Jeffrey Wells

Ah duh-duh-deedah-luh, deedah-luh, deedah-luh…that’s all, folks! At least as far as the Venice Film Festival is concerned. Or any festival for that matter. Or so reports World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy

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The tragic suicide of Piper Laurie’s Sarah in Act 3 of The Hustler, while obviously devastating on its own terms, struck most sensible viewers as a WTF? As nonsensical nihilism.

Sarah felt jilted and abandoned by Eddie Felson’s (Paul Newman) intention to train to Louisville with Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) so to chill or placate her Eddie invited Sarah along.

So what does she do once the train pulls out of Penn Station? She promptly proceeds to radiate scowling vibes in Bert’s direction and generally behave like a downer and a party pooper.

Why? The idea behind the trip is to win big-time money from Murray Hamilton’s Finley or a rich mark like him. What is so awful or degrading about winning money during a private game of billiards? Nothing whatsoever, and yet Sarah is determined to be John the Baptist and point accusational fingers. She behaves like a 16 year old alcoholic with a toxic and judgmental attitude…disdain and superiority.

Bert may not be the kindest and gentlest fellow, but at least he’s not a phony — he’s honestly avaricious and, yes, parasitic as far as Eddie is concerned. But his social behavior (aside from openly disliking and sneering at Sarah) is more or less gentlemanly. Albeit crusty and curt.

I’ve always felt a vague kinship with the chilly, flinty Bert because at least he’s behaving like a sensible adult. Lushy, judgmental, guilt-tripping Sarah should have simply stayed in NYC, and all would have been well enough when Eddie returns. She’s unquestionably a drag, and not just in the realm of Bert and Eddie but to me, Jeffrey Wells, sitting in row #11.

20 or 25 years ago legendary editor Dede Allen bemoaned needlessly rapid or heebie-jeebie cutting for its own sake. She would almost certainly be gobsmacked by the cutting of F1.

“The Great Dede Allen”, an obit posted on 4.18.10:

The death of legendary editor Dede Allen, 86, naturally requires an acknowledgment of her innovations. Those would be (a) shock or jump cuts and (b) running sound from a forthcoming scene before actually cutting to it — i.e.. “pre-lapping.”

And yet the biggest feather in Allen’s cap has always been (and always will be) her cutting of the country-road massacre finale from Bonnie and Clyde. Still a knockout but truly astonishing back in the day.

I’ve never forgotten and never will forget that clip of a briefly exhilarated Faye Dunaway looking up at the flying birds just before the roar of gunfire.

My favorite description of the carnage what followed was from Pauline Kael — i.e., a “rag-doll dance of death.”

The irony is that Allen allowed assistant Jerry Greenberg to do the actual cutting on this sequence. Allen supervised, of course, but “she let him do that,” says Warren Beatty biographer Peter Biskind.

The legend is that Allen borrowed her jump cuts and shock cuts from French nouvelle vague films. And yet Biskind says Allen told him this wasn’t so. “She said she never watched very many French new wave films and that she basically got these techniques from working on TV commercials,” Biskind recalled this morning.

I’ve spent the last half-hour searching around for a visual tutorial that explicitly shows how Allen applied her innovations, but no dice so far. You’d think someone would have cut one together by now.

Allen has been on the map since 1961, after all, when she landed her first solo editing credit on Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler. In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s Allen’s name was a signifier of elegant class-act cinema. Her credits beside Bonnie and Clyde and The Hustler included significant films by Arthur Penn (Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks), Paul Newman (Rachel, Rachel, Harry & Son), Warren Beatty (Reds, which was co-edited by Craig McKay), Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Wiz), George Roy Hill (Slaughterhouse-Five, Slap Shot) and Robert Redford (The Milagro Beanfield War).

From 1958’s Terror From The Year 5000 through ’08’s Fireflies in the Garden, Allen edited or co-edited some 31 films. She bailed on editing 1992 to 2000 after taking the job of head of post production at Warner Bros.

