*batteries not included (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, October 5 my husband Charles and I watched a movie from 1987 that I hadn’t seen back then and he couldn’t recall whether he’d seen or not: *batteries not included. (That typography on the title -- all lower-case and with an asterisk at the beginning -- is what appears on the opening title and in the official trailer.) Although Steven Spielberg didn’t personally direct it -- Matthew Robbins did, though Spielberg is credited as “executive producer” and his company, Amblin Entertainment, is listed as one of the producing studios -- *batteries not included is very much in the same sort of extraterrestrial whimsy that produced Spielberg’s acclaimed and highly popular E.T. five years before. *batteries not included was written by a committee -- Mick Garris got “story by” credit and the screenplay was credited to Brad Bird & Matthew Robbins and Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson. Those otherwise redundant combinations of ampersands and “ands” are Writers’ Guild-speak meaning that Garris passed his “original” story to Bird and Robbins, who worked collaboratively until the producers (including Spielberg and his then-business partner Kathleen Kennedy) brought another pair of collaborators, Maddock and Wilson, for rewrites.

The result was a quite charming film set in New York City, particularly in an old, decaying block of Eighth Avenue that is part of the super-parcel on which billionaire land developer Lacey (Michael Greene) wants to build a mega-parcel that’s going to displace the tenants and make Lacey a ton of money. Lacey has assigned the task of getting rid of the current tenants of 817 Eighth Avenue, virtually the only building still standing on the land where he wants to put his mega-project, to his assistant Kovacs (John Pankow). Kovacs has in turn hired a gang of Mexican-American cholos headed by Carlos (Michael Carmine, easily the sexiest man in the movie even though -- or maybe because -- he’s supposed to be playing a bad-ass thug), whose assignment is either to bribe or intimidate the current tenants into leaving so Lacey can take over the building, destroy it and build his super-project before his approvals from the city run out. We then meet the tenants of the building, who turn out to be the most lovable and charming people the writing committee could create.

The leads are Frank and Faye Riley, played by the real-life long-term married couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy -- Tandy in particular played so many of these crotchety or (as here) slightly demented but at heart lovable old ladies in her later years it’s hard to remember she was the first Blanche DuBois in the 1947 original Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (and as good as Vivien Leigh’s performance was in the 1951 film -- in which she was surrounded by the other three principals of the original stage cast, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden -- it’s a pity Tandy’s performance in the role could not also have been preserved). Indeed, one of the most amazing things about *batteries not included is that the lead actors are both old people -- Hollywood wasn’t big on making movies featuring old people in 1987 and if anything their ageist prejudices are even worse today -- and though there are some younger people cast as their fellow tenants none of them were picked for sexiness or physical appeal.

The Rileys run an old-fashioned coffee shop (back when that term meant a restaurant that served fast food but wasn’t part of a chain, as opposed to a coffeehouse) and their fellow tenants in the building include Mason Baylor (Dennis Boutskaris), son of an upper-class father who’s interested in pursuing a career as a painter and preserving historic buildings -- his girlfriend moves out on him early on because she thinks the place is a pigsty and she doesn’t want to be there anymore -- along with Marisa Esteval (Elisabeth Pena), a youngish Latina who’s pregnant by her boyfriend (a traveling musician named Hector), though she and Mason are predictably drawn to each other as the film progresses; and Harry Noble (Frank McRae), a long-retired African-American boxer who’s virtually catatonic until … but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Carlos and his cholos leave envelopes in cash at the doors of the remaining tenants, who call it “blood money” and won’t move, so Carlos decides to attack -- literally -- by having his crew go in Riley’s cafe with hammers and baseball bats and smash everything in sight, from the glass cupboards containing the dessert items to the jukebox that only plays 78’s (an indication of how thoroughly time has passed the Rileys by) and the old photos showing the Rileys at various crucial moments in their lives -- represented by actual photos of Cronyn and Tandy taken over the years by Arthur “Weegee” Fellig (whose last name lost one of its “l”’s in the closing credits) and other photographers of similar reputation and vintage.

