Forgotten Movies Tarantino Helped to Deliver Again to Pop Tradition

Few directors have the gift of gab on the level of Quentin Tarantino, who compulsively recommends old movies whenever he opens his mouth.

On his own Video Archives Podcast and the Pure Cinema Podcast, where he appears as a frequent guest, Tarantino has introduced contemporary audiences to many films, often forgotten ones from the 1970s, from which he famously draws inspiration.

Now that the auteur has even morphed into a critic with his book Cinema Speculation, it feels like Tarantino wants to tell us something vital about the movies he loves. Discover the forgotten films Tarantino rescued from obscurity.

Dark Star (1974)

The first film of legendary director John Carpenter, the sci-fi comedy Dark Star, sometimes gets overlooked as a goofy bit of schlock Carpenter came up with on his way to making Halloween, which cemented the director’s reputation and fortune with its 1978 release.

Dark Star, by all accounts a thorough collaboration between Carpenter and his co-writer Dan O’Bannon, certainly lacks the polish of its sci-fi contemporaries like 2001: A Space Odyssey ё Star Wars: A New Hope. However, the film holds its own in Carpenter’s catalog and gives us a window into the culture of its era, albeit adapted into space.

“He’s the one talking [Dark Star] down,” Tarantino explains on the Video Archives Podcast, referring to Carpenter. “He even said to the effect, ‘Well, I don’t respond to it because I see its student film origins.’”

“I see very little student film origins,” Tarantino adds. “To me, it just looks like a good science fiction movie… It’s a science-fiction masterpiece. It’s a counter-culture, anti-establishment, hippy filmmaking masterpiece.”

Straw Dogs (1971)

Over the years, Quentin Tarantino has made no secret of the director who most influenced him: Sam Peckinpah, the hard-living World War 2 veteran and director of gritty Westerns and crime movies. Of Peckinpah’s output, Tarantino has claimed only two films count as true masterpieces: The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs.

While not exactly forgotten, Straw Dogs, which stars Dustin Hoffman as a clueless husband unable to protect his wife from menacing day laborers in the English countryside, has a reputation as a tough film to watch, mostly due to one scene we won’t get into here.

“Nothing about Straw Dogs is necessarily enjoyable,” Tarantino says on the Video Archives Podcast. “It is a rough movie. It is rather horrific. Little by little, things are pushed a little too far, then a little farther, then they spiral out of control. There’s not a clear read on any character in this movie.” He pauses before adding, “And that’s why it’s art.”

The Last Run (1971)

Richard Fleischer’s 1971 crime drama, The Last Run, starring George C. Scott and Tony Musante, features Scott as an aging criminal coming out of retirement in Portugal to drive an escaped assassin (Musante) across Europe.

“Fleischer had a flair for lurid material,” says Tarantino on the Video Archives Podcast. Of Scott’s performance, he muses, “If Bogart were to make movies in the ’70s, I could totally see Bogart playing this role.”

The film has a low-key charm that only led it to modest success in its own time. Tarantino tells us, “It has a very slight story, but like the route George C. Scott is planning, it’s a straight-ahead line but with major turns, and everything changes when you make those turns.”

Rage (1972)

Another George C. Scott star vehicle celebrated by Tarantino, Rage, finds the middle-aged Scott as a rancher living in Montana with his son, who falls victim to a military test gone awry when an aircraft leaks poisonous gas over the young boy and his sheep herd, killing both the boy and his animals. Scott, who narrowly avoids the same fate, goes on to exact his revenge on the reckless authorities who perpetrated the crime.

“He reigns h-ll on the institution,” Tarantino tells Video Archives Podcast listeners, “which is the real culprit in this, because every member of this institution thinks they’re doing the institution’s bidding and the public good.”

Star 80 (1983)

One of the most emotionally devastating movies of the 1980s, Bob Fosse’s Star 80, took the then-recent murder of model-turned-actress Dorothy Stratten (played by Mariel Hemingway) as its subject matter. Stratten, the lover of the director Peter Bogdanovich, could not escape the pursuit of her spurned ex-husband, Paul Snider (played by Eric Roberts), a possessive loser with delusions of grandeur.

Speaking on the Video Archives Podcast, Tarantino describes Star 80 as a “snazzy, entertaining, poppy movie galvanized by a tour de force performance by Eric Roberts—not only great but my favorite performance of that year.”

Delirium (1979)

The low-budget, regionally produced exploitation flick Delirium, directed by Peter Maris, focuses on a killer sent by a right-wing cabal to restore order to a city turned upside down by violent criminals. As the movie progresses, the killer, a Vietnam vet who hardly speaks, develops some ideas of his own about the cause of all the madness.

