Month: March 2020

Joseph Wambaugh‘s cop and crime books were all the rage from the early to late ’70s. Drawing from his 14 years of service with the Los Angeles police force, Wambaugh’s novels portrayed cops as complex, glum-hearted fellows coping with stress, heartache and constant anxiety. In the early ’70s gritty, semi-sympathetic portraits of angst-ridden beat cops felt like something new, or so it seemed. Out of that came Hill Street Blues (’81) and I don’t know how many other in-depth cop dramas on broadcast, cable and streaming.

The most substantial film to emerge from the Wambaugh canon was Harold Becker‘s The Onion Field (’79, in which James Woods and John Savage arguably gave their career-best performances. (Wambaugh’s book was published in ’73.) At the same time I’ve only seen The Onion Field once, and have no interest in going there again. Based on a real-life cop killing, it’s a relentlessly grim and haunted thing. Which is what makes it good, but also why I’d rather not revisit.

I was never a fan of Robert Aldrich‘s The Choirboys (’77), nor of Wambaugh’s 1975 source novel. I’ve always found alcoholism and lushy behavior to be terminally boring, and both properties were soaked with smelly booze.

My two favorite Wambaughs are Richard Fleischer‘s The New Centurions (’72), a mezzo-mezzo episodic which costarred Stacy Keach and George C. Scott, and the four-hour NBC TV movie of The Blue Knight (’73), which starred William Holden as crusty beat cop “Bumper” Morgan on the verge of retirement.

There’s a relatively new Twilight Time Bluray of The New Centurions available, and a Blue Knight Bluray popped a couple of years ago.

I could never understand why George C. Scott’s Andy Kilvinski put a gun in his mouth after hanging up his badge. He felt that his life was over, I realize, but he could have gone into business as a private detective. He could have had a whole new life.

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I understand the sexual threat in Trading Places when Paul Gleason, dressed in a gorilla suit, is put into a cage with an actual gorilla. But what kind of threat is the tied-up naked girl facing in Cecil B. DeMille‘s pre-code The Sign of the Cross?

We’re meant to think “oh, a helpless woman at the mercy of a wild beast” but what’s the threat exactly? Sexual assault isn’t an option since gorillas mount from behind. Gorillas aren’t carnivores and they don’t bite. So what’s the worst that could happen to the poor woman? As long as she stands still, probably nothing.

Bottom line: DeMille’s brand was often about shovelling the forbidden fruits of sin and titillation, but always with the opportunism of a skilled hypocrite, which is to say under the guise of moral condemnation and pseudo-religious sanctimony.

He was essentially a kind of prudish, two-faced con man — Frank Morgan‘s “Professor Marvel” character in The Wizard of Oz. The upside is that composition-wise he always painted with striking visual flair.

Early this morning on Facebook, starting with a thought from director Eugene Jarecki:

I’ve watched Singin’ in the Rain five or six times, but I can’t take it anymore. Donald O’Connor, I mean, and his relentlessly plucky, rubber-limbed, super-athletic performance as Cosmo the piano player.

O’Connor thinks he’s playing a funny quipster but nothing he says or does makes you crack the slightest smile. Everything out of his mouth is arch and feigned and wink-winky — he doesn’t deliver a single sincere note in the entire film.

After a while you’re thinking “Jesus, who is this asshole?…does he do anything but mug and bark lines and make stretchy clown faces and bounce around?” I realize that the fault lies with Betty Comden and Adolph Green‘s script, which only pays attention to Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds‘ characters.

All I know is, Cosmo ruins the film for me. It’s not O’Connor I have trouble with, but the smirking, wafer-thin, seltzer-bottle attitude that he was called upon to play.

I realize that O’Connor lived a difficult life to some extent once he got into this mid 20s. I thought he was fine in the Francis the Talking Mule movies, and he wasn’t bad in There’s No Business Like Show Business.

Oh, how I love cut-to-the-chase, no-beating-around-the-bush prose. A boring writer could have made a couple of chapters out of the first page, but Woody Allen is telling his story in a kind of fast neighborhood street patois mixed with one-liners from “Caesar’s Hour.” Blunt assessments, zero sentimentality, all economy. In the mid 1920s his grandfather, “in a burst of manic euphoria, bet more and more on Wall Street, and you can see where this is going.” His parents “loved each other in their own way, a way known only to a few headhunting tribes in Borneo.” His father’s “weak, wan and degenerate-looking” brother “drifted around the Flatbush streets, peddling newspapers till he dissolved like a pale wafer…white, whiter, gone.” I’d fallen in love by the middle of page #1.

