The Last Detail (1973). Grade: B

Three sailors walk into a bar. There’s Jack Nicholson, very young Randy Quaid, and very Black Otis Young. Nicholson orders beers all around. The bartender snipes, “the law says I have to serve him” (Young), “I can’t serve him” (Quaid). Nicholson snipes back a little bit, causing the bartender to tell him quit it or he’ll call the Shore Patrol. Then Nicholson explodes, slamming his sidearm on the bar. “I AM the motherf***ing shore patrol, motherf***er!”

Your typical Jack-goes-manic scene, right? We’ve seen him play this kind of thing a zillion times. What makes this different is the way Nicholson laughs about it with the others outside. “Did you see that cracker a**hole?”

Of course they saw it. But Nicholson needs the validation; he needs an audience for his “badass” behavior. Without the attention, there wouldn’t be any point. It’s a funny scene, sure. (The clip was included in A Decade Under the Influence, an overview of seminal ‘70s movies.) But what makes it is the pathetic need for approval afterwards.

Nicholson had been acting in small roles throughout the 1960s — and not being especially good at it — when he appeared as a straightlaced lawyer-turned rebel in 1969’s Easy Rider and a hard-living hardhat rebelling against his privileged background in 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Practice in those earlier small roles had improved his acting tremendously; the turn of the decade gave him the right parts to play. Nicholson could never have been convincing as a flower child or typical ambitious young man. He needed to be the outsider, and by 1969 movies were more willing to depict those kinda of characters.

Director Hal Ashby was an outsider, too, an overaged hippie who’d moved to Hollywood in his mid-30s and improbably landed a job as a film editor with virtually no prior experience. He got to direct his first film, The Landlord, in 1970, and from that point on had one of the most remarkable directing stretches in movie history; Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound For Glory, Coming Home, and 1979’s Being There. The first three films are the most daring, the last three the most conventional, but all seven are well worth watching. That’s a helluva decade. (The 80s weren’t as kind to Ashby.)

And writer Robert Towne was another weirdo, who’d made his way into filmmaking after a stint in the Army and at odd jobs like tuna fisherman. He’d acted in and written Roger Corman movies, and by 1973 was a well known “script doctor,” someone who patches up bad bits in other peoples’ screenplays for no credit but a enviable chuck of money; this was the first serious script Towne ever sold.

It’s based on a 1970 novel of the same name by Darryl Ponicsan, a teacher-turned-Navy sailor-turned social worker. I haven’t read the book, but this CinephiliaBeyond article says the script is fairly close except for the Nicholson character. In the book, he’s an educated, literary sailor (so, like Ponicsan), and dies at the end, wracked with guilt over what he’s done.

Nobody dies in the movie. As to the guilt… well, here’s yer plot:

Randy Quaid has been caught stealing $40 from his naval base’s polio relief fund. A bad thing, to be sure! But, what’s worse (for him), the polio fund is the favorite charity of the base commander’s wife.

So, Quaid had the book thrown at him. He’s been tried, and sentenced. To eight years in military jail (way worse than regular jail). Eight years for stealing $40.

Somebody’s gotta transport Quaid from Virginia to the Portsmouth Naval Prison (just across the border between New Hampshire and Maine). That job’s been assigned to long-time enlisted men Otis Young and Nicholson. They’re not eager to take a 20-year-old to jail for eight years, but there’s no getting out of the job, the “detail.”1

What Nicholson decides is he’s gonna make a fun little vacation out of the trip. They’ve been given more time than they need to get to Portsmouth, they’re getting a generous per diem, so why not make the trip last as long as they can and max out that budget money. Have a good time; maybe show the kid a good time as well.

Where the guilt comes in is when, during the course of the vacation, they come to really like the kid. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to let him “escape.” But if they do, then Young and Nicholson will be in deep doo-doo; they’ll be the ones headed to military jail for dereliction of duty.

The movie starts off a bit slow, and the sarcastic / mock military music by Johnny Mandel grates on your ears. But as it goes along, Hal Ashby’s feel for the characters and the quality of the acting starts to make this both genuinely charming and genuinely sad. (Ashby intentionally shot this in sequence, so that the very inexperienced Quaid could find how he wanted to play the role.)

The Otis Young part was written with Nicholson’s friend Rupert Crosse in mind, although, awfully, Crosse became terminally ill with cancer. Young is the movie’s rock. He’s got just as much “screw this unfair sentence” feeling as Nicholson, and he’s got his own resentments about how racism hinders promotion in the Navy, so he enjoys bending the rules a little. On the other hand, though, he’s happy with the choice he made to join up. He’s getting close to (what was in 1973) a very nice lifelong pension coming due; while he doesn’t like the system, he’s made it work for him.

Young’s satisfaction with the Navy begins to seem like it’s showing Nicholson everything he can’t be and can’t have. When he gets out — if he behaves well enough long enough to get a pension, which seems iffy — he’s not going to have any idea how to live on it, the way Young will. He’ll be a man pushing middle age who’s never had a conventional job, who seemingly has no friends or family. If the Navy’s a dysfunctional family for Young, it’s a flophouse for Nicholson. It’s marking time on a journey to noplace special at all.

At Sense of Cinema, Richard Armstrong writes that “Few films have such a sense of time running out.” The more fun the guys have, the sadder it is knowing the clock stops at midnight. The more Quaid learns from his Cool Evil Uncle figure Nicholson, the more he realizes just what he’s going to be losing for eight years. Earlier, when Nicholson tried to convince Young that prison was the best thing for Quaid, how he was too much of a vulnerable simpleton to make it in the harsh, real world, you could almost agree with him. Not by the end of the movie, you can’t.

Quaid, who’s unfortunately been beset by major mental problems the last few decades, really is sweet here. Bud Cort (from Harold and Maude) lobbied hard for the role, and would have been fine in it. In fact, Towne’s script called for a shorter actor (like Cort). But when Ashby said he’d found the 6’4” Quaid, Towne loved the idea; instead of a little helpless kittycat of a guy, it’s a big helpless kittycat of a guy, and that makes the character more poignant. Quaid has a shot near the end, a little ways off in a park, where he’s using his arms to communicate, and it’s both very sad and very hilarious (for my money, it’s the moment that makes the movie as good as it is). The big guy silently expressing his regrets. It’s priceless.

It’s strange that Nicholson was so good in the 1970s, and so willing to slip into self-parody in the years that followed. I won’t call it lazy, the way I would some actors who started repeating themselves for audience/critical praise. Since I don’t think Nicholson gave a s**t about either. He was willing to appear in increasingly silly movies which required a minimal amount of effort and paid well; that’s his business.

But maybe the 70s were a prime period for Nicholson because they were a prime period for the kind of movies he did well in; independent-minded, anti-establishment films. He could be the lost rebel in this and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because it was an era that made movies about lost rebels and an audience that was willing to see them. Within ten years you went from the military misfits here to Joe Cocker singing the abominable “Up Where We Belong” in An Officer and a Gentleman. That’s just not a movie for Nicholson in so many ways, and it was increasingly not a time for Nicholson either. Not for what he could do at his best. (Amusingly, he turned down the Robert Redford part in The Sting to do this one.)

Other Making Of film facts? Well, Towne had actually written this in 1970, but the studio was nervous about the language. He later recalled, “‘I remember talking to an executive who told me “Bob, wouldn't 20 ‘motherf***er’s be more dramatic than 40 ‘motherf***er’s?” And I said, “No, they wouldn't.” The whole point of the swearing in The Last Detail is that it's not an expression by characters who are about to act. It's an expression of powerlessness.’”

Towne refused to change the screenplay, and in the meantime worked on his “script doctoring” job (including a scene in The Godfather) and on his own script for Chinatown. Idiot studio executive Peter Guber wanted to go ahead with a script revised by someone else and starring Burt Reynolds / David Cassidy, but producer / book rights holder Gerry Ayers stuck to his guns. Once the increasingly-popular Nicholson became available, the studio went with Towne’s script as it was.

This was the first movie with Michael Chapman as cinematographer; he’d been an assistant on Ashby’s The Landlord and Ashby hired him for the top job when neither Gordon Willis nor Haskell Wexler were available. (Chapman would go on to shoot Taxi Driver and The White Dawn, among others; he’s better here outdoors than in.) You can read quite a bit of Chapman’s reminiscing about the film (mostly how scared he was and how much fun he had regardless) at CinephilaBeyond, which also has fun production/publicity photos:

Hal Ashby was busted for weed possession during location scouting in Canada; the opening base scenes and the late scene with a picnic in a park were filmed in the Toronto area. Everything else was in the place where the characters are. The filmmakers had wanted to shoot a scene of the characters drunk on the steps of the Supreme Court but Chief Justice Warren Burger refused, possibly because of Nicholson’s public criticism of Nixon; they shot in front of the National Archives instead.

When the boys visit a New Age group of transcendental chanters, keep your eyes out for Gilda Radner among them. You won’t have to squint so hard to catch Carol Kane, in one of her first roles. The jovial naval officer who sends Nicholson/Young on their “detail” at the start is Clifton James from Eight Men Out and Lone Star.

As post-production started, Ashby had to fire the editor who’d done the first rough cut, as it wasn’t even close to what he’d asked for. He brought in Robert T. Jones, who had a reputation for working fast, since by starting the editing over they were behind schedule. As the process went longer, and the studio started grumbling, Jones/Ashby worked on the editing at Ashby’s house, so the studio couldn’t take the film away and cut it themselves, which they threatened to. The final cut had the most f-words of any movie yet released, although Jones took them all out later for a TV-friendly version. That TV network, ABC, allowed one mild cussword; Nicholson’s character could still be nicknamed “Bad Ass.”

If you liked any of Nicholson’s 1970s work and you haven’t seen this one, you should really give it a try. Stick with it; it gets much better as it goes along.2 If you haven’t seen the 1970s movies of Hal Ashby, this is a great introduction; I might like Shampoo a little better and others might like Harold and Maude, but you can’t go far wrong with any of the three. And it just so happened that when the library DVD froze up with five minutes to go (rare, but it does occur), we found a perfectly-good print on YouTube, for as long as that’s allowed to remain. (I even cued it up to the bar scene for you, but you can go back after that scene and start it from the beginning.)

Robert Towne, when he was on his game, could really really write. This movie would be nominated for an Oscar, as if that mattered to Towne; but it wouldn’t be his last nomination. He’d get more for Chinatown and Shampoo. Towne also, sort of, received a nomination for the script of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, which Towne had hoped to direct himself and had to give up control of. When he saw the changes that the producers/director made to his script, he was appalled and took his name off the movie.

So, when it was nominated, the nomination went to P.H. Vazak, who didn’t win. It’s doubtful Vazak minded not winning; Vazak was Towne’s dog. No dog had been nominated for a screenwriting Oscar before, and none would be again, unless you count Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, which I do.

Go For Broke! (1951). Grade: B-. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). Grade: B+

Although it’ll probably be put into the official “memory hole” in about five years or so, here’s a rotten thing that happened: during WWII, about 95% of Japanese-Americans were put into detention camps scattered across the West. Around 2/3 of these were U.S. citizens.

The reasons were varied; there was some genuine fear of Japanese war aims, such as sabotage. (Except German and Italian American citizens weren’t treated anywhere near as unjustly.) Largely, though, there was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment stirred up by the attack on Pearl Harbor. And some (not all) within the Roosevelt administration were perfectly willing to use this bigoted sentiment to distract from the government’s military and intelligence failures at not being adequately prepared for a possible Pearl Harbor attack.1

So the internment camps were built, and thousands upon thousands of American citizens became prisoners for no good (or Constitutionally valid) reason for several years. A great many lost their businesses, their homes, everything their families had hoped to build in America in the first place.

And by the 1950s, Hollywood was ready to address what happened. Kinda. Barely.

Enter Dore Schary, born into a Jewish family in Newark in 1905. Schary got involved with theater as an actor and a writer. One of his plays was read by bigshot Hollywood producer Walter Wagner, and Wagner brought Schary to Hollywood. Where he wrote and produced… and by 1948, was named head of production at MGM.

Schary seems to have been that rare duck who actually believed the studio would do better if they mixed in the occasional thought-provoking picture. Don’t get me wrong, Schary backed his fair share of formula junk, and a few people thought he was every bit as big a jerk as any other studio mogul out there. Hollywood didn’t have any heroes, never did, never will. Yet Schary does seem more interesting than most.

He had been working at RKO when he butted heads with owner/idiot Howard Hughes; Schary wanted to produce a movie about the Battle of the Bulge, Howard Hughes didn’t. So Schary jumped ship to MGM, produced Battleground about the Battle of the Bulge, and it was a huge hit.2

Schary wanted to produce a movie about the WWII internment camps and assigned Battleground screenwriter Robert Pirosh to the project. However, they soon decided to make a positive movie about Japanese-Americans rather than a depressing one about the camps. Per the AFI, this was “partly because of Cold War tensions.” AKA, they were worried about catching crap from the HUAC/Joe McCarthy types who saw any movie that criticized anything about American life as a possible sign of dastardly Commie influence.

So Go For Broke! has exactly one line mentioning the internment camps. Hilariously, it’s one character regretfully explaining why the camps were necessary, at first, because “we were worried about a Japanese invasion.” Maybe the administration used that scare tactic as a selling point for the camps, but trust me, nobody in the U.S. military was remotely concerned about a Japanese invasion, on the grounds that it would be impossible.

The rest of the movie just has the existence of the camps as an undercurrent. Because what the story’s about is the U.S. Army’s 442nd Infantry Regiment, which was made up entirely of Japanese-American volunteers from the camps. It became one of the most highly-decorated military units in all of WWII.

The movie stars 35-year-old Van Johnson, who had also starred in Battleground, and would go on to play either a war hero or a cynical world-weary type so often that it became a chore to watch anything Van Johnson was in. (He wasn’t an awful actor, he just became a very lazy one.) Besides Van Johnson, who I am largely sick of, the movie stars a bunch of actual veterans from the 442nd — so, macho military types, not actors. I was completely expecting this to be AWFUL.

Surprise! It’s not bad at all, and some of it is really good indeed.

I’m gonna give credit for that to Robert Pirosh, who wrote it and directed it (this was the first time he directed, and he’d go on to do several war movies). Pirosh was an actual military veteran, and the battle scenes have some real kick to them. They don’t show violence in a realistic way, there’s no severed limbs. (Many veterans were extremely upset by sanitized versions of the war in movies like Sands of Iwo Jima; you can read about that in this excellent, first-rate 1989 The Atlantic article by Paul Fussell. The Atlantic didn’t ALWAYS suck.) But people DO die at random, and being an audience favorite doesn’t necessarily save you in this movie. Neither does being clever or brave (although some soldiers we see are both); clever/brave people can get killed at random just like anybody else. Plus Pirosh has a good sense of how to use explosions and bullet blasts in a visually unexpected and vivid way. The battle scenes don’t drag the story down at all.

Pirosh also gives us some good old-fashioned military cynicism. Nobody likes a hard-ass tyrant commanding officer, and the way the soldiers grumble is believable and funny. At times, the men of the 442nd feel like it’s their butts being asked to face risky assignments to save the necks of racist white officers. I had fully expected Van Johnson to be a noble, non-bigoted hero who dies because he’s a sacrificial victim of American idealism. Actually, he starts out half a bigot, and has to be schooled about how ignorant he is. (The schooling comes from his enlightened white superior officer, not his Japanese-American troops, because this IS 1951, after all.)

There’s a little stereotype humor, but it’s generally inoffensive. For example, Van Johnson leads the men in a training exercise to jump and scale a wooden obstacle; almost all his men are too short, because they’re Japanese. OK, so far, so annoying, right? But then we see how the clever 442nd soldiers beat the obstacle anyways — they give each other boosts over the wall. There’s some rolled “r”s and such, but not too much of it — we’re a VERY long way from Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And there’s the usage of Japanese-American words like “nisei” which most audiences wouldn’t have known at the time.

The soldier/actors aren’t enormous Thespian talents, yet the way this is written, they don’t need to be. They’re decent guys trying to do their best, and that’s enough. One’s given a good speech about how he lost family members in the Pearl Harbor attack, so he wants to fight the Japanese army as much as anyone. And there’s a fair amount of celebrating Japanese-Hawaiian music (ukuleles and such) that isn’t remotely presented in a minstrelsy-kind of way. (It may not be a strictly accurate portrayal of Japanese-Hawaiian music/dialect, but it’s certainly not demeaning or condescending at all.)

The cinematography’s by Paul C. Vogel, and it’s perfectly acceptable, nothing special. HOWEVER: this movie fell into the public domain in 1979, and as such, there are a LOT of really crappy low-quality prints on YouTube. We saw one, in fact. Don’t do that to yourself! Here is a decent-quality print on YouTube. Here is one you can watch if you are a PBS member. And there’s a few different video versions circulating at libraries, although I can’t vouch for the quality of all of ‘em.

Van Johnson hadn’t become lazy yet, the story is a positive one, and the plot zips along well enough, especially in the first half. If I have any criticism of this at all, and it’s a minor one, it’s that I think the story could have used some trimming; the bit where someone adopts a pig is not generally necessary.3 (Animal lovers, don’t fret, the pig is not threatened in battle, although it does eventually help feed a starving family.) This is a pretty good movie at 92 minutes; it might have been even better at 82.

Bad Day at Black Rock comes in at 81 minutes, and it’s very, very good indeed. For the kind of movie this is, it’s just about perfect.

Spencer Tracy steps off the Streamliner train in a tiny town in the middle of the Nevada desert (actually California, but who’s counting). Already, the fact of the train stopping in this town is a big deal; it hasn’t stopped here in years. Already the locals are nervous. Then Tracy asks where he can rent a car or a ride to a ranch called Adobe Flats.

And then the locals get really nervous.

This is directed by John Sturges, who’d later direct big popular favorites like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; those movies have their virtues (mostly the stars), but this is a tighter and more energetic film than either of ‘em. The script’s by Millard Kaufman and Don McGuire,4 adapted from a 1947 magazine short story by Howard Breslin; I wan’t able to find it, but Wiki has these pages from the start of the story:

Notably, the broody outsider in a suit seems to have his arms crossed. The Tracy character in the movie lost one arm in the war.

Right off the bat, the locals are hostile to Tracy, like hotel clerk John Ericson and tough guys Ernest Borgnine / Lee Marvin. They let him know he’s not welcome here; Tracy meekly apologizes, but he isn’t going anywhere. He wants to see Adobe Flats. And he wants to find out, where’s Kokomo?

Kokomo’s the name of a Japanese-American farmer, and Kokomo’s been murdered. Nobody in town admits it, not in so many words. But we in the audience know that SOMETHING bad happened to Kokomo, and we know that basically the whole town did it — at least, Borgnine and Marvin did. And their smooth, ruthless boss/bully, Robert Ryan.

Robert Ryan was a liberal who opposed the HUAC and supported Dr. King, and boy did he specialize in playing haters. He was a hater of innocence in Billy Budd, he hated Blacks in Odds Against Tomorrow (produced by and starring Harry Belafonte), he hated Jews in Crossfire (produced by Dore Schary, who produced Go For Broke! and Bad Day at Black Rock). Ryan’s quite good in these parts — he always seems to give these guys their own intensity, the haters don’t resemble each other. Here, the guy has that sanctimonious superiority which still flourishes today in most Western or Midwestern rural communities,5 where some of the locals like to imagine how they’re the Real Americans and everyone else is a mooch, exploiter, wimp; that they’re the only real practitioners of Self Sufficiency. To this character, his total xenophobia is a virtue; anyone who’s not exactly like him is an inferior and a threat. When Tracy rejects Ryan’s offer to go hunting, Ryan hates him already.

What’s amazing about this movie is how the script is structured. In 15 minutes, we know (basically) what the crime is and (basically) who did it. The drama is, does Tracy know it? And, if the bad guys think he knows it, what are they gonna do to him? The story moves from “might be a threat” to “definitely a threat” to “how the hell can he avoid this threat” without stopping much at all. There’s a few speechy words from Ryan, and a few (amusingly cynical) ones from Walter Brennan as the town vet/doc/mortician, yet generally the script is always amping up the stakes.

As is Sturges’s direction. It’s silly, in a way, how he stages this; tall men standing lankily against the desert mountains and sky. Yet it really works, because it illustrates how this world operates. It’s a small, petty world, but Ryan towers over it; it’s his little fiefdom to rule, mostly via the way everyone fears his sneering contempt. They’re grateful when somebody else is getting Ryan’s scorn. He’s a petty puppet master and he’s not gonna let any “Jap-loving cripple” undo his world.

