Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981)

Kurt Russell in Escape From New York

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Season Hubley. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Nick Castle. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Joe Alves. Film editing: Todd C. Ramsay. Music: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth.

John Carpenter is a curious kind of auteur, best known for horror flicks and action thrillers that often feature his name before the title, as in "John Carpenter's Escape From New York." I'm not much of a fan of his work, except for his wonderful Starman (1984), which demonstrated once again what a fine actor Jeff Bridges is. Escape From New York stars Kurt Russell, making a determined attempt to escape from Walt Disney, who established him as an all-American boy type in movies and on TV in the 1960s. Here he goes to the other extreme as Snake Plissken, a once-heroic soldier turned criminal. The premise of the film is that crime in America has grown so bad that in 1988 the entire island of Manhattan was walled in as a maximum security prison -- a reflection of the bad rep that New York City got during the 1970s. In 1997, when the film takes place, Snake is arrested and sent to this prison, but at the same time Air Force One has been hijacked and though the president (Donald Pleasance? How did that happen?) bailed out in an escape pod as the plane crashed into the Manhattan prison, he has disappeared. Because of Snake's earlier exploits, he is given a chance to free himself by rescuing the president, but he's implanted with a device that will kill him if he doesn't succeed in the next 24 hours. So he pilots a glider to the top of one of the World Trade Center towers and descends into the anarchy and nightmare that the inmates have made of the city. It's all pretty entertaining slam-bang stuff, with a colorful cast: Lee Van Cleef as a tough cop, Ernest Borgnine as a cabbie who drives a beat-up taxi through what's left of the mean streets of the city-prison, Harry Dean Stanton as an inmate who lives in the public library, Isaac Hayes as the boss of the prison inmates, and Adrienne Barbeau as his mistress. There's a tight-budgeted look to the film, especially when viewed today after the CGI revolution, but it works.

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Ian Holm in Alien

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dallas: Tom Skerritt
Lambert: Veronica Cartwright
Brett: Harry Dean Stanton
Kane: John Hurt
Ash: Ian Holm
Parker: Yaphet Kotto

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cinematography: Derek Van Lint
Production design: Michael Seymour
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) posited that extraterrestrial beings might not be bent on world domination or worse, but instead were just looking to be friendly neighbors. Spielberg went on to reinforce that idea in 1982 with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a kind of reversal of the treatment of space creatures in 1950s sci-fi films, born of Cold War paranoia. But although the Spielbergian vision informed several other successful films, including John Carpenter's Starman (1984), the truth is that when it comes to movies, paranoia is fun.  No movie established that more clearly than Alien, whose huge success launched a whole new era of shockers from outer space, including Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Almost 40 years later, Alien still holds up, while the Spielberg films are looking a bit sappy. Is that a commentary on the movies themselves, or on us? Alien benefits from near-perfect casting and from outstandingly creepy design, making the most of the work of H.R. Giger on the alien and its environment and of Carlo Rambaldi (who had also created the benign aliens of Close Encounters and E.T.) on animating the creature. While it's true that time has not been entirely kind to some parts of the design -- such as the cathode ray tube monitors for the ship's computers, which would definitely be outmoded in 2037 when the film is set  -- everything else has become sci-fi standard, including the depiction of the Nostromo as an aging tub of a ship whose maintenance crew, Brett and Parker, gripe about being paid less than the management staff. Scott doesn't labor over the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that will become more prominent in the sequels, but it's nice to see it there.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett: James Coburn
Billy the Kid: Kris Kristofferson
Alias: Bob Dylan
Sheriff Kip McKinney: Richard Jaeckel
Sheriff Baker: Slim Pickens
Mrs. Baker: Katy Jurado
Lemuel: Chill Wills
Chisum: Barry Sullivan
Gov. Lew Wallace: Jason Robards
Ollinger: R.G. Armstrong
Eno: Luke Askew
Poe: John Beck
Alamosa Bill: Jack Elam
Maria: Rita Coolidge
Bowdre: Charles Martin Smith
Luke: Harry Dean Stanton

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Screenplay: Rudy Wurlitzer
Cinematography: John Coquillon
Music: Bob Dylan

With its laid-back pace punctuated by moments of violence, not to mention its soundtrack by Bob Dylan, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid may be the ultimate stoner Western. After being mutilated by MGM -- the credits list six film editors -- it was savaged by critics on its first release, but the release on video of Sam Peckinpah's original preview version in 1988 caused a reevaluation of the film, with some now calling it a masterpiece. I wouldn't go that far: To my mind the narrative is still too elliptical and the inspiration -- rewriting a myth -- too commonplace. But it has moments of brilliance that transcend its flaws, such as the beautiful sequence of the death of Sheriff Baker, with its fine use of the iconic performers Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado and the underscoring with Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." James Coburn, always an underrated actor in his prime, is wonderful as Pat Garrett, and while Kris Kristofferson was never much of an actor, he and Coburn play well against each other. Dylan was no actor, either, but he's used well here as the enigmatic figure who lets himself be known as "Alias," and the scene in which Garrett forces him to read the labels of canned goods while he toys with other members of Billy's gang is nicely done. The gallery of character actors both old (Chill Wills, Jack Elam) and new (Charles Martin Smith, Harry Dean Stanton) is welcome. Its post-censorship era's exploitation of women -- there are an awful lot of bared breasts, though we also get a fleeting butt-shot of Kristofferson -- is overdone, and it certainly wouldn't earn any seal of approval from the American Humane Society after the scene in which live chickens are used for target practice.

Turner Classic Movies

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas has so much going for it: the performances of Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, the dialogue by Sam Shepard, the cinematography of Robby Müller, the music by Ry Cooder. It won every major award at Cannes. So why do I feel like it's an unsatisfying film? It's not that I demand resolution from a work of art: That's a criterion long absent from modern and postmodern criticism. Life doesn't resolve itself, so why should art? I think it's partly that Paris, Texas resolves too much -- namely, its initial mystery: Why is Travis Henderson (Stanton) wandering in the desert, speechless and amnesiac? But the film doesn't make the explanation resonate with anything other than the failure of a marriage -- or perhaps two, since the marriage of Walt (Stockwell) and Anne (Aurore Clément) seems to be held together only by Travis's son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), whom they have been raising since his disappearance. It's as if L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) had concluded with an explanation for Anna's disappearance, when in fact that unresolved disappearance is the whole point of the film: a catalyst for the experiences of Claudia and Sandro. Are we supposed to feel that the reunion of Jane (Nastassja Kinski) with Hunter -- a sex worker and an uprooted child -- is a kind of closure? It was Jane, after all, who gave up Hunter to Walt and Anne after Travis's first disappearance. For me, the first half of Paris, Texas is brilliant moviemaking: among other things in its superb use of landscape -- both the bleakness of Texas and the freeway- and airport-choked Southern California -- as a correlative for the lives of Travis and Walt. It's when Travis takes Hunter on the road in a needle-in-a-haystack search for Jane that the film falls apart. Wenders had already made a film about this kind of search: Alice in the Cities (1974), which seems to me a more satisfying film than Paris, Texas because it doesn't overreach itself, it doesn't complicate things with too many backstories and too much striving toward significance. It comes as no surprise to learn that the film was only half-written when it was begun, and that Shepard, who had been called away to work on another film, literally phoned in the climactic narrative in which Travis explains his disappearance. Though it's a tribute to the brilliance of both Shepard and Stanton that the scene comes off as well as it does, it plays as a set piece, and not as an organic part of what has gone before.