"Repo Man" (1984) Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estavez. Directed by Alex Cox.

• "Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year! They oughta have 'em, too."-- rogue atomic scientist J. Frank Parnell, assuring Otto, his young hitch-hiking friend, that atomic energy is actually quite safe. From "Repo Man"  

When one talks about counter-culture films of the 1980's, it;s not really a long list. But somewhere near the top has to be this film.  "Repo Man" came out smack dab in the middle of Reagan's America: much of the nation was trying to recapture a  pre- Vietnam War America, devoid of doubt for those who could find a comfortable current to float down the Mainstream with. 

 

By 1984, I was 24 and I knew this  America of my early youth was long, long  gone. It was replaced by a light bulb salesman  with is finger on the nucear trigger and a bunch of smug suburbanites waiting for the folks in the wastelands of  inner-city America to kill each other with drugs and guns. Thinking people maintained a healthy distrust of authority, and expected less then did the peace niks and the Woodstock generation.   That culture fight was over and in America and the conservatives were very sore winners.  

 

 The Underground was now in charge in defining the zeitgeist of places like east Los Angeles, where most of this film is set. The sense of confidence once held dear is now only a mirage outside of the campaign slogans and mass market sods pop jingles on television. You could smell the paranoia coming out of the pores of a lot of people, and nobody was immune in my experience. 

 

This movie captures a lot of that feeling.  We used to say among my friends that if somebody didn't "get"  the angst-driven humor of "Repo Man", they were either lucky or stupid.  Both perhaps.  

 

The film follows an aimless young man named Otto (Emilio Estavez) who is walking  into the minefield of young adulthood.  His parents (television-addled burn- outs)  are barely aware he exists. They have taken the money they saved to send him to college to give to a television Evangelist to send Bibles to the already Catholic and war-torn people of El Salvador. 

  Otto leaves his dead-end job in a grocery store and hooks up with a "Repo Man" named Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) who lives by a  a cynical philosophy of life. Frank is an equal opportunity nihilist who will allow neither Communists nor Christians to be his partner in his "repo" work.  Here Bud explains the code to Otto.   (Warning: this clip contains foul language.)

 

 

  He's a throwback to "The Man Who Knows Indians" from the older Western genre, a loner out to do a dirty job who relies on himself and will take in a partner to keep his personal ethos going after he's gone.  It also makes it easier for him to repossess cars to have a partner.

 

The streets in "Repo Man" are unremitting slums; the gritty underworld of criminals, street punks who seem lost in old "Dead End Kids" movie but with cooler hair, angry ex-car owners,  a girlfriend who is in to defining her "relationship" with Otto even after she inadvertently tortures him in a lab test gone  VERY wrong, and a renegade atomic scientist from Los Alamos who is driving a ' 64 Chevy Malibu into the heart of L.A....with something wicked in the trunk.   

"Repo Man" is about the emptiness of American commercial society and also the end of American idealism.  The jarring sounds of Punk Rock have replaced the romantic (or at least idealistic) tempos of rock and folk tunes. 

 

 The 60's are truly dead and the future is no longer anything but a vacuum waiting to be filled by who knows what? 

 

All in all "Repo Man" is both outrageous and honest, a movie that tells the truth about a lot of people's daily lives and makes it's points with a dark humor and wit.           

 

 

 

Friday Funny, American Edition: Police Squad (In Color!) Intro and "Naked Gun 2 1/2" (1991)

After subjecting television viewers to a slew of mediocre television crime shows, spawned in the 1960s and 70's (with stoic, rigid and near-humorless law-and-order spouting walking manikin-coppers) from the likes of actor/producer Jack "Dragnet" Webb and Quinn Martin ("Streets of San Francisco", "Cannon" ,et al) producers David and Jerry Zucker finally did something about it.

After making a big pop culture success "Airplane" in 1980, they turned their attention to lampooning the old-style cop procedural with a short-lived six -episode series in 1982 called "Police Squad".

The show featured Canadian-born Leslie Nielsen, an actor previously trapped as a guest star in formal and uninspired roles as urban cops and detectives, as Frank Drevin of "Police Squad, A Special Branch of the Police Force".

