Christmas 1981 at the Movies

12/25/21 • 41 min

4 Listeners

On this episode, film critic and historian Edward A. Havens III takes his Wayback Machine back forty years, to look back at the movies you could have seen after Christmas dinner in 1981.

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The movies covered during this episode include (released in 1981, unless otherwise noted):

Absence of Malice (Sydney Pollack)
Arthur (Steve Gordon)
Atlantic City (Louis Malle)
Buddy Buddy (Billy Wilder)
Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson)
Cinderella (1950, Clyde Geronimi and Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson)
Four Friends (Arthur Penn)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz)
Gallipoli (Peter Weir)
Ghost Story (John Irvin)
Heartbeeps (Allan Arkush)
Modern Problems (Ken Shapiro)
Montenegro (Dušan Makavejev)
My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle)
Napoleon (1927, Abel Gance)
Neighbors (John G. Avildsen)
On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell)
Only When I Laugh (Glenn Jordan)
Pennies from Heaven (Herbert Ross)
Ragtime (Miloš Forman)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg)
Reds (Warren Beatty)
Rollover (Alan J. Pakula)
Sharkey's Machine (Burt Reynolds)
Taps (Harold Becker)
They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich)
Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam)
Whose Life Is It Anyway? (John Badham)

On this episode, film critic and historian Edward A. Havens III takes his Wayback Machine back forty years, to look back at the movies you could have seen after Christmas dinner in 1981.

----more----

The movies covered during this episode include (released in 1981, unless otherwise noted):

Previous Episode

The Orphans: Part 2

4 Recommendations

This episode continues an irregular series that takes a look back at a minor cinematic phenomenon that happened more often in the 1980s than in any other decade: the one-time-only distribution company.

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We talk about the 1985 cocaine crime drama The Texas Godfather, featuring Vince Edwards and Paul L. Smith, the 1986 comedy Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter, starring Paul Sorvino, Abe Vigoda and Lorne Greene, and the 1986 gender switch comedy Willy/Milly (aka I Was a Teenage Boy, aka Something Special), starring Pamela Segall, Patty Duke, John Glover and Seth Green.

Next Episode

The Orphans: Part 3

1 Recommendations

Today, we’ll be talking about the 1980 movie Union City, which featured the film debut of Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry, the 1981 Canadian erotic drama Head-On, which would not get released in America until 1985 and under a much different title, and the 1985 dystopian sci-fi action drama Wired to Kill, which was both one of the earliest films to star fan-favorite Tom "Tiny" Lister Jr. and be the last film to feature fan-favorite Merrick Butrick.