Once upon a time in the golden period of films known as the 1970s, Mel Brooks was, along with Woody Allen, the biggest directing name in comedy. Both had been on the legendary writing staff of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows in the '50s (along with Neil Simon and Carl Reiner) and both brought a distinctly Jewish tone to their slapstick. While Allen represented the Manhattan highbrow, Brooks’s style lurked more in the offensively low end Borscht Belt style. By the '80s, when Allen's status raised to the level of genius, Brooks’s comedy had already become passe and completely juvenile, working in the obvious (Spaceballs, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, etc.). But his early string of comedies, from The Producers through High Anxiety, created a lot of laughs, peaking in 1974 with two comic masterpieces: Young Frankenstein and, maybe even better, the bawdy western spoof Blazing Saddles.

As a remake of Blackboard Jungle, with a lot of A Clockwork Orange thrown in, the ’82 punk rock revenge flick Class of 1984 is still a surprisingly effective piece of exploitation pulp. With a theme song called “I Am the Future” sung by Alice Cooper (shockingly written by long time film and TV composer Lalo Schifrin!) prophetically announcing its intentions— this is a new youth nightmare. Entering the school through metal detectors (now a standard in many urban schools) the hero/teacher in this story, Andrew Norris (Perry King), is shocked at the conditions at his new school, and the kids are much more aggressive and nasty. Blackboard Jungle’s Glenn Ford had it easy compared to this guy. Yes, these aren’t you father’s punk kids anymore.

The essay by Michael Joshua Rowin included with this film seems to approach the film's historical aspects, presenting its theme as an overflowing aggression from the director in the turbulent '60s. Rowin addresses the fact that Ferreri - unlike his peers Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Fellini - made films that went against the norm and were arguably ahead of their time. For Ferreri, the '60s meant the drastic change in the importance of politics and culture, which was replaced by materialism, technological stimulus, and constant protest. He claims that Dillinger is Dead is Ferreri's “angriest” work, and that its masculinity shines through its use of a war-friendly atmosphere, "weak" female characters, and phallic symbols. There is no argument that Ferreri was tackling the changes in his world in a way that requires some delving into and critique. My review of Dillinger is Dead is not to go against those made by Rowin and other critics, but to give a different understanding of the lead character. From someone who is familiar with the films of Ferreri's peers, and other Foreign New-Wave directors, there was something fantastic about this film that has nothing to do with political and social change—a quality that is a bit more universal and relevant.

A classic tale of boy loves violence, loses violence, and reunites with violence. Alex de Large (Malcolm McDowell) is a romantic hero for a decidedly unromantic age, represented here by a Moddish parallel universe. When all things, including humans, lose their intrinsic qualities, becoming place holders in the stimulus-response equations of a totally administered world, even the most barbarous of acts, if freely chosen, can take on a heroic hue. Not exactly a comforting thought, that one. Thus, Kubrick enhances audience identification with Alex’s creative acts of resistance via a first-person voice over, visualizing his sadistic reveries (as in a masturbatory sequence involving Beethoven’s 9th), and shooting his violent deeds through an extreme wide angle lens which tends to slightly distort everything around our humble narrator.