German Amazon has announced the year-end availability of a Universal/Alfred Hitchcock Bluray box set, which will street on 12.28. The titles will include Rope (meh), Rear Window (excellent!), The Man Who Knew Too Much (ditto), Torn Curtain (who cares?), The Birds (very good), Family Plot (meh), Frenzy (semi-okay), Shadow of a Doubt (excellent!), The Trouble with Harry (zzzz), Marnie (flatline), Psycho (already available), Saboteur (agreeable), Topaz (meh) and Vertigo (finally!). 14 films, 1607 minutes, 145.99 euros or 10.50 each.

Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Roxborough posted an astute assessment of the likely favorings of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival jurors: actresses Hiam Abbass, Emmanuelle Devos and Diane Kruger, fashionista Jean Paul Gaultier, directors Alexander Payne, Andrea Arnold and Nanni Moretti, actor Ewan McGregor and documentarian and activist Raoul Peck.

I’m calling my mom later today via Skype. Skype to landline, I mean. But as usual, I’ll have to ask the people at her assisted living facility to make her pick up the phone. She never answers when I call directly, and she won’t call me on the cell. “Why don’t you answer when I call?,” I’ve asked. “Because I don’t feel like it,” she’s said more than once.

Sometime around last November’s Savannah Film Festival James Toback told me about a faux-documentary he was planning that would include lensing during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It’s since been reported that Alec Baldwin, Toback’s constant Savannah companion, will star as himself. Last week Forbes columnist Roger Friedman wrote that Toback’s film crew “will be hitting all the big [Cannes] parties and events” starting on Wednesday, and that Neve Campbell “shot some material for Toback in New York last week.”

Today will include (a) a final burst (or slog) of Berlin-based column salt-mining, (b) a final three-mile walk this afternoon, (c) figuring out a bus departure point to Berlin Tegel tomorrow morning, (d) picking up dry cleaning, (e) re-packing, and (f) enjoying the anticipation of weather that’s actually warm and pleasant for a change. Expected Nice arrival Tuesday at 1:45 pm. Pick up press pass by 3:30 or 4 pm. La Pizza gathering at 7:30 pm.

The more I think about it, the more I’m resenting the Cannes Film Festival’s decision to delay screening Jeff Nichols‘ Mud until Saturday, 5.26, at which point many if not most journos have left. That’s just obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, etc. Publicists need to schedule a Star/Olympia screening a day or two earlier. Seriously.

A recently posted clip from Jacques Audiard‘s Rust & Bone, the much-anticipated 2012 Cannes Film Festival selection that costars Marion Cotillard and Matthias “big effing ape” Schoenaerts (the no-testicles Bullhead guy).

The Masters of Cinema Bluray of Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity (1944), which I ordered weeks ago, will include an “extract” from the original screenplay depicting the excised gas chamber ending, which was filmed by Wilder but removed from the final version because it was deemed too depressing and “unduly gruesome.”

Consider this passage from filmsnoir.net: “In his 1998 book on film noir, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, James Naremore offers this penetrating analysis and critique:

“The execution described in the longest version of the script greatly increases our sympathy for Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), all the while raising questions about the criminality of the state. It also provides a tragic recognition scene for Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), who is shaken out of his moral complacency.

“This last point is especially important, because Keyes functions as a representative of the insurance company. Although he approaches his work with the intuitive flair of an artist and the intellectual intensity of a scientist, he remains a loyal agent of industrial rationality — a talented bureaucrat who, in effect, has helped to create the office building, the drive-in restaurant, the supermarket, and all the other landmarks of modern Los Angeles that the film relentlessly criticizes.

“One of the many virtues of Wilder’s original ending is that this complex, brilliantly acted character would have been made to confront his inner demon and to experience poetic justice. Keyes would have been brought face-to-face with the culminating instance of instrumental reason, the “end of the line” for industrial culture: the California gas chamber.

