1980 Week: The Blue Lagoon

          Originally published in 1908, Henry De Vere Stacpole’s romantic novel The Blue Lagoon has been adapted for movies and television several times, but the 1980 version is the most notorious. Starring model-turned-actress Brooke Shields, who was 14 at the time of filming, the picture attracted a fair amount of controversy because Shields’ character appears nude throughout most of the fable-like story about two shipwrecked children who become sexually active young adults during the years they spend alone on a tropical island. Even though it’s plain watching the film that body doubles were used and that Shields’ hair was strategically draped during many scenes, there’s no escaping the way the actress is sexualized in every frame. (Costar Christopher Atkins is objectified the same way, but he was over 18 when he made the picture.) The Blue Lagoon and 1981’s critically panned Endless Love represent the apex of Shields’ early film career, during which her target audience seemed to be pedophiles.
          Yet one gets the impression that Randal Kleiser, the producer-director of The Blue Lagoon, saw the movie as a poetic tribute to innocence, love, and nature. He even hired one of the industry’s best cinematographers, Nestor Almendros, to fill the screen with rapturous images of beautiful young people cavorting on pristine beaches and swimming with fantastically colored wildlife in crystal-clear waters. Had Kleiser realized his vision, The Blue Lagoon could have been sweet and touching. Alas, because Kleiser cast his lead actors primarily for their looks—and because he inherited all the creepy baggage from Shields’ previous films—Kleiser ended up making the equivalent of softcore kiddie porn.

          After a passable first hour during which the vivacious British actor Leo McKern plays a sailor who washes ashore with the children and teaches them basic survival skills, the movie takes a nosedive once Atkins and Shields commence performing the lead roles. Each has decent moments, but more often than not, their acting is laughably amateurish. This makes the story’s incessant focus on sex seem puerile instead of pure. Concurrently, Kleiser’s indifference toward promising plot elements, such as the presence of brutal savages on the far side of the lovers’ island, means that repetitive shots of naked frolicking dominate. Still, the promise of naughty thrills often generates strong box office, and The Blue Lagoon did well enough to inspire a sleazy knock-off (1982’s Paradise, with Phoebe Cates), a theatrical sequel (1991’s Return to the Blue Lagoon, with Milla Jovovich), and a made-for TV remake (2012’s Blue Lagoon: The Awakening, broadcast on Lifetime).

The Blue Lagoon: LAME

Candleshoe (1977)

          “I ain’t depressed,” tough street kid Casey explains. “I’m delinquent. There’s a difference, you know?” Had all of Candleshoe, the live-action Disney flick that tells Casey’s story, risen to the droll level of this dialogue, the movie would have been much more entertaining. Alas, the passable film coasts on the strength of glossy production values and skillful performances as the filmmakers substitute unnecessarily intricate plotting for actual storytelling. Based on a novel by Michael Innes, Candleshoe is one of those Disney pictures that twists itself into narrative knots while trying to generate an offbeat spin on a familiar formula. At its core, the movie presents the standard Disney gimmick of a wild kid becoming tame thanks to the acceptance of a loving family. Yet Candleshoe also includes con-artist schemes, an elaborate heist, a kidnapping angle, sweet kids attending to a dotty aunt, transatlantic travel, and a vivacious butler who masqueredes as different people in order to convince his employer that her estate is still solvent. Candleshoe only rarely breaks from the exhausting work of providing exposition long enough to offer such simple pleasures as slapstick and verbal comedy. So, while the movie isn’t bad—since it’s harmless and moderately intelligent—it’s leaden and slow when it should be light and speedy.

