Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #93 Into the Night (1985)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’m deep into a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.
I’ve followed more or less a straight line in chronicling Peckinpah’s complete filmography. But I’ve been meandering sideways through Bowie’s curious career in film, hitting big milestones like The Who Fell to Earth and Labyrinth but also using this as an excuse to finally explore the oddball likes of the obscure coming of age crime drama B.U.S.T.E.D, the painfully quirky indie heist comedy The Linguini Incident and the dreadful anti-war satire Just a Gigolo.
Bowie has made some weird-ass choices as a film actor but he’s also popped up randomly in movies that no one would think of as David Bowie movies necessarily, but that he graced with God-like presence all the same. I’m talking about movies like Last Temptation of Christ, The Prestige, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Zoolander, Bandslam and today’s movie, the 1985 John Landis action-comedy Into the Night.
Less a proper motion picture than a film geek Easter Egg hunt, Into the Night was the first film director John Landis made since legendary character actor Vic Morrow and child extras Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen died on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie during a scene Landis was directing due to a malfunctioning helicopter.
After that fatal tragedy on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, a lot of people felt John Landis belonged in director jail, that infamous professional purgatory for filmmakers who have committed the unforgivable crime of directing movies that don’t make money. A whole lot more people believed Landis belonged in regular old jail jail for his literal crimes as well. These people included prosecutors who charged the hotshot director with involuntary manslaughter. Three weeks into Into the Night’s two month long shoot, Landis was ordered to stand trial in connection with the three deaths.
Hollywood felt differently, however. They weighed the deaths Landis was responsible for, directly and indirectly, against the boffo box office of Animal House, Blues Brothers, American Werewolf in London and Trading Places and decided that, as a powerful straight white man whose work had made lots money, Landis deserved another chance. Or two. Or three. Or four. Or five. Or six. Or however many it took before he proved himself unemployable and irredeemable by sinfully making lots of moves that lost money.
Into the Night resembled Peter Bogdanovich’s tragic light romantic comedy They All Laughed in gambling that a not terribly commercial trifle’s exceedingly modest charms would somehow be strong enough to make audiences looking for a laugh and some escape forget the trail of blood, violence and death trailing them and their overwhelming air of sadness and murder.
I’m not sure They All Laughed and Into the Night would have cleaned up at the box office under any circumstance, but they certainly couldn’t overcome being released in, respectively, the lingering shadow of They All Laughed star Dorothy Stratten’s brutal murder at the hands of her rage-poisoned and steroid-addled husband, a crime dramatized in the Bob Fosse psychodrama Star 80 and the horrible deaths of a veteran actor and two small children.
Landis’ directorial career would rebound commercially with safe, star-driven vehicles for Saturday Night Live alum Spies Like Us, Three Amigos and Coming To America before his career went ice-cold with the back to back flops Oscar, Innocent Blood, Beverly Hills Cop 3, The Stupids, Blues Brothers 2000, the direct-to-video Susan’s Plan and the 2010 would-be comeback movie Burke & Hare . These critical and commercial flops caused Hollywood to finally say, “Hey, didn’t that guy kill some people? Maybe we should stop giving him money to make movies.”
But Hollywood was more indulgent in the mid 1980s, when Landis was still a box office king who had not yet brought shame upon himself and his family by making a string of commercially unsuccessful films.
Into the Night casts Jeff Goldlum as Ed Okin, an aerospace engineer in a deep existential funk that renders him unable to sleep. His wife is cheating on him. Work does not engage him intellectually or emotionally. His crude, racist coworker Herb (Dan Aykroyd, doing a favor) suggests he cure his blues with a trip to Las Vegas for some carousing with painted ladies.
One lonely, sleepless night, Ed instinctively decides to drive to LAX without much in the way of a plan. His literally sleepy, dissatisfying life is turned upside down when Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer), a glamorous, sexy mystery woman who has lived hard and wild, finds refuge in his car while being pursued by four villainous Iranian heavies, including Landis himself.
Beyond cartoonish evil, the Iranians’ trademark is being mindlessly, unnecessarily and theatrically destructive, creating as much chaos and noise as humanly possible, which seems appropriate, considering that one of them directing The Blues Brothers, a much more elegant and iconic comic symphony of mindless destruction.
Ed knows that he should probably go home and try to forget his dalliance with violence and international intrigue but when danger takes the form of Michelle Pfeiffer in tight jeans at the height of her preternatural beauty and charisma it is difficult, if not impossible, for a heterosexual man like Ed to resist.
The tough-witted femme fatale leads the bored and exhausted insomniac on an eventful, episodic ramble through after hours Los Angeles and a colorful coterie of disreputable and criminal characters played by famous directors and the occasional musical icon like rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins and David Bowie. The British pop icon is prominently billed in the opening and closing credits for a role that’s both the unmistakable highlight of the film but also nothing more than a goddamned cameo. It’s not even a glorified cameo: it’s just a cameo.
Bowie gets an “And” as well as a name credit in the opening credits and is the first cast member listed in the end credits after stars Goldblum and Pfeiffer. The impossibly big name-glutted opening credits include “And David Bowie as Colin Morris” yet David Bowie as Colin Morris has about the same amount of screen time as everyone else in the cast, which is between one and three minutes.
That’s only enough time to make an impression if you’re David Bowie, who lights up the screen with a surge of electricity and star power at the height of his Let’s Dance/Serious Moonlight Yuppie Reagan/Thatcher phase with a dashing mustache, tie and fetching summer suit, oozing menace, mystery and danger.
Into the Night instantly and dramatically improves when Bowie swaggers onscreen and sticks a gun in Goldblum’s mouth.
Things just sort of happen to our weirdly underwhelming, oddly passive protagonist but Bowie is focussed and relentless in a way that energizes the proceedings. Unfortunately, Bowie’s flashy bit part ends almost as soon as it begins.
Cinematographer Robert Paynter, whose resume includes Scorpio, Superman II, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places and Little Shop of Horrors plays up the inky blackness of a Southern California night. Into the Night is so dark at times that it can be difficult to even make out what’s happening.
Paynter’s atmospheric camerawork powerfully captures the loneliness and sadness of night as it fades into the dawn. Into the Night borders on experimental in its willingness, even eagerness , to blanket its characters in near-total darkness.
Over the course of 115 shambling, shapeless minutes, Into the Night manages some sharp gags and nice scenes, like a nifty little set-piece where Ed accidentally stumbles upon a film set. The sequence where he tries to put a quarter in a pay phone that turns out to be a prop pay phone, then accidentally leans against a wall that similarly turns out to be more cinematic magic feels almost like a miniature short film.
The problem with Into the Night is that it’s yet another 1980s/1990s movie convinced that nothing is more compelling narratively than jewelry smuggling subplots. Into the Night devotes way too much of its running time to an emerald smuggling plot whose convoluted pointlessness defeats the film’s faltering comedy.
Landis is just one of a dazzling array of filmmakers whose cameos will delight cinephiles and movie buffs and have regular, sane folks asking, “Who’s that?”, “Who cares?” and finally “Why is much of the supporting cast made up of people who can’t act?”
If the sight of David Cronenberg fills you with glee, or it makes you giddy to see the Canadian fright master teamed up with Jeff Goldblum a year before they made history with The Fly you’ll get more out of Into the Night than normal people. Similarly, a bearded man saying, “Listen Bert, I’ll call you back” is only notable if you recognize that the man in question is the legendary Jim Henson, who also voiced and performed noted Bert compatriot Ernie on Sesame Street.
In jokes and a never-ending string of cameos and pop culture references elevate Into the Night, but only to the level of passable mediocrity.
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