“This is really a movie where if you’re out looking for information on it, you might not want to,” advises Video Archives Podcast co-host Roger Avary, emphasizing its “fantastic tonal shifts” would hold less power if previewed.

Tarantino builds on this, underlining that the script will “take you places you don’t expect to go.” Later, he adds, “The one-note aspect is part of the effect because the movie has other fish to fry. It has another story to tell.”

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

Irvin Kershner, a director most famous for helming The Empire Strikes Back, made an entirely different kind of movie just two years before with The Eyes of Laura Mars, a film that revels in the disco world of 1970s New York City. The story revolves around Laura Mars, a fashion designer, played by Faye Dunaway, who can’t stop witnessing murders in her head from the killer’s point of view.

The film, written by John Carpenter, “could have been an American giallo,” says Tarantino on the Video Archives Podcast, referring to the Italian slasher-mystery genre popularized by directors like Dario Argento. “It captures a uniquely authentic but different high-class Manhattan than Dressed to Kill. It captures the disco Manhattan. And this movie has one of the best disco soundtracks of its era.”

Rolling Thunder (1977)

William Devane had his first starring role with Rolling Thunder, a movie about a returning Vietnam vet who ends up on a quest for revenge after some thugs interrupt his homecoming with stomach-churning brutality. The film features a young Tommy Lee Jones in a supporting role, who, together with Devane, ventures across the border to Mexico to straighten out the baddies.

Rhapsodizing on the film in his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino writes, “I loved Rolling Thunder so much that years before it became available on Vestron Home Video—for a period of ten years—I followed it all over Los Angeles, whenever and wherever it played…What I used to claim about Rolling Thunder was it was the best combination of character study and action film ever made. And it still is.”

Hardcore (1979)

Paul Schrader pushed the envelope for the time with his 1979 film Hardcore, which stars George C. Scott as a devoutly religious Midwesterner who ventures into the seedier side of Los Angeles to rescue his daughter from the adult film world. In classic Schrader style, the movie pushes a principled character to his breaking point in a way that terrifies and amuses the viewer. While far from a perfect film, Hardcore mostly delivers on its fish-out-of-water premise, though some moralism does creep in near the end.

“It’s supposed to possess the class of a studio picture, but simultaneously appeal to cinema of sensation viewers,” writes Tarantino in Cinema Speculation. And for the film’s first hour, Schrader makes a compelling movie with undeniable power.”

Concluding his review, Tarantino notes, “When I first reached out to Schrader, I warned him that, while I liked the film’s first half, I’m very rough on it and him in the second half. He wrote back, ‘I don’t think you could be harsher than I am on the second half of the film.’” Hey, nobody said the films Tarantino recommends don’t have their flaws!

Daisy Miller (1974)

Speaking of flawed films Tarantino loves, Henry James’ tragic novella Daisy Miller tells the story of an innocent abroad in Europe looking for love in the late nineteenth century. Daisy, the protagonist, finds herself courted by a young Italian man, while a jealous fellow American expatriate tries to throw cold water on the budding romance.

Director Peter Bogdanovich adapted Daisy Miller for the screen in 1974, and the poor box office performance marked a major downhill turn in his career. Tarantino has taken up the cause of resurrecting the film’s reputation, writing in Cinema Speculation that what sets the film apart “from the whole Masterpiece Theatre vibe of most classic literary film adaptations is the director’s approach. He tries to turn the first half of the film into a comedy.”

“But the film gains power as it progresses and builds to a gut-punch ending,” he continues. “Bogdanovich’s film is very funny, yet it leaves a viewer profoundly sad as you watch the final credits fade up.”

Joe (1970)

One of the funniest movies about hippy culture and the reactionary elements it spawned, Joe, directed by John G. Avildsen, asks viewers to empathize with the parents of the flower children. Featuring a young Susan Sarandon and an outrageously small-minded Peter Boyle, Joe shows us how a hatred of hippiedom led some members of the Greatest Generation to lose their minds.

“As harsh, and ugly, and violent as the movie Joe is,” writes Tarantino in Cinema Speculation, “at its heart, it’s a kettle-black comedy about class in America, bordering on satire, while also being savagely vicious.”

Matador (1986)

Pedro Almodóvar, one of the directors Tarantino claims inspired him most in his video store days during the 1980s—after the New Hollywood of the previous decade had pivoted to a corporate-driven model that favored happy endings—made an unusual thriller in 1986 called Matador. In the opening of the film, which stars Antonio Banderas as a student bullfighter who gets caught up in a series of murders, a former bullfighter indulges in a bout of self-love while a montage of slasher film plays on the television.

“I remember when I worked at my Manhattan Beach video store, Video Archives, and talked to the other employees about the types of movies I wanted to make, and the things I wanted to do inside of those movies,” Tarantino explains in Cinematic Speculation. “And I would use the example of the opening of Almodóvar’s Matador.”