This is one of many, many movies that features a pile of rocks called the Alabama Hills near the eastern California town of Lone Pine; unlike most of those, it actually uses Lone Pine, too. Just about all of this was actually filmed on location, and it gives the movie a feeling of grounded reality most others from the period don’t.

Just like in Go For Broke, the internment of Japanese-Americans is mentioned once here and remains in the background after. Tracy tells Ryan he’s looking for Kokomo, and Ryan says he was sent away to one of the camps and never came back. Per the AFI, this movie is also thought by some to be about the HUAC/McCarthyism, and per TCM’s Rob Nixon, co-writer Kaufman later highlighted a line about vigilantes superseding the rule of law in his copy of the script. But I don’t read the anti-McCarthy angle here. I think this is an anti-racism movie above all else.

Holy smokes, does TCM have a ton MORE info on the making of this one for ya; the key articles are here, here, and here. (Until right-wingers buy Warner Bros./Discovery, which owns TCM, and kill the channel/website. Which will happen, just not tomorrow.) I will try to sum up the best TCM info as briefly as possible.

Tracy didn’t want to make this movie until the main character was changed to be someone who’s lost an arm, at Schary’s suggestion. (He said “I never knew an actor who could resist playing a” person with disabilities, although Schary put it tackily in the way producers do.)6 Tracy hated the heat, the altitude, and being on the wagon. He got into it with Walter Brennan, a conservative who supported the HUAC hearings (Tracy was neither).

When called to go through a door, Borgnine did — and Sturges had nailed the door shut, causing some of the door to come apart in the shot you see in the movie. Borgnine wasn’t happy about it.

Originally, the movie didn’t have any music or any train shots in the credits. Preview audiences thought the opening was too abrupt, though — just Tracy getting off the train — so associate producer Herman Hoffman got the train shots done (they look quite cool, using a helicopter chasing a train going backwards; reversed, it looks like the train is chasing the camera). André Previn’s music was added at the last minute too, and it’s not God-awful.

The train was chartered from Southern Pacific for “$5,500 and the cost of 265 round-trip passenger tickets.” It took 18 hours to get to Lone Pine, going very slowly and backwards; the line hadn’t been used in ages, and if a bridge was gonna collpase, better it do so with an empty rear car than the engine with a human driver.

There was a later remake of this starring — hold for it — Mickey Rooney, called Platinum High School, set at a private school on an island.

And this was one of the most-viewed movies at the White House movie theater over the years. You know, the movie theater which was razed by a gentleman who’s every bit the sycophancy-demanding bully Robert Ryan is in this movie.

That’s the thing about both these movies; they’re both still relevant today, aren’t they? At least the subject of bigotry towards “foreigners” is, and the history of the internment camps, as much as that history in these movies is background, not foreground. Heck, they’re even refitting some of the old internment camps used during the war. You know what they’re being used for now, don’t you? Japanese-Americans do.

For all its exceptional qualities, Bad Day at Black Rock isn’t without missteps. The two youngest performers, John Ericson and Anne Francis, are drips. The movie essentially has Tracy talking people into guiltily doing the right thing, which is always dubious to me. And Tracy’s too old for the character (this is supposed to take place RIGHT after the war ended, and guys his age wouldn’t have been in the war unless they were officers before the war began; that’s not who this character is).

But wow, is this an effective one. For once, the “smart” dialogue actually sounds pretty smart. For once, CinemaScope is used artfully (and the Eastman color is better looking than the more common Technicolor of the period; thanks, cinematographer William C. Mellor). Maybe Tracy and Brennan didn’t get along, but they sure act well alongside each other here. And while all Ryan’s baddies are worth watching, this one’s in the best story. (It won’t surprise you that Borgnine and Marvin are quite good at being menacing themselves — Marvin with a car engine, especially.)

Watch Bad Day at Black Rock as a suspenseful drama with a relevant message, then watch Go For Broke! as an interesting companion piece, and not a half-bad movie in its own right. And you’ll still be out less than three hours! And most three hour movies don’t have as much as EITHER of these.

Roger Deakins begins this book with a story. On one of his earliest film jobs, a documentary shot in rural southern Ireland, Deakins found himself quite lost. He came across “a fishing shack, blacked with tar in a vain attempt to protect it from the weather,” and nearby “was an equally weather-beaten man and his dog.” Deakins told the man he was lost. And so the man puffed his pipe and began to speak.

“‘What followed was the story of his life and what a rich life it had been; his wayward youth, his adventures in the merchant navy, meeting the love of his life in a strip club in London’s Soho, and so much more. Finally, he emptied his pipe and gestured towards the fishing shack. “My parents lived here. I was born here, and I will die here. I can’t help you get where you are going but I wish you well. Drop by if you are this way again.”

Deakins means the story as being close to his own; like the sailor, he too wandered aimlessly until he ended up where he wanted to be all along. It also fits his professional career. Plan; but be willing to adjust on the fly for the unexpected things you will run across. You never know where life can take you, for good or ill.

Deakins’s mother died when he was very young, and only as an adult did he learn that she had been an aspiring actress with a few roles to her credit before she had children. Later, he would learn that she had been in a very famous 1938 documentary photo, taken when she was 21. Just someone enjoying life, before it became sad:

Apparently, Deakins still sees that picture of Josephine popping up all over the place in random locations, like a Santa Monica shopping mall or a pub in Scotland where he was shooting 1917.

After his mother’s death, his father remarried; the new wife did not like the kids. Deakins found himself growing apart from his family, and more restless in his seaside town of Torquay. He didn’t do well in school, but he was introduced to world cinema and documentaries at a local arthouse theater; it gave him the Film Bug.

Deakins attended Bath Art College, where he was being trained to do graphic design; he didn’t have any interest in that. A fellow student steered Deakins to the National Film and Television School in London, where Deakins was eventually able to get experience on his own and fellow students’ film projects. He writes that upon graduating in 1975:

“A governor of the school suggested I seek work as a production assistant in Plymouth, at the local television station closest to Torquay. With luck and hard work, he suggested, I might make my way up to camera operator in seven or eight years. Whether this was a serious suggestion or a deliberate attempt to rile me up I have no idea, but within a decade, I’d worked as cinematographer on a film the governor in question produced. Whether is was intentionally motivational or not, to this day I am indebted to David Puttnam for giving me such uninspiring advice. Instead of Plymouth I decided to try my luck in London.”

(Puttnam became the Oscar-winning producer of such movies as Chariots of Fire; the 1985 movie that Puttnam produced and Deakins shot was Defense of the Realm.)

That’s one of the many charms about Reflections on Cinematography. In between the technical and personal stories, Deakins has no compunction about dishing the dirt on people he found to be rude or unprofessional. Filming 1992’s Thunderheart with Val Kilmer, Kilmer announced that someone was “in his eyeline.” Everyone in the crew who could removed themselves from his eyeline. It turned out Kilmer was taking about a sight “way, way out on the horizon you could just barely see a kid on the back of a pickup truck, the child of a rancher who was probably out looking for his cows.” So a production assistant was duly sent to pay off the offending eyesore to move their truck. A camera assistant whispered to Deakins, “does Val ever act in the theater? Does he have the audience turn their backs on the stage?”

Or another instance where the (not good) director Roger Spottiswoode was s**-talking Deakins’s work on the (bad movie) Air America. Some other filmmakers had asked Spottiswoode for a report card on Deakins. Spottiswoode delivered a “scathingly bad report,” saying Deakins “liked to operate the camera myself, was not a fan of second units,1 that I did not like shooting with multiple cameras or with zoom lenses, and that I preferred working out the shots in a scene before the day’s shooting began.” That was “exactly what the brothers had wanted to hear.”

“The brothers,” of course, being the Coen brothers, with whom Deakins would shoot 12 movies, including Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, A Serious Man, and No Country for Old Men.

Deakins has also shot several movies I think look great, but few have seen, such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (it DOES look amazing; it’s also 160 minutes long, so viewer beware). He goes into detail on movies he shot for Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve, two directors I don’t care for.

So there is a mild problem with the book; when chapters go into great detail on how a particular movie was shot, but you either haven’t seen it or didn't like it (because of the directors, not Deakins). It doesn’t make those chapters bad, just something you’re more likely to skim for the writing that catches your eye.

I loved learning how the “camera follows bowling ball” shots were done in Big Lebowski; Mitch Lillian and Bruce Hamme just put the camera on a felt pad and it was pushed behind the ball on a 40-foot pole. That the motel flames in Barton Fink were the real deal (and they were hot, but carefully safe). And how after shooting The Hudsucker Proxy in Chicago, in the winter, Deakins thought nothing could possibly be so unpleasant, weather-wise. Nothing could be THAT cold.

Then the chapter on Fargo is titled “Twenty Below.”

I had some more notes on the book from the first time I checked it out; but I lost them. (On a piece of paper, no less! See, it’s not just computer files that can get lost.) So I don’t have chapter/page citations for these (I wrote ‘em down!), but, believe me, they’re all in here:

How Deakins has nothing against digital photography per se; it’s just another tool in the toolbox. His thought is that a lot of movies shot with digital cameras look bland because the directors aren’t familiar with how lighting can be used. It’s often possible for digital cameras to record usable images without any additional lighting at all, and so some newer directors might feel they don’t need to light shots for dramatic emphasis, even when it could help the movie.

The unspoken corollary to this is that directors used to ASK experienced cinematographers what they think could/should be done to express something within a shot. If they’re not asking now, it’s because they’re too dumb to realize what the material they’re directing is actually about. Granted, most old-time Hollywood directors were idiots, too. Some things never change. (Deakins mentions that some directors don’t want to worry about shot selection at all, focusing on the actors instead, and letting the cinematographer select the shots. He doesn’t deride that, and neither do I; it’s a perfectly valid way of approaching a film.)

When directors/choreographers DO bounce ideas off each other, the results can be terrific. Deakins mentions several times when the idea for a shot came from him, or from one of the crew. So, shot-by-shot analysis film scholars, go ahead and PROVE that each shot in a work by a Master Auteur expresses their inner turmoil. Sometimes it’s the boom mike guy saying “it’ll work a lot better if we do it this way.”

Along those lines, Deakins mentions how part of a cinematographer’s job is to help the director realize their vision, no matter how elaborate it might be, visually… but, also, help the director and the production team be realistic. Let them know what is doable with the money and the time available. (While Deakins will work with directors like the Coens who storyboard a whole script beforehand, he prefers to work out shots each morning. And, the Coens ended up being very flexible in welcoming creative collaboration.)

So, even though there are some films here you just won’t be curious about, there’s useful and almost always engaging writing for anyone who wants to learn more about the ways movies are actually made. Sure, there’s more details about fill lights than I needed, but you can just skim that stuff easily.

There’s a great bit where Deakins is invited to Pixar during the making of WALL-E to demonstrate what the art of cinematography is. And he gives a short presentation on a mockup of a movie set. “Using a traditional blend of key lights, fill lights, kickers, and backlights with multiple flags to shape the light and patterns of light on the walls.” This continues. “After about twenty-five minutes, I started to wonder if I’d taken the exercise too far… it was becoming harder and harder to move around the set!”

Then Deakins told them, you might think that’s what I do… but it’s not what I do. He pointed everyone’s attention to a single light bulb illuminating an electrician’s face in an interesting way, and said, “This is what I do.” Use whatever technology serves the image you want to show, and no more than is necessary. It’s a concept Deakins returns to several times.

This book is VERY worth a library checkout. The suggested retail price is $45 USD, which is steep for my budget, but those of you with a bit more cash and serious movie-buff friends might consider this as a gift item. $45 is actually cheap given the normal price for books this handsomely printed, at 400 8”x10” pages, most illustrated with wonderful photographs/production sketches. Be warned, however — the copy I checked out from the library already showed some fraying binding issues, which isn’t ideal for a book not even a year old. So purchasers should know and gift-recievers should be informed that this is probably a read-upright-in-armchair-or-on-sofa book; it doesn’t seem stitched/glued together well enough to withstand being read flat on a table.

You can check out this brief interview with Roger and James Deakins (James is Roger’s wife/filmmaking partner) at Film Review Daily. Interestingly, it says that Keith Phipps, “a writer from Chicago,” helped shape the book and collate some of the material. Those who remember when The A.V. Club was a really terrific publication will remember Phipps, a longtime writer/editor there.2

Serious cinematography buffs, especially those who work at the craft themselves, can also look at Deakins’s official website. There are forums for solving lighting problems and such.

Those who aren’t quite as technically-inclined will still find much to enjoy in the book. On the set of Kundun, James Deakins would try naming interesting movies that director Martin Scorsese3 hadn’t seen. You simply don’t play stump-the-film-nerd with Scorsese; he’s seen everything. In return he would ask the staff to get videotapes of interesting movies he thought Deakins would enjoy watching, since there wasn’t a heckuva lot else to do after hours on the remote location. And then this happened:

“‘Every time Marty asked for a movie, the staff had to find someone in Italy to hand-carry it through Moroccan customs as, if sent on its own, a VHS tape would never have made it. Those in the production office were not so fond of the “name a movie” game that Marty and James played!’”

I’ll bet!

It's good behind-the-scenes stuff, it's good technical stuff, and great personal memories. A very cool book, from one of the greatest-ever at his craft.

The Circle (2000). Grade: B-

Five women, roughly ages 17-46 or so. First, we see A & B. A leaves, and we follow B’s story for a while. B narrowly misses meeting C, and we follow C for a while. Then C briefly meets D, and we follow D; D sees E across the street, and we follow E. Then E ends up in the same spot as A & B. It’s a circle.

There are also circles within circles; like the spheres in a Venn diagram, they sometimes interact, sometimes not. The circle that encloses all these characters is the repression of women in modern Iran. Within that circle, some have more relative freedom than others…

This was the third feature by Jafar Panahi, after 1995’s The White Balloon and 1997’s The Mirror; both of those are about girls. These characters are all women, but some are older and a little world-wiser than others. For example, we see young Nargess Mamizadeh showing her older friend a painting of her home village, which was a “paradise.” The friend’s a little dubious that paintings depict reality. And perhaps is too kind to say that it’s not Mamizadeh’s home village, it’s a Van Gogh.

(Specifically, “A Wheatfield With Cypresses,” something I either know because I am Twinsbrewer The Great Art Expert or because Wiki says so on its The Circle page.)

Panahi’s filmmaking methods do not lay out for you exactly what’s going on at all times; you have to puzzle it out for yourself.1 That was never a problem for me with Offside, Taxi, This is Not a Film, or No Bears, all of which were made later on. It did cause a major problem here, and it threw me out of the movie. Not enough that I didn’t still appreciate and enjoy it, but I did find it frustrating.

So I’m going to describe EXACTLY the moment that frustrated me (and Mrs. twinsbrewer, too).2 It’s not a spoiler, or if it is, it’s a teeny tiny one. It happens fairly early on.

Mamizadeh has gotten her bus ticket to her home village (and it took quite some doing). She’s about to board the bus, and asks the driver how long until departure? Ten minutes, he says. Don’t be late, I won’t wait for you.

So Mamizadeh goes back upstairs into the bus terminal. And she sees a shirt she likes in a shop window. She wants to buy it for a boyfriend/fiancee waiting back home. The shopkeeper is helpful.

All of this is Panahi at his finest. Even without the subtitles, we’d know what is going on at the shop. It’s also agonizingly tense. You want to scream “just get back on the bus already! Don’t miss your bus!” When the shopkeeper asks “do you want this gift-wrapped?” and Mamizadeh says “sure,” it’s adding to how nervous we are. It’s a masterful scene, completely absorbing you, and there’s no spooky music or anything. It’s all about the pacing.

Then Mamizadeh takes her nice gift-wrapped present back to the bus and… leaves? She doesn’t get on the bus?

We were UTTERLY confused what was going on. Maybe Mamizadeh got lost in the terminal, and went down the wrong departure stairwell to the wrong bus? But if then, why does she keep wandering sort of aimlessly? Did she get cold feet about traveling alone at the last second?

After such an incredibly skilled buildup of tension, to have it just… deflate into confusion was a MAJOR letdown.

Thanks to the special features on the Winstar/Fox Lorber DVD, now I know what happened.

Mamizadeh wasn’t lost, she got back to her bus. It’s still there, she’s not late.

It’s just that she sees cops searching the bus. And she’s knows if she gets on, they’ll nab her. She’s not supposed to be traveling alone without student I.D., and she’s got no student I.D. So, she can’t get on the bus; she goes looking for her friend instead. That’s what’s happening.

Now, I’m not going to blame the confusion on Panahi; sometimes, these things can be subtitle fails. Still, I haven’t been confused (or, if I was, it wasn’t for long) at his later movies. So, he might have gotten better at making his movies subtitle-fail-proof. This movie might have also been primarily aimed at Iranian audiences, who would have known exactly what was going on; later Panahi films would make things clearer to outsiders like my slow-on-the-uptake self.

And now, if you watch this movie, you won’t be confused as to what’s going on. And you should watch this movie! I’d say Offside is probably the best entryway into Panahi’s films, but this one would work, too.

If you do watch it, you won’t be hurt by watching the same special feature that explained this plot point for me, called “The Women of the Circle.” I’d wait until after seeing the movie, since there are some mild spoilers like the one I just mentioned, and I didn’t find the plot confusing in any other instance. But DO look at it after seeing the movie; it’ll give you extra details about the characters you may have missed (I missed a few). And a fun extra thing; how either the names of the actors of the names of their characters often have a meaning that’s relevant to this story, such as “hope” or “angel.”

(The name “Solmaz Gholami” is called out at both the beginning and ending of the movie, which means that the first room we saw, and the last room we see, are both part of the same larger facility. And “Solmaz” means “eternal” — hence, the circle coming back to itself.)

In another special feature, a short and watchable interview with Panahi, he mentions that only two of the women had any acting experience. Fatemeh Naghavi plays a middle-aged woman so desperate that she’s actively trying to abandon her kid, hoping it will end up in a better home. Who knows why? Is she mentally unwell? (Life as a woman in Iran would mess up anybody.) Is her family just terribly poor? Panahi’s filmmaking style won’t tell us (this script was co-written with Kambuzia Partovi), but it’s not important for us to know. Naghavi’s anguished face tells us everything we need to know.

Maybe she’s just had one two many kids already. Along those lines, the other actor with prior experience is Fereshteh Sadr Orafai, who (among other troubles) is an unmarried woman trying to get an abortion. She’s tried telling the authorities her husband just died and she can’t afford the baby; they say, fine, then… just get signed permission from your father and your husband’s father. Obviously, that’s impossible. (But it still means it’s easier for a woman to get an abortion in Iran than in Texas.)

The hospital-worker friend Orafi appeals to is Elham Sabotakin, and she’s very solid, as are fellow non-professional actors Maryam Parvin Almani (the one who doubts a Van Gogh is “paradise”) and Mojgan Faramarzi, who’s suspected of prostitution. (Just getting into a car driven by a man who’s not a husband/relative is grounds for suspicion.) I don’t think Faramarzi even has any lines, just a wary, resigned expression. This is the world she lives in and she’s used to it.

Best of all is Mamizadeh’s hopeful “two tickets to paradise” character. Panahi said that character was the hardest to cast, and he was really getting frustrated over it until he saw Mamizadeh at random. He had her come in for some screen tests, and that was it. Mamizadeh’s fantastic, I’m surprised that she doesn’t seem to have done anything since. Maybe she didn’t have any interest in acting as a career; or maybe she got scared off by the heat that came down on Panahi.

Because his first two films had passed the censors; this one, for obvious reasons, did not. I haven’t seen those first two yet, although I will. Apparently, one’s about a girl trying to get her mom to buy a goldfish, and the other about a girl who’s lost in Tehran and trying to find her way home. Those two plots don’t sound like they’re showing any kind of structural hardships in society at large, just characters overcoming obstacles.

But once you go full “it sucks to be a woman in Iran because of all the restrictive rules,” then, yep, they’re-a-gonna ban ya. And just about all Panahi’s films have been banned since (although people still see them on bootleg copies, of course… video piracy existed long before the internet did, my friends.)

Yes, this is a movie about living in a repressive authoritarian theocracy, which sounds bleak, and it ain’t a laff riot. But it’s not a grim-fest either, it’s not meant to grind you down emotionally. These women are going to keep on surviving, it’s just a chore for them to do so. And as far as authoritarian theocracy goes, Americans can consider it their training manual for the future!

