Heckerling: National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)

How do you transplant the Griswolds to Europe without losing sight of the picaresque Americana so precious to the Vacation franchise? For National Lampoon’s European Vacation, John Hughes and Amy Heckerling came up with an ingeniously simply answer – turn Europe itself into just another prize on an all-American game show. After coming first place on Pig in a Poke, the Griswolds discover that they’re not only taking home a motorcycle, a dream kitchen and a ten-year supply of car polish, but that they’ve also won an all-expenses paid trip to London, Paris and Germany. Embarking so quickly that you barely register leaving America at all, they settle right back into the comic groove of the first film, although it’s a bit brassier and broader this time around, as if to define them as Americans against Europeans, rather than waspy suburbanites against the inner cities and open fields of middle America. Similarly, there’s a more plastic, cartoony style of humour, with a few musical and fantasy sequences thrown in for good measure, that often recalls the rise of the Zucker comedies, and even develops into something like a Monty Python tribute when Chase is paired with Eric Idle in the British sequences, although all the extras we meet along the way are a bit more exaggerated and theatrical this time around as well, part of what prevents the film ever quite relaxing into the gorgeous languor of Vacation. All of which is to say that the Griswolds still feel like characters on a game show, even once they arrive in Europe – functionally dysfunctional, pooling their weirdnesses in ways that work surprisingly well – where they’re unable to ever quite get their road trip off the ground, as they find themselves perpetually crashing into one car after another, stuck on the wrong side of the street, or trapped on monumental roundabouts that spiral the peripatetic momentum of the first film into something considerably more manic, kinetic and absurd. Of course, the absurdism was there in Vacation as well, but it’s heightened and focused here to the absurdism of American tourists in Europe, or at least the absurdism of a certain kind of American tourist family that simply transplants their own particular slice of heartland oblivion wherever they go. Not only does that cement the Griswolds as the nation’s favourite nation of four – the game show family par excellence - but it actually makes it feel as if we’ve never left America as all – as Dana Hill, playing the best version of Audrey, points out, England looks exactly like New England anyway – especially once they descend on Clark’s relatives in Germany, who are as much of an amusement park as Walley World. In perhaps the most inspired moment of the film, the Griswolds recreate the iconic dash through the Louvre in Bande a Part, as if all it took to fulfil Godard’s dream of a fully Americanised Paris – so palpable in that film in particular –  were a mass influx of credulous, conspicuous American tourists, and the Griswolds in particular, in whose hands Paris becomes a culminated New Wave cityscape, a New Wave film consummated as an American tourist spectacle, with all the sublimity and idiocy – the sublime idiocity – that they've made their own. 

Cunningham: Friday the 13th (1980)

If Friday the 13^th had done no more than cement the creepiness of summer camp as an American institution, then its shadow over subsequent popular culture would already be great indeed. But, for all its pulpy legacy and serial promiscuity, this is one of the most beautiful and elegant of 80s slasher films, as well as the most surprisingly cinephilic and classical in its allusions and assurances. In many ways, it takes its cues from Halloween, opening with a murder that occurs in the 1950s – in this case, at Camp Crystal Lake, in what appears to be upstate New Jersey – and then flashing forward to the present day, where a group of teenagers have arrived to work as camp counselsors as Crystal Lake prepares to open once again to the public. Like Halloween, too, the opening is shot in first-person, but what distinguishes Friday from its predecessor is just how far Cunningham takes that POV approach, with the action regularly shifting to the killer’s perspective, often at the most unexpected and unlikely moments. In fact, so fluid and flexible is this POV sensibility that it quickly collapses into establishing shots, as well as any shots that are even slightly off or oddly framed, along with POV shots from the various characters themselves, conjuring up a synthetic, syncretic, composite perspective that’s as dissonant against this gorgeous backdrop as the camera itself, from whose movements it feels increasingly feels indistinguishable. Indeed, by about a third of the way through, there’s a sense that any camera movement somehow contains the killer’s perspective, as we’re collapsed into a roving, prehensile gazethat zooms, pans and pivots away from any discernible or imaginable body, so subliminally and effortlessly fused with your own position as spectator that the film doesn’t really have to go to any great lengths in terms of voyeuristic or sexploitative spectacle – the pleasures of looking are more than exhausted by Cunningham’s exquisitely restrained mise-en-scenes, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a dramatisation of Walden, or a pastoral interlude by Douglas Sirk. As a result, the murder scenes are quite imagistic, revolving around tableaux of intensified, penetrative looking – it’s the most indebted of all slashers to Argento – rather than extended action sequences, even as Cunningham manages to condense each death to a plosive, brutal, manifesto of gore that makes all the bodies feel like found objects, ornaments in a twisted memento mori that stakes out Crystal Lake as its canvas. Even when we are actually present at the moment of death, it feels as if we are stumbling across the body – and that we have been expertly orchestrated to stumble across the body – with the same surreal surprise and horror as the characters, as they try to envisage what kind of character, what kind of monster, could have done this. Yet because the killer never is, and never can be, in the frame – we are light years away from Jason as a character, let alone the campy, charismatic caricature of later, installment, spin-offs and crossovers – the dread refuses to affix itself to any object or subjectivity, instead building around the dark voids that Cunningham opens up at the back of the action – windows, doorways, benchtops – as you scan the far horizon for a flicker, a presence, that you suddenly, chillingly, realise is already behind you, all around you. For all Betsy Palmer's off-kilter charisma, then, Jason’s mother is slightly anticlimactic in her very appearance and embodiment, but, then again, she’s only a conduit for Jason, who’s a conduit for the camera – she merely emerges from a darkness that’s terrifying precisely because it’s lost its power to determine what is concealed and what is revealed anymore, slave to the bright point of light that gradually gathers around Jason, a tungsten orb that is somehow darker than anything we can see, anything we can feel, in this beautiful, mercurial, eviscerating offering. 

