In my 7.20.22 review of Nope, I wrote about the difficulty of understanding Daniel Kaluuya: “As Eddie Murphy might say if he catches Nope, ‘I don’t what the fuck this guy is sayin’.’ Remember Murphy’s imitation of James Brown with those scat riffs? That’s how Kaluuya sounds. I understood him maybe 20% of the time, if that.”

I’d forgotten that I said the same thing in my 6.9.15 review of Sicario: “Emily Blunt’s partner is played by Daniel Kaluuya, and I’m telling you here and now and forever I didn’t understand a single phrase from this guy. It was like he was speaking Farsi. Seriously, dub his ass for the U.S. release.”

Excerpted from that same review, which was titled “Su-Su-Sicario…Nope, Phil Collins Disapproves“:

“Sicario is basically about heavily militarized, inter-agency U.S. forces hunting down and shooting it out with the Mexican drug-cartel bad guys, and at other times flying here and there in a private jet and driving around in a parade of big black SUVs and so on….zzzzzz.

“It’s a strong welcome-to-hell piece, I’ll give it that, but Sicario doesn’t come close to the multi-layered, piled-on impact of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, portions of which dealt with more or less the same realm.

“The tale, such as it is, is told from the perspective of Emily Blunt‘s FBI field agent, who, being a 21st Century woman who’s in touch with her emotions, is of course stunned and devastated by the unrelenting carnage blah blah.

“You know what I’d like to see just once? A female FBI agent who isn’t in touch with her emotions, or at least one who tones it down when it comes to showing them. Too much to ask for, right?

“One of her battle-hardened colleagues, a senior veteran with a semi-casual ‘whatever works, bring it on’ attitude, is played by the ever-reliable Josh Brolin.

“My favorite character by far was Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro, a shadowy Mexican operative with burning eyes and his own kind of existential attitude about things. Benicio the sly serpent…the shaman with the drooping eyelids…the slurring, purring, south-of-the-border vibe guy.

Fair warning: If you don’t want to get hung up about the shape of ears on certain people, you have to make a serious effort not to look at them in the first place. Seriously, don’t go there. Because once you look at one pair of funny ears (or a person with one funny ear and one normal one), you won’t be able to stop and from then on your entire observational life will be about ears, ears, ears, ears, ears and more ears. And once this kicks in, there’s no escaping it. So I’m warning you with absolute sincerity — don’t start.

And you know what else? HE is going to compile a list of critics who went triple-quadruple apeshit over Jane Campion‘s film when it premiered at Telluride. I will do so in the service of a thought that’s worth contemplating: “How can you trust any critic who would sing bizarre arias and urge you to see such a grim, joyless and oppressive slog of a film?”

The critics who did ecstatic cartwheels over The Power of the Dog are the reason that people hate critics.

HE was mixed: “To me watching The Power of the Dog felt like work; it made me feel vaguely trapped. I walked out scratching my head and muttering ‘what?’ No fist fights, no gunshots, etc. And clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker. But it wasn’t for me. I knew that within minutes.”

To use a Michael Caine-ism, Self-Styled Siren (aka Farren Smith Nehme) has blown the bloody doors off the urban myth about John Wayne being so angry at Sacheen Littlefeather for reading Marlon Brando‘s statement about declining the 1972 Best Actor Oscar that he had to be restrained by six security guys lest he physically assault or throw her off the stage.

Was Wayne, standing backstage, angry about the Brando statement? Yes, he was. But the rest is almost certainly bullshit, folks! Probably “never happened,” says Self-Styled Siren. It’s basically a tall tale that’s been passed along from one shady narrator to the next for decades.

So who’s at fault? Littlefeather, 75, is the most recent myth-bearer. SSS reports that Littlefeather didn’t actually witness an enraged Wayne being restrained by security guys. Or maybe she did…who knows? On 8.16.22 NPR quoted Littlefeather claiming that Wayne “attempted to assault me onstage…he had to be restrained by six security men in order to prevent him from doing exactly that.” Two days later she told Variety‘s Zack Sharf that Wayne “came forth in a rage to physically assault and take me off the stage. And he had to be restrained by six security men in order for that not to happen.”

