BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED
With Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and Michael Carmine.
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While some of Spielberg’s proxy directors have used the formula cleverly (Robert Zemeckis in Back to the Future) or have even subverted it (Joe Dante in Gremlins), mostly the films emerge with a cookie-cutter uniformity (Innerspace, Young Sherlock Holmes, Harry and the Hendersons). Spielberg himself is the most rigid interpreter, and ironically his recent self-conscious attempts to shake off the formula (The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun) have shown an even greater enslavement to it. In both those films Spielberg used the cheapest way to intellectual respectability–adapting a classy best-seller–and both are shorn of all possible ambiguities, reducing everything to a support for his shallow family reunions.
The closer you look at the details, however, the less simpleminded, and the more critical, the film appears. For one thing, though the tenants are not wealthy, they’re not exactly poor either–Robbins seems to make them middle-class in a rather subversive, ostentatious way. The story centers on two of them: Frank and Faye Riley (played by those happily married hams, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy), who not only live in the building but run the coffee shop on the ground floor. The opening credits–shots of Frank and Faye in a bustling old-time New York–make it clear that these are not poor people but hardworking members of the petite bourgeoisie suffering under straitened circumstances. They haven’t changed; their neighborhood has.
This suggestive treatment of the poor (and, by extension, nonwhites) emerges even more strongly in the movie’s villain–or, to be more accurate, his surrogate. For although the danger posed to the tenants originates with the developer, he and his henchmen are kept in the background. Their threat is personified instead by Carlos (Michael Carmine), a poor Puerto Rican youth who supplies the muscle to back up the landlord’s threats. He’s dangerous looking all right, but oddly enough he never threatens people, just property. One of his first acts is to go through Frank’s diner with a bat, smashing and destroying.
And Carlos is the only character in the movie who actually risks his life to save another. After the arsonist (a middle-aged man in a suit who drives a station wagon–yet another middle-class caricature) sets fire to the building, Carlos runs into it to rescue Faye. Yet he never receives any credit for his heroism, and in fact when he shows up to console Frank and Faye at the hospital in an effort to assume some respectability, he’s abruptly and cruelly rejected.
