I remember seeing that one. It was a bit glurgy for my tastes, but was vastly improved by Debra Winger’s distinctive performance.
In a Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid kind of way?
1980 is back at a time when men were still dominating the silver screen. Women weren’t kick ass like they are now. If that movie was remade now, I think you’d see the kind of characters you wanted to see in that movie. If you want to see an example of what I mean, watch a movie on Netflix called, “Gunpowder Milkshake”.
For years, my husband wanted to see ‘Eraserhead’. It was finally released on DVD in 2005 or so, and when he learned that, he bought a copy. So he and I, and our young teen daughter, settled down to watch this lauded weird masterpiece. So we did. And in total silence, and then we put it back in the DVD case and never spoke of it again, LOL. How was it? well, hard to say! It was every bit as lauded and weird as rumored, but it was not a pleasant experience and…well, curiosity was satisfied.
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid! That brings back great memories.
To answer your question - both films lift footage from classic movies for subversive purposes. But I think Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid lifts characters and dialogue, whereas Nothing Lasts Forever lifts establishing shots of things like buildings, airplanes, and escalators.
Here’s a trailer:
I had such trouble finding Diary of a Mad Housewife, that I half-suspected that its obscurity was due to some sort of male backlash conspiracy. It was made at the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and I was interested in seeing it as an adult woman, since I was about eight when it came out. I also was curious about Carrie Snodgress, because she left acting shortly after the movie after being nominated for an Oscar.
I finally found a VHS copy at Suzler Library’s once wonderful video collection. Rented it with glee.
And it was…okay. I always like Richard Benjamin, who played the crappy husband. I didn’t find Carrie all that impressive. There were no satisfying rage scenes, nothing overtly emotional at all, really. Wife with crappy husband has affair with crappy boyfriend. It’s been done better.
I had a similar experience with Mondo Cane. I remember hearing about the film when I was a kid in the 60s. I knew it was a documentary, but it was advertised as something very daring and risqué. I finally saw it a couple of years ago, and the experience was decidedly “meh.”
Another film I had been dying to see for decades was Hangover Square (1945), about a classical composer who has blackouts where he murders people. I learned about in the mid-70s, when I bought an LP containing the piano concerto played in the final scene. I finally saw the movie about thirty years later, when I managed to obtain a bootleg VHS copy. It was pretty good, but not quite as good as I expected—in the intervening years, I had built it up in my imagination as this incredibly thrilling movie, so a letdown was probably inevitable.
In general, if an old movie is obscure and hard to find, the odds are because it just wasn’t a very good movie. To quote Theodore Sturgeon “ninety percent of everything is crap”.
I saw that when it made it’s debut (and as far as I can tell, only showing) on Turner Classic Movies. It was…strange. I’m not sure it could be called “good”, though.
Reminds me of a time a coworker said the movie “The Night Porter” was interesting. So we watched it. it was horrible, and we said so. His reply: “I said it was interesting. I didn’t say it was GOOD.”
When I was a kid I was really pumped about seeing Freejack. It had cyberpunk, race car driving, time travel, blowing shit up real good, Mick Jagger manning an APC and Anthony Hopkins, who was fresh off of Silence of the Lambs. My teenage self thought this flick had it all. But, the movie never made it to the theater in my town, and I never got around to renting it on VHS. Years later I looked for it on Netflix, but it was listed as “unavailable.”
Anyway, in 2017 (8 years after the far-off year of 2009 in which the movie takes place) I found a DVD of it for sale at a used book store for two bucks, and I decided to pick up.
After watching it, I thought to myself, “How can any movie with Mick Jagger and Anthony Hopkins as the bad guys be so boring?” I mean, I wasn’t expecting it to be great, but I figured it would at least be entertaining schlock, and it didn’t even rise to that level.
I can relate to this. Although I watched Trek obsessively during its original run and syndication years and had seen most episodes multiple times, I somehow kept missing “The Empath.” When I finally did manage to catch it on a rental VHS tape, I found it rather tedious.
I had for years been intrigued by the Anthony Quinn movie The Savage Innocents. Anthony Quinn plays an Eskimo (Inuit) in it. I had read that the Bob Dylan song Mighty Quinn was based on it. You’re probably most familiar with the Hollies version (if you’ve heard of it at all) but the Grateful Dead covered it live a number of times. I had read that Quinn the actor said it was one of his favorite roles.
