American Life and Movies from The Ten Commandments to Twilight by Daniel Benjamin

Author:Daniel Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC

In movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, the 1980s ushered in what has now become an expected universe of massive special effects.

Other movies made on a more modest scale also became huge hits. These included Romancing the Stone (1984) and Back to the Future (1985). In Romancing the Stone, a writer played by Kathleen Turner travels to Colombia to rescue her kidnapped sister, only to find herself in the thick of a dangerous adventure. The Back to the Future series wooed audiences with its first film, in which a high school boy played by Michael J. Fox travels thirty years back in time and meets his parents as teenagers. Horror films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) were also massively successful franchises, each with many sequels.

Even though the predominant tenor of the 1980s film making wasn’t about raising social issues, a powerful new director, Spike Lee, had great success with his funny, occasionally bitter, looks at race relations. Many moviegoers consider Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)—a film that explores the tricky and sometimes inflammatory relationships between people of different races and ethnicities—to be one of the best movies of the decade.

Though Lee ushered in a new kind of urban filmmaking, other films of the 1980s also tackled race relations in the United States. In 1985 The Color Purple was a huge hit. Adapted from Alice Walker’s novel, it depicted life for single black women in rural Georgia during the 1930s. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg and boasted a star cast including Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, and Laurence Fishburne. The film was an enormous success both critically and at the box office, and it received eleven Academy Award nominations.

Another much-lauded film of the decade was Driving Miss Daisy (1989), based on the off-Broadway play by Alfred Uhry. The plot spans nearly thirty years and depicts the friendship between Daisy Werthan (played by Jessica Tandy), a Jewish widow living in Atlanta, and Hoke Colburn (played by Morgan Freeman), an African American man hired by Daisy’s son to chauffeur her. The story also tackles the topic of prejudice against Jews and African Americans. Driving Miss Daisy was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and won four, including Best Picture. In October 2010, it was given new life as a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave (who was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of Daisy) and James Earl Jones as Hoke.

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