So I was out and about earlier today, hanging at my favorite street-date-violating DVD emporium, discussing the State of Things with a friend of mine whose generation is at least one prior to my own, and we were contemplating purchases.
"You think I should get the Blu-ray of Logan's Run?" So he asked.
I raised an eyebrow. Once or twice. "There's a Blu-ray of Logan's Run? Oh, yes, I see. Well I don't know if you should get it, but I sure as hell am gonna get it..."
"Well, the movie's not so good, is it?"
"The movie's hardly any damn good at all. Let's just say that I'm getting it for...sentimental value."
The thing about today's young people is that, God love 'em, they're never able to leave well enough alone. What's the sentimental value of the thing? How does that sentimental value subsume the fact that the movie's not terribly good? And so on. Yeesh.
Of course those among my readership who are around my age know what I'm talking about. I'm hoping they'll be nostalgically cosseted by a little reminder. Back in the '70s, the MPAA ratings board was quite a bit more lax than it is today. Which is to say that it staunched incidental female nudity to the extent of giving "GP" or "PG" ratings to certain films wherein said nudity was contained. While in these times, you so much as flash a nipple and you're good for an "R." This did not obtain back in the day. Necessarily. But because the ratings themselves weren't obliged to list a group of wherefores, we weren't privy to the reasons for any given rating. So surprises could abound.
So. Logan's Run. Whose so-half-assed vision of a dystopian future was such that its male leads were seen pretty much right off the bat patrolling what were, unmistakably, unretouched 1970's shopping malls. But which also features the incredibly gorgeous Jenny Agutter, whom us Jersey boys had failed to catch in Walkabout five years before, as the initially resistant love interest of Michael York's hero Logan. And she's walking around in translucent green gauze semi-togas much of the time. The fifteen-year-olds under-17-year-old-boys in the theater around July of 1976, of which I was one, just sat there going "Homina homina homina." Or, rather, "Agutta agutta agutta."
And then York's Logan began his titular run, taking Agutter's character with him. They go through a rainstorm, or a river, or some body of water...after which they come upon a cave. A conveniently frozen cave, with icicles and everything. And in the cave there are animal pelts that they can wear. Only they're already in these very wet futuristic, and in Agutter's case, gauzy clothes. And York's Logan, with an utterly straight face, delivers this line after appraising the pelts: "Let's take our clothes off first, before they freeze on us."
And Agutter, or, to be fair, I should say her character, Jessica 8, FALLS FOR IT, and strips down right there.
Um, holy crap, we 15-year-olds (or so) thought back then. And, not to sound like a dirty old man or anything, but I'm still pretty impressed.
My Lovely Wife is impressed too, not so much with Agutter's split-second stripping, but with York's nonchalant delivery. "He really does make it sound like the freezing thing is his main concern, which of course is complete bullshit," she notes. "I didn't know Basil Exposition had it in him."
Thus, I sum up the sentimental value of Logan's Run, a thoroughly cheesy-looking picture whose cheesiness is, I have to say, almost too-convincingly punched up in Blu-ray.
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