…is the 1.37 aspect ratio. Debra Paget (still with us at age 91) may have been at her fetching peak in 1959, but boxy aspect ratios have always been and always will be mesmerizing. Look at all that head room…acres of it! And all hail director Fritz Lang, by the way — Metropolis, M, Fury, The Return of Frank James, Man Hunt, Scarlet Street, Cloak and Dagger, Rancho Notorious, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human Desire, While the City Sleeps and, last and least, The Indian Tomb.

[Something has gone really screwy with WordPress coding. The first two words of the next sentence are supposed to read William Holden and not just William, but the coding won’t cooperate.]

William Holden didn’t have to end up dead in Gloria Swanson‘s swimming pool. And he really didn’t have to submit to self-loathing when he began to fall in love with Nancy Olson’s Betty Schaefer, a fellow screenwriter.

Don’t forget that the second half of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard was largely driven by self-revulsion — a young male screenwriter (Holden’s Joseph C. Gillis) feeling morally sickened by his willingness to sexually satisfy a 50 year-old former silent-era star (Swanson’s Norma Desmond) in exchange for a swanky lifestyle.

1950 was one sexually uptight year, you bet. It saw both the release of Sunset Boulevard and the widespread condemnation of Ingrid Bergman for having had Roberto Rossellini’s baby outside of wedlock. In the eyes of the general public there was nothing more odious than unsavory sexual behavior…any kind of hanky panky outside the usual proper, middle-class boundaries.

But Gillis could have have just laid his cards on the table as he explained to Schaefer, “Look, I was broke…the finance company was about to take my car away. I’m not evil…I’ve simply been using Desmond and living off her largesse while I figure out my next move.

“Plus I did what I could to finesse her awful Salome script. What’s so terrible about that? Okay, so I’ve been to bed with her a few times. I’ve laid there while she rides me like a stallion…big deal.”

Schaefer: “Don’t worry about it, Joe. You did what you had to do in order to survive. Now pack your things. You’re moving in with me.”

Gillis: “But we haven’t even been intimate yet. And what about your devoted fiancé, nice-guy Artie (Jack Webb)?”

Schaefer: “I don’t love him, not really. Largely because he’s too possessive plus he’s not from the creative side, and writing is my lifeblood. We’re not a great match. I’ve submitted to his sexual advances on occasion but he doesn’t turn me on. I’ve never once blown him and I’m sorry but that means something. This may sound cold but all’s fair in love and war.”

Did Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (’13), which was filled with brutality and sadism, qualify as black misery porn?

No, it didn’t. Not once did I think to myself, “This is a real downer.” Partly because Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s “Solomon Northup” was and is a great character, and because McQueen’s film amounted to much more than subject matter — it was and is a masterful, deeply affecting human drama.

That said, read this Wikipedia page about Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” (2019) and explain to me how RaMell Ross’s film adaptation (Amazon/MGM., 10.25), due to screen at Telluride and open the New York Film Festival a few weeks later…tell me how this doesn’t feel (from a distance at least) like Black Misery Porn in bold caps.

So why are the owners of Saugatuck Sweets trying to convert heathens and existentialists?

Friendo: “I agree with this a thousand percent. Very glad you wrote it. Something seismic has shifted. To the point that I don’t think comparing the Harris movement to the ‘High Hopes’ JFK campaign is at all out of line. As in 1960, this is about the candidate, but it’s also about something much larger than the candidate — a major pivot from the place we’ve been (the darkness of the Trump years, which absolutely include 2020-2024). You can feel the LARGENESS of the coalition. And the votes of women — of all stripes — are going to add up to a tsunami. Trump, the showbiz con man, suddenly looks like the old, dark, grim establishment.”

“When my mom got into her 80s, we had to deal with periodic medical issues. Fainting. Falls. Broken bones. Luckily, she was in good stead with the local rescue squad because she faithfully attended their crab feast fund-raisers.

“Each time, my siblings and I would move heaven and earth to get her home from whatever hospital she had landed in.

“In 2003, I tried to talk one emergency room doctor into releasing her after 11 hours.

“’I’ll let her out if she can tell me who the president is,’ the doctor said.

“We both looked at my mom, expectantly.

“’George,’ she said.

“I was thrilled; W., it was.

“’George Washington,’ she finished.

“After each episode, I’d proudly tell her internist, Dr. Simon, how we had nursed her back to health.

“‘You don’t understand,’ he said with exasperation. ‘Picture your mother hanging off a ledge, holding on by five fingers. After one of these incidents, she’s hanging on by four fingers. Another incident, three fingers. And so on. You think you’ve gotten her through and you’re starting fresh, but you’re not. It’s cumulative.’

“My mom was a stubborn old bird and she hung on with two fingers, and then one, until she was 97. We gave her morphine at the end, with a bourbon chaser.

“I know that octogenarians and nonagenarians can keep their wits about them. My mom was sharp and funny into her 90s.

