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After reviewing Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (HBO, now streaming), I began to poke around her filmography and consider her less successful films. I wound up focusing on Richard Quine‘s Sex and the Single Girl (’64), a strenuous, tedious sex farce that nonetheless became a commercial hit. God forgive me but I read the Wiki page, watched the trailer and read two or three reviews.

Wood played a mythical version of “Sex and the Single Girl” author Helen Gurley Brown, who was 42 in actuality while Wood’s version is a couple of decades younger and on the prim and proper side. Tony Curtis played Bob Weston, a reporter for a scandal magazine looking to expose Brown as “a 23 year-old virgin” and therefore a pretender in matters of sexual experience.

The below promotional photo of Curtis and Wood (they both seem to be thinking “oh, dear God…the lack of modesty!”) was aimed at lowest-common-denominator prudes circa 1964, and therefore reflected a safe marketing strategy. It’s nonetheless infuriating if you think about it for five or six seconds.

Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood in a promotional pose for Sex and the Single Girl (’64).

Forget the plot line — if a 39 year-old hound dog (Curtis was born in ’25) was reading “Sex and the Single Girl” his expression would be one of arousal and anticipatory satisfaction, as frank descriptions of the sexual escapades of a moderate-minded single woman would indicate all kinds of randy, rompy activity in his immediate future.

And why in heaven would the author of said book express shock or amazement? Did Quine or the producers believe that movie stars and the characters they play should have at least a glancing relationship with the same reality? Jesus God…Wood had a brief affair with Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray when she was 16 or 17, and eight or nine years later…oh, forget it.

Early to mid ’60s sex farces were deranged, deluded, borderline Satanic.

Good heavens…Catch 22 author Joseph Heller shared screenplay credit on Sex and the Single Girl. Held his nose, cashed the paycheck.

Please read this N.Y. Times review by A.H. Weiler, published on 12.26.64:

“Sex and the Single Girl brought out the single gals in droves and clusters yesterday to the Rivoli and the Trans-Lux 52d Street. One mildewed bachelor, fearing disaster, bravely latched on to a balcony perch and finally exited with a slight stagger.

“It’s not the worst picture ever made, girls and boys. No kidding! Not even with Natalie Wood being archly pursued by Tony Curtis for over two hours and, most fortunately, with Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer bringing up the rear.

“That simpering title — all that’s left of Helen Gurley Brown‘s hope-chest best-seller — still tells the story and flavor of this Warners release. Now there’s a plot, involving Miss Wood as Helen Gurley Brown, a maidenly, 23-year-old research psychologist on advanced marital and pre-marital studies. Yeah, man! And Mr. Curtis is a scandal-magazine writer who blasts Dr. Wood’s (or Brown’s) best-selling book, then stalks her personally, blandly borrowing the problems of his neighbors for soulful couch musings and amorous bait.

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“William Barr’s Perversion of Justice,” a lead editorial by the N.Y. Times editorial board, presents a clear case that Trump’s attorney general is little more than a thug and a boot licker — that he’s “turning the Justice Department into a political weapon for the president” and hasn’t the slightest regard for the rule of law. But for me, the keeper is the illustration by Nicholas Konrad, which elaborates upon a photograph by Times staff photographer T.J. Kirkpatrick.

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad.

You can feel the current right away. Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson‘s The King of Staten Island (Universal, 6.12) is first and foremost a New York extreme-behavior borough movie with tattoos and firemen…that much is obvious. And a real-deal movie about flawed or constipated or otherwise damaged or disappointed human beings trying to ignore or work through their histories and hang-ups and trepidations, and being randomly funny or nervy or guilty or fucked-up in the margins but…aahh, what do I know from a trailer? I’ll tell you what I can sense. This film is not smug or lazy or camped out in its own rectum but ambitious and probing…a go-for-broker.

“You make everyone around you crazy…you gotta get your shit together…time is passing by really quickly.”

Given the likelihood that theatregoing will be a spotty if not verboten activity for the next few months and the Academy’s proclamation that streaming-only films will be eligible for the 2020 Oscars, it seems inevitable that several forthcoming Netflix films (all dated for 2020) stand a better-than-decent chance of becoming hot Oscar contenders, and almost certainly in the case of David Fincher‘s Mank, Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy, Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde and Edoardo Ponti‘s The Life Ahead.

