1970s American Films

"In an interview looking back at the role, Weaver said: “The writers were especially smart in that they didn’t turn Ripley into a female character. She was just a character, a kind of Everyman, a young per-son who’s put in this extraordinary situation. Believe me, when we did [the sequels], I saw how hard it was to write a woman in a heroic, straight, unsentimental, authentic way.”"

"Alien has proved an ideal text for academics, a deep well – or perhaps a totem pole – of Freudian allusion from which critics and theorists have drawn whatever they fancied. Since it was first released, every frame of the film has been pored over for meaning. James Cameron’s excellent sequel, Aliens, has been studied too. (The other films in the series, not so much.) Most of this attention has been occupied by the character of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and the Swiss artist HR Giger’s terrifying design for the alien, or “xenomorph”. But the androids, the spaceship, the uniforms and even the ship’s cat have come in for analysis. In 2019, the rise of the Alien-academic complex shows few signs of slowing down."

"The 1979 film had married science fiction with horror in a way unseen since the ‘50s, reviving the monster genre, which had, for the most part, died out in the wake of Psycho’s ushering in of an era of more personal, intimate, human horror."

"Ridley Scott’s 1979 thriller was greeted with no particular fanfare by the reviewers, and if there was a critical consensus it was that the film was at best watchable pabulum-reasonably professionally handled visually and enjoyably scary, but without significant nuance to qualify for discussion as art. Jack Kroll’s comment was typical: “It’s about time someone made a science fiction thriller that thrills, that has no truck with metaphysics, philosophy or theosophy and just boils everything down to the pure ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.” Aside from its manifest violence, the only aspect of Alien that attracted much critical fire was what one reviewer called its “gratuitous sexism.”True to a two hundred-year-old tradition of gothic horror, the film relies for its most gut-wrenching effects on the spectacle of a helpless beautiful woman threatened with violence by an unspeakable, inhuman, but quintessentially masculine horror. Significantly, one scene repeatedly mentioned as a “gratuitous” injection of voyeurism involves Sigourney Weaver’s stripping down to her underwear just prior to a final attac by the alien and her subsequent blasting of the creature into space and, presumably, oblivion. The implication seems to be that Alien was overall good, clean, horrible but simple-minded fun, and shouldn’t have been compromised by random intrusions of irrelevant sex. A close look at Alien, however, reveals that not only is sexuality not occasionally intrusive in an otherwise prestine film, but that sexual symbolism and iconography of a singular kind are pervasive throughout the film and may actually be its “leitmotif”. What Alien is about is gestation and birth. The sexuality of the film has strong reproductive overtones that distinguish it from the kind of garden variety titillation of most thrillers. The centrality of the birth process to the film is not hard to demonstrate."

"The film was nominated for Best Art Direction at the Academy Award and won for Best Visual Effects. Anyone who has ever seen the notorious "chestburster" scene – which was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1944 painting [[w:Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion|Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion – will understand why Scott's special effects team, headed by Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, deserved to win."

"The premise is simple: seven astronauts working on a battered cargo spacecraft, bring something back on to the ship after touching down on a strange planet, and the alien starts preying on them."

"Make no mistake about it — the gore, which is essential to this film’s effectiveness, is excessive enough to help earn the film the first ‘R’ rating given to any of the four recent sci-fi blockbusters. Any theater playing Alien may well consider building new wings on the restrooms to accommodate queasy patrons.”"

"Alien is such a great and groundbreaking film that no amount of redundant prequels and sequels will ever reduce its luminous majesty. It will always be there as a never-to-be-improved-upon metaphor for the icy despair and inhuman horror of deep space."

"The gender politics of Alien have been grist for endless deconstruction, although “Memory” does examine a few fresh wrinkles. Philippe unpacks the feminist dimension that links the movie to other 1979 releases as different as “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Elsewhere, his subjects discuss the Alien’s stature as a Fury, an extraterrestrial manifestation of a figure from Greek mythology, exacting retributive violence on behalf of the repressed feminine. Pointedly, Philippe begins the film with a shot of the Temple of Apollo ruins at Delphi and a dramatization of the Furies, played by a trio of actresses with a few creepy Giger-esque visual enhancements. It may seem like a curious point of entry, but it reinforces that Alien is timeless, in part because it brilliantly cross-pollinated so many of our most ancient and enduring myths. Its abiding respect for the past is what gave such shattering force to its vision of the future."

