Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  Guido returns the precious Goodsen belongings but, malicious to the end, tosses the Steuben egg at Joel. Does he, in Ferris Bueller fashion, decide to take a step back and let that egg—that damned egg!—splinter into a million pieces thus ending his subjugation at the hands of material possessions? No, he hurls himself across the lawn in agonized slow motion, attempting to catch it before it hits the ground. Even though he has good hands, there remains just the merest shadow of a hint of a scratch and that’s what Mrs. Goodsen zeroes straight in on. She expresses grave disappointment, but just as all seems to be lost, Joel’s dad breaks the good news: his son’s going to Princeton. As he accepts his Future Enterpriser award, Joel makes mental plans to continue his profession in college. “I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night. Time of your life, huh kid?”

  Years before Gordon Gekko got to give his historic “Greed Is Good” address, Joel Goodsen was laying out the terms of the times: financial reward is everything, the upper-middle class lifestyle must be preserved and maintained at all times, a capitalist is just a prostitute in a different kind of business suit. Brrr … And writer/director Paul Brickman keeps the movie consistently chilly. Lots of space, lots of darkness, lots of neon, Tangerine Dream’s electropulse and the frostbite that is Rebecca De Mornay. Brickman never took the American Graffiti step of outlining his characters’ futures, but if I might be so bold, I’d say that Joel ends up bankrolling a Republican presidential candidate’s campaign and that he’s either bought Lana’s silence or had her shut up permanently.

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  “Food riots in Poland. El Salvador fails. Greens control Germany and demand end to nuclear arms in Europe. Mexican revolt. The U.S. stands alone.” If ice water ran through Risky Business’ veins, Red Dawn’s blood was boiling. In his capacity as writer and director—his resume includes Conan the Barbarian, Apocalypse Now, Big Wednesday and Jeremiah Johnson—John Milius has been absolutely unabashed in his mythologizing of Man. Man the killer with a code; Man the noble savage, smeared in his own feces, clad in the pelt of a mountain lion he killed, fucked and skinned with his bare hands; Man the warlord, claiming fresh territory as his own, trampling and raping all who bar his way.

  In Red Dawn (1984), Milius tapped into the festering right-wing paranoia of the early eighties and used it to fuel a freakish teenage tough-guy fantasy. His scenario, which doubtless caused sleepless nights in many a bunker, was that a coalition of Russian and Cuban forces were rolling slowly but inexorably across the southern and northwest borders, surprising and quickly conquering the heartland. Then, they come to Calumet, Colorado. Big mistake. Sure, it looks grim at the outset. A fresh-faced history class is attempting to pay attention (as the teacher delivers a lecture on Genghis Khan) while outside, the sky goes black as a mass of pinko paratroopers drop in to crush the town under their heels. In a matter of moments, it seems, Lenin posters line the streets and dissenting locals cool their heels in internment camps. But not everyone is unprepared for the attack. A band of teenagers led by the barely civilized Jed (Patrick Swayze) stock up on Spam, grab a cache of munitions and head for the woods, with the last words of slain countryman Harry Dean Stanton ringing in their ears: “Avenge me, boys.” Thus the boys (Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Darren Dalton, Doug Toby, Brad Savage) plus two female recruits (Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey) become a crack vigilante unit, known and feared as … the Wolverines (the name of their high school football team)! Using booby traps, improvised ingenuity and the element of surprise—methods not dissimilar to the ones Macaulay Culkin employed to prevent Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern from ransacking his home—the Wolverines turn the tide in favor of the tattered remains of Old Glory.

  Red Dawn was much maligned on its release, but for the wrong reasons. This was around the time that Rambo was settling old scores, that Reagan made his “Begin bombing Russia” joke on an (oops!) open mike, that Chuck Norris’ Invasion U.S.A. was on big screens and Kris Kristofferson’s Amerika was on TV. Milius’ movie was the only one that portrayed its heroes as scared and crippled with self-doubt. They even got caught up in questioning the morality of their vigilante action. Ambivalence was also on show in the enemy camp. A Cuban commander (Ron Superfly O’ Neal) was depicted expressing more admiration for the crazy kids that were blowing up his tanks than his creepy Russian colleagues.

  Call Red Dawn a dud action movie if you want (even with a hand on the pump, Lea Thompson was still perky). Deride it for ludicrous Man-mythologizing scenes like the one in which Jed makes a Viking of whimpering Robert (C. Thomas Howell) by killing a deer and forcing him to drink the blood (“Kinda makes you feel different inside,” observes Bob). But as far as irresponsible bug-eyed red-baiting movies of the eighties went, it may have been the least retarded. And, as far as Boy movies went, there were many worse offenders.

