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My favorite moment in Platoon is when Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and King (Keith David) are talking about their U.S. backgrounds and core identities. I don’t remember it verbatim but King asks Taylor if he comes from a wealthy family and Taylor sidesteps a response. Soon after Taylor offers some kind of poetic or idealistic reason for having volunteered for Vietnam duty (“I wanted to see the injustice and conflict first-hand”), and King says, “Well, you gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.”

I fell for King at that very moment.

I naturally loved Willem Dafoe‘s Elias (and so did Martin Scorsese — soon after he offered Dafoe the lead role in The Last Temptation of Christ because of it) and identified with the potheads. And I hated the rugged whiskey-drinkers (Tom Berenger‘s Staff Sergeant Barnes, Kevin Dillon‘s Bunny, John C. McGinley‘s Sergeant O’Neill).

I’ve seen Platoon six or seven times, but I never once spotted Johnny Depp (and he’s definitely in it, according to credits).

The Big Sleep‘s Agnes Louzier, the bitter femme fatale who once claimed to have never met up with a really smart guy, never one who was “smart all the way around the course,” passed a week ago at age 96.

In real life Agnes’s name was Sonia Darrin. The Big Sleep was Darrin’s only significant film, although she did appear in the semi-respectable Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (’43).

Wiki excerpt: Darrin costarred in 12 films between ’41 and ’50. She married William “Bill” Reese, a theater set designer and marketing services company president. The couple had four children (three sons and a daughter), and lived in Manhattan. Their youngest son is the former child actor Mason Reese.

Darrin lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for over 50 years.

Agnes Louzier: “A half-smart guy, that’s what I always draw. Never once a man who’s smart all the way around the course. Never once.”
Philip Marlowe: “I hurt you much, sugar?”
Agnes: “You and every other man I’ve ever met.”

Let’s say you intend to produce a narrative film about the late Scotty Bowers — bisexual pimp to the stars in the ’40s and ’50s, author of a tell-all book about his sexual adventures and the subject of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood.

Let’s also say that you’ve managed to persuade gentle erotic mood-spinner Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) to direct your Scotty film. But you still need to find the right screenwriter[s] to make Scotty’s story into an engaging, playable thing.

In all honesty, would you hire Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, a couple of edgy straight guys who’ve done little more than wallow in adolescent, arrested-development stoner comedies since they broke through 13 or so years ago…would you hire Rogen and Goldberg to write your Scotty movie, a fair amount of which would have to include some guy-on-guy action…dicks, boners and such?

If your answer is “uhm, no…that’s probably not a great idea,” I would share your viewpoint. If your response is “yeah, hiring the writers of Longshot sounds intriguing and could definitely work,” I’d love to hear an explanation.

The apparent intention is to make Scotty’s story into…what, a satirical period comedy? Or at least to goof it up to some degree? I’m not saying Scotty Bowers didn’t live his life with a certain twinkle in his eye, but Rogen-Goldberg never wrote a line or a gag that didn’t reflect stoner Millennial mindsets and attitudes. Plus their sexual conveyances have always been unrelentingly straight. How are they supposed to make bisexual currents in 1940s and ’50s Hollywood come alive?

Just to clarify, HE strongly approves of Guadagnino directing but is totally effing stunned about Rogen-Goldberg writing the script, as reported earlier today by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming.

If you were Jack L. Warner in late 1945 and planning to produce Night and Day, a film about the life of Cole Porter, who would you hire to write it? Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, right?

Fleming reports that Tyrnauer and Altimeter Films partner Corey Reeser will produce alongside Rogen and Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures. Searchlight’s Richard Ruiz will oversee the project.

Even if I didn’t know that Samuel Bronston and Henry Hathaway‘s Circus World (’64) was a financial calamity (North American gross of $1.6 million vs. production costs of $9 million) that ended Bronson’s high-rolling career…even if I didn’t know this I could still smell a misconceived effort from the trailer.

That awful narration, the flatness of tone and lighting, the obviousness…God!

The idea was to somehow recreate the box-office appeal of Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth (’52). It didn’t happen, in large part due to lead actors who didn’t blend.

56 during filming in ’63, John Wayne had become too bulky and too past-his-prime** to play Rita Hayworth‘s circus impresario lover, and Hayworth wasn’t doing too well herself with her alcohol problem and (alleged) early-onset Alzheimers.