Summer of ’42 (1970)

Set on the island of Nantucket during the Second World War, Summer of ’42, directed by John Mulligan and adapted from the memoir of screenwriter Herman Raucher, revolves around a teenage boy who falls in love with an older woman whose husband has gone off to fight overseas. The coming-of-age story had phenomenal success at its release but largely fell off the radar for several decades afterward.

“The nature of the comedy had never been quite seen before and people really responded to it,” says Tarantino on the Pure Cinema Podcast, before explaining that Summer of ’42 then pivots somewhere darker. “People just wept in the theater, because it has a devastating third act. If you ask me, it’s one of the best third acts in seventies cinema.”

Mandingo (1975)

Critics have never known quite what to do with director Richard Fleischer’s shocking film Mandingo, a campy historical drama that, at turns, feels ahead of its time and, at others, feels more than a bit retrograde. The story, which centers on events at a slave plantation in the Antebellum South, covers some of the same ground as Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, which pays it homage in several scenes.

“Like The Godfather,” explains Tarantino on the Pure Cinema Podcast, “it’s a very artistically rendered adaptation of a really trashy paperback.”

What’s Up, Doc? (1972)

Director Peter Bogdanovich had a streak of three back-to-back hits in the early 1970s—The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon—that ranks among the most remarkable streaks in cinema history. Why this streak ended would require more space than this article allows, but suffice it to say that overconfidence ran into tragedy followed by bitterness and, ultimately, redemption.

What’s Up, Doc?, the middle film in the Bogdanovich streak, sometimes gets overshadowed by the two films that bookend it. Tarantino has done his best to remind audiences of the film’s grandeur, referring to it as “untouchable” and noting that it contains “the greatest comedy chase scene of all time.”

Piranha (1978)

In the wake of the birth of the modern blockbuster that began with Jaws, a rush to replicate the film’s success led to many ripoffs. The best of these, director Joe Dante’s Piranha, took the fearsome freshwater fish as its monster, gave it some genetic enhancements, and set it loose in an American summer.

“If you ask me, Piranha is as fun as any movie made in the seventies,” Tarantino says on the Video Archives Podcast. “I’ve seen it eight or nine times since it came out, and I’ll probably see it three more times. And I’ll enjoy it every time.”

Unstoppable (2010)

The last film of director Tony Scott, Unstoppable, could easily seem like a missable mishmash of cheap action thrills if one doesn’t look too closely. Starring Denzel Washington opposite Chris Pine, this runaway train movie has the velocity of its subject matter and offers up a novel fear for the contemporary paranoiac—exploding trains in small towns anywhere, anytime.

According to Tarantino, “It really is one of the best examples of a director going out by doing his thing that he does better than anyone else on an incredibly high note…It just completely holds up—such an exciting movie.”

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)

Charles Bronson teamed up with director J. Lee Thompson one last time for Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, as unsettling an action movie as anyone will ever see. The film follows Detective Crowe, played by Bronson, who gets sucked into a sordid gangland story involving child trafficking and, in due course, righteous vengeance. Kinjite would most likely not get written today, let alone produced and distributed. With that said, the film does not back down from its irredeemably dark themes, which puts it in an increasingly rare category.

Speaking on the Pure Cinema Podcast, Tarantino says, “J. Lee, he does not let me down. He doubles—triples—down on the [grotesque subject matter] and plays with your perception of it.”

Black Sabbath (1963)

The trailblazing Italian horror director Mario Bava, who helped to define the horror genre as we know it today, directed the anthology film Black Sabbath in 1963, which features horror icon Boris Karloff as its presenter. The movie serves up viewers with three separate stories involving a telephone stalker and a call girl, an animated cadaver that feeds on the blood of loved ones, and a cursed ring stolen from a corpse.

“Mario Bava became one of the first directors I got to know by name because I saw Black Sabbath on television, and then it would pop up again,” Tarantino explains to interviewers at SiriusXM Town Hall. “Along with Sergio Leone, it was Mario Bava who got me thinking in terms of shots…even when I would see a Mario Bava movie I didn’t like, I would still recognize the style and that operatic quality.”

The Outfit (1973)

The novelist Donald E. Westlake, who wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, published a long-running series of crime novels about a character called Parker, a professional armed robber with a code of ethics that doesn’t keep him from killing the occasional bystander.

Parker has appeared in various movies, usually by other names. “Westlake didn’t mind selling his books, but he never sold his character,” Tarantino writes in Cinema Speculation. Tarantino’s favorite of these films, John Flynn’s The Outfit, stars Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker as partners in crime.

Tarantino writes, “The scene between Duvall and Baker on the stairs is the epitome of poignant masculinity.” Regarding an inadvertent second viewing, he clarifies, “It was even better the second time.”