Day: April 9, 2025

In the early to mid ’50s Dewey Martin was quite the appealing young actor — handsome, well-spoken, disciplined, no-nonsense vibes. He landed strong supporting roles in a quartet of respected and successful films — Howard Hawks‘ The Thing (’51), The Big Sky (’52) and Land of the Pharoahs (’55), and William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours (’55).

But after costarring with Dean Martin in Ten Thousand Bedrooms (’57), Dewey’s feature career began to go south.

He turned up in several more films, but no good ones. He was in Meet Me in Las Vegas (’56) and The Proud and Profane (’56), but without credit. His supporting role in The Longest Day (1962) was deleted. He became a semi-prominent TV actor (the lead role in a well-remembered Twilight Zone episode that aired in ’60 (“I Shot An Arrow into The Air“) and plugged along throughout the ’60s, but the gas was pretty much gone from the tank by the early to mid ’70s.

Martin married Peggy Lee in ’58, but they divorced in June ’59.

I don’t know what Martin did for a living during his last few decades, but he had a strong constitution and wound up living until age 94. Martin passed seven years ago in San Pedro.

Where would Martin have been without Hawks’ admiration and professional support? The Thing, The Big Sky and Land of the Pharoahs were fairly big deals in their day.

What was the essence of the Hawks-Martin bond? Presumably Hawks saw Martin as the son he never had, but I’ve searched and asked around and know nothing.

The bottom line is that things began to dry up for Martin after Hawks took a hiatus from directing after Land of the Pharoahs and didn’t return until Rio Bravo, which was shot in 58 or thereabouts.

I hate to say this but I suspect the name “Dewey” didn’t work for certain folks — it sounded unmanly or adolescent. It may have reminded some in the audience of Huey, Dewey and Louie.

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A semblance of class and restraint on the left…not so much on the right.

JFK’s subued Oval Office scheme, circa 1961.

Richard Nixon’s Oval office.

The following has happened many, many times in my moviegoing life, and especially before I got into this racket: I’d read a bunch of shitty reviews of a given film, but I saw it anyway and…surprise!…it turned out to be not only half-decent but surprisingly good here and there.

This led me to wonder what kind of stick had been shoved up the asses of the critics who panned it. What was their basic malfunction? It gradually hit me when I became friendly with several critics in the late ’70s and beyond that some are “friendly” or appealing enough on a colorful personality basis (in terms of exuding actual human qualities one of my favorite critics was Andrew Sarris, with whom I spent three or four hours on a road trip in ’77) but some of them are just snippy, snarly pricks. If not overtly then on some kind of buried, deep-down basis. (This is not a psychological examination piece.)

The critical shitstorm that clobbered (but failed to seriously injure) Green Book is one example of this.

My first viewing of Peter Farrelly‘s Oscar-winning film happened at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, and the crowd didn’t just approve and applaud — they adored it. But along came the prick critics (many of them wokeys) and before you knew it Green Book was a movie that not only needed to be disparaged but killed. I didn’t “think” Green Book was a nice, agreeable, feel-good thing — I knew it was that. I’d felt a rousing connection in the presence of hundreds of Toronto filmgoers.

Nobody ever claimed that Green Book was some kind of historic masterpiece, but it was fine as far as it went, not to mention charming and likable and undeniably well-crafted. But the pterodactyls in the critical community used every weapon in their reptile arsenal to draw blood, which led me to recall a line that I once heard William S. Burroughs say before a microphone: “Some people are shits.”

I came to a similar conclusion two years ago while reviewing Stephen Frears‘ The Lost King. “The people who’ve trashed this film are really and truly rancid,” I wrote, as The Lost King “is a good, personable, middle-class British film…not a comedy but amusing here and there…I completely enjoyed its company.” I didn’t care for a couple of aspects (the ghost of Richard appearing to Sally Hawkins) but to use a misstep or two as a reason to completely dismiss it is just vile.

It’s commonly understood at this point that David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up is (a) not a sequel to Tarantino’s original, (b) about the continuing adventures of Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and (c) set in 1977 (cocaine, death to disco). Fincher directing, script by QT, principal photography starting in July.

It’s not my place to suggest any plotlines or casting ideas, but I’m going to anyway. Julia Butters, who played a precocious eight-year-old actress, Trudi Fraser, in Tarantino’s original OUATIH, should be woven in somehow. If only because she made a commendable impression in the 2019 original at age nine or so, and because she’s not only a grade-A actress (she was in Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans plus Leonardo DiCaprio called her “a young Meryl Streep“) but is now 15 and on the verge of you-tell-me.

If HBO creatives aren’t thinking right now about a White Lotus spinoff show called Blame It On The Ratliffs, they should be immediately fired.

An upper-middle-class family suddenly tossed into the horrific animal pit of financial Armageddon and the resultant loss of comfort, elevated status, having to land jobs, sell the house and move to a vaguely crummy neighborhood…pretentious swells forced to adapt to a lesser (dare we say “shitty”?) standard of living and hating every moment of it.

The sure-to-be-psychotic journey of Parker Posey‘s Victoria Ratliff alone…the unmitigated joy of watching Victoria suffer one social-station comedown after another…talk about a bomb cocktail! The Sopranos meets Absolutely Fabulous plus you-name-it. Initial periods of shock, denial and bargaining followed by a brush with catatonic depression. And then she becomes the angriest, most ferocious “Karen” of all time.

Victoria promptly divorces Jason Isaacs‘s Tim Ratliff, of course, as (a) he nearly Jonestowned the entire family with those poisoned pina colada smoothies…okay, four of them including himself…plus (b) she needs to find another sugar daddy pronto, or at least she has that goal in her mind. In reality she’s too old to find a sexually active husband, but she might get lucky with a pot-bellied 70something horndog…who knows?

Tim is looking at government prosecution, of course, plus enormous legal fees (Scott Galloway could play his attorney!) and a country-club jail term of three to five years. Plus, as noted, divorce with Victoria trying to shake him down for every last shekel.

But will his plight be as horrible as he imagined it might be back in Thailand? He’s presumably socked some assets away in anticipation of legal trouble but he might not have been cagey enough to have thought of that. All financially savvy fellows with shady associations know they have to covertly move liquid funds to foreign territories, and perhaps even keep a bag of cash and diamonds in an outdoor shed (maybe in a special below-the-floor safe a la Tony Soprano).

It’s safe to say that in prison Tim will experience a spiritual awakening.

Patrick Schwarzenegger‘s Saxon Ratliff will not handle poverty well. He said that in so many words in episode #7. He runs away at first….maybe a cross-country trip, maybe an escape to a bartending job in Key West, maybe a little drug-dealing, maybe a floor salesman gig at a BMW dealership. Stone-cold miserable at every turn, but then a possible spiritual growth spurt….actually learning to stand on his own two feet and become (we should pardon the expression) a man.

Sarah Catherine Hook‘s Piper Ratliff and Sam Nivola‘s Lochlan Ratliff will be the least affected or at least the most adaptable. Lochlan will be, for sure. Sarah is her mother’s daughter so we might expect a little freaking-out at first.

Get to work on an eight-part miniseries right now. And if they go for this, I want a “based on an idea by” credit.

And Chevy Chase thought so too, according to legend.

“The Giant Garden Slug Blows Eddie Murphy While John Candy Watches”…check.