Brian Wilson is, was, always will be an artist. His peak genius period was ’64 to ’68, give or take. But during the same period the others were, shall we say, on the shallow side. Insufficiently developed in more ways than you can shake a stick at. Don’t forget that the Beach Boys played South Africa during the height of apartheid, and were put on a UN blacklist (along with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Cher) for having done so. They’ve been a Republican band for a long time, saluted by John McCain, Ronald Reagan and the like. They even considered playing at Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration.

In last night’s “Four Ain’t Enough” thread, “Bob Hightower” trotted out the old “anyone who prefers High Noon to Rio Bravo doesn’t really like Westerns” line.

I tapped out a pretty good Rio Bravo vs. High Noon piece 13 years ago, but here’s another go, written this morning and mostly freshly phrased.

I like Rio Bravo enough to own the Bluray and re-watch it every two or three years, but it’s mostly a laid-back, hang-out, easy-does-it thang by way of the lore of Hollywood westerns.

On top of being an anti-High Noon argument piece, of course — a refutation of the Carl Foreman idea that when push comes to shove, fair-weather friends (or 95% of those who behave as if they like and care about you, especially at parties) aren’t worth a damn, and when things get tough you’ve only yourself to rely upon. Which is precisely how I feel about life anyway.

The best westerns aren’t just about genre conventions and cliches, but about the human condition…right?

From the ’07 piece: “You know from the get-go that High Noon is going to say something hard and fundamental about who and what we are. It’s not going to just poke along some dusty trail and go yippie-ki-yay and twirl a six-gun. It’s going to look you in the eye and say what’s what, and not just about the political and moral climate in some small western town that Gary Cooper‘s Will Kane is the sheriff of.”

Rio Bravo is not really invested in the “uh-oh, the bad guys are coming to break Joe Burdette out of jail and kill us in the bargain” situation or even in the characters except for Dean Martin’s broken-down alky. Sweat, nerves, tremors of seal-loathing — 100% believable.

The best scene, of course, is that dialogue-free beginning in the saloon, although it never made a lick of sense that Martin would bash Wayne on the head with a wooden club simply because Wayne has given him a look of well-deserved disgust when Martin is about to reach into a spittoon to retrieve a silver dollar, which is course is par for the course for the town drunk.

It also makes no sense that Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) would casually shoot Bing Russell in the stomach at close range, as there’s been no real provocation. It’s almost on the level of “aaah, I’m bored, here’s a bullet.”

On top of which Ricky Nelson’s high-register, pipsqueak speaking voice is too late ‘50s, too eighth-grade, too malt shop, too “Be-Bop Baby”…it lassos Howard Hawks’ studiously self-conscious, movie-ish western and sends you right back to Ozzie and Harriet-ville every time he opens his mouth.

And that sing-along jailhouse scene (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”, which uses the same Dimitri Tiomkin melody that was heard over and over in Red River but with new lyrics) is a real curiosity. It was thrown in to placate Nelson’s and Martin’s fans, but it stopped the movie cold, of course, especially when Walter Brennan‘s “Stumpy” joins in on “Get Along Home, Cindy Cindy”.

You know what would’ve been cool? If Hawks had cut away to Joe Burdette in his jail cell, smiling and quietly humming along.

Also from ’07: “Does Rio Bravo have a sequence that equals the gripping metronomic ticking-clock montage near the end of High Noon? Is the dialogue in Rio Bravo up to the better passages in Zinneman’s film? No. (There’s nothing close to the scene between Cooper and Lon Chaney, Jr., or the brief one between Cooper and Katy Jurado.) Is there a moment in Rio Bravo that comes close to Cooper throwing his tin star into the dust at the end? Is there a “yes!” payoff moment in Rio Bravo as good as the one in High Noon when Grace Kelly, playing a Quaker who abhors violence, drills one of the bad guys in the back?”

And don’t forget my “Tarantino’s Once Is Kin To Rio Bravo” piece from last July.

What Mac Sledge meant is that he doesn’t trust those the all-too-brief periods when happiness or, if you will, temporary euphoria or at least the absence of even the slightest melancholia…when those good vibes arrive and seem to light up everything and soothe all those souls. I’ve always preferred Hank Worden‘s line in Red River: “I don’t like it when things are goin’ too good and I don’t like it when things are goin’ too bad. I like ’em in between.”

The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, High Noon, The Naked Spur, Shane, The Searchers, The Big Country, (not Rio Bravo), The Magnificent Seven, North to Alaska, One-Eyed Jacks, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Professionals, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Silverado, Unforgiven, Open Range, The Assassination of Jesse James, No Country for Old Men, The Revenant, Hell or High Water. (22)

Talk about a completely stunning, punch in the gut, good-God-almighty piece of news…I’m truly saddened and gobsmacked. Condolences, hugs, regrets. Only 43 years old!

