Orion Pictures released The Silence of the Lambs on Valentine’s Day 1991. Somebody in that office had a sense of humor.
Thirty-five years later, Jonathan Demme‘s thriller still works on every rewatch, even when you know what’s waiting at the end. If you want something for Halloween weekend that scares you without a hockey mask, start here.
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There is a moment early in Pan’s Labyrinth when a girl walks into the woods with a book under her arm and finds a stone face lying in the dirt. It is missing an eye. She has the eye. It’s a small carved stone she picked up beside the road, and she fits it back into the socket, and the forest seems to take a breath. Twenty years later, that may still be the best introduction to a fairy tale ever put on film, because it tells you everything without saying a word. Something old has been broken here, and this child has been carrying the missing piece.
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Every October the old monsters come out to play, and every October there is an argument to be made that the best Frankenstein picture of them all is the one that was played for laughs. Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein opened in December 1974, and more than half a century later it remains that rarest of things, a parody made with so much love for its source that it ends up standing right beside it.
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Forty-three years ago today, on September 21, 1983, a new David Mamet play opened in the smallest theater at London’s National Theatre. Seven men, two rooms, a lot of talking. Mamet had worked in a Chicago real estate office for a while in the late 1960s, and he wrote about it like someone who never quite got the smell of the place off his clothes. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the next year.
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Go watch it. That’s the verdict, and I’ll spend the rest of this telling you why, but I don’t want you sitting through eight paragraphs wondering whether I’m going to recommend a musical comedy about Hitler.
The Producers (2005) is a movie about two men scheming to produce the biggest flop in Broadway history. It cost forty-five million dollars and took in thirty-eight. Mel Brooks could not have written that ending himself, and God knows he tried everything else.
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The Miracle of Marcelino opens the way a lot of great fables do, with an ending. A priest is called to the deathbed of a woman he doesn’t know, and to comfort her he tells the story of a boy named Marcelino. From there the film drops back decades, to a war-scarred Spanish monastery where the friars find an abandoned infant on their doorstep. They decide, over the objections of at least one grumbling brother, to raise him themselves.
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High Noon opens on the happiest morning of Marshal Will Kane’s life. Played by Gary Cooper, Kane has just married Amy Fowler, played by Grace Kelly, and turned in his badge, ready to leave the small New Mexico town of Hadleyville behind for a life running a store. Then word arrives at the train station: Frank Miller, the outlaw Kane sent to prison years earlier, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train, with three of his old gang already waiting at the depot to meet him. Kane and Amy start to drive out of town. He stops the wagon himself, turns it around, and goes back to face what’s coming.
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out in 1979, directed by Terry Jones, written by all six Pythons together, and produced by John Goldstone, with George Harrison quietly saving the whole production by financing it himself after the original studio got cold feet and walked. Graham Chapman plays Brian Cohen, born in the stable next door to a rather more famous baby on the same night, and cursed for the rest of his short life with extraordinarily bad timing. I have loved this film for longer than I can honestly account for, and every time I sit back down with it, I’m struck again by how a movie this silly manages to also be this wise.
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