Early in the evening of Tuesday, 10.3, I chatted with respected Hollywood historian and biographer Joseph McBride about Billy Wilder‘s Stalag 17 (’53), and more particularly about Joe’s commentary track for Kino Lorber’s upcoming 4K Bluray version (out 11.21).

I haven’t seen the 4K Stalag 17 but…well, let’s wait for it. I own an older Bluray version which I’m happy with, but I’m always hot to own the latest upgrade.

McBride’s book on Wilder (“Dancing on the Edge“) came out in September ’21. He’s also written authoritative studies on John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, the Coen Brothers, Steven Spielberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, etc.

Here’s part one of our discussion (roughly 29 minutes)…

And here’s part two (around 27 minutes):

It’s very easy to talk to Joe about Hollywood histories and backstories and just kick it all around. It was generally a fine, wide-ranging discussion, not just about the genesis and the making of Stalag 17 but about William Holden, Wilder, John Ford…everyone and everything. McBride can chew this kind of fat for hours on end without breaking stride.

Please forgive the occasional intrusions of purring and meowing Katya.

Am I a non-compliant suppressive person in the realm of gay cinema?

In my 9.1.23 review of Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers, I praised it for being “a classy, meditative, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship” while admitting that the beard-stubble sex footage made me squirm a bit. Which resulted in attacks, of course. For in today’s realm, if you don’t sing arias about bare-backed slurpy kissing scenes you’re a homophobe.

“Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris,” I wrote, “except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.

“Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.

How many famous people could be described as “no neck” types? We all have necks, of course, but some celebrities don’t (or didn’t when they were alive) have the kind you would notice. I don’t literally mean no necks — I mean necks that are barely there.

I’m thinking particularly of Mickey Spillane and Claudette Colbert, and of Randy Newman‘s “no-beck oilmen from Texas” (a lyric from his 1971 tune “Rednecks“).

I got started on this when I noticed a Facebook posting by Harlan Jacobson that described Maestro‘s prosthetics manager Kazu Hiru as an “Ears, Nose, and No Throat guy“….what does this mean? Is there a featured player in Maestro who has no visible throat to speak of?

I’m having trouble thinking of other no-neckers besides Spillane and Colbert. They have to be out there. Assistance?

George Clooney speaking in Boys in the Boat featurette: “These guys at the University of Washington are taking on the seniors, and then taking on the fraternity [something], and then taking on the Nazis.”

Clooney is using the usual shorthand, of course, but does he really mean that the young athletes who belonged to Germany’s 1936 Olympic rowing team were devout “seig heil” guys? Yes, Adolf Hitler saw the Berlin ’36 Olympics as a a potential proof of Aryan supremacy (Jesse Owens screwed that pooch), but how many German citizens were ardent supporters of the Nazi party that year, and how many were playing along to get along? A third or less?

How many blue-state liberals today pretend to be wokester sympathizers but are just keeping their heads down in order to stay out of trouble?

Let’s imagine, God forbid, that The Beast might win the ’24 election. He would therefore be president during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Would it then be fair or accurate to describe the U.S. Olympic team as “the MAGAS”?

[3:10 mark] “…and the party of a great man who should have been president and would’ve been one of the greatest presidents in history….Hubert Horatio Hornblower! Humphrey!”