Three strains dominated 80’s entertainment:

All that Lucas-Spielberg Sci-Fi/Fantasy stuff (though Lucas checked out for most of the 80’s and Spielberg went Oscar-hunting while farming out “Gremlins” and the like to Joe Dante and “Back to the Future” and the like to Bob Zemickis)

John Hughes: Teenage angst and comedy in the upper-class Chicago suburbs, with two seminal works: “The Breakfast Club” (“Five Angry Teenagers”) and “Ferris Bueller “(Snark-snide Philosophy for the ages.) Note: Tom Cruise’s “Risky Business,” set in Hughes upscale Chicago turf, is sometimes mistaken for a Hughes film. It isn’t, but it is.

The Joel Silver canon. AKA the “80’s action movie.” This was essentially a mating of two great seventies templates: “Dirty Harry” (gunfighter cop) and “Star Wars” (dazzling special effects, ear-blasting sound effects, and humongous explosions). The “Silver movie” snuck in early with the cop-buddy picture “48 HRS” (from Walter Hill, a Peckinpah era leftover), and detoured through Schwarzenegger superhero action (“Commando”) , before hitting successive bonanzas in ’87 and ’88: “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard.”

“Lethal Weapon” came first, a black-white cop buddy movie in the “48 HRS” tradition, and rather familiar stuff, though Mel Gibson here finally broke through as an American studio version of the action hero after some time in the less accessible international character of Mad Max and a slowly failing attempt at “serious American films” (The Bounty,The Year of Living Dangerlously, The River, Mrs.Soffel, etc.) Many of those films were fine, but Gibson got no traction as a star til he pulled a gun and made with the bang-bang.

“Die Hard” was next up, and proved to be a rather elegantly structured “single set” thriller which mixed elements of “The Towering Inferno” (trapped in a skyscraper) with “Ten Little Indians” (one by one, people get killed, except in this one, each victim is a villain) with “North by Northwest” (elegant Eurovillain with henchmen versus regular guy at wrong place/wrong time), with “Vertigo” (dangling from high places and falling) with “The Wild Bunch” (machine-gun-powered bang-bang) with…well practically everything else imaginable.

“Die Hard” was a black-white buddy cop movie again, but this time the buddies were strangers (McClane on the inside, the black patrolman on the outsides) and only walkie-talkie voices to each other. Sidney Poitier found “Die Hard” to be the most effectively integrated of movies in the 80’s: the good guys, the bad guys, the FBI guys, all were a an entertaining mix of the races. (In a nice little match-up, the sole surviving villain, a witty black computer expert, was punched out by the witty black limosine driver who brought Bruce Willis to the fateful tower in the first place.)

Just as “Lethal Weapon” plucked Mel Gibson from prestige-movie box office mediocrity and made him a “movie star,” so did “Die Hard” pluck Bruce Willis from his cushy trap as a funny TV star (“Moonlighting”) and made him a movie star, too. Prior to “Die Hard,” Willis had done two rather sad failures with the once great Blake Edwards (“Blind Date” and “Sunset”) and it didn’t look like the movies would take him. But Willis got “Die Hard” famously after Richard Gere, Al Pacino, and Clint Eastwood turned it down. (Those three are confirmed; Burt Reynolds and Sly Stallone are rumored.) The producers wanted Gere the most – they didn’t want a muscleman. As for Eastwood, irony: Eastwood made his fifth Dirty Harry sequel “The Dead Pool” instead, and he made it cheap, like a seventies movie. The super-expensive, super-explosive “Die Hard” blew “The Dead Pool” away at the box office in Summer ‘88, and Eastwood’s action star career collapsed. He came back later…as the Great Auteur.

Willis, paid a then-stunning five million for a TV actor with two movie bombs on his resume, earned his pay and then some, turning John McClane into a wise-cracking, vulnerable, somewhat muscled-up version of his goofy-sexy TV private eye on “Moonlighting.”

Absolutely key to the success of “Die Hard” was its villain, British stage star Alan Rickman, an unfamiliar face to U.S. audiences at the time. Rickman had lost his stage role in “Dangerous Liasions” to John Malkovich in the movie, but rode this “consolation part” as the “Die Hard” villain to a little bit of film history. Hans Gruber is an elegant, well-tailored descendant of James Mason’s head villain in “North By Northwest.” Gruber has great lines, great intelligence, and great savagery – giving a Japanese executive the count of three to reveal information, Gruber actually shoots the guy after “three” when he doesn’t get it. Of pre-9/11 irony, Gruber is only masquerading as a terrorist. He demands the release of some terrorists whose names he got, he tells his henchman, “from Time Magazine.” But its only a cover for Gruber’s merciless plan to steal millions.

The action in “Die Hard” was as good as it gets in the 80’s, and if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about. Meanwhile, a multitude of side characters (McClane’s conflicted wife, the black patrolman, Gruber’s blonde-haired ballet dancer of a killer henchman, an arrogant police official from “The Breakfast Club,” a slimy TV reporter, a Reagan-era corporate sleazeball who tries to negotiate with Gruber, the limosine driver, and on and on), almost made “Die Hard” an epic.

But here’s the kind of narrative detail that really made it great: a dialogue scene that had my full-house 1988 audience cheering, groaning, and yelling with each little turn of the moment:

Hans Gruber is climbing around the entrails of the skyscraper when he stumbles right into John McClane with a gun. The audience cheers. Except the two men have never seen each other (they’ve dueled verbally on walkie-talkies), and Gruber switches his German accent to an American one and announces that he is “Bill Clay” (he has seen the name “William Clay” on the skyscraper directory behind MaClane.) The audience groans as McClane bonds with Gruber as “Clay,” and as McClane eventually gives Gruber a handgun. Gruber turns the gun on McClane and it doesn’t work, because McLane “made” Gruber as Gruber from the get-go. The audience applauds, but Gruber’s henchmen show up with machine-guns and another great action sequence is launched. Here’s the thing: it’s a GREATER action sequence because of the scene with Gruber and McClane that leads up to it. And how cool: Alan Rickman turned his British accent into a German one, and then into an American one. He’s the Peter Sellers of villains.

There’s perhaps too much action movie silliness in “Die Hard” to move it to classic status. But not really. One reason that the “Die Hard” sequels have felt lesser (even as they’ve made money) is that the original had that feeling that classics DO have: everything came together just right: Willis as the hero, Rickman as the villain, the excitement of the action sequences, the twists and turns of the plot. It’s really quite a successful narrative entertainment, and Alan Rickman is better than all three of the head villains in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies of the same decade.

Enough’s been made of Willis’ “Yippie-Ki-Ay” line (delivered to the evil Rickman, which makes it even better) so I will instead note the great line delivered by the late, great slimeball Paul Gleason. At the end of a spectacular explosion sequence that brings two arrogant FBI men to the their deaths in a crashing helicopter, police official Gleason gets the deadpan observation:

“I guess we’re gonna need a couple more FBI guys, huh?”