List of 1981 box office number-one films in the United States

Never heard of Back Roads, Paternity or Rollover. After reading the Wikipedia summary of Bustin' Loose, I think I'm going with Excalibur.

Excalibur or Time Bandits for me, my sense of mischief died a long time ago

crazy remembering how briefly huge Richard Pryor was

I gotta say that this is not an attractive poster image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Four_seasonsmovieposter.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/x1bGPeX.jpg

The Four Seasons, Alan Alda's writer-director debut, was one of the top films of its years. I remember a Dissolve Forgotbusters piece about it: https://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/544-the-agonizing-dullness-of-alan-aldas-the-four-seas/

So wait, did you leave French Lieutenant's Woman off?

crazy remembering how briefly huge Richard Pryor was

Belushi too -- had two separate number one films, one of which was a two-week holiday smash!

So wait, did you leave French Lieutenant's Woman off?

― Ned Raggett,

you might say I forgotbustered it

Bustin’ Loose is dire, but still preferable to Tarzan the Ape Man, maybe the worst directed movie ever released by a major studio.

In this company, the low-wattage pleasures of Stir Crazy and The Four Seasons and Arthur feel like Golden Age Hollywood.

Voted Arthur for the theme song. Due to my itunes app almost totally corrupting the album art on my iPhone, my bacharach box set has Sagat’s “Funk Dat!” as the cover.

I remember seeing Time Bandits in the theater… voted for Omen 3 … v underrated imo

Gawd I finally got around to seeing Hardly Working just the other day. Weird seeing middle-aged Jerry Lewis still doing his man-child character - in suburban South Florida - including recycled gags and very late period yellow-face. I did laugh a few times.

I’ll go with Arthur. My dark horse is Happy Birthday to Me, an enjoyably loopy slasher.

haha for her 13th birthday my sister wanted to be taken to see the (R-rated) Happy Birthday To Me and got way more than she bargained for

I def saw Excalibur in theater, maybe Time Bandits too

I must have been 6 or 7 when I walked in on my old man watching Fort Apache. I saw the scene where the cops throw the 'rioter' from the roof, and it burst into tears — proper formative film moment.

I always mix up Happy Birthday To Me and Bloody Birthday.

I wish Eric H. were still around to talk about HBTM, a film I learned about just last week because of that unforgettable poster.

Fort Apache is exploitative trash but Paul Newman is at his best.

rollover sucks

It’s just too dull iirc. Hard to make that subject matter interesting - stock trading shenanigans

Kristofferson is miscast too

It was on TCM a few months back. I gave up 20 mins in.

This is a classic interzone year: the '80s not yet born but with seeds planted (i.e. Raiders).

As Damien staggers through the courtyard and collapses, Christ then appears in the archway above him as a corporealized bright light. Damien mocks Christ for thinking he has won, and then collapses and dies from the dagger's wound. DeCarlo reappears carrying Peter's body and hands him to a praying Kate. As they leave the ruins, Bible passages are shown on-screen.

Laugh about it, cry about it, when you've got to choose...

I have seen two from this list: Excalibur, which I remember as minor Boorman, and Time Bandits, frankly the only Terry Gilliam film I retain a strong fondness for despite its creator's terribleness.

Quite possibly if I had seen Excalibur as a kid and Time Bandits in my 20's this would be the other way around.

waht

Excalibur is canonical Boorman, the reason he exists as a director.

struggling to think of anything else he's done that's half as worthwhile, plus Nicol Williamson is a winner on his own

Catch Us If You Can and Point Blank are five star films.

Point Blank, Deliverance, The Exorcist II, Excalibur, Hope and Glory, The General -- a fine filmography.

admittedly i overlooked Point Blank but i'm sure i've seen a chunk of the Dave Clarke movie and gtfo

The General is really good but for Nicol Williamson substitute Brendan Gleeson, don't care about Hope and Glory or Exorcist II, Deliverance is a memetic nothing of a movie

It's great! Boorman tasked with making some A Hard Day's Night rip off and instead he delivers this rainy miserable classic, almost post apocalyptic in tone.