  Bad Boys

  You know him: The leather. The swagger. The thin skin. The misunderstood, brooding loner with the loud bike, the oily hair and the dark secret. Nice girls shudder away from him but nurse forbidden desires for his rough touch. Other guys sneer at him, but fear his rage and envy his instant access to the wildness within. Everybody loves the bad boy.

  In a decade bursting at the seams with young actors who appeared to covet nothing more than the chance to play tortured loose cannons, very few were actually able to summon up the necessary cojones to do a good Bad Boy. The doyen of hoodlums with heart was Matt Dillon, an actor so rebellious he even played a character called Rebel (in the movie Rebel). Talk about your impeccable credentials: Dillon was the bad influence in Jonathan Kaplan’s little-seen Over the Edge, a movie about a bunch of disaffected California kids left to rot in an airless upwardly mobile ghetto. When Dillon’s Richie, the kid who leads the others into drink, drugs and crime, gets shot by an overzealous cop, the other teens go on the rampage. Originally planned for release in 1979, Orion Pictures (who scheduled it as their debut movie) yanked it from their schedule after a few test screenings, fearing it would incite copycat violence. Hysterical as that reaction sounds, Over the Edge’s climactic scene, of the kids locking the parents who all but abandoned them in a classroom, then smashing the shit out of the school, packs a hell of a kick. You sort of want to break things after you see it. Or at least barge into things and pretend you didn’t see them there.

  Dillon went on to play someone approaching the Good Boy/Bad Boy crossroads in Tex (1982), the first film in his S. E. Hinton troika. His titular Tex is a 15-year-old Oklahoma farmboy, growing up without parental influence (his father is on the rodeo circuit). He takes a little drink, gets involved in a little horseplay, pays lip service to the notion of petty crime, but, ultimately, comes out okay. This slight film, directed by Tim (River’s Edge) Hunter is made special by Dillon’s amazing ability to make a slack jaw and a glazed expression suggest hidden depths and inner turmoil.

  Along with Tex cohort Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillon was one of the massed ranks of Bad Boys hurtin’ and brawlin’ and weepin’ their way through Francis Ford Coppola’s fairy-tale adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1983). Dillon, Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe and Ralph Macchio were the Greasers, a band of dirt-poor, ill-educated, no-account Tulsan teens. They may have sported oilslicks on their head and cows on their backs, but these Greasers were angels with dirty faces, pure of heart and loyal to a fault. As Coppola empties vats of treacle, canonizing his cast and bathing his central characters, Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny (Ralph Macchio) in angelic hues, only Dillon’s devilish Dallas strikes the right Bad Boy chord. “If he was here, I’d probably … fall in love with him or something,” shuddered Diane Lane’s Cherry Vallance.

  Lane was suckered by Dillon’s seductive slack jaw once again in Coppola’s second Hinton adaptation, Rumble Fish. “You’re smart, Rusty James,” she told his character, “just not word smart.” The story of a nascent bad boy and his worshipful relationship with his legendary elder brother, The Motorcycle
Boy (Mickey Rourke), Rumble Fish (1983) is dazzling to behold for about fifteen minutes. After that, its black-and-white impressionism (interrupted only by the deep red of those metaphorical fish) and post–rigor mortis performances made it indispensable solely in the noggins of advertising executives and video directors who suddenly had a fresh concept to pilfer.

  A fourth Hinton adaptation, 1986’s That Was Then, This Is Now, both starred and featured a script by renaissance man Emilio Estevez. His character Mark enjoys the hoodlum lifestyle, rumbling and hustling with best bud Bryon (Craig Sheffer). Then two blows shatter the fabric of their friendship. First, their laconic mentor Charlie (Morgan Freeman) is wasted in a shootout. Then Bryon takes up with nice girl Cathy (Kim Delaney) and wants to change his no-good ways. Mark, smarting at being tossed aside, lashes out at those around them, he descends into massive sulks and plaintive cries for attention, like getting Cathy’s little brother hooked on drugs. You really notice the absence of Coppola’s melodramatic hand on this one. Director Christopher Cain’s showiest moment is when he shoots one of Mark’s miserable monologues about how he never had nothin’ or no one with the raindrops on the nearby window pane reflected on his face. Like the sea of uncried tears welling within him!