"Much admiration is justly lavished on the exquisite Lovecraftian qualities of Giger’s designs, his creation of a monster whose various slime-dripping protuberances managed to be hideous, beautiful and unnervingly sexual all at once. It was Giger who gave Alien its vision. It was Scott, with just one feature (“The Duellists”) under his belt, who gave the movie its impact. To watch Alien now is to marvel at just how patient and stealthily elegant a picture it is, particularly in its first hour, with its creeping camera movements, hypnotic pacing and enveloping, womb-like sense of dread. Released today, it would no doubt feel like an art film among so many noisier, clunkier blockbusters. If Alien looks formally radical in retrospect, it was also thematically provocative in its moment: Here was a movie that turned on the audacious spectacle of a man being raped and impregnated and that gave us a (still) too-rare female action protagonist for the ages in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley."

"The horror genre, in any period, is one that you like, or leave distantly alone. The violence in Alien is less ’real’ than the shark-infested waters of Jaws. But telling yourself that these galactic goings-on are improbable nonsense is less effective than it should be in unclenching your fists or making your heart stop pounding. Surrender at all to Scott’s extraterrestrial make-believe and you are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights."

"Alien is an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production. Don't race to it expecting the wit of "Star Wars" or the metaphysical pretentions of "2001" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." At its best it recalls "The Thing", though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"A GIGANTIC construction moves serenely through space where, though the night never ends, there's always enough light to see strange objects. This one looks like the main set of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance". It's as if Babylon had been cut loose from earth to sail back through space to its own time. In actual fact, it's the cargo-ship Nostromo on its return to earth at the end of an extended voyage to the far end of the galaxy. When we go inside, the ship appears to have been as suddenly deserted as the Mary Celeste. We wander down empty corridors into abandoned living quarters, into engine rooms and, finally, into the command room where the computers are the only signs of life. The interior of the ship is vast. It contains the kind of waste space one seldom sees anymore except in some rare old Manhattan pile like the Dakota. Something decidedly eerie is going on."

"Don’t race to it expecting the wit of Star Wars or the metaphysical pretensions of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At its best it recalls The Thing (from Another World), though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"The amount of academic work that has been written about Alien is phenomenal. But in a way that should not be surprising. The film contains themes about motherhood, gender politics, post-humanism, biology and so much else. Almost everything we can do in film studies we can do through Alien."

"Weaver begins the action looking girlish and serious, but changes into the toughly self-reliant woman who defined her subsequent roles. Her career evolves before our very eyes. Interestingly, the famous, heart-stopping moment where the alien embryo jumps out of the egg happens much more fleetingly than you might remember. Scott cuts away from it quickly, leaving the negative image impressed on our retina. Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots. The idea of it starting the size of a toad, then emerging the size of a bus with multiple rows of razor-teeth is skin-crawlingly horrible."

"After 40 years, this sci-fi horror masterpiece still feels lethally contemporary. With screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Ridley Scott created an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare [parody]] of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, and the biological weapons industry."

"Alien is another triumph of technology over art. It is also a horror movie set in space — and it just doesn’t work…. Scott does make a concession to feminism by casting Sigourney Weaver as the hero but he couldn’t resist a sexist jab at the end when, with no motivation, she removes her trousers.”"

"Many, many years ago — back in 1985 — I wrote an episode of my comic strip where two women are talking to each other. They want to go see a movie and one woman says, "I'll only go to a movie if it satisfies three criteria." I have to confess, I stole this whole thing from a friend of mine at the time because I didn't have an idea for my strip. My friend Liz Wallace ... said, "I'll only see a movie if it has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man." That left very, very few movies in 1985. The only movie my friend could go see was Alien, because the two women talk to each other about the monster. But somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era and now it's this weird thing. People actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test. Still ... surprisingly few films actually pass it."

"No other horror or science-fiction film has captured the humdrum reality of doing a day’s work for a day’s pay with such accuracy. For that matter, perhaps no film of any genre has. There may be sitcoms that depict these everyday frustrations and interactions as deftly as Alien does. But in the cinema? The most authentic ever film about earning a living could well be the one with a giant, slimy, acid-blooded extra-terrestrial monster."

"The sheer normality of these interstellar wage slaves is conveyed before we even see them. At the start of the film, the crew members of the Nostromo, a “commercial towing vehicle”, are snoozing in their suspended animation pods, but one of them has left a plastic drinking-bird ornament bobbing away on a table, and there is a coffee cup on a dashboard. Then, when the ship’s onboard computer wakes them, they don’t slip into form-fitting Starfleet uniforms and hurry to their posts: they shrug on their shapeless overalls, and then sit around eating and smoking while two blue-collar engineers, Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), grouse about “the bonus situation”."

"Alien was green lit by 20th Century Fox after Star Wars proved just how lucrative science-fiction could be in 1977. The two films aren’t wholly different, either. Han Solo, a scruffy, self-centered mercenary, was one of sci-fi cinema’s first great working-class heroes, and his battered, lived-in spacecraft inspired Scott. “[Star Wars] influenced me when I did Alien,” he said later. “I thought I better push it a lot further, make [the aesthetic] feel a lot like truck driving.”"