The ratings were not good but the show took on a cult following in VHS releases. A big screen adaptation, "Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad" (1988) was a success. Nielsen was perfect in his comic turn on this material, and the actors and actresses around him spoofed some of the same stoic cops, femme fatales and one-dimensional big-time crime bosses they had played previously. Two more film sequels followed. Later Nielsen spent the last part of his career doing take-off films playing authority figures (vampires and U.S. Presidents) gone zany.

"Reds" (1981) Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Last night i watched this film for the first time in thirty years. I found it a daring tour de force by star-director-co-screenwriter Warren Beatty at the time. "A three-hour film about an American Communist who goes to Russia...and dies" as he puts it in the DVD commentary was not potentially the stuff of box-office gold in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan and the most heated time of Cold War America since the early Sixties.

But the film did do well enough at the box office to make a small profit and earn a number of awards, including an Oscar for Beatty as a director and Maureen Stapelton in her role as Emma Goldman.

The film follows early 20th Century American globe-trotting journalist and activist John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant as writers and political radicals. They fall in love and then, after moving from staid Portland, Oregon, to living a bohemian lifestyle in the Greenwich Village part of New York (and having some tumultuous old-fashioned Hollywood romantic complications) go to Russia to witness, report and (for Reed) participate in the October Revolution of 1917. Seeing the film the first time prompted me to go out and read John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" and its a great piece of reportage, and historically significant even if some critics have found it too kind to one political movement in that revolution.

Written as it was at the beginning of such an epochal event in human history, Reed can be forgiven for being a bit too romantic about the possibilities of what was happening in Russia to empower workers and forgotten people all over the world.

The first half of the film shows us Reed's view of the Revolution and the growth of radical labor politics in World War II era America. The scene with the laborers in the barn in the clip is indicative of that.

The second half of the film shows how those around Reed (including Bryant and Emma Goldman) become more disillusioned with the chances of radical change in America and the high cost that Lenin's government is exacting on the Russian people. At the same time, Beatty and his fellow screenwriter, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, make it clear that Reed is a man who is a man trapped between his own country (where he faces jail for sedition charges stemming from opposing the entry of America in World War One) and his lack of total revolutionary fervor for some in Russia who increasingly use him as a tool to promote their own ideas as the Bolsheviks desperately try to fight off the attempts by disenfranchised revolutionary parties, moderate and reactionary groups and foreign armies who mean to bring down their government. He seems a man without a country, chasing a revolution that has little use for his true reflections.


I couldn't help wondering what would have become of Reed's view of Russia had he lived longer? According to a quote attributed to Bryant, he felt at the end of his life he might have misjudged the Bolsheviks. But there is controversy there. What we do know without controversy is that John Reed at his best was courageous and had no tolerance for censorship or the lies of politicians or bureaucrats.

It's clear though his is a tale that would be little known outside formal history classes in America were it not for the box office clout of a American film star. No matter what you think about the beliefs of these two main people when you reflect upon them, I think most would say this is a tale well worth the telling.

David Bowie - Absolute Beginners

With thanks to the Rev Kook and others, I refer you to the comments below for a clip from the title song and some scenes from the movie which features this and other jazz and pop songs.

"House of Games" (1987) Lindsey Crouse, Joe Mantenga: Written/Directed by David Mamet

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Mike: Wait, wait, wait. What is this? What are you gonna do to me? What are you fronting off about? And if I'm this bad dude, why don't I just take out some gun, blow you to a billion parts?
Dr. Margaret Ford: I'll tell you why. Cuz I think you're just a bully.
Mike: [chuckles] Just a bully? What, you're not gonna let me carry your books? Aren't you a caution.
Dr. Margaret Ford: Let's talk turkey, pal.

This movie was the first that playwright David Mamet directed ,an adaptation of his own screenplay. The story pits a psychiatrist with a best-selling book who butts up against a steely con man named Mike (Joe Mantegna) in a seedy bar and gaming club to help one of her patients, a desperate young man who appears on the verge of suicide.