Some more things Panahi mentions on the interview. One, that they shot the movie in 53 days, but they missed about 16 days because the weather wouldn’t cooperate. Still, getting all the footage to match the correct time of day is an impressive achievement (the movie takes place over the course of one afternoon becoming night). Two, that the opening continuous shot required almost a week to do, because it got messed up over and over and required retake after retake. So then, don’t make it a continuous shot! It’s not important that it be continuous. What’s important is that the first and last images we see in the movie are similar.

Finally, in the interview, Panahi is asked if he’s ever seen Max Ophuls’s La Ronde (French for “a circle”), another movie where A meets B meets C and so on, until G meets A again. (It’s also close to my favorite movie.) Panahi quickly says no, he hasn’t. Says he doesn’t watch foreign films.

Hmm. By the time of 2015’s Taxi, he definitely says he likes watching foreign films. It may be that in 2000, he just fibbed a bit and said he didn’t, in order to convince the censors that he wasn’t Corrupted By Decadent Western Culture, or anything like that.

Still, even if neither Panahi or writer Kambuzia Partovi had seen La Ronde, they’d probably heard about it. There seems to be a connection of sorts between Iranian and French culture; I don’t know what that is, I am ignorant of everything when it comes to other lands and peoples… but I do hear the occasional French word in these films. And La Ronde is pretty well known to cinema history buffs, even if they haven’t seen it, the same way Nosferatu is. So I’m guessing they’d at least heard about the structure idea. No harm in borrowing it for your own purposes! (Somebody somewhere invented the first “flashback” scene in drama or literature and the world’s been borrowing that ever since.)

This is a darn good movie — and once you understand why Mamizadeh doesn’t get on the bus in that one scene, it’s even better. The high quality and the watchability of Panahi’s movies comes from his basically humane outlook. Here, and in Offside and No Bears, when we see authorities being sticklers for rules, we also see their vulnerabilities, the way that they’re not always trying to be a-holes, sometimes just trying to stay out of trouble themselves. Panahi said in this 2000 interview that we all live in circles restricting our thoughts and movements and awareness of what’s outside. “I hope that if this film has any kind of effect on anyone, it would be to make them try to expand the size of the radius.” Spoken like an artist… and a MATH NERD.

Terms of Endearment (1983). Grade: C

I’ve never read a book by Larry McMurtry; I have seen several movies based on his books. All of them seem to lack a little something to me, I don’t know what to call it. Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment — for movies about “the little people,” there’s nobody in these stories I understand. There’s characters I can like/dislike, but nobody who seems like anybody I know.

For example, there’s a scene here where Shirley MacLaine calls daughter Debra Winger to celebrate some good news. What’s the good news? MacLaine, who has resisted dating since her husband died about 20 years ago, has found a guy she really likes. OK — that seems like something you might share with your adult offspring.

But MacLaine does it the morning after she sleeps with the guy. It fact, she’s in bed with him right now, he hasn’t woken up yet. And Winger is just giddy to hear about it!

That… well, that seems really odd to me. Maybe it’s because I will never understand Texas.

McMurtry’s books apparently are either set in the Old West (of the writer’s imagination?) or in contemporary Texas. What strikes me about the titles was how young McMurtry was when the books were published. His Comes a Horseman was adapted into Hud, and the movie’s about a sad longing for the decay of a rural ranching town. The book came out when McMurtry was 25. The Last Picture Show, about looking back wistfully on high-school years… when he was 30. Terms of Endearment is about a complex, decades-long relationship between a mother and her adult daughter; McMurtry was 40. In each case that seems just a BIT too young too be looking at the subjects from any kind of thoughtful reflection on personal experience.

The movies made from his books remind me of the movies made from John Irving books (The World According to Garp, etc). I DID read a bunch of those as a teenager, and got sucked in by all the “little people” melodrama. I wouldn’t be as interested today.

The writer/director here, James L. Brooks, got his start in TV, and played a big hand in constructing shows like Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi that “mixed humor with heart,” as it was put back then (and Lou Grant with the great Ed Asner as a crusading newspaper editor, which sounds shallow but likable). This was Brooks’s first feature. His next film after this, Broadcast News, was pretty idiotic about how TV journalism actually works, but it had affecting performances by Albert Brooks and William Hurt and the great Holly Hunter.

Here you’ve got MacLaine and Winger plus Jack Nicholson and Jeff Daniels — all of whom I’ve enjoyed in at least a few things. None are bad in this. But MacLaine is capital-A Acting, and Daniels being mopey, and Nicholson playing “Jack Nicholson,” and that’s not showing the best talents of each. Only Winger seems to be fully relaxed and in character, and it’s a bummer of a character.

Yer plot: Winger’s hanging with her bestie on the night before Winger’s marriage to Daniels. MacLaine takes Winger aside and says, don’t go through with it. This guy’s a loser, with no ambition. All he wants to be is… a teacher! (That’s a very honorable profession if you genuinely believe in it, and we find out later that Daniels is a university teacher, which back then didn’t pay too badly.)

Oh and I forgot the dumb intro scene, where there’s a baby in a crib and we hear MacLaine’s voice worrying that it’s dead, while her husband tells her “it’s just sleeping,” so she wakes the baby up and it cries. Relieved, she puts it back down again, still crying, and leaves the room.

I figure this intro scene is meant to tell us everything we need to know about the MacLaine/Winger relationship. That MacLaine’s overprotective, and it’s out of a place of love, but she is still kinda self-obsessed. Once she’s reassured by the baby’s cries, she then ignores the crying baby.

I mean, this works, I guess? It tells us what it’s supposed to. And I imagine several members in the audience felt like “this movie understands me so well!” (The movie was a big hit, and did well even months after it was first released, which means people were telling their friends to see it.)

But, again, there’s nothing I recognize here. My mom was pretty protective (and with good reason; I was a frequently sickly child, and my next-youngest brother had a MAJOR health scare, which he survived just fine). Yet Mom was much more chill as she got older. Or, I’m known/met people who have overprotective/over-pushy parents well into adulthood; they generally become pretty good at setting boundaries. These two seem to enjoy how mutually needy they are. It’s not wrong, necessarily, it’s just… weird.

The main plot is, well, Daniels plays a serial cheat. Once he’s gotten Wagner to pop out a few babies, he’s staying out all night with feeble explanations. At one point, Wagner takes the kids and up and leaves; she goes back home to Houston, and leaves Daniels at the university in Des Moines.

It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why she then goes BACK to him once he gets a new position at a university in Nebraska. I mean, in terms of the movie, sure, there’s an explanation — Wagner thinks he’s making a new start, no more philandering. But why does she believe him? What possible thing could connect these two? There’s sex, and both are perfectly attractive people, yet you don’t feel any spark or any connection between the characters. Wagner seems to be following him out of… inertia, basically. And it’s basically impossible to accept the idea that Debra Winger, who radiates intelligence, would be resigned to inertia. So it’s impossible to understand this character at all. (Why does she like old Ethel Merman records? What the heck does that tell us about her? Nothing, except “she so quirky!”)

We’re in slightly sprightlier territory with MacLaine and Nicholson; he’s a retired ex-astronaut who lives next door to MacLaine, and enjoys goading her with the floozies he brings over, with the way he gleefully paunches out besides his backyard pool, and how he makes every casual conversation seem like a tacky come-on. You can tell she finds his boorishness a little amusing.

MacLaine, who later said she’d had a healthy love life with several of her male co-stars, said it never happened with Nicholson: “I don't think he would've been my type to have an affair with anyway. I would laugh too much.” Which is what saves this predictable relationship, with its mostly-awful dialogue, from being a chore; the idea that Jack’s putting on his slyest moves and Shirley’s enjoying laughing at him. Nicholson’s utter lack of vanity here (the paunch, the comb-over) is in itself a form of vanity; it’s like he’s saying “even THIS is irresistible, isn’t it?” It’s eminently resistible, but he and MacLaine seem to be having a good time together anyways.

The Winger/Daniels relationship was this movie’s soggy sandwich wrapper to begin with, and it just fully descends into mush in the final act, in which MacLaine is doing her most Acting; it’s all a chore. Everyone still sells it, but this is where you know that either the original material or Brooks’s conception of it was just the purest schmaltz. And it doesn’t help that Winger’s kids are given a Big Scene when we know absolutely nothing about who they were in this family before. (They mostly just go skulk when Mommy and Daddy are fighting; we have no idea how this family interacts.)

I’m gonna jump right out and guess that McMurtry’s writing was as phony as Brooks’s attempts at television/movie sentiment, as phony as John Irving’s books were. This isn’t a movie that touches you the way a genuinely-felt story and characters can. This is something that audiences can RELATE to, the way they could (in 1983) relate to the mopey letter writers asking Dear Abby/Ann Landers for advice.1

There is cinematography here by Andrzej Bartkowiak. It uses a gauze filter in the “past” scenes, and that is all you need to know about it. Michael Gore provides the sap-tastic score; he is the younger brother of teen sap-pop sensation Lesly Gore. “You Don’t Own Me” is better music than this score and the song has arguably a better plot than this movie.

OK, what can I find about “making of” thingys? From the AFI Catalog: “Brooks spent three months researching the project in Texas,2 and completed the screenplay in the six months following his trip. Brooks had a longstanding desire to make a film about a mother-daughter relationship after noticing the cultural impact of Nancy Friday’s psychological research in My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity (New York, 1977).” Ah. The same Nancy Friday was asked in 1998 to speculate on the future of embattled White House intern Monica Lewinsky and replied, “she can rent out her mouth,” so Friday was a person of Deep Psychological Insight.

From the AFI and from Eleanor Quin at TCM, it was actually retired actor Jennifer Jones who had started getting this project going, and James Brooks nudged her out of her own idea. (It’s Hollywood; this happens.) Brooks added the astronaut character, and he wrote it specifically for one of his favorite-est stars, that romantic charmer Burt Reynolds. (Brooks’s first screenplay was for a 1979 romantic comedy starring Reynolds, and I’m not gonna see it unless you bribe me, get in touch to negotiate a price.) Quin also tells us that MacLaine’s and Wagner’s acting styles didn’t quite mix, and when a sequel was filmed 13 years later, Wagner said they could use her picture in the movie, so long as MacLaine wasn’t throwing darts at it.

John Lithgow’s in this for a few minutes and it makes me want to see more of young John Lithgow (he was taking a three-day break from shooting Footloose). Danny DeVito is here and comes off pretty funny for all of his two or three lines; it’s too bad we rarely got a chance to see him play “normal” parts.

I wish that James L. Brooks had taken this book and this cast and made a different movie with it; maybe just use the basic characters and toss out the plot altogether. But Hollywood generally doesn’t have the inventiveness to do that, not with “dramatic serious” novels. Too bad. There’s a shred of material here to work with. All that remains in the finished product is that shred.

Still, it’s not the worst hugely-popular mega-melodramatic movie I’ve ever seen. You can do worse than this. Ultimately, if I’m gonna watch full Hollywood weepie, I’d rather it be some 1930s/40s thing with Bette Davis or Greta Garbo or such. Debra Winger is fine here; she’s just too good to be playing this character. That happened to her a lot, alas. And to many others.

Modern Romance (1981). Grade: B-

Albert Brooks is a guy who should be perfectly thrilled with his life. He’s got a nice bachelor pad in L.A., he’s got a good-paying job as a film editor, and he’s got a loving, gorgeous girlfriend in Kathryn Harrold. So, naturally, he immediately breaks up with her. Harrold tells him “can we have this conversation after dinner” and groans about how it’s going “this time.” They’re been through this scene several times before.

I remember in the 80s and 90s reading that Albert Brooks was sort of the poor man’s Woody Allen. That his character had all the neurosis and self-obsession of the Allen characters in Manhattan or Hannah and her Sisters, but that the films weren’t as intellectually challenging.

Hogwash. They’re better. They’re better because Allen always demanded to be the star/hero of his dramatic movies. (The ones he appeared in, at any rate). Brooks is the star, but he’s not afraid of playing a putz. Allen, in the end, always wanted you to feel sorry for him. Brooks wants you to laugh at what a self-centered dweeb this guy can be.

Brooks was born in 1947, the son of actor Thelma Leeds and radio comedian Harry Einstein (so Brooks’s given name was Albert Einstein). He went to Beverly Hills High School with the likes of Richard Dreyfuss and Rob Reiner; then to Carnegie Mellon University with Michael McKean and David L. Lander (“Lenny and Squiggy,” among many other things), but dropped out at 19 to pursue a comedy career. By the end of the decade he was regularly getting spots on national variety/talk shows.

After those appearances and several short films that appeared on PBS and Saturday Night Live, Brooks got the chance to co-write and direct a feature film, Real Life, a parody of a 1973 reality series about an “average” American family in Santa Barbara. Real Life pointed out how a documentary filmmaker invading a family’s space for a long stretch would inevitably alter the way people were going to behave, and how such a project would easily become about the filmmakers themselves. It was very deadpan, very hit-and-miss with the comedy, and it flopped; a different studio was willing to give Brooks another shot.

It’s a good thing they did, because this is a big improvement over Real Life. It’s still very much a sketch comedy, and some of the sketches don’t play out as well as some others. But when it zings, it’s howlingly funny, and when it’s cringe comedy, it really does make you roll your eyes with astonishment at just HOW schmucky this guy can be.

It helps to have a good supporting cast. Brooks, by himself, isn’t always funny during a Quaalude-high scene (although a bit with a record player is pretty good). During his scenes with Bruno Kirby (as an assistant editor) and Albert Henderson (as a sound mixer), things pick up quite a bit. And a high-pressure jogging-gear salesman had me absolutely howling. That’s Bob Einstein as the salesman, egging on his younger brother Albert; Bob Einstein also did his “Super Save Osbourne” failed-Evel Knievel character for 40 years and had recurring roles on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development.

The main “straight man” here is Kathryn Harrold as the patient on-again, off again girlfriend. Patient up to a point. I mean she is gorgeous, she is in her early 30s, she’s got a job that pays very well — she’s only going to put up with the flakiness of Brooks for so long. Harrold’s main job is to react to Brooks, and she’s good at it; when she’s ticked, you’re completely on her side.1 This guy would irritate anybody.

As Jay Carr writes at TCM, “he's funny and horrible at the same time.” “The number [Bob Einstein] does on him is nothing compared to the number he does on himself and can’t stop doing. Modern Romance is Brooks's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess. A very specific mess, a Hollywood mess, a finicky, funny, obsessive compulsive who just can't leave anything alone.” Brooks is not playing Everyman, but he’s playing someone whose pettiness everyone might recognize a wee bit in themselves. Brooks later told a story about a test screening of this that didn’t go well; he was cheered up by a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, who asked how Brooks did such an effective job showing jealousy, a subject Kubrick wanted to make a movie about himself. (Do yourself a favor, and if you’re ever tempted to watch Eyes Wide Shut, watch this instead.)

This doesn’t have quite the kick that Defending Your Life and Lost in America later would; Defending has a more consistently creative script, and Lost has that great visual of Brooks and Julie Hagerty as rebels across America in… their Winnebago. (It also has Hagerty herself, the funniest performer Brooks ever set himself off against.) But this has Lost’s co-writer, Monica Johnson. She worked in TV/movies during three different decades after her brother, a writer for The Odd Couple, convinced Johnson to give up dental assistants’ school.2

The cinematography’s by veteran low-budget filmmaker Eric Saarinen (who, yes, is related to the architect Eero Sarinen). It looks fine. The music’s all a mixture of existing tunes, mostly popular ones from the period; there’s a funny Michael Jackson deep cut and that dang Disco Beethoven number you could no more ignore in the era than you could Disco Star Wars.

Mostly, this is Brooks doing self-abasing cringe comedy, and while you might want a little more consistency, this won’t bore or frustrate you. The funny moments really work. This movie is a good answer to the “perfect young people who have it all yet feel unsatisfied” movies of recent vintage, things like The Worst Person in the World. You’re generally supposed to sympathize with those characters’ strivings, how they are always looking to Get More out of Life. Well, here’s a guy who’s always looking to Get More out of Life, and it shows you what a lazy chickens**t he really is. I thought I was King of the Whiners; I ain’t got nothing on this dude. Granted, one should not exactly take that as a self-confidence booster.

Trapeze (1956). Grade: B-

Oh boy, another Burt Lancaster movie! I can tell you’re already getting thrilled to hear about it. What massive amount of hammy overacting am I gonna start describing this time?

Listen, it’s not my fault, these things come in to the library when they do. I mean I’m the one who orders them, so sure, it’s kinda my fault, OK, blame me. But I when I watched the kinda bad Lancaster/Tony Curtis movie Sweet Smell of Success, it reminded me that I saw this one as a kid, and I liked it.

Guess what? I still like it. There’s two plots, one’s just OK and one is pretty bad. But this movie has quite a lot of nifty trapeze work. So it’s like a musical with a bad plot and good songs/dancing. Although I probably thought the plot was really involving when I was like, 10 years old or whatever.

Here’s the two plots, explained. One is that there’s a circus, and it’s shown as being run the same way Saturday Night Live is. Everybody’s trying to come up with an act that will be more popular with the audience than anybody else’s act. Once the Lorne Michaels of Italo-French circusing decides your act will please the most easily-pleased morons, he makes you the star. Go against him, he’ll ruin you. Meanwhile, everybody’s trying to graduate to the bigtime, the Ringling Brothers act in New York… and the Italo-French Lorne Michaels is trying to sign them to a longterm contract for peanuts before Ringling can offer them the big money.

That’s the OK plot. I don’t think circuses work like that IN ANY WAY, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they did. Or maybe we can just accept it for dramatic convenience. I’m not crazy about it, but it’s passable; again, this movie functions the same way a musical does, a certain amount of Plot Crappiness is acceptable. Now onto the Other Plot.

The Other Plot involves a love triangle between Lancaster, Curtis, and Italian sex bomb Gina Lollobrigida, who is basically built like Jessica Rabbit (and seems less human). Lollobrigida may have had the ability to act, I don’t know… but she sure ain’t doing so in this movie. She’s meant to represent Steamy Mediterranean Irresistible She-Devil Incarnate, and that’s just a bit too much silliness to lay on a character. (About the only time Lollobrigida seems lifelike is when she’s cussing Lancaster out in Italian.)

It’s a bad plotline. There’s also probably no way to get rid of it.

The way the two interact is as follows. Lancaster used to be the greatest trapeze artist in the world, until he was injured during a performance. Now he walks with a cane and does technical work for a second-rate circus in Paris. In walks Tony Curtis, the “young” (Curtis was 30) son of another legendary trapeze artist, whose dad told him, if you want to learn from the best in the world, it’s gotta be Lancaster. Lancaster shoos him off at first, but starts to warm to Curtis’s suggestion; that Lancaster teach him the secrets of the “triple somersault,” a feat so rare none have performed it since Lancaster’s injury. Lancaster can’t do it himself, but he could be the “catcher,” the guy who swings from his knees and grabs the other artist who’s flying through the air.

The only problem is scheming Lollobrigida, who Lancaster used to date until he realized she was using him to advance her own career. Now she’s trying to get her hooks into Curtis. She knows that the young, athletic Curtis is the real star of the Lancaster/Curtis act, and that if she can pry him away from Lancaster and insert herself in the act, they can Go Places. (Although she might be planning to betray him, too…)

While the oafish Thomas Gomez, our Lorne Michaels in this situation, is ignoring Lancaster’s pleas to keep the act “pure,” to have it just be the two men, one of whom can pull off the amazing “triple.” Gomez doesn’t see anything wrong with adding a skimpily-costumed beauty to the act, whether she’s got any trapeze talent or not. And there’s another “catcher” skulking in the background, waiting for Lancaster to be too old so he can swipe his job (and swipe Curtis).

Needless to say, this is all some overstuffed dramatic bullhonky, and the love triangle in particular is a real drag. But none of that matters too much, because for a good portion of the time we are watching real trapeze artists perform really exciting moves.

Lancaster himself had been first a stage then a circus acrobat with a partner he’d known since childhood, Nick “Cavat” Cuccia. Here’s the two of them together via the Federal Theatre Project sometime in the late 1930s:

In 1939, a hand injury forced Lancaster to give up being an acrobat, although later when he became a movie star he’d help Cravat get small roles, usually stunt roles, in Lancaster’s movies and others. (He played the wing gremlin in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”) He did some body/stunt double work for Lancaster here.

Lancaster always wanted to make a movie about circus life, and by 1956 he was a big enough star, with his own production company, to make it happen. And in the movie, at age 42, he does a considerable number of his own stunts! The most dangerous are performed by Eddie Ward of Ringling Brothers and a handful of other trapeze artists. Most of the long shots feature those folks. Curtis and Lollobrigida are doing far less of their own stunts, although Lollobrigida can hang off a rope alright and Curtis had some spryness to him.1 (Horribly, one of Lollobrigida’s stunt doubles fell 40 feet, broke her back, and died.)