"I’m going to attack [the audience] sexually… I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs."

"[The] plot is simple in the extreme. Alien has almost no wit, no depth of character, no complexity of plot, no subtext of meaning. In the long run, that might prevent it from being a truly classic horror film. For the moment, however, that won’t matter. The immediate sensation of Alien is nerve-shattering terror, and on that level it works masterfully.”"

"Alien is an expensively assembled science-fiction and horror shocker that’s being pushed hard by 20th Century Fox, and enough of it works on the gut-level of cheap thrills to justify the company’s high expectations. Alien has its problems [though]. Visual effects and shock moments aside, Scott seems ponderous about getting through simple plot mechanics that one of the old science-fiction films could have tossed off with workmanlike abandon. But for those who like this kind of film, he’s produced — in 70mm and Dolby sound — something like the equivalent of every amusement park ride rolled into one.”"

"Bolaji Badejo – Alien"

"Yaphet Kotto – Parker"

"Ian Holm – Ash"

"John Hurt – Kane"

"Harry Dean Stanton – Brett"

"Veronica Cartwright – Lambert"

"Sigourney Weaver – Ripley"

"Tom Skerritt – Dallas"

""The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility...its purity. A survivor - unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." ...Is there room enough in space for us and it?"

"Top Secret - Science Officer's Eyes Only...Bring back life form. Priority One. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable."

"A word of warning …"

"There are things so terrifying, they only exist in a nightmare...or outer space."

"Sometimes the scariest things come from within."

"In space no one can hear you scream."

"[to Dallas] Oh, God! It's moving right towards you! Move! Get out of there!"

"It's a robot! Ash is a goddamn robot!"

"[last lines in the film] Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo. Third Officer reporting. The other members of the crew - Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas - are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off. [to Jones, the ship's cat] Come on, cat."

"[after the Nostromo explodes, seemingly killing the Alien] I got you... you son of a bitch."

"You... are... my lucky star."

"I didn't make Gates of Heaven so that Werner Herzog would have to eat his shoe. It's not as if I decided to realize my potential as a human being in order to get somebody to ingest something distasteful. I specifically asked Werner not to eat his shoe."

"You don't know where the US is standing after a State of the Union Address, but after seeing that film you will know. It's a film on a family behind all that [the pet cemeteries], with all their failures and all their dreams and all their dramas involved. And it's the only authentic film on love and emotion and late capitalism and maybe it's the only authentic film on loss of emotions and distortion of feelings and degeneration of feelings. It's a very, very sad film."

"The first film I made, Gates of Heaven, was very much in reaction to a prevailing idea about how documentaries should be made. Namely, the idea of cinema verite, truth cinema. There was this idea that if you follow certain rules, if you shoot things in a certain way, then out pops the truth. The rules, themselves, are fairly straightforward. Shoot with a hand-held camera. Shoot with available light, become a fly-on-the-wall, observing but not observed in turn. And of course, try to be as unobtrusive as possible. It's one of those meat-grinder ideas. You put in the appropriate ingredients, and magically, truth results. To me, it's utter nonsense. Who could have ever made such a claim? On the basis of what? Does the font you use to print a sentence guarantee its truth or falsity? I think not. All of us get comfort - I can't speak for all of us, but my guess is the preponderant number of people in this room get a certain comfort from reading The New York Times. It's that familiar set of fonts that we're used to seeing every day, fonts which give us a certain level of comfort, a belief that what we're reading is true. I would submit that style doesn't guarantee truth. How could it possibly ever do such a thing? We may feel that the fonts are truth-telling fonts, but it's our uncritical reliance on a whole constellation of beliefs."

"From the beginning, I would always object when people would say, 'It's the pet-cemetery movie.' No, no, no, no! It's not about pet cemeteries. And the next question is always,'If it's not about pet cemeteries, what is it about?' Well, that's tricky! In essence, it embodies many of the ideas that are in every single film I've made. The obsession with language. Eye contact. An interest in accounts of subjective experience rather than objective reporting. The fundamental belief that if you scratch the surface of any person, you will find a world of the insane, very close to that surface."

"Every time I show this, it plays differently. Some people think it's about animals. Some people think it's about life and death. I've shown it to a group of bankers, who believe it raises all kinds of questions about success, about starting a small business. People think it's funny or sad or deadpan or satirical. They think that Errol Morris loved the people in the film, or that he was being very cruel to them. I've never yet had a person tell me that it's a bad film or a film that doesn't interest them.""

"[Gates of Heaven is] a film about hope - hope held by the loneliest people who have ever been on film."