Claudia Luther‘s L.A. Times obit says Allen “was the first film editor — male or female — to receive sole block credit on a movie for her work,” and that “this honor came with Bonnie and Clyde.” Okay, maybe…but why does Allen have sole credit as the Hustler editor on the IMDB? I was home I’d run the DVD and double-check. (I’m currently sitting in a motel room on Route 7 in Ridgefield, Connecticut.)

I’ve always loved the opening-credit sequence in The Hustler, which I presume Allen had something to do with. It basically used footage from various scenes throughout the film (which a first-time viewer obviously wouldn’t have the first contextual clue about) and freeze-frame them when the credit pops up — i.e., “directed by Robert Rossen.” I don’t know for a fact that Allen came up with this idea, but it would fit into her profile if she did.

Penned 21 and 1/2 years ago by an Austin-based film lover named “Cue–ball”:

As long as we’re on a Hustler jag, please reconsider an HE piece titled “Sara and ‘The Hustler’“, posted on 9.27.21.

If you’re a hotshot CEO and you’re “ doing” a woman who works for you — a married, silver-haired HR exec — rule #1 is that you don’t engage in PDA inside a crowded sports arena during a rock concert. You confine your get-togethers to hotels, motels and dark, smokey places…duhhhhh!

An annual $100M production tab (according to Deadline’s Matthew Belloni) means The Late Show with Stephen Colbert costs $8.3M ($8,333,333) each month, resulting in an annual loss of $40M or $3.3M ($3.333,333) per month.

I’m not suggesting that CBS’s decision to pull the plug wasn’t primarily political, but these numbers obviously make no sense.

Colbert’s annual haul is said to be $15M with an alleged per-episode rate of $89K. He can’t host that show for, say, $40K or $50K per episode? That’s not exactly chump change.

If I was running that show my basic message to Colbert and everyone else would be “at the very least this show breaks even…take it or leave it.”

Posted last night by the redoubtable Bob Hightower in the wake of yesterday’s brief Connie Francis obit-slash-tribute — “Not-So–Prudish Girl From New Jersey”:

HE replies:

I’m not “condemning” Francis for having recorded “Nixon’s The One” in 1968. “Not cool” is simply, merely a frowned–upon thing — not a career damaging felony, but in the eyes of her 30-and-under peers (a major social slogan back then was “don’t trust anyone over 30”) certainly a social misdemeanor.

The message of Nixon’s ‘68 campaign was basically “all of this social convulsion stuff has gone too far!”…he was saying “enough with the repulsive, antiwar, pot-smoking hippies and yippies” and was calling for a re-assertion of U.S. pride and traditionalism along with anti-youth-activist repression — in a word “lawnorder”.

A somber, straightlaced, opposite-of-Senator Eugene McCarthy figure, Nixon appealed to the silent majority (law-abiding, tax-paying, Middle American normies) who were saying “enough already!” because things had gotten too crazy with militant antiwar street action and burning cities following the April ‘68 assassination of MLK and the subsequent murder of RFK two months later.

1968 was easily one of the most socially convulsive, politically divisive, tearing-asunder years in U.S. history, primarily due to anti-Vietnam War furor and the concurrent rise of radical left orgs like SDS and the Black Panthers and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s Yippie movement, not to mention the growing social (and sexual) radicalization of college-age, middle- and upper-middle-class youth.

Connie Francis recording that pro-Nixon campaign song was a social identity statement that basically said “I’m with the normies and with Merle Haggard and the Okies from Muskogee**…I’m aligned with your stodgy parents and the billy-club cops and the construction-worker hardhats** and Peter Boyle’s ‘Joe’** and in support of our boys fighting to stop the commies from taking over South Vietnam.”

