Day: August 28, 2021

On the day that Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks opened (3.30.61), a 35mm print was sent to the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach (1095 North Ocean Drive). JFK flew down from Washington that morning, arriving around 11:30 am. He joined his father (Joseph P. Kennedy), Peter Lawford and Bing Crosby for some golf that afternoon. They all had dinner and then watched Brando’s film in the private screening room, which had been installed by Kennedy Sr., a Hollywood mogul in the 20s and 30s, after buying the home in 1933.

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HE to Joseph McBride, author of “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University Press, 9.24):

“I just wanted to tell you, Joe, how much fun your Wilder book is. I was expecting the usual sequential, chapter-by-chapter approach, and I got that from your very thorough recounting of his youth in Germany. (And you went to Germany for some first-hand digging — respect!)

“But once the Hollywood adventure begins, you start weaving in and out. You don’t abandon a steady, linear, through-line approach, but you don’t exactly stick to it either. The narrative starts hopping around, and I loved that! In your journey with Billy Wilder you become Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.

“And I love, love, LOVE that possibly accurate story about the waitress being paid to have it off with the square and virginal Charles Lindbergh in that Long Island hotel on the night before his flight, and then, at the end of the film, the same waitress being part of the crowd during Lindy’s triumphant victory parade in Manhattan, and he doesn’t see her waving! What a great ending! I love the young vanity mirror woman who is actually in the film, but the waitress story would have been ten times better.

“I agree about Gary Cooper’s hesitant (wussy?) manner as he got older, and that he was way too old to pay Audrey Hepburn‘s lover in Love in the Afternoon. But what about that Wilder quote that “I got Coop the week he suddenly got old.” Cary Grant would have been a much better fit. Coop looked like he was at least 65 if not 70 in that film.

“I’m still reading, but I’m hoping for fresh anecdotes and stories about the making of One Two Three. In my estimation the amazing velocity and chutzpah in the last half of that 1961 film represents one of Cagney’s greatest performances by far, right up there with Public Enemy and George M. Cohan and Cody Jarrett. Plus I loved the strident, back-and-forth, give-and-take energy between Cagney and Horst Buccholz…what was it exactly that HB said or did to piss Cagney off so much?

“I’m presuming that at one point you’ll offer thoughts about how and why Wilder succumbed to ‘50s conventionality by deciding to become a proficient ‘house director’ between ‘53 and ‘58. He just went along with the flow of things, took this and that job, tried to be Lubitsch in this or that way, etc. But the fact is that after the making and release of 1953’s Stalag 17 and before the writing and shooting of Some Like It Hot in ‘58, Billy Wilder took a four and a half-year breather from the burden of being ‘Billy Wilder.’ For lack of a better or fairer term, he became Paycheck Billy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

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I’ve cracked the Dune code. I’ve figured it out. I finally know what it is. Dune is a “mood piece” that puts you into “a trance”, but it would help if you get really effing ripped before seeing the damn thing. Toke up, suck it down, bring your own brownies and gummies.

I began to sense this when a friend who recently saw it said he was a fan of “epically scaled movies, even flawed ones or those that are hard to follow [as Dune] has a number of distinct characters weaving in and out.” What Dune viewers need to do, in other words, is get themselves into a place in which “flaws” don’t especially matter and “following the action” isn’t all that vital. (Whuht?)

You just have submit to Dune, go with it, and see past ALL THAT FUCKING SAND. And you have to see it on a big screen — no watching Dune on iPads or laptops. You have to go big or nothing. You are little, microscopic …not even a granule of sand. Dune is the whole effing desert and it will fill your soul with wonder.

Then I talked to another guy who’s seen Dune and claims he “went into something of a trance and was mesmerized from beginning to end. Seeing it a big screen was fabulous, and I might well see it again sometime just for the immersive pleasure.” In other words, Dune tripped this guy out. Imagine if he’d dropped two Bliss gummies a half-hour before sitting down.

Third person: “Dune‘s not bad. It just makes no sense. But that’s okay — it’s a mood piece. Good to see if you’re really stoned.”

At first 2001: A Space Odyssey failed to “make sense” or add up for certain snooty people (i.e., critics, rationalists). It was derided for being a “shaggy God story”. And then what happened? Younger people started going to it ripped or even tripping, and suddenly the spaciness of it became the all of it. 2001 became a cult stoner movie, and then the marketing guys finally caught on and they changed their slogan to “the ultimate trip.”

This, I’m sensing more and more, is what Dune is or could be. If you meet it halfway by being ripped out of your gourd, you can climb onto its back like a huge sand worm and ride the whirlwind. The next time Warner Bros. has an on-the-lot screening, they need to forego the wine and cheese and pass out edibles instead.