The suspicion is that Littlefeather has primarily been repeating what she’s heard or has come to believe. Considering Wayne’s longstanding reputation as a racist conservative who once called Native Americans “greedy” for not sharing land with white settlers, Littlefeather, a Native American activist, is understandably sympathetic to any anti-Wayne narrative that comes along.

Who hatched the myth about Wayne being restrained? The original bad guys, SSS reports, are late Oscar show producer-director Marty Pasetta and (apparently) British writer Joan Sadler. But the biggest bullshitter…okay, the most questionable storyteller was Sadler, it appears. The only problem is that SSS provides no article sourcing, and that information about Sadler is quite scant.

It all started with Pasetta saying in 1974 that Wayne was “in an uproar” over the Brando-Littlefeather statement. (Uproar, in this context, refers to an angry vocal response.) And yet at the time Pasetta didn’t mention Wayne wanting to physically assault or intimidate Littlefeather.

Seven years later Sadler came along, according to SSS, with a 1981 article that (partially?) focused on the 1973 incident and which mentioned “six security men” who had allegedly restrained Wayne. SSS offers no link to the Sadler piece, but here’s the passage in question: “Backstage the late John Wayne, ever game for a scrap with the Indians, wanted to bound on stage to personally eject Littlefeather before she could speak. It took six men to hold him back.”

Seven years later, in 1988, Pasetta finally began talking about the security guys and Wayne threatening to drag Littlefeather off the stage. Why Marty hadn’t mentioned this any time previously is anyone’s guess.

So let’s just say that the mysterious Sadler did it, and that Pasetta (who was killed in 2015 by a drunk driver in Palm Desert) jumped into the pool after the water had already been warmed up by Sadler. And then, years later, Littlefeather decided that the same swimming pool water seemed inviting and so she became a proponent of the “six security men” blah blah.

This, in any event, is what SSS has concluded, and considering that she committed a fair amount of study and shoe-leather reporting, it’s fair to give her the benefit of the doubt.

If I hadn’t titled this article “Unreliable Narrators,” I would have gone with “Sadler and Pasetta Did it.”

Excerpt from 8.19 Facebook post by Robert Chandler, a Brit:

“During a flight a couple of days ago, I watched John Huston‘s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre for the first time in my life.

“Now a hale and hearty 74 years old, this gold-mining allegory (greed, capitalism) is shockingly good and uncompromising. It is spare and essential, and full of excellent performances.

“I had no idea where the story was heading or how it played out for Humphrey Bogart‘s character, Fred C. Dobbs. There’s no vanity in Bogart’s performance, no weakness, no movie-star nod to the camera that says ‘hey, I’m a good guy, really.’

“Bogart’s performance is matched by his fellow drifter on the gold trail, played by Tim Holt, and then exceeded (perhaps) by the director’s father, Walter Huston, as a veteran prospector who talks with a frenzied excitement but has his greatest moment in a scene where he says very little as he saves the life of a drowned Mexican boy.

“There’s an incredible moment where Bogart, after a moment of betrayal, is shown being consigned to hell when he rolls nearer to the campfire and the flames rise up in the camera as it tracks in to reframe him.

“The Tampico kid who gets his face doused while selling lottery tickets is played by a young Robert Blake, who had a colorful and lengthy Hollywood career, including playing one of the killers in Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood (’67). But he’ll always be known — at least to my generation in the UK who frenzy-fed on cult movies at the Scala — as the pint-sized cop in Electra Glide In Blue (’73).

“Sierra Madre plays fresh and hard, and is exciting to watch. No scene is wasted. If anything, it’s a refreshing reminder of how film stories used to be told sparely and without compromise.”