The shrink Margaret Ford (Lindsey Crouse) becomes attracted to the world of con artists and how they conduct their con games,all the bluffs and "tells" and signals and elaborate schemes which set up "marks" to turn over large amounts of money with deceptions that are tightly coordinated and on the knife edge of danger. Margaret is intrigued by both this underworld of confidence men Mike has assembled to make his illicit living, and the obvious chemistry she and Mike have as a team in this dangerous demimonde world of dark streets and dangerous situations.

The film has a group of engaging characters and enough twists and turns to keep one guessing who will come out ahead (or at least alive) in this smart highly charged suspense film.

Steve Martin Makes Coffee for Burt Lancaster: " Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" (1982)

I found this oddball movie amusing and a nice tribute to the film noir genre of movie-making and detective stories of Hollywood in the post-war 40's and 50's.

Steve Martin plays Rigby Reardon, a private gumshoe who will do just about anything for money--even help a beautiful mysterious woman (Rachel Ward) who hires him to solve the murder of her father, a prominent cheese scientist, whose death was officially listed as an accident.

Film Critic Leonard Maltin called this one a "one joke" film, but that's not quite fair in my mind. The joke is that, using simulated old-style black and white cinematography, the detective can be seen playing opposite actors and actresses from 40 years back in Hollywood history. That's the main joke, but it's used in a way that succeeds more often than it falls flat. And Martin--even in an early role--is already the type of actor who can stretch his persona as a broad comedy performer out a bit.

This is the one of the best past/future scenes in the picture. Reardon comes calling at the dingy digs of Swede Anderson (Burt Lancaster from 1944's "The Killers") and decides the guy could use "a cup of my java".

Is Time Travel Right For You? (Part Two) "Somewhere in Time", "Frequency", "After the Fact", etc

"The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out."

—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)

 

(to right: the cover of prolific science-fiction author Fred Saberhagen's "After the Fact", one of two "Pilgrim" novels concerning time travel.  In this one the "Flying Dutchman of Time"--Jerry Flint-- has to try and save Abraham Lincoln from assassination at the climax of the Civil War. Other good  good time travel novels I recommend include "The Book of Kells" by R A McAvoy (a story of Viking marauders versus the early Celtic Christian civilization in medieval Ireland, and the modern young man and woman who find themselves in a time portal to the midst of the trouble) and "Time Frame" by Michael Creighton (concerning a American billionaire who creates a way to travel back in time and how difficult it is for a group of young people to get out of the forests, castles and  battlegrounds of  14th Century France alive)  These books are  entertaining because they are also good history.    

Sean Redmond's comment on the "motif" of time travel does go a long way I think to explaining its hold on many millions of people. No matter what we believe about how and why we are existing at this time on this planet, we all strive at some points in our lives to matter, hopefully to matter in a way  to make our family/friends/society  better for our being here.

 

There is always the question of "what if?"  Whole religions like Buddhism are focused on resolving that which is flawed  within us and getting us off the wheel of existence. But many simply would prefer some more time with a lost loved one or a chance to rectify an old problem and redress it now that we as individuals have the wisdom to do so.

To travel back in time to fix a bad situation or cure a longing for something the modern world doesn't provide can be seen in two of the most memorable time travel movies I recall.  The first is a crime story within the time-travel motif called "Frequency" (2000). The story is explained by the movie trailer below.  There is no time travel in the film per se, but there is communication between father and son in 1969 up and back to 1999.  Thanks to a flare-up of sun spots and an old ham radio link-up, a serial killer might be stopped and a family life altered for the better.  This film is a  good suspense yarn also.      

 

One of the best things about the movie to me is how the character of the Son in 1999 gets his father to realize this is not a hoax is by giving him the details of the New York Mets improbable "cinderella" victory in the 1969 World Series over the juggernaut Amercian League favorites, the  Baltimore Orioles:  a shared passion for some great moments in  sports unite a family for a larger purpose! 