It's got a StudioCanal blu now and pops up on TPTV, give it a full view you won't regret it.

TPTV always shows it at 6 in the morning in the same slot as Freddie and the Dreamers/Acker Bilk/Skiffle Boys Run Wild movies, i'm not sure it's the best time slot for me to engage

i'm just rhetorically lashing out tbf, you're wrong about Excalibur, it is not a Great Movie but it is a beautiful one

if you only compare boorman to himself, then your idea of what's minor or major could be wildly different than if you are comparing boorman to dozens or hundreds of other noteworthy directors

well, yeah!

The real question now is: is Arthur major or minor Gordon?

(While googling to find the director's name I discovered the Portuguese title is Arthur, The Happy Conqueror)

I’m a Gregghead so Arthur it is for me. This is the only one is saw in a theater.

Excalibur is amazing, not just for Nicol Williamson but also for Nigel Terry, who plays Arthur as if he fell off his horse and landed on his head right before they called "Action!"

Excalibur's a Wagner mixtape load of fluff really but still it mesmerised me as a teenager, as did Helen Mirren and whatsisname who played Merlin. Classic.

Excalibur
Friday the 13th Part 2

honestly difficult choice for me

Excalibur is one of my earliest cinema-going experiences, seen in a small theatre on the ferry to Ireland. My mum let me and my sister go on our own, under the misapprehension that it was a kid-friendly movie. Turns out we were definitely a bit too young for it.

Mirren's best movie and performance imo

Time Bandits by a long way, Excalibur has crimped hair and bead curtains so loses out on authenticity just for a start. Above Boorman filmography missed Zardoz, maybe his finest moment after Point Blank?

Zardoz is another that made a big impact on me as a teenager. Classic.

I had thought Scanners topped the US box office upon release and was surprised to find it missing from this list. Apparently Cronenberg just claimed it did in an interview, so I wonder if he misremembered or if it was a different box office chart.

I voted Excalibur for the armored sex scene

I went with Time Bandits, mostly for the kind of childhood nostalgia others have mentioned. I really loved it when it came out. There are a bunch of these I haven’t seen and I’m not in any hurry to. I remember liking Excalibur, but haven’t seen it in forever.

I saw Fort Apache the Bronx on TV, never seen the unedited version. I don’t remember a lot about it, but it definitely contributed to my formative sense of New York City grit and decay. And for whatever reason, my dad wanted to see Neighbors, so we went to see that in the theater. Maybe Siskel and Ebert gave it a good review or something. I remember it being pretty good? One of my introductions to the idea of “black comedy.”

I also saw Neighbors in a theater and aside from the dark comedic tone of it I also remember it was the first time I saw a punk rock girl in a movie (Belushi’s daughter).

Also saw Incredible Shrinking Woman and the Cheech & Chong one at the theater, enjoyed both but no idea if they would hold up.

Oh shit just realised I have seen Neighbours too, late night on tv. It was good.

I liked Neighbours when I was a kid. It was from when I had got my first clunky VHS recorder and got into rewatching movies. Some peak performances from Belushi and Ackroyd, as much as that might mean to you!

voted raiders

Time Bandits all the way.

Guess I should watch Happy Birthday

Crazy that Cathy Moriarty was only 20 in Neighbors playing Dan Aykroyd’s wife… her next film after playing Jake La Motta’s wife in Raging Bull.

Hardly Working went to #1??

Excalibur and Zardoz have really good commentary tracks from John Boorman that are presumably available on the modern blu-ray releases. I learn from the former that he ended up keeping Helen Mirren's golden breastplate. They achieved the glowing green armour effect by simply shining green-tinted spotlights at the actors. The man who played Arthur's knight's swordsmith was the armourer, and a couple of the cast members were Boorman's children, which in one scene must have been really awkward to direct. One of the locations was reused from Zardoz but with a different matte painting.

The commentary for Zardoz is sweet because he was obviously fond of the film but aware of its shortcomings, and it appears to have been a jolly shoot. It's actually surprising he could remember any of it, but then again films have production ledgers so presumably there was at least one sober person on set during the making of that film.