          Anyway, Jodie Foster, at her precocious best, plays Casey, an American street kid living in a dingy foster home. One evening, she’s “purchased” by English crook Bundage (Leo McKern). Turns out Casey vaguely resembles the long-lost niece of a wealthy Brit, Lady St. Edmund (Helen Hayes). Bundage hopes to insert Casey into Lady St. Edmund’s estate, Candleshoe, so Casey can find a buried treasure. Casey agrees to pretend she’s the long-lost niece in exchange for a cut of the take. Yet once Casey arrives at Candleshoe, she falls in love with the family—Lady St. Edmund; her resourceful butler, Priory (David Niven); and several children. Meanwhile, Casey discovers that Candleshoe is bankrupt, so she joins in with family schemes to keep the place afloat without revealing the financial trouble to Lady St. Edmund. Inevitably, some moments in Candleshoe are charming,simply because the actors are so good. Hayes provides warmth, Foster provides spunk,McKern provides menace, and Niven provides wit. Yet Candleshoe trudges when it should soar, never taking flight until the moderately entertaining slapstick-fight finale.

Candleshoe: FUNKY

The Omen (1976) & Damien—Omen II (1978)

          A massive box-office hit feeding the public’s post-Exorcist appetite for supernatural horror but opting for cartoonish violence over gut-wrenching realism, The Omen is fabulously entertaining nonsense. The film’s premise remains tantalizing even after years of underwhelming sequels and retreads, Jerry Goldsmith’s powerful score set the template for myriad lesser imitations, and some of the creatively staged deaths in the picture have entered the horror-cinema pantheon. So even though The Omen has undoubtedly lost much of its power to shock, the film’s shameless entertainment value survives. Like the previous year’s Jaws, the first Omen movie is a textbook example of pulp disguised as prestige thanks to glossy stars and impressive production values. (Among other parallels, Goldsmith acknowledged that the iconic score John Williams created for Jaws was an influence on his work for The Omen.) Yet while critical admiration for Jaws has only grown over the years, time has put The Omen in its proper place as a guilty pleasure.
          Here’s the backstory. Producer Harvey Bernhard saw dollar signs when a clergyman acquaintance pondered what might happen if the antichrist emerged in modern times, so Bernhard commissioned a script by David Seltzer and hired promising director Richard Donner (the success of this picture earned Donner a choice gig helming 1978’s Superman: The Movie). The story that Bernhard and his collaborators contrived involves American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who adopts a mysterious infant after his own son is stillborn. The ambassador unwisely hides the truth from everyone, including his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), but once young Damien (Harvey Stephens) reaches his seventh year, things get messy. People around the child die gruesomely, raising Thorn’s suspicions, and then a crazed priest tries to convince the ambassador his “son” is an inhuman beast sired by a jackal.
          The beauty of the premise, in terms of generating spooky excitement, is the implication that Satan has both an endless supply of minions and nearly limitless power. Furthermore, the biggest challenge to embedding the antichrist in society is the possibility that someone might take Damien out before he’s old enough to defend himself. That last bit creates a potent moral dilemma for Peck’s character.
          Even though the plot crumbles under scrutiny, the movie’s operatic death scenes are enjoyably preposterous (“It’s all for you, Damien!”), and the made-up mythology (e.g., “the seven daggers of Meddigo”) casts an engrossing spell. Peck anchors the picture with anguished determination, while Leo McKern is memorably intense as the dude who says Damien’s gotta die, David Warner adds an enjoyable presence as a conspiracy-minded photographer, and Billie Whitelaw is all kinds of creepy as Damien’s nanny. With respect to Donner, who manages pace and tone expertly, and DP Gilbert Taylor, who provides a master class in the use of filters, the movie’s VIP is Goldsmith. His Oscar-winning score uses eerie chants such as “Ave Satani!” (Latin for “Hail Satan!”) to infuse the picture with palpable menace. His music is the film’s dark heart.
          One could argue that the picture’s first sequel, Damien—Omen II, actually makes more narrative sense than its predecessor, inasmuch as teenaged Damien’s circumstances seem better suited to future global conquest; Damien (played in the follow-up by Jonathan Scott-Taylor) accepts his destiny while being raised by his uncle (William Holden), a corporate giant whose empire the antichrist stands to inherit. Alas, Damien is less exciting than the previous picture. It’s not as if Bernhard and co. suddenly decided to take the franchise seriously, but director Don Taylor lacks Donner’s crowd-pleasing flair and Holden, though always watchable, is very much in paycheck mode, whereas Peck committed to the silliness of The Omen. Having said that, the perfectly cast Scott-Taylor is quite disturbing as he grows more and more comfortable in his unholy skin, and the death scene involving an icy lake is genuinely frightening; the scene might even surpass the gruesome kills that made the first Omen notorious. One great scene, alas, does not make a great picture. Neither does behind-the-scenes turmoil. British director Mike Hodges was discharged partway through production and replaced with American journeyman Taylor.
          The original Omen series concluded with The Final Conflict (1981), a grisly installment featuring Sam Neill as grown-up Damien trying to prevent the Second Coming, although a quasi-related telefilm called Omen IV: The Awakening followed ten years later. The original film was pointlessly remade in 2006, and a dreary prequel, The First Omen, appeared in 2024.

