Directed and written by Melville Shavelson and starring Charlton Heston and Harry Guardino, The Pigeon That Took Rome (6.20.62) is a comedy set in the final days of World War II. Don’t forget that Rome was captured by the Allies on 6.4.44.

“In 1944, during the last stages of the war in Europe, American officers Paul MacDougall (Heston) and Joseph Angelico (Guardino) are sent to Rome to act as spies for the Allies, even though they have no experience in espionage. Working with Partisan resistance soldier Ciccio Massimo (Salvatore Baccaloni), MacDougall and Contini send regular reports to their superiors by carrier pigeon.

“Angelico also finds himself falling in love with Massimo’s pregnant daughter Rosalba (Gabriella Pallotta), while her sister Antonella (Elsa Martinelli) has her eye on MacDougall. Angelico proposes to Rosalba, and Ciccio prepares a feast to celebrate his daughter’s upcoming wedding. However, Ciccio prepares squab for the occasion, killing all but one of the carrier pigeons. Ciccio scrambles to replace them, but the new pigeons he finds are German, and they deliver MacDougall’s and Angelico’s messages directly into enemy hands, creating new confusion.”

…you’re basically telling the audience, “Okay, guys…time to grim up and grapple with those uh-oh Jesse Plemons vibes. One look at that kisser and it’s like “okay, here we go.”

Plemons was just cast by Martin Scorsese in a major role in Killers of the Flower Moon, as a top-dog FBI agent investigating a string of murders of Native Americans in 1920’s Oklahoma. Plemons can be best described, no offense, as (a) a funny-looking Matt Damon, (b) a creepy looking Matt Damon with a drug problem or (c) a space-aliens version of Matt Damon after being kidnapped 40 years ago and just returned to earth except he hasn’t aged a day — kidnapped at 45, still looks 45.

You can’t go wrong with Plemons…those demon eyes, that copper-meets-carrot cake hair.

I love the “big smelly fish in the back seat of the maroon-colored sedan” scene in The Irishman. Plemons played Chuckie “dumb shit” O’Brien. Questioned about what kind of fish has stunk the car up, Plemons is too dumb to simply say “look, a friend of mine ordered it…I just picked it up.” Instead he prolongs it, fucks around, refuses to tell the guy that it’ wasn’t his fish. O’Brien was also too dumb to put the fish into a bucket of ice and then put it in the trunk. Instead he wraps it up in newspaper and then places it on the back seat, and smells the whole car up.

…for all those millions of Midwesterners and particularly suffering Texans who are all but freezing to death as we speak, I’m sorry. I hate extreme cold — the kind of windy cold that sometimes descends upon Boston and Chicago around thus time of year. 26 degrees in Austin, 18 degrees in Park City, etc.

CBS News: “A Texas mayor resigned after seemingly telling residents to fend for themselves in a Facebook post amid a deadly and record-breaking winter storm that left much of the state without power Tuesday. ‘No one owes you [or] your family anything,” Body said on Facebook. “Nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim — it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and fired of people looking for a damn handout.”

A “friendo” whom I know pretty well and whose opinions I don’t always agree with but whose observations are always fairly spot-on…this person has seen Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick‘s four-part Allen v. Farrow (HBO Max, starting on 2.21), and I’m upset and alarmed about what he told me, which is that he found the doc persuasive. Not in a conclusive smoking-gun sense, but in a way that registered. He went into it with a “show me” attitude and came out with his mind…well, nudged to some extent.

“Friendo” has read tons of material about Woody Mia Dylan Soon Yi over the last 28 years — he knows the turf pretty well. And he shares my view that certain adamant kneejerkers from the film realm were all too willing in years past to cast Woody aside. The doc nonetheless persuaded him as far as it goes that Allen may (emphasis on the “m” word) be guilty of committing an act of one-off incest with Dylan Farrow on 8.4.92. Just allowing for the possibility that the Woody haters…I don’t want to think about it. I’ve been on the Woody-is-innocent team for such a long time.

“Friendo” didn’t arrive at this conclusion suspicion without thinking it over good and hard. And he says the doc is “not” a hatchet job, in part because of the craft levels.

I’ve requested a link to Allen v. Farrow but until HBO coughs one up I’ve obviously no basis from which to accept or argue. The Woody friendlies (including Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman and Allen friend and confidante Bob Weide, who posted a sight-unseen assessment roughly a week ago) have vented suspicions and logical counterpoints all along, as I have. But Weide hasn’t seen the doc and even says he doesn’t want to.

Another journo colleague who’s never been part of the lynch mob says the doc is not a slam-dunk or dispositive, and yet Moses Farrow’s landmark 2018 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“) is challenged in the doc by members of the family, as well as by Allen’s own testimony in a child custody hearing. Allen allegedly stated, I’m told, that Moses had “gone for a walk that afternoon and was not in the house.”

Plus, I’m also told, the doc shows a police drawing of the attic in which the alleged molestation took place. Despite Moses’ claim that were no train tracks or toy-sized trains of any kind in the attic, the drawing allegedly shows train tracks and a toy train set-up of some kind.

Not in the house? A plain-spoken offering of first-hand testimony from a then-14 year-old kid who was there on that fateful day, and who is currently a licensed marriage and family therapist…I’m sorry but I was sold early on. Moses’ claim that there was no operating train set in the attic has always been, for me, one of the most important pieces of testimony. Moses states in the essay, in fact, that the train set was sitting in a kind of downstairs play room for the boys.

Now comes an alleged image, supplied by the Connecticut police, that argues with this? And Moses wasn’t even around when the alleged incident took place? What’s going on here?

Jerry Zucker‘s Ghost (’90) implanted a creepy idea in the minds of millions — that when a seemingly evil or at least dastardly person dies (like, say, Tony Goldwyn‘s “Carl” or Rick Aviles‘ “Willie”), his soul is surrounded by a crew of shadowy growling demons who grab hold and take him down to hell. I’d be lying if I said this image didn’t manifest when I read about the death of Rush Limbaugh, a victim of lung cancer at age 70.

A truculent and blathery broadcaster of a long series of Big Rightwing Lies since he became a nationwide brand in the early ’90s (although he’d been making a lot of noise as a radio talk-show guy starting in the late ’80s), Limbaugh is, was and always will be the grandfather of rightwing disinformation and bullshit, right up to a radio show statement he made on 2.24.20 about the coronavirus: “I’m dead right on this…the coronavirus is the common cold, folks,” adding that it was being “weaponized” to bring down Trump.

When Limbaugh’s lung cancer diagnosis was announced three weeks earlier, or on 2.3.20, I posted the following: “I want to say this plainly but carefully: I did not feel profound sadness when I read of Rush Limbaugh’s condition. His strident-rightie rhetoric did a lot to inflame Bumblefuck Nation and rupture the fabric of civility in this country and fortify the toxicity that fuels the culture-war fires to this day. In the eyes of many millions Limbaugh is a flat-out villain. Anyone on my side of the battlefield (i.e., with a liberal or left-center attitude or philosophy) who says he/she feels badly about Limbaugh’s misfortune is just ‘saying that’, trust me.”

But of course, there is no cosmic moral judgment system that sends guys like Limbaugh to the caverns of hell and others into the clouds of heaven. I regret to say that death is a non-judgmental, non-denominational agent of flatline finality and that’s all. Nothing would give me more comfort than to learn otherwise…to learn that the 21 grams of spiritual matter that used to reside inside the body of Rush Limbaugh is hovering in some dark, self-loathing place. Wherever and whatever that is, it’s probably safe to say that Donald Trump‘s soul will be joining him down the road.