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  Snatching Matt Dillon’s Bad Boy baton was Sean Penn. Here was a guy who lived the role long after the cameras had stopped turning. He was involved in numerous public rumpuses, he did short periods of hard time and few women seemed able to resist his puppy-dog psychosis. Sean Penn was such a Bad Boy he even starred in a movie called Bad Boys (1983). In it, he played Mick O’ Brien, a criminal-minded young citizen whose purse-snatching, car-jacking lifestyle is abruptly terminated after he gets involved in a shoot-out, the end result of which is the accidental death of the young brother of Hispanic gang leader Paco Moreno (Esai Morales). Mick gets banged up in a juvenile correctional facility seething with murderers, rapists, junkies and gangbangers. In order to immediately establish himself as top dog in juvie hall, he wraps a bunch of Coke cans in a blanket, walks right up to the reigning inmate and smashes his head open.

  Mick may have communicated the fact that he’s one tough fuck but his time is ticking away fast. On the outside, Paco Moreno has sworn vengeance for the death of his brother. To this end, he rapes Mick’s devoted girlfriend, J.C. (Ally Sheedy in her big-screen debut) and commits enough blatant offenses to get himself confined behind bars. The tension mounts till finally the prisoners—desperate for entertainment and obviously incarcerated in the days before a decent basic cable package went hand in hand with a sentence—barricade the screws in their offices, turning the prison into a battleground for the Ultimate Fighting Championship between Mick and Paco. Not until Rowdy Roddy Piper interrupted They Live to stage a protracted demonstration of his wrestling prowess would a modern movie contain such a lengthy scrap. After what seems like several days of kicking, punching, gouging and scratching, Mick straddles Paco’s barely conscious body, holds a knife above his head and prepares to slam it down into the body of his enemy. As the knife hangs in the air, the other prisoners chant “Kill! Kill! Kill!” The blade descends, the chant stops and Mick looks spent. It takes a moment for the camera to pull back and reveal the knife embedded in the ground.

  For the first and, to date, only time in his scene-stealing history, Sean Penn was consistently upstaged in this movie by his wacky, pint-size sitcom smart-ass cellmate Horowitz (played by Eric Gurry, who previously performed almost the exact same role in the Al Pacino movie Author!, Author!, which was written by Beastie Dad Israel Horovitz). Going Mick’s Coke-cans-in-blanket assault one better, Horowitz wreaks havoc on a psycho called Viking (Clancy Brown) by wiring a radio to explode and leaving it in the thug’s vicinity. It’s hard to tell which is more unbearable; Viking’s screams of agony following the destruction of half his head, or Horowitz’s cackles of delight.

  * * *

  Aidan Quinn, who has a battery of nice guys, good eggs and repressed rebels to his credit, donned leathers and jump started a Harley in Reckless (1984), the Naked Gun of eighties Bad Boy flicks. Everyone’s got it in for his miserable Johnny Rourke, including his drunken dad, the fascist coach who won’t put him in. Sometimes it gets to be so much that the only thing he can do to release the tension is ride way up to the top of a hill, look down on the stinking, grey town and its little people with their little lives, suck down a brew and revel in his own charisma. In this last-mentioned activity, he is not alone. The regulation rich girl suffocating inside her pampered existence and dying for a hunk on a hog to drag her away from dullsville is on hand and she’s played by Daryl Hannah. “I’m fucking perfect and I’m sick of it,” she spits at Johnny, giving him an open invitation to cover her with axle grease. Among their more brazen exploits is breaking into the high school and scattering the personnel files around as they run wild through the corridors, laughing, kissing and shrieking to the accompaniment of Kim Wilde’s call to arms, “Kids In America.” Reckless was written by Chris Columbus who went on to direct the Home Alone movies.

  * * *

  Penelope Spheeris, known in the nineties as the director of, among others, The Little Rascals, The Beverly Hillbillies and Wayne’s World, spent the previous decade avidly chronicling the exploits of misfits and rejects on the edge of society. The Boys Next Door (1985) was a white-trash-on-a-killing-spree bloodbath featuring two Cali kids, Roy (Maxwell Caulfield) and Bo (Charlie Sheen) celebrating their graduation from high school and upcoming entry into the real world by driving around splattering strangers. Society is implicitly fingered as the true culprit.

