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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 08/17/2024 [TheJamesMadison]

John Landis

John Landis was one of those young, bearded guys who took Hollywood by storm starting in the 70s on, alongside other filmmakers like Scorsese, Spielberg, and de Palma. He was brash, bringing anarchy to comedy with a gritty visual aesthetic endemic to 70s filmmaking, and he went from success to success to success with Animal House to The Blues Brothers to Trading Places, being key in helping to create the movie star that was Eddie Murphy.

And then Landis took the golden opportunity of his career already marked by little more than success: working with Steven Spielberg on a Twilight Zone movie. There was no producer to work with more than Spielberg in the 80s. He helped secure the careers of people like Robert Zemeckis and Joe Dante. Working with Spielberg was the path to a golden future, and John Landis managed the set where a botched special effects sequence involving a helicopter and firing mortars at night with two child actors who shouldn't have been there (the production was skirting child labor laws by paying them under the table) in the middle of the night. The mortar misfired, hitting the helicopter, and the aircraft fell from the sky, decapitating Vic Morrow and Myca Dinh Le before the helicopter fell on Renee Shin-Yi Chen, killing her instantly.

The trial coming out of the accident defined Landis' career from then on out. It took several years to be heard (the accident was in 1982 while the trial start in 1986, lasting 9 months), and there are tales of him getting into fights with his stars (most notably Chevy Chase on Three Amigos and Eddie Murphy on Coming to America) over talk about the trial. At the end of the trial, he was acquitted (as well as George Folsey, Landis' regular producer, Dorcey Wingo, the pilot, Dan Allingham, the production designer, and Paul Stewart, the explosives expert). The rampant ambition evident in the huge chase of The Blues Brothers was gone, never to return.

Perhaps he should have never been allowed near a film set again, but he kept working regularly for more than twenty years until his final feature film in 2010, Burke and Hare. There was a uniformity to the quality of his earlier films before the accident, as well as a burgeoning voice, but afterwards the most he could do was be a tool for others like Eddie Murphy. His career probably should have been over, but it was at least deeply diminished. That's not to say that all of his films after the accident are bad (Three Amigos and Coming to America, in particular, are worthy of note), but they feel rarer and more to do with other people than him.

So, that leaves the question of who he was as an artist? I know that I'm talking about him in the past tense, but the man is still alive. I just don't expect him to ever make another movie. Like Clint Eastwood (Juror #6 is already done filming) or Joe Dante (Little Shop of Horrors starts filming next month) or Terry Gilliam (he just secured funding for The Carnival at the End of Days), you know?

Pre-Accident

Most of the films that people know Landis for (not necessarily his most well-known films) come from before the accident, namely Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and An American Werewolf in London. There are competing authorial voices across most of them except Werewolf where he was sole writer as well as director. Animal House is as much an Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis movie, The Blues Brothers was birthed from the insanity that is Dan Aykroyd, and Trading Places was a director-for-hire job that largely became dominated by Eddie Murphy. However, through it all there was a brewing sense of direction through it all. It was essentially anything for a laugh.

From Schlock to Trading Places, whether amateurish in execution (Schlock), purely chaotic in effect (The Blues Brothers), or surprisingly restrained and, aside from vulgarity and nudity, feeling like it could fit in the 30s (Trading Places), Landis was demonstrating a seriously underlining of anarchic humor. The two most potent and obvious examples are Animal House and The Blues Brothers.

Animal House is largely the brainchild of Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller, writers for different forms of National Lampoon, distilling their college experiences, heightening them for comic effect, and then Landis injecting an anarchic energy to the filmmaking, especially in its finale, to push the comedy to absurdist heights. The Blues Brothers operates on a similar level but being born from the insane mind of Dan Aykroyd (they share writing credits because Landis cut down Aykroyd's rambling 400 page script to something more manageable). It's an ever-increasing escalation and chase as things rise in absurdity until we can accept a car falling straight down thousands of feet because it flew off a bridge a few dozen feet off the ground.