“But I also know they begin losing threads of the narrative, and it’s as painful to them as it is to those who care about them.

“At some point, older people find themselves on that ledge. And, as Dr. Simon taught me, each traumatic incident you pull through just leads to another.”

— posted this morning (7.13) at 7 am.

“Kamala Harris would be the first woman president, the first black woman president and the first Asian president. But I don’t vote for who will be the first. I vote for who will win, and for whatever reason Harris has never been popular.

“You can count the number of delegates she won in the 2020 primaries on one hand. As long as that hand has no fingers.

“In three years as vice-president she’s been quieter than an electric car. And like an electric car, your MAGA uncle can’t explain why she fills him with homicidal rage. Sometimes life isn’t fair, and it’s not fair that she isn’t popular.” Alas…

I’ll tell you two reasons why Harris isn’t popular. One, that cackle. And two, those word–salad statements that she’s shared in interviews.

I don’t understand the sudden, mystifying enthusiasm for Jean Negulesco’s Daddy Long Legs, a 1955 Fred Astaire–Leslie Caron musical. I’ve always respected and half-admired this romantic fantasy flick…oh, wait.

It is my unfortunate duty to report that the horror factor in Oz Perkins Longlegs is highly effective for the first…oh, 50 or 55 minutes. Very chilling stuff, in no small part due to Maika Monroe’s riveting performance as a psychic, Clarice Starling-like FBI agent.

But once a certain satanic Marc Bolan fan is arrested and the “trance-inducing doll meets crazy mama” plotting kicks in, it all falls apart. The fucking thing doesn’t add up, makes no sense, isn’t crazy enough, and has nothing going on underneath.

I saw Longlegs with a large crowd at the AMC Lincoln Square, and when the lights came up after the closing credits you could feel the flat vibes. The crowd seemed disgruntled, murmuring “huh?” and “the fuck was that?”

Screen Anarchy ‘s J. Hurtado, Bloody Disgusting’s Meagan Navarro and /Film’s Bill Bria are all apparently delusional or at the very least dishonest.

Edward Douglas:

Jeff Sneider:

In IndieWire‘s “The 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time,” Bill Desowitz (aka BD) writes the following about Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66):

“Before The Wild Bunch, there was Brooks’ marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment: A prestigious film that earned two Oscar nominations for Brooks (director and adapted script) and cinematographer Conrad Hall. While it lacked the stylistic bravado and fatalistic doom of the legendary Sam Peckinpah Western, Brooks’ crack at the genre was action-packed (with a sequence aboard a fast-moving train) and philosophically insightful (with lots of sarcastic quips).

“Oil baron Ralph Bellamy hires four soldiers of fortune to rescue his kidnapped wife (Claudia Cardinale) from revolutionary leader-turned-bandit Jack Palance: Planner Lee Marvin, dynamite handler Burt Lancaster, wrangler Robert Ryan, and archer Woody Strode. Turns out Marvin and Lancaster were friends with Palance, and, sure enough, nothing is what it seems. Filmed mostly on location in Death Valley and near Lake Mead in Nevada, the 87-day shoot required lots of efficient planning and day-for-night shooting by Hall and his crew.”

How the hell does “a marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment” end up in 97th place on a list of 100 great westerns? Oh, and Palance’s Jesus Razq is not a “revolutionary leader-turned-bandit” — he’s a scrappy guerilla fighter. Taking what he and his small army need to survive, but no banditry at all.

A few days I called The Professionals one of three best films of 1966:

Four years ago I posted HE’s list of the 22 greatest westerns, to wit:

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Robert Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.15), an Our Town-ish, passing-pages-of-time film, has been exclusively previewed by Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican.

Robert Mitchum’s career began in 1945, when he was 28. It ignited in ‘47, when he hit 30. And he was 25 when this beach photo was taken.

Mitchum looked so young in 1942 that he was barely recognizable according to “Jeff Bailey” in Out of the Past standards. Some guys peak between their mid 20s and mid 30s and some in their mid teens or early 20s. But if you haven’t peaked by age 25, you’ll never get there.

I decided at a very young age to avoid seeing Hawaii (’66), and I’ve never seen it since. It was directed by George Roy Hill, who was 44 during filming, when the more seasoned Fred Zinnemann withdrew.

As a kid I’d always hated going to church on Sundays, and so I really didn’t want to submit to Max Von Sydow‘s Reverend Abner Hale character, a classic stick-up-his-ass preacher character. I never wanted to know the story or anything, and until today I didn’t know Julie Andrews‘s Jerusha Bromley Hale character dies in Part Two. I only just learned today that Gene Hackman and Carroll O’Connor had costarred. I never knew Bette Midler had a non-speaking background role.

A friend has seen it and swears Richard Harris‘s performance as Capt. Rafer Hoxworth, a whaler, was “really underrated”. The Bluray has both the roadshow version (189 minutes) as well as the general release version (161 minutes),