HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA! BY SANDRA HARRIS.

 

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA! 

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library.

It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen.

I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers, the Whitehouse, etc.; then the aliens turning hostile fire on the dopey peeps holding up welcome signs atop the skyscraper; and then the first appearance of Will Smith, US Marine Captain Steven Hiller, the man who’s eventually going to save the earth, and the cool way in which he realises that, today, he’s actually woken up to a global emergency. Ah well. I tried. I really did.

Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman (‘He was great in TITANIC,’ my lad tells me), Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Randy Quaid, Margaret Colin, Harvey Fierstein, James Rebhorn and Harry Connick Jr. all do a fantastic job in a film that just embodies not only Americanism at its finest (everyone working together against a common enemy), but also ‘Nineties movies and the movie industry when it was still great, before the much talked about AI got a foothold. I kind of felt like a proud American myself by the time the credits rolled…

The film I chose for my evening viewing, CAPE FEAR (1991), has only just come to Netflix, which I couldn’t be more pleased about. It stars Robert de Niro in my absolute favourite role of his- yes, I know he was in THE GODFATHER PART 2, TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, MEAN STREETS, GOODFELLAS, CASINO and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA as well! I’ve made my choice, lol.

He plays Max Cady, a brutal thug of a man who’s just done fourteen years in prison for rape and battery. He holds his lawyer, Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, responsible for his tough sentence and targets Sam, his bitchy, dissatisfied wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and sexually precocious daughter Danielle (a brilliant Juliette Lewis) in a relentless and truly terrifying campaign of revenge. Well, it’s not called CAPE FEAR for nothing, you know.

Aside from the fabulous performances, the film is notable for the inclusion of Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck from the original 1962 film, and also for the out-of-this-world musical score by Elmer Bernstein, who adapted the music of Bernard Herrmann for the movie. Herrmann, of course, did the super-memorable score for Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), with all the screeching violins and everything. 

Also, Martin Balsam, who played the ill-fated Detective Milton Arbogast in PSYCHO, is present in CAPE FEAR (1991) as the Judge who’s not at all happy with Sam Bowden for having Max Cady beaten up by three thugs instead of doing things the lawful way. The film is actually a treasure trove of American movie memories.

PS, THE SIMPSONS did a much-loved parody episode of Cape Fear, with Sideshow Bob in the Robert de Niro role, that is literally one of their best-ever shows. Several of the movie’s most iconic scenes get the Matt Groening treatment and the whole effect is just so witty and funny that it’s no wonder people often cite this episode as their all-time favourite of the long-running shows. 

On Thursday, the news broke that Michael Madsen had died of cardiac arrest in his home, aged only sixty-seven. The Chicago-born Michael was one of my favourite actors, and one of Hollywood’s greatest ‘tough guy’ movie stars, with roles in THE DOORS, RESERVOIR DOGS and THELMA AND LOUISE, all in 1991, FREE WILLY (1993) and FREE WILLY 2: THE ADVENTURE HOME (1995) and KILL BILL: VOLUME 1 (2003) and KILL BILL: VOLUME 2 (2004).

I personally think that he’ll be best remembered for his role as Mr. Blonde in Quention Tarantino’s uber-violent film about a doomed heist and the men responsible for it. Madsen’s performance is unforgettable; he does a sinister soft-shoe-shuffle to Stealer’s Wheel's iconic 1973 hit, STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU, while tormenting and taunting a tied-up cop prior to slicing his ear off with a straight razor. Once seen, literally never forgotten.

I remember buying a book of Madsen’s poems (yes, the tough guy wrote poetry, too!) in an Oxfam shop in 2011, just before the news broke that the terrorist Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Operation Geronimo, under Barack Obama’s first Presidency of America. The poems were really good too. I must dig that book out and re-read them in honour of one of America’s best- and handsomest- tough guys. May he rest in peace, and Happy Independence Day weekend to all my American Facebook friends.