurgence of the kind of spectacle that only the movie screen does justice to: “The Last Emperor,” “Ran,” “Hope and Glory,” “The Killing Fields,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Reds,” “Year of the Dragon,” “Once Upon a Time in America,” “The Emerald Forest,” “Little Dorrit,” “Gandhi,” “Red Sorghum,” “The Right Stuff,” “The Mission” and the restored “Lawrence of Arabia.” If you think you’ve seen any of these because you watched them on video, you have yet to see them.

There was, for want of a better description, the exquisite small-scale film: “The Dead,” “The Moderns,” “Stevie,” “Testament,” “Tin Men,” “Barfly,” “Smash Palace,” “Choose Me,” “Malcolm,” “Bagdad Cafe,” “The Shooting Party,” “Housekeeping,” Lizzie Borden’s “Working Girls,” “Pixote,” “A Sunday in the Country,” “Dance With a Stranger,” “Baby, It’s You,” “Diner” and “My Dinner With Andre.”

There were outstanding documentaries: “Shoah,” “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,” “George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey,” “Streetwise,” “The Times of Harvey Milk” and “Hail, Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

There was the swoony, no-fooling love story: “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Roxanne,” “Moonstruck,” “Out of Africa” and, if you’re willing to lump in obsessive love, “Betty Blue.”

And there was a nice, healthy amount of comedy: “Arthur,” “Splash,” “Melvin and Howard,” “Ishtar,” “Married to the Mob,” “Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “King of Comedy,” “Airplane!,” “Brazil,” “Punchline,” “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” “Working Girl,” “Breaking In,” “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life,” “Radio Days,” “Zelig,” “Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Broadway Danny Rose” and Woody Allen’s third of “New York Stories.”

There, that feels a little better now, doesn’t it?

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