Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

The setting for this film, directed and cowritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is a small oil town in Texas in 1951.  As one of the characters says, the place is ‘flat and empty’, a description that equally well applies to life there.   So it’s not surprising that most of the characters spend a lot of time hankering after sex even if in virtually all cases the reality is sterile and unsatisfactory.  It's appropriate that Hank Williams’ ‘Cold Cold Heart’ is heard playing in the background at least a couple of times. The only sexual liaison we see that has some genuine warmth and affection to it is an affair between young Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and middle-aged Ruth (an Oscar-winning performance by Cloris Leachman) who is trapped in an unhappy marriage.  Indeed all of the marriages we see are unhappy.  As one of the characters observes, “80% of married life is misery.” The main object of lust among the young folk is Jacy (a perfectly cast Cybill Shepherd making her ...

Given that this is John Carpenter directing a science fiction film starring Jeff Bridges it's a real mystery as to why it has taken me so long to see it.  Perhaps the fact that it was a commercial flop put me off? Anyway it turns out those critics who liked it (the majority) were right. The story is uncomplicated enough. Bridges is an alien who crash-lands on Earth, takes the form of Scott, the dead husband of Jenny (Karen Allen), and then needs to rendezvous with a rescue ship in Arizona in three days time in order not to die. To add further jeopardy the US military are trying to capture him. The essence of the film, rather surprisingly for a Carpenter film perhaps, is both a road movie and a love story that develops between Scott and Jenny as they travel across country.  Bridges and Allen are a perfect match for each other, and Bridges in particular gives a remarkable performance in what is potentially a very difficult act to pull off, for which he  garnered a well-dese...