Ramis: National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)

For anyone interested in the tone and texture of middle America in the mid-80s, it’s hard to beat National Lampoon’s Vacation, the first and funniest adventure with the Griswolds, an all-American family who embark on a road trip from the Chicago suburbs to California to visit Walley World, a loose version of Disneyland, the destination of John Hughes’ short story Vacation ’58, which formed the basis of his screenplay. At the head of the family is Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), followed closely by Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo), their children Rusty (Anthony Michael Hall) and Audrey (Dana Barron) and a whole host of family members, friends and locals they meet along the way, most memorably Ellen’s cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) and his daughter, Vicki, played by a very young Jane Krakoswki. By far the most mobile of the Vacation series, the action rarely stays in one place for very long, as the Griswolds move from attraction to attraction, in what often feels like a paean to roadside America, a vanishing heartland that’s captured in a series of beautiful, breathtaking aerial shots of highways, usually as they detour and loop around cities, paving the way for the incredible roller coaster sequences that ensue once the family arrive at Walley World and find they have the park to themselves. Of course, that also means that we don’t actually see many cities, since this is the kind of family who’ve spent their whole life avoiding actual urban cores, even or especially when they’re traversing the entire country, carrying a suburban lens with them wherever they go, which colours the entire film in turn with a pastel postcard palette, attuned to the minutiae of motor courts, drive-in diners, gas stations and campsides, as well as  a correspondingly mild, gentle comic style that makes the more audacious moments feel even more perfectly and shocking pitched by comparison. In large part, that’s down to Chase – after Caddyshack, this is the role that really defined his comic style – who puts in a performance of such self-effacing mildness that his sliminess really takes you by surprise, seduces you before you even know what’s happened, with the same implausibility that conjures up Christie Brinkley in every other scene as a fantasy he can’t quite be bothered to pursue. Modern fratcoms are so dominated by manchildren, sex addicts and self-referential bromancers that it’s quite striking to encounter a comedian who’s so normal, so vanilla, so whitewashed in his sliminess, as well as so obliviously, complacently and kind of lazily content, for the most part, with his role as nuclear family patriarch, which in Chase’s hands feels more viscerally and skin-tinglingly creepy that the most ostensibly outrageous of contemporary comedians. Discovering perverseness in mildness was his particular gift – he barely ever changes the tone, volume or inflection of his voice – a gift that he extends to his whole family here, who are totally twisted, but in a surprisingly mild, manageable kind of way that makes watching the film a kind of sublimation, a continual – imperfect – forgetting of how screwed up it all really is. In recent years, there’s been a move towards recreating the Vacation spirit, firstly with films like We’re The Millers and then with the actual Vacation remake, but watching the original is to bask in a calm that is perhaps not possible to really capture again in such a frenzied, post-cinematic environment, at least not as oddly, obliviously and perfectly as it is here. 

Fellini: La Città Delle Donne (City of Women) (1980)