An overwhelming majority of the left-leaning showbiz community was against the war and was generally in a posture of sympathizing with or at least understanding the tumultuous social changes that were afoot back then, and yet Francis was basically saying “I’m proud of our glorious flag and U.S. traditions (including imperialism abroad) and so I’m with Bob Hope and Anita Bryant and Morey Amsterdam and Pat Boone.”

The U.S. was a free country back then and so Francis was fully, naturally and obviously entitled to her opinions, but you can’t say that in the context of ‘68 her views and political alignments weren’t, at the very, VERY least, “uncool.”

** Yes, I’m aware that Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” popped in July of ‘69 and that those World Trade Center construction workers beat up hippie protestors in ‘70, and that John Avildsen’s Joe opened on 7.15.70, but the resentful working-class feelings that drove these social expressions were fully felt and shared in ‘68.

Is it really because of dropping revenues, or is it partly to do with Colbert being a Trump hater?

Besides ignoring the great Dolores Claiborne, what else was I doing in 1995? I’ll tell you what — I was watching all the other goody-goods.

HE’s top five films of ‘95 are Heat, Se7en, The Usual Suspects, Dolores Claiborne and Crimson Tide.

#6 through #10 are Swimming With Sharks, Leaving Las Vegas, To Die For, Before Sunrise and The Bridges of Madison County.

And then, in this approximate order: Leavibg Las Vegas, Get Shorty, Apollo 13, Living in Oblivion, Operation Dumbo Drop, The Brothers McMullen, Casino, Mighty Aphrodite, Sense and Sensibility, The American President, Toy Story, Nixon, Richard III, Dead Man Walking, Empire Records, The Basketball Diaries, Dangerous Minds, Clockers, Kids, Clueless, Beyond Rangoon. (31 films in all)

Braveheart won 1995’s Best Picture Oscar, but I can’t in all honesty call it one of my faves of that year. I haven’t re-watched it once in the 30 years that have elapsed.

“Sometimes bein’ a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to.”

Because I was lazy and cowardly I chose to avoid Taylor Hackford, Kathy Bates, Tony Gilroy and Gabriel Beristain’s Dolores Claiborne back in the late winter or early spring of ‘95. It really wasn’t cool that I shut this worthy film out, but I finally watched it last night and holy moley mother of God…it’s exceptionally good!

Shot roughly 23 or 24 years before the dawn of the #MeToo movement, it might be the best “most men are cruel and abusive animals, and especially the alcoholic ones” movie I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t experience even a twinge of my usual “okay, here we go again with another serving of rote anti-male diminishnent”…I believed every scene, every line, every plot pivot. It may be the best Hollywood-produced feminist film ever made. I trusted every frame.

It’s almost certainly Hackford’s finest effort, and Beristain’s shifting color schemes (Fuji amber for flashbacks, cold grays for present tense) are truly mesmerizing.

Gilroy’s dialogue is so well-honed and soothingly concise and bracingly articulate.

The co-lead performances by the 46-year-old Bates, whose titular tour de force should’ve won a second Best Actress Oscar in the wake of her startling Misery breakout, and the 32 year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh are keepers. Ditto the supporting David Straitharn, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer and John C. Reilly.

Adapted from Stephen King’s same–titled, best–selling 1992 novel, this Castle Rock production is an exceptionally well-crafted melodrama (almost a kind of realism-based horror film) of the highest calibre…you’re never unaware that you’re chest-deep in a totally classy, #MeToo-ish truth testament made by grade-A people. Because the film is so deftly assembled and therefore persuasive and compelling, Gilroy’s altered adaptation (King’s book was one long first-person confession by Claiborne) isn’t as downerish as it sounds on the surface. And yet it’s basically about small-town confinement, suppressive conditions, domestic misery and exceptional spousal cruelty and abuse, dysfunctional family trauma, incest and blessed revenge.

The final half-hour really pays off in a way that top-tier films used to pay off in the old days (i.e., before the horror of Marvel and D.C., before Stalinist-woke narratives, before streaming multi-part sagas for couch potatoes).