In this episode, Dara is recalling an early cinema experience that only succeeded at the second attempt – but it was ET, so it was totally worth the wait. At that time, all his objects of desire were heroic archetypes and it would be another few years before an actress on the big screen stopped his breath. The year ET came out, 1982, also saw the release of Robert Towne’s Personal Best, which placed Mariel Hemingway as the focus of longing in the world of aspirant Olympic athletes. Former athlete Patrice Donnelly was cast as the older athlete who competes with Scott Glenn for her affections and her chemistry with Hemingway jumps off the screen.
There are also palpable sparks between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in 1951’s A Place In The Sun, a nasty treatment of social climbing and complicated pasts that leaves one in no doubt about the privileged lives of beautiful people. The moral of the story? Don’t presume to desire something that’s not meant for you.
That’s one of the problems facing Marlon Brando’s repressed army officer in John Huston’s Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967), also featuring Elizabeth Taylor. Dara recalls seeing that peculiar and slightly kinky film when he was a teenager and being surprised not only by the messy sexual themes of the film, but also by Robert Forster’s pivotal role in proceedings.
Finally, why does a song from the Robert Towne-scripted Days of Thunder (1990) hold such particular resonance for Dara?