No, I’ve never seen Circus World. I might give it a shot if I could see it gratis, but otherwise I’m cool with reading the bad reviews and imagining the shortcomings.

** Duke was also too old to play Angie Dickinson‘s boyfriend in Rio Bravo (’59), which was shot in ’58 when he was 51. Ditto Capucine‘s lover in North To Alaska (’60), which rolled film when he was 52 or thereabouts.

Pre-dawn (5:35 am) in San Felipe (7.27.20) vs. similar vista used for opening credits of Mike Nichols’ Catch–22 (sequence shot in Guaymas, Mexico), which opened on 6.21.70.

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Posted from lounge chair on outdoor patio in 94-degree heat, and with shitty wifi to boot:

Four essential performances were given by the late, great Olivia de Havilland: (a) Maid Marian in Michael Curtiz’s Robin Hood (‘37) , (b) Melanie Wilkes in Gone With The Wind (‘39), (c) the disturbed victim in Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (‘48). and (d) the vaguely gullible woman-of-means in William Wyler’s The Heiress (‘49).

There were other sturdy performances, but these four were the keepers. Have I seen every noteworthy Olivia de Havilland performance? No. The truth is that I found her virtuousness (which was always a central eiement) deflating and…I’ll leave it at that.

She was a fine, classy, top-tier thesp, for sure, but I gradually chose to regard OdH as more of a maidly vibe or a classic chastity brand than an actress for all moods and seasons — the intrepid woman of Paris, pushing on, the never-say-die trooper, sometimes riding her bicycle and occasionally speaking with THR’s Scott Feinberg.

This may sound like a putdown, but she never conveyed even the faintest hint of eroticism…not the slightest sniff. This is what almost all leading actors and actresses do, after all — they invite you to sense the aroma. Nor could you imagine her sister, Joan Fontaine, succumbing to any such impulse. Okay, perhaps Joan occasionally thought about intimacy but that’s all. My sense is that Olivia, by the measure of her screen performances, never even did that.

OdH passed this morning (or last night) at age 104. Sweet dreams, gentle waters.

Regis Philbin, John Saxon, Olivia de Havilland — the trilogy is complete.

Early this morning Jill Blake conveyed delight after turning a daughter (or some younger person) on to To Catch A Thief, particularly in response to the younger person’s request to see a film with Cary Grant “running around.”

Being a special kind of asshole, I jumped in with an anecdotal mansplainer. I pointed out that Grant doesn’t “run” anywhere in that 1955 Alfred Hitchcock classic but “scampers” cat-like across French rooftops. For this I received a hale and hearty “fuck off!”, which needed an extra “douchebag!” to really drive the point home.

It was impossible to survey the flotsam & jetsam frolicking and lounging around the historic, all-wooden, once-transporting Hotel del Coronado yesterday and say to myself, “Life in these United States is just as layered and fascinating and distinctive — socially, fashionably, politically — as it was 100 years ago.”

We stayed last night in San Diego’s Holiday Inn Express, which is aesthetically acceptable and atmospherically fine except — except! — for the young drunks next door who were quacking like ducks and bellowing like sea lions way past bedtime hour. We called the desk three or four times, and I guess the last warning conveyed by security (“If you don’t shut up we’re going to evict your ass”) finally got through. But what an ordeal.

The same kind of bloated manatees I was observing at the Hotel Del Coronado were, like us, staying in less pricey digs back in the city. I couldn’t bring myself to part with $300 or $350 plus tax for a HDC room…I just couldn’t.

I grew up and came of age amongst proper (okay, mostly proper) citizens of Rome for the most part. But ill-mannered, crudely spoken, Jabba-sized, poorly dressed barbarians have since stormed the gates, and this, as that ancient Pelican Walter Cronkite used to say, is “how it is” these days.

I criticize no one individual. I simply report and speak the anthropological truth.

In terms of immaculate black-and-white viewing pleasure, nothing beats Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out (47). I’ve been re-watching it every three or four years for the last couple of decades, but the Bluray versions (I happen to own an eight-year-old Region 2 Network Bluray) are just breathtaking…every glistening, perfectly lighted frame could and should be hung in an art gallery. It really doesn’t get any better than this.

