Steven Hilliard Stern | Through the Shattered Lens

Harry Holland (Kirk Douglas) is an aging cowboy who used to be one of the old west’s more fearsome outlaws. When the newly reformed Harry wins $200 in a poker game, local weasel Reggie Bell (Derek McGrath) tries to get out of paying him by accusing Harry of cheating. A gunfight leads to Harry getting wounded, the sheriff accidentally getting killed, and Harry locking himself away in a hotel room with a Shakespearean actress, Bess (Alexandra Bastedo).

Unsure of how to get Harry to leave the hotel room and surrender himself, the townspeople send meek Deputy Wally Boldgett (Graham Jarvis) to track down the legendary lawman Sam Sterrett (James Coburn). Like Harry, Sam is a veteran gunfighter and if anyone can face down Harry Holland, it’s him! Unfortunately, as Wally soon discovers, Sam is now an alcoholic who no longer has much interest in enforcing the law on the frontier.

While Wally tries to sober up Sam and deliver him to the town, Harry and Bess remain in the hotel room and fall in love.

Draw! is a light-hearted western comedy. Though it deals with the classic western theme of aging outlaws trying to find their place in a changing society, Draw! is more interested in laughs than pathos. Reggie Bell, for instance, is such a weasel that he’s never a credible villain, despite all of the times that he tries to be. Even once he’s trapped in the hotel room, Harry is never really worried. Even when the gallows start to go up in the towns square, it’s mostly played for laughs.

The main appeal of this film is to watch two genre vets act opposite of each other and both Kirk Douglas and James Coburn deliver. The film is split almost evenly between the two actors, with Coburn especially digging into his role. When he’s first introduced, Sam is so drunk that he can barely see straight and it’s not until he actually reaches the town and pins on his old sheriff’s badge that he starts to straighten up and become the cool and confident James Coburn that we all know. Coburn does a great job of showing Sam gradually starting to once again care about things like justice and doing the right thing (regardless of what the law says). Coburn’s laid back style compliments Douglas’s natural intensity. When Sam and Harry finally speak to each other, their shared history as friends and competitors comes across naturally.

Draw! is both a good western and a showcase for two iconic actors.

The_Park_Is_Mine_VideoCover Tommy Lee Jones is Mitch, a troubled Vietnam veteran who has just lost his job and who can not convince his ex-wife to let him spend any time with his kids. One day, Mitch receives a letter from Mike, a friend who has recently committed suicide. In the letter, Mike explains that he has been stashing weapons and explosives in Central Park. Before he discovered that he had cancer, Mike had been planning to take over the park as a symbolic protest against government bureaucracy. Now that Mike is dead, it is now Mitch’s job to declare, “The park is mine!”

When Mitch takes over the park, he announces that he does not want to hurt anyone. Instead, he wants everyone in New York to spend some time to thinking about their lives. “There’s a lot of people like me, who don’t feel like they have any control over their lives,” he says, “Think about how you treat people and how you want to be treated.” Meanwhile, he will be camping out in the park for 72 hours and anyone who tries to come after him runs the risk of getting shot or blown up. Then he orders everyone to vote for Bernie Sanders and make America great again. Or at least he would if this film had been made today, instead of in 1985.

Deputy Mayor Dix (Peter Dvorsky) is so evil that he makes Ghostbusters‘s Walter Peck look reasonable. Dix is personally offended that Mitch has taken over Central Park. He is so offended that he is even willing to first call out the National Guard and then hire foreign mercenaries to sneak into the park and track Mitch down.

Reporter Valerie Weaver (Helen Shaver) also sneaks into the park so that she can interview Mitch. When Mitch captures her, he shouts at her, “GET NEKKID!” No, it’s not that type of movie. Mitch just wants to make sure that she’s not carrying any weapons on her. (The Park Is Mine was made for HBO. Even in the 80s, HBO understood the importance of getting nekkid.)

One of my favorite things about The Park Is Mine is that, after he goes to all the trouble to paint his face and dress up in camouflage, Mitch still spends the entire movie wearing a blue Yankees cap that would make him an easy target for anyone with a scope.

The Park Is Still Mine

My other favorite thing is that, after Mitch asks everyone to think about how they treat people, a crowd of people gathers outside the park. When a reporter interviews them, a burly man with a hockey mullet and dressed in denim steps up and says, in a perfect Canadian accent, “My name is Elton Costanza. I’m from Queens!”

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I’m not sure if Elton Costanza is meant to be related to George Costanza. He does look like he could be a distant cousin.

The rest of the film’s depiction of New York City is about as plausible as Elton’s accent. For a film taking place in New York in the 80s, the streets are too clean and the people are too friendly. Even when that crowd shows up to support Mitch, they are the most polite crowd that anyone could hope for. That may be because. though The Park Is Mine takes place in New York, it was filmed in Toronto.

The Park is Mine is both thoroughly implausible, totally heavy handed, and stupidly entertaining. Tommy Lee Jones is one of the few actors who can actually sell a line like, “The park is mine!” and Yaphet Kotto provides good support as a policeman who is sympathetic to Mitch. Peter Dvorsky is all too believable as the ultimate example of heartless bureaucracy. The most interesting thing about The Park Is Mine is that it comes down, without a hint of ambiguity, on the side of a domestic terrorist. That probably would not be allowed to happen today. In fact, the entire film feels like a relic of a past age, a celebration of an individualistic philosophy that America once embraced but, ever since the trauma of 911, has been in the process of abandoning. If Mitch was unhappy with America in the 80s, imagine how he would feel about the Patriot Act, NSA spying, too big to fail bailouts, and campus safe spaces.

Like Let’s Get Harry, The Park Is Mine is pure 80s hokum that deserves a nostalgic DVD release.

Hopefully, one with Tommy Lee Jones providing commentary.

The Park Is Definitely Mine