The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)

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While reading reviews of Subservience, I noticed quite a few people referencing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle as a clear influence. I couldn’t remember if I had watched that one before so I queued it Saturday morning.

It is a movie I distinctly remember knowing about when it came out. I remember the trailers and people talking about it. It was a part of a slew of films that came out in the early 1990s that were like big-budgeted, R-rated Lifetime movies. They usually featured Rockwell-esque domestic life being shattered by some pretty, young woman.

Directed by Curtis Hanson, this film is better than most of those films. It sometimes subverts the genre in interesting ways, but even when it plays it straight, Hanson is a good enough director to make it rise above.

Claire Bartell (Annabella Sciorra) is a happy housewife. She has a loving husband, Michael (Matt McCoy), a young daughter Emma (Madeline Zima – who played the mother in Subservience which is a nice bit of casting), and a baby on the way.

When she is sexually assaulted by her obstetrician (in a scene that foreshadows its creepiness so much that my wife left the room before anything untoward actually happened) she comes forward. Other women come forward after that and the Doctor decides to kill himself before he can be arrested. The doctor’s wife, Peyton (Rebecca DeMornay) miscarriages when she learns the news.

Flash forward a few months. The baby is born and Claire decides she wants a nanny. Not to go back to some job, mind you, but she volunteers at a nursery and she wants to build a greenhouse in her backyard. So she’ll be close by, but it would be nice to have someone watch the kids, clean up a little, and maybe cook once in a while.

Enter Peyton and her devious ways. What’s interesting about the film is that it doesn’t do what you expect it to. In most films like this Peyton would seduce the husband, then turn him against the wife. But here, despite nearly every other male character saying something about how beautiful Peyton is and how they wish she was their nanny, and despite Peyton actually trying, Michael will not give in to temptation.

Likewise rather than attempting to turn the family against Claire, she turns Claire against everyone close to her. The local handyman (Ernie Hudson) who dotes on Emma, might just be a pervert. The friendly relationship between Michael and her best friend Marlene (Julianne Moore) might have turned into an affair. Peyton manipulates every situation to make Claire feel like she’s going crazy.

The film begins with the handyman riding his bike in a hoodie. He stops by the Bartell house and knocks on the door. Nobody hears the knock or answers the door. He walks around the house and looks through the windows. When Claire sees him she screams and panics. Suburban white woman screams as an unknown black man stands outside her house.

But he was expected. Claire had requested a handyman be sent to her house. The film doesn’t directly comment on her inherent racism in this scene, but it is certainly there. When we see him riding that bike the music is peaceful. When he approaches the house and looks through the windows the film doesn’t make it menacing. So that when she screams and when he is recognized as a kind person, it is surprising. It is just another way the film lightly subverts our expectations of the genre.

It is still a white, suburban family being, um, rocked by a beautiful, young woman, so it doesn’t stray too far from the formula, but I appreciate that it was at least trying to do something different.

Backdraft (1991)

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Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I had seen years ago, when I was a teenager or in college, or whatever. Sometimes it is a movie that I didn’t like that much but I want to revisit to see if my feelings have changed. Sometimes they do, and I’m glad I watched it again. Sometimes they don’t and I realize my feelings were right all along.

Backdraft falls into the latter category. I didn’t like it when it came out, and I don’t like it now. It does, however, have some spectacular effects, and ones that are not CGI which makes it even better.

You can read my full review here.

Runaway Train (1985)

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I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We are now up to 1985.

I live in a small town that has two major train lines running right through the middle of it. I don’t know how many trains pass through our little burg on any given day but it is a lot. You can hardly drive from one side of the town to the other without getting stopped by a train. Sometimes two. Or three. It is very annoying. I used to carry a book with me in my car and whenever I was stopped waiting on a train I’d read a few pages. I finished more than one novel that way.

Despite this, I still love trains. I remember the first time I ever rode a train. We were riding across France. I sat in my window seat with my headset on, listening to music and watching the beautiful countryside glide by.

Trains are so much better than planes. They might not be as fast, but they are much more comfortable and pleasant. I wish we had more trains in the USA. I’d take them everywhere.

I love movies about trains. I’ve watched Westerns where they are building the first train lines out west. I’ve seen horror films with some crazed killer stalking prey on a train. There are mysteries and thrillers set on trains. One day I’m gonna make a huge playlist of all the movies that have trains in them. That would make a fun viewing.

Not all train movies are good, of course. There isn’t anything special about a train that makes your story interesting. Runaway Train is a good example of this.

Jon Voight plays Oscar “Manny” Manheim a ruthless convict being held in Alaska’s Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison. He’s so terrible the warden has had him locked away in solitary confinement for three years. When the courts say he can’t do that, Manheim is released into general pop.

Though the prison is supposed to be some kind of Alcatraz-like inescapable place, Manheim easily gets out by having fellow inmate Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) roll him out in a dirty clothes hamper. Inside the laundromat, they grease themselves up and slip out through a sewer tunnel. From there they hop aboard the titular train.

Darn their luck, the train conductor has a heart attack and falls off the train. In doing so he destroys the brakes and sends the train heading down the line at full speed. Rebecca DeMornay plays a train employee who is pretty useless, honestly.

There are some dispatchers back at the base, who have computerized systems to track where the train is going. They call upcoming stations to try to stop the thing, but they are pretty useless as well, honestly.

The film periodically attempts to ring some tension out of the speeding train, but this is no Speed (1994) and they mostly fail at it. Every time they cut to the dispatch station

Voight is sporting some godawful facial hair and an even worse accent. Everyone else seems to be trying their best, but it all just falls sort-of flat. It is the type of film where after watching it I just kind of shrug my shoulders and go, “that was something,” and the look for something else to watch.