“For the original version of Double Indemnity, Paramount built an exact replica of San Quentin’s gas chamber, depicting it as a modern, sanitized apparatus for administering official death sentences. At considerable expense, Wilder photographed the step-by-step procedure of execution, emphasizing its coldly mechanical efficiency. There was no blood, no agonized screaming, and, for once in the movie, almost no dialogue.

“Much of the sequence was shot from Walter’s point of view, looking through glass windows at the spectators outside the chamber — an angle creating a subtle parallel between the chamber and the ‘dark room’ of a movie theater. When the fatal pellets dropped, clouds of gas obscured the windows, and we could barely make out Keyes standing amid the witnesses, turning his head away. Soon afterward, a doctor entered the chamber to pronounce Walter dead. According to the script, the original film ended as follows:

“‘All the witnesses have now left except Keyes, who stares, shocked and tragic, beyond the door. The guard goes to him and touches his arm, indicating to him that he must leave. Keyes glances for the last time towards the gas chamber and slowly moves to go out. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE THE DEATH CHAMBER CAMERA SHOOTING IN THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR AT KEYES , who is just turning to leave. Keyes comes slowly out into the dark, narrow corridor. His hat is on his head now, his overcoat is pulled around him loosely. He walks like an old man. He takes eight or ten steps, then mechanically reaches a cigar out of his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. His hands, in the now familiar gesture, begin to pat his pockets for matches.

“‘Suddenly he stops, with a look of horror on his face. He stands rigid, pressing hand against his heart. He takes the cigar out of his mouth and goes slowly on toward the door, CAMERA PANNING with him. When he has almost reached the door, the guard stationed there throws it wide, and a blaze of sunlight comes in from the open prison yard outside. Keyes slowly walks out into the sunshine, a forlorn and lonely man.’

“Until someone rescues this scene from the Paramount vaults, we will never know if it is superior to the current version, and even then there may be room for debate. One thing, however, is clear: Keyes’s lonely walk out of the prison would have thrown a shadow over everything that preceded it. It was not until Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole that Wilder would produce such a savage critique of modernity. Although the released version of his famous thriller remains an iconoclastic satire that challenges the censors, it is a lighter entertainment than the original and a much easier product for Hollywood to market.

“No matter how much we admire the film that was exhibited in 1944, the form of cinema that the French described as noir is probably better exemplified by another Double Indemnity, which we have yet to see.”

In a July 1975 Images Journal interview with Robert Porfirio, Wilder said the following:

“We were delighted with [the gas chamber ending] at first. Fred MacMurray loved it. He didn’t want to play it. No leading man wanted to play it, initially. But then he was absolutely delighted. I am a great friend of his, but can tell you when he shot the scene, there was no hesitation, no nothing, no problem with his performance. I shot that whole thing in the gas chamber, the execution, when everything was still, with tremendous accuracy.

“But then I realized, look, this thing is already over. I just already have one tag outside that office, when Neff collapses on the way to the elevator, where he can’t even light the match. And from the distance, you hear the sirens, be it an ambulance or be it the police, you know it is over. No need for the gas chamber.”

“In the end, Obama had to rip off the Band-Aid and take a stand, because if his campaign depends on painting Romney as a bundle of ambiguous beliefs, the first black president can’t be ambiguous himself on a civil rights issue. Not to mention that big bucks from gay backers will be needed to replace the lost bucks from alienated Wall Street donors.

“The gay community, forgiving all prevarication, was electrified. As the Will & Grace co-creator Max Mutchnick put it on the CBS morning show, there are now little boys who can dream of both being a president and marrying a president.

“As Obama is reminded of what it feels like to generate excitement, what it feels like to lift the spirits of a demoralized country by using the bully pulpit, maybe he can start occasionally blurting out something he feels strongly about. It’s humanizing.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 5.13 N.Y. Times column, “Seeking Original Bliss.”

