9. “Used Cars” (1980)
The in-your-face wackiness of Zemeckis’ second feature, again produced by Steven Spielberg, with John Milius along for the ride this time, took a detour away from the sweetness that would become the director’s stock in trade (and that even his first feature, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” had demonstrated.) Instead, here we get zany hijinks with a kind of nasty edge, as Kurt Russell’s slick amoral car salesman/wannabe politico grifts and cons his way to the top of the heap and into the heart of uninteresting love interest Deborah Harmon. The ever reliable Jack Warden does provide some memorable moments, although the conceit of him playing rival car-lot-owning brothers is somewhat wasted by having one of them die early on — which cues up a lot of corpse-related shenanigans when his estranged daughter (Harmon) returns to town and Russell can’t tell her her Dad’s dead because of farce reasons. There’s a wide streak of misogyny that feels broad even for a 1980s T&A comedy (the botched commercial they shoot in which a screaming model has her clothes ripped off and her bare breasts mauled feels particularly icky), but the film seems to believe it’s a lot of good clean fun and nearly squeaks by on that self-belief alone. In fact, it apparently got the highest-ever test audience scores for a Columbia picture to that date, yet somehow went on to fizzle right out at the box office. Coming after the commercial disappointment of his debut and the bomb that was Spielberg’s “1941,” which Zemeckis co-wrote, the underperformance of “Used Cars” saw the writer/director lumbered with the reputation for writing scripts everyone loved that somehow translated into films no one wanted to see.
8. “Back To The Future Part III” (1990)
Fans of the franchise have been arguing for 25 years over which of Zemeckis’ sequels to his time-travel classic is superior, or at least over which of them holds up less poorly to the original. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but we ultimately favor the convoluted time-hopping second movie over the back-to-basics, Old West trilogy-closer. Filmed back-to-back with its predecessor, and picking up from the previous film’s cliffhanger, it sees Marty (Michael J. Fox) travel back to 1885, where Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) has been trapped, in order to save him from Biff’s great-grandfather (Thomas Wilson) and return him to the present. The film certainly has a more streamlined narrative than its predecessor, and Zemeckis’ usual eye for a set piece is fully intact (the train sequence near the end is excellent), but it’s arguably a little too streamlined, coming as across as a bit of a retread of the original, minus the charm. In fact, rather less than that: there’s little of the cleverness of the original’s screenplay, and too often (as occasionally with “Part II”), the film goes back to the well of a callback to the original, at the expense of an actual joke. Still, Fox and Lloyd are as charming a pair as ever, Wilson reminds you that he might be the stealth MVP of the series, Mary Steenburgen makes a fine addition as Doc’s love interest, and it’s still good-natured and sweet enough that it never comes across as a cynical cash grab.
7. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (1978)
Foreshadowing “Forrest Gump“‘s splicing of a fictional character into real-life history, and even occasionally using archive footage to bolster the “authenticity,” Zemeckis’ first film is actually a pretty decent, if terminally slight comedy lampooning the excesses of Beatlemania. Set in the run-up to the Fab Four’s first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” the film follows a gaggle of swooning, shrieking, sighing Beatles obsessives from New Jersey as they beg, borrow, and steal their way to New York and into the hotel where John, Paul, Ringo and George (only ever seen in long shots or with their backs turned) are staying. It’s terminally frothy and not a little shrill at times, with well-worn “hotel comedy” gags abounding: people get stuck in lifts, hide in room service trollies, duck into broom closets, and disguise themselves as bellboys (“Some Like It Hot” has a lot to answer for). But it’s good humored enough, and the young, largely female cast are appealing, particularly the busybody uberfan played by Wendie Jo Sperber (Marty’s sister from “Back to the Future“) and the quieter homebody played by Nancy Allen, who has a great way of suggesting her character’s borderline-orgasmic response to touching Paul McCartney‘s hairbush without ever being crude. “Raging Bull“‘s Theresa Saldana and Mark McClure (Jimmy Olsen in the ‘Superman‘ films and Marty McFly’s brother) also appear, as does Paul Newman‘s daughter Susan Kendall Newman in one of her only film roles.
6. “Contact” (1997)
After the unprecedented success, even by his standards, of “Forrest Gump,” Zemeckis headed to the cosmos for an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s sci-fi novel, a reasonably serious, realistic look at the first encounters between mankind and an alien civilization, and the face-off between science and faith. Jodie Foster takes the lead role as Ellie Arroway, a driven scientist who discovers a signal from a distant star with instructions on how to build a galaxy-crossing transport, with Matthew McConaughey (nearly two decades before “Interstellar,” a film which shares more than a little DNA with “Contact”) as her Christian philosopher love interest, and a strong cast that includes James Woods, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, William Fichtner, and Tom Skeritt. Sprawling and novelistic, it’s one of the most ambitious movies of an ambitious career for the director, and sometimes lives up to its potential: in its earliest days, it’s a thrillingly plausible look at what would happen if extraterrestrial life really did make contact, and Foster gives one of her best performances in the lead role. By the end, it’s gone on too many tangents that don’t pay off (John Hurt, as an eccentric billionaire, is a fun performance that could be removed from the film entirely without harming it), and the conclusion ends up sinking into New Age-y sentiment. But its rougher edges can be forgiven for the sheer scope and sincerity of a film that’s well worth reappraisal.