Per Raquel Stecher at the OutofthePast blogsite, there was a good deal of Hollywood fighting over who was responsible for the story/script; there was a 1950 book by Max Catto called The Killing Frost (I haven’t read it), there were claims that Catto plagiarized the book from other people’s work, there were the credited James R. Webb and Liam O’Brien (brother of Blog Friend Edmond O’Brien), there was uncredited work by the likes of Ben Hecht and possible theft by the likes of producer Harols Hecht (no relation); check out the link for the details, if you like. (They’re also at the AFI Catalog site.) There’s also a 1931 German movie with a reasonably similar plot that might have been an influence and might not.

The director here is the very talented English filmmaker Carol Reed (The Stars Look Down, The Third Man), and he really keeps things zipping right along with the trapeze scenes. It was Reed’s first film shot in CinemaScope (extra widescreen), and Reed makes good use of it under the big top. While our main characters are in the air, the camera is either vertical below the safety netting or horizontal up by the roof, staring at the flipping and flying from one side of the screen to another. On the ground, the frame might be showing us trapeze activity in the background, or the wide variety of animal acts, or even some mice scurrying along the outside of the circus ring (as Mrs. twinsbrewer pointed out, “where there’s popcorn on the ground, there will be mice.”) Reed can’t do as much with the drippy love triangle plot, but then again I doubt anyone really could. It’s just some really bad writing.

I don’t know that anyone really misses the rather skeezy, sleazy kinds of circuses that we used to have when I was little; where the animals were trained via whip and the human performers frequently underpaid/put at risk, where you jostled for seating on wooden benches with overpriced concessions and everything smelled of elephant crap. You can go to a State Fair for the overpriced food and the odors, you can see jugglers/acrobats at Ren Fests, everybody hates clowns, and for a higher level of performance artistry, you could see Cirque du Soleil or one of its ripoffs. Ringling Bros. and Barnumn & Bailey had cheaper shows than Cirque du Soleil, so a little more democratic, but it wasn’t really worth the cost of animal and worker mistreatment.

In fact, the best act I ever saw at a Ringling Bros/Barnum & Bailey circus was one at the Target Center in the mid-2000s, where the best act was a brilliantly-trained poodle that would walk around in a circle as its trainer played a music box, and when the music box stopped, the poodle would slump over softly like a walking toy that needed to be rewound. So the trainer would pretend to wind up the music box, start playing again, the poodle would start walking again, etc. It was delightful and nothing you couldn’t train a smart dog to do using treats. Ringling Bros/Barnum and Bailey went on hiatus in 2017 and only returned to live shows in Louisiana in 2023. This time with no clowns, animals, or “master of ceremonies” creepy Lorne Michaels figure. Good luck to them; but do dog acts, those can be harmless and fun.

Trapeze makes effective use out of the fact that old-timey circuses WERE dangerous (although knowing somebody actually died puts a damper on the fun quite a bit). Those flying scenes are pretty thrilling (cinematography by Robert Krasker, who shot The Third Man and the opening scenes of Great Expectations; when he’s outside the circus, Krasker’s color work is just so-so). The music’s by Malcolm Arnold, although if you didn’t read the name you’d probably hear it from the overuse of ominous horns and cymbals.

The pairing of Curtis and Lancaster here (who are both “fine,” if playing silly characters) proved to be a huge success; it led to them teaming up again in Sweet Smell of Success, which every film critic and their cousin will tell you is a “classic.” It ain’t. It’s deeply unpleasant (with maybe only the photography by James Wong Howe worth looking at). This is a far easier and more entertaining watch. And there’s even some side performers you might get a kick out of; Johnny Puleo as a dwarf who’s worried about getting any taller, Sid James as a snake-handler (them’s real snakes, and they look bored), Katy Jurado as a horse rider nursing a flame for Lancaster (in the end, as he walks off into the sunset, a woman joins him, and it’s not supposed to be Jurado but thinking it is makes it a better ending).2

Again, this isn’t deep stuff; I enjoyed it at nine or so (on a little boxy black-and-white TV, it’s better in widescreen). It IS very like a musical, where the musical numbers are the real star of the show. And of course it’s horrible that a trapeze performer died… but stunt people were frequently killed in the movie, back then. Watch any scene where there’s a massive battle involving hundreds on horses and somebody likely got stomped to death. It’s still neat here to see those gifted stunt doubles soaring through the air, and to see how much athleticism Lancaster still had left in ‘im.

The vaunted “triple somersault?” Eh, it’s not as impressive as the movie thinks; a stunt where a “catcher” lets someone go and then catches another person immediately after is far more impressive. The whole “quest for triple” thing seemed silly to me here; it’s like when people watch Olympic diving or ice skating, and the TV announcers will tell us how many spins and flips the athletes are doing. We at home don’t tend to care. We just think it all looks cool.

The Sugarland Express (1974). Grade: C+

Goldie Hawn’s been declared an “unfit mother” and lost custody of her kid; the kid’s been placed in a foster home. So, naturally, what’s the best way to get the kid back? Find a pro bono lawyer who can help with the case? That’s by no means easy, but it might be worth a shot.

Or, maybe, break your husband out of jail and set off to kidnap the toddler — in a stolen police car. While you’re holding the officer hostage. That’s by no means easy, but it might be worth making a movie about. Mayyyybe.

This was the first feature directed by the 26-year-old Steven Spielberg; he’d been working in television since 1969, having basically talked his way into getting Universal to give him a shot. He’d done episodes of Night Gallery and Columbo, and three made-for-TV movies; one, Duel, about a guy in a car getting chased by a crazed semi-truck driver for no reason, was well-received and got a theatrical release overseas.

So it was likely the success of car-chase-themed Duel which gave Universal the idea that Spielberg could make a bummer story featuring tons of cars into an entertaining movie. And the stuff with the cars IS entertaining, innovative work; nobody had shot patterns of vehicles this way before. Others have since, so it might not seem as impressive today. Including Spielberg himself; Close Encounters cribs a lot of shots from this movie. But that’s alright; there’s nothing wrong with plagiarizing yourself, especially if very few people saw the first time you did it.

Universal had planned originally to release this in a few cities at first, hoping for good reviews and word-of-mouth to build enthusiasm for a wider release. But they lost their nerve after a terrible preview showing, and so it was dumped into wide release without much fanfare and to little moviegoer interest. The reviews WERE mostly good, though. From the Amblin’ website (Spielberg’s own movie production company):

“‘The Sugarland Express certainly caught American film critics’ eyes, with Pauline Kael of The New Yorker declaring the film to be “...one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.” “Spielberg uses his gift in a very free-and-easy, American way—for humor, and for a physical response to action,” wrote Kael. “He could be that rarity among directors—a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation’s Howard Hawks.”’

Sure — but that’s omitting the following from Kael’s review: “I can’t tell if he [Spielberg] has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good filmmakers have got by without being profound. He isn’t saying anything special in The Sugarland Express, but he has a knack for bringing out young actors, and a sense of composition and movement that almost any director might envy.”

I’d say that’s proven to be a pretty fair summation of what’s been good and bad in Spielberg’s career. Composition and movement were really his greatest gifts; being a Deep Thinker, not so much. His best dramatic movie, Schindler’s List, had at its soul solid material from the brilliant historical writer Thomas Keneally; the very-good Lincoln and Munich came from the work of skilled playwright Tony Kushner. Meanwhile, Spielberg just doesn’t seem to know when the material he’s working with is trash, like War of the Worlds or War Horse or the tepid script for The Post or sadistic one for Saving Private Ryan. But then a lot of good filmmakers have gotten by without knowing a good script from a lousy one (Howard Hawks certainly did his share of duds).

Also, I’ll add something that Kael didn’t pick up on, but seeing it now makes it obvious; it’s clear from Sugarland Express that Spielberg is incapable of showing any kind of romantic scenes whatsoever. I don’t mean sex scenes (as bad as the ones here and in Munich are); sex scenes are REALLY hard to pull off, and most of the time are a bad idea. But Spielberg can’t get into romance at all, period; the closest might be the two survivors paddling back to shore together at the end of Jaws.

That doesn’t hurt this story much, though. William Atherton is basically just following his wiener; Goldie Hawn straight-up tells him if he doesn’t go along with her harebrained plan, she’s never gonna jump his bones ever again. And Atherton, for whatever reason, says alright, sure, you fugged talked me into it.

This is loosely based on a real story that happened in Texas, in May of 1969, per TCM’s Frank Miller. An ex-con and his wife were pulled over for not dimming their high-beams as they drove past a cop; the couple fled into the woods, then robbed a nearby farmhouse. When a cop came to answer the farmhouse call, they kidnapped him in his own cop car. This began a sometimes high-speed chase that went for over 200 miles, lasted six hours, drew as many as 90 cop cars and media trucks into the mix, and did not end well for the couple.

Spielberg’s script was reworked by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, and it varies a little from the real story in some small unimportant ways, then some much bigger and annoying ones. So, instead of it being an ex-con driving at night who makes a series of increasingly poor decisions, it’s Atherton in a pre-release minimum-security facility with four months left to go on his sentence. Then Hawn shags him into escaping and hitching a ride in the world’s crappiest car. When a cop pulls over the car for being a road safety hazard, they kidnap the cop. That’s not exactly the real story but it establishes that these people are not-so-bright, which seems close enough to the truth.

But then it throws in some real head-scratchers. The AFI Catalog site tells us that “the night spent in a motor home on a used car lot, the attack by vigilantes, and the couple’s purpose of regaining their child from a foster home were all fictional.”1 Well, anybody watching the movie had figured that out already. (The AFI site also has a big spoiler about the ending, which differs a little from the real-life ending; only click on it if you know the movie and are curious for more details.) The motor-home scene and the vigilante attacks make NO sense whatsoever. And how the heck does Goldie Hawn know the address of the foster home where her kid’s been placed? Even in Texas, they’re not gonna just give that information out. (The real life couple on the run were headed for the ex-con guy’s father-in-law’s house, because the father-in-law had the kid.)

There’s three (well, three and a half) major roles here, two are pretty darn good, and one will surprise you. I’m a “gimme the bad news first” sort of fellow, so we’ll start with that. Ben Johnson is the older, grizzled sheriff who becomes the main negotiator over the police radio; a veteran Western actor, Johnson is a bit wooden. Goldie Hawn got a lot of praise for this, since she’d only played dumb blonde parts before; I would rather see those. I don’t mind Hawn’s comic acting. But here, her character’s tiresome, and while Hawn commits to the part well enough (taking much less than her usual salary to do so, she was a popular actor), I don’t think there’s much anybody could have done with it. Maybe a young Diane Keaton, or Glenda Jackson doing an American accent? In any case, the character’s a vain, foolish idiot, and while Hawn doesn’t embarrass herself by trying to play this part as “lovably kooky,” she can’t make the woman any less irritating.

There’s a much more winning role for Michael Sacks as the kidnapped cop. It’s not the way any cop would actually behave, but Sacks makes the fellow likably laid-back and compassionate; he’s the main one you’re rooting to come out of this unscathed.2 The real surprise is William Atherton as Hawn’s husband; because movie fans from the 80s will remember Atherton as “this man has no d**k” from Ghostbusters and the horrible TV reporter from Die Hard. He’s got one of the toughest jobs any actor can ever have, and that’s to play a pretty dense fellow sympathetically, without trying to show the audience that you’re “acting” dumb, you aren’t really dumb. Atherton guts it out. He makes you feel bad for the guy; even if he really is doing a dumb thing, he’s doing it for understandable reasons. He loves Hawn and doesn’t want to lose her.

The cinematography’s by the talented Vilmos Zsigmond, and makes fine use of existing light; the end shots are a bit cliched, but damn if they’re not pretty and they really do work. The score’s by John Williams (of course!), and while his use of harmonica might make you want to slap the guy, the quiet moments are fine. (And don’t slap John Williams! He’s 94!)

In a pretty funny “behind-the scenes” story, Frank Miller tells us that “producer Richard D. Zanuck instructed the production manager to start the film with relatively simple shots. He also decided to get to the location late that morning so that Spielberg could establish control of the set. When he arrived, however, he discovered the director had set up one of the film's most complicated shots, which he pulled off just fine.” Well, the kid did have a knack for moviemaking. And no doubt that’s why Zanuck went right ahead and assigned Spielberg to Jaws despite the relative financial failure of this one, and while that shoot had its share of troubles, the movie did pretty well, I hear.

This is a fine directing debut and a watchable movie, if the added-on plot implausibilities might completely throw you out of the story (they sort of did for me); the energy of the whole project still keeps your attention. The main reason for seeing this is to take a look at what young Spielberg was already capable of doing (in both the good sense and the disappointing one). And to see William Atherton as a sympathetic character; he was pretty good at it. It’s too bad he was eventually typecast as a sniveling baddie; I think he’d have been a fine character actor.

Incidentally, under the “Personal life” section of Atherton’s Wiki page, it says: “Atherton has been married to writer Bobbi Goldin since December 8, 1980. On The Phil Donahue Show in 1981, Atherton claimed that he was once homosexual but changed due to the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel.”

Well, that’s certainly his business, and you always wanna congratulate a long marriage, and people can date and love different kinds of other people, all things are possible with humans. Although the next part of the Wiki page says: “‘Atherton has sung in various productions in later years. In 2011, he performed “I Remember It Well,” a popular song from Gigi with his former Reprise Theater co-star, Millicent Martin, at a sold-out performance in Palm Springs for Michael Childers's One Night Only, benefiting the Jewish Family Service of the Desert. He returned in 2013 to the same sold-out event to sing the classic, “Isn't It Romantic?’”

So what, he loves belting the showtunes. That doesn’t make ya gay. Although, man… Gigi? That’s… um, that’s a bad musical. But “Isn’t it Romantic” is a good tune. So it all evens out.

Seven Days in May (1964). Grade: B-

Kirk Douglas is mocked by one of his colleagues for still serving in the military: “I’d have thought you’d become one of those civil liberties lawyers by now.” Clearly, he’s a center-left-leaning, open-minded guy in a military whose brass aren’t known for appreciating sorts like that.

But Douglas’s strident right-wing boss, Burt Lancaster, is at least fair enough to appreciate that Douglas is good at his job. Douglas is grateful for this, and likes Lancaster personally, despite their political differences. So it’s a hard day, indeed, when Douglas has to tell the President what he thinks Lancaster is up to. He thinks Lancaster is plotting a political coup to seize control of the entire U.S. government.

This is based on a 1962 novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II (I haven’t read it); both were journalists for publications owned by the same media company. In 1961, Knebel had talked with famously hard-line Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who criticized Kennedy for not offering air support during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. And Kennedy had recently fired far-right general Edwin Walker, a figure who regularly denounced people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “pinkos” and had distributed crazed John Birch Society literature to troops serving under his command. Knebel and Bailey made their central villain here a combo of LeMay and Walker (and Walker is mentioned by name in the film). Kennedy thought the book had an important message despite the “awful amateurish dialogue” and was happy to see Hollywood giving it a go.

Kirk Douglas bought the book rights and hired John Frankenheimer (from The Manchurian Candidate) to direct; Frankenheimer almost refused when he found out Douglas wanted Burt Lancaster in the movie. Per Jeff Stafford of TCM, when they were filming Birdman of Alcatraz together, Frankenheimer and Lancaster hadn’t gotten along, with Lancaster at one point picking the director up and placing him down in a different part of the set, saying “THAT’s where the camera should go.” But Douglas convinced Frankenheimer that Lancaster would be no problem this time around, and it worked out well; Lancaster and Frankenheimer became friends. (Which annoyed Douglas, who thought the director was copping an attitude.)

Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone was brought in to adapt the book and hopefully improve the dialogue. Since I haven’t read the book I can’t tell you if this dialogue is an improvement or not, but most of it plays pretty well. Except for a lousy scene between Douglas and Ava Gardner, who’s playing an ex-mistress of Lancaster; Douglas is trying to get tangible proof of the affair that he can use as a weapon if need be, and the script has poor Gardner stuck in the role of “unmarried bitter woman ashamed of her past immorality.” It’s a tacky scene; it’s also by Nedwick Young, a writer of mostly garbage scripts.

The plot mostly involves, well, the plot; the plot to take over the government. First we have Douglas getting suspicious, then reporting the suspicions to the President, then the President wanting to find out if the suspicions are correct. Douglas is dispatched to work on Gardner, Martin Balsam to get info about the plotters, and Friend of Blog Edmond O’Brien is sent to see if a secret new military base is really being built in Texas.

I won’t reveal what the coup plot entails — not because it’s a big secret, but because part of the drama here is learning what the plan really is, and if I give that away, it would be like telling you who the killer was in a mystery movie. It seems perfectly believable in 1963 to me. Yes, shooting finished in 1963, even though the movie wouldn’t come out until early 1964. Because Kennedy was a fan of the novel, the filmmakers got permission to stage an angry protest scene in front of the White House, where protesters and counter-protesters get in a fight. Well, in October 1963, the fired General Walker convinced riled up attendees at one of his speeches to attack people at a nearby event featuring Kennedy ally Adlai Stevenson. Per Patrick Kiger, the ensuing melee looked “eerily similar to the one in the movie.”

The acting’s pretty good, except for the Gardner role that’s so poorly written nobody’d be able to save it. (Poor Gardner, only 40 when this was shot, was drinking pretty hard and looks older; she’d complain to Frankenheimer about the way she was being treated, and he doesn’t seem to have been a sympathetic ear.) Douglas can sometimes be grating when he’s being noble, and Lancaster the same when he’s overplaying “evil,” so these are energetic-yet-restrained performances from both. (Douglas, especially, SEEMS like a respectable, cautious and intelligent military officer; this is not a character who would give big histrionic speeches in public.) O’Brien is maybe a little too sympathetic (he’s best when he’s just smart), but I never not enjoy the guy. And taking over for Spencer Tracy (who quit because he wanted top billing) is Frederick March, always at his best when he’s being dogged (like in Les Misérables); he’s got a good Serling-specialty scene where he’s explaining what American principles he absolutely stands for.

Of course, not everyone shares those principles. Whether or not Knebel/Bailey knew it, there might have almost been a coup attempt in the 1930s, where certain business leaders were hoping to depose FDR and install a military general as head of state instead; the supposedly intended General testified to Congress about it and Congress took no further action. (Some think it was more an idea being tossed around than a seriously planned thing.)

And I fully expect a coup to happen between November and January, and I’m 90% sure it will be successful. I think the ruling party will lose badly in the election, and that CBS/Fox News/CNN (which will by then be owned by far-right-wingers) will have 24-hour coverage of “election irregularities” for two straight months. After which the sitting Congress will simply refuse to accept the results, or not ALL of the results. They will stay in power. We all knew this was extremely likely with the 2028 Presidential election; I think it makes more sense to do it now. Fewer people care who’s in Congress. If you thought the last 16 months were nightmarish, just wait until one-party control becomes permanent. I think it’s gonna make dictatorships of the past look mild by comparison.1

Whether I’m right or wrong on that prediction (I’m right), the fact that we can all imagine something of the sort takes away some of the dramatic oomph of Seven Days in May; that plot doesn’t seem as bad as the modern one is. What was a shocking concept at the time is almost commonplace now; even pre-election, the current Immortal God Emperor and his minions are violating the Constitution multiple times a day. And while the Lancaster character’s got a vastly inflated sense of his own importance and rightness, he genuinely cares about the country. He thinks he’s the only one who can save millions from dying in nuclear war. The current far-righters WANT millions to die from a shredded health care system, from overwork, from pollution and climate change. They protect nobody but themselves.

Also lacking in dramatic oomph; the movie just ends. Evil is defeated, good survives, and the movie quickly stops. The original script had the Lancaster character dying in a car crash that could be an accident or could be suicide. That’s actually not a very good ending either, but they should have tried harder to improve on this abrupt one. At least there’s a scene that’s nice to Gardner for once, it helps.

This isn’t a great movie, but the acting is good and the pacing mostly decent and the confrontations are the right kind of speechifying, the kind that’s actually giving us some information about who the characters are. Frankenheimer’s direction is once again really sharp during a live TV moment, and the rest of the time it’s quite competent. As is the Ellsworth Fredricks cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith score (not one of his best just because he’s one of the best; most writers don’t have ten classic scores to fall short of).

