Non-truths flood our communal atmosphere, not because we’re compulsive liars but because of our disrespect for various parties.

Nobody’s 100% honest with their bosses or supervisors; ditto their wives or girlfriends. Familiarity breeds contempt, and with that a willingness to dispense occasional evasions and half-truths.

Very few parents are 100% honest with their tweener and teenaged kids. Almost no drivers are honest with traffic cops. If I truly respect and fully trust you, I’ll be as honest as the day is long. But we live in a universe full of short days.

This goes double or triple from a celebrity’s perspective. Pretty much every famous person lies through his or her teeth when it comes to public statements. Not blatantly but in a mild, sideways fashion.

But that’s okay because they’re well motivated. They’re lying because they despise the gossip-driven media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off.

I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”

Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his ‘word’ to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”

Tom Cruise was J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he told Oprah Winfrey he was in love with Katie Holmes and wanted to marry her and so on. He was saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me, and if you don’t think I’m being honest then too bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags who pass along tabloid fairy tales.”

You’re hot or you’re not. Earlier this month I posted two thumbnail assessments of the careers of Tony Curtis and William Holden. They both enjoyed relatively brief hot-streak periods. Holden’s lasted six or seven years, or between Stalag ’17 (’53) and The Horse Soldiers (’59). Curtis’s fortunate-son period ran 11 or 12 years, or between Sweet Smell of Success (’57) and The Boston Strangler (’68).

As noted, Holden kept plugging until his death in ’81, but from The Horse Soldiers on (or over the next 22 years) Holden only made six genuinely good films — The Wild Bunch, Wild Rovers, Breezy, Network, Fedora and S.O.B. Curtis had no luck at all after The Boston Strangler.

Burt Lancaster‘s career was different in that he was always a long player. His commercial hot streak of the late ’40s to mid ’50s (westerns or action-swashbuckler films mixed with two or three dramas) happened between his late 30s and mid 40s, but except for his 1950s peak achievement of From Here To Eternity (i.e., Sgt. Milt Warden) along with The Rose Tattoo and The Rainmaker, he was more into commercial bounties.

Then came a prestige-drama-mixed-with-action period — 12 or so years, 1957 to 1969, between his mid 40s and mid 50s — that turned into Lancaster’s greatest run. Oh, the glories of Sweet Smell of Success, Run Silent, Run Deep, Separate Tables, The Devil’s Disciple, The Unforgiven, Elmer Gantry, The Young Savages, Judgment at Nuremberg, Birdman of Alcatraz, A Child Is Waiting, The Leopard, Seven Days in May, The Train, The Hallelujah Trail, The Professionals, The Swimmer, Castle Keep and The Gypsy Moths.

In the ’70s Lancaster, entering his 60s, downshifted into mostly genre-level, mezzo-mezzo films — seemingly a getting-older, wind-down cycle. The highlights were Robert Aldrich‘s Ulzana’s Raid, Luchino Visconti‘s Conversation Piece and Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900.

Then came the ’80s and a resurgence with three great performances in three commendable films — aging wise guy and Lothario Lou Pascal in Louis Malle‘s Atlantic City, oil tycoon Felix Happer in Local Hero (’82) and the kindly Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams (’89).

Lancaster was not a great actor, but he was a graceful and commanding alpha-male presence, and he had a great sense of style, and he knew how to sell it. What was his greatest performance? I’m torn between From Here To Eternity, Elmer Gantry, The Swimmer and Atlantic City (“Boy, that was some ocean”).

Dave Itzkoff has a 2.28.19 N.Y. Times story called “Can Captain Marvel Fix Marvel’s Woman Problem?” The problem, historically speaking, is a leering, less-than-enlightened attitude about Marvel’s female characters over the decades. The idea is that Captain Marvel might popularize a less sexist, more liberated agenda. Yes, I’m putting myself to sleep as I write this.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

You know that Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams‘ performances as Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon are going to be Emmy-level. You know it. The limited series will debut on 4.9.19, and run eight episodes.

The dominant themes or undercurrents seem to be that (a) serious creative innovation is rare, (b) women value fidelity, (c) it’s all over much too quickly, and (d) fast-lane living comes at quite a cost.

Fosse only lived to age 60 — cigarettes, uppers, alcohol, stress. He died of a heart attack on 9.23.87, outside the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Verdon died at age 75, on 10.18.00.

There’s still no credited director but the guy who shouted “action” and “cut” is probably Thomas Kail — Kail, Rockwell, Williams, Steven Levenson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, George Stelzner and Joel Fields served as exec producers.

The costars are Margaret Qualley (Ann Reinking), Norbert Leo Butz (Paddy Chayefsky), Nate Corddry (Neil Simon), Aya Cash (Joan Simon), Susan Misner (Joan McCracken), Bianca Marroquín (Chita Rivera), Kelli Barrett (Liza Minnelli), Evan Handler (Hal Prince), Rick Holmes (Fred Weaver), Paul Reiser (Cy Feuer), Ethan Slater (Joel Grey), Byron Jennings (George Abbott) and Laura Osnes (Shirley MacLaine).

It’s time to write another “oh, God, help me…I hate living in a damaged-back prison cell” piece. I haven’t written one since Tuesday, 2.19, or two days after I fell flat on my back in the Sierra Nevadas, a few miles above Lone Pine.

A friend wrote me a few minutes ago, asking if I’m out of the “pain dungeon.” I replied that I’m “35% or 40% out but still in it. Still painful, still a huge ache in my soul, just not as much as before.”