Not to mention Spike Lee‘s Da Five Bloods, George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Charlie Kaufman‘s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Ryan Murphy‘s The Prom, David Dobkin‘s Eurovision, Ben Wheatley‘s Rebecca remake, George Clooney‘s The Midnight Sky and Antonio Campos‘ The Devil All The Time. 12 in all.

By my estimation the first four will almost certainly emerge as Best Picture finalists. I know that the Mank script (penned by Fincher’s dad Jack) is brilliant, and that Fincher and Gary Oldman (as Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz) will do it justice. I suspect that Hillbilly Elegy may strike a chord as a kind of “lefty Hollywood reaches out to rural Bumblefucks to try and understand their plight” type of deal. I haven’t read Blonde but I’ve been hearing good things (as in good, crazy, out there) for years. My enthusiasm for The Life Ahead is strictly gut-level.

By the way it’s just been announced that Da Five Bloods will debut on Netflix five weeks hence — June 12th. So where’s the trailer?

Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz in David Fincher’s Mank.

If and when The Beast says anything about the 2.23.20 murder of Ahmaud Arbery by suburban Georgia vigilantes, and especially the foot-dragging response by local authorities to an obviously unwarranted shooting by gut racists, it’ll be some kind of Charlottesville statement — i.e., respect due process, “there are many good people in Georgia”, killing is bad but black guys shouldn’t grab a white man’s shotgun, blah blah.

This is obviously Trayvon Martin II. The case blew open yesterday with the release of video of the shotgun slaying.

Boilerplate: “On 2.23.20 Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old African American man, was shot dead while running near Brunswick, Georgia. Arbery was unarmed and running on a road, when he was chased and then confronted by three white bubbas with a pickup truck: Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan. The confrontation involved Arbery trying to grab one of the men’s gun, and resulted in Travis fatally shooting Arbery.

Update: Two arrests (the shooter son and the father) happened today. Earlier: An anonymous YouTube video of the shooting was publicized on May 5th on a radio station website, before being reposted on Twitter by the attorney for Arbery’s family; it went viral. After the video’s release, the presiding prosecutor, Atlantic Judicial Circuit District Attorney Tom Durden, said a grand jury would decide whether charges would be brought.”

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Said before, saying again: I harbor no ill feelings about Val Kilmer. The opposite, in fact.

I helped report that “Psycho Kilmer” Entertainment Weekly article that ran in mid ’96, but I had a nice chat with him at a party he threw at his home back in ’04 or thereabouts. (He had just finished working on Oliver Stone‘s Alexander.) I ran into Kilmer again in the fall of ’11 while having lunch with Descendants costar Judy Greer. We waved and smiled as Kilmer sat at a nearby table. When I tried to pay the bill the waitress told me the check had been taken care of by “that man sitting over there,” except Kilmer had left by that point.

In Taffy Brodesser-Akner‘s “What Happened to Val Kilmer?” (N.Y. Times, 5.6.120), the 60 year-old Kilmer asks, “You don’t think we will be going to Cannes? How about the Olympics? The Olympics has never been canceled except in time of world war.” You can’t cancel the world, right? Bad things happen, but you still need art.

Val Kilmer as captured last month by N.Y. Times photograoher Jeff Minton.

TBA: “And I thought: Right? Right! You still need art. You still need forward momentum. You still need to believe that all your effort wasn’t for nothing, that we could — we will — survive a dark moment in history and that when that happens, we won’t be left without the things that made those moments decipherable and meaningful and therefore tolerable.

“The world outside had seemed to be getting so, so bad for so, so long, and this was the first whiff of overarching hope and positivity that I’d witnessed in I couldn’t remember how many months or years now — so much so that I almost couldn’t identify it when I saw it. The last glowing embers of hope coming from Val Kilmer? The movie hunk of my youth, who disappeared unceremoniously and now presented with an entirely different appearance and a bizarre accounting of where he’d been?

“But there was something familiar about it, like a faint knocking that came from inside me: It was the special kind of optimism that maybe only the faithful have, the enduring belief that some force will come along and save us from the centrifuge of despair we’ve found ourselves in. When is the last time you saw that up close?