This won’t edify you and it won’t waste your time either; it’s solid for what it does. It’s comparable to The Best Man, another 1960s political move that maybe won’t thrill you to your bones, but it’s got some brains behind it. When’s the last time an American political movie was halfway bright at all? Heck, the smartest political thing I’ve seen in years was an episode of Borgen, a show about the Danish government. It’s an up-and-down show, but a good Season One episode was about how the government had a responsibility to give more power to the people, not impose it from above. And especially not in Greenland. (The creator of the show said this January that if he’d pitched U.S. threats about annexing Greenland, he’d have been laughed out of the writers’ room.)

I don't want to get into a thing where I'm back-and-forthing praise for other people's blogs; the only movie blog you MUST see, if you haven't, is Janne Wass's scifist.net, which is attempting to review EVERY sci-fi movie in EVERY language in chronological order. From the silents to today. It's obviously an impossible project, but he's up to late 1959 now, even though he hasn't posted since February.

It's an amazing site with amazing research on every entry. It's genius and I hope Janne Wass lives to 300, because that's how long it would take him to complete this thing.

The Signal Watch isn't at that level of obsessive (awesome!) insanity, but it’s got a lot of really enjoyable writing. Fans of comic-book adaptations and film noir movies (I can think of at least one reader here who likes both) should definitely check it out.

Anyways, I referenced that site’s post about Alamo Drafthouses and phones in theaters, and the writer typed the following about This Here Blog:

“I'm at the age where I'm mostly just *curious* about what people are saying if they're a reasonable person talking on a topic I care about, be it movies, comics or baseball. And that's because most conversation about any topic on the internet feels like it starts at an 11 and goes up from there. Or, if the writer is going for a drier approach it's so in pedantic or in the weeds, it becomes homework to get through.”

“Library DVD Love is that nice hit up the third baseline, just on the right side of the chalk. Neither foul nor a pop fly. A straight shot just past the baseman. Maybe I don't always know what the hell this blogger is always talking about (I do not see *that* many movies), or maybe I don't agree, but in der clerb, we all fam.”

A double right down the baseline is really high praise. For you non-baseball people, it's the equivalent of a really great assist in basketball, or Jason Robards having the third major role in All the President's Men. It's not a home run, it's not a game-winning buzzer-beater, but it’s solid and dang good in it's own way. This metaphor made me smile. And my friends/family don’t always know what I’m talking about, either.

While I'm at Blog Reccing, check out Psychotronic Review if you want a TON of (well-researched) posts about some of the bizarrest movies ever made. I basically want to see none of those movies, but I love learning that these harmlessly odd things exist. Plus, 99% of the posts are just the right length. It won’t be me bloviating 2000 words about some 1970s movie you have no interest in seeing, it'll be 500 words about that movie, and more fun.

Or: 2000 words about a movie that deserves it: Buffalo Rider. Hell, let's just steal the video Psychotronic Review found where some folks do a bluegrass-type song commenting on Buffalo Rider. There's four of these, but this is my favorite for “he straight-up got mauled by a cougar.”

That is GOLD. And nobody else is gonna do a film history research piece on Buffalo Rider, where the entire point is: a dude rides a buffalo. C'mon now -- isn't that already more interesting than reading about the newest Christopher Nolan movie? It is, or YOU'RE LYING. (Or you're Nolan.)

Also, not movies, but Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian, who is just awesome, with a basically perfect paragraph in her latest “The Week in Patriarchy” column:

“In a recent study looking at European Great Tits and 36 other bird species, men could get about a meter closer to birds than women. Scientists have no idea why.”

You know that's a paragraph which was fun to type, and so it's fun to read. (I hope to have a review of a Movie Book next Sunday that also seems like it was fun to type, and was definitely fun to read, stay tuned.)

Finally, I mentioned in the photo caption up top that I don’t know how to do site header images on Substack, and today is not the day I’m gonna puzzle it out. I also mentioned that I don’t know what the site header for this blog would be, but then I had an idea. Would this work?

I mean, it’s not our dog (we’re dogsitting, we didn’t dognap it), and ideally it’d be all the way across with library DVDs, but I didn’t want to annoy a relaxing critter any more than I already was. Still, as far as a horizontal header goes, I give it a solid C+. Needs some good font to go with it. On the plus side, it’s got a Kelly Reichardt movie in front, and if this blog is about anything, it’s about mentioning Kelly Reichardt and Jafar Panahi at pretty much any opportunity.

Anyways, thanks as always for reading, and we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow.

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (2021). Grade: B

At what point did kids stop watching Sesame Street? I don’t mean at what age, I meant what year? When did it utterly crowded out by the Disney channel and by smartphones/tablets? (I understand a hazard for some HDTVs is kids who think they’re touchscreens and knock them over.)

I don’t know. I know the program itself moved at least partially to HBO in 2015, although it does still air during the week on what remains of PBS. When it finally dies, though, it’ll be a sad day for children’s television. A wonderful experiment will be over — one that tried to use the medium of children’s entertainment for the actual purpose of teaching, rather than monetizing, kids.

This movie is “inspired” by a 2008 book of the same name by Michael Davis (I haven’t read it). It’s directed by Marilyn Agrelo, who did the fine documentary Mad Hot Ballroom about dancing classes in New York City schools. Its subjects are the original creators and cast of the show; several of them have died, but Agrelo managed to find enough archival footage to give them equal screen time with the others.

The show was mainly the brainchild of Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer of informative television programs in New York, and Lloyd Morrisett, an executive at the charitable wing of the Carnegie Corporation with a background in children’s psychology. They wondered if it were possible to use television — which kids were hooked on — to help in childhood development and education. They figured there must be a way, because kids knew things like the Budweiser jingle by heart; if they could learn a beer song, maybe they could learn tricks to help them with math & reading, too.

Soon involved were Jon Stone, a veteran of TV shows like Captain Kangaroo, and Jim Henson, whose felt “muppets” were frequently seen in TV ads. With all their work carefully guided by research into early childhood development, they set about creating a program that was specifically targeted at urban kids, making their set look like a block might look in New York. And hiring a human cast from a multiracial background (although critic Miya Twala points out that the book explains that much of the cast’s diversity came after a letter-writing campaign by parents asking for more representative faces).

Not everything went smoothly. There was a purple jive-talking character named “Roosevelt Brown” invented by one of the show’s Black cast members, Matt Robinson; some Black parents found the character offensive, and so it was pulled (and Robinson left the show). And it wasn’t allowed to be broadcast in Mississippi, because of the multiracial cast. The working hours on the show were insane, with some of the crew remembering how they were essentially missing their own children’s growing up in order to help the children of strangers.

But most of the memories seem to be happy ones, particularly from producer/director Stone (who is spoken about in a way that makes you sense his later years were more difficult). And from most of the cast, and the puppeteers, and music supervisor Joe Raposo, who really does seem to be a particular type of musical genius. He had a knack for a catchy tune (“Sing,” “C is For Cookie,” “Bein’ Green,” the familiar theme song) and for musical parodies — the movie shows one just featuring four Beatles-eque Muppets singing “Letter B” very closely to the tune and arrangements of “Let it Be.” (Eric Idle was very good at creating Beatles-soundalike songs, too.)

Critic Twala — not a fan of the documentary — found it to be basically promotional material. And director Agrelo has worked on Sesame Street and its sister show, The Electric Company. (The kids I knew growing up all moved from one show to the next when they thought they were “too old” for Sesame Street anymore.)

But I felt the movie was less about worshiping the particular creators of Sesame Street and more about celebrating the idea of the show in itself; not, originally, a device to sell Tickle Me Elmo dolls or Sesame Street Live tickets, but to help kids learn reading and counting. Whether or not the show worked, the intentions behind it were good ones. That’s what makes this an interesting documentary, I think, even if you never saw the show. (It debuted in 1969, so people born before 1962 or so wouldn’t have watched it themselves, although their kids/friends’ kids might have.)

Mrs. twinsbrewer thought one thing was frustrating here — the number of people who were involved who said they did something that”changed the world.” Because Sesame Street didn’t change the world, at least not in the sense that the creators partially hoped, the sense Fred Rogers tried to make happen; to try and create a nation of kinder, more tolerant people. We’re a nation largely made up of loud jerks. (The documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, about Rogers, is absolutely essential viewing for anyone who remembers and admires the show; skip the fiction film with Tom Hanks.) I remain firmly convinced that the rise of authoritarianism in this country is driven by people who’ve been angry for 50 years that Sesame Street taught their kids the Spanish word for water.

But there’s no way to guess how many people did learn notions of kindness and decency from Sesame Street or Fred Rogers; how without them, this country might have been even WORSE. And there’s no way of knowing how many kids really did do a little better in school, or developed a love of reading, because of programs like Sesame Street or Reading Rainbow. If the programs benefited ten kids per episode, that’s still an awful lot of kids! And I think they reached far more kids than that.

I had a good time seeing Sonia Manzano and Roscoe Orman again, and seeing Jim Henson and Frank Oz try to crack each other up, and Jerry Nelson having a ball with his cheesy fake-Eurotrash “the Count” accent. And the great Caroll Spinney as both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch; one person says that being both the optimistic and the sarcastic character probably saved Spinney a lot of time in therapy. And I enjoyed the extra features on the disc, too; you’re never gonna go wrong with sound nerds showing off the toys they make to sound like trains rumbling by or whatever.

Basically, I just like the idea of Sesame Street. You can argue whether something started by the Carnegie Corporation is the best way to use the medium to teach instead of numbly distract children, but it’s hard to disagree with the goal. I am told that there are some decent people out there doing children’s entertainment on YouTube and such today. Obviously, though, the majority are simply collecting young viewers as a cash grab.

Street Gang celebrates people who were making programming for children because they liked children. And frequently did it with the maximum of creativity and genuine wit. The documentary shows this little cartoon, which is almost Dadaist:

That’s a pretty funny little meta-commentary on technology, right there.

Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980). Grade: C+

During one live radio concert, Sissy Spacek (as Loretta Lynn) pays tribute to her idol, Patsy Cline, then in the hospital. Cline hears the broadcast and sends her husband to go pick up Spacek, and the two of them become fast friends. Unfortunately, Cline dies in a plane crash a short while later. We see Spacek hearing the news on the radio, looking thoughtful. And then a minute later she’s shown having a good time on her tour bus.

That’s one (or two) of the problems with Coal Miner’s Daughter. There’s a strange lack of emotion in what should, because of the story, be a very affecting and emotional movie. You’re also not sure how much of this is absolutely made up for the film. (The Cline in hospital story seems to be true, but other things in the movie, I dunno.)

This is based on George Vescey’s 1976 biography of the same name; I haven’t read it, so I don’t know what questionably-true things in the movie are drawn straight from the book. Like, for example, how the movie depicts Lynn as getting married at 13; she was actually almost 16. That’s still WAY too young, so it’s not a big dramatic invention; it’s just an indication that whatever stories a person tells a biographer (or a scriptwriter) are subject to the same foggy memory problems that all of us can have from time to time.

This isn’t an insult-your-intelligence nostalgic piece of celebrity deification like the recent spate of identical, formulaic musical biopics. The acting has some heart to it, and the approach to the characters and culture being depicted is a decent, humane one. It lacks a little oomph, but I’d rather be left a little cold than condescended to.

The story, basically, is about Lynn’s poor background in the coal-mining town of Van Lear, KY (Lynn has a terrific 2004 album called Van Lear Rose). She falls in love with an older WWII vet and marries him; after they have a few kids, he helps her record and promote the song that would become her first hit single. It’s a rocky marriage, but it is a loving one. Lynn becomes a star. The end!

All those scenes in Van Lear are first-rate. The very first shot had me going, “dang, this looks good.” (Cinematography by the German-born Ralf D. Bode; indoors, his work is nothing special, but the outdoor shots are VERY good indeed.)1 Sissy Spacek’s father is played by Levon Helm, the drummer/vocalist for The Band; if you ever wondered why that Canadian group had a drawly twang, it’s because of the Arkansas-born Helm. He’s got a great face for the movies (he’d be in The Right Stuff, too), and it’s put to good use here. Helm suggests a settled-down wild boy; you can see why he’s wary of Tommy Lee Jones, and not just because he’s a 21-year-old trying to date a 15-year-old. It’s also because Helm can see the wild boy in Jones. Helm’s presence really helps this movie; he’s got hints of anger beneath the surface that never actually erupt, but you can feel them there. It makes the family’s poverty that much more vivid. (Phyllis Boyens, a Appalachian folk musician, plays the mother.)

This is directed by the English filmmaker Michael Apted, and everything I’ve seen by him has this same strange emotional disconnect; that said, he seems like a director of some intelligence. (He’s also known as a documentary filmmaker; his documentaries in the Up series track the same 14 people at seven years old, then 14, 21, 28, etc., all the way up to 63 before Apted died in 2021.) The way Apted and cinematographer Bode approach the Kentucky small-town location is really commendable; they don’t shirk away from the dinginess of the buildings or the non-Hollywood faces of the locals, but they don’t give off a spooky Deliverance-type vibe. This comes across as almost ethnography rather than exploitation. (Most of the extras were locals, and provided some of their own instruments for a scene with music.)

Helm’s character leaves the story about a third of the way in,2 and the movie never really recovers, because instead of his immediately-readable face we have the impenetrable one of Tommy Lee Jones instead. Jones does a fine job of acting, and pulls off stuff like playing drunk in a bright tacky satin shirt very well. (For a genre as homophobic as country music, those 60s/70s country stars and their entourages sure pulled off a camp-as-hell look, with spangly sequined jackets and the like.)

However, Jones is supposed to seem absolutely devoted to Spacek; the real Lynn forgave her husband’s cheating and boozing because he really did love her in his own way.3 And when Jones is being supportive of Lynn’s career, he seems like a good guy to have on your side. But you don’t get any kind of romantic vibe from Jones; he had more chemistry with Will Smith than he does with Spacek here. He’s good casting in terms of the accent, but not so much as a romantic lead. (Supposedly, Harrison Ford was considered for the role. Would he have been better? I don’t know. The accent likely wouldn’t have been.)

Sissy Spacek, who was 30 when this came out, does a better job playing the teen Lynn than the adult one — or it could just be that the adult Lynn is a much more poorly-written character. (Screenplay by Thomas Rickman, who was from Kentucky himself, which might explain why the early scenes are the best ones.) The young Lynn character is sympathetic as she’s convinced to marry too early, and genuinely likable as an energetic-but-naive young woman on the road promoting her record. But, again, we don’t feel any real connection between her and Jones — or between her and Beverly D’Angelo as Patsy Cline. (Even though it’s a neat performance by D’Angelo; she suggests a world-weary kind of mentor to Spacek, although the real Lynn was five months older than Cline. Lynn did say that Cline taught her a lot about how to handle stardom.)

Spacek does her own singing here, and while it doesn’t have quite the richness of Lynn’s voice, it’s pretty and it sounds close enough. We’re with her most of the way through the movie, especially when she’s justifiably angry. But when Lynn starts to show signs of an emotional breakdown, the script doesn’t really explain what’s eating at her. Is it the touring schedule, the ups and downs of the relationship with Jones, the emptiness of celebrity? All of the above? It seems generic, and that seems to be the way Spacek’s playing it, too; generic angst we can’t understand or feel for.

And this all contributes to the strange emotional deadness I’ve mentioned; the lack of intensity in the love story, and our disconnect from Spacek’s blues, gives the movie a numbing effect, when it should be an emotional wringer from up to down and back over again. It’s a movie about the tough life of Loretta Lynn where I increasingly don’t care about Loretta Lynn (the non-reaction to Cline’s death doesn’t help in this regard). When Lynn has a freeze-up moment on stage, we don’t feel her terror; when Jones carries her off, we don’t feel her relief.

Did that incident ever happen? I can’t find any mention of it online.4 There was, possibly, an incident where Lynn saw someone who looked like her dead mother in the crowd and froze onstage; that’s from a REALLY iffy website full of such moving stories about stars. There’s also a “trivia” note on IMDb that says Lynn fainted when she saw Levon Helm in costume, looking so much like her father. I’ve learned to take IMDb with a grain of salt about such things; the same trivia page tells a story about Tommy Lee Jones meeting the real Mr. Lynn. It doesn’t match what Jones says on a DVD interview.

There are certain minor things in the movie that DEFINITELY never happened. Loretta Lynn didn’t write “You Aren’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” after catching her husband cheating, like she does here — she was inspired by a story a fan told her. Patsy Cline never had a tour bus. I don’t regard those as important; what’s more important is how the movie fails to make us really feel the Cline/Lynn friendship in the first place.

This mostly emotionless story (after the first hour or so) is still an improvement over earlier cornball Hollywood biopics… or most of the crappy Hollywood biopics being churned out today. (The one about Elton John was the only one that, I thought, actually tried to get into the musician’s head a little.) And the acting is good, even if Spacek didn’t want to do the role at first. She intended to tell Lynn this in person (Lynn had been talking about Spacek in the role on TV), but when she met Lynn after a concert yelling “BAM BAM BAM! I couldn't hear nothin' but them dat-gum drums a'beatin' in my ear!,” Spacek was hooked.

Per TCM, after the movie came out, Dolly Parton sent Spacek a telegram reading “Dear Sissy, I hope you make millions of dollars from Coal Miner's Daughter so that you can get a boob job and do the Dolly Parton story.” Boy, do I really hope that Hollywood never does the Dolly Parton biopic! But they probably will. And they’ll probably cast someone boring in the role. Heck, be original, Hollywood — hire some Brit who can actually act and just teach ‘em a Tennessee accent! It’ll be better than whatever dumb celebrity you’re probably thinking of.

Guarding Tess (1994). Grade: C

First off, an “aspect ratio” rant.

I know, I know. You either don’t know what those words are, or you do and you wonder why I’m mentioning something so basic, or you’ve read them here before and you want to reach out through your computer and slap me for using them again.

Ouch! That hurt! And I deserve it. But I’m not sorry.

Basically, I want you to take black packing tape and strip it vertically over the left and right sides of your TV screen. I’d say two or three strips on each side would do it. And judge for yourself if this improves your viewing experience. It will not.

(Obviously, this is a thought experiment. Do not actually put packing tape on your TV. Or any other kind of tape. The only thing that should touch your TV screen is a clean, lint-free cloth or your toddler’s greasy fingers after eating a pizza.)

Putting tape on your screen would duplicate the look of what “pan-and-scan” is.1 It’s how virtually all widescreen movies were shown on home video before Criterion started existing. They would chop off the sides of the image to fit old, boxy-shaped TVs.

And, amazingly, libraries still have some old pan-and-scan DVDs.

I can’t friggin’ believe this.

The copy of Guarding Tess we got from the library was “pan-and-scan.” The DVD also had a little checklist slip inside the front cover to write on if the disc had any playback issues. If it skipped a little or froze up because of scratches, you could write that on the checklist slip and the library would consider replacing the disc.

I was half tempted to write “it’s pan-and-scan” on the checklist, but didn’t. Librarians have enough to deal with right now. Still, I wish they would just get rid of these things if any better option is available. The same way they have with old VHS tapes.

When the video started playing, and I groaned out loud, “ugh, it’s pan-and-scan,” Mrs. twinsbrewer asked if I wanted to pop the disc out and look for an Internet Archive copy I could download. (That’s what we did with Matinee and Moscow on the Hudson.)

Nah, I said. I don’t think this’ll be one of those movies where the image quality matters much. And I was right.

This was directed and co-written by Hugh Wilson, whose credits include WKRP in Cincinnati and Police Academy. Also, weirdly, a baseball movie co-written by legal thriller author John Grisham? Starring Harry Connick, Jr.? File that under the “it sounds so awful I kinda want to see it” territory. After getting around to Masters of the Universe with Frank Langella, though. First things first.

Hugh Wilson was not, to put it bluntly, a good movie director. Or even, really, a movie director. He was probably the kind of guy who liked having the chair labeled “director” and production assistants who could bring him coffee in just the right way and being able to call Shirley MacLaine “Shirl” or something like that.

However, I imagine Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Nicholas Cage were familiar with this sort of talentless dingbat, and knew how if they bounced off each other in the right way, they could still produce something that gave audiences a little bit of fun. Which is what they’re doing here. And it saves the movie from Hugh Wilson’s unparalleled hackery.

Cage is a Secret Service agent assigned to protect former First Lady MacLaine, who lives in a small rural town in Ohio (that doesn’t look like Ohio ‘cuz it ain’t Ohio). Living in nowheresville is troublesome enough for a young fellow (Cage, 30 when this came out, had entered the period of “looks 40” that he’d inhabit for the next 20 years). But dealing with MacLaine is worse.

