Subway (1985)

Another 1985 film, along with Trouble in Mind, that I discovered only in the past five years but immediately fell in love with. They are both movies about dreamworlds, both influenced by post-punk New Wave fashion and hairstyles, both exuding retro-Hollywood cool and romantic melancholy. I like a lot of films from this era -- even if I didn't see them at the time, so it's not just nostalgia. These two movies share a visual and design sensibility with Diva (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) too, for example.

I was tempted to post three blue screen caps, because there's a lot of blue in the movie, but then I opted to post three that were devoid of the lead characters instead.

QOTD

'Mattie is often compared to her literary ancestor, Huckleberry Finn; but though the two of them share some obvious similarities, in most respects Mattie is a much harder customer than careless, sweet-tempered Huck. Where Huck is barefoot and "uncivilized," living happily in his hogshead barrel, Mattie is a pure product of civilization as a Sunday school teacher in nineteenth-century Arkansas might define it; she is a straitlaced Presbyterian, prim as a poker. "I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains," she says coolly to the drunken Rooster; tidy, industrious, frugal, with a head for figures and a shrewd business sense. Her deadpan manner is reminiscent of Buster Keaton: Mattie, too, is a Great Stone Face; she never cracks a smile when recounting the undignified and ridiculous situations in which she finds herself; and even predicaments of great danger fail to draw violent emotion from her. But this deadpan flatness serves a double purpose in the novel, for if Mattie is humorless, she is also completely lacking in qualities like pity and self-doubt, and her implacable stoniness -- while very, very funny -- is formidable, too, in a manner reminiscent of old tintypes and cartes des visites of Confederate soldier boys: dead-eye killers with rumpled hair and serious angel faces. One cannot picture Huckleberry Finn in the same light; for while Huck is an adventuresome spirit, duty and discipline are wholly foreign to him; conscripted by any army, any cause, he would desert in short order, slipping away the first chance he got to his easy riverbank life. Mattie on the other hand is the perfect soldier, despite her sex. She is as tireless as a gun dog; and while we laugh at her single-mindedness, we also stand in awe of it. In her Old Testament morality, in her legalistic and exacting turn of mind, in the thunderous blackness of her wrath -- "What a waste! ... I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!" -- she is less Huck Finn's little sister than Captain Ahab's.'

-- Donna Tartt, afterword to True Grit (The Overlook Press, 2004)