Just so we’re clear, Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa? and Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock delivered the one-two punch that made George Segal into a marquee brand.

Segal was a respected, well-liked, plugging-away actor throughout the ’60s, and he definitely elevated his stock rating with his lead performance in Irvin Kershner‘s Loving (’70 — 3.4.70). But Reiner-Yates added the boldface, above-the-title stardom factor to Segal’s guilt-ridden, self-flagellating, Jewish-guy thing, and he was off to the races.

Poppa (a cult film, not a hit) was released on 11.10.70, and The Hot Rock (a silly ensemble caper comedy for guys) arrived on 1.26.72 or 14 months later. Pre-Poppa and post-Hot Rock Segal were entirely different entities.

With these two in the bag, Segal landed the titular role in Paul Mazursky‘s Blume in Love (6.17.73), and thereafter he wasn’t just a star but a complex ’70s soul man — the highest rung of the realm. And then, 14 months after Blume, came Segal’s Bill Denny in California Split (8.7.74) — a grand-slammer.

And then God lost interest and his hot streak ended, just like that. Segal kept working for another 40 years after that, and good for his spirit and tenacity. But what a rude jolt. 1970 through ’74: “You’re finally really hot, George…you’re totally cool and everyone digs you.” 1975 and onward: “Okay, you’re still good but time to cool things down.”

Temporary, pre-release trade ad title for Pert Yates’ The Hot Rock.

This is going to make me sound like some kind of sentimental or undisciplined sap, but the night before last I watched an HD Amazon stream of All Through The Night (’42), and I kind of loved it — fun performances (Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Jane Darwell and a 25 year-old Jackie Gleason), great-looking, punchy, swiftly paced.

It’s a thoroughly lightweight, second-tier, studio-lot Warner Bros. comedy-thriller about a gang of Manhattan wiseguy gamblers vs. a team of Nazi saboteurs, and it really moves along — runs 107 minutes, feels like 80 or 85. And the Damon Runyon-esque dialogue (“Catch ’em with their panzers down”) really zips along. The writers are Leonard Spigelgass and Edwin Gilbert.

Produced by Hal Wallis and Jerry Wald and completely lacking in substance**, All Through The Night is the kind of par-for-the-course programmer that the studios used to crank out like sausage. But it’s surprisingly smooth and winning…a dopey goof-off flick but very well done for what it is, and stocked with Warner Bros. contract players, and extra enjoyable now because the 1080p resolution is so clean and sharp.

And the spiffy, smooth-sailing Bogart, wearing his Maltese Falcon toupee, looks and sounds great — he’s having fun and doesn’t give a shit. Ditto William Demarest, Judith Anderson, Phil Silvers, Barton MacLane, Kaaren Verne, etc.

…to live with a light sleeper with extra-sensitive hearing, a woman who can be woken up by damn near anything. And who chews you out when this happens.

Sleeping modes differ, of course. Some (like me) sink to the bottom of the pond and can’t be aroused by anything less than a 7.0 earthquake, and others (like the CEO of Tatiana, Ltd.) float on the surface of the pond. And I’m telling you that the slightest little piddly-tinkly-twinkly noise…a fork falling off a plate onto our glass-top coffee table, the accidental dropping of an iPhone battery, the mere snapping of a twig…wakes her up, and when that happens it’s like getting reamed out by Vladimir Putin.

I like to watch an old film to settle down with, and I always do so with wireless headphones. My movie time starts when Tatiana dozes off, around 10:30 or 11 pm. From that point on it’s “observe Moscow Rules or die.” If I want to get up for anything (a bottle of water, an ice pop, feed the cats) I’m careful to step extra-gently without shoes and only on the balls of my feet…I’m an angel walking on cotton balls. But that’s not good enough for General Strelnikov because if I walk on top of certain sections of wooden floor a slight groaning or creaking sound results…”you woke me uhhhp!!”

My name is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and I live in the Gulag Archipelago.

Originally posted on 8.26.17, or roughly five months before the first stirrings of woke terror:

Respect for the late Jessica Walter, who passed yesterday at age 80. Walter achieved screen immortality when she portrayed Evelyn Draper, the estranged younger sister of Don Draper (kidding!) and the original psycho-nutso girlfriend in Clint Eastwood Play Misty For Me (’71).