  * * *

  Class of 1984 (1982) takes no such pains to absolve it’s eponymous antagonists. “Unfortunately, this film is partially based on true events,” warns the opening announcement. Music teacher Andrew Norris (Perry King of TV’s Riptide) turns up for his first day at Abraham Lincoln High School to find that a gang of homicidal punks have the institution in the grip of their cut-off leather gloves. They intimidate, beat and torture at will, deal drugs and run a vice ring. Norris immediately bumps heads with the leader of the gang, a suave maniac called Stegman (Timothy Van Patten of … for 100 points … too slow, TV’s The Master), who is given to leering pronouncements like “I am the future. Life is pain. Pain is everything.” Though Stegman is a prodigious enough talent to bring water to the eyes of Norris with his self-composed sonata, he’s also psychotic enough to slice up the bunnies in the biology class run by Terry Corrigan (Roddy MacDowall of … I’m going with Tales of the Gold Monkey). When the punks rape Norris’ pregnant wife, he snaps. At a school concert recital while the orchestra is sawing its way through the 1812 Overture, he wastes them, one by one, with Stegman plummeting to his death in front of a packed auditorium just as the band hits the rousing climax. That’s the second-best bit. The best is when school wimp Arthur (Michael J. Fox of TV’s … too easy) is found hanging from the flagpole.

  * * *

  James Spader, an actor normally content to stand and sneer from the sidelines, was pressed into Bad Boy mode on two occasions. In The New Kids (1985), he was the effete, drawling, platinum-coiffed, pit bull caressing, Tennessee Williams–like head of a crew of inbred, mouth-breathing troublemakers out to rub dirt in the pretty faces of new kids in town, Lori Loughlin and the never-heard-from-before-or-since Shannon Presby. In Tuff Turf (1985), he’s a rich kid hit by hard times. His relocation to the grubby side of the tracks is eased by the fact that the hot moll of the local thuglord throws herself at him. Spader’s what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here performance in the first movie is enthralling, but the second film has the edge. Not only does it require him to break sweat and engage in physical contact, but at one lunatic juncture, he has to crash a swank party and sing a heartfelt ballad. And you thought the Academy’s snubbing of Hoop Dreams was a sin …

  Jock Itch

  If the hacking up of nubile coeds in slashers can be traced to the payback fantasies of vengeful nerds, the criminalization of the athlete i
n eighties’ movies has its genesis in the same resentment. Here’s one of the great anomalies of the decade: what could be more inspiring, desirable and downright American than the prospect of young men and women engaged in the act of healthy competition? The same sporting life that regularly reduces guys like Bob Costas to blubbering wrecks was, in the cinema of teen, seen as a breeding ground for nazis, morons, sadists, rapists and enemies of freedom. How many million movies have you seen where the heavy, the tormentor of the hero, the abuser of women, the force of oppression, was the dumb jock? Emilio Estevez’s Breakfast Club sporto had to be deprogrammed via doobage before he could confront and discard the boorish, bullying side of himself. In Heathers, Christian Slater shrugs off the slaying of two football stars, reasoning that he’s rid the world of date rape and AIDS jokes. While movies like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham acted as Valentines to sport, the same marquee that trumpeted their presence also announced countless horror films and comedies that screamed “I have seen the enemy and he’s wearing the number nine jersey!” Sure, you don’t have to dirty your cuticles digging for high-profile, pro-sport teen flicks but when you come across them, be aware that they’re espousing a minority view.

  * * *

  In the 1990s any lithe and limber slice of beef who can kick over his head stands a better than average chance of winding up with his own straight-to-cable “Feet of Fury” revengefest. But back in the heady years of teen stroking, the martial arts arena was the personal province of one man. Surname: Macchio—brutal, musclebound, remorseless. First name: Ralph—timid, whimpering, puny. Put them together: enter The Karate Kid (1984). Director John G. Avildsen had, with Rocky, displayed some proficiency in telling the story of an Italian-American underdog rising to face impossible odds. Dropping back a generation and switching contact sports, he followed Daniel (Macchio), a New Jersey kid relocated to the seemingly welcoming climes of Southern California. While the physically unprepossessing new kid has enough reserves of nervous personality to win a date with a pretty classmate (Elisabeth Shue), his presence makes enough enemies to inspire an attack by students who are also members of the local karate club. They don’t just kick sand into his face; after they’ve beaten him to a bloody pulp, they rev up their motorbikes and send torrents of sand spraying into his wounds. But help is at hand. Before the karate nazis (all spookily clad in those Halloween skeleton suits) can attempt some Seagal-style eye gouging, a portly diminutive figure steps out of the shadows, and with a few deft kicks and wrist-snaps, sends the gang scampering away in disarray.