How did Anthony Quinn feel when he first saw this poster in ’61 and knew that for the rest of his life certain movie fans would associate him with the idea of seething rage and muskrat teeth? And it’s all imagined by the illustrator. There isn’t a single scene in The Guns of Navarone in which Quinn gets angry at anyone, much less flashes his teeth. During most of the film he plays it steely and sullen. The one exception is an Act Two scene when he pretends to be a coward, moaning and whimpering and crawling around on the floor in front of Nazi captors.
I can’t find the link, but I’m 96% certain that “way back when” I read a print interview with Cher that touched on her relationship with Gregg Allman, and that she told the interviewer that when she and Allman first met sometime in early ’75 “I’d never heard of him.”
The Allman Brothers Band burst onto the rock scene in ’69, and had become stone legends by late ’70. Duane’s motorcycle-accident death (10.29.71) was a huge tragedy. The Eat A Peach album (’72) was huge. They toured all over. Not knowing the Allmans was like not knowing who Elton John or Linda Ronstadt or the Eagles were.
Cher had been rich and famous since the mid ’60s, and living in her Sony and Cher Comedy Hour realm between ’71 and ’74. I’m not 100% sure about the above-referenced quote, but if Cher said it it’s worth contemplating, I think.
I’m not a big pie guy as a rule. I’ll have an occasional slice of pumpkin pie around the holidays, but that’s about it. I nonetheless ordered apple pie a la mode last night at Barney’s Beanery…an idea that hit me out of the blue. The vanilla ice cream was perfect, but I went into…well, you’d have to call it shock when I saw that the pie was covered with melted cheese.
Call me ignorant and naive, but until last night I’d never even heard of cheese-melt apple pie. I knew right away that I couldn’t even think about eating it. Or sampling it. I was gradually persuaded to take a single bite, and I couldn’t really taste the cheese. The sugared apple stuffing was overpowering.
Our waitress informed us that cheese-melt apple pie has been served by Barney’s Beanery since it opened 101 years ago.
Research: “In 1998, a reader of the Los Angeles Times complained that ‘[a column] about cheese and apple pie left me feeling like I live in the twilight zone… I have so far never encountered American friends or acquaintances who even want to try this.” When asked whether he ate pie with cheese in his home state of Mississippi, one chef said: “Oh, God no! They’d put you away in a home.”
“The idea appears to have originated in England, where all sorts of fillings were added to pies. At some point, the 17th-century trend of adding dairy-based sauces to pies morphed into a tradition of topping them with cheese. For instance, in Yorkshire, apple pie was served with Wensleydale, which is likely how the phrase ‘an apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze’ began.
“According to The Mystic Seaport Cookbook: 350 Years of New England Cooking, New England settlers brought the idea behind these Yorkshire pies with them, but instead of Wensleydale, they began using cheddar.”
A 10-year-old Palestinian girl breaks down while talking to MEE after Israeli air strikes destroyed her neighbour's house, killing 8 children and 2 women#Gaza#Palestine#Israelpic.twitter.com/PWXsS032F5
In the comment thread for “Five Things” (5.14), which was all about the superhack career of Richard Donner, someone mentioned The Omen (’76) and I jumped in with the following:
“The Omen is a good creepy film of its type. The best thing about it is Jerry Goldsmith‘s score. I would have drowned Damian after realizing what he is, but that’s me. I realize, of course, that unless Gregory Peck and Lee Remick remain in a denial cocoon for years on end there’s no movie.”
Because of that posting I re-watched this 1976 film last night, and almost immediately I was scolding myself for calling it “a good creepy film of its type.” It’s not — it’s actually a very stupid film that was made in a lazy, half-assed manner with mostly awful dialogue, and was burdened by idiotic plotting.
The Omen‘s success was based upon a general audience belief in mythical religious bullshit, and it launched itself upon the lore of The Exorcist (’73), which was and is a much better film. So please accept my apology for saying what I said. I don’t know what I was thinking.
