Jeff Wells

Shirley Knight passed three and a half years ago (4.22.20), and in my brief obit I wrote the following about a chat I had with her in ’15 or ’16:

“I spoke to Knight at a party four or five years ago. I told her I wished I could re-watch The Lie, a 1973 live-TV drama that was written by Ingmar Bergman and dealt with a stale upper-middle-class marriage. It was captured live and on videotape at the CBS Television Center on Beverly and Fairfax. Running 98 minutes, it aired on 4.24.73.

“Bergman’s Swedish teleplay, initially performed in ’70, was originally called Reservatet. The U.S. adaptation was directed by Alex Segal (no apparent relation). It wound up being nominated for five Emmy awards.

“Knight told me she’d never seen The Lie (captured on videotape but never re-broadcast), and didn’t know if it had been offered for rent or sale or anything. Apparently a cruddy-looking MUBI version was viewable not long ago.”

Last night I discovered a decent-looking, recently posted YouTube file of The Lie. It was only posted two months ago and has only been viewed 181 times as of today.

As far as Bergman-penned marital downers go, it’s excellent — okay, a little hesitant at first but it soon picks up steam, and the last 35 or 40 minutes are quite invasive and powerful.

Knight plays Anna, the well-tended, 30something wife of George Segal‘s Andrew, a moustachioed, slightly older architect. (In fact Knight and Segal were only born two years apart.) Anna and Andrew live a sedate but regimented and hollow life. Segal is vaguely unhappy about something he can’t put his finger on, and Anna is in the eighth year of an affair with Robert Culp, whom she was involved with before her marriage.

The Lie ends with a huge devastating argument between Anna and Andrew over infidelities and whatnot — a meltdown that leaves them both gutted.

The fact that The Lie included a discreet nude scene (i.e., Knight removing her nightgown, seen from the rear) was striking for mainstream television back then. Before the nude scene the presentation stops for a few seconds, and an announcer and a title card state that viewers should be aware that The Lie deals in mature subject matter, etc.

The costars include Victor Buono, William Daniels, Dean Jagger, Louise Lasser, Mary Ann Mobley, Elizabeth Wilson and Allan Arbus.
‘
It’s definitely worth seeing.

On his latest Netflix special Armageddon, Ricky Gervais throwing spears and javelins at the wokester terror network is completely expected and quite satisfying. I don’t know what to add to this. His brand of humor is shocking no one because it’s so well defined.

Read more

During a New Hampshire town hall meeting yesterday, Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley was asked about the fundamental cause of the Civil War. Right away she paused and turned and smiled nervously and indicated this was a tough question. In other words an alarm bell was going off in her head. Haley clearly decided right away that she didn’t want to offend any hard-right, states-rights bumblefucks in overalls with pieces of hay between their teeth, and so she omitted mentioning the world “slavery.”

Instead she blathered on and tap-danced like Fred Astaire, saying that the war was about “how the government was gonna run…the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do“. Haley’s mention of “freedoms” couldn’t be interpreted as anything but an allusion to the mid-19th Century belief in the right to own slaves. Her questioner (possibly a Democratic party plant?) expressed surprise that she’d dodged the word “slavery” in her response, and Haley responded, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

Today Haley tried to walk this awkard episode back by telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”

But think about this. Before she answered yesterday Haley had calculated that saying the War Between the States was triggered by slavery — i.e., the alleged right of Southern plantation owners to own slaves and thereby save on labor costs — a boilerplate analysis that any third-grader would sagely agree with…Haley was actually afraid of angering any hard-right yokels who might still theoretically believe in the concept of slavery as a metaphor for states rights…imagine!

On 11.19.67, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour featured the Smothers Brothers and George Segal singing Phil Ochs‘ “Draft Dodger Rag“.

WWII-era veterans and patriots were presumably outraged that a folk song about weaselling out of the draft was being performed on a major network in prime time.

Segal’s most recent film, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre from director Roger Corman, had opened on 6.30.67.

The first truly good film in which Segal starred, Irvin Kershner‘s Loving, wouldn’t be seen for another two and one-third years.

Cream‘s “Disreali Gears” had been released two and a half weeks before this broadcast (11.2.67).

The Chicago debut of Martin Scorsese‘s Who’s That Knocking On My Door had happened four days earlier (11.15.67) and Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate would be released roughly a month later (12.21.67).

Two days after this performance, on 11.21.67, Gen. William Westmoreland told the National Press Club in Washington, “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing…we have reached an important point…when the end begins to come into view.”

Read more

You know what’s a lot better than you might expect? Rollercoaster (’77), a Jennings Lang-produced disaster thriller, made near the end of the big-budget disaster-flick cycle.

Rollercoaster was promoted as a drop-your-socks Sensurround experience, and it was that to a certain extent. But it was mainly an intelligent, low-key, logic-driven chase thriller.