A note about these films and the then-state of Hollywood: None of these movies were particularly expensive to make. Animal House cost $3 million. The Blues Brothers was actually pretty expensive at $27 million. His sixth film, the Eddie Murphy starring Trading Places, cost $15 million. These budgets weren't exploding (The Blues Brothers was pretty big for the time), and they weren't shoehorning Landis into sequels, and this was right about the time that franchising of Hollywood was really beginning (First Blood was released in 1982 and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 was released in 1985). He was going from original production to original production (well, as original as an adaptation of a Saturday Night Live skit can be), and he still had to beg for years for the $6 million to make his best film: An American Werewolf in London.

The Height of His Power

An American Werewolf in London is pure Landis. He wrote it. He formed a production company, Lycanthrope Films Limited, with his regular producer, George Folsey, to fund it. He directed it. He had about as total control over the film as he could. It was also something of a gamble. The horror/comedy mashup was still relatively untested at the time (they date back to the silent era with Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary while James Whale helped push the Universal Monster franchise in that direction starting with Bride of Frankenstein and ending with the Abbott and Costello mashups that leaned much more towards the comedy than the horror), so it was seen as something of a risk.

There were two defining features to Landis' early career to me. The first was the embrace of anarchy, and the second was a deep love of the films of his youth, all manner of schlocky nonsense from the Universal horror franchise to Godzilla films to screwball comedies. It was in London where his love of Universal horror movies comes out, taking heavy, direct, and acknowledged inspiration from The Wolf Man (the movie gets mentioned and described in some small part within the film). This is Landis making an updated version of a film he loved, embracing sex and gory violence at a level in the 80s that Universal would never have been able to approach in the 30s.

And it's a technical treat. The most famous part is the werewolf transformation which won Rick Baker the inaugural Academy Award for Best Makeup which is painful to watch and really effective. However, the movie is more than that. In my review, I called it mere genre (a term that Mark Andrew Edwards objected to) because I saw it as a highly accomplished genre exercise without much of an emotional core, finding the emotional elements thin, too thin for what the film wants to deliver.

That being said, it shows Landis at his purest, at his most in control. There's violence portrayed on screen that was captured rather irresponsibly (making unsuspecting bystanders think a real animal attack was going on), technical skill, and an overall aping of what came before, packaged well. And it made about $60 million at the box office. That's not The Blues Brothers money, but it was Landis taking the risk himself and it paying off. He really was on top of the world.

And he followed that up with Trading Places, one of the first three films that Eddie Murphy made as a movie star, having a good hand in launching Murphy into superstardom (Walter Hill and Martin Brest probably deserve a bit more credit with 48 Hrs. and Beverly Hills Cop respectively).

Post-Accident

And then Landis mismanaged the set of his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. He was caught in a legal process for several years after that, finding work as he went, even getting what he described as something of a passion project off the ground (Into the Night which is...it's not good). And it's obvious that he'd had his wings clipped. For all that you can say about his culpability on that set or about his unusual behavior afterwards (he reportedly showed up to one of the children's funerals and started screaming about how film is forever), it was obvious from the start of his post Twilight Zone career that his energy was gone. The voice that he had been developing was simply never going to come back.

This is not to imply that everything he made after 1983 is without worth. Some fan favorites were made in the late 80s and early 90s, movies I very much enjoyed like Three Amigos, Oscar, and Coming to America, but the energy was just...different. They feel generic in ways that his early films do not. It's the difference between gritty reality of cars smashing into each other in The Blues Brothers and the clean sets of what should be a rugged, poor Mexico in Three Amigos. It's the frantic editing of the toga party in Animal House compared to letting Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall be funny as the camera runs in Coming to America.

Into the Night is supposed to be this thriller as Jeff Goldblum rescues Michelle Pfeiffer but just keeps wanting to go to bed. Spies Like Us just feels like the comedy is poorly filmed. Innocent Blood is another bore. And things really don't get a whole lot better, and it's always feeling like when he's doing things for himself (Into the Night and Innocent Blood in particular), he's falling on his face. When he does things well, it's because he's taking a backseat to larger personalities (Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, mostly) who can dominate the film while Landis mostly just manages the set. He went from a comic filmmaker with real drive to a studio director, just there to make sure sets kept moving through pages.

