The Bluray of Warner Archives’ 4K restoration of Michael Curtiz‘s Doctor X (’32), which will arrive on 4.20, has both the two-color and the black-and-white versions, which were filmed separately. It stars Lionel Atwill in the title role (actual name: Xavier), pre-King Kong Fay Wray and Lee Tracy as a snappy news reporter.

WhySoBlu review, 4.8.21: “The amount of work they have gone [through] to give this film new life is fairly astounding. Check out the featurette on restoring it for all the nifty details and examples. It has a painterly quality. Details are strong as can be given the age and type of film process.

“The monochrome version also features an impressive restoration with good details and crisp image.”

When the anti-disco revolt began in the spring of ’79, advocates were derided as both homophobic and racist. If you wore a “Death to Disco” T-shirt…if you liked The Who‘s “Sister Disco” or Bob Seger‘s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll,” you were behind the curve and maybe a chip off the old asshole block**.

I explicitly recall my friend Stuart Byron, an “out” Village Voice columnist who later worked for producer Ray Stark, telling me to my face that I’d be wise to keep my loathing of disco under wraps lest I sound like a homophobe.

40-plus years later the disco haters have been totally vindicated by history and the tradition of good musical taste, and nobody even alludes to homophobia as any kind of lingering undercurrent.

This hasn’t stopped today’s reverse-racist wokesters from using the same bullshit against anyone who doesn’t fall into line in the movie realm. If you dare to apply seasoned judgment in the assessing of this or that film that happens to be POC-focused…if, say, you’re a devout admirer of Lakeith Stanfield‘s performance in Judas and the Black Messiah or Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Widows and Mangrove (as I am) but you have reservations about the late Chadwick Boseman winning the Best Actor Oscar for his “okay but no great shakes” Ma Rainey performance or Viola Davis‘s blustery, obviously supporting lip-synch fatsuit performance (as I do), you might have an attitude problem.

Women scream when King Kong breaks free on a New York City stage. Joan Davis screams a lot in Hold That Ghost! Doris Day screams just before the Albert Hall assassination attempt in The Man Who Knew Too Much. At the end of Vertigo James Stewart asks Kim Novak “why did you scream?” during that fateful moment at the top of the San Juan Batista bell tower. A nameless woman in Some Like It Hot screams when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon run across the lobby of the Seminole Ritz. Janet Leigh screams, of course, when the shower curtain is ripped aside in Psycho. One of the witches screams when a knife-wielding Mia Farrow enters the Castevet’s living room at the end of Rosemary’s Baby.

No doubt about it — there was a lot of female screaming going on in 20th Century movies. Which suggests there was some actual real-life, rip-roaring screaming going on from time to time. But you know what? For the most part female screaming was an invented dramatic device that had no abundant basis in fact, and perhaps not even an incidental basis.

In my entire life I heard a woman “scream” exactly once, and that was when I was two or three years old and my mother had opened the driver’s side door on a busy street and a passing car slammed into it and ripped the door off the hinges. And even that wasn’t really a scream — it was more like a frightened “oooggghhh!”

There was another moment on a LAX-to-JFK flight in ’02 or thereabouts that half-qualified. Our 757 jet hit a sizable air pocket and the plane plunged a couple of hundred feet in a twinkling, and a woman sitting next to me went “aawwwhhh!” — another gulpy moan.

When’s the last time a woman screamed in a movie? I can’t actually recall. 20 or 30 years ago? Longer?

I know that women “screaming” has definitely disappeared from the landscape. And that guys, oddly enough, have rushed in and taken their place. The last I heard anyone let go with a falsetto scream was when Lady Gaga‘s dog-walker, Ryan Fischer, was shot during that recent dognapping incident on Sierra Bonita Ave. The last time before that was when that Vietnamese doctor was dragged off that United flight in 2017.

Last night Bright Wall/Dark Room (‪@BWDR‬) tweeted the following: “You can pick ONE actor and put them into any movie ever made. Who do you pick & what do you put them in?”

The mid ’60s version of Steve McQueen as (a) Neil Macauley in Heat, (b) John McLane in Die Hard, (c) Vincent in Collateral and (d) Casey Affleck‘s character in Manchester By The Sea.

Humphrey Bogart as Bat MacPherson (aka “Kilgallen”) in Only Angels Have Wings.

I’ve noted several times that David Jones and Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal (’83) has been absent from streaming, Bluray and even DVD for decades. Herewith an English language capture, no subtitles — 91 minutes, posted on 2.11.20.

Ben Kingsley at 54:06: “I’ve always liked Jerry. To be honest I’ve always liked him rather more than I liked you. Maybe I should’ve had an affair with him myself.”

This morning the Washington Post‘s Peter Marks published an apology from B’way and Hollywood producer Scott Rudin for the latter’s volcanic behavior with office staffers over the years.

