LIFE Movies of the 1980s: A Look Back at the Decade's Best Films

By The Editors of LIFE

Travel back to the future with dozens of 1980s favorites

Before the internet, in the days of Rubik's Cubes, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Wall Street's booms and busts, movies captured the spirit of our times. Now you can revisit those great films with LIFE Movies of the 1980s, packed with glowing photos and behind-the-scenes stories from the pages of Life magazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Oct 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781547840076

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Introduction

An Era All its Own

The colorful pre-Internet 1980s gave us a run of classic movies, many of which remain cultural touchstones evoking a time, a place, and most of all, a feeling

PARAMOUNT PICTURES/EVERETT

"I just wanted to make a movie where people would say he’s a responsible director who came in under budget and under schedule," Steven Spielberg, shown here setting up a shot for 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, told Empire magazine. The director had just come off the overblown 1979 comedy 1941 and was desperate to jump-start his career.

In the go-go 1980s, an uneasy nation faced the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the AIDS crisis, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Wall Street’s erratic booms and busts. But there was considerable comfort in the pop-cultural pleasures of new wave music, Brooke Shields’s Calvins, the Rubik’s Cube, The Cosby Show—and, of course, the movies. Oh, the movies! In those long-ago days when an apple was a piece of fruit, digital referred to fingers, and the Internet was virtually (no pun intended) unheard of, we stood in line to see Michael J. Fox travel Back to the Future, Tom Cruise make All the Right Moves, and Eddie Murphy morph from New York comic to Beverly Hills Cop.

With apologies to Bob Dylan, the times they were a-changin’—and so were the channels. Pop prophets saw future profits in an upstart cable network known as MTV. Broadcasting nothing but music videos at a time when most bands didn’t actually make music videos, it confounded its critics by becoming the decade’s definitive influence on popular culture. Its relentless emphasis on sex, speed, and spectacle quickly transformed fashion, politics, and mores—not to mention cinema, which adopted its fast cuts and focus on propulsive hit songs. (Think Flashdance, Top Gun, and Footloose.)

In the end, the revolution was televised—and TV, in turn, influenced film . . . often to attract the young and the restless. (The eighties, said original MTV VJ Nina Blackwood, were a celebration of youth.) Sure, 1980s movies have been called escapist fantasies cynically tailored to kids—teenage males, in particular—but that perspective is ultimately simplistic. The 1982 fantasy classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is, for instance, arguably Steven Spielberg’s most personal film; Back to the Future (1985) was inspired when one of its screenwriters discovered his father’s high school yearbook and wondered if they would have been friends; and Ghostbusters (1984) was Dan Aykroyd’s homage to his recently departed best friend, John Belushi. That film also reflected a new brand of mainstream movie humor inspired by the underground comedy of the 1970s—specifically the success of Saturday Night Live.

You’ll find all of these films—and more—in this book. Our focus on four major influences on the decade’s cinema (teen angst, music videos, edgy comedy, and retro escape) means that some of the decade’s memorable stars don’t appear: Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Debra Winger, Kevin Costner, Jodie Foster, Michael Douglas, and Richard Gere are missing here. Same with stone-cold classics like Tootsie, Die Hard, Raging Bull, Platoon, and Blue Velvet—to name a few. But the nearly two dozen films in the following pages all helped define a celluloid era unique in its many virtues—with movies that remain just as funny, touching, and thrilling three decades later.

JOYCE RUDOLPH/© PARAMOUNT PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Scenes from a bountiful decade (above and following), Steve Martin and John Candy in 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles

COLUMBIA PICTURES/EVERETT

Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita in The Karate Kid, Part III

© COLUMBIA PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Meg Ryan in 1989’s When Harry Met Sally

Chapter One

The Teen Decade

Too young to have faced the public crises of Vietnam and Watergate, adolescents in the 1980s found their far more private problems reflected at the movies