THE MOVIE OF MY LIFE PHASE ONE: Candidates for 1979

WANDA NEVADA

We lost Peter Fonda recently, and this western comedy features him as the male lead, a gambler who ends up winning a precocious 13 year old Brooke Shields in a card game.  To my shock, Fonda also directed it (the last of three he made in the 70‘s, including the absolutely stupefying counterculture sci-fi thriller Idaho Transfer).  There’s a couple of reasons why I want to watch this--it’s another in the strange line of films Shields made that kinda sexualize her before her time, and the villain is played by one of my favorite character actors of the era, Sevren Darden.  There is a plot about treasure hidden in the Grand Canyon, but I imagine this is mostly Fonda and Shields riffing off each other and....well, I’m in the mood for some Peter Fonda, and I always like digging up the more peculiar fare of an actor’s cv.

NIGHTWING

If you peruse my Twitter account, you’ll know I am rather fond of bats.  I kind of think they have gotten a bad rap and are really cute in their ways.  This film, coming as it did at the end of not one, but two film trends--the Nature Attacks and Disaster subgenres--is about a plague of vampire bats that may or may not have been conjured by a Native American curse to prevent a tribal elder from selling oil rights to an Evil Tycoon.  It’s directed by Arthur Hiller, the Oscar nominated man behind 1970's Love Story, and was apparently such an awful experience for him he stuck to comedy for the rest of his natural life.  The cast is made up mostly of character actors of the era (the closest thing to Big Names in this mess are Strother Martin and the great, still alive David Warner), and it was a pretty big bomb.  I want to see how badly the reputation of my favorite Chiropteran buddies are besmirched by this ill-advised attempt to cash in on dying trends.

1941

There are several generations who probably don’t even know this film exists....but this ‘epic’ (wedged oh-so-comfortably between Close Encounters of The Third Kind and Raiders of The Lost Ark) is the Steven Speilberg film that put some humility into him.  This wild slapsticky comedy about Los Angeles panicking over an imagined attack by Japan in the wake of Pearl Harbor was a massive disaster, made all the more disastrous because of its budget.  It’s the film that prevents him from having one of those runs that John Carpenter or Dario Argento had--Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom kind of replaced it as his big misfire, but that film didn’t crater like this film did (it was a major hit, truth be told) but trust me....this one is his Greatest Embarrassment.


MURDER BY DECREE

Bob Clark, who directed this feature, had an odd career.  You know him best for, depending on your age, Black Christmas, Porky’s or A Christmas Story...and because of those three highs, a lot of other work from his eclectic cv has fallen through the cracks.  This is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, considered by some Holmesians as the best, in which Christopher Plummer’s Holmes goes after Jack The Ripper.  It’s got a great cast (I should probably warn you that the presence of Geneviève Bujold, playing one of the Ripper’s victims, did help influence me in choosing it for the poll) and is supposedly one of Clark’s best films.  I ignored it when it was released because I wasn’t into Holmes at the time....but I’d like to correct that ignorance.

As always, go to my Twitter Page to vote.  You’ll have one week, at which point I will have to view what you chose and report on it.  This will be the last poll until November, as next month I’ll be pre-occupied with The 2019 Halloween Horrorfest, which you can still help program!

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