Jack Butler put up a fine post on the Corner on Saturday to mark the 40th anniversary of Blade Runner, a film that, in my view, is the greatest science-fiction movie ever made. Jack notes that Blade Runner was “underappreciated” on its initial release. That’s true, although I can remember reading the reviews at the time it first hit British cinemas and deciding then and there that this was something that needed seeing. And soon. I was right.

Contrary to many, I liked the voiceover and, indeed, the original ending (which, appropriately enough, featured leftover footage from The Shining, to some, the greatest horror film ever made, although both it and Blade Runner are masterpieces that transcend their genre). As for the different cuts of Blade Runner (I have seen a number of them), there’s a way beyond the obvious in which, collectively, they add to a film in which memory is malleable and the hero may, unknowingly, not be what he thinks.

Meanwhile, the news has been released that Joe Turkel, so memorable as Eldon Tyrell, the scientist and entrepreneur behind the Tyrell Corporation (a company so far overlooked by Capital Matters: This must change), died on June 27 at the grand old age of 94. Until reading his obituary, I was unaware, shockingly, that, in a second connection between The Shining and Blade Runner, he had also played Lloyd, the bartender at the Overlook, another extraordinary performance. RIP.

Jack describes Blade Runner as neo-noir, which indeed it is, and also singles out Vangelis’s soundtrack, rightly so. That soundtrack, of course, includes, “One More Kiss, Dear,” a song that brilliantly links an imagined future to a lost past, a pastiche, of course, but in a film when memory can be confected, the real thing would not have been . . . right. In The Shining, by contrast, Kubrick went back to the 1930s, close enough to the Overlook’s greatest — if that’s the word — years, resurrecting a recording of “Midnight, the Stars and You,” sung by Al Bowlly, who was later killed during a German bomb attack on London in 1941, but not before he had recorded a version of an Irving Berlin song anticipating the day when Hitler would be no more:

When that man is dead and gone
When they lay him twelve feet deep
I’ll be there to laugh, not weep . . .