Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast

Greetings Cagers and Travoltettes! This week on the podcast, Nathan’s Postal co-author Brock Wilbur (get your copy today) joins us to begin our inevitable descent into the mid to late ‘80s, where both Travolta and Cage started making curious career choices that would bury them in obscurity until they could claw themselves out. Here, we see both our heroes tackling those rarest of Travolta and Cage roles — the non-American. In Robert Altman’s stuffy, inscrutable TV special Basements, Travolta plays a Cockney hitman opposite a wearied Tom Conti in a filmed staging of the Harold Pinter play “The Dumb Waiter,” and it’s just as confusing and baffling as you’d expect. But where Travolta commits wholeheartedly to his over-the-top Cockney accent (“POPPYCOCK!” his Fanatic character would call it), Cage pulls a Boy in Blue for the Italian war drama Time to Kill, in which he plays the world’s most Californian Italian during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s. CW: discussion of sexual assault in this segment