Best Cast – 1978

My Nominations: The Boys From Brazil. California Suite. Dawn Of The Dead. The Deer Hunter. Heaven Can Wait. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Midnight Express. Superman.

A great selection of films with either ensemble casts or smaller quality over quantity focused casts. The Boys From Brazil is not a film which is often spoken of anymore, but it is well worth revisiting giving its cultural significance – Oliver picked up an Oscar nomination – and because it takes a number of renowned actors known mainly for their heroic good guy roles, and having them act as some of the most horrible humans in history. James Mason, Gregory Peck, Bruno Ganz, Steve Guttenberg, Lilli Palmer, Denholm Elliot, Prunella Scales, and Michael Gough are among those rounding out the cast.

California Suite seems like the sort of film which would have been nominated had this category existed in 1978. It’s a Neil Simon comedy directed by Herbert Ross, and features a variety of A Listers and Oscar Winners – Maggie Smith winning another for this film, along with Michael Caine, Bill Cosby, Alan Alda, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau, Elaine May, and Richard Pryor. One which would absolutely not have been nominated, but which remains a firm favourite in my personal mini category of single/near single location siege movies with a tight cast, is Dawn Of The Dead. Ken Foree is the standout, but the surrounding trio of Gaylen Ross, David Emge, and Scott Reiniger make a the film one of the all time great horror movies. It’s difficult to see another movie wrestling the win away from The Deer Hunter – De Niro was nominated for Best Actor, Christopher Walken won Best Supporting Actor, Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, then you also have John Savage and John Cazale.

Heaven Can Wait is another cert for a nomination if this category had been around – Warren Beatty, James Mason, Julie Christie, Jack Warden, Dyan Cannon, Charles Grodin – good cast, decent movie. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a Sci Fi classic which treats the audience and subject matter with respect, as well as giving a high calibre cast – Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Brooke Adams. Midnight Express is filled with intense performances – John Hurt, Brad Davis, Randy Quaid, Irene Miracle, while Superman ushers in the age of the comic book blockbuster and features a huge and notable cast – Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeves, Ned Beatty, Margot Kidder, Jackie Cooper, Terence Stamp, Trevor Howard, Susannah York, Maria Schell etc.

My Winner: The Deer Hunter

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Best Writing (Original) – 1978

Official Nominations: Coming Home. Autumn Sonata. The Deer Hunter. Interiors. An Unmarried Woman.

A couple of expected nominations from the Best Picture list, a Woody Allen, a Bergman, and a random. Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman edges feminist or female led narratives out of the dark ages and into the more liberal modern age, his script brought to life by Jill Clayburgh’s performance. Autumn Sonata is a latter day Bergman drama, again dealing with the relationship between women – this time dealing with a mother and daughter rekindling after years apart. His usual ponderings on life and death are simmering here, but there’s little said that he hadn’t already covered. Interiors sees Allen largely leaving comedy behind and trying his hand at Bergman, but the writing feels a little flat and lacking in Allen’s voice. Coming Home was a fine winner this year, being unique at the time as it viewed the Vietnam war and its aftermath through the eyes of the women who waited for their husbands to come home. Edging it for me, unsurprisingly, is The Deer Hunter, dealing with the before, during, and after of three men and their relationships with others and each other – the differing impacts all shades of the same tragedy.

My Winner: The Deer Hunter

My Nominations: The Deer Hunter. Coming Home. Big Wednesday. Dawn Of The Dead. The Driver. Eyes Of Laura Mars. Girlfriends. Halloween. Animal House.

I take the two Vietnam movies over to my list, and add the forgotten one from the loose trilogy – Big Wednesday doesn’t have the big ideas of the other two, instead based on Milius and Aaberg’s youth in Malibu as war abroad loomed large. While it does race through several staples of war movies – the innocent beginnings, the recruiting, the scenes of war – it does so with a less po-faced approach with a lot of humorous one-liners, and feels more authentic at times with War being this nuisance or distraction to the ultimate goal of hitting that ideal wave. Dawn Of The Dead, in the midst of its satirical leanings, manages to throw out some classic horror dialogue, from the classic ‘when there’s no more room in hell’ line, to the more straightforward arguments between scientists and journalists as everyone falls apart. Halloween proves that 1978 had more than one horror movie pumping out dialogue still quoted daily today, usually coming from the mouth of Loomis with his ‘Death has come to your little town’, and ‘what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil’. More than a series of quotes, Halloween is a fine example of a screenplay finely honed to produce maximum scares and atmosphere, in turn almost single-handedly creating/perfecting a genre.

John Carpenter was already on a roll by 1978, his script for The Eyes Of Laura Mars one of the finest Giallo examples – certainly one of the finest US examples. The central idea of a woman, one used to exploiting or at the very least using carnage and violence for her own gains, who ‘gains the power’ of witnessing real life murders through her own eyes is one which has been used notably since, while The Driver plays a similar trick with the noir genre – a genre which had been dead for a couple of decades by this point. The script dispenses with exposition and dialogue and padding, and instead is as streamlined as you can get – refusing to even name its characters – meaning the plot is a series of fraught exchanges which upend noir character tropes while moving the plot along. My final two nominations are at different ends of the comedy scale – Animal House the uproarious and anarchic vehicle of future stars and Girlfriends the precursor for much of the offbeat Indie comedy the US began producing in the 90s, which then spilled into the free-form Apatow style blockbusters of today.

