Flashback Friday Looks at the Films of Recent Emmy-Winner Jodie Foster

September 20, 2024
HANK ORSO

The Films of Recent Emmy-Winner Jodie Foster

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SHE'S A LESBIAN! This is a popular comeback in the crowd of gay men at Sidetracks in Chicago when they play the clip from the musical "A Chorus Line" and the song "One." It also clearly describes the multi-faceted and enormously talented Jodie Foster, who has deftly ridden a career in show business since she was three years old as a model for Coppertone, up through her Emmy win this week for True Detective: Night Country. It's her first Emmy after a slew of film awards and nominations, so Flashback Friday thought we'd look back at her less illustrious but equally important work.

We're all familiar with her stellar roles in groundbreaking and cinematically historical films like Taxi Driver and Silence of the Lambs. She was only 13 years old when she did the former Marin Scorcese-directed film for which she garnered an Academy Award nom for Best Supporting Actress as well as a BAFTA win. The pivotal role of Clarice Starling in Silence... earned her the Lead Actress Academy Award. But she has a filmography that is worth delving into if these are all you know of her work.

Before Scorcese directed her in Taxi Driver he chose her to play the tomboy best friend of "Tommy" in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). She played a lot of rough-and-tumble, take-no-guff tomboys, who know how to connive and trick to get by in a man's world. Okay, a boy's world. Before this breakthrough role, she was playing a similarly tough kid in 1972's Tom Sawyer and Napoleon and Samantha both costarring Family Affair star Johnny Whitaker. In the latter film, she really did have to get tough when she was grabbed by a lion on set, leaving her with permanent scars on her back! But it was Alice... which put her on target for that costarring role later in Taxi Driver.

Being a horror fan, yer boy Hank here can't disclude this 1976 horror/thriller costarring acting powerhouse Martin Sheen. Foster further plays to her strengths as a resilient 14-year-old battling wits with adults as she attempts to hide her secret in the basement. Foster decried the film for years because of a nude scene, for which her older sister worked as her body double. Her sister played this role in similarly sexual scenes in Taxi Driver. It's mildly schlocky, but still gives some good creep factor, especially when it comes to the taboo nature of Sheen's character. That year also saw the release of the Disney flick Freaky Friday, the original body-switching comedy that started its own sub-genre of teen comedy.

As a huge fan of John Irving's novels (The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany) I was also a big fan of this wackadoo dramedy depicting the loves, losses, and laughs of a family living a rather uncharacteristic life. Foster gets to kick ass, and bed Rob Lowe (who plays her brother!) as the middle daughter Franny coming into her own amidst the craziness. It's a definite must-see of unconventional films and themes.

2005's Flightplan is a white-knuckle thriller costarring Lord of the Rings trilogy actor Sean Bean. It lifts a similar Hitchcockian plotline from the 1965 thriller Bunny Lake is Missing and puts it 30,000 feet in the air. How does her daughter go missing in the jumbojet Foster's character designed, and no one seems to have ever seen her? Did she ever exist? Again, Foster has to kick ass and fight the men to find out the truth. This film makes a good double feature with her 2002 thriller Panic Room costarring a very young fellow lesbian Kristen Stewart.

And finally...

One of my favorite films ever. Little Man Tate (1991) is Foster's directorial debut in which she plays the working-class mother struggling to understand and get the best for her son who just happens to be a natural math savant with an astronomical IQ. It's at times heartbreaking and joyful with an intelligent tenderness at its core. Also, you just can't go wrong with Dianne Weist!

Scores of television and film roles, both impressive (The Accused, Nell) and not so much (any project she did with Mel Gibson!) have woven through her illustrious career spanning almost her entire life. After her first Emmy win this week, we're excited to see what this powerful, out, female voice in the arts does next!