Richard Donner, The People’s Choice (1930-2021)

If a filmmaker’s critical stock were based on the amount of pleasure they brought to mass audiences, Richard Donner, who died yesterday at age 91, would be in the pantheon. And if you’re a fan of The Goonies, he’s already in your pantheon, likely. But we’ll get to that. 

Among Donner’s other crowd pleasers were the entire run of Lethal Weapon pictures, beginning in 1987 with the first installment of the good cop (Danny Glover)/lunatic cop (Mel Gibson) sort-of franchise and chugging through the running-on-fumes 1997 Lethal Weapon 4, which felt kind of like a feature-length version of an end-credits outtakes reel. But for most of his career Donner never let his story sense or desire to create onscreen excitement desert him.

That career began in television, working on shows as far-ranging as Gilligan’s Island and Perry Mason. One of his six Twilight Zone episodes, “Terror at 20,000 Feet” — you know, the one where William Shatner thinks he sees a man-monster tearing up the wing of the plane on which he’s traveling — is one of the scariest half-hours of television ever lensed, and proof of the right stuff that Donner possessed. Even maestro George Miller was hard-pressed to duplicate its effectiveness in a big screen remake of the episode for 1983’s The Twilight Zone: The Movie. 

But Donner’s career in features took a while to get started. 1961’s sci-fi X-15 failed to achieve liftoff, and Rat-Pack-mini-Cooper Salt And Pepper, starring Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. as Swinging London nightclub owners turned detective, is something of a cis-het Camp classic (although perhaps it did give Donner training in how to handle a mixed-race buddy crime story, which came in handy for Weapon.) 

It was with 1976’s The Omen that Donner hit pay dirt. Its studio, Warner Brothers, approached it during production as a potential exploitation profit-taker, an elevated grindhouse picture. But the Satan-as-a-boy shocker became a runaway hit, not just on account of Catholic Church worrywarts huffing and puffing about potential blasphemy (I think I actually saw it for the first time on Easter Sunday and thinking I was being subversive; ah, teenhood) but because world-encompassing evil was really a zeitgeisty topic. That, and it was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to feature an onscreen beheading, by way of a sheet of plate glass, yet. Gnarly. 

As trashy as the whole enterprise was (male lead Gregory Peck looks mildly embarrassed throughout, although Samuel Beckett muse Billie Whitelaw goes at her task as the nanny with complete abandon), Donner directed not just with a straight face but with exemplary brio. He went on to the far more family-friendly Superman, starring Christopher Reeve in the title role. (The all-star cast also featured Margot Kidder, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, and, you know, Marlon Brando.) A genuine comic book movie so consistently bouncy that it sometimes achieves genuine buoyancy, it’s all the more a miracle when you consider the circumstances under which the picture was made. Director Richard Lester, who directed Superman II and was a second-unit director on Donner’s film, recollected that producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind tried to push Donner into quitting the film and not paying him. (Lester himself was sort of inveigled into these projects while trying to get the Salkinds to pay him for his Musketeers films.) 

No matter how many Superman films have come after the 1977 one, that film is still spoken of with reverence and affection, not just because of Reeve’s ideal portrait of the Man of Steel, but the overall sense of fun and fresh-faced innocence with which Donner imbued much of the movie. 

Inside Moves, made in 1980, was a different kind of crowd-pleaser, a low-key drama about a suicide-attempt survivor (John Savage) who finds a sense of purpose of sorts with a group of barroom ne’er-do-wells. It marked the second movie appearance, after a three-decade absence, of Harold Russell, the real-life disabled Army vet who won a special Oscar for his work in The Best Years of our Lives, and later in the ceremony took home a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as well. His sensitive performance in Inside Moves showed he hadn’t lost a step in all those years. 

Always a competent-or-better craftsman, Donner’s work rose and fell relative to the material he worked with. Which varied widely, even wildly. Was he the actual opposite of what’s sometimes called an auteur, always on the lookout for films from which he can put across a personal point of view? It’s more likely that Donner, who was by all accounts a kind and personable man — Gene Hackman’s performance as what the actor called “a director of integrity” in Postcards from the Edge was the actor’s personal tribute to Donner — was someone whose desire to entertain was uppermost in his mind and heart. 

With a project like the Medieval fantasy Ladyhawke, he showed a remarkable delicacy of touch; the same year, 1985, he gave us The Goonies, a Steven-Spielberg-produced childhood adventure that felt like something Spielberg might cook up with A Christmas Story maestro Bob Clark. Packed with characters that are incredibly grating or side-splittingly-outrageous depending on how you look at ‘em. it remains in a sense even more contentious than The Omen. But the viewers who delight in it REALLY delight in it. (This is also true of his fractured Christmas Carol hot take, Scrooged, starring Bill Murray, from 1988, which besides Superman may be my own favorite Donner. And I don’t mean the reindeer.) 

In the 1990s, writing for Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia, I stated of Donner, who by that time was just past Lethal Weapon 3, “A competent mainstream director with an uncanny middlebrow empathy and little by way of personal signature, Donner in all likelihood would have been a favorite of moguls in the studio era. In today’s Hollywood, he functions almost as a one-man studio of his own, initiating, producing, and directing highly commercial projects.” I may have overstated this state of affairs but in any event it did not really last. And while it did last, Donner made one of his most entertaining and underrated films, the 1994 movie Maverick, with Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and the great man who originated the title character himself, James Garner. A breeze of pure pleasure. 

And Donner’s autonomy did not extend quite so far as I presumed for long; witness 1995’s Assassins, featuring a scenario by the Wachowskis but saddled with one of Sylvester Stallone’s most ponderous performances, which sinks the movie. The much-bruited pairing of Lethal Weapon madman Gibson with Julia Roberts sounded sure-fire, but the overdetermined high concept of 1997’s Conspiracy Theory lacked credibility. And then came Lethal Weapon 4 and Joe Pesci exclaiming “We’re back!” (Yes, but to what end?)

His last film, 16 Blocks, had a scenario that harked back to old TV stuff like Naked City (one show that Donner never directed — and this is a guy who directed so much television he got several shots at The Banana Splits) and was both energetic and arguably a little too old school. He’d finally gotten to the point where he was making them like they didn’t make them anymore, and audiences hardly responded. But for over a decade, few directors were as consistent at keeping popcorn movie lovers on the edges of their seats or reared back with laughter.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

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