Swing Shift (1984)

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, Ed Harris

Have I Seen it Before: Never. To wit, before this last Friday, I had never even heard of the film. But there sure is something about checking into a hotel late, turning on the TV, working through whatever motion blurring difficulties you might be subjected to, hoping that the cable package includes TCM, and just going with whatever might be on.

It’s a unique way to take in a movie. There aren’t a lot of reasons to miss cable, but TCM is one of them. Aside from re-watching Romancing the Stone (1984), I didn’t get to watch nearly enough random movies from cable this vacation.

Did I Like It: There’s a thinness to the whole affair that I can’t quite get over, that’s only exacerbated after I read that the film was largely taken away from Demme in favor of Hawn, who put more focus on the relationship between her and Russell, even though neither of them are asked by any version of this film to do anything that made them objectively stars, and subjectively undeniably watchable.

What we’re left with is a distressingly tepid World War II homefront drama. Lora mentioned as she was half-falling asleep that there is almost nothing—even up to the structure of the screenplay itself—that wasn’t done during A League of Their Own (1992), and it’s hard to argue that. I’m tempted to give this film a degree of credit for getting there eight years ahead of League, but that movie obviously has more of a hook than what we’re given here, a far deeper roster of a supporting cast, and two leads in Tom Hanks and Geena Davis who are far better cast here than Hawn or Russell are in this.

I’m still glad I got to watch it, though, even if it was by accident.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

Have I Seen it Before: One doesn’t start a Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins) podcasts without coming across this one at some point in their past.

Did I Like It: Can a review of this film over thirty years after its release add anything new to the discourse about it? Probably not, aside from the need to say that whatever you remember about the film, it’s better than that memory feebly maintains.

It’s such a singular cinematic experience that our episode of Friendibals did kinda, sorta descend into an effuse-fest.

And I’m actually okay with that! The movie is that good, and stands far and ahead above any other attempt to bring the character to life, with the exception of—against all odds—the tv series Hannibal.

But after that bloom of rediscovering the film withers even slightly (it’s been several days since I screened the movie and recorded the episode), are their complaints that I can reach for?

A reflexive criticism I could see is that it, at the most basic level, implies some very not-nice things about transgender people. The film doesn’t do nearly enough (or at least as much as Thomas Harris’ novel) to make explicit that Jame Gumb’s (Levine) is a monster who thinks he is a transgender, not that trans people are akin to monsters.

That all might be forgiven, and a degree of nuance is on display here, if only the film weren’t so good that it isn’t just an extremely good way to spend two hours, but that it singlehandedly re-defined the serial killer genre through the present. We could (and I, inevitably, will) talk about the glut of Hannibal Lecter sequels and prequels we got in result to the film’s ubiquity*, but nearly every serial killer movie in the last thirty years. Just look at Instinct (1999), a movie I was only 50% certain I was remembering correctly before looking it up. Any film featuring crime of any sort absorbed the sounds, but not the language of this film. Just look at Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). There’s a mean-spirited, at best, but ultimately hatefully violent myopic discourse regarding the trans community now, and while it would be exceptionally reductive to blame that all on this film, every stunted attempt by filmmakers to give their monsters more dimension for three decades might very well have done so.

If only the film weren’t so good.

*Another thing I forgot during the podcast: In the book and in Ted Tally’s screenplay, the iconic muzzle placed on Lecter was written as a hockey mask. One could imagine why that didn’t survive to the final cut.