You’d figure with the disaster-flick promotion there would be at least two or three scenes of rollercoaster cars flying off the tracks and people being killed, etc. There’s only one such scene, however, and it happens during the first half-hour and that’s it.

The rest is all cat-and-mouse stuff with amusement park inspector George Segal on the trail of psycho yuppie bomber Timothy Bottoms.

I would’t necessarily call it Hitchcockian but it uses elements of suspense to engaging effect.

Rollercoaster was written by Richard Levinson and William Link, the guys who created Colombo. It’s nicely (as in carefully, patiently) directed by James Goldstone (The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight —-’71); Goldstone’s big-screen career was unfortunately killed when he directed When Time Ran Out… (’80).

Here’s a link to the whole film.

A little less than three years ago I posted a roster of HE’s top 20 Henry Fonda films. There was some pushback over my placing Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time In The West, in which Fonda played a blackhearted villain named Frank, in 15th place.

I put it there because it wasn’t a “Henry Fonda” performance, but an aberration in the vein of Fort Apache. And yet even Fonda’s Fort Apache performance as Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, a stiff-necked, emotionally constipated fanatic, represented an aspect of his own nature. (Peter Fonda once said this in an interview.) Frank was a bizarre showhorse role — completely divorced from Fonda the man and Fonda the legend.

In 19 of the 20 performances listed below Fonda was basically playing himself, which is how we’ve always preferred him.

1. 12 Angry Men
2 The Ox-Bow Incident
3. The Grapes of Wrath
4. The Lady Eve
5. The Best Man
6. The Wrong Man
7. Young Mr, Lincoln
8. Drums Along The Mohawk
9. My Darling Clementine
10. You Only Live Once
11. Fort Apache
12. On Golden Pond
13. The Boston Strangler
14. The Fugitive
15. Once Upon a Time in the West
16. Advise and Consent
17. Slim
18. Jezebel
19. The Tin Star
20. Jesse James

Arguably the worst stinkers of Fonda’s career were Mr. Roberts, Fail Safe (a technically good film that I’ve only rewatched once — that means something) and Sex and the Single Girl.

I’m not saying that people are feeling less empathy for alleged victims of sexual assault (no one should ever let that ball drop), but they seem to be feeling less knee-jerky and less Robespierre-ish in the matter of instantly condemning alleged perpetrators.

There’s no way such a proclamation would have been published three years ago. People seem to be understanding that #MeToo overplayed its hand and that a somewhat more circumspect, due-process attitude about sexual misbehavior is warranted.

In 2009 quite a few Hollywood heavyweights signed a letter in support of Roman Polanski….seems like a long time ago.

David Rothkopf to Steve Schmidt: “The irrationality of the degree of support for [The Beast]…despite his criminality, his control over the Republican party seems stronger than it’s ever been….even with all these trials, even with all we know about him….rational objections to this anti-democratic authoritarian don’t seem to hold.”

That’s because Trumpism isn’t rational — it’s emotional, primal, boiling in the blood. And Rothkopf doesn’t even allude to this.

Far-right Trump supporters believe that over the last several years U.S. culture has been under assault by the woke scourge (currently manifested by Biden’s kneejerk deference to diverse tribalism, equity favored over meritocracy, scolding white people for being white, trans values in elementary schools, Dylan Mulvaney, hordes of immigrants surging through the Mexican border), and they see him as the only hardcore bully-boy enemy of this scourge…the only guy who is saying “fuck this noise” without qualification.

Is there merit to this general thesis or analysis? To varying degrees, yes. Is it worth electing a fascist dictator in order to put a stop to this scourge, or at least to try and reverse or suppress it? Of course it wouldnt be worth it. Putting Trump back into the White House would be insanity. But like I just said, the Trump bonfire isn’t about rationality.

The strongest Best Actor narrative belongs to The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti — bringer of a beloved centerpiece performance (Joe and Jane Popcorn have been over the moon for Alexander Payne’s ascerbic holiday film from the get-go) plus Paul’s legendary Sideways performance wasn’t even nominated 19 years ago.

Bradley Cooper’s devotional, emotionally emphatic, technically dazzling performance as Maestro’s Leonard Bernstein is obviously a formidable challenger, but Cooper’s narrative (i.e., he really researched and worked it) doesn’t quite measure up to Giamatti’s.

And forget Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy at this stage — the HE narrative (in terms of recognizable human behavior Murphy’s genius physicist is quirky to the point of being inhuman — he’s playing an alien from the planet Tralfamadore) has settled into the groundwater.

Plus Oppie was a flakey wimp (building an A-bomb to kill tens of thousands of Nazis is okay but not so much a hydrogen bomb, which shouldn’t be built because it’s too big). HE sides with Harry S. Truman (“Don’t let that crybaby back in here”).

Plus no admirer of Oppenheimer believes that Murphy’s Oppie was capable of sexual arousal as aliens don’t enjoy coitus…be honest. There was no believing for a second that Murphy and Florence Pugh actually did the deed.