Posted by Andrew Sullivan, around 2 pm today:

“I have to say I’m horribly conflicted on some issues. I’m supportive of attempts to interrogate the sins of the past, in particular the gruesome legacy of slavery and segregation, and their persistent impact on the present. And in that sense, I’m a supporter of the motives of the good folks involved with the Black Lives Matter movement.

“But I’m equally repelled by the insistent attempt by BLM and its ideological founders to malign and dismiss the huge progress we’ve made, to re-describe the American experiment in freedom as one utterly defined by racism, and to call the most tolerant country on the planet, with unprecedented demographic diversity, a form of ‘white supremacy’. I’m tired of hearing Kamala Harris say, as she did yesterday: ‘The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.’ This is what Trump has long defended as ‘truthful hyperbole’ — which is a euphemism for a lie.

“But here’s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does.

“In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter. Because without order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow. And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.”

Laser Discs were cool when they were cool in the late ’80s to mid ’90s. (DVDs came in around ’97, right?) The increased clarity and sharpness, not to mention the commentary tracks and documentary supplements on the Criterion editions, delivered a kind of paradise realm. But then came laser rot and the nightmare freeze-ups that became all too common after three or four years of use. Thank God that shit is out of my movie-watching life. Thank God for the here and now.

Today on Old Format Theater I go deep through the closet to see if the Laser Disc machine still works (and yes, I kept my Laser Discs). @docstrangelove #TheApplegates pic.twitter.com/JicdXQGbEh

— Larry Karaszewski (@Karaszewski) August 28, 2020

#MOW2020 We wish we could be there. We stand behind you!

The countdown has begun. We can choose love, progress, and a better future…or we can choose more death, destruction, chaos, and hate.

Our latest video: #Daisypic.twitter.com/TOviquov6j

— Stand For Better (@standforbetter) August 28, 2020

Originally posted on 8.8.10: I’ve been a Paddy Chayefsky fanatic for as long as I can remember, but I waited until ’08 to see Middle of the Night (’59), a melancholy May-December romantic drama. Directed by Delbert Mann, it costarred Fredric March and Kim Novak with Albert Dekker, Martin Balsam and Lee Grant supporting.

Chayefsky adapted it from his 1954 Philco-Goodyear live-TV drama, which costarred E.G. Marshall and Eva Marie Saint in the March-Novak roles. It was also presented in ’56 on the Broadway stage with Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands.

Middle of the Night is a dirge — the kind of movie that you can easily respect but otherwise requires a certain effort to get through. Right away I was telling myself “this is good but I’m not enjoying it, but I’m determined to stay with it to the end because it’s a Chayefsky thing and is obviously well acted, especially by March and Novak and Albert Dekker, and because it has some fascinating 1959 footage of midtown Manhattan and yaddah-yaddah.”

It’s about Jerry (March), a recently widowed 56 year-old who runs a Manhattan clothing business, having an affair with Betty (Novak), an insecure 24 year-old divorcee. It’s a grim, grim film — even the off-screen sex feels like a vague downer of some kind. But it also feels honest and even courageous in the sense that relatively few 1950s films painted frank portraits of big-city despair and depression.

When I say “well-acted” I mean according to the mode and style of 1950s acting, which tended to be on the formalistic, speechifying, straight-laced side. (Which is why the internalized styles of Brando, Clift and Dean were seen as huge breakthoughs.) I found myself wishing that Mann had asked everyone to tone it down a bit. Nobody mutters or stammers or speaks softly, or struggles with a thought.

Middle of the Night is about loneliness and guilt and fear of social judgment that you’re not behaving as you should (or as your family wants you to behave), and the opposing notion that you may as well lunge at whatever shot at temporary happiness that comes along because life basically sucks and no one gets out alive.

It feels cleansing to come upon an Eisenhower-era drama that admits that a fair percentage of people are miserable (even or perhaps especially those who are married) and explores this situation in some detail, and with the usual blunt eloquence that you get from any Chayefsky work.

Everyone in the cast (including Lee Grant and Martin Balsam as March’s daughter and son-in-law) walks around with a certain melancholy under their collar, unhappy or at least frustrated but committed to keeping up “appearances.” God, what a self-torturing way to live!

Sad is loss, suffering, cruelty. Sad is “one day the universe rolled out of bed in a bad mood, decided this or that person’s life or career was no longer necessary or compelling, and decided to crush him / her like a cockroach.” It’s also “I had this thing and then lost it, and now it’s gone forever.”

Until I watched this video I’d never had the slightest interest in Rand Paul‘s height. But post-viewing I have to say that my primary observation was “wow, he’s definitely no basketball player.” Google says he’s 5’8″. I can believe it. Right next to Lindsey Graham (5’7″).

You need to deploy a certain kind of musical rhythm to deliver a good speech. Especially if you’re reading off a prompter. Some have a natural gift (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) and some need to learn it, and others can’t find the groove even with years of practice. All to say that Donald Trump‘s delivery last night was flat and robotic. No spirit, no energy, no relish. And it went on for what, 70 minutes or so? The speech itself was the usual bullshit, but he would’ve done much better if he’d winged it.