Last night for movie night we saw Raising Arizona (1987). I never saw it before, assuming that it was some smarm about a guy helping his girlfriend raise her daughter (named Arizona). No, the title is a misdirection: no one is raised, and Arizona is, for some reason, the last name of the family and the state they live in (although they speak with Deep South accents).
The plot: Small-time robber H.I. McDonnough (Nicolas Cage) keeps getting arrested and sent to prison, but there are no bullets in his gun, so his sentences are only a few months long. He falls in love with Ed, the cop who keeps taking his mug shots (don't get excited, it's a lady, played by Holly Hunter). After his latest release, he finds a regular job, she quits the police force, and they get married and move into his horrible house trailer in the desert outside Tempe, Arizona.
He's achieved the heterosexist trajectory of job, house, wife, and...uh-oh, he still needs kids, and Ed is "barren."
Idea: Wealthy furniture store owner Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) and his wife have just had five babies, the Arizona Quints. No one can handle that many, so why couldn't Hi and Ed take one off their hands? It would be doing them a favor.
They kidnap "the best" of the group, Nathan Jr. (played by TJ Kuhn, who didn't want to be an actor. He's now a real estate agent.)
Meanwhile, brothers Gale and Evelle (John Goodman, William Forsythe) break out of prison and impose upon HI and Ed. They kidnap the baby for a reason I don't remember (either to return him to his parents for the reward, or to force HI to join them in a bank robbery). But they grow attached, and decide to raise Nathan Jr. on their own.
Hi has a vision of a a scary, motorcycle-riding bounty hunter (Randall Cobb), who throws hand grenades at squirrels. He turns out to be real, and offers to find the boy for the reward money. Nathan Senior rejects him, but he tracks Hi/Ed and Gale/Evelle down anyway.
After many chases, robberies, gun fights, and "leaving the baby behind", everything works out: the bounty hunter is exploded, Gale and Evelle return to prison, and Hi/Ed return the baby. Nathan Senior doesn't press charges, because "there was no harm done." Except putting him and his wife through several days of worry?
Beefcake: Nicolas Cage is shirtless a lot, with a hairy chest that I haven't seen in his other movies, and there's a lot of attention paid to his bulge.
There are some cute cops and FBI agents in the background.
More after the break
The Gay Connection: There's only one homophobic statement, a rarity in the 1980s: Gale and Evelle heard about the big bank robbery opportunity from a guy who went to prison for "soliciting sex from a state trooper" (during this period, police officers often hung out in t-rooms to entrap gay men). They don't usually associate with "that type," but he provided useful information.
Gale and Evelle are obviously framed as brothers because otherwise they would be strongly queer coded, especially when they decide to raise the baby themselves, and "become a family."
John Goodman (Gale) went on to star in Roseanne/The Conners, which had gay characters, and The Righteous Gemstones, where his Eli Gemstone was arguably bisexual.
Sam McMurray played Glenn, HI's boss, a sleazy dude who suggests wife-swapping and tells anti-Polish jokes (when he tells one to a state trooper, he's sent to prison). He went on to play William, probably the first gay dad on tv, on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987-90).
He also played Andy, whom Peggy thinks she's having an affair with, on an episode of Married with Children (1990). Remember Al's gleeful "He's a homo, Peg."
I always thought he was gay in real life, but he's got a wife and kids.
Tod Michael Boger (right) plays a stunning college-age Nathan Jr., a football hero, in a flash-forward. The retired actor and his best friend were murdered in a road rage incident in 1991. They are buried side by side, causing me to wonder if they were a gay couple.
My eardrums were also destroyed by a horrible screeching "aaaaaaahhhhh!!!!" that played over the introduction and during five-minute long chase scenes. I could not believe that such an awful noise was made by a human being, but it was actually recorded by musician John R, Crowder.
In 2017, Phoenix Magazine interviewed him about the...um...music, which they called yodeling. He corrected them: "I would hardly call it yodeling. I called it hollering." The Coen Brothers asked him to imitate a segment from The Goofing Off Suite, by folk singer Pete Seeger, so he did, but made it crankier and more bumpkin-like, with hollering and whistling.
The Heterosexism: Having kids is the meaning of life; we are put on this Earth for no other reason than to make more of us.
In the final scene, HI has a vision or dream of his life in the future, when he and his wife are elderly, and invite their family to the trailer for Thanksgiving dinner. Holding each other, they gaze out on their sons and their wives, and grandkids (three boys, three girls, in gender-polarized outfits).
Ugh. The heterosexist trajectory of house, job, wife, and kids writ large.
"The Conners": Gay Kid Argues with his Mom in this Update of Roseanne's Family. With John Goodman.
The Worst Heterosexist Movie of All Time: "Knowing" It's even worse than Chuck and Buck!
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