The core of the statement was that Rudin will “step back” from his Broadway ventures, adding that that he was “taking steps that I should have taken years ago to address this behavior.”

Rudin’s announcement is basically a strategic bone tossed to his many social-media critics. For good or ill (mostly the latter, his critics would say) Rudin was able to swagger around for decades…throughout the ’90s, aughts and most of the 20teens he was the savvy, blistering, highly demanding office tyrant who made top-tier films and produced between two and five high-prestige B’way plays per year. On both coasts Rudin made money and won awards for many people. But the cultural ground shifted in late ’17 and now he needs to adapt or die.

Rudin’s mea culpa comes in the wake of (a) Tatiana Siegel’s 4.7 Hollywood Reporter expose (basically an evergreen refresh) about Rudin’s occasionally brutal behavior, (b) Richard Rushfield‘s 4.9 Ankler follow-up (“Mr. Potatohead“) and (c) “Moulin Rouge!” B’way star Karen Olivo declaring on Instagram that she won’t be returning to work after the pandemic shutdown because “the silence about Rudin” was “unacceptable.”

A 4.17 Siegel article reports that Rudin was more or less forced to back away from the forthcoming The Music Man revival after star Hugh Jackman said he was “very concerned” and that “something needed to be done.” Jackman’s costar Sutton Foster reportedly “said she would leave the highly anticipated musical if Rudin didn’t take a seat, says [a] knowledgable source.”

Once upon a time the shouting, volatile, highly-demanding producer or swaggering “boss from hell” was a lamentable part of showbiz lore…Burt Lancaster‘s J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success, Alan King‘s Max Herschel in Sidney Lumet‘s Just Tell Me What You Want, the real-life Joel Silver and Harvey Weinstein, Saul Rubinek‘s Lee Donowitz in True Romance (based on Silver for the most part), Kevin Spacey‘s Buddy Ackerman in Swimming With Sharks, Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, etc.

None of these characters were pleasant to be around on a 24/7 basis, but, as in real life, they had a dominating brand and tradition that you had to finesse one way or the other.

And then along came the sensitive, safe-space-seeking Millennials and that Buddy Ackerman shit began to get old right quick.

“Much has been written about my history of troubling interactions with colleagues,” Rudin’s statement reads, “and I am profoundly sorry for the pain my behavior caused to individuals, directly and indirectly.”

To be perfectly frank, I fear that Variety (Claudia Eller, Cynthia Littleton) screwed the pooch when they offered a blanket apology to Carey Mulligan for that one paragraph in Dennis Harvey‘s 1.26.20 review of Promising Young Woman, despite editor Peter Debruge not changing a word of it during Sundance ’20 and no one else changing it for nearly a whole year after that.

Plus the faux pas of Variety not even allowing Harvey to write a follow-up to explain where he was coming from and to remind everyone that he LIKED Promising Young Woman.

I suspect that was a bad move in that it created empathy on Harvey’s behalf (and resentment of Variety‘s needless bludgeoning) among male Academy members of a certain age. All I know is that the buzz was building and building in Mulligan’s favor up until Kyle Buchanan‘s 12.23.20 N.Y. Times interview with her, and then a few days later came the Variety apology and then it all started to change. I know that the Carey momentum seemed to slow down if not stall after that.

I can’t believe that the Academy will give the Oscar to Viola Davis for lip-synching with a fat suit; I expect that despite Frances McDormand having won twice before, they might hand it to her. I personally would love to see the Oscar go to Mulligan, perhaps as a referendum on all her performances since 2009’s An Education as much as her work in PYW, but, like I said, I think Variety may have messed things up for her. Perhaps not but maybe.

HE to Academy members: It wouldn’t be fair to blame Mulligan for what Eller and Littleton did. She didn’t ask for an apology, remember. She just took issue, briefly, with Harvey’s alleged or perceived view that she wasn’t hot enough to play Cassie, the Promising Young Woman avenger.

Let’s imagine I had absolute power and a group of scientists and financiers came to me and said, “We can take Abraham Lincoln‘s blood from that Ford’s Theatre chair and clone him…literally recreate him head to toe…an exact duplicate, voice and all…do we have your permission to do this?”

My first reaction would be that the idea sounds more than a little macabre and that it’s probably better to leave well enough alone and that none of us can go home again, etc.

But in all honesty, a part of me would be intrigued by the idea of creating Abe 2.0. Not with any expectations that he would enter politics and become a statesman, of course. If I approved the cloning I would insist, in fact, that the creation of said being be shrouded in total secrecy and that he would be free to live his own life by his own steam and create his own personality and take any path that seemed appropriate, unhindered by anyone’s expectations.

But I would also think it fair that Abe 2.0 (who could end up as a CVS manager or an Uber driver or a basketball player) should be informed of his genetic lineage at age 30, I would think.

