Blast from the Past: 15 Movie Gems from 1985

The company of wolves

Director Neil Jordan is lush Gothic fantasy horror is a haunting twist on “Little Red Riding Hood‘ adapted from a short story by Angela Carter in her anthology of fairytale reinventions, The Bloody Chamber. The central story concerns a young girl named Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) who wears a knitted red cape and encounters a mischievous hunter/werewolf (Micha Bergese) in the woods on the way to her grandmother’s (Angela Lansbury) house. There are also several embedded fairy tales that focus on the wolf, two narrated by Rosaleen and two narrated by the grandmother.

Jordan has described this structure as “a story with very different movements,” all variations on the central theme and “building on the fairy tale that everyone knows.” The production design and beautifully sensual cinematography – all realized on a limited budget of $2 million – further enhance the dreamy atmosphere. The company of wolveslike the fairy tale that inspired it, is an unashamedly Freudian metaphor for Rosaleen’s romantic and sexual awakening, in which she discovers her own power, which both frightens and fascinates her. You rarely find such a richly layered film full of symbolism and gloomy images.

Desperate for Susan

In this quintessential ’80s mistaken-identity comedy, Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) is a disaffected upper-class housewife from New Jersey, fascinated by the personal ads in the local tabloid, especially those between two free-spirited bohemian lovers, Susan (Madonna) and Jim (Robert Joy). She follows Susan one day and is hit on the head when a mafia enforcer mistakes her for Susan, who had stolen a pair of valuable earrings from another suitor, who in turn had stolen them from a gangster. Roberta develops amnesia and, believing herself to be Susan, befriends Jim’s best friend, Dez (Aidan Quinn).

Desperate for Susan is director Susan Seidelman’s love letter to the (admittedly sanitized) counterculture of Manhattan’s Lower East Side of the 1980s, peppered with guest appearances by performance artists, musicians, comedians, actors, painters, and so on from that period. The script is full of witty one-liners and a great supporting cast, including John Turturro as the owner of a seedy Magic Club, Laurie Metcalf as Roberta’s sister-in-law Leslie, and a deadpan Steven Wright as Leslie’s dentist crush. It’s light, catchy, frothy and easily Madonna’s best acting role, perhaps because she’s largely playing herself.