Around noon we walked into town along the blazing white beach, and the heat (99 or 100 degrees) was so intense I began to feel like Gasim gasping for air and close to collapsing in the Nefud desert. I almost couldn’t see for the perspiration. I lost around seven pounds in the space of 60 minutes.
Posted from lounge chair on outdoor patio in 94-degree heat, and with shitty wifi to boot:
Four essential performances were given by the late, great Olivia de Havilland: (a) Maid Marian in Michael Curtiz’s Robin Hood (‘37) , (b) Melanie Wilkes in Gone With The Wind (‘39), (c) the disturbed victim in Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (‘48). and (d) the vaguely gullible woman-of-means in William Wyler’s The Heiress (‘49).
There were other sturdy performances, but these four were the keepers. Have I seen every noteworthy Olivia de Havilland performance? No. The truth is that I found her virtuousness (which was always a central eiement) deflating and…I’ll leave it at that.
She was a fine, classy, top-tier thesp, for sure, but I gradually chose to regard OdH as more of a maidly vibe or a classic chastity brand than an actress for all moods and seasons — the intrepid woman of Paris, pushing on, the never-say-die trooper, sometimes riding her bicycle and occasionally speaking with THR’s Scott Feinberg.
This may sound like a putdown, but she never conveyed even the faintest hint of eroticism…not the slightest sniff. This is what almost all leading actors and actresses do, after all — they invite you to sense the aroma. Nor could you imagine her sister, Joan Fontaine, succumbing to any such impulse. Okay, perhaps Joan occasionally thought about intimacy but that’s all. My sense is that Olivia, by the measure of her screen performances, never even did that.
OdH passed this morning (or last night) at age 104. Sweet dreams, gentle waters.
Regis Philbin, John Saxon, Olivia de Havilland — the trilogy is complete.
Early this morning Jill Blake conveyed delight after turning a daughter (or some younger person) on to To Catch A Thief, particularly in response to the younger person’s request to see a film with Cary Grant “running around.”
Being a special kind of asshole, I jumped in with an anecdotal mansplainer. I pointed out that Grant doesn’t “run” anywhere in that 1955 Alfred Hitchcock classic but “scampers” cat-like across French rooftops. For this I received a hale and hearty “fuck off!”, which needed an extra “douchebag!” to really drive the point home.
On Facebook Paul Schrader asked which kissing scenes deliver the best currents. In all candor the flying-and-kissing scene between Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried in Schrader’s own First Reformed is one of the all-time greats. I’m also thinking of that mad-hunger moment between Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in Witness. Along with the usual-usuals.
Update; Apologies for forgetting Kyra Sedgewick’s name while posting about that “Moon River” kiss with Tom Cruise.
I just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s “History Will Judge The Complicit,” an Atlantic article about the differences between go-along collaborators vs. independent contrarians in politics, and with a particular focus on once semi-respectable Republicans who’ve abandoned principle by kowtowing to The Beast.
But the following passage also applies, I feel, to go-along film critics who routinely give thumbs-up reviews to films that they know deep down are mediocre, substandard or worse. One of the motivating factors in handing out “easy lay” reviews is that it feels comforting and almost peaceful to do so.
Here’s how Applebaum describes the mentality:
The one bad thing about our San Felipe mobile home is the shitty wifi, which is roughly the speed of 56K dial-up (or the way things were 20-plus years ago). I can’t really file anything this way. It takes three to five minutes for a page to load. Option #1: walk into town (1/4 mile north) in search of a better signal. Option #2: To hell with it, go swimming or sailing, read Oliver Stone’s “Chasing The Light”, etc.