    

 

Twenty years before "Frequency" came "Somewhere In Time" (1980) starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer.  Based on a Richard Matheson short story, the film followed a young man who meets an older lady at a theatre party and  longs to discover  how she ever knew him.  This film became a true "cult film" in the best sense of the word, and even today generates a fan base that makes a pilgrimage to the grand resort hotel in Marinac, Michigan, where the film was shot.  Whereas most time travel stories concerned crime or spectacle, this one has a story which penetrates the heart, a unique film that even I, not exactly an arch-romantic, nevertheless find this little film somehow more moving each time I've viewed it.   John Barry's marvelous score---featured on the clip--is just one of the many great compositions he has done in cinema.   

  

My own version of a time travel novel was something I finished about ten years back and redacted it a bit in 2007.  I flogged about the agencies and book conventions for awhile.It never got a publisher so I did it myself with a great measure of help from Shirley  

It's something of what I liked best in all these novels and films and concerns a detective investigating his friends' murder, a task which takes into the world of modern theater and, later, to the time of Shakespeare's London. "Cursed Spite" is the name of the work and if you like stories of history and imagination, I'll be happy to send you a copy, gratis, since my wife would love to get more of these copies we printed out of our garage :-) 

I also think personally it's a good tale. You can get "Cursed Spite" by contacting me and leaving a mailing address at my e-mail: dnoakes@charter.net 

 

 

 

For more on the book, here's the website listing.   http://www.cursedspite.com

For those who perused and/or commented on the last "time travel" blog and stopped by for its sequel here,  I thank you! 

Zelig (1983) Woody Allen, Mia Farrow

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

Woody Allen's mock documentary fellows the course of a fictitious Jazz Age celebrity named Leonard Zelig. The film seamlessly blends old footage of the 1920's and early 30's and uses special effects and photo-shopping techniques to put Zelig (Allen) in the center of many historic events.

The film is an essay on the pitfalls of conformity. To some degree, especially young people, the need to "fit in" is common enough, and probably has its roots in the desire to be part of a lager group or tribe for survival. Most of us grow away from this tendency. For others, it becomes a lifelong path.

Taken to its logical extreme, however, it can lead someone to a loss of identity, or, as this film later shows, a journey into toxic mass movements like fascism. When economics in a nation are unhinged and troubled, these pressures are naturally greater.

Both this film and director Bernardo Bertolucci's hard-hitting drama "The Conformist" (1970) have similar themes. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065571/

Both films draw similar conclusions--that early events in a individual life can lead him into a state of total societal immersion. Both characters turn to the ruthless power of European fascism as a solution to their feelings of personal inadequacy. Bertolucci's character, Marcello, lives out a life of a middle-class father and husband, and also enslavement to Mussolini's spy network. This leads him to a crisis: to become a betrayer of those who trusted him in the past and their murderer, all in the name of scotching dissent against "Il Duce." But does he even care about politics , or is something deeper at work here?

Leonard Zelig chooses total conformity to remake himself from a Jewish/American New Yorker into a storm-trooper in Nazi Germany.
In Allen's movie, there is a ray of hope: a conformist can find a safe haven from extremism through psychiatric care, and, eventually, romance. (This is an American movie comedy after all, and for all of Allen's protests, he follows the rules of the genre. Mia Farrow plays his psychiatrist and just like a good studio director from the era he grow up in, they come together in the end. )

"Zelig" is a lighter comedy for Allen, at least until Hitler enters as a supporting character. But this still is a rare film that is both funny and makes a strong point about how our personalities are shaped by those around us.

Tear Down This Myth :How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Biographies & Memoirs
Author:	Will Bunch

"That Reagan was a trans-formative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public-relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for story-telling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle class resentment of 1960s unrest."---From "Tear Down This Myth", Chapter One.


This 2009 book, by Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist Will Bunch, explores the contradictions between Ronald Reagan the President and Reagan the Conservative Myth. It basically cuts "The Gipper" back down to size by examining how he actually governed with a largely Democratic House of Representatives in opposition to his more grandiose Republican agenda. In fact, Reagan's first term was a limited mandate brought on more by fatigue caused by the economics of high inflation, the threats real or imagined coming from revolutionary Iran and the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the general leadership inertia of Jimmy Carter than any personal longing for a Hard Right revival.