My Winner: Dawn Of The Dead

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Top Ten Tuesdays – Robert De Niro

It’s Tuesday again, and that means it’s time to look at ten films by one of my favourite performers – this time around I check out Robert De Niro, one of the finest actors of all time and someone who has perhaps more iconic performances in history. There are so many films I have not been able to discuss here, and while recent movies have not been as well received, for over thirty years he has been at the top of his game. I haven’t given much thought to the list order below, it’s a mixture of favourite De Niro performances and favourite films that he has been a part of, but really the numbers are not important.

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

I may get a lot of stick for this one, considering some of the much more acclaimed films I haven’t included in my list. De Niro transforms himself once again and maybe becomes the most un-De Niro of his career. Unsurprising given the character he plays here (The Monster) but he still manages to bring power, gravitas, and emotion to the role. I’ve always enjoyed this version of the story – much of it comes down to the look of the film, but you have a strong central cast in Branagh, De Niro, and Bonham Carter. The film retains a bleak tone, and a truly gothic approach, ensuring it is an authentic vision of Shelley’s masterwork.

Cop Land

Although more famous for Stallone’s performance, De Niro also puts in another heartfelt character examination as he plays an unusually (for him) good, plain cop wanting to shut down corruption within the force. In this ensemble film with some terrific actors, De Niro stands out primarily because of how normal he is when compared to the characters he is more known to play.

Ronin

Ronin is one of the best films ever to not really be about anything – it’s one big mis-direct for most of the movie as we follow a group of mercenaries, led by De Niro who are tasked with hunting down some mysterious briefcase for the IRA. Throw in some intrigue, back-stabbing, Russian mob, political nonsense, action, and some of the best car chases ever filmed and you have a riveting film which is endlessly watchable. There is a brilliant cast each unleashing strong performances, and De Niro leads the way tricking the viewer, his companions, and his enemies.

The Deer Hunter

This one cemented De Niro as a long-lasting talent and features some of his most gruelling work, both physically and emotionally. We follow De Niro and his friends starting out as casual workers and hunters who are abruptly ripped out of their simple lives to the horrors of Vietnam. De Niro’s Mike is one of many characters who change dramatically throughout the course of the film, though De Niro is possibly the one who tries to hold on to his previous life most dearly even though he resorts to brutality to survive. It’s a startling, powerful film with a superb cast, and allows De Niro opportunity once again to craft another iconic figure.

Heat

De Niro plays the villian in Michael Mann’s opus, but it is the duality between his desire for a normal life, his need for one last score, and his obsession with beating the cops which ensures the character is more than a by the numbers crook. His scenes with Pacino are electric, but so are his scenes with Kilmer, Brenneman, and so on. With Mann in control, with wonderful dialogue, and with De Niro and co at their best, this was always going to be a classic.

Godfather II

De Niro’s first big outing sees him filling in Brando’s shows – arguably the most difficult job in cinema history, but he manages to be everything Brando was and more, carving out his own style as the young Vito Corleone entirely separate from the Don which Brando portrayed. Arguably he is more like Pacino in the first film – a young man trying to find his way in a violent world, eventually being drawn into that violence and its seductive potential rewards.

Raging Bull

Going through some shocking physical changes earned De Niro an Oscar win, but even if he had not piled on the pounds, his performance here is nothing short of flawless. La Motta is an ugly figure, a man driven to success but easily swayed by the demons which try to pull us down, and De Niro and Scorsese never flinch from showing the grim realities of success, of downfall, of the power-hungry, and of sheer masculine brutality. The fights are wonderful of course, but it is that contrast of the glory of victory and adoration of the crowd juxtaposed with all the wife and brother beating which make this an anti-Rocky and one of the best films of the 1980s.

Taxi Driver

To prove that he wasn’t a one trick pony (though with Mean Streets earlier he had already done this) after the success of The Godfather part II, De Niro set his sights on another iconic character. He converts Travis Bickle from words on a page to a brazen, all too real paranoid romantic, a man who is steadily losing his mind in the midst of all of the scum and filth he sees surrounding him. Scorsese and De Niro again create another ambiguous masterpiece as Bickle is a clearly disturbed and dangerous figure, but his attempts at saving others and his ironic ‘happy ending’ merged with his ultra violent descent and near assassination attempt leave the viewer with uncomfortable questions to ponder on.

Goodfellas

The film that brought De Niro successfully into another decade and again partnered him with Scorsese and Pesci, Goodfellas is another extraordinary tale with high levels of violence, realism, and humour. Although the dreamlike quality of much of Scorsese’s work is present, this is largely an effectively realistic portrayal of mob life – from both the inside and outside, from both the good and wrong side of the law. It’s hard to say who steals the movie here with Pesci, De Niro, and Liotta all superb, but De Niro is the one who manages to hold sway over the more maniacal and obsessive other duo.

The Untouchables

People forget that De Niro was even in this movie. In fact, it’s rare that I hear people talking about the movie at all, unfortunate because it features one of De Niro’s best performances – and the same can be said for Costner, Connery, Garcia, and Billy Drago. De Palma keeps the tension high, the entertainment flowing, and De Niro is free to give his version of an Al Capone who is on his way out thanks to superhero good guy Eliot Ness. It’s an unusually beautiful film given the subject matter, and although there is plenty of violence there is a lot of heart as Costner leads his family – both at home, and his family at work to hopefully safer times. De Niro is excellent as Capone in a performance which drew a substantial amount of criticism, but he comes over as a Tony Montana style leader, his grasp on reality and on his own power pouring away, even as he still leads with an Iron Glove (or baseball bat).

What is your favourite De Niro performance and film – is it something I’ve missed from my list? Do you prefer De Niro’s comedy roles or his more serious, dramatic performances? Let us know in the comments!