With the exception of three good scenes — the nanny hangs herself during Damian’s birthday party, the dogs in the graveyard scene with Peck and David Warner, and Warner gets his head sliced off by a flying pane of glass — The Omen is a painfully mediocre effort.
Almost every scene summons the same reaction: “Why isn’t this better…why didn’t they rewrite the dialogue?…God, this wasn’t finessed at all.”
I came to really hate the tiny, beady eyes of that young actor who played Damian — Harvey Spencer Stephens (who’s now 51 years old).
The middle-aged, warlock-eyed priest who gets impaled by a falling javelin of some sort — why did he just stand there like a screaming idiot as he watched the rod plunge toward him?
Why didn’t Peck and Remick simply fire that awful demonic nanny (Billie Whitelaw)?
Why didn’t Peck just buy a pistol and shoot that demonic Rotweiler right between the eyes, and in fact shoot all the other Rotweilers in the graveyard?
As I mentioned Friday, The Omen depends upon Peck and Remick refusingtoconsidertheobvious during most of the running time. Refusing to reach for an umbrella, wear a raincoat or take shelter during a thunderstorm…that kind of idiocy.
During his career heyday (’45 to ’64) Peck mostly played one smart, restrained, rational-minded character after another. (His roles in Spellbound, Duel in the Sun and Moby Dick were the exceptions.) The Omen was the first time Peck was called upon to play a stuffed-shirt moron — a denialist of the first order. Okay, he starts to wake up during the final half-hour, but it’s truly painful to watch an actor known for dignity and rectitude and sensible behavior undermine the idea of intelligent assessment at every turn.
For some odd reason the footage of Rome made me almost weep with nostalgia for that city — I haven’t been there since ’17.
I could watch The Exorcist once a year for the rest of my life, but I’ll never watch another Omen film again…ever. I was truly angry at myself for wasting 111 minutes of my life.
In an interview with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Robert De Niro spoke about his recently injured leg. “I tore my quad** somehow,” he said. “It’s just a simple stepping over something and I just went down. The pain was excruciating and now I have to get it fixed.
“But it happens, especially when you get older. You have to be prepared for unexpected things. But it’s manageable.”
De Niro said the injury wouldn’t affect his performance as bad-guy cattleman William Hale in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently rolling. “[Hale is] pretty much a sedentary character in a way,” he said. “I don’t move around a lot, thank God. So we’ll manage. I just have to get the procedure done and keep it straight in a certain position and let it heal.”
And so the point of this riff: Please name the most vividly etched sedentary characters in the history of cinema, starting with Jabba the Hutt and moving on down. How about Orson Welles‘ Cardinal Woolsey in A Man For All Seasons (’66)? Or the supreme Martian commander in Invaders From Mars (green head, face of a Mexican woman, communicates with lizard-like pincers or tentacles)? Maybe the iron-lung guy in The Big Lebowski? Or William Hickey‘s Don Corrado in Prizzi’s Honor.
Only full sedentary characters qualify. Sidney Greenstreet sits like an iron Buddha statue 95% of the time in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but now and then he gets up and walks into or out of a room — that’s a disqualifier.
One, presuming that Bob Wilson and his wife Julia (William Shatner, Christine White) are flying coach, it’s amazing how much breathing and leg room average folks had on flights in the early ’60s. Two, the windows have sliding plaid curtains…luxury! Three, a stewardess asks the distressed Shatner if he needs a blanket — it’s been years since I’ve seen blankets in coach (even those shitty synthetic ones). Four, before today I never realized that the gremlin was played by Nick Cravat, who was Burt Lancaster‘s lifelong friend and acrobat partner. And five, Richard Donner directed mostly big-budget features but “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was a more effective ride than almost everything he did for the big screen (except for Lethal Weapon, his peak effort).