These years are not just history for me, but the stuff of my young adulthood. That Reagan could even be elected President in 1980 took me as a bit of a shock. And after the economy tanked and unemployment went up to ten percent on the West Coast, I thought he just might become the one-term President he seemed to richly deserve. But gas prices came down and the Federal Reserve rung inflation out of the economy with tight fiscal policies and by late 1983 the worst recession since World War II was over and "The Gipper" was smelling like a rose again. His act of draconian attacks on the liberal programs he once defended as a stalwart Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman Democrat made my teethe grind more than once. And his policy of painting the Soviet Union as The Evil Empire did little more than cause the old men in the Kremlin to hunker down more and postpone the appointment of a reformer like Mikhail Gorbachev.

But the actor and sports announcer and corporate pitchman made his pitches good theater. It must have been hard for conservative-leaning voters not to re-elect a man whose folksiness and ability to make you think he cut taxes--even when he actually raised them for ordinary workers who drew their salaries and wages from company payrolls--and embodied some kind of Sky-God persona was too hard to resist.
Reagan's greatest gift was his ability to take complex problems and make them sound simple and solvable to average voters. "Government is the problem, not the solution," he said in his First Inaugural Address and that largely was the formula the Neo-Conservatives have stuck to, long after de-regulation made any sense. But Reagan's--interestingly a Economics-educated man from a small college south of Chicago--never had an economic proposal that made sense. George Orwell was rocking in his grave as "The Gipper" made many people believe that you could somehow balance the Federal Budget, crank up Defense Spending with a blank check for hundreds of billions to The Pentagon and lower taxes for top income earners---all at the same time!

Reagan's principal opponent in the 1980 Republican Primary was George HW Bush, who called these plans--some bastard Kenseyian version of "supply-side formulas"-- little more than "voodoo economics". But Bush himself changed his tune and got the nod to be Vice-President, thus setting forth a chain reaction of electoral events that culminated in twenty years later in his son, George W's, election, or appointment by The Supreme Court, to the Presidency.

The greatest damage to the country came in the last decade from Reagan-ism--as Bush the Younger tried to "out-royal" the King of Conservatism and drive the deficits higher and engage in wars in Iraq and the protracted fight in Afghanistan--- even some conservative pundits doubt Reagan would have pursued, or presided quite as stupidly. (People conveniently forgot that it was Reagan in early 1983 who pulled out of Beirut, Lebanon after a truck bomb killed 241 Marines in their compound.) It is not damning with faint praise to imagine that Reagan, for all his faults, could have seen the push to invade Iraq in 2003 for what it was---a push inspired by armchair warriors like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld to a dubious end. There is evidence cited in Mr. Bunch's book that Reagan resisted the imploring of the Hawks in his administration to invade Nicaragua full on with American troops. But, like Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, somehow logic and common sense came to the First Magistrate, and another Vietnam was avoided.Bad enough that so many died in El Salvador from American supported death squads.

There was, of course, that Grand Opera invasion of the island of Grenada in October, 1983. Bush the Younger --perhaps seeing Iraq as some larger Grenada-type mission, went ahead with his attack on a nation of 30 million that was no Grenada and costs the lives of 4,000 troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis. Reagan would have had to get up rather early to be that dumb.

But, by 2003, The Reagan Years were the stuff of Legend. And the facts weren't allowed to enter into the argument. He was not a very popular President while in office (his average Gallup Poll favourability was an enemic 52 percent, less on average than Kennedy, Eisenhower or Clinton ) . But thanks to a Hollywood-honed folksiness and a generally improving economy--one that crashed again during the Bush I years after the deregulated Savings-and-Loan industry ran aground--he gained an overinflated reputation this book does a good job refuting.


Again, from the book:


"His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the "malaise" of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: An economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge.

"His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan's real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy - even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so many time that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H.W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight - linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s."

And that brings us up to the present and the end of Reagan-ism and faith in big business to look after our jobs and our health and our life savings. A hard lesson learned only when the man who set all this disaster in motion had long since began to lose his memory from the ravages of Alzheimer's and old age. One can't help wondering what Reagan would have made of his own works, and if a word of caution by his lips might have made a difference, however slight.