Few directors are as robust in their sense of fantasy as Fellini, so witnessing his fantasies collapse in on themselves as catastrophically as they do in City of Women is something of an experience. Culminating his episodic, spectacle-driven output of the 70s before his return to narrative with And The Ship Sails On, it features Marcello Mastroianni as a kind of smutty everyman who stumbles into a rural society run exclusively by and for women. As he’s led through one surreal, convulsive tableau after another, he’s forced to confront his relationship with his mother, his lovers and women in general, although it doesn’t exactly feel as if Fellini is updating his orgiastic mise-en-scenes for a feminist climate, despite the claims of some contemporary critics. If anything, the film is fairly hostile towards feminists and the women’s liberation movement, cariacturing and conflating them with an emergent teen subculture from which Fellini is clearly alienated, most spectacularly in a scene in which Mastroianni finds himself surrounded by a heaving, lurching disco music video as he gazes wistfully on a rapidly receding cinematic past. What is striking about this feminist utopia-dystopia, however, it that it proceeds by turning Mastroianni and Fellini’s lascivious gazes back upon themselves, as if the most radical – and terrifying – thing about the feminist movement, from a cinematic standpoint, were the way in which it denaturalised the pleasure men take in looking at women. For Fellini, that pleasure has always been utterly synonymous with the pleasure of watching a cinema screen, or of watching the world full stop, with the result that City of Women feels like a devolution of cinematic fantasy more than anything else, a forerunner of Inland Empire in the way its fantasies become more free-floating, abstracted, rarefied, taking us to what often feels like the very edge of Fellini’s cinematic universe. In large part, that reflects the sheer auteurist ambition of Fellini’s sets and mise-en-scenes, the most plastic and artificial in his career to date, which is really saying something, albeit not surprising either, since auteurism often feels like precisely what is at stake here. As Mastroianni moves through the film, the backdrops become increasingly larger and more elaborate while relegating him more and more to their very peripheries, blank zones where diegetic and non-diegetic space and light collide, contiguous to the mass audiences of women that recur in most of the mise-en-scenes but never exactly identified with them either. From massive roller-rinks to greenhouse bedrooms to underground amusement parks, these spaces are less concerned to disguise their theatricality than anything else in Fellini’s career to date, which would possibly make for a largely theatrical experience were Fellini’s camera not so fluid, flamboyant and downright crazy, as if to keep that fantastic cusp between spectator and spectacle as mobile and magical as possible, as Mastroianni tries to decide whether to inhabit or elude it. Even when he’s placed squarely in the middle of the action, there’s such a perverse plasticity and monumental artificiality to Fellini's set design of that his wry naturalism – his most naturalistic performance to date – feels more and more peripheral, which is perhaps why his smutty potency gradually gives way to a succession writhing, infantile, polymorphous gestures, powerless in the face of ever more remote feminist dominatrixes, culminating with him being tucked up in bed and subjected to a retrospective of the greatest sado-masochistic icons of the silent era. For all that And The Ship Sails on ushered in a gentler, more elegiac phase of Fellini's career, then, there is a kind of finality about City of Women – it is apocalyptic in its vision and intensity, an experiment in creating the last film that, at moments, feels as if it has somehow, bizarrely, succeeded. 

Medak: The Changeling (1980)

Although the early 80s witnessed the slasher film go mainstream, one of the first and most beautiful horror films of the decade was emphatically not a slasher film, but a gorgeous throwback to the atmospheric B-movies of the 40s and 50s. Like so many of those films – especially those made under Val Lewton – The Changeling is essentially about the relationship between a character and a space, in this case renowned composer John Russell (George C. Scott), who moves into an old house in Seattle following the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter in New York. Although the house appears to be set on a regular suburban block, its massive Victorian Gothic edifice quickly dislocates it from the surrounding streets and city, as it starts to communicate with Russell through a variety of sonic and musical devices, from the piano in the downstairs parlour room to a music box that he discovers in the attic. As Russell investigates and explores this endless, labyrinthine structure with the assistance of his property agent, Claire Norman (Trish Van DeVere, Scott’s actual wife at the time), director Peter Medak crafts a kind of object lesson in the music of suspense, a tribute to  suspense as a classical art, a symphonic co-ordination of sound and image that’s folded quite subliminally into Russell’s latest symphony, which becomes indistinguishable from the haunted spaces in which he is composing it. In part, that’s due to Medak’s gorgeous camera, whose movements are always a little too fluid or a little too spacious to feel as if they’re tethered to Russell’s perception, but too curvaceous and anamorphic to feel omniscient either, instead poising themselves at the receding threshold between Russell and the house, swivelling around the enormous, endless staircase that acts as echo-chamber and opening up great glissandoes of space with a precision and patience that often makes it feel as if the film is shot in slow motion. Whereas contemporary slasher films tended to alternate between suspense and shock, here shock is entirely subsumed into suspense, with the horror emerging gradually and wholistically, much like Medak’s incredibly detailed, deep-focus compositions, which seem to seek out and isolate the most eccentric and exotic aspects of any space, even when we venture outside the house. Admittedly, venturing outside might initially seem unnecessary and even undesirable, but part of the pleasure and surprise of the film is the way in which this languorous, peripatetic curiosity – a very spatial curiosity – segues effortlessly and brilliantly into neo-noir in the third act, as we sink into something like a cold case - or at least a cool case – that uncovers a deep past to Seattle, a Pacific Northwest answer to Vertigo, in the spirits that flit in and out of Russell’s cupboards and chandeliers. Shrouded in the cool, moody textures of a cityscape that’s cloudy all year round, George C. Scott never felt quite so rarefied as among these wanderings and wonderings, never quite so attuned to the autumn of his years – every look, phrase and gesture is musical in its understatement, vibrating in perfect unison with Medak’s directorial vision.