BEFORE: To get me back to this "lost classic" from the 1980's, Richard Edson carries over from "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III". If you don't know who Richard Edson is, he's probably most famous for playing that weird burn-out parking garage attendant in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", who takes Cameron's father's sportscar out for a joyride and puts all those miles on it. Anyway, he's got a small role in tonight's film, but that's enough - I needed a way to connect between these two films that feature different Arquette sisters in their casts.
Tomorrow, Feb. 20, on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming (and we're getting very close to this year's Oscars now, just 6 days to go...) it's a line-up of "Courtroom Dramas" during the day, a battle of "Who Played It Better: Henry VIII" during prime-time, and another battle between the "1954 Best Score Winners: Dramatic vs. Musical" late at night:
4:00 am "Philadelphia" (1993)
6:15 am "Fury" (1936)
8:00 am "Trial" (1955)
10:00 am "Libel" (1959)
12:00 pm "Inherit the Wind" (1960)
2:15 pm "Twilight of Honor" (1963)
4:15 pm "Madeleine" (1950)
6:15 pm "12 Angry Men" (1957)
8:00 pm "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933)
10:00 pm "A Man For All Seasons" (1966)
12:15 am "The High and the Mighty" (1954)
3:00 am "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)
I've seen 6 out of these 12, of course "Philadelphia" (running this great film at 4 am seems very strange - why not run the more obscure "Madeleine" then?), "Inherit the Wind", "12 Angry Men", "A Man For All Seasons" and two films I watched just last year, "The Private Life of Henry VIII" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". This brings me up to 93 seen out of 228, and I'm still just above 40%.
THE PLOT: A bored suburban housewife, seeking escape from her life, suffers amnesia after an accident and is mistaken for a free-spirited New York City drifter named Susan.
AFTER: This one's been on the books for a long time - I think I picked it up off the Starz Encore channel last year, but since then that channel's been pretty non-useful to me, so I'm thinking of dropping it. The number of films from the 1980's that I haven't seen, that I would also WANT to see, is getting very low, like maybe two or three films. And you have to figure, if I've spent the last 34 years not watching a film like this, there's probably a good reason, right? Like, if this film were very important or there was some urgent reason to watch this, I would have done so already - it's got a big cast, so it should be easy enough to link to, however many of them are fairly obscure actors, so it did kind of prove to be a huge headache to work this in somewhere. Honestly, I'm glad to cross it off the list today and move on to bigger and better things.
Because if you watch a lot of romantic comedies from the 1980's, like, say, this one and "Overboard", you could easily get the impression that the 80's decade was full of rich and middle-class women falling off boats or getting hit on the head to cause amnesia, and then being led to believe that they were really poor rural housewives or gold-digging club kids. Then inevitably this would lead to them falling in love with a struggling but good-natured carpenter or film projectionist, and rejecting their old lifestyle and marriage, even after remembering who they really are, in favor of a new love with a much poorer man. I don't remember this actually happening so much during that decade, though who's to say? I think the practice of putting the images of missing people on milk cartons started about the same time, and I wonder how many of those people weren't really missing, but had just hit their heads and suffered from soap-opera style amnesia and just got mistaken for someone else with the same hairstyle and jacket and continued on under their new identity.
That being said, if you take this as a movie about a woman from New Jersey with big hair whose husband sells hot tubs to yuppies via commercials on late night public access channels, who follows the antics of a free-wheeling club kid through the personal ads (because people didn't yet use cell phones or text messages to communicate) and she ends up wearing some giant earrings and working in a Times Square club while falling for a projectionist at an indie revival movie theater, after they dance to "Into the Groove" - well, it's hard to think of a sentence that better captures the essence of the 1980's. The only thing they didn't do here was play a couple games of Galaga while on their way to buy some designer jeans.
Now, with that being said, I don't think there was ever a place in NYC like "The Magic Club", where dime-store magicians did this sort of show with simple tricks like sawing a lady in half, or making doves appear inside a cage. It's like some low-rent version of L.A.'s "Magic Castle" but this would never fly in 1980's Times Square, where the most popular attractions were peep shows, brothels and drug dealers, all of which had ways of making your money disappear. But this film got some other prominent NYC locations right, like Battery Park and St. Mark's Place (where Susan buys the hat), and the vintage clothing store "Love Saves the Day" on 2nd Ave and East 7th (where she sells her jacket) which closed down in 2011 to become a fast-food place, and then got leveled by a gas explosion in 2015. And a web-site that lists where in NYC certain movies were filmed confirms this, the Magic Club sign was a front-piece that was built on the outside of the Audubon Ballroom up in Washington Heights, where they also shot the interiors for the same club scenes.
Just like yesterday's film, there's a lot of randomness to "Desperately Seeking Susan" - sure, a lot of STUFF happens, but it's hard to say that the parts definitely all add up to some coherent whole. Not with so many unanswered questions - who was the guy in the hotel room at the beginning? Who stole the earrings in the first place? Why was Roberta so fascinated by the cryptic personal ads, if she didn't know the people involved? Why didn't the used clothing store keep better records, or even wash the clothing before re-selling it? Why couldn't Roberta just be happy married to the hot-tub sales king of New Jersey? That sounds pretty sweet to me. Let's not forget - why are most magic tricks so lame? And was it really that much easier in the 1980's to be mistaken for someone else, because nobody could send you a selfie or look you up on your Facebook page?
It's getting harder and harder for me to reach back into the 1980's and maintain my linking - which is a real problem because even though about 2/3 of my watchlist was made in the new millennium, which makes linking easy because all those films are drawing from the same pool of actors, I've got about 30 films on my list that were made BEFORE 1980, and some reach back to the 1930's. How am I possibly going to link to them? I'll have to take a hard look at them after my October horror chain to see just how bad the damage is. Right now there's a 10-year gap, no films to watch between 1984 and 1994, so I'll have to keep finding actors with long careers to jump over that gap. Today I linked from a film made in 2012 to one made in 1985, and tomorrow I'm linking to a film that was released in 2011 - how much longer can I keep getting lucky like that?
Also starring Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Hope Floats"), Madonna (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Mark Blum (last seen in "Miami Rhapsody"), Robert Joy (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Laurie Metcalf (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Anna Levine (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Will Patton (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Peter Maloney (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Steven Wright (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), John Turturro (last seen in "God's Pocket"), Anne Carlisle, Jose Angel Santana, Richard Hell, Rockets Redglare, Annie Golden, Ann Magnuson (last seen in "Tequila Sunrise"), John Lurie (last seen in "Wild at Heart"), Victor Argo (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), Shirley Stoler, Arto Lindsay, Kim Chan, Patrick John Hurley, with cameos from Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Michael Badalucco (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Carol Leifer, Richard Portnow (last seen in "Trumbo").
RATING: 4 out of 10 newspapers stolen from a vending machine
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