Later in the piece: “Perhaps we had created the coronavirus out of our fear and wickedness — children in cages, the rich hoarding wealth; perhaps we had only the suggestion of a virus. I grew up with too many messianics in my household. I found this kind of thing too easy to believe, if only because it was more believable than the fact that in 2020, my young, healthy colleagues were in the hospital, the streets were bare, I was stuck inside my house and nobody knew how long that might go on for. It was so hard to parse all the fear that permeated society now — what was real and what had come as a result of our own hysteria. During the day I’d think that it was the fear that was hurting us most.

“But at night my husband would shake me to wake me up because I’d been crying in my sleep. More quickly than I could have imagined, the world took on the hallucinogenic quality of right before you fall asleep, when everything is outsize and nothing makes sense. The margins on my suspension of disbelief started to close in on themselves, and the borders of things began to diminish, and now the world seemed like a word you stare at so long that it becomes nonsense.”

The only title that would even begin to make sense would be Lick The Blood Off My Hands, but that’s a job for a dog and not Joan Fontaine.

It apparently never occured to director Norman Foster, producer Richard Vernon, screenwriters Leonardo Bercovici and Walter Bernstein or original author Gerald Butler that nobody is ever going to kiss the blood off anyone’s hands. Even if the blood is freshly spilt kissing the bloodied area wouldn’t remove it — at best you’ll create little lip-pucker impressions in the region of the wound. Blood always dries quickly and turns a dark reddish brown, and once that happens even dogs wouldn’t be able to lick it clean.

I’ve seen most of the major ’40s noirs, but I never came close to this puppy because of Butler’s title.

Joe Biden‘s vice-president can’t shouldn’t be chosen for cosmetic or charismatic reasons. The right vp would have to be ready to step into the Oval Office on a moment’s notice, and with Uncle Joe you have to consider what could happen in a year or two or three, given his age and whatnot.

For me the ideal partner would be Elizabeth Warren, but at the same time I’m not sure she’s the best choice from an electoral perspective, as her Democratic primary campaign never really connected and she never polled well in battleground states.

Kamala Harris is my second choice, and Susan Rice my third. Stacey Abrams is brilliant and extra-articulate and forceful — you tell me if she’d be a knockout campaigner or major ticket enhancer. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer seems a bit wet behind the ears but maybe not.

It takes a certain amount of character and maturity to simultaneously walk and chew gum about a certain film — to be able to disagree with the content (or some aspect of it) but at the same time admire the chops or the expertise with which it casts a certain emotional spell.

If wokesters disagree with what a film is saying, they’ll write it off without a second thought. Serious cineastes take a broader view. They may not respect or even despise where a film is coming from but the reputable ones can’t reject it entirely if it hits the emotional mark, or if it’s superbly made.

The oldest example is Leni Reifenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will — reprehensible content, mesmerizing technique.

A recent example is Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book, which a chorus of cranky Shallow Hals derided for daring to operate within the realm of 1962 and thereby not in synch with 21st Century wokester values. I knew all that, but there was no denying that Farrelly’s film was emotionally affecting — that the connection between Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali‘s characters carried a kindly, comforting current.

Jean Luc Godard was probably the first serious film demon to acknowledge this dichotomy, In a Cahiers du Cinema piece Godard admitted to being seized with affection for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers when he picks up Natalie Wood and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” This is a “dishonest” moment from a 20th Century perspective as Ethan is a racist sonuvabitch, and there’s no way he’s going to renounce his gut feelings at the very last minute. But for Godard, the moment was transcendent.

I revisited this idea yesterday when I re-posted a Gunga Din riff from 12.24.17: “Otis Ferguson‘s review of this 1939 adventure flick called it a racist and arrogant celebration of British colonial rule. And yet I’ve been emotionally touched and roused by this film all my life. The last half-hour of Gunga Din is perfect, but it ends with Sam Jaffe‘s Indian ‘bhisti’ basking in post-mortem nirvana over having been accepted as a British soldier.” An appalling idea when you think about it, but it works.

