This morning a friend sent an excerp Xxxx t of Paul Benedict Rowan‘s “Making Ryan’s Daughter: The Myths, Madness and Mastery” (New Island, 7.1.20). It had appeared in a 7.19.20 issue of The Independent.

What’s wrong with Ryan’s Daughter? Lean’s decision to cast the over-rated Christopher Jones, whom he impulsively decided upon after failing to sign Marlon Brando for the role.

Jones played a British Army officer (Major Randolph Doryan) whom Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) has a torrid affair with while married to a local school teacher, Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum).

I have always felt that Ryan’s Daughter is beautifully made and altogether half of a very good film. It is one-quarter spoiled, unfortunately, by Jones’ lifeless performance and one-quarter spoiled by John Mills‘ village idiot.

Summary: Jones’ performance and general professional manner was so stiff and unresponsive that Lean, Miles and Mitchum decided that drugging him with valium was the only way to solve matters.

Mitchum had hashish parties and imported women for what sounded like orgies. Miles became infatuated with the married Mitchum and eventually chased him back to Los Angeles, breaking up her marriage to the multiple Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Bolt.

And all this after Lean lost Marlon Brando at the last minute to play the lead and cast Jones instead, who had a nervous breakdown during production, not knowing he was being drugged. Post-filming Jones returned to LA and promptly quit acting.

Jones was living in Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s guest house on their rented Cielo Drive property. and claimed to have had an affair with Tate. She was murdered by Charles Manson followers during filming, which devastated Jones.

Miles and Jones grew to dislike one another, leading to trouble when filming the love scenes. Jones was engaged to Olivia Hussey, and said he was not attracted to Miles. He even refused to rehearse the forest love scene with her, which prompted Miles to conspire with Lean and Mitchum on the valium thing.

It was Mitchum who settled on the idea of drugging Jones by sprinkling an unspecified substance daily on his cereal. Mitchum overdosed Jones, however, and the actor was nearly catatonic during the love scene.

Joe Biden had already wished everyone a “happy, happy Easter” and had also said “all right” (as in “okay, that’s enough of that shit”). So it’s not like he forgot to wave. Maybe he was saying to himself “look, I’m here, I wished everyone well, I smiled, I applauded the easter bunny, I was careful not to mention anything religious …why do I have to fucking wave on top of everything else?”

Recorded last night at 7:15 pm, just before the TCM Classic Film Festival showing of Invaders From Mars.

Plus they’re all bunched up around the ankle and touching the ground/floor. Ethan Hawke’s HE stock just dropped a few points.

I attended two screenings yesterday at the TCM Classic Film Festival — Heaven Can Wait (‘78) and Invaders From Mars (‘53). The announced policy was “masks on unless you’re eating popcorn.”

Somewhere in Time opened on 10.3.80, but was filmed in the spring of ’79 or 18 months earlier. This synchs with Jane Seymour‘s account of her on-set affair with costar Christopher Reeve.

In late 2017 Seymour confided some of the details to the Herald Sun: “[Chris] was a wonderful man. We fell madly in love while we were doing the movie. We were both single, but kept it very hidden.”

Reeve and Seymour broke it off when Reeve’s ex-girlfriend, Gae Exton, revealed she was pregnant with a child — Matthew Exton Reeve, as it turned out, born on 12.20.79

“That was the beginning of the end of an amazing relationship,” Seymour said. “Chris and I were close friends until the day he died [in 2004].

Exton gave birth to a second child, Alexandra Exton Reeve, in December 1983.

HE-posted on 7.31.17: I haven’t written about Jeannot Szwarc‘s Somewhere in Time for 13 years, or since the sad passing of Christopher Reeve on 10.10.04. I’ve said before that Reeve gave one of his better performances in it.

I’ve never called Somewhere In Time a great or even especially good film, but it did develop a cult following about a decade after it opened, and it has — or more accurately had — one of the most beautifully executed single-shot closing sequences in a romantic film that I’ve ever seen, and one that almost certainly influenced the dream-death finale in James Cameron‘s Titanic.

I’m speaking of a longish, ambitiously choreographed, deeply moving tracking shot that’s meant to show the viewer what Reeve’s character, Richard Collier, is experiencing on his passage from life into death. I saw it at a long-lead Manhattan screening of Somewhere in Time 37 years ago, but no one has seen it since. 

That’s because some psychopathic or at the very least criminal-minded Universal exec (or execs) had the sequence cut down and re-edited with dissolves. The version I saw allegedly no longer exists. All that remains today is the abridged version.

The sequence was a single-take extravaganza accomplished with a combination crane and dolly. It happened as Collier is dying on a bed in a Mackinac Island Grand Hotel room. His spirit (i.e., the camera) rises up and above his body, and then turns and floats out the hotel-room window and into a long, brightly-lighted hallway and gradually into the waiting embrace of Collier’s yesteryear lover, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour).

A completely fair assessment: “Democrats, for all their flaws, still see democracy as the essence of America. They see America and democracy as inextricably linked. They believe that one without the other is unthinkable. Republicans? Thinkable. Very, very thinkable.”

In a twinkling of an eye (i.e., the last four or five days) Bill Murray, 71, has undergone a sudden industry devaluation. I’m not saying he can’t do any more Wes Anderson films but otherwise he seems to be suddenly “over.” As in more or less unemployable.

Unless, that is, Murray submits to behavioral rehab or goes on a major Apology Tour or something in that realm. I for one can’t imagine that Murray would swallow any humble pills. Old leopards can’t change their spots.

Murray is certainly the latest swaggering, boomer-aged hotshot actor to have behaved questionably (i.e., stupidly) in the vicinity of Millennial women on a film set, and thereby jeopardized his career.

Murray: “Hey, guys…I’m Bill freakin’ Murray and I’m just futzing around…or, you know, picking on a younger co-worker. Or experiencing a goofy mood swing. Or a dark one. But it’s cool, no sweat…been doing this for over 40 years.”

Millennial Co–workers: “Do you know why you’re a cautionary tale, Bill? Because you haven’t read the writing on the wall. We run the show now, not you. You will mind your on-set behavior, respect our rules and jump through our hoops or we will destroy your life…got it? Let this be a warning to all of the older assholes in this town…adapt or die.”

This is nothing less than generational cultural warfare.

The last time I briefly spoke with Murray was nine years ago (early May 2013) on the set of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men. He was “on” and funny and a kick — I was saying to myself “this is so cool…Murray is performing and cutting loose and it’s just me and the unit publicist enjoying the show.”

So Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal is dead because Murray invaded someone’s safe space or pulled somebody else’s pigtail? What about “enough of this crap…everyone back to work?

This Beat The Devil ad ran in the N.Y. Times in mid February 1964. In ‘79 I was the managing editor the Thousand Eyes Cinema Guide, a TV Guide-styled monthly magazine that focused exclusively on Manhattan repertory cinemas, so I knew that realm pretty well but I’d never heard of the 5th Avenue Cinema, which had given up the ghost in September ‘74.