“This is the only time I’ve been consciously trying to capture a sensation, which is that emotion of when you’re a 12-year-old and you fall in love. I remember that being such a powerful feeling, it was almost like going into a fantasy world. It’s stuck with me enough that I think about it still.” — Moonrise Kingdom director-cowriter Wes Anderson speaking to N.Y. Times contributor Dennis Lim in a 5.13 article called “Giving Chase To Young Love on The Run.”

(l. to r.) Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton and Bruce Willis in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

“One of the great things about Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, for me, was that you had teens and tweeners dealing in a calm, matter-of-act way with a sexual affair between a guy in his early ’50s and a teacher in her mid ’30s, and a story that involved obsession, betrayal, jealousy, laissez-faire finance, erotic hunger, cigarette-smoking and revenge.” — from a 1.12 HE riff titled “A Little Romance.”

“I’d really like to see a movie from Wes Anderson about adult characters dealing with adult-type stuff. They can act like adolescents all they want, but enough with the precious adolescents and the stop-motion animals and robots and Dalmatian mice and bright young obsessives with father issues. Please. We need a Wes movie about guys in their late 30s or 40s who don’t come from inherited wealth and have had to scrap to survive and who ride motorcycles and fuck well and have more or less found their place in life.” — from a 3.23.12 HE post called “End of Phase One.”

Moonrise Kingdom will have its first Cannes Film Festival screening less than three days hence. I’m flying down to Nice on Tuesday morning, and will be in my pad by late Tuesday afternoon. No one will be more delighted than myself if Moonrise turns out to be even a little different than what everyone — and I mean everyone — is expecting.

I never pay much attention to Director’s Fortnight or Critics Week selections during the Cannes Film Festival. But this year, as an exercise, I’d really like to catch one film from both programs. But what to choose? I’ve just spent a half-hour or so going over the lists…nothing. So I’m appealing to Guy Lodge or some Guy Lodge-y type acquaintance who can suggest a couple of must-sees that, let’s face it, I’ll most likely hate or be bored by.

Inbox Update: “Iranian filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi’s A Respectable Family will have its world premiere at the Director’s Fortnight on Sunday, May 20.

“Based on Massoud’s own personal experiences growing up in Iran, the film is an unabashed controversial look of contemporary Iran through the eyes of an expat feeling alienated in his own country. Not unlike A Separation, Massoud’s film is a ‘detective story without any detectives’ while focusing on a family drama shaped by a country’s history, politics, religion and ethos.”

Director’s Note: “I belong to the generation that lived through the eight long and deadly years of the Iran-Iraq war. Today this generation represents three quarters of the country. Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world — an educated youth full of curiosity and a desire for life. A youth which dreams of a tolerant Iran open to the rest of the world.

“To me, Iran is impossible to grasp without taking the history of the last 30 years into account. I didn’t make up the story of A Respectable Family. It is a true story — the story of my childhood after the 1979 revolution, my teenage years during the war and of my experience today in Tehran.”

A homework assignment that I’ve been dreading due to sheer laziness has to be done — an appraisal of Tere Tereba‘s “Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,” which has been out since May 1st. It covers Cohen’s entire life (9.4.13 to 7.29.76)…well, from age six on…and offers plenty of shoe-leather detail and minutiae up the wazoo.

Gangster Mickey Cohen, taken sometime in 1953.

The tone of Tereba’s prose is somewhere between excitedly neutral and half-admiring, and that’s a little odd, I must say. But that’s what happens, I suppose, when you write about a famous sociopath. You either get into Cohen’s head and accept that scuzball attitude, or you write disapprovingly like you’re Jack Webb or J. Edgar Hoover. Or you find some kind of objective middle ground,

The research and writing ate ten years of Tereba’s life, and I certainly respect that commitment. Her writing isn’t elegant, but it’s servicable enough. And the story is entertaining (as gangster sagas always are) and timely, of course, with Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad, a “get Mickey Cohen” melodrama in the vein of Brian De Palma‘s The Untouchables, opening on 10.19.

One of the similarities is that both films fudge historical fact, or so it would appear in the case of The Gangster Squad.

The real-life Gangster Squad, led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin in the film) and Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) never really got Mickey Cohen any more than the real-life Untouchables got Al Capone. Capone and Coen both did prison terms for income tax evasion, and were therefore “brought down,” so to speak, by federal agents. It may be that the Gangster Squad funnelled information that aided in Cohen’s first income tax conviction (he did two separate prison stretches), but they didn’t nail him in any heavy dramatic way, or not as I understand.

So The Gangster Squad is not a “get Mickey Cohen” movie as much as a “make a lot of noise and look cool and sexy and studly while trying to get Mickey Cohen” movie. Unless Beall’s screenplay makes up a phony ending. I’m basically expecting a general hodgepodge of Untouchables, Public Enemies, L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Falls.

“A movie is always fiction,” Tereba says. “I’ve written a definitive non-fiction book.”

Will Beall‘s Gangster Squad screenplay is based on Paul Leiberman‘s 2008 seven-part L.A. Times series titled “L.A. Noir: Tales From The Gangster Squad.” A book version will appear on 10.2.12, or about two weeks before the film opens.

The climactic finale in Lieberman’s seven-part series is the shooting of Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen at a San Fernando Valley restaurant called Rondelli’s, which happened while Cohen dined nearby with his crew and his bulldog. Whalen isn’t listed as a character in the Gangster Squad‘s IMDB rundown, but this incident is presumably depicted in the film. It’s certain, however, that while Cohen was tried for complicity in Whalen’s killing and O’Mara testified at this trial about Cohen’s guns having been found in a garbage can near the scene, Cohen was never convicted. (Sam LoCigno confessed and wound up going to jail for the shooting.)

Tereba and Liberman’s work will be competing with three other books about Cohen — “Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words: As Told to John Peer Nugent” (1975), “Hollywood’s Celebrity Gangster, The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen” by Brad Lewis (2009) and “King of the Sunset Strip: Hangin’ with Mickey Cohen and the Hollywood Mob” (2006) by Steve Stevens and Craig Lockwood.

When I spoke with Tereba the first thing I wanted to know was whether she’s read the Gangster Squad script, and if so, what parts are fictional and what parts aren’t?

Her first response to the script question was “I may have [read it],” but then she backed off and said she hadn’t read the script and that she has no idea what the film will contain or omit, and that she’s looking forward to seeing the film with a container of popcorn like everyone else. I find it inconceivable that a person who worked as hard as Tereba did on her book wouldn’t make a point of snagging the Gangster Squad script so she could speak with a degree of authority about the scripted content during interviews. I told her she’d be wise to get hold of a copy and read it so she won’t sound disingenuous the next time somebody like me asks.

“Do you think Warren Beatty and Barry Levinson‘s Bugsy was all fiction?,” I asked. Tereba replied that Benjamin Siegel was sitting on a couch with another guy in his Beverly Hills home when he was shot to death, and that the film left this guy out. She also said that Cohen (played by Harvey Keitel in the film) was “part of the conspiracy” to have Siegel rubbed out.

I can’t keep doing this. I could go on and on and on. I could talk about the women that Cohen allegedly had. Or how Harvey Keitel’s head was half-shaved to mimic Cohen’s appearance in Bugsy, and how Sean Penn, who plays him in The Gangster Squad, has kept his full head of hair…fuck it, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want, like Cohen did.

Tereba isn’t exactly your standard book-author type. She’s been a fashion designer since the late ’60s. She knew and hung with Jim Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela way back when, and was in Paris when he died. (Or had just been there or something.) She had a role in Andy Warhol’s Bad (’77). And she has some kind of honky accent that leads her to pronounce “Cohen” like “Cohn,” as in Harry.

Was Mr. Mickey’s name not spelled C-O-H-E-N, and was it not a two-syllable thing? “It’s just the way I talk,” she answered.