I’ve always hated the shallow fantasy notion of superheroes and the corporate, FX-dependent theology of Marvel and D.C. films, but from time to time I’ve been surprised to find myself buying into the bullshit, Avengers: Endgame being the most recent example.

A couple of times I’ve mentioned how Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St. Louis says the wrong things by (a) ignoring the dark underside of Charles Lindbergh — “a nativist anti-Semite who admired the fascist state and urged the United States to stay out of the war because Nazi victory was certain,” as an HE commenter once put it — and (b) shamelessly embracing the idea of heavenly assistance just before the exhausted Lindbergh (James Stewart) is about to land his plane at Le Bourget field in Paris. He starts to lose it — freaking and whimpering over a sudden inability to focus on the basics of landing a plane. Then he thinks back to a “flying prayer” that a priest had passed on, and he blurts out, “Oh, God, help me.” And of course he lands safely. It’s a cheap Sunday-school trick, but Stewart’s acting and Franz Waxman‘s music sells it.

Leonardo DiCaprio was 19 or 20 when this MTV chat (posted a couple of weeks ago, allegedly taped on 2.5.95) happened. He says he was in Paris to finish shooting The Basketball Diaries, but how could that be when Diaries premiered at the ’05 Sundance Film Festival a couple of weeks earlier? He more likely was there to begin shooting Agnieszka Holland‘s Total Eclipse, right?

LDC’s actual quote about youth (at 4:38) is “I’ll never get to be young again…this is my time to be young.”

This reminds me of Mr. Robinson’s remark to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, after learning that Ben has just turned 21. Mr. Robinson (lighting a cigar): “That’s a helluva good age to be. Because Ben…?” Braddock: “Sir?” Mr Robinson: “You’ll never be young again.”

After living in this town for 37 years and being enough of an Alfred Hitchcock junkie to have visited Cropduster Junction four years ago, you’d think I would’ve gotten around to eyeballing Hitch’s legendary Bel Air home at 10957 Bellagio Road. But I never did until last night around 7:30 pm.

It’s a spacious, well-shaded ranch-style home with a huge sycamore tree in the front yard, but with way too much paved concrete in the front and side areas. The cement makes it look like a small country club that expects heavy in-and-out traffic.

The home is right on top of a Bel Air golf course fairway, which is cool, but last night’s atmosphere was ruined by some asshole on the other side of the golf course blasting a Brittany Spears tune.

Hitch died here in 1980 — his wife Alma passed two years later.

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Tara Reade‘s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden is offically kaputski. It ended this morning with a story by AP”s Alexandra Jaffe, Don Thompson and Stephen Braun. It says the following: “Tara Reade, the former Senate staffer who alleges Joe Biden sexually assaulted her 27 years ago, says she filed a limited report with a congressional personnel office that did not explicitly accuse him of sexual assault or harassment.

“’I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty and it made me uncomfortable,’ Reade said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press. ‘I know that I was too scared to write about the sexual assault.’

“Reade said she described her issues with Biden but ‘the main word I used — and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment — I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’

“Reade described the report after the AP discovered additional transcripts and notes from its interviews with Reade last year in which she says she ‘chickened out’ after going to the Senate personnel office. The AP interviewed Reade in 2019 after she accused Biden of uncomfortable and inappropriate touching. She did not raise allegations of sexual assault against Biden until this year, around the time he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”

Plus she’s cancelled the Fox News interview that was to have happened tomorrow (i.e., Sunday).

Pally to HE: “She’s such a fucking liar.”
HE to Pally: “If she didn’t complain about sexual assault through official channels in ‘93, this whole thing is OVER. ‘Chickening out’ doesn’t cut it.”
Pally to HE: “I was thinking about the actual thing she described, the assault taking place in some sheltered, semi-public area. Imagine being in public with ANYONE and sticking your fingers inside the woman — that would NEVER happen. In private, yes, but not in public. Her original story is like ‘I wasn’t wearing stockings because it was hot.’ She left that detail in — as if she’d thought about it and had to explain why he could have such easy access. Had she been telling the truth — if Biden had actually assaulted her — he would have invited her to his private office or a hotel and then starting kissing her, etc. Even Weinstein knew that. Practiced predators know they have to hide what they’re doing.”

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