My honest opinion of Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) is that he was always an engaging actor and sometimes an extraordinary one, but his performances began to feel overly neurotic and mannered when he hit his late 30s, or roughly from ’64 onward. His best period began with Mr. Roberts (’55) and ended with The Fortune Cookie (’66) — an eleven-year stretch. His peak years amounted to only four — Operation Mad Ball (’57) to Some Like It Hot (’59) and The Apartment (’60).

Posted on 9.8.19: “Lemmon was the hottest guy in Hollywood after starring in the one-two punch of Some Like It Hot (’59) and The Apartment (’60), both directed and co-written by Billy Wilder. Because the latter mixed ascerbic humor and frankly sexual situations, Lemmon was offered almost nothing but frothy sex comedies for five years following The Apartment.

The only decent film he made during this period was Blake Edwards‘ Days of Wine and Roses (’62).

“The sex comedies were The Wackiest Ship in the Army (’60), The Notorious Landlady (’62), Irma la Douce (’63, minor Wilder), Under the Yum Yum Tree (’63), Good Neighbor Sam (’64) and How To Murder Your Wife (’65). He also costarred that year in The Great Race, a period costume comedy about arch humor, empty artifice and scenic splendor.

“Lemmon finally broke out of that shallow, synthetic cycle with Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie (’66). Not grade-A Wilder but certainly half-decent, and a great boost for Walter Matthau. And then Luv, The Odd Couple, The April Fools, The Out-of-Towners, Kotch, Avanti! and Save the Tiger. And then he hit another wall with Wilder’s The Front Page.

“The Lemmonisms are all over Save The Tiger (’72), but five or six scenes in that film are true and on-target, and that ain’t hay. His performance in The China Syndrome also made me snap to attention. Ditto Ed Horman in Missing.”

I relate to the Lemmon profile in David Thomson‘s “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (2002 edition), page 513:

“I have to confess that sometimes one squeeze of Lemmon is enough to set my teeth on edge. There’s no doubt that, as a younger actor, Lemmon could be very funny. He is very skilled, meticulous and yet — it seems to me — an abject, ingratiating parody of himself.

“Long ago worry set in. The detail of his work turned fussy, nagging and anal. His mannerisms are now like a miser’s coins. There have been a few films — like James Foley‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (’92) — that used this demented worryguts as necessary material. And Lemmon is very good in that film. But far too often, he stops his own roles and starts preaching anxiety, leading everything away from life and into the jitters.”

Last night some neo-Nazi hooligans protested the first preview performance of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry‘s Parade, a 1998 historical musical that’s being revived at the Bernard B. Jacobs theatre (242 West 45th Street).

It dramatizes the trial, imprisonment and lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was falsely convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in 1913 Atlanta. After his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1915, Frank was seized by an anti-Semitic mob and hanged from a tree in Marietta, Georgia — Phegan’s home town.

Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen) plays Frank in the stage revival. Last night he posted a statement about the anti-Semitic protest.

I don’t have much interest in catching Parade, but this morning I was recalling my one and only viewing of Mervyn LeRoy‘s They Won’t Forget, a 1937 drama based on the same tragedy.

Pic was based on Ward Greene‘s “Death in the Deep South,” a fictionalized account of the Frank case. It starred Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Edward Norris and — in her feature debut — Lana Turner.

For decades LeRoy successfully functioned as a smooth and dependable house director of big-studio features — The Wizard Of Oz (partially — Victor Fleming received credit), Thirty seconds Over Tokyo, Little Women, Any Number Can Play, Quo Vadis?, Million Dollar Mwemaid, Mister Roberts, No Time for Sergeants, The FBI Story, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, A Majority of One, Gypsy. But he made his best films in the early to mid ’30s — Little Ceasar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and They Won’t Forget.

Consider how LeRoy concluded Forget‘s lynching scene — not with a literal depiction but a snagging of a mail sack as a train speeds by. That’s John Ford-level expressionism.

Parade will open on 3.16.

Last Sunday (2.19) Variety‘s Clayton Davis was entertaining a notion that the DGA bounce for Everything Everywhere All At Once had immediately stalled following BAFTA having more or less blown it off by giving most of their organizational love to All Quiet on the Western Front. The Best Picture situation, he felt, was suddenly “up in the air.”

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy was immediately skeptical. He’s as much of an EEAAO hater as myself, but is also striving for a little straight-from-the-shoulder.

From Ruimy’s “Variety Believes There’s Still a Good Chance EEAAO Doesn’t Win Best Picture,” posted on 2.20.23:

“I don’t think the BAFTA [aftermath] changes much in the Oscar race. It’s still EEAAO’s Oscar to lose. Yes, the UK voting bloc is fairly pronounced within the Academy, but I don’t believe we should take last night’s EEAAO snubbing as total gospel.

“The [unfortunate] fact of the matter is that the Academy has decided to be heavily influenced by Film Twitter this year, and thereby get sucked into the EEAAO bandwagon.

“This is still a three-film [dynamic] between EEAAO, The Banshees of Inisherin and Top Gun: Maverick. But what we need right now is love sweet love….that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of”…kidding!

