What do you wanna bet that My Dinner With Herve (HBO, 10.20), a film about Fantasy Island star Herve Villechaize (Peter Dinklage) recalling his life in an interview with a journalist (Jamie Dornan), will completely ignore what I regard as Villechaize’s funniest, strangest performance? I mean his gay Mexican character in Robert Downey Sr.‘s Greaser’s Palace (’72), who’s in and out in the space of a single five-minute scene.
“Nick Nack”, Christopher Lee‘s manservant, in The Man With The Golden Gun plus “Tattoo” in Fantasy Island…that’s all Vellechaize admirers ever talk about.
For those who’ve never seen Greaser’s Place, it doesn’t quite work unless you watch it totally ripped.
Frank Tuttle‘s This Gun For Hire (’42) is primarily a violent thriller, but the combination of frostiness and vulnerability in Alan Ladd‘s Raven, a professional assassin, feeds into a vibe of brusque indifference and existential despair. Released two years before Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity, I’ve always regarded This Gun For Hire as the first high-impact film noir. Which puts it into the pantheon of 1940s releases. Pretty much every film-loving dweeb subscribes to this view.
But for some odd reason Universal has never released a Bluray or streamed it in HD. Here we are in 2018, and the only way to watch this still engrossing, hard-boiled drama is on that same shitty DVD Universal released 14 years ago. Why don’t they get the lead out and remaster it? It would be fairly criminal to just let it remain a 480p experience.
Ladd’s breakout performance made him a big star, but his flush days lasted only about 15 years, give or take. The poor guy died at age 50, of an accidental suicide in January of ’64.
“Once Ladd had acquired an unsmiling hardness, he was transformed from an extra to a phenomenon. Ladd’s calm slender ferocity make it clear that he was the first American actor to show the killer as a cold angel.” – David Thomson, “A Biographical Dictionary of Film.”
“One shudders to think of the career which Paramount must have in mind for Alan Ladd, a new actor, after witnessing the young gentleman’s debut in This Gun for Hire… Obviously, they’ve tagged him to be the toughest monkey loose on the screen. For not since Jimmy Cagney massaged Mae Clarke‘s face with a grapefruit has a grim desperado gunned his way into cinema ranks with such violence as does Mr. Ladd in this fast and exciting melodrama. Keep your eye peeled for this Ladd fellow; he’s a pretty-boy killer who likes his work…Mr. Ladd is the buster; he is really an actor to watch.” — from Bosley Crowther‘s review of This Gun For Hire (’42).
The great Neil Simon has passed at the age of 91. Great as in hugely popular, prolific, hard-working, driven. I always admired his success and relentless output and came to respect some of his more mature material of the ’70s and ’80s, but I never regarded him as a heavyweight. Which he didn’t need to be because he was “Neil Simon.”
I was always impressed and often amused by Simon’s screenplays, which were usually adaptations of his hit Broadway plays, but I never thought they were profoundly moving or emotionally devastating or anything in that realm. They were mostly safe, likable and easily digestible stories about middle-class relationships (love affairs, marriages, families) for all ages but mostly for people born between the 1920s to the mid ’40s, or those who came of age with a “life can be brutally hard” sensibility that definitely resulted in a pre-boomer attitude.
Born in 1927, Simon grew up during the Depression and World War II and obviously believed that the gift of laughter was worth its weight in gold. His plays were never silly or juvenile and occasionally had bite and tension, but they were always “likable” and uplifting. Simon was a smart, very shrewd guy who used his life experience (struggling New York Jewish) to propel and sharpen his stories, but he always needed to entertain. And that he did. He wrote clean and true and, having come from TV comedy in the ’50s, knew about timing and pacing. His dialogue always felt “written,” but in a pleasingly professional way.
Simon was always a New York playwright first and a Hollywood screenwriter second.
A few months ago I re-watched Gene Saks‘ adaptation of Barefoot in the Park (’67), which Simon wrote in the very early ’60s (which were basically the ’50s extended up until the Kennedy assassination) and which opened on Broadway in October 1963. Costarring Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Mildred Natwick and Charles Boyer, it’s very easy, witty and unthreatening. Always alert and “real” as far as it went, and never tiresome or lacking in pep.
As a failed screenwriter I know something about how difficult it is to write well and concisely while generating laughs and sustaining dramatic tension, and so I have nothing but respect for that play and film. But there’s nothing earth-shattering about it.
Nine years ago I made my first mention of enlightened incarceration of dumbfuck rural righties via green re-education camps. I said I was half-kidding, of course, but you knew I was half-serious. A year later I said I was “perfectly serious” about rounding them up in trucks, etc. Five years later, in late 2015, Bill Maher joked that this idea made sense. Kidding but half-serious. And now Doonesbury‘s Garry Trudeau is saying the same thing, calling it a desperate liberal daydream but at the same implying there are crazier ideas out there.
In other words, a fair way to describe Hollywood Elsewhere is “the column that spoke too soon.” You may find certain HE ideas or notions appealing, but for your own political protection it’s better to wait for other opinion-shapers to echo them first. For I am Hawkeye or Chingachgook, a finder of new paths and new realms. If you’re smart you won’t immediately repeat or advocate what you read in Hollywood Elsewhere…instead you should wait five years, or better yet ten.
“Exterminate, forbid or significantly reduce selfishness in our society and we’re obviously looking at a better world. Therefore the extermination of the right would theoretically be a reasonably good thing. Not that this is possible. I understand that. But if I ran things they would all be rounded up and sent to green internment camps for reeducation. All right, I’m kidding.” — from an 8.5.09 post titled “Argument Over Beers.”
A year later, on 9.17.10, I wrote that “I want these people rounded up in trucks and incarcerated in green reeducation camps. I’m perfectly serious.”
“The more pernicious and threatening the climate-change situation gets, the less radical my green reeducation camps idea will seem. If you don’t want any kind of future for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, fine…let’s just cruise along and do nothing. But there’s really no way to argue against the notion that rural yokels and their Congressional reps are, no exaggeration, the most malicious villains of our time…public enemies in every conceivable sense of that term.” — From “While Rome Burns“, posted on 5.8.14.