Robert Krasker (1913-1971), the Australian dp, won an Oscar for his brilliant capturing of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (’49), but his Odd Man Out cinematography is the grander achievement, I feel… more pictorially transporting on top of sadder and more poignant when you factor in everything else. Krasker was an absolute devotee of film noir and German Expressionism, and I would go so far as to call his work magical in this instance. Each and every shot is on the level of “my God, look at the snowflakes and shadows and the gentle illumination of lamplight…amazing! And look at that! And that!” And it never stops.

The Reed classics aside, Krasker’s other credits include Laurence Olivier‘s Henry V, David Lean‘s Brief Encounter, Irving Rapper‘s Another Man’s Poison, Robert Rossen‘s Alexander the Great, Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd and Anthony Mann‘s El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Krasker’s Third Man Oscar was historic — he was the first Australian cinematographer to be so honored.

Last weekend I watched Richard Attenborugh, William Goldman and Joseph E. Levine‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), which I hadn’t seen since it opened 43 years ago. I was surprised to discover that despite its somewhat lackluster reputation (certainly among the critics of the day) that it plays half decently.

As ambitious in its attempt to capture the failure of Operation Market Garden as the 1944 Allied military campaign itself, A Bridge Too Far was an all-star WWII epic in the tradition of The Longest Day. Both are based on books by Cornelius Ryan.

The difference is that ABTF explores a downish note of defeat and disillusion and mismanagement rather than hard-won victory, and as such can be seen as the first military fuckup movie in a long series of such films, the kind in which the good guys (i.e., our side) get their asses flanked and kicked and shot all to hell, and are left wondering “what the hell happened?”

The Outpost, Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers — all of these films owe a debt to A Bridge Too Far, just as Attenborough’s film owes a debt in return to Lewis Milestone‘s somewhat glum and bitter Pork Chop Hill and you tell-me-what-else.

American forces engage the enemy for shaky or questionable or dubious reasons and the troops involved get pounded all to hell and nearly wiped out. Those who survive are left shattered, exhausted, gutted. “Well, we fucked up but at least we learned something…or did we?”

There are so many famous faces in A Bridge Too Far — James Caan, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, a cigar-chomping Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Maximilian Schell (as a thoughtful and humane German officer), Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, a baby-faced Ryan O’Neal, Liv Ullmann, etc. There’s no escaping a presumption that these performances are entirely about the paycheck, and so it’s hard if not impossible to invest in the various stories and vignettes.

And yet I was taken by Redford’s action cameo as Maj. Julian Cook, famed for leading a crazy military crossing of the Waal river during Operation Market Garden. And I related to Connery’s Major General Roy Urquhart, and Caan’s Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun (based on Charles Dohun). And two or three others.

You have to give Attenborough credit for managing such a vast army of actors and extras along with hundreds of planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps…no miniatures and obviously no CG. Not a bad film. It doesn’t meet anyone’s definition of “great” but is certainly approvable.

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The moment has come for Get Out champion Bob Strauss to weigh in on the recent Kanye West fruit-loop thing. This is a dire situation, and as far as I can discern Strauss is the only man in Hollywood who can speak to it with any authority. The night before last Kanye referenced Get Out when he claimed that wife Kim Kardashian was en route to Wyoming to “lock me up” on Monday night. (This was a day after the South Carolina Harriet Tubman meltdown…right?) Quote: “Kim was trying to fly to Wyoming with a doctor to lock me up like on the movie Get Out because I cried about saving my daughter’s life yesterday. Everybody knows the movie Get Out is about me.”

Politically speaking the great Charlie Chaplin was a left-leaning humanitarian and a self-described peacemonger who became entangled in the raw end of the anti-Communist fervor of the late 1940s, and out of this conflict he eventually left this country for Switzerland — an exile given the boot.

In ’47 Chaplin angrily denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in response Representative John E. Rankin, who helped establish HUAC, declared in June 1947 that Chaplin’s “very life in Hollywood is detrimental to the moral fabric of America…[if he is deported] his loathsome pictures can be kept from before the eyes of the American youth…he should be deported and gotten rid of at once.”

Chaplin’s delivery of the final speech in The Great Dictator (’40) is too agitated, too shrill. He should have dialed it down a couple of notches. And yet portions of the speech are a close match with a certain John Lennon song that some are saying should replace Francis Scott Key‘s “The Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem.

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