Jeffrey Wells

Filed late (1:05 am) on Friday, 9.4:

I’m sorry but Ernest Lubitsch‘s To Be Or Not To Be, a political farce, struck me as forced, strident and hamfisted, and never all that funny. It’s mostly wearying. I actually felt betrayed.

What happened to the celebrated Lubitsch touch…the use of sophisticated wit, stylistic subtlety and sly understatement? Everyone overacts so much that I started to feel beaten up after a while. Will you guys turn it down please? Sig Ruman! (One of his best small comic role was Count von Drosten Schatenberg in Wilder’s One Two Three.)

How many dozens of times do the actors shout “Heil Hitler”? How many times does a character repeat “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?” And why does Jack Benny appear to be at least 15 pounds heavier than he looked on his ’50s TV show? One look at the 1942 Benny and you’re thinking “weight watchers!”

The only actor who didn’t annoy me is the truly sublime Carole Lombard — she delivers each line with absolute charm and dry perfection. She was killed in that Nevada mountainside plane crash a month before To Be Or Not To Be opened in February ’42.

One of filmdom’s most chilling depictions of fascist thuggery and brute oppression arrived in this wee-hour passage from Costa-Gavras‘s Missing (’82). The white horse moment begins at 2:05.

Would John Malkovich‘s “Chris”, a grizzled, past-his-prime CIA guy based in Santiago along with Sam Rockwell‘s “Lee”, have cheered on or chuckled about the terrorizing of this poor horse? Absolutely not. If anything Chris is a horse lover, whisperer, caresser. He gently communes with horses throughout the film, and they with him.

I saw Missing at least four or five times during the initial release, and visited Renee Furst‘s apartment to interview Costa-Gavras for The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of.

Keith Szarabajka, whom I befriended in ’78 while we were working as busboys at the Spring Street Bar and Grill, costars as David Holloway, one of Augusto Pinochet‘s victims.

Not one single rush-line hopeful got into this evening’s 7:45 pm screening of Lance Oppenheim and Robert Pattinson‘s Primetime. There were about 90 or 100 desperate souls hoping to commune with RPatz, myself included. I was about 25th in line but nobody and I mean nobody got in. Fugedaboudit.

I’m honestly not that put out by this. We can all sense decent-to-middling vibes here. Nobody’s going to be blown away. Satisfied or intrigued perhaps, but no one will be dropping to their knees.

I am, however, truly excited by the prospect of seeing, for the first time in my life, Ernst Lunitsch‘s To Be Or Not Be (’42), which I’m presuming will be in mint restored condition. The 9:30 pm Sala Pasinetti screening begins in 30 minutes.

There’ll be another chance to see Primetime tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, 9.5), and we’ll see how that goes. No biggie either way.

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There was allegedly one jury holdout — one! — who (a) refused to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty by reason of medicated psychosis, and (b) who probably insisted that there can be no excuse for the murder of innocent children, and that Clancy’s pink-wearing, TikTok-following sympathizers were under the influence of a form of psychosis themselves.

Each morning around 6:45 am this correspondent settles into a churning, rumbling vaporetto cruise across the Venice lagoon. Talk about joie de vivre…a daily reminder of how life can massage or excite or enthrall those who are lucky or fortunate enough to experience such a journey. I won’t let myself feel blase about this.

”…to have the camel inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” — Lyndon Johnson, speaking in 1964 about J. Edgar Hoover.

Eight months ago I tapped out “Peak Malkovich“, a hurried career assessment of a widely-acknowledged mythical actor whose actual age (73) is exactly the same as his Wild Horse Nine character, a grizzled, bewhiskered, cancer-afflicted CIA guy named Chris.

In fact Malkovich looks more like 83 than 73 in this Martin McDonagh film (he looked spiffier during today’s Venice Film Festival press conference), but that’s how genetic inheritances tend to work from time to time.

I wrote last December that Malkovich’s peak era lasted 14 or 15 years — his Biff in the 1984 B’way stage production of Death of a Salesman (“a 31 year-old, totally-on-fire John Malkovich,” I wrote after seeing the play), Places in the Heart (’84), The Killing Fields (’85), Burn This on Broadway (’87), Dangerous Liaisons (Vicomte de Valmont) and his marriage-shattering affair with Michelle Pfeiffer, The Sheltering Sky (’90), In the Line of Fire (’93), Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom in Con Air (’97), and finally his multitudinous self in Being John Malkovich (’99).

We all know that Malkovich rebounded in Burn After Reading (’08). I for one went apeshit. Excerpt: “I’ve long felt that his alcoholic, self-deluding, furiously frustrated Osborne Cox, another CIA guy, is not only his greatest-ever film performance, but one of the greatest comedic film performances ever…because Cox is grounded in actual, real-deal rage.” That’s what I said eight months ago, yes, and now that statement is invalid.

Because JM has rebounded yet again with what may be his greatest, certainly his most touching film role ever — a guy who feels badly about all the death and convulsion that he’s activated over the decades, and who is looking to “shed his corroded skin”, so to speak, while thinking about the right or fitting way to end it all.

Chris is an increasingly feeble but uninhibited fellow who seems mostly out to lunch in the film’s early portions but gradually gathers more and more pizazz and lucidity and fuck-all conviction. This is the glory of his sly performance…the way it almost imperceptibly gains, gains and gains.

Malkovich will be aggressively campaigned for Best Actor over the final four months of ’26 and then the first two months of ’27 (the special Telluride tribute happening this weekend is the official kick-off). This is a go-for-broke moment for Malkovich-Malkovich-Malkovich. I can easily see him taking the gold statuette on 3.14.27. The only thing that could keep this from happening will be Malkovich’s aloof manner and stubborn integrity…his general loathing of sell-sell-sell.

Variety‘s Guy Lodge has summarized Wild Horse Nine as “two CIA agents go on holiday to Easter Island” just prior to the Chilean military coup of 1973, “and then [the story] ending with a small lump in the throat”.

I disagree with “small” — the lump in the throat is fortified by Chris’s resignation and melancholy self-acknowledgment. It therefore leaves a lingering residue. We’re not contemplating Malkovich himself hanging up his spurs or six-shooter, but we’re certainly pondering the last 40 or 45 years of his storied life and career, and this kind of bittersweet reflection tends to stick to the ribs or at least moisten the cheeks.

What are the odds that Malkovich will land another role as good as Chris between now and whenever things finally come to an end? We know they’re fairly slight. HE says “go for the gusto while the going is good.”

Gloria Steinem was major. From her berth in Manhattan and beginning early in the Nixon administration, she sparked a change in social consciousness while introducing “Ms.” as a substitute for “Miss” or “Mrs.” as she advanced the new cause of women’s liberation in the late ’60s and for many decades beyond.

For 55 years she was the face of the movement — iconic, sensible, articulate and dignified — and she had great-looking gray-streaked hair and wore fetching tinted glasses.

And she wasn’t a bot. An ideologue, yes, but a politically sklillful, practical-minded one. And quite attractive or, if you will, bonerish in her heyday. And contentedly sexual with a string of distinguished boyfriends including Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols, Jim Brown, Robert Benton, Rafer Johnson, Mort Zuckerman, etc. Steinem earned everyone‘s respect and allegiance. Steinem was 92 when she passed. Tip of hat, hand on heart.

Paul Schrader‘s The Basics of Philosophy focuses on child sexual predation. Jack Huston, Sofia Boutella, Daniel Zovatto, Bill Pullman and Dana Delany. My mind immediately flashed on Guy Green‘s The Mark (’61), which costarred Stuart Whitman, Maria Schell and Rod Steiger.