I followed dinner with a viewing of Steven Spielberg's The Goonies. Having not seen the movie for a decade or so before tonight, I can now confirm that it originally succeeded on account of more than the repeat theater attendance of exuberant youngsters.
Spielberg matched the finest of one filmmaking craft with that of another. The screenplay transports an otherwise outlandish plot: pensive kids, propelled first by need and then danger, search for buried treasure. Eight young actors assembled for Goonies were together only once but their on-screen rapport surpassed the so-called Brat Pack, finishing at a distant second to the Little Rascals.
Any skilled director must have known what he got himself with the four leads — two rising stars, one sophomore from The Temple of Doom and one memorable no-name. They gave Richard Donner nuance in their delivery; looks and gestures of camaraderie beyond what was blocked out, and a minimum of treble squealing. Jeff Cohen, playing Lawrence Cohen, or "Chunk," had found at age — what, eleven or twelve? — a small mastery of one-man slapstick.
There was and is a musical quality to the movie's pacing and direction: gags repeated only for good effect, thrills multiplied en route to a respectably graceful climax. An unthinkable, wonderful reversal happens; a tear or two is plucked from you; and closing titles cross the screen. Goonies gets put away with the guarantee of being watched again.
Spielberg made a film that will age very slowly, verified by me, at least, in the meeting between the apostrophic dreamer and leader — little Mikey Walsh — and the crafty, centuries-dead pirate, when Mikey steps into the bejeweled captain's quarters, long since made a tomb. The boy speaks to a skeleton rogue with an eyepatch, and tonight it was grotesque and moving, which is how I remember it.