Half an hour into the film, when it’s clear the people living in the building need some sort of deus ex machina to save their homes, one dutifully appears -- though perhaps it’s more of a machinus ex dea: a pair of toy-like flying saucers. The little saucers are tiny -- under a foot in diameter -- and for a while it’s unclear as to whether they house miniature living beings or are themselves their planet’s dominant life form. What’s more, there seems to be a gender differentiation between the two, with one seeming “male” and one seeming “female,” and in the middle of the movie, when they’re not working their high-tech magic to save the tenants and their building from extinction at the hands of a sinister super-rich land developer (and in 2020 it’s hard not to believe the writers based at least some of the villain’s characterization on Donald Trump -- 1987 was the year the real Trump pushed his way out of the trash-fame of the New York tabloids and “wrote” his alleged autobiography The Art of the Deal, thereby becoming one of those people you suddenly hear of all over the place and feel like you’re expected both to know and to care who they are when in fact you do neither), they manage to have whatever sort of sex they have and produce a litter of three even tinier saucers as their offspring. (It’s an ironic reversal of Spielberg’s claim that the title character of E.T. was an animate plant, was 10,000 years old and its species didn’t have sex or gender differences and reproduced by budding.)

The little saucers live on metal and electrical energy -- they have to plug themselves into wall sockets to keep going (and sometimes they have difficulty doing this in ways that are funnier now than they were in 1987, given both the modern-day ubiquity of cell phones and the difficulty their owners frequently face in getting them to recharge) and they eat some of the tenants’ housewares and regurgitate them into quirky works of art. They also have an extraordinary power to fix things: the night after Carlos and his cholos have wrecked the Rileys’ cafe the saucers have cleaned it up and got it in working order so the Rileys can reopen it on schedule for their morning trade. Later, when Carlos and Kovacs set the entire building on fire through a combination of an acid trigger and breaking open its gas pipes, and nothing is left but the stoop in front (where we see Mason sitting forlornly, obviously regretting the loss of both his home and something he considers an architectural landmark), in a scene I suspect was inspired by the legendary French short The Red Balloon an entire army of animate (or semi-animate) UFO’s from the same planet descend on that block of New York and reconstruct the entire building overnight.

There’s also the marvelously poignant plot gimmick of having Faye Riley suffering just enough signs of age-related dementia that she occasionally has the delusion that Carlos is actually her long-dead son Bobby -- even though she has a newspaper clipping about how Bobby died (at 18 in a car accident) -- and the anger she trains on him (just as we’re starting to like him because he’s changed sides and is now trying to help the Rileys) when she suddenly realizes, “You’re not Bobby!” *batteries not included has some flaws -- the title is barely explained (we hear it only twice, once in a TV toy commercial and once from Harry Noble after he manages, in a quirky combination of mechanical work and tender loving care, to nurse the last of the saucers’ three offspring -- the runt of their litter -- back to full life); the references to other movies seem a bit arch; at times director Robbins and the writing committee (which included him) seemed to be trying too hard to make this into another E.T.; and Charles thought the final gag -- Lacey’s super-project gets built after all but with the restored brownstone sitting in the middle of it -- just too overused and corny.

It occurred to me that the ending would have been stronger if Lacey had changed the design of his project to make the new buildings match the design of the old brownstone and created a new community with some of the flair of the old, including a set-aside for affordable housing. Not only would that have given us a sense that Lacey had undergone a Scrooge-like regeneration, it would also have made this film’s rather muddled politics (the principal bad guy is a fat-cat capitalist but his “enforcers” are Trump-like negative stereotypes of Latinos as vicious thugs) more consistently progressive. But overall I quite liked *batteries not included; the word I keep coming back to is “charming,” and there’s a sort of old-school old-pro aspect about the performances of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy that gives the other actors something to play off against and brings dignity and strength to the whole movie.