A long time ago I rewatched Deliverance and was struck by how strange it is. Is is a thriller, a horror film, an adventure film, a psychological drama? It's all of those things, with a bleakly down-to-earth tone that's vintage 1970s. And it was a huge hit. I got interested in Boorman's career after that because he's so erratic. He has an incredibly diverse filmography.

I'm only aware of total box-office numbers, so it's surprising to see that Time Bandits and Excalibur actually topped the box-office. They were "things", if only for a week. People in Des Moines and Hackensack, New Jersey were aware of them, if only for a short while. There was a brief period when the people of Green Bank, West Virginia, debated whether to go and see a Terry Gilliam film at the cinema. That kind of thing doesn't happen nowadays.

And, as mentioned, 1981 feels like the grey area in between the 1970s and 1980s. Raiders of the Lost Ark had come out, but Back to the Future was some ways off. I mentally associate the period with flatly-lit, brown films where the main characters are worried-looking middle-aged people as in e.g. Wolfen. I like to think that The Osterman Weekend (1983) was the last of the breed. But there was Winter Kills and Wrong is Right from the same period.

The weird thing is that the harder I look, the more films with Sean Connery and Michael Caine emerge from the mist, and yet those two actors can only have been in a finite amount of films, and yet the more I look the more films appear. The Black Windmill. The internet says 1974, but when did it actually appear?

otm re Deliverance.

Only title I have absolutely no recognition of is Back Roads; I used to watch Siskel & Ebert's "Sneak Previews" on PBS religiously.

Voting Time Bandits.

Back Roads: Martin Ritt's forgotten follow-up to Norma Rae, w/Field & Tommy Lee Jones

Thanks...I just watched two TV trailers, can't say if I remember seeing them at the time.

Wikipedia plot synopsis is amusingly mjnimal:

Amy Post is a $20-a-trick hooker in Mobile, Alabama. One night she entertains Elmore Pratt, an ex-boxer who has just been fired from his job at a car wash. He cannot pay her for services rendered.

Pratt punches a plainclothes police officer. He and Amy drive away together, intending to head for California, bickering along the way.

Is Hardly Working the one with Jolly “Fats” Weehawken Airlines? That haunts me more than 40 years later (I watched multiple times some late period Jerry Lewis movie on HBO in the early ‘80s, just not sure if it was that one).

No, that’s Cracking Up (1983). The most exciting thing that happens in Hardly Working is Jerry gets a job at the post office.

I remember that Cracking Up was mentioned in this thread here, with a clip from the opening scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtqFEpZOfuM

The astonishing thing is that it came out in 1983! I would never have guessed. As one of the commentators points out the material is okay, but it would have been funnier if the camera had simply stayed still.

As a kid writing espionage fiction, I loved Rollover for all of its seriousness. When Kristofferson died recently, I read some remembrance of him related to how crazy it was to make Kris Kristofferson shave his beard for a role.

Anyway, voted for Bustin' Loose which I somehow saw in the theater a bunch of times when I was 10-11.

Time Bandits was a "thing" for more than a week; looking at that list it topped the box office for four weeks in November! That was what I voted for, out of the like eight and a half of these I've seen.

My favorite film that likely made it into multiplexes in 1981 sadly didn’t make it here: “Modern Romance.” Might not have been a huge hit though.

xp yeah Time Bandits was the 10th highest grossing film that year.

Check the 1982 list, birdistheword.

^ That has Modern Problems - a Chevy Chase movie - at number one, not Modern Romance

Oh lol I misread

Only title I have absolutely no recognition of is Back Roads; I used to watch Siskel & Ebert's "Sneak Previews" on PBS religiously.

They reviewed it!

https://vimeo.com/852821682

Tarzan The Ape Man is a great film if you're a 14 year old boy with no access to real porn and it's on channel 4 at 11pm

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Mommie Dearest was the most memorable and enjoyable film of this bunch. Its depiction of Joan Crawford was fascinating and it kind of destroyed Faye Dunaway's career

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

QT on Happy Birthday To Me, which sounds pretty kooky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iepRqK33dc