A little thread to discuss _The Onion Field_ (the movie mainly) -- as well as a general observation on memory and nostalgia

As I've not read the book, but anyway -- picked up the movie on DVD used for cheap last year and watched it last night. A good minor film, I would say -- in otherwards, I didn't feel like I was watching something groundbreaking or canonical, but I was definitely watching a very solid film, something that felt of its decade -- filmed in 1979 -- in that I could see how so many sequences would have been done differently and probably to their detriment in later years, while earlier it probably couldn't have been easily done at all. No question that it couldn't have existed without something like _The French Connection_ as a model, f'r example, in the intersection of aiming for a strong realism. And apparently this was James Woods' breakout role as one of the two small-time crooks, deservedly so -- his vaunted intensity makes perfect sense here, strikingly so for a younger actor. The music was done by Eumir Deodato (yes, that Deodato) -- his dark moments were excellent, the main lush theme overbearing and inappropriate (the bagpipes at the end were far more haunting and contextually in keeping with the subject), but to his credit most of the time there isn't a score per se at all, silence and ambient sound being more effective. Some unexpected and pleasing cameos here and there too -- John de Lancie, William Sanderson with two or three line parts -- and it's a pretty good film set in LA and its environs, rather than necessarily being about LA.

But here's in some respects the larger point -- for me, this one of the first films I was aware of as an 'event' of some sort. I was 8 when it was released, and while I had certainly seen movies many a time before then -- I've gone on elsewhere about how seeing _Star Wars_ when I was six was so important to me -- _The Onion Field_, though I never saw it or knew anything about it, remained fixed in the memory as something 'big' movie-wise, I guess you could even say cultural-wise. I guess it was a combination of Joseph Wambaugh's reputation (and the fact that this was based on his first true crime book after early novels) and other factors that helped in the attention, but for me it was also the triumph of memorable graphic design -- simple but not stupid, if anything perfectly calculated, as you can see here:

http://www.thehollywoodstore.com/posters/o/images/15.jpg

A bit small and other posters and ads showed even more surrounding space, but the starkness and simplicity -- the fence, the car, the two men with guns and the other two with raised hands, the line of the ground -- was and is compelling.

In some respects buying and watching the film was an exercise in seeing if the impression I had gotten many, many years back would be rewarded by the end result, and to a large extent it was. Has anything similar happened to you?