She basically treats her entire Secret Service detail as personal assistants, bringing her breakfast in bed and what-not. Which is beneath Cage’s dignity. He’s attained the rank of Special Agent in Charge, after all; he wants to be protecting the President on visits to foreign countries, not babysitting an attention-seeking old lady. (MacLaine was 59, but is given makeup to look 75.)

The first scene has Cage bringing MacLaine breakfast in bed for the last (he thinks) time; the next scene has him bragging to his Secret Service boss in D.C. that it wasn’t such a hard assignment after all, not if you know how to handle people the way he does.

So, of course, immediately Cage’s boss tells him he’s gotta go back. And then we see Cage shift and explain how the job is THE WORST. But, MacLaine has the ear of the current president, and she placed the call saying she wants Cage. So that’s that.

Right away, you see what a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad writer and director Hugh Wilson was. He’s playing this scene straight, which is idiotic. (If a specific ex-First Lady was requesting a specific handsome young agent be assigned to her, wouldn’t Politico be all over the story, or TMZ?) What Wilson should be doing here is letting Cage completely freak out and start pathetically begging like he's losing his grip; make the character actually funny.

Instead, Cage becomes determined to make MacLaine’s life a living hell, so she’ll want to get rid of him. He’s gonna insist she sits in the correct seat in the limo; everything’s gonna be “by the book.” She in turn is going to find little ways of rebelling against whatever “the book” says, just to needle Cage.

All of this writing is just plain awful, the direction something A.I. could do today, the cinematography by Brian J. Reynolds so professionally bland it could be an episode of Walker: Texas Senior Care Ranger, and the music by Michael Confortino (The Santa Clause) actually rising to “aural atrocity” levels at the terrible climax (which we’ll discuss shortly).

But you can sit through this without actively wishing to go back in time and murder everyone who invented movie cameras, and that’s because of Cage and MacLaine. MacLaine, after The Apartment, never really had much in the way of meaty roles until the 80s and 90s, and so she must have mastered the art of finding something in junk that felt like it was worth doing. Here, she’s playing the role with a hint of fading diva, and when we’re supposed to feel bad for her watching old victory videos, it falls flat. But when she’s just enjoying getting under Cage’s skin, she’s got a sparkle in her eye. (MacLaine later said she’d slept with the majority of her co-stars, and while she found Cage appealing, “he was not attracted to me.”) It’s like one of those British shows with an old couple who keep needling each other. While Cage seems to be having fun as McGruff, the Safety Detail Crime Dog. He’s basically playing an exasperated parent.

You know about six minutes into this that it’s going to involve Real Heart at one point, as Cage and MacLaine get warm and fuzzy with each other. You wish it wasn’t going to happen, but you know it will. Surprisingly, the first part of this — where it’s just the two of them chatting amiably — actually works. It’s the second part that’s so ridiculously stupid. As one reviewer put it, “Guarding Tess is a comedy if your sense of comedy is watching an old lady nag Nicolas Cage for an hour, then get kidnapped.”

Yes, spoiler alert, MacLaine is kidnapped. But not in a funny “makes more trouble than the kidnappers bargained for” way. In a they-buried-her-underground-in-a-coffin-with-a-small-breathing-pipe way. Fred Topel wrote: “I’m sorry, if you are making a comedy, you do not bury old women alive in abandoned farm houses.” (Then added, “the whole world is buried alive in an abandoned farmhouse right now so it doesn’t seem all that far fetched.”)

All this DRAMA is to show us that Cage really CARES about MacLaine (we knew that already) and so his Secret Service detail can finally get in on the Protection Action they’ve been craving. It’s shown as a kinda of professional accomplishment for Cage that he can be proud of. Good Grief! (And during this whole sequence the music is absolutely just horrible.)

So why did I give this no lower than a C grade? I don’t like it. I don’t suggest you watch it. I agreed wholly with the reviewer who wrote “I work in insurance and in my spare time compose hundred-page excel spreadsheets of the words most commonly appearing on ceefax and yet my life is still more exciting that Guarding Tess.”

Because I was able to sit through it without actively hating the movie (the way I actively hated The Surfer). MacLaine and Cage are fine here. That’s the very limited bar the movie sets for itself, and it clears it. Barely clears it. It won’t harm any fans of either actor. But you are probably better off rewatching Raising Arizona or Moonstruck again. Or, for MacLaine, Bernie or Postcards From the Edge.

Thinking of Postcards, how much better would this have been if the sarcastic Carrie Fisher wrote it and the satirical Mike Nichols had directed it? They might have had the gumption to do what this movie never dares — which is to make the First Lady an absolute terror. Now, Cage dealing with THAT would have been funny… and that role probably more fun for MacLaine to play.

I guess I should mention some of the other actors… I guess so. It’s a bunch of names you won’t recognize, and faces you immediately will. Richard Griffiths, the Mean Uncle of the Wizard Boy movies, is here, and we spent some time wondering aloud what the heck it is he does. He’s not MacLaine’s husband, the husband’s dead. He’s not one of the Secret Service staff, he’s not a cook. We finally decided “he’s the world’s most out-of-shape nurse” and left it at that.

You’ve also got James Rebhorn, Dale Dye, and Austin Pendleton doing exactly what they did in every other crappy movie of the period. Pendleton, especially, who was always a “weasely/mousey” type without being any fun at it. The one time you’re grateful he’s in the movie is when it gives Cage the opportunity to go bananas near the end.

Which you can do, right now! When I was looking (for purposes of the FASCINATING intro) to see if there WAS an Internet Archive version of this, I didn’t see one… but I did see a free YouTube version. So I’ve cued it up for you. Cage going bananas! You can then back it up to watch the whole movie, if you like (but, seriously, watch something better instead):

And, see? Correct aspect ratio. But I still think the libraries should replace pan-and-scan discs!

La Cérémonie (1995). Grade: B-

Sandrine Bonnaire, a woman who’s always listening and observing, rarely sharing, has found something old about her new friend, Isabelle Huppert. Huppert’s ailing father died in a fire; it had suspicious origins. She tells Huppert about it, and Huppert replies that she knows something old about Bonnaire, too. How her sickly child died in an accident, under suspicious circumstances. Then the two of them both begin laughing… since nothing was ever proved.

Now in the liner notes essay for the disc we got (a Home Vision Entertainment edition, there is also a Criterion disc available), critic Jonathan Rodenbaum says that director/co-writer Claude Chabrol and the two actors debated what was actually behind those tragic histories. They decided that Huppert had been responsible and Bonnaire hadn’t, but the viewer can come to a different judgment if they wish. This is a movie that won’t lay everything out for you; at the end, the fate of a main character is left ambiguous. I found that interesting; others might find it frustrating.

When Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Parasite won all the awards, I did check it out, and I could see what the fuss was about; formally, some of the visual design of the movie was impressive. But the class conflict angle was handled in a really exaggerated and unbelievable fashion; ultimately, the movie felt shallow. (Then I saw Bong’s Snowpiercer, which is also about class conflict, and decided, yup, this guy’s as shallow as anybody in Hollywood.)1

The class conflict angle here is far more subtle and far more realistic. On the surface, the wealthy family which hires Bonnaire as their maid seem like decent enough sorts, and as far as Movie Rich People go, even fairly generous. Jacqueline Bisset, the wife, gives Bonnaire a sizable wage over her previous job, sight unseen. Jean-Pierre Cassel, the husband, offers to pay for Bonnaire to take driving lessons so she can be more independent; when she says her vision’s too bad to drive; he offers to pay for her glasses. Nobody from the family pervs on Bonnaire, and the young adult daughter Virginie Ledoyen even chastises her parents for their condescension in calling her a “maid.”

There’s one thing they don’t know, though, and it’s not about Bonnaire’s dead child. It’s that she’s illiterate. She’s not stupid; she’s very quick on her feet to deflect attention from the things she can’t read; but she is illiterate (the way it’s shown to the audience is a little sloppy and confusing at first). One day the wife leaves a list of groceries to order over the phone; Bonnaire tries comparing the words to labels in the shelf, but it’s no use.

So she walks into town and says hi to the local postal worker (Huppert, who Bonnaire’s met before). And asks Huppert to call it in for her, saying their phone is broken. Huppert knows Bonnaire’s hiding something, but she likes that; she likes how Bonnaire has an air of secrets about her. Their friendship becomes more intense — and they have to hide it from the family Bonnaire works for, since the husband HATES Huppert for sneaking peeks at peoples’ mail.

This is the first movie I’ve ever seen by French filmmaker Claude Chabrol, who is considered a kind of French Hitchcock. His films frequently featured characters in dangerous situations, since, Chabrol said, “that’s the area of human activity where the choices are most crucial and have the greatest consequences.” Chabrol’s film career began at the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (along with Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut); in 1957, Chabrol and Éric Rohmer published the first academic study of Hitchcock’s films.2 He ended up making 54 movies, and maybe 25% of those were fairly well-regarded; this is thought to be one of the best of his later films.

Chabrol wrote this script with Caroline Eliacheff, and Rodenbaum’s liner notes essay says she is a psychoanalyst; “in interviews Chabrol credits her with developing the psychology and psychopathy of both these women beyond the elements found in the novel.” (It’s based on a 1977 novel, A Judgement in Stone, by English author Ruth Rendell; I haven’t read it, but apparently Rendell liked this movie more than the many other movie/TV adaptations of her work.)

Bonnaire, who was so amazing in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond as an alienated, angry young drifter, is amazing again here… and it’s almost all done non-verbally. She seems to live in a fierce world of her own. There’s a potent scene early on, where the husband calls her from work to go find a file he forgot on his desk. She immediately hangs up the phone, goes into her room, and starts binge-watching loud channels on satellite TV. This is a task she simply can’t complete, and so she’s basically saying “nyah nyah nyah I can’t hear you” and blaring out the rest of the universe.

Bonnaire carries the movie, because for the first 75% of this, nothing “dramatic” is happening. It’s just everyday events. What makes it fascinating, and increasingly unnerving, is that we can’t quite figure out what’s going on behind Bonnaire’s always-watchful eyes. When she’s saying “yes, sir,” or “yes, ma’am,” what is she actually implying? We know it’s something… and we know that the family isn’t picking up on it. Which is probably not improving Bonnaire’s opinion of this family.

While Huppert’s character is less hidden, yet no less perplexing. She’s acting like someone in her early 20s with “playful gal pal” energy, but she’s too old for that. (Huppert was 42.) So her quirkiness seems a bit off, until you realize that this is part of the point. She IS too old to be behaving this way, but she’s accustomed to acting on instinct. You know how they say that adult frontal lobes don’t fully develop until someone’s 26 or so? This character’s never finished forming.

The British Jacqueline Bisset as the wife has what sounds like a flawless French accent to me; her mother was French-English. She’s fine, yet the harder part goes to Jean-Pierre Cassel as the husband. He’s gotta be self-righteous in a way that seems reasonable to us in the audience (after all, we wouldn’t want people reading our mail, either), yet with just a hint of being annoying, so you can see why Huppert/Bonnaire take such a disliking to the guy. Cassel pulls it off nicely; a popular comic actor and dancer in his day, he must have been charming enough to know what’s just slightly off-putting.

And Virginie Ledoyen’s good as the daughter, who’s got a skin-deep compassion for the conditions of the working class (she’s like a prep school kid who’s just read Howard Zinn for the first time). She’ll give her parents a hard time about using condescending language, but when she meets Huppert on a country road, she shows where she’s really coming from. Huppert’s car is broken down, and Ledoyen’s gonna show off how down with the Reg’lar Folks she is by getting the engine running again. Then she wipes her hands on a rag and tosses it in the mere postal worker’s face.

The title La Cérémonie means something sarcastic in French; you can learn what the meaning is at this link, but it will give away a MAJOR late plot point. So does knowing what this movie, and the original novel, were inspired by. Jean Genet wrote a play inspired by the same thing. I don’t think it would ruin the movie if you knew what happened; I suspected it, and the WAY it happened still surprised me. But I do think you should only click on those links if you’ve actually seen and enjoyed the movie first.

Claude Chabrol half-kiddingly said that this was “the last Marxist film,” and I wonder how kidding he was. I can’t, quite, tell if this is meant to be a movie about class conflict or not. After all, the family is seemingly fairly nice. Maybe the point is that it’s easy for very comfortable people to be superficially nice without giving a real f**k; maybe that point isn’t here. Film critic Adam Martin didn’t think so; he thought Chabrol was more of a cynic than a social critic. I’d have to see more of his films to decide.

But I appreciated what social observations we have in this one, and I especially appreciated what Huppert/Bonnaire bring to this. Parasite was, I guess, OK; I don’t remember actively hating the thing. But I don’t really remember any of the characters. I’m not going to forget Huppert/Bonnaire here anytime in the near future. The way Bonnaire’s face looks as if she’s always judging everything around her; and now I know what that judgment was always going to be.

A Decade Under the Influence (2003). Grade: C+. Jane Fonda in Five Acts (2018). Grade: B-

In A Decade Under the Influence, Francis Coppola explains why he was given the opportunity to direct The Godfather, despite the availability of more experienced directors. One, because Coppola had an Italian-American background, and it was hoped he could bring that experience to the movie. Two, because Coppola had worked under Roger Corman, whose films were low-budget, and so it was hoped that this would help keep down costs.

Well reason #1 panned out — the movie is filled with believable depictions of Italian-American culture. Reason #2 didn’t. The movie went way over budget. That was forgiven when it became a giant financial success.

I found this interesting, because it showed that, very early on, Coppola had a tendency towards massively overscaling his movies. (At least, in The Godfather and especially the sequel, the money was put to good use, creating a vivid recreation of the past.)

It’s also one of the very few times that anything in A Decade Under the Influence was new information to me.

Why would I want to see a movie about 1970s movies, when I’ve seen the vast majority of the most famous titles multiple times? Well, in the hopes of learning something new (which, mostly, I didn’t). And also because I enjoy one of the movie’s directors, Ted Demme. He also directed the very funny The Ref and the “Streets of Philadelphia” music video, which was simple and I liked it a lot. (The other director, Richard LaGravenese, wrote Behind the Candleabra, one of the few musician biopics that’s actually really good.)

I liked this, too. I don’t mind seeing the famous clips again, and the pacing’s fairly decent (even if the full runtime, 138 minutes, is too long). If nothing else, most of the interview subjects are people I was interested in hearing from.

You’ve got Coppola, Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, Ellen Burstyn, Julie Christie, William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, Sydney Pollack, Roy Scheider, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Sissy Spacek, Robert Towne… a whole host of others. Bogdanovich and Scorsese are always interesting when they talk about movies. Robert Altman and Pam Grier are interesting when they talk about anything.

Some of the directors say surprisingly dumb things. Lumet talks proudly about really overworking and emotionally manipulating Al Pacino on the set of Dog Day Afternoon, and it reminds me why I respect but do not enjoy that movie — it’s all misery from the first scene until the last. (Give me the moments in Serpico where Pacino is relaxed or funny, instead.)

Friedkin nonchalantly tells us that he wasn’t particularly interested in The Exorcist until he found out that all the events in the movie actually happened, and they were recreating reality. And you know what? I believe him. I believe he’s shallow enough to actually think that, and to not take the implications seriously. Because if The Exorcist is real, that’s big news! It means there are devils taking over people’s bodies, here on Earth, today, and the only force that can control them is a very specific interpretation of Roman Catholicism! Hey all you Hindus and Muslims and Jews and Protestants — you’re all wrong! Start taking catechism classes today!

Of course, Friedkin (who did have some moviemaking talents) was not exactly a Deep Thinker. Roy Scheider tells a story about seeing The French Connection with a mixed-race audience, and when Gene Hackman’s racist cop character drops the N-bomb, Scheider was surprised to see some Black members of the audience cheering. Not because they like the character — because the movie confirmed what they already knew about racist cops. No doubt Scheider and Hackman thought the character’s bigotry was appalling. Did Friedkin? I’d expect he wasn’t even thinking about it one way or the other. (At this point Clint Eastwood pops in to tell us that Dirty Harry was a very similar movie to The French Connection, and while stylistically he’s wrong, in terms of police ethics, he’s right.)

One question I have is — who is this documentary actually for? (It’s three separate episodes that originally aired on IFC.) There’s a good amount of “what the 1970s were like” archival footage. Are you aware that there was a thing called the Vietnam war, and the U.S. public was deeply divided in their opinions about it? Do you know that Watergate happened? The documentary seems to either assume you don’t know these things, or your memory needs a refresher course.

If the documentary is for audiences who don’t already know the period, and these movies, then it is awfully careless about spoilers. There’s a major climactic moment from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest shown in a clip, and Robert Towne gives away the ending of Chinatown. There’s also key plot points shown in clips from Carrie, The Godfather, Mean Streets, and Young Frankenstein. (The YF one gives away one of the movie’s best jokes — surely that’s a rude thing to do to somebody who’s never seen it!)

If I were teaching a film class, I wouldn’t show this to new students — and for more experienced film fans, you’ll already know most of what’s mentioned here. The best thing a documentary like this can do (besides just keep you amused/interested, which it succeeds at) is to introduce you to movies you haven’t seen. This might do that for some movie fans who don’t know the period well, but be warned; some of the film clips that look interesting are from actually not-very-good movies. (The King of Marvin Gardens, for instance.) Still, I can imagine there are some people out these who haven’t seen Deliverance or Mean Streets or Shampoo, and they might enjoy those. I did. (I also was reminded I haven’t seen The Last Detail in a really long time, so I think I will fix that.)

This isn’t a bad watch. It’s a good “end of the day and unwind” thing to put on, because you can pause it at anytime and pick it up again later. I didn’t find it informative, but I never mind hearing from the likes of Julie Christie. It is funny when someone like Scorsese talks about modern mega-budget movies eating up the money that could have gone to ten smaller movies; um, tell me again about the budget for Killers of the Flower Moon, Marty? There’s a little too much self-congratulation, here, but not so much that it annoys you. And if some of the tales being told here might sounds a little like wishful memory thinking, they’re still mostly amusing tales.

Jane Fonda’s memory, on the other hand, seems sharp as hell, and there’s not a lot of wishful memory thinking going on in Jane Fonda in Five Acts. There’s some painful stuff in there. Still, the movie isn’t invasive; these are things that Fonda herself wants to share. And while you might find some of them more interesting (or depressing) than others, Fonda herself comes across as a fascinating individual. She always did.

The “five acts” mentioned are the five main influences in Fonda’s life over different periods. There is her father, her three husbands, and Fonda taking ownership of herself. This might sound like too-familiar autobiography territory, and in a way it is. It’s redeemed by Fonda’s (seeming) frankness, though. She does admit some unflattering things; and if she’s actually holding back when she seems that most open, well, that’s the risk of interviewing an actor of her enormous talents. If she were fooling us, we wouldn’t be able to tell.

Right away, we learn something that most movie fans will not be eager to learn. Henry Fonda DID stand for all the things he stood for in his movies; he DID hate bigotry and injustice. He was also a pretty terrible husband and father. Early on, Fonda tells us how her dad was emotionally absent and unfaithful, and how this hurt her mother. (Fonda’s mother committed suicide when Fonda was 12 years old.) Later, we learn that her dad would frequently fat-shame his daughters. Jane Fonda eventually became bulimic.

It was the troublesome home life that got Fonda into movie acting. In her early 20s, and living at home with her father, she became so frustrated one day that she walked on the beach in Malibu to a neighbor’s house; legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg. (He played the raspy-voiced old Jewish gangster in Godfather II). Strasberg agreed to let Fonda enroll in his acting class. After months of basically auditing the course, she was forced to perform a scene, and when she did so, Strasburg told her she was one of the most talented actors he’d ever had in the class.

(It’s a nice moment, and clearly Fonda is sharing a positive memory of feeling valued for the first time; you’re happy for her. But, the way she tells it, Strasberg said this in front of the whole class, which is kind of a jerk move by the teacher — how must the other students have felt! That’s something you say to a student after class, Professor.)

It’s amusing hearing Fonda describe how she fell for French exploitation director Roger Vadim; basically, he was a bad boy, and she knew it, but he had the charm thing going on. (Vadim had a reputation for hooking up with the prettiest young actors of the day and putting them in his movies; including Catherine Deneuve, another very smart and talented woman too good for that guy.) It’s pretty funny when she describes how she shot the opening credit scene to Barbarella (a futuristic sci-fi piece of psychedelic lunacy), where she’s supposed to be floating in zero-G, nude; she had to be roaring drunk to do it. Then they found out a bat had flown across the shot, so she had to do it again, roaring drunk and hung over as well. (Can’t they have Space Bats in the future? Star Trek II had a Space Rat.)

Watching this, though, something struck me as odd. Unquestionably, Fonda is one of the finer female actors movies have ever had. She brought conviction and intensity to every part, even silly parts in overheated movies. But has she ever been in a really good movie?

Not thst I know of. She’s intense and intelligent in Klute, and it’s very handsomely filmed by Gordon Willis/Alan J. Pakula, but the script in that one is a turgid serial-killer-thriller piece of dreck. She’s compelling in Coming Home and Julia, and those films have good directors, but the stories are one-note and dully messagey. The China Syndrome is messagey in the better way — it’s pissed-off — but the science of it is bunk.

While Fonda’s friend Lily Tomlin has been in several good-to-really good movies (Grandma and Nashville and the nifty The Late Show.) And it’s no insult to Tomlin, who I love, to say she’s not an actor of Fonda’s abilities; few actors are. Maybe Fonda’s just been unlucky (Cate Blanchett has, too); maybe her commitment led her to too many “intense” parts that weren’t all that great. Whereas Tomlin could just relax and have fun and still be wonderful, because Lily Tomlin could never NOT be wonderful.

And really, during the 1970s, which was Fonda’s key period, how many good serious roles for women were there? There’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and An Unmarried Woman, and Fonda turned down the latter role because of Julia. There’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Shampoo, and those already had Julie Christie. One thing that really sticks out when watching A Decade Under the Influence? There’s no women directors and few women writers. The only two I can think of from the period would be Elaine May and Joan Macklin Silver (neither is mentioned). Alas, aside from underground filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Lizzie Borden, this has largely always been the case in the movie biz, changing only quite recently.

Still, it’s not like Fonda was wasting her time in the 1970s. She was a very famous political activist (and still is), and on pretty much every issue she’s spoken out about, she’s been on the right side. She talks here about being misled into believing that there were fewer American P.O.W.s in Vietnam than there were… but, OTOH, the government has been perpetuating a myth for almost 50 years that there still ARE P.O.W.s in Vietnam, and that myth has been more damaging than Fonda’s getting some bad information. Fonda’s presence as an activist (and the presence of other celebrities) has led some people to grumble that celebrities should “stick to acting”; well, they don’t complain when actors shill for THEIR side of the issues.

Fonda’s generally been so bright politically and gives off such intelligence that it’ll come as a shock when she says she “was introduced to this amazing psychic” who predicted wealth and beauty. A psychic? Really? That (among other things) led her to marry the dingbat Ted Turner, who certainly had money and property in a beautiful part of Montana. Well, by 1991, the acting roles weren’t coming, and she loved scenery and animals. She got to surround herself with both for a few years. It’s her life, you can’t blame her. You may just choose to use this segment to go make a sandwich or something. It doesn’t last very long.

A shoutout to director Susan Lacy, who’s a good interviewer and picks good archival clips. There’s a major spoiler for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, but if it puts you off the movie, that’s doing you a favor. Lacy also directed a documentary about the Jane network of underground abortion providers in the 1960s; I’d love to see it.1 Sadly, A Decade Under the Influence’s co-director Ted Demme died before the film was released, at only 38 years old. The movie has a short tribute to him at the end.

Neither of these will blow you away, both are a little too long, and both go down easily. If you want to actually learn something significant about film history, see the 2009 documentary Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood, about all the enormously talented actors/writers/directors/cinematographers/set designers who fled Europe in the 1930s. It’s an impressive list and a fascinating if sad story. Here, you’re not getting much you need to know, but there’s stuff you won’t mind seeing. Whatever you think about the 1970s, it was certainly a seminal decade in American film, and whatever you may think of Jane Fonda, she’s sure had an unusual life story which she’s the best person to tell. There are far worse ways to spend a few evenings, or a weekend afternoon.

Unfaithfully Yours (1948). Grade: B-

There’s a couple of great Preston Sturges stories. One, which is fairly widely-known among old movie fans, is how Sturges sold his script for The Great McGinty for only $10 — with the condition that he be allowed to direct it. (No successful screenwriter had ever moved to directing before.)

The other, I’ll just quote from Wiki:

“‘While on a date with a young actress of certain renown, she informed Sturges that while she had pretended to find him witty and charming, she actually considered him a bore. ^“The only reason I'm going out with you, sir, is for the same reason that a scientist embraces a guinea pig; I just like to try my situations out on you to see how they turn out.” She claimed that the dramatic research was for a play she was writing. Outraged, Sturges told her that if she could write a play, he could write a play, but that his would be better and run longer. Within two months, he had written his first play, The Guinea Pig, only to find out that she wasn't writing a play at all, and that she was surprised and flattered that he had taken her ravings so seriously.’”

That’s terrific. It’s amazing to think that someone could just up-and-start writing, at age 30, essentially as a “screw you” gesture, and turn out to be both good/successful at it. It’s also a story that Sturges told himself, in his autobiography. (The autobiography also says that Sturges showed the actress some of his writing, and she said it was great “like champagne.”) Was the story true? I dunno. But I hope it is.

What’s definitely true is that Sturges was able, for almost two decades, to turn out genuinely funny scripts in a way few other writers could (Billy Wilder and Ben Hecht were two of them). He had his duds, since anyone will, and he made some poor directing/casting choices at times. (Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek are funny scripts ruined by the irritating presence of Eddie Bracken.) Sturges made a truly terrible decision when he partnered up with Howard Hughes, who was like a King Sadim; everything he touched turned to s**t.

But still, what wonderful movies! The Palm Beach Story is a true classic,1 The Lady Eve darn close, and if The Great McGinty and Christmas in July aren’t in their category, they’re still mighty entertaining. Some people don’t mind Eddie Bracken as much as I do, so they can enjoy those movies, too.2

This isn’t up with the very best, but it’s got some laugh-out-loud funny lines in it. And any movie which has that going for it is always worth watching. (Most “comedies” don’t have any.)

It’s also got a nearly perfect plot. Rex Harrison is a world-famous conductor who’s just married a woman 15 years younger (Linda Darnell). Soon after the honeymoon, Harrison has to travel overseas for a series of concerts. He asked his brother-in-law, Rudy Vallée, to keep an eye on her while she’s away. Check in and see how she’s doing. If she’s feeling low from loneliness, maybe take her to a party or a movie or something.

But Vallée took this advice the wrong way; he thought Harrison means “keep an eye” as in “make sure she’s not sleeping around.” So Vallée hired private detectives to follow Darnell. They’ve produced a report, and Vallée’s read it; he thinks there’s something in there Harrison should see. Harrison, understandably, is furious. He tears it up and tells Vallée to never speak to him again, except politely when they’re forced to be around each other at social events.

One person after another keeps mentioning the report to Harrison, and what’s in it. Eventually, despite trying not to, he learns that Darnell was seen going in/out of another man’s hotel room, late at night, in her lingerie.

When he conducts his next concert, Harrison imagines three ways he can get his revenge on his wife and her lover. And we see what he’s imagining. And it’s set to three different pieces of music; a Rossini, a Wagner, and a Tchaikovsky. The revenge plots match the stories being told in the music.

When it comes time to carrying out any parts of his revenge, though, Harrison is not as successful as he was in his imagination. And that’s a fantastic idea for a movie. The “jealous older husband” bit ain’t ideal… but “imagined sweet victory goes haywire in real life” isn’t just funny, it’s also something that’s happened to nearly all of us. Most of us don’t fantasize about getting revenge on a spouse, but we do dream of telling off that jerk we know across the street, or the jerk boss we work for. And how ashamed of themselves they will be. We don’t actually try to do this… and if we try, we fail at it!3

While this notion is a brilliant one, the execution ain’t perfect. Some of that might be on Sturges, some of it on studio head Daryl F. Zanuck. In an interview on the Criterion disc, Sturges’s widow, Anne Nagle, says Zanuck wanted the movie cut by 20 minutes and, when Sturges refused, oversaw the cutting himself. Since Zanuck thought the ponderous All About Eve was a brilliant script, he was obviously no connoisseur of comedy.

Zanuck also cast Rex Harrison in the movie after Sturges’s first choice, James Mason, wasn’t available. Now, Rex Harrison is perfectly good at delivering witty putdowns and exuding self-satisfied smugness (as he does in the fantasy sequences), and he’s frequently very funny at such moments.

What Harrison is terrible at is slapstick, is physical comedy. And unfortunately he does about 15 minutes’ worth of it here. It’s so bad, it almost sinks the movie, although he’s given a few good nasty zinger lines to redeem the climax. I don’t know if James Mason would have been able to do physical comedy, either; I’ve never seen him try. (He’s hilarious in Lolita, by far Kubrick’s best movie, but that’s not physical humor.)

Once it became apparent how bad Harrison was at the slapstick, it should have been toned down a notch. (There’s multiple instances of him falling off chairs when one would do.) If Sturges thought this stuff was funny, then the fault’s his. But, maybe he wasn’t wrong to do so? The great critic Pauline Kael loved this one, and so did some critics of the film’s day.

The movie bombed. Partially because some people didn’t enjoy the slapstick, partially because the studio barely promoted it, partially because of terrible luck. Before the film’s release, Harrison’s lover, Carole Landis, died from an overdose of Seconal, and the press was all over him for some time about it. Once an actor takes a major hit in public opinion, it can hurt the movies they’re in for some time — it still happens today.

The film’s failure just about sealed the end of Sturges’s career. Per Brian Eggert of DeepFocus Review, Sturges’s years of insistence on full creative control had been tolerated by the studios when his movies were a success; once they weren’t, they got their revenge by not hiring him at all. (This also still happens today.) Sturges wrote: “In twenty-two years, I managed to alienate every one of the seven major studios and soon found myself out of work.”

Eggert’s essay touches on the darker, semi-autobiographical themes in the movie, as does Jonathan Lethem’s Criterion essay. (For one thing, Sturges was having an affair with a much younger woman.) That might be true, the Harrison character might be based on the director himself, but if so I don’t think that makes any difference to the movie. I think the movie’s at its best when it’s mocking male jealousy, and I wish there was more of it!

How’s the rest of the cast? From tolerable-to-good. Linda Darnell is perfectly lovely and vulnerable, and that’s all that’s required (she also really enjoyed the shoot). Barbara Lawrence is inoffensive as Harrison’s sister (but so devoid of verbal wit it’s hard to imagine they’re related). Al Bridge is decent as a house detective, Edgar Kennedy much more fun as the head of a detective agency who’s also a big music fan.

And speaking of music, former teen idol/singing sensation Rudy Vallée is actually quite terrific as the nebbishy brother-in-law. He has a line about busy people being the most competent that’s simultaneously funny, true in one way, and untrue in another. It’s true that most of the very hardworking people I know are also quite good at fitting in an extra task if need be; I’ve also known rich nitwits who claim to be super-hard-working and super-competent when they’re not.

We’re unfortunately missing William Demerest, who was in all of Sturges’s earliest movies; Demarest was still under contract to Paramount, and Sturges had moved to Fox. Still, Lionel Stander is alright in what I imagine would have been the Demarest role (Sturges came up with this story in 1932). Incidentally, Stander, a fierce anti-Hitler and pro-union guy, was blacklisted before there was a blacklist; Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, supposedly threatened to sue for $100,000 any studio that gave a long-term contract to Stander, who Cohn called “a Red son of a bitch.” Then when the actual postwar blacklist happened, Stander didn’t return to American movies until 1965.

Since the actual music’s by some great composers, it’s terrific (except during the slapstick scenes when it’s changed to sound “wacky,” and this works poorly). It might be a stretch to say Wagner is great, but this piece is certainly familiar, and its corny nature suits the way Harrison’s character is feeling sorry for himself and imagining what a noble martyr he will be. The competent cinematography’s by Victor Milner.

This isn’t the top Sturges to see — that would be The Palm Beach Story and The Lady Eve. Nor is it the best Harrison comedy — that would be Blithe Spirit. (Where he plays a pissy husband who’s late wife’s ghost comes back to haunt him; that guy’s arrogant sexism gets him a very funny comeuppance.) But for fans of Sturges who’ve enjoyed the earlier films, this is a welcome addition to his catalog. It’s like reading a good, minor work by an author you love.

By “entertainment world,” I mean actors/directors. Mostly. I don’t think there are any screenwriters (unless they’ve directed a movie). There is at least one cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and at least one composer, Hans Zimmer. (I don’t know who ALL the 350+ people are.) There’s a dozen or so rock musicians — both Mitski and Florence Welch are into weird psychosexual dramas, which doesn’t surprise me at all. (Get Aimee Mann! Get Aimee Mann!) There’s no authors that I know of, which is odd — wouldn’t you want to hear what, say, Stephen King or Kazuo Ishiguro like? (We know which adaptations of his books King DOESN’T like.)

There are, fortunately, no professional sports athletes. I love baseball, but ask the average baseball player what movies they love and it’s NEVER going to be anything you would find in the Criterion Closet. (Maybe Bull Durham.) Still, you never know… Eduardo Escobar is a giant Nick Cage fan, so…

I’ve gotten a few movie suggestions from these mini-interviews, and I imagine a lot of you have, too.

One of the fun things about these is trying to guess which movies a person will name, especially a director. I’m usually wrong when I guess, but I guess anyways. When I saw that Jafar Panahi had done one of these, I thought “he’s GOTTA mention Vittorio de Sica, right?” Because de Sica was a master of getting strong performances out of non-professional actors, and Panahi in movies like Offside and No Bears does the same.

Yup, he mentions one de Sica movie. And that’s it!

At the other extreme is Natasha Lyonne, who I loved in Russian Doll and Poker Face (with Russian Doll, it’s the first season that you need to see, it's really really good). Lyonne goes full free shopping spree:

I mean, I would so marry this woman today. If I wasn’t already married, if Mrs. twinsbrewer didn’t marry her first, and if Natasha Lyonne didn’t have any better options than me (she has a near-infinity of better options than me).

Finally, John Waters. Does he pick anything outrageous and wild? Disappointingly, no. But he’s still John Waters. The guy’s effortlessly charming.

If you know of any particularly entertaining Criterion Closet videos, let me know in the comments and I’ll check them out!

Thanks for reading, as always! We’ll return to our regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow.

The Intruder (1962). Grade: C+

There’s a bus, and William Shatner is on it. He’s riding through the South, he sees Black farmhands, dilapidated shacks, and the like. Then he steps off the bus, and helps a little girl and her mother disembark. All smiles. He’s made his first friends in town. He hopes to make more.

In order to stop racial integration at the local school and preach a litany of lies and hate. Fun stuff!

No, it’s not, but it is grimly compelling, and I struggled with how to grade this one; that’s usually not a problem for me, I love passing judgment on other people’s hard work! I think that strictly as a movie, it deserves a slightly higher grade; it’s a good exercise in building tension, shot very well indeed considering the small budget (about $1 million in today’s money).

It’s just that that social message here is mighty complicated. On the surface, the movie is against racism, and everybody sane can agree with that. If you think about the way racism is portrayed here, though, the message starts to seem a bit murkier. When you hear the N-word used in 1949's Intruder in the Dust, it is shocking, but the movie doesn’t overdo it; the point is made. When you hear it here… I dunno. It feels like it might be purely FOR the shock value.

Shatner’s a slick guy from D.C., representing the Patrick Henry Society (a clear parallel to the John Birch Society). He is in town, a smallish one in Missouri (there’s a Missouri state map on a hotel wall). The reason he’s in town is because a judge has ordered the town to integrate their school. The white residents (most of them) don’t like it, but it’s the law and they respect that. Shatner’s here to tell them they don’t have to respect it. He’s gonna fire them up to the point where they use intimidation and even violence to prevent it.

He does so with charm one-on-one; before a crowd, he’s a preacher/demagogue. And something that might surprise you… Shatner’s really quite good in this.

I became curious about this movie because of a post on Psychotronic Review titled “William Shatner is a Great Actor.” (We can quibble about the adjective.) The writer says, “I’m not a huge fan of William Shatner. But people often claim that he’s a bad actor. Or that he over-acts. He doesn’t! People are really talking about the roles he plays. But even there, it’s wrong. He performs Captain Kirk with much subtlety when it is called for. But sure, he throws himself into big speeches when the time comes. That is how it should be!”

If you think about this, the writer’s basically right. The cheesy moments in Star Trek were largely cheesy because of the scripts. When you’re playing, say, “guy wrestling with being possessed by malevolent alien,” or “guy talking a computer to death,” it’s hard to go full Chekovian realism in the moment (I mean playwright Anton, not ensign Pavel). DeForest Kelley had his moments of cheese; even Leonard Nimoy did. (Emoting with rock monster, for instance.) In “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Shatner’s very good. In the scenes with Bibi Besch as his ex-lover in The Wrath of Khan, Shatner was very good.

And he’s very good in The Intruder. He’s genuinely charming as he meets the various townspeople; well, he would be charming if we didn’t know what he was like inside. When he’s putting the moves on a dim, easily-impressed high school senior, he’s appropriately gross; when he is sexually cornering another, older woman, he’s truly scary. Shatner doesn’t put quote marks around his racist dialogue to let you know “he’s not really that way”; the nonchalant way he delivers the lines can actually make you feel loathing. When he’s yelling in front of a crowd, sure, Shatner’s over the top, but it’s very like the way actual bigot demagogues rally their followers.

The script’s by Charles Beaumont, who adapted it from his own 1959 novel (I haven’t read it); Beaumont wrote a whole bunch of Twilight Zone episodes. It’s got its strengths and its weaknesses. The major strength is the movie’s good guy, Frank Maxwell, because he’s not a perfect guy; he doesn’t want the school to be integrated, either. But he respects the law, and he doesn’t like bullies. The moment where he stands up to the bullies on principle is the best thing in the movie.

The weak side is the plot logic. Shatner hasn’t been in town very long when a huge number of people turn up for his fiery rally. I doubt that Southerners would respond to a Northerner coming into town so quickly. (Although this was inspired by a real guy from the North1 who tried forcibly resisting integration in Clinton, TN, and six locals were convicted with him.) Plus, while the demented ravings of the John Birch Society did have followers, they weren’t THIS popular. (Their ravings are basically what the far-right stands for today, however.)

The ending really loses all credulity. There’s a mob that’s about to lynch a Black teenager, Charles Barnes; then, the girl who’s falsely accused Barnes of rape comes forward and admits to the crowd that she was fibbing, and how Shatner put her up to it. The crowd mellows out and feels guilty about what they’ve done.

This is so divorced from any conceivable reality that it’s pretty darn offensive. Writer FourStarFilmFan says: “we know that history was not always so forgiving. It is strewn with the names of men and women who were degraded, intimidated, and often killed. That’s why part of me rumbles with a deep sentiment that must be acknowledged. It wants to cry out and warn folks not to see this movie.”

The movie is a major technical accomplishment, shot on such a small budget very quickly, in multiple locations. Per Jeremy Arnold at TCM, “the crew kept getting kicked out when the locals discovered that the film's viewpoint was for integration and not against it.” Since the main Black character, Charles Barnes, was a real student at a local high school in one of the towns, when the filmmakers were run out of town, they helped Barnes relocate somewhere safer, too. (According to the AFI.)

But the commitment to shooting in hostile locations was worth it; this movie has a look of real buildings and real people that grounds the story. (If it had looked like a slick Hollywood movie and had the same troublesome ending, that would have been intolerable.) The very adequate cinematography’s by Taylor Byars, and it includes some actual night scenes which are perfectly visible; that’s practically impossible on a low budget.2 The obvious-but-not-bad music’s by Herman Stein.

Per the AFI, the movie was tagged by the censors for the number of N-words it used; director Roger Corman refused to remove them, and even got the approval of the NAACP; the censors eventually did re-rate the movie as acceptable. It still flopped hard, however, leaving Corman on the hook for the publicity costs. So he re-titled it I Hate Your Guts and marketed it as an exploitation-style movie:

The whole experience led Corman to swear off ever making another “message” movie ever again: “From that moment on I thought my films should be entertainment on the surface and I should deliver any theme or idea or concept beneath the surface.”

Well, he certainly did THAT. Corman was mostly famous for ultra-low-budget (like, way less than this, even) junk. He made a few Edgar Allen Poe adaptations with Vincent Price that actually don’t look bad at all (although the non-Price actors tend to be), but for the most part Corman made junk. It’s junk that doesn’t pretend to be anything but junk, though, and so some of it’s inoffensively amusing.

The basic upside to Roger Corman’s career is that his cheapie movies became a kind of film school for talented directors in the 60s and 70s; George Armitage, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, John Sayles and Martin Scorsese all worked with Corman.

The downside was he became a real jerk. Psychotronic Review writes how movies with Corman’s name on them were generally made in the later years. “When they were looking for funding for their Corman/Poe homage, Elvira’s Haunted Hills, Mark Pierson and Cassandra Peterson met with Corman. He really liked the project and offered himself a 30 percent stake in the film.”

“‘That’s right: if they paid him 30 percent of the profits, they could put his name on it. Otherwise, nothing. This goes along with all the “Roger Corman” releases that have little if anything to do with him.’”

So do I believe Corman was genuinely trying to make a point about racism in America here? Or is this pretty much an exploitation movie? Let’s split the difference and say it’s an exploitation movie that at least means well; just like Hollywood’s been doing since Hollywood existed. (This was made outside the major studio system, but in an interview on the DVD Corman sounds as self-worshiping as any egotistical Hollywood director might.)

Do you need to see it? It depends. If you’re a fan of movies that generate tension, this one absolutely does; or if you’re curious about Shatner in a more serious role. He and Frank Maxwell have about the only two memorable characters in the movie; although writer Charles Beaumont gives a surprisingly decent performance in a small role as someone trying to protect the threatened Charles Barnes.3 (Sadly, Beaumont would be dead in 1968 at the age of 37, of a terrible brain affliction.)

If you want a more serious, less-upsetting movie from the period about Black people facing racism in the South, you could try the really wonderful and moving Nothing But a Man, or Gordon Parks’s debut film in The Learning Tree. Or, the earlier Intruder in the Dust. Intruder is based on a Faulkner novel, and features a stunning performance by Juano Hernández as a racist town’s proudest and least deferential Black man. When the locals try to punish him for his attitude, Hernández won’t even give them the frightened response that they’re looking for. It’s a tense movie, but I promise you it ends well, and Hernández is so good!

All About Eve (1950). Grade: C-

Here’s a partial list of things you can do while watching All About Eve, a 30-minute radio drama stretched out to a 138-minute movie. We know because one or both of us did these things:

• Answer emails

• Clip toenails

• Fill out electronic time card

• Make soup

• Nap

• Use the restroom (1 or 2, you’ve got time for both)

Etc. You get the gist. The point is, there’s barely a story here, you’ll know what it’s going to be pretty early on, and it takes forever to get there. Aside from Bette Davis being a great actor and George Sanders being an interesting one, there’s not a lot happening, and virtually nothing you’ll miss if you’re making soup.

Plot is as follows; there will be a mild spoiler.

Davis is a Big Broadway Star, a major Lady of the Theater. Not musicals, dramas. One night, Davis’s friend Celeste Holm notices meek-looking Anne Baxter hovering in the vicinity of the stage door outside. It turns out, Baxter is Davis’s biggest fan, and never misses a performance. So Holm invites her in to meet her idol.

Baxter tells a sob story about her miserable life and everyone in the dressing room (a few more of Davis’s friends) take pity on poor little Anne Baxter. Soon enough, she becomes Davis’s right-hand-lady, a kind of personal assistant. Davis spots Baxter holding up one of Davis’s costumes, onstage after the show, and is touched by the idolization.

Well, we aren’t. Because of the incredibly mediocre script, we aren’t.

Since the very first scene is a flash-forward, to Davis and those same friends at a big gala awards show, where Baxter is accepting a major acting award. While Davis and all her friends shoot stares of loathing in Baxter’s direction. So we know what's gonna happen, and any dramatic tension that might have been in this (thin) plot is lost.

This is Single White Female meets a Hollywood gossip column about “who’s up and who’s down.” It’s probably most famous for a “twist” near the end, where Sanders reveals he’s dug up some dirt (I saw it coming a mile away), then an ironic/cynical final scene, which is like the ending of the laziest Black Mirror episodes. In between you’ve got “knowing behind-the-scenes” dialogue like the following (transcribed by IMDb):

• Bill Sampson: This is my cue to take you in my arms and reassure you. But I’m not going to - I’m too mad.

• Margo: Guilty!

• Bill Sampson: Mad! Darling, there are certain characteristics for which you are famous, on stage and off. I love you for some of them, in spite of others. I haven’t let those become too important. They’re part of your equipment for getting along in what is laughingly called our environment. You have to keep your teeth sharp - all right - but I will not have you sharpen them on me, or on Eve!

• Margo: What about her teeth? What about her fangs?

• Bill Sampson: She hasn’t cut them yet, and you know it! So when you start judging an idealistic, dreamy-eyed kid by the barroom Benzedrine standards of this megalomaniac society, I won’t have it! Eve Harrington has never, by word, look, thought, or suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love. And to intimate anything else doesn’t spell jealousy to me - it spells a paranoiac insecurity that you should be ashamed of!

• Margo: Cut! Print it! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pits?

Holy crap. Or, let me amend that… just crap. And there’s a ton of it. It’s striving to be acerbic and witty and it simply stinks.

This was written AND directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, quite the multitasker; he not only wrote this junky script, he directed it, and was in charge of casting it, too. And wow, did he miss. Aside from Davis and Sanders, this is a staggering collection of utter nonentities (well, I guess there’s Thelma Ritter, too, which… doesn’t help). Baxter and Gary Merrill (as Davis’s boyfriend) and Hugh Marlowe (as Broadway’s hottest director) are painfully dull individuals. And they’re in almost every scene. They’re doing the opposite of overacting, since overacting is fun in a way. They’re underacting. It’s like watching people audition for a soap commercial.

(There is a little going on behind the intelligent face of Celeste Holm, despite the part being written so woefully thin. Holm would essentially quit movies after this one, only appearing in a few roles every few years or so; she preferred to work in theater. Smart lady!)

As for Baxter, she was fine as a pert, smiling airhead in The Magnificent Ambersons, but dramatic heft just isn’t her thing. It’s laughable when, five minutes after seeing her win a (future) award for acting, she’s telling her sob story in Davis’s dressing room and you might be asking yourself, “THIS person becomes a great actor? How is that possible?” Baxter was cast because she supposedly looked like Claudette Colbert, who was going to have the Davis role until she hurt her back on another film; I’m not seeing the resemblance.

Mankiewicz adapted this from a 1946 short story by Mary Orr, which was itself adapted into a 1949 radio drama, both called “The Wisdom of Eve.” (I skimmed the story, it’s at Archive here.) Orr based the story on something that actually happened to Austrian actor Elisabeth Bergner, although Bergner’s wannabe replacement didn’t succeed.

As Mankiewicz worked on various drafts, he would run them by studio head Daryl F. Zanuck, who basically kept shouting “brilliant!” like in those Guinness beer ads. Great — a movie essentially catering to the taste of studio heads, notably the most creative people in Hollywood.

The studio bought the rights from Orr for either $3500 (per the AFI) or $5000 (per TNT); in any case, not a lot, and gave her ZERO screen credit. While the movie hardly changes the story at all, it just pads it. The main change is introducing Sanders’s acerbic theater critic, and turning him into a cad, because no doubt Zanuck and Mankiewicz enjoyed showing critics as a**holes. Then, after the movie was a huge success, Random House published a hardcover version of the screenplay, so readers could enjoy savoring the sort of “witticism” sampled above. At least Orr got a third of the book sales.

There’s another minor change from the story, in which Eve utterly wins — here she wins but she’s punished for doing so, because Morality Must Prevail.

I don’t know what was up with this whole string of “the entertainment business is corrupt to the core” movies coming out around this period. This, Sweet Smell of Success, A Face in the Crowd, The Barefoot Contessa (also written/directed by Mankiewicz, and you can’t make me watch it). I suppose it was major ego-fluffing by pretentious filmmakers to show the “bad showbiz people” who were nothing like their good pure honest selves. And there’s always public attention for things that purport to show us the “real dirt” about how the celebrity-making system works. (It does not work the way it does in this movie.) At least when Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard, he gave us some good lines and creepy atmosphere and Erich von Stronheim.

If you find yourself making it through this all the way, it’ll likely be because of Bette Davis, who’s quite good in her quieter moments, and fairly compelling when she’s furious, even if reciting out loud Mankiewicz’s thudding dialogue would stymie any actor and does here. George Sanders is always most fun when he’s playing most arrogant, and here he is, although he makes the unfortunate decision to play the role semi-realistically, as a character who’s dead inside. He was more enjoyable in Rebecca, where he was a mean a**hole who had fun doing it.

The bland cinematography’s by Milton R. Krasner, and it looks like “Milton R. Krasner” sounds. The music’s by yet another abysmal member of the Newman family, who should all have switched to Himalayan yak herding as children, and spared the universe their terrible scores. (Randy Newman did some OK work on the Toy Story movies and many people respect his talents as a songwriter, so I’ll back off Randy, but Alfred Newman here is rotten.)

There’s more “making of” information in Frank Miller’s TCM article; those who like the movie (who won’t have read this far) should check it out. Davis and Sanders had a fine time and loved the script (???). Bette Davis had a sore throat early on (from fighting with her soon-to-be ex-husband) and it deepened her voice, which she then had to keep deepened for the rest of the shoot. Some people supposed this was an intentional effort to sound like Tallulah Bankhead, but it wasn’t.1 Ho-hum; many more things like that if you want ‘em. The only thing that interested me was how Angela Lansbury was considered for the Anne Baxter part — that might have breathed some life into this thing.

One bizarre little tidbit from the AFI — this movie was, originally, released with the stipulation that it had to be shown at scheduled times; apparently, in 1950, it was common for theaters to just show popular movies in a kind of continual loop! So audiences could show up whenever, watch the end of the movie, then see the beginning. That stipulation didn’t last long, and theaters went right back to showing the movie in a loop. “Confusion arose because of the public's deeply ingrained habit of going to a movie show at any desired hour, when most convenient or on impulse.” Sounds strange to me. In any case, if you see the second half of this movie, I can’t imagine why you’d want to see the rest.

It’s maybe not as bad as all that — this is a Cherished Classic and all. But boy, is 138 minutes WAY too long for this plot. And boy, was Joseph Mankiewicz a boring writer/director. His brother Herman wrote Citizen Kane and an unfilmed script denouncing Hitler when nobody was daring to. Herman’s grandson Ben is a host at TCM, and TCM does great work showing older movies to new viewers. But Joseph was a real bore. He did co-direct a documentary about Dr. King with Sidney Lumet; that might be worth seeing. This movie, if it had to exist at all, should have been 85 minutes long and directed by Sam Fuller or somebody like that with some actual energy. And it shoulda had Angela Lansbury.

Spotlight (2015). Grade: B+

My brother clued me in to the movies written/directed by Tom McCarthy, and I immediately liked them. The Station Agent, with Peter Dinklage as a isolated, angry man suffering from depression, who finds a chance at healing when some friendly people elbow their way into his world. The Visitor, with Richard Jenkins as a rather sad, sheltered academic who suddenly finds a young immigrant couple has been living in his apartment when he’s away. It’s a touching movie, although it doesn’t shy away from the perils of the immigrant-in-America experience. Win Win isn’t up to the level of those two, but it’s good, and it has another excellent performance by Paul Giamatti.

And then my brother told me “guess what the next Tom McCarthy movie is gonna be? It’s gonna be about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.” And I wasn’t sure WHAT to expect.

McCarthy himself said he wasn’t thrilled about the subject to begin with — not because he didn’t think it was important, but because he didn’t know how cross-checking reference guides and making lots of phone calls could be made into an interesting movie. But then he met with producers Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust, and they pitched him on how he could frame the story; a new editor arrives at the Boston Globe who’s neither Catholic nor from Boston, and how the outsider’s perspective was needed to start the story.

McCarthy teamed up with Josh Singer, a writer who’d worked on The West Wing and a film about WikiLeaks; they were able to interview all the actual reporters portrayed in the movie and got their hands on legal transcripts of victim testimony.

The story’s about how the Catholic Church knew there was a problem with priests molesting children and not only didn’t address the problem, they took steps to hide it. A priest who’d molested kids at one church wouldn’t be defrocked, he wouldn’t be turned into the law — he’d be transferred to another parish.

I grew up Catholic, and we were fairly darn serious about it — we generally didn’t just go every Sunday, but most of the Holy Days of Obligation (10 extra days where you’re supposed to go to church if you can). My mom eventually taught Confirmation class; we were pretty Catholic.

So we definitely had the possessive relationship with favorite priests that many Catholics can develop. Where parishoners get attached to a particular priest. It’s not what the Church wants to happen; they want people to be attached to the Church and the Lord, not any specific local priest. So they will re-assign priests every so often to new churches.

But, every now and then, it would be a priest who really hadn’t been around that long. Adults might whisper, especially if it was a younger priest, that there might have been some “impropriety” involved. Yet most assumed this usually involved women (Catholic priests are forbidden to have sex or get married). Nobody thought that it involved molesting children.

Or did they?

One of the themes of the movie is the Boston Globe reporters (the older ones) kicking themselves for not figuring out the scope of the abuse scandal earlier. There’s a key sequence when Billy Crudup, who up to this point has been portrayed as a sleazy lawyer getting measly cash settlement for victims, tells the reporters that he tried exposing the size of the scandal, years and years ago. And that the Globe buried it.

They check in their archives, and sure enough, the story’s there, buried deep at the back of the Metro section. Nobody ever followed up on it. Michael Keaton says he was in charge of Metro at the time, and he doesn’t even remember the story. He doesn’t know why he didn’t do more with it.

Now, this never happened — not exactly. What happened was, McCarthy and Singer were in touch with the real lawyer Crudup plays in the movie, and the lawyer told them about this. They looked in the back issues of the paper, and sure enough, the story was there. They asked the real editor Keaton’s playing, and he says he didn’t remember it, and he regretted it. So they wrote a fictionalized version into the movie.

Very little of the rest of it was fictionalized, although certain scenes were dramatized a little; conversations that took place in emails are shown as happening in person, because reading emails onscreen is boring. (So’s reading texts, which I wish more movies would realize.) A scene where Rachel McAdams gets a startling confession from a priest (Richard O’Rourke) didn’t happen in a doorway, it happened slowly over the course of multiple interviews. (It’s one of the most potent scenes in the movie, though, and reminds us what we’ve been missing since Hollywood decided it was through with the great McAdams.) The real reporters got to comment on drafts of the script and visit the set in Toronto (where a former Sears was transformed into the Globe offices by set designer William Cheng, who said one of the tricky things was making the computers/software look 15 years old).

Just about the whole cast is superb, with Liev Schreiber as the new, outsider Metro editor who starts the process rolling. Keaton is the self-described “player/coach” of the Spotlight team, who can spend months or years on a single story; the other members are McAdams, Brian d’Arcy, and Mark Ruffalo. Stanley Tucci is basically channeling his innermost Stanley Tucci-ness, and it’s as appealing as always; he’s a grumpy victims’ lawyer who distrusts Ruffalo at first until Ruffalo proves he can stick with it.1 In roles as victims, Michael Cyril Creighton and Jimmy LeBlanc are very fine as very different types of people (one’s a yuppieish gay man, the other a working-class guy who probably knows several ex-hockey players). Neal Huff does a neat turn as a leader of a victims’ support group; he’s got the angry, defensive air of somebody who’s used to nobody believing him. (A couple of the actors playing church representatives and others who helped bury the story have a bit of a TV legal procedural feel, but it’s not a huge deal.)

Most of the newspaper actors bear a fairly close resemblance to the people they’re playing (not that it matters); all except John Slattery as Ben Bradlee Jr. — whose dad was played by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men. It’s impossible to watch this without thinking of the earlier film (which also had an excellent cast); the 1976 movie is certainly far more visually sophisticated. Tom McCarthy’s not a visual director, he’s an actors’ director. But this is a more ethically complex movie; that one made its reporter characters into idealistic heroes (much more heroic than the real Woodward & Bernstein); here, while the reporters are less self-interested, they are Globe homers; at time they’re openly more worried about another paper scooping the story than anything else.

Just because McCarthy isn’t a visual director is no attack on him, or on the intelligent cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi; there’s almost no over-use of handheld cameras, except for one scene where Brian d'Arcy James is running down a street. That was probably McCarthy’s decision, and I think it was a rather unnecessary one; the idea’s to show us that the reporters are worried about their OWN kids, not just the ones they’re finding stories about. But running down the street wouldn’t help anything. The purpose is better served when Keaton observes how one of the abusers was his hockey coach, and wonders, was he just lucky? I think anybody who was altar-boy adjacent or had a Catholic priest as sports coach has wondered the same thing. (Although, as we’ve discovered since, the problem is by no means limited to Catholicism.)

This sure was a story that was hard, at first, for a lot of devout Catholics to accept. I remember one Minneapolis Star-Tribune far-right-wing columnist, Katherine Kersten, who wrote a column saying the allegations were made up or exaggerated as part of a liberal agenda to destroy all trust in religious institutions. (Did the paper fire her? Hell no. She retired in 2013 and still writes guest columns, and is part of a right-wing “think tank.”)

Less rigid Catholics were shaken by the story, and appreciated how the movie wasn’t specifically attacking Catholicism per se; Tom McCarthy’s family was all Catholic, and he went to Boston College, a Catholic university.2

The Church itself didn’t attack the movie, the way they had 2013’s Philomena. That’s not because the Church had magically become more tolerant of criticism; I think it’s just because this movie is so careful about getting its story straight. In Philomena, writers Jeff Pope and Steve Coogan made up some minor insignificant details about the real story, and whenever you do that, you leave yourself unnecessarily open for bad faith criticism. Everything that Philomena said about “Magdalene laundries” being, very often, horribly abusive places was 100% true. I guess the moral of that story is, if you wanna take on a big, powerful institution, cross your t’s and dot your i’s correctly.

There’s a real sadness in rewatching this one, and it’s not just the story itself; it’s that newspaper reporting of this kind, the kind that takes time and doesn’t produce instant results, is all but dead in America. There’s a few outlets still doing it — ProPublica is one — but for the most part, papers have shifted to strictly being content providers.3 They’ve slashed their investigative departments.

Many people have blamed the internet for killing newspapers, and there’s some truth to that; readers who’ve grown used to free content and don’t want to pay to read it are a factor. A larger one is newspapers losing their classified ads, since the main function of those was either announcing items for sale or job postings, both of which are available online. (Online-only job postings have major drawbacks; instead of calling a human to try to get an interview, it’s likely that bots are assessing your online applications, and there’s virtually nothing stopping the bot from discriminating against you because of age. If your resume stretches back to 2000 or further, you are not 29 years old. Age discrimination is illegal, AND it happens all the time.)

An even bigger thing than free internet content and the loss of classified ads has been the interminable rise of “social” media, delivering information in ever-shorter bite-size videos and posts.4 Which, of course, are specifically targeted at individuals, whose data has been mined to discover their interests. A newspaper’s set publishing schedule has a harder time competing for attention.

All this leads me to think… if a news story like the Church abuse cover-up happened today, would anyone even notice? Only a handful of people who are following specific stories of the sort would hear about it. If it damaged the reputation of a right-wing-leaning institution, FOX and probably CBS wouldn’t cover it (and soon enough, CNN’s likely to be owned by far-right zealots).

The movie addresses the issue of the internet a little, it’s always hovering in the background. (We see a billboard for AOL Online, for example.) Yet McCarthy and Singer said their hope was that the movie would make people realize the importance of real journalism, and help it to come back. It’s not going to happen.

There’s ways it could happen; the wise economist Dean Baker has suggested giving everyone in the country a $100 refundable tax credit for subscription to news services, online or print; if you don’t subscribe to anything, you don’t get the credit. That’s a perfectly good idea. But are the big tech giants going to let anything of the sort happen? No.

So, watch the very fine Spotlight as a period piece; enjoy the ensemble acting, the smart script (and Howard Shore’s good, simple score). Watch the good guys beat the bad guys, be astonished (as these reporters are) by the immense public response the story received. And pray to whatever Gods you believe in that something replaces the valuable work that serious news reporting can do. Because, right now, a handful of people reading ProPublica isn’t cutting it.

Incidentally, some of you may have seen Tom McCarthy as an actor before. He was in the movie Flags of Our Fathers, several episodes of Boston Public, and every episode of the last season of The Wire. Playing… the world’s most unethical journalist. McCarthy said he did hear a few cracks about it when they were in the Globe offices (they did shoot a few things in the real building). But most of the reporters he hadn’t already met didn’t know at first he was directing the movie! They just assumed he was playing a reporter again.