Matt wrote "And boy, would I like to read that EDWARD SCISSORHANDS/OSWALD FLIPPERHANDS compare/contrast piece" ...
heh, not surprised you caught that too. I'd forward the piece if I had it on this machine, it was long ago and on a pre-Internet machine, the only line I recall is "and what is the pasty-faced, messy-haired, funny-fingered Penguin if not Edward's evil twin." Actually it was largely a piece about Danny Elfman's score, but I was finding myself then starting to need more to write about the films as a whole (Elfman can be so abstract and random that he's actually difficult to write about, though at the same time it's always obvious that his music is yet another character in any of Burton's movies).
Ashamed to admit that I've never seen OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, and now in the era of DVD, I'm tending to wait until the urge comes upon me to see whatever (presently, via Netflix, I'm on a Takashi Miike kick, and speaking of awesome death scenes, the finale of DEAD OR ALIVE may be the most apocalyptic of all, rivaled of course by BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES).
And speaking of the Apes, Mr. Seitz, those first five movies are an obsession of mine (which made Tim Burton's remake such a peculiar disappointment, studio meddling to the nth degree, not least being the casting of Mark Wahlberg in the lead — this is someone Burton would have AT MOST cast as a bully figure, it's like a weird mirror image of 80s nebbish Anthony Michael Hall showing up as the beefy asshole in SCISSORHANDS, whose dispatch at Edward's hands is also particularly surprising and unsettling).
Anyway, I think the principal author of the APES movies is the noted poet and screenwriter Paul Dehn, who showed up on the scene with the second movie, wangled the ingenious means of thinking up the third, ESCAPE, and carried it over into the bloodthirsty CONQUEST. If you've read any of his scripts, they're far more elaborate than final budgets would permit, but awesomely cinematic; there are acres of gorgeous descriptions of the Forbidden Zone in his first draft of BENEATH, very little of which they could afford, I suppose.
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES was the only one of them to get a PG instead of a G, and in fact Fox was terrified that the movie was going to get an R rating, so a lot of the more overtly sadistic material got cut; for example, Don Murray's Governor Breck was originally slated to be beaten to death with his own belt, and I think they probably did film that, but instead Roddy McDowall's Caesar does an uncharacteristic about-face and delivers that dreary homily about "compassion and understanding," which was clearly post-dubbed and clearly hacked together at the last second; Roddy McDowall had given arguably the best work of his career during Caesar's original final rant, and in the post-dub he's not able to bring back the same frenzy, perhaps because he didn't quite buy it either.
Were people in a worse mood then, or in more of a forgiving one? I don't know. Consider the notorious re-rating of THE WILD BUNCH to NC-17.
And PAPILLON, an awesomely brutal film (and one of my all-time favorites possibly for that reason, it's so unremittingly bleak), got away with a PG, and it's also crammed with female AND male nudity, though none of it frontal. The DVD carries an R rating, which I think it well earned, but I think in the 1970s and early 80s it was easier for big-budget movies to talk their way down a notch. Spielberg was apparently very good at charming the MPAA even when he was a relative unknown with JAWS (which bore the unusual "May Be Too INTENSE For Younger Audiences" underneath its PG).
He also talked them down from R ratings for RAIDERS, POLTERGEIST, GREMLINS and TEMPLE OF DOOM, around which time (mid-late 1984) he proposed the PG-12 rating, which became instead PG-13.
Mutinyco mentioned the death of Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo in SEVEN SAMURAI instead of the more famous arrow attack in THRONE OF BLOOD; both outstanding sequences, I still think the most chilling death scene Mifune did for Kurosawa (there were several) is one Mifune actually didn't do at all: when we learn of his fate via the shadowy Takeshi Kato, describing in gruesome detail what happens to him in THE BAD SLEEP WELL. It was somehow even worse than seeing it would have been.
I am inexplicably put in mind of Klaus Kinski's nearly plaintive winding-down at the end of Herzog's NOSFERATU.
And as for television (I'd thought of this earlier but no one else had brought up television), the freeze-frame close-up of Brian Blessed as the poisoned Augustus while his widow Livia (who is responsible) is struggling between justifying herself and grieving; Sian Phillips' performance throughout the series is a marvel (well, there's not a bum job amongst the whole cast, that's why so many of them are household names now), and yet I don't know that she wasn't even better in this one monologue where we can't even see her.
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