Tribute to Sean Connery

No, he's not dead and its not his birthday, and, yes, he's said some really stupid things about hitting women if they dare remind him to use a fork when he eats his entree at a fancy restaurant or whatever, but this clip proves Sir Sean Connery is a master of screen acting.

The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988, by Martin Scorsese

Here's the surprisingly intimate scene between Pontius Pilate (David Bowie) and Jesus Christ(Willem DeFoe) from the film based on the 1961 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Both book and later film stirred up a storm of controversy. Scorsese's work was protested vehemently by some Catholic groups and a number of evangelical Christian organizations ,such as James Dodson's far-far right "Focus on the Family". The protests and the anonymous threats against those involved with the film put a decided chill on Hollywood making anything in a the way of a challenging religious film for some time.

You will notice Jesus remarks, which are consistent with the gospel accounts, make no political claim whatsoever. Pilate gets Jesus' worldview wrong--sees him as a politician, a dubious designation then and now-- and then the Roman realizes how truly revolutionary this little colonial trouble-maker really is.
They are two men are at complete odds in values from one another.

Traditionally after this encounter, Jesus will be whipped, then mocked by occupying Roman soldiers as "King of the Jews". The Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Catholic Gary Wills in his book "What Jesus Meant" (2006) points out something ironic and telling about the brutal and shameless mock-coronation that the gospel accounts report Jesus was given by the soldiers and future events :

"the clothing of Jesus in spurious emblems of temporal authority, has been repeated down through the centuries by people claiming to be Christ's followers... Christian emperors did it,both in the East and the West. The Popes did it. The divine -right kings. Now some evangelical Christians do it. All have dressed Jesus in borrowed political robes. They will not listen to the gospels, where Jesus clearly says that his reign is not in the present order of things. The political power they claim to exercise in his name is a parody...like the mock robe and crown put on him by the Roman soldiers. These purported worshipers of Jesus are doing the work of Pontius Pilate. Jesus, born on the run from power, is still hunted by it."

Maurice Jarre (1924-2009) A Great Composer

Three-time Oscar winner Maurice Jarre died today in Los Angeles. Although mainly known to the public for his classic scores for the films of Sir David Lean, he also composed directly for orchestra and did dozens of other film scores, far removed from the romantic "Lara's Theme" from "Doctor Zhivago". He was also the composer on the hard-as-nails Lee Marvin-Burt Lancaster western "The Professionals" (1966) as well as the World War II classic "The Tin Drum" (1979) , and the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" (1985) .

Here he conducts one of my favorite scores from his prolific works--the overture to Lean's adaptation of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" (1984).
The occassion was a 1992 tribute to Lean, and portions of a documentary on his last motion picture are interwoven with the French-born Jarre and the orchestra.
Next to John Barry and John Williams, Jarre was one of the giants of international cinema, and a creative artist who made one appreciate music all the more for its power to inspire every emotion necessary for great drama.

The Untouchables (1987) Music Montage--Ennio Morricone

This is the exception to the rule that films made from baby-boomer television shows don't translate from small to big screen. Director Brian DePalma took a break from making grim, cheerless and remarkably misogynistic horror movies and made a film that brings some genuine heart and robust spirit to the cop/gangster melodrama
The place is prohibition-era Chicago and its a simple story of a young and naive Federal Agent, Elliott Ness (Kevin Costner) who tries to bring down the biggest mobster in the city, Al Capone (Robert DeNiro). With corrupt authorities and cynics all around him, he handpicks a group of three other men (Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, Charles Martin Smith) who cannot be compromised or bought off. And though it plays very fast and loose with the facts of Ness' real attempts to tame Chicago, its probably the best old-fashioned gangster film since the days of Cagney, Robinson and Bogart.

This is great moviemaking, with a top-notch score by Ennio Morricone and a early screenplay by noted playwright David Mamet. This is DePalma's finest movie. And, in a rare supporting role, stands Connery as a tough Irish-American cop who serves as a no-nonsense paternal figure to Costner. Its the older man's most engaging role since he played opposite Michael Caine in John Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975).