Unable to recall or even investigate where this remote horse ranch in the Belizean jungle was located, or the name of the couple who ran it. The guy was from Texas — I remember that much. And the howler monkeys in the high trees. And the fact that we went swimming in a lake, and under a waterfall. Fall of ’90, 30 and 1/2 years ago.
In yesterday’s riff about the trailer for Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater (Focus Features, 7.30), I shared reservations about Matt Damon‘s “yokelish Midwesterner who probably loves Donald Trump and resembles those generic beastly types who stormed the Capitol.
“I’m sorry but I don’t care for heavy-set fellows who swallow their words…vaguely surly, low-key clock punchers who drawl ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’ and still insist the election was stolen…I love hanging with super-smart reporters who work for the Boston Globe, but not Jesse Plemons gutty-wuts like this.”
To which Correcting Jeff wrote, “At least Wells owns being an ass.”
HE to Correcting Jeff: “In what way exactly is it asinine to say what I said above?
“Audiences like certain characters and they dislike others. It’s a common, natural process. Basic human appeal, intelligence, decency, spunk, charisma, relatability, compelling energy…these things and more go into determining whether you want to hang with a certain character for the length of a feature film or not.
“I was persuaded by the Stillwater trailer that I don’t especially want to hang with Damon’s burly hinterland character. Based on the lack of above-mentioned qualities. How exactly does this make me an ass?
“If McCarthy and Damon had simply agreed before shooting that Damon’s overly performed bumblefuck character would be too much of an obstacle for people like me, and that the wiser course would be to have Damon drop 15 or 20 pounds and play the guy as if he’s Matt Damon, the movie star, only from Oklahoma — a guy with an intelligent appreciation of the life’s ins and outs, no blue-collar baseball hat, no swallowing of consonants, no cornbelt accent — if they’d done this the movie would be A LOT more appealing.
“I don’t want to spend two hours with a schlubby guy whose friends, one imagines, could have easily stormed the U.S. Capitol on 1.6.21.”
My Warner Archive Bluray of They Won’t Believe Me (’47) arrived yesterday; I watched it last night. Produced by Joan Harrison, written by Jonathan Latimer and directed by Irving Pichel, this RKO release has acquired a reputation in some circles as a tasty, extra-dark potboiler — required viewing if you’re any kind of film-noir fanatic.
It’s dark, all right, and I’m not sorry I saw it, but it’s a completely unbelievable, ridiculously over-plotted piece about a doomed nogoodnik — Robert Young‘s slimey, squishy, wholly unsympathetic Larry Ballentine**. The plot is mainly about how Ballentine hoodwinks, strings along and betrays three women — a gold-digger (Susan Hayward), a journalist (Jane Greer) and his rich, endlessly forgiving wife (Rita Johnson).
It makes no sense that Hayward, Greer and Johnson are each in love with Young — he’s obviously a waste of skin. If “they won’t believe me” is Ballentine’s lament, the obvious reply is “why the hell should they?”
The only aspect that really works (in a WTF, blunt-trauma way) is the bizarre ending when Ballentine, on trial for killing his wife Greta, tries to commit suicide by leaping out of a courtroom window on the fifth or sixth floor, just before the verdict is announced. A trigger-happy marshall shoots and kills Ballentine as he reaches the window ledge. And then they read the verdict.
I’ve honestly never disliked a lead character as much as this, and Young’s performance is no help. He’s playing an absolute cipher and a cad — a Shallow Hal with no smarts, no passion, no cunning, no wit, no sense of irony about himself, no style. Robert Mitchum‘s sardonic private detective in Out of the Past is shady but likable — Young is detestable. Within minutes you’re rooting for his demise. It’s no surprise that They Won’t Believe Me flopped.
If your idea of an A-level noir is Out of the Past, Double Indemnity or The Big Sleep, rest assured that They Won’t Believe Me is at best a C.