Why would I want our 16th President to re-experience the world a second time? Because I would want certain people to interview him and hear his voice — that would be one thing. And because he might take to writing or political activism, and I would want to know what judgments he might have about Twitter, Trump and QAnon, wokesters and the film assessments of Glenn Kenny and David Ehrlich. And secondly, where would be the harm? A person of exceptional genetic tendencies and inclinations would join 21st Century America along with tens of millions of others. How would that be a bad thing?

HE to commentariat: Which historical figures, if any, would you like to see cloned and re-introduced to planet earth?

The idiots who pay to see Fast & Furious movies aren’t going to turn in their idiot cards and develop a sense of taste any time soon. The F9 trailer speaks for itself. The people behind it — principally Justin Lin, the cyborg whore who’s now directed five of these fucking things — help found the satanic death monkey training school that Godzilla vs. Kong‘s Adam Wingard graduated from a few years ago.

Eternal shame upon the F9 cast members who are capable of feeling it: Vin Diesel (does anyone recall his genuinely winning performance in a sublime little Sidney Lumet film called Find Me Guilty?), Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron.

Excerpts from “Gleeful Action Porn Provides Glimpse Into Hell,” posted on 3.31.15:

James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3) is, of course, a cyborg muscle-car flick made for people who despise real action flicks and prefer, instead, the comfort of cranked-up, big-screen videogame delirium inhabited (I don’t want to say “performed”) by flesh-and-blood actors and facilitated by a special kind of obnoxious CG fakeitude that grabs you by the shirt collar and says “eat this, bitch!”

I hated, hated, hated this film like nothing I’ve seen in a long time.

“What’s wrong with silly, stupid four-wheel fun?” the fans ask. What’s wrong is that movies like this are deathly boring and deflating and toxic to the soul. They’re anti-fun, anti-life, anti-cinema, anti-everything except paychecks.

Furious 7 is odious, obnoxious corporate napalm on a scale that is better left undescribed. It is fast, flashy, thrompy crap that dispenses so much poison it feels like a kind of plague. Wan’s film is certainly a metaphor for a kind of plague that has been afflicting action films for a good 20-plus years.

In Act 3, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus is asked by a crowd of alarmed plebians why he conspired to murder their leader. “T’was not that I loved Caesar less,” Brutus answers, “but that I loved Rome more.” By the same token I spit upon Furious 7 and the whole cyborg action muscle-boy genre not because I love sitting through cranked-up, power-pump, beyond-silly action flicks less (although my feelings of revulsion are as sincere as a heart attack) but because I love real action movies more.

Someone or some entity will step in and save H’wood’s Arclight plex and particularly the Cinerama Dome**. Some wealthy entrepeneur or digital distribution company (Netflix, Amazon, Quentin Tarantino) will save the day. The Arclight cinemas (including the ones in Sherman Oaks and Culver City) are central to the L.A. movie experience. They’re simply not allowed to permanently shutter…out of the question.

** The ultra-curved Cinerama Dome screen distorts the shit out of Scope films (2.39:1), by the way. It distorts the shit out of everything.

All hail director Richard Rush, who passed on 4.8.21 at age 91.

I met, interviewed and even hung out with Rush a bit during the 1980 promotion (spring and summer) of The Stunt Man — an audacious, whimsical turn-on that’s partly a sardonic comedy and partly a surreal meditation on the nature of “reality” and filmmaking. It was Rush’s one big triumph, or more precisely as a success d’estime within the community of hip know-it-all critics.

I was flattered to be invited to a special Manhattan Stunt Man gathering that included Rush, costar Steve Railsback and three or four elite journo schmoozer types — a boozy late-night hang that went into the wee hours. Out of this I became friendly (short termish) with Railsback’s wife Jackie (aka Jackie Giroux). Several weeks later I wangled a GQ assignment to interview Peter O’Toole, whose Stunt Man performance as director Eli Cross was one of his best, at his London home**.

Wiki excerpt: “Adapted by Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus from a same-titled 1970 novel by Paul Brodeur, The Stunt Man is about a young fugitive (Railsback) who lucks into a stunt double gig on the set of a World War I movie whose charismatic director (O’Toole) is quite the force of nature. Pic was nominated for three Oscars: O’Toole for Best Actor, Rush for Best Director and also for Best Adapted Screenplay.”

Nocturnal high-def Los Angeles in the early to mid ’40s…Gilda, The Outlaw, The Letter on theatre marquees. Hat stores, fur stores, Atlantic Richfield gas stations. A large spotlight mounted on a flatbed truck. Hundreds upon hundreds of mid ’40s autos parked curbside — a 2021 film set in this era couldn’t hope to deliver this kind of authentic realism. Downtown Los Angeles plus the mean streets of Hollywood. Video-like clarity plus simulated sound…fairly amazing.