Four Field Guides to BAM’s Massive “Indie 80s” Series
Indie 80s: Crime
By Jonathan Stevenson
The great crime movies of the1960s and 70s tended to use bad behavior as a lens on loftier social, political, and philosophical subjects. In 1967 alone, three classic movies—Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, and Point Blank—that ostensibly concerned crime emerged as deeper explorations of economic strife, racism, and existential alienation, respectively.
At the same time, though, the motives and circumstances of criminality were a career-long obsession of Hitchcock’s, the main currency of film noir, a preoccupation of French New Wave directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, and the dominant theme of Taxi Driver. And between the Manson murders in 1969 and Ted Bundy’s final capture in 1978, a durable popular fascination with charismatic killers evolved. Following the liberations of New Hollywood, it was logical that crime writ large found a place as a major cinematic theme.
Around a quarter of the fifty-plus movies in Indie 80s could be fairly characterized as crime movies. Several of the films are especially notable for telegraphing ways of thinking about crime that became very influential during the independent movie boom in the 1990s led by Quentin Tarantino, among others, and beyond.
The Coen Brothers’ feature debut Blood Simple (1984), a murder-for-hire satire, is rife with depravity, epitomized by the inimitable M. Emmet Walsh’s slow-drawling, cigarette-rolling private eye Loren Visser—a man so venal and small-minded that he cannot quite fathom how evil he is. It was through his character that the Coens established their signature blend of outré wackiness and razor-sharp sardonicism. In a delectably snide scene, Visser, wearing a canary-yellow suit and a ten-gallon hat, playing with a Zippo inscribed “Man of the Year,” slouches in a chair facing Dan Hedaya’s Julian Marty, the nightclub owner Visser is working for, who is looking at the photographs Visser has taken of Marty’s wife having all-night sex with one of his bartenders. After marveling at the couple’s stamina, and noting Marty’s distress, Visser cheerfully offers these words of comfort: “It ain’t such bad news. I mean, you thought he was colored.” Blood Simple said, very casually, that criminals lurk in or around all of us. It put both the Coen Brothers and the Sundance Film Festival on the map. The rest is film history.
Far darker is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), starring a thoroughly immersed Michael Rooker in the title role of real-life murderer Henry Lee Lucas. With the possible exception of the scene in which Henry and his pal Rube Goldberg a fat, sarcastic TV salesman to death with his own set, the movie is chillingly humor-free. Its scariest aspect is the absence of police, which amplifies the point that impulse killers who lack traditional motives are all the harder to identify, and may walk among us undetected until they strike. Toxically controversial during its release, Henry ushered in a veritable sub-genre of serial-killer flicks, which by the early 1990s became acceptable enough to attract putatively wholesome stars like Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs), Brad Pitt (Kalifornia), and Woody Harrelson (Natural Born Killers).
BAM has archly included the New York-set pulp film Vigilante (1983) in the program. It’s easy to dismiss the movie, with its asinine dialogue and laughable production values, as grindhouse trash and a knock-off of Death Wish—itself a shamelessly exploitative film—because that’s in part what it is. But in casting mainly African-American men as not just culprits but also saviors who have to a bring timid, law-abiding white guy—played by under-sung character actor Robert Forster—around to their way of thinking, it also encapsulates a key aspect of the blaxploitation phenomenon. Furthermore, the film anticipates the eclectic sensibility Tarantino showed in his own ode to the blaxploitation genre Jackie Brown (which featured Forster). Indeed, Tarantino could well have had Vigilante in mind when he made Grindhouse.
Another theme that 1980s indies plumbed was the allure that criminals hold to the law-abiding but bored citizen. From Little Caesar to Bonnie and Clyde, the subject had always been intriguing, but films like Smooth Talk, which was inspired by a Joyce Carol Oates short story, took a more intimate perspective (as did Stand By Me, less directly, a year later). Treat Williams’s Arnold Friend, a predatory drifter, seduces Laura Dern’s Connie Wyatt, a restless teenager home alone, into a dangerous jaunt that clearly but non-specifically excises her innocence, landing the film in the fertile—and realistic—middle ground between the damning transgressions of Terence Malick’s Badlands and the redeemable misadventures of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. More broadly, Smooth Talk sets the tone for coming-of-age movies—from A Bronx Tale to Brick—in which the primary mechanism, one way or the other, is crime.
Perhaps the most earnest entry among BAM’s crime group is Robert M. Young’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1983), a self-consciously subdued film starring Edward James Olmos in the title role as a Mexican cowboy chased by a massive Texas Ranger-led posse for killing a sheriff due to a misunderstanding. The film suggests the Rangers’ movement towards a brand of justice more nuanced than the traditional string-‘em-up variety. Eastwood would push back only gently with Pale Rider and Unforgiven, as revisionist westerns like this one would become the rule and not the exception. The other four movies too set trends rather than following them.