It's really hard to talk about Landis' career without the accident because the accident is this large dividing line between when he was interesting and when he stopped being interesting.

The Final Stages

He did work with surprising consistency through the 90s, directing the third Beverly Hills Cop film at the behest of Murphy (though the two had gotten into a falling out during the filming of Coming to America for different reasons depending on the source). The Stupids was an unfunny adaptation of a short series of children's picture books. Blues Brothers 2000 could have been something of a return to form, but Universal was overbearing during the production. It's also obvious that Landis' heart was in nothing on screen except the musical numbers, even the big car crash feeling rote rather than energetic.

The experience of making the Blues Brothers sequel was so bad for him that he went off immediately after with one million dollars to make an independent film, Susan's Plan, a Coen Brothers-esque black comedy crime film that's pretty easily his worst effort, the sort of product that a man who'd been making movies for decades should be unable to produce at that low level. His career seemed to be over at the feature film level until he got an offer from Ealing Studios in England to make a blackly comic film about the Burke and Hare murders (it's...fine).

And then the offers stopped coming. Max Landis, his son, created a minor career as a screenwriter through the 2010s (his first credit was actually on an episode of Masters of Horror that John directed and co-wrote), and during one of his manic efforts at promotion, he would tell of how his father could get meetings in Hollywood as the director of things like The Blues Brothers but that he couldn't get a dime to make a movie. It's a similar situation that Orson Welles found himself in, executives would love to talk to the man who made Citizen Kane, but they wanted nothing to do with his projects.

So, it seems like Landis' criminal negligence (that he was acquitted for) finally caught up with him. It just took decades of decreasing results at the box office and artistically for it to happen.

Man, Hollywood is a scummy place. Glad I don't live there.

What Makes a Man Filmmaker?

Landis is one of those filmmakers that it becomes impossible to separate the man from the art at a certain level because his actions as a man had a very appreciable affect on his art. If you want to completely divorce the discussion from the Twilight Zone incident, you stop talking about his career when it reaches 1982. If you want to go on, you have to bring it up because it explains so much of the difference in simply how he made movies after that.

I prefer what came before. I like some of what came after, but what came after includes Beverly Hills Cop III and Susan's Plan. His earlier films felt like they were coming from a fairly unique place, even if you could easily see the influences of people like Reitman, Murphy, or Aykroyd. The movies after hinge entirely on whether other talent cared at the time.

Oh well, at least Oscar was a surprising delight. Seriously, I doubt many of you have seen Oscar. It's a 30s screwball comedy and works really well. Check that out.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Alien: Romulus

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Spies Like Us (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's deeply uneven, but funny and amusing enough. Just barely." [Library]

Three Amigos! (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It flows well. It's got winning performances. It works as a comedy. I'm not sure what Ebert was talking about, to be honest." [Library]

Coming to America (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, I really like the first two acts. They're colorful, fun, and really quite funny. They allow space for Murphy and Hall to provide laughs all while laying the groundwork for a third act that really just goes through the motions." [Library]

Oscar (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Really, this is something of a delight. It's light and fun and fast. It recalls the best of the 30s and 40s screwball era (the casting of Eddie Bracken in a small role as a stuttering snitch feels like a nod to Sturges), and I think it honestly deserves better." [Library]

Beverly Hills Cop III (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "So, it's all just dead weight. No one cares. The plot is threadbare and gets forgotten for long stretches. Murphy, the comic center of the film, is completely uninterested in being funny." [Paramount+]

Blues Brothers 2000 (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "This is not the complete and utter disaster I thought it would be." [Library]

Susan's Plan (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "I mean, this is embarrassing. This is terrible. This is Landis' low point." [Library]

Burke and Hare (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "So, it actually has a good bit of charm, but it mostly comes from the smaller elements. It is an interesting look at an underserved bit of history." [Kanopy]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 9/7, and it will talk about the films directed by Orson Welles.