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A Hulu miniseries set in 18th Century Russia, The Great is a serving of feminist history about young Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) and her acrimonious relationship (to put it mildly) with Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), described in her memoirs as an “idiot”, a “drunkard from Holstein”, “good-for-nothing”, etc. It begins streaming on 5.15.20. No thanks.

In the space of 24 hours I went from never having seen Anthony Mann‘s Raw Deal, to begrudgingly watching a shitty 480p version on Amazon Prime, to half-admiring it, and then realizing it was actually better than that, and then deciding that owning the Classicflix Bluray wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Especially considering the following extras: (a) a feature-length audio commentary by author and film historian Jeremy Arnold, (b) “Deadly is the Male: The Making of Raw Deal” — a featurette with writer and film historian Julie Kirgo, film historian and director Courtney Joyner and biographer and producer Alan K. Rode; (c) “Dennis O’Keefe: An Extraordinary Ordinary Guy,” a featurette with Jim O’Keefe (son of Dennis O’Keefe) and biographer and producer Alan K. Rode & film historian & director Courtney Joyner; (d) A 24-page booklet with an essay by author Max Alvarez (“The Crime Films of Anthony Mann”) featuring stills, posters and other production material; and (e) a restoration comparison.

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Skyhorse Publishing today began to distribute 75,000 copies of Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing,” which is great news. But upon visiting the Skyhorse website (and then the Barnes & Noble site where I did the actual ordering) I was disappointed to learn that there’s no Kindle version. Who reads dead-tree hardbound these days?

Update: For some idiotic reason there was no Amazon Kindle purchase option earlier this morning, but now there is. So I bought the Kindle version and cancelled the Barnes & Noble hardback.

Allen on Hachette’s decision to not publish “Apropos of Nothing“, included in a postscript: “Hachette read the book and loved it and despite me being a toxic pariah and menace to society, they vowed to stand firm should things hit the fan. When actual flak did arrive they thoughtfully reassessed their position, concluding that perhaps courage was not the virtue it was cracked up to be and there was a lot to be said for cowering.”

Dr. Jerome Adams, speaking this morning on Today: “I want America to understand. This week, it’s going to get bad. We really need to come together as a nation. You’re seeing young people out in beaches. Here in DC, the district set up a cam to watch the cherry blossoms. You look on the cam and you see more people than cherry blossoms. This is how the spread is occurring. We really, really need everyone to stay at home. I think there are a lot of people who are doing the right thing. But unfortunately we’re finding out a lot of people think this can’t happen to them.”

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As far as I can assess there are five modes of COVID-19 behavior.

First are the oblivious assholes who wander all over, take few precautions, don’t wash their hands much, behave as if nothing’s really changed, etc. These people are public enemies.

Next in line are your casual responders — people who are mindful of the pandemic but are somewhat careless or sloppy-minded…taking walks, talking to friends on the street (I saw a few yesterday and the day before), washing their hands once or twice a day if that, willing to alter their behavior but not that much.

Then there are your caution freaks who nonetheless yearn to taste a spoonful or two of the life they used to live — people like myself who wash their hands obsessively, never go outside for supplies (local market, CVS) without a face mask and plastic gloves, never stand less than three or four feet from anyone, who wash their hands when they get home and then again for good measure, and who occasionally indulge in modest rumblehogging.

Fourth are your strict shut-ins who haven’t left their homes over the last 10 or 12 days due to the usual fears and who order all necessities online — the ideal citizen in this time of nightmare crisis. Tatyana freely admits to being this kind of conservative.

Last and fifth is your semi-paranoid Howard Hughes-style germaphobe who pads around the house with plastic bags around his/her feet, washes hands frequently (which is good) and constantly wipes down kitchen counters and coffee tables (which is good) and who, when online, shrieks and scolds the fuck out of anyone who admits to careful shopping and taking an occasional breath of fresh air by lowering their face mask while standing on a patch of grass near a parking lot. Or while driving inside a car with all the windows closed.

People who qualify as category five types shall henceforth be known as “virusbros” — the COVID-19 alarmist cousins of Berniebros who are technically in the right (Bernie Sanders‘ assessment of our social ills being the most frank and accurate of all the present and former candidates) but who harass and belittle and piss people off.

Virusbros have been proliferating on HE — people like SlashMC, Vendon Fleece and Lazarus Jones, to name but three.

Thanks to HE commenter manwe_sulimo for coining the term yesterday.

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I went out for some paper towels, but WeHo Pavilions was fresh out. It was raining lightly outside. I was leaning against the car, and for a moment or two I pulled down the paper mask and my God, the whiffs of damp grass and rain-sprinkled sidewalk and a small cup of cookies & cream in my right hand. Mask-wearers like myself have been doing without gentle, spirit-lifting aromas these last few days, and it’s been a shame. We’ve all been doing without in different ways, and it’s likely to stay this way for months to come.

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