The Omen: GROOVY
Damien—Omen II: FUNKY

Ryan’s Daughter (1970)

          The only film that venerable director David Lean made in the ’70s, Ryan’s Daughter disappointed people who were expecting something similar to Lean’s previous successes, the blockbuster epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Although Ryan’s Daughter has echoes of both earlier films, Ryan’s Daughter neither coheres as organically nor achieves the same cumulative power as Lean’s ’60s smashes. Seen with fresh eyes, however, it’s an impressive but flawed film that deserved a better reception. Set in Ireland during World War I, the picture follows the emotional journey of Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles), a small-town girl who gets everything she ever wanted and then decides she wants more, with disastrous consequences.
          In the tiny village of Kirray, Rosy marries the much-older schoolteacher Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), only to discover that marriage isn’t full of the magical romance she expected. Anguished, dissatisfied, and guilty, Rosy becomes even more confused when she meets Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), the new commandant of the British force occupying Kirray. A beautiful creature scarred with war wounds and tortured by PTSD, he’s a kindred spirit to Rosy in that neither of them feels synchronized with the rest of society, so they commence a torrid affair. Their indiscretion leads to trouble when Doryan confronts Tim O’Leary (Barry Foster), a charismatic revolutionary who enlists the aid of Kirray’s entire population for a gun-smuggling operation.
          The original screenplay by frequent Lean collaborator Robert Bolt spins an absorbing yarn, and while it’s tempting to lament that the movie is excessive at its full length of three and a half hours (including entrance, exit, and intermission music), nearly everything onscreen during those three and a half hours is artful and interesting. Lean’s methodical storytelling is wondrous, because he conveys subtle mental shifts through expert juxtapositions of images and sounds; for instance, the myriad nuances contained in the wedding-night scene with Charles and Rosy are excruciating and specific. Additionally, the Oscar-winning cinematography by Freddie Young is indescribably beautiful. Whether he’s shooting a delicately lit interior scene or a spectacular panorama of the wild Irish coast, Young fills the screen with such masterful interplays of light and texture that each shot is like a timeless painting. Even more impressively, Lean manages to make Mitchum, the quintessential macho movie star, believable as a soft-spoken pacifist.
          Having said all that, the picture has significant problems. Inexplicably, John Mills won an Oscar for his vigorous but cartoonish performance as Kirray’s village idiot, and composer Maurice Jarre opts for a distractingly arch style in several of the film’s musical themes. Worse, the characterization of Rosy’s father, Thomas Ryan (Leo McKern), is muddy at best; the second half of the story turns on one of Thomas’ actions, and his motivation is woefully unclear.
          Still, for every shortcoming, the picture has a virtue—while Thomas Ryan is poorly conceived, Kirray’s hard-driving minister, Father Collins (Trevor Howard), is a complex figure who evolves from stern to nurturing. Plus, Ryan’s Daughter has not one but two believable love stories: Rosy’s marriage to Charles is illustrated as effectively as her dalliance with Major Doryan. Ultimately, the fact that Ryan’s Daughter isn’t an unqualified masterpiece shouldn’t detract from the fact that it’s a compelling drama writ large.

Ryan’s Daughter: GROOVY