After a single night of great sex with Carmel disc-jokey Dave Garver (Eastwood), Walter/Draper grasped and stalked and terrorized and wound up wielding a large kitchen knife. Audiences cheered when she met her doom at the finale.

16 years later Walter became the second most psychotic and terrifying figure in this realm with the arrival of Glenn Close‘s Alex Forrest in Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction (’87).

Alex caused blood to instantly drain from the faces of tens of millions of straight American male dilletante infidels…husbands and boyfriends who had once or twice slithered into a little involvement on the side without getting caught. Or had dreamt of this.

The idea with both Evelyn and Alex was that if you become intimate with them just once or twice, for a single night or over, say, a 24-hour period, you need to devote your life to them forever…leave your girlfriend, get divorced, invite her to live with you and become her lifelong partner as she prepares for a coming child, etc.

Walter’s peak feature-film period ran from the mid ’60s to early ’70s — Lilith, Grand Prix, The Group, Bye Bye Braverman, Number One, Play Misty for Me, etc. She kept working and hung in there and won an Emmy or two (she was oh-my-God-so-fucking-great in Arrested Development!…aaagghh wonderful!) all the way to the end. And don’t forget her voice work in Archer.

I’ve never seen Starlift (’51), a Warner Bros. musical with Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Ruth Roman, etc. I don’t think I’ll ever see it. But this Jimmy Cagney cameo is a good scene. Dick Wesson, the admirer/imitator in uniform, conjures one of the best Cagney voices I’ve ever heard.

Here are a few memory snippets about the high-school experience of accused mass murderer Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa in Arvada, Colorado.

Given the prevalence of racism and bullying among high-school adolescents, it goes without saying that post-9/11 a U.S.-residing teenager with that name would be taunted and provoked. Teenagers can be horrible.

If I’d been Al-Issa’s parents, I would have given him an American nickname so his classmates would leave him alone, or at least pick on him less. Immigrants do this in order to assimilate into American society. Issur Danielovitch didn’t keep his name — he adopted another one.

3.9.11 HE review of Bertrand Tavernier‘s The Princess of Montpensier (IFC Films): “The initial response at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival was not wildly enthusiastic, so I was rather surprised to find that this historical drama of intimacy, set in 16th Century France during the Catholic vs. Huguenot wars, is one of the most intriguing erotic trips I’ve taken in a long while.

“Partly because the occasionally undressed lead, Melanie Thierry, performs in a way that feels rather prim and Grace Kelly-ish, an all-but-extinct vibe or romantic brand in films today. But primarily because the movie is mostly about unrequited desire and hardly at all about consummation.

It’s probably not bawdy or obvious enough for most viewers, but I felt and believed this film without the slightest discomfort, and I never wanted to turn it off or multitask as I watched.

“The story is basically about four or five guys who can think of little else but having Thierry, and who spend most of their screen time being told ‘if only,’ ‘no,’ ‘not now,’ ‘not here’ and so on. I only know that the combination of Thierry, the feeling of sensual restraint or suppression, and the generally realistic and non-movieish atmosphere created by Tavernier and his team (including some excellent hand-to-hand combat and duelling scenes) feels right and believable and on-the-money.

“It’s delightful when a film drops you into an exotic time-trip visitation without making this world seem arch or ‘performed’ or overly prettified or set-decorated within an inch of its life. I’ve never thought of Tavernier as a director who excels or even cares about violent action and/or mercury-popping eroticism, but maybe I need to go back to watch some of his films.

“I didn’t expect to say this, but I felt as stirred and satisfied and convinced by The Princess of Montpensier as I was by Andrzej Wajda‘s Danton (’83), a superb historical drama about the post-revolutionary “terror.”

Solemn condolences and melancholy tidings in the matter of Bertrand Tavernier, who has passed at age 79. A great director (Coup de Torchon, Round Midnight, A Sunday in the Country, Let Joy Reign Supreme, Life and Nothing But, In The Electric Mist, The Princess of Montpensier), a brilliant fellow, French to the core but an internationalist, an avid cineaste and warm acquaintance to journalists the world over.

