Movie Poster of the Week: "Independence Day"

Adrian Curry

Sometimes a poster in an online database seems like the last remnant of a lost film. Robert Mandel’s 1983 Independence Day (an “interesting but unfocused little picture” according to Leonard Maltin) is not on DVD, although there are a couple of used VHS tapes knocking about on Amazon, and I had never heard of it before I started idly looking for interesting foreign variations on the Roland Emmerich blockbuster in honor of the 4th of July. Described as a “romantic drama about a small-town photographer, yearning for the big city, who falls in love with a racing car enthusiast, whose sister is a battered wife” the film stars Kathleen Quinlan, David Keith, and, not credited on the poster, but the most praised aspect of the film, a pre-Hannah and her Sisters Dianne Wiest. Mandel went on to direct mostly for TV (including The X-Files pilot, one episode of Lost, and 2001’s Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story) and Independence Day was retitled for broadcast as Follow Your Dreams. But the not uninteresting poster, with its stark graphic, its very ’80s title treatment and not one but two taglines, remains. Happy Independence Day!

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