Actual Ruimy statement: “What we need right now is for Everything Everywhere to lose at the Producers Guild of America” — the Daryl F. Zanuck award (the org’s equivalent of a Best Picture trophy) at the PGA awards, which will happen on Saturday, 2.25.

Ruimy: “That’s the only way out of this mess.”

I know God doesn’t hate me personally. I know He doesn’t give a damn one way or the other, and certainly doesn’t believe in placing any thumbs on the scale. But I am nonetheless on my knees and begging Him/Her/It to somehow step in and prevent this horrific scenario from happening.

In the view of the Critical Drinker, Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania “sums up everything the MCU has become…a plot so entirely predictable and generic that it feels as if it was written by an overworked AI, basically consisting of a series of tired and played-out tropes that have been done a million times before…visuals that are so obnoxiously overdone you can barely process what you’re seeing…

“Ant Man 3 is everything that most of us have come to despise about Marvel at this point…two hours of trite, bland, corporatized, predictable, pointless, soul-destroying nothingness…what a pile of absolute shite.”

Posted on 2.17.23:

If Sonny Bono hadn’t slammed into a tree while skiiing in the Lake Tahoe region on 1.5.98 and if he’d otherwise kept himself in good health, he would have celebrated his 88th birthday five days ago (2.16.23).

Bono was 64 at the time of his death. I’m sorry he suffered through that. But he lived an interesting life with an unusual arc — at first a hippie-ish songwriter, singer and performer in the ’60s and ’70s, and then a “protect the small businessman” Republican in the ’80s and ’90s.

An early ’80s memory: I was driving west along the hilly-curvy section of Sunset Blvd. (near Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion) when I noticed Bono in his car, waiting to slip into the eastbound lane.

Two or three years later I ordered a drink at Bono, his Italian joint on Melrose near La Cienega. My immediate impression was that there were too many tables scrunched together.

I’m mentioning Bono because until this morning I somehow hadn’t read that he and Roddy Jackson co-authored “She Said ‘Yeah!’“, a fast and catchy Rolling Stones song from ‘64 or ‘65. The song is basically a horndog thing — a lust-struck guy wants to have it off with a hot girl, and to his infinite delight she’s down for it… “yeah!”**

I’d also never read that Bono co-authored “Needles and Pins,” a 1962 song that took off when a version by The Searchers charted in ’64. Bono co-penned the song with Jack Nitzsche and Jackie DeShannon, who recorded a version in ’63. The song is more commonly known as “Needles and Pinzah.”

HE’s latest Substack discussion (i.e., Jeff and Sasha) mostly focuses on the glorious, EEAAO-snubbing (except in the matter of editing) BAFTA Awards. We also got into some standard Oscar race pulse-taking. Again, the link.

Roger Friedman‘s 2.20 “Cannes exclusive” isn’t about the certainty of Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon debuting at the 2023 Cote d’Azur festival — that assumption has already gained ground. Ditto the loose talk about Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, James Mangold‘s Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Fortune Dial of Destiny, Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance and Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla.

Friedman’s new info (alleged but not confirmed) is partly about the festival’s opening-night attraction — Pedro Almodovar‘s A Strange Way of Life, a 40-minute, English-language short costarring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. With just about every significant feature running 120 minutes these days (and often longer), one can’t help but admire Almodovar’s decision to keep A Strange Way of Life to one-third of that running time.

In my mind a 40-minute film isn’t a “short” — it’s a tweener.

The other announcement is about Maiwenn‘s Jeanne du Barry, a historical drama set during the French revolution that may, according to Friedman, screen on the second night of the festival. Alternately called La Favorite, the film will star Maiwenn as Jeanne Becu (aka Madame du Barry) in a rags-to-riches-to-guillotine story. Accused of treason, Becu lost her head during the French terror, and more precisely on December 8, 1793.

Johnny Depp allegedly plays the aged King Louis XV, who enjoyed Becu as his final mistress. The only problem is that Louis XV died in 1774, or 15 years before the French Revolution of ’89 and nearly 20 years before Becu’s execution so I don’t get it.

Wikipedia says Netflix will release Jeanne du Barry in France in 2023 (probably right after Cannes ’23), but that the streaming release won’t happen for another 15 months, or sometime in the fall of ’24. The Wiki page also states that the film, which finished shooting last October, was financed by the Red Sea International Film Festival. I don’t know…sounds kinda fishy.

The length of Scorsese’s Flower Moon is still in the vicinity of three hours and and 20 minutes. One possible reason is that the story Scorsese is looking to tell (based on David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name) simply required that running time to make it all work. Another possible reason is that Scorsese was fearful of Flower Moon being accused by Film Twitter of being a white savior tale and so he decided to add a fair amount of “Native Americans had their own agency” stuff so he and the film wouldn’t get in trouble with Native American wokesters.

The “Flower Moon has allegedly been woked into an anti-white savior film” angle was fully explored by Jordan Ruimy on 1.20.23. The first hint of this was reported the same date by Variety‘s Zack Sharf.