Monsieur Tavernier was simply a magnificent human being and a consummate Renaissance man — warm, gentle-mannered, passionate, knew everything and everyone. I was transported when I realized about 15 years ago that Tavernier was an HE reader, and doubly if not triply elevated when I met him at a journo gathering in Cannes a year or two later. We first chatted at the Algonquin Hotel in ’81 or ’82, during a press interview for Coup do Torchon. Quite the occasion.

We last met almost exactly a decade ago (3.9.11), during a French Consulate press encounter for The Princess of Montpensier, which might be my favorite Tavernier of all. Right now I can hear Bertrand whispering to me from heaven, telling me to stand tall and hold fast against the demonic Twitter jackals (I don’t know for a fact that he hated wokesters but I’m 98% certain of this) and to keep the cinema-love faith.

As an employee of Tatiana, Ltd., I’m obliged to run certain errands. Last Sunday afternoon I was told to visit the Beverly Blvd. post office and send a stuffed plastic envelope (first-class) to an eBay buyer in Miami. Because it was Sunday I had to slip the parcel into a large blue post office bin that had a relatively thin drop-off slot. The bin was pretty well stuffed, I quickly realized, but I managed to push the package into the slot, about 10″ to 12″ deep.

After driving off into the West Hollywood maze I called my superior and explained what had happened. She didn’t like the package being vulnerable to passerby thieves, and ordered me to go back and retrieve it.

I returned to the post office about a half-hour later. I put my hand into the bin but couldn’t find the Miami parcel. Other packages had been jammed in on top of it. I called Tatiana with the news — “I can’t find it…it’s been pushed deep into the bin so it’s probably okay.”

The USPS online system always notifies senders when their package has been scanned and put into the system. If you drop a package off on Sunday you’ll see a USPS online confirmation by the following morning. On Monday morning there was no confirmation of any kind.

I was sent back to the Beverly Blvd. office on Monday afternoon to inquire. The first postal employee I spoke to looked at me impassively, like she was a wood carving, and basically washed her hands. I double-checked the USPS scanning system and reported back to Tatiana. “Ask someone else,” she ordered. A second employee was more responsive. She went into the back room to check. She said the package was probably okay and would most likely be in Miami by the coming weekend (3.26 or 3.27).

Tatiana is convinced that I screwed the pooch by pushing the parcel into the bin in the first place. I should never have dropped it off into an overstuffed bin! “You may have ruined my reputation as a seller and sender,” she said. Furthermore, she said, if the package doesn’t arrive this weekend I will owe her the cost of the contents.

Plus she’s just told me I can’t divulge the contents or their value. I live under a Putin-like regime.

…from Dana Carvey, just after the 7-minute mark:

A little more than four years ago Tatiana and I attended a J.J. Abrams Oscar Wilde party at Bad Robot. My post about same used this headline: “Hansard Recalling Guthrie — A Beautiful Moment at J.J. Abrams’ Oscar Wilde Soiree.”

The evening’s highlight, I meant, came when Once maestro Glenn Hansard sang a portion of Woody Guthrie‘s “This Land Is Your Land” a capella. Everyone was humming along and the feeling in the room was quite beautiful, which is to say patriotic in the best sense of that term.

During the recent presidential inauguration (1.20.21) of Joe Biden, Jennifer Lopez performed some verses of Guthrie’s as part of a medley with “America the Beautiful”.

But now it appears that this heartfelt Guthrie narrative — i.e., “Woody was a beautiful guy and a serious humanitarian socialist, and we all love this song for its values” — is coming to an end. The new narrative is basically that “This Land Is My Land” is a racist-white-man song that dismisses the historical rights of Native Americans and Mexican Americans, and is basically a tribute to white American expansionism and suppressing native voices, etc.

A month and a half ago essayist and culture writer Sam Yellowhorse Kesler posted a piece on npr.org piece called “The Blind Spot in ‘This Land.’

And yesterday MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell went after the song also: