Another diss for 20th Century Fox’s marketing team: Ridley Scott has criticized them for selling last May’s Kingdom Of Heaven as a romantic actioner instead of a religious and political piece, which he argued for but didn’t get. Fox marketers were seemingly afraid of playing up the Islamic-vs.-Christian conflict element in the film’s advertising because this would reflect on the U.S. presence in Iraq and other political issues of the day. Okay, but the running-time issue is a bit more interesting. I read two or three posts last spring claiming that Scott’s three-hour Kingdom cut, which was test-screened before being trimmed, was a somewhat better film that the 2-hour, 25-minute version that went into theatres. So why wasn’t the three-hour cut offered on the recently issued DVD? Because they intend to wait a year and get a second revenue stream out of “Director’s Cut” sometime in ’06, I imagine.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Eon Productions will officially announce that Dan…sorry, will announce the name of whomever’s been chosen to play James Bond in Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale at a London press conference tomorrow (Friday, 10.14). If only Wilson and Broccoli had gone with Quentin Tarantino’s idea for Casino Royale…”let me do it my way, I won’t screw up your franchise,” etc…but they’re going with Campbell and Crash screenwriter Paul Haggis, who’s said to be interested in remaking the Bond series the way Chris Nolan revitalized Batman and Bruce Wayne. This can’t really happen, of course, with producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli running the show, so forget it. Daniel Craig, whom the Daily Mail identified earlier this week as the new 007, has real machismo and an icy killer quality in his cold gray eyes, but I wonder how the mainstream popcorn crowd (i.e., those who’ve never seen him in Layer Cake or anything else) will respond.

Harold Pinter was named today in Stockholm as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. The Birthday Party, The Servant, Accident…the screenplays for Turtle Diary, The French Lieutenant’s Woman…of course. But for me the ultimate Pinter work has always been Betrayal, which I first saw on the New York stage in 1980 with Roy Scheider, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner. Maybe the rights holder to David Jones’ riveting 1983 film version (CBS Fox Home Video put out a cruddy, muddy-looking VHS in the mid ’80s) will take notice and finally release a cleanly mastered DVD of this disappeared Pinter film, which costars Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodges. Where would the art of dialogue be without Pinter’s influence? Verbal evasion, unspoken menace, less is more, the things that are there but unsaid.