The 4K transfer has been nicely finessed — the 74 year-old film looks as good as it ever will. A nice silvery sheen, excellent black levels, finely detailed.
I was so bored I began thinking about Young’s actual life, and how he was plagued by alcoholism and depression despite a career that enjoyed a fair amount of comfort from playing the title roles in two popular, long-running TV shows, Father Knows Best (’54 to ’60) and Marcus Welby (’69 to ’76). The poor guy tried to commit suicide when he was 84. (Who does that?) He passed in ’98 at age 91.
Roughly five weeks ago I caught a trailer for Taylor Sheridan‘s Those Who Wish Me Dead (Warner Bros./HBO Max, 5.14), and it sure seemed like a no-go and a no-sale.
“An aggressively produced, go-for-broke action exploitation flick,” I noted, “shot and edited in a slam-bang, visually searing, Bruce Willis-in-the-’90s way…loaded with jet fuel and cranked WAY TOO HIGH (black-attired bad guy sadists firing automatic weapons at a woman and a kid in the middle of firestorm?). And if you believe, by the way, that a beautiful, super-rich, fashion-magazine icon slash Brad Pitt-ballbuster with her own personal pedicurist can be (or ever could be) a Montana firefighter…well, that’s up to you.”
If you read between the lines of David Rooney‘s review of the film itself, posted this morning in The Hollywood Reporter, it’s obvious he has concerns.
Excerpt #1: “If you can get past the miraculously dewy complexion and on-point smoky-eye look of Angelina Jolie as a toughened Montana Forest Service firefighter…”
Excerpt #2: “[Then again] her role provides scope for gnawing demons, maternal warmth and kick-ass survival skills — including some cool retribution with an ax.”
Excerpt #3: “[Pic] doesn’t match the finely etched characterizations and contemplative writing of his original screenplay for Hell or High Water, but even if the genre quilting isn’tentirelyseamless, it’s a ruggedly entertaining throwback to studio movies of the ’90s about real people navigating hairy life-or-death situations.”
Excerpt #4: “Production designer Neil Spisak [has created] an artificialforestset with a creek running through it, as well as watchtowers.”
The great actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd passed earlier today at age 106.
I was so taken by his performance as a blind but very skilled English professor in Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes that I asked to chat with him. Two encounters happened, both in September ’05. We did a phoner, and then I was invited to take snaps at his Mandeville Canyon home. We talked for another hour or so.
Norman Lloyd, 90, is in only three scenes in In Her Shoes and is on screen maybe seven or eight minutes, but his performance is one of the most poignant notes in a film that has more than a few of them.
It’s not one of those burn-through-the-screen performances (along the lines of, say, Beatrice Straight‘s fight-with-Bill-Holden scene in Network). It’s more like a coaxer. You can sense Lloyd’s intellectual energy and zest for life despite his character’s withered state, and you can feel and admire the tenderness he shows to Maggie …tenderness mixed in with a little classroom discipline.
He plays a sightless retired college professor who prods Diaz’s Maggie character, who is dyslexic and can’t read a billboard slogan without stumbling, into reading poetry to him — specifically a poem about loss and emotional guardedness by Elizabeth Bishop.
At first Maggie is reluctant, then she agrees to read to him…slowly, almost painfully…I have a dyslexic friend and she doesn’t read this slowly…but she gradually improves.
Then Lloyd prods her into explaining what she thinks of the poem. She tries to duck this, but Lloyd — relying on skills from a lifetime of teaching — won’t let her.
This isn’t just the heart of the scene — it’s a pivotal scene in the film. It’s the moment when Maggie turns the corner and starts taking steps to be someone a little better…because she starts believing in her ability to see through to the core of things, and in the first-time-ever notion that she has a lot more to develop and uncover within herself.
I know how cliched it sounds to say a character “turns a corner” and so on, but sometimes these moments happen in life. You just have to be able to hear the little voice in the back of your head that says, “You’ve taken a small step…you’ve just moved along.”