Day: May 26, 2025

The seething and loathing in Charles Grodin‘s eyes…the “being pushed to the limit by this godawful kid”…..this is actually funny stuff. And I never even saw Clifford (’94, which was actually shot in ’90 and then sat on the shelf for four years.

In honor of Tuesday night’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Bad Day at Black Rock, HE is re-posting (second time within the last 12 months!) a riff about Anne Francis‘s Liz Wirth character not (heh-heh) getting any, or at least being indifferent to the concept, due to where she lives.

The original HE posting appeared on 11.15.24:

Bad Day at Black Rock (‘55) is a good, strong John Sturges film except for one thing. Nobody in that tiny little desert backwater is doing Anne Francis.

It makes no sense that Francis would even be there, as a woman this fetching would never settle for a grim existence in a dinky little ghost town like this. Life is short — you have to go for the gusto and the goodies.

But even if you accept that Francis’s “Liz Wirth” would be content to live in this dusty hell hole, human nature dictates that someone in that miserable hamlet would’ve stepped up to the plate and said to her, “I’m your man…really. We can make beautiful music together and have all kinds of nice plants on the patio.”

Someone always steps up and seals the deal in these situations. It happened in each and every cave settlement in prehistoric times, in every village in ancient Judea, in every clay-hut, grass-roof settlement in medieval Europe. Not that a knockout like Francis would’ve rubbed shoulders with everyday European villagers or Judeans or cave-dwellers.

The fact that director John Sturges never addressed this reality — Francis not only being unattached but none of the dudes even applying for the position — tells you something about the funny-looking Sturges, who might’ve been an egghead brother of Richard Kiel except shorter, and with a high forehead. It suggests he wasn’t much of a hound in his youth or that he tried his luck with women but wasn’t very successful.

If I was Spencer Tracy, I would’ve sized things up and sauntered over to Robert Ryan or Lee Marvin or Walter Brennan or Wirth’s brother Pete, who works at the hotel, and said, “Are you telling me that no one’s giving Anne the high, hard one, or at least trying to? Because that really goes against basic human nature.“

Anne Francis passed in 2011 at age 80.

Altogether I saw 21 or 22 films** during my 11 days at the Cannes Film Festival, although I tried like hell to see a few more. Within the limits imposed by stress, fatigue and the necessity of eating cheese sandwiches and getting five-hour sleeps, I did my best to cover the whole magilla.

The Venice Film Festival, three months hence, is the next big event. Thanks again to those who contributed to HE’s GoFundMe Cannes/Venice travel fund.

For me and in this order, there were five gold-star standouts in Cannes:

1. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which I’ve written plenty about. (HE review)

2. Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague. (HE review.)

3. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake. Pic wound up winning the Director’s Fortnight Audience Award as well the Camera d’Or. (HE review)

4. Thomas Ngojil‘s Untamable. (HE review).

5. Eva Victor‘s Sorry, Baby. (HE review)

For credentialed, non-elite press people like myself, Cannes is quite the aggressive, move-it-or-lose-it ticket competition.

I was basically shut down in trying to reserve tickets for Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest (which I actually Ubered to see in nearby Cannes la Bocca only to get shut out a second time), Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great (waited in last-minute line outside Salle Debussy…ixnay) and Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water. For what it’s worth none of these films were described in radiant, top-of-the-line terms by critics.

If Lee’s producers and the festival organizers had wanted more people to see Highest 2 Lowest, they would have scheduled a Salle Debussy screening that was concurrent with the black-tie Grand Lumiere screening, or at the very least a next-morning screening at the Salle Agnes Varda. But they didn’t.

HE definitely saw (and in some cases suffered through) the following Competition films:

1. Case 137, d: Dominik Moll.
2. Die, My Love, d: Lynne Ramsay
3. Eddington, d: Ari Aster
4. Fuori, d: Mario Martone
5. The History of Sound, d: Oliver Hermanus
6. It Was Just an Accident, d: Jafar Panahi
7. The Mastermind, d: Kelly Reichardt
8. Nouvelle Vague, d: Richard Linklater
9. The Phoenician Scheme, d: Wes Anderson
10. Romería, d: Carla Simón
11. The Secret Agent, d: Kleber Mendonça Filho
12. Sentimental Value, d: Joachim Trier
13. Sirat, d: Óliver Laxe
14. Sound of Falling, d: Mascha Schilinski.
15. Two Prosecutors, d: Sergei Loznitsa
15. Woman and Child, d: Saeed Roustayi
16. Young Mothers, d: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
17. Urchin, d: Harris Dickinson.

Plus four Directors’ Fortnight films:

18. The President’s Cake, d: Hasan Hadi.
19. Wild Foxes, d: Valéry Carnoy.
20. Untamable, d: Thomas Ngojil.
21. Sorry, Baby, d: Eva Victor.

I really wish I could have seen the Lee, the Johansson and the Stewart. I was really kind of pissed off that I was more or less blocked from seeing them. Didn’t seem fair on the part of the organizers.

I was either forced to blow off (scheduling conflicts) or simply chose not to see the following Competition films:

The Little Sister, d: Hafsia Herzi
Renoir, d: Chie Hayakawa.
The three-hour Resurrection, d: Bi Gan.
The almost universally loathed Alpha, d: Julia Ducournau.
Eagles of the Republic, d: Tarik Saleh .

** 22 films if you count Friday afternoon’s (5.23) empty-Coke-bottle screening of Barry Lyndon.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoningopewned three days ago (5.12). So what’s the HE community verdict? C’mon, cough it up.

The Metacritic score (only two-thirds of critics approve, roughly the same in the case of Joe and Jane Popcorn) tells you there’s trouble in River City. (The Rotten Tomatoes 80% score is meaningless — that site is crawling with whores).

Having seen it 11 or 12 days ago and soon after posted my somewhat bewildered review, I’ve been feeling more and more anoyance with Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt having been pretty much deified. Hunt is spoken of and deferred to with the same respect and reverence offered to Angela Bassett‘s U.S. President (former CIA honcho Erika Sloane). He might as well as be Superman in a Warner Bros. D.C. film.

What happened to the idea of major government authorities pledging to disavow any knowledge of Hunt and/or the M:I force if things theoretically go south? Final Reckoning‘s Hunt is completely out of the shadows. He could host his own CNN show, or even run for President himself.