I searched for it for years. It could never find it at the specialty VCR tape rental places and when Netflix started they didn’t have the DVD although it was on their list of movies marked unavailable. I had it on my list for years until one day they had a copy! It was unwatchable. I had to stop half way through. Their depiction of Inuit life was racist, insulting, paternalistic and downright awful. They did have some beautiful location shots but the parts with the actors was on a sound stage.
I got the Frank Zappa album “Roxy And Elsewhere” (still my favorite Zappa album) some time in the early nineties, and there’s the song “Cheepnis” that starts with a long humorous spoken introduction about the fifties sci-fi flick “It Conquered The World” (by Roger Corman, which I also learned much later) to explain the concept of “cheepnis”. I always wanted to watch that movie, but it took me about twenty years to finally find it on a file sharing site (don’t judge me, my filesharing days are long over). I have to say I wasn’t disappointed, it was the kind of schlock that Zappa described, and on top of that it had a young Lee Van Cleef as the lead, which was a bonus I hadn’t known of before.
The director of that film, Allan Moyle, didn’t make another feature for ten years, until Pump up the Volume. Not sure if the long layoff was directly due to the big flop that was Times Square. He butted heads with the legendary Robert Stigwood on the movie, who wanted it cut around the soundtrack songs, to the detriment of plot cohesion. The soundtrack is both out-of-print (never officially released on CD to my knowledge) and a brilliant new wave sampler, featuring everyone from the Ruts to the Talking Heads, to XTC (a song not on any of their albums), to Roxy Music and David Johansen, Suzi Quatro and Joe Jackson.
The movie itself…meh.
How about a film that was found and then lost again? “Ice Palace” (1960) with Richard Burton and Robert Ryan.
A real potboiler from author Edna Ferber about two “larger than life” characters who find themselves at loggerheads in the Alaska territory, ending as Alaska is about to become a state. Back in the VCR days I finally found it on a late-late show and taped it. Then I accidentally recorded over the tape.
Amazon lists it on DVD, but the DVD’s are coded for other regions.
I still remember an article about the film before its release. The quote was something like "We hope Stigwood’s Times Square will do for new wave what Saturday Night Fever did for disco and not what his Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band did to the Beatles.
I saw Nothing Lasts Forever a few years ago and was underwhelmed. A great cast, but it was just silly and dumb, I thought. I think I actually fell asleep while watching it, which is rare for me.
Old movies I saw for the first time long after their release that I liked or even loved:
Casablanca
The Third Man
The Godfather
The Quiet Man
Notorious
It’s a Wonderful Life
Those that did little or nothing for me and/or seemed overrated:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Zulu
Chariots of Fire
Sphere
The Manchurian Candidate
Gone with the Wind
It was tedious when it was new, too. There are those who believe…that it is worse than Spock’s Brain.
It took me a long time to see that film. I was probably 30. My first viewing was hindered by me going “Oh THAT’S where that comes from!” every five minutes. I’d seen so many homages and parodies that it was like I’d already seen it. (It’s just a bunch of famous quotes strung together,)
Once I got past that, well, I found it to be every bit as good as promised.
Almost always a letdown.
Back in my younger days, I watched Up to His Ears (1965) – twice! - on LA’s Z Channel. Based on the old Jules Verne story about a rich guy so bored he hires a hitman to do him in, only to change his mind, I thought it was hilarious, surreal, clever, witty, you name it. Plus, it starred my two favorite actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress.
At least a couple decades went by before I was able to see it again (on TCM). Belmondo and Andress were still awesome and there were some clever, witty, hilarious, surreal bits, but I had totally forgotten two supporting “comedy relief” twit characters. My younger self no doubt found them funny, but my older self thought they cast an unbearably unfunny taint on the whole film.
I still have a short list of movies I have wanted to see for many years. I am sure they will be disappointing, but that won’t stop me from trying to watch them should I ever get an opportunity… or from being disappointed by them.
The theatrical release version of The Quatermass Experiment, with Brian Donlevy, whose career was on the skids by then, due to alcoholism. My parents wouldn’t let me watch it when it was on TV - years later I caught it, and it wasn’t very good.
Of the original BBC TV serial, only the first two episodes were telerecorded [kinescoped] and no subsequent episodes exist today.
For years I wanted to see Black Narcissus but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then just recently I found it on YouTube, which is strange because I had searched YouTube for it before and not found it. The movie did not disappoint.