I’m living in a kind of minimum-security prison with a fucking cane and 10 or 15 hydrocodone pills. (Thanks to the HE reader who slipped me the narcotic remedies.) I hate it so much. It’s so spiritually suffocating. I’ve been in excellent shape all my life — loose and limber, hiking, lifting this or that, running here and there, riding on the hog, no stiffness and aches whatsoever. And now, suddenly, I’m 89 years old. It’s fucking awful.

Do I feel less acute pain now than I did a week ago? Yes. Will I be out of the pain woods a week from now? Not necessarily. If God is with me I’ll probably be feeling pretty good by 3.15, or roughly a month after the accident.

Wall Street Journal reporter Reid Epstein has tweeted that Joe Biden has described Mike Pence as “a decent guy, our vice president.”

That’s it! Biden is done, finito, over and out. In this highly charged, intensely contrarian atmosphere, a possible Democratic presidential candidate cannot be exuding collegial, business-as-usual, hail-fellow-well-met vibes about a culturally ass-backwards, white-haired rightwing fiend who’s stood foursquare behind our mafia-crime-boss President, and who once ratted out his fraternity brothers for having a beer keg.

There’s no room for that kind of casually jocular, country-club, “Mike has his flaws but he’s an okay guy” attitude. Forget it!

On top of which Epstein and Janet Hook have filed a WSJ piece about how Democratic leaders in Iowa “are hungry for a young standard-bearer who will usher in generational change,” which is basically a “not now, too late, you’ve missed your chance” message aimed at Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The Pence quote plus that 1.23 N.Y. Times story about Biden accepting a $200K speaking fee from the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan weeks before the November 2018 election, and during his speech supporting Representative Fred Upton, a long-serving Republican ‘who in 2017 helped craft a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act'”…that’s it.

Biden is toast — he will not make it through the Democratic primary process.

The likeliest Democratic nominees are now Beto O’Rourke (who will be announcing within a few days) or Kamala Harris, and at the end of the day O’Rourke will probably be the victor.

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If someone were to remake Elmer Gantry with, say, Leonardo DiCaprio or Matthew McConaughey or Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, they definitely wouldn’t re-shoot this scene. Because if they did, the Stalinist wokesters would tear them apart on Twitter for daring to patronize African-American churchgoers of the ’20s, and in fact for projecting a borderline racist characterization.

Justin Chang and Guy Lodge would sputter and howl and lead the charge. They and their brethren would accuse the filmmakers of trying to make white audiences feel good about themselves, of trying to ignite fantasies about how soulful and open-hearted whites imagine themselves to be in the gentlest of spiritual circumstances.

In the original Elmer Gantry (’60) this scene was one of Burt Lancaster‘s all-time finest — a charismatic movie-star scene — and one reason why he won the Best Actor Oscar that year. But God help any actor or filmmaker today who would be stupid enough to imagine that an evil white person could step into a black church and just blend right in, etc. Only a white supremacist at heart could imagine such a scenario.

Conductor, composer and pianist Andre Previn has left the earth at age 89. To this day I’m unfamiliar with 90% of what Previn composed or conducted. To me he was the movie-score guy — Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Elmer Gantry, One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce, My Fair Lady, etc. Previn was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won four.

Previn wrote a brief memoir of his early years in Hollywood, “No Minor Chords“, published in ’91 and edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Previn’s life famously took a soap-opera turn in the late ’60s when he and then-wife Dory invited Mia Farrow into their lives. An affair between Previn and Farrow resulted and the marriage ended. Dory later launched a career as a performer with “Beware of Young Girls,” her song widely perceived to be aimed at Farrow.

In “No Minor Chords”, Previn recounted a near-dalliance with Ava Gardner in the mid 1940s.

“She listened to me play, quite attentively,” Previn wrote, “and then asked an incredible question: ‘Would you like to take me home later?’ Well, I was 17 and I simply could not allow myself to put a subtext connotation to this, so I asked: ‘You mean you don’t have a ride home?’ Ava gave me a long, searching look, saw that I was serious, excused herself and got up from the piano bench.”

I blew a couple of such opportunities myself in my late teens. I was too dumb or timid to simply realize what had been offered. I’ll never forgive myself…never.

If Don Vito Corleone was reckless or stupid, he would have spoken explicitly to his underlings about what he wanted done. But he didn’t need to. All he had to do was raise an eyebrow, give a look to Tom Hagen, imply what he was thinking.

And so he didn’t say “tell Clemenza to have his men beat the living shit out of these animals. Don’t kill them but definitely spill their blood, break their bones, make them weep with pain. But don’t kill them — that wouldn’t be justice.” Instead he said, “Give this to, uh, Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren’t going to be carried away. After all, we’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker says.”

By any measure J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year, Margin Call) is a major-league director. By any reasonable standard Triple Frontier (Netflix, 3.6), which Chandor directed and co-wrote with Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker), looks like an above-average commando thriller. The four stars (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund) are grade-A-ish or in that general realm. So it’s not just some run-of-the-mill Netflix programmer. It has a serious vibe.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been saying that I want to catch a theatrical press screening, as an action film of this apparent calibre needs size and aural power to fully work, and because Roman Vasyanov‘s lensing looks handsome as hell. And with the limited theatrical debut only six days away (the Netflix streaming begins on 3.13) it’s been hard as hell to find an L.A. press screening. And it’s not on the Netflix online press site.

A Manhattan theatrical premiere is scheduled for this Sunday, 3.3…finally! It will press-screen concurrently in Los Angeles — thanks!

In 2010 Tom Hanks signed to do an earlier version of Triple Frontier under director Kathryn Bigelow. Johnny Depp was also attached or at least interested. There was talk at the time of changing the title to Sleeping Dogs. In late ’12 it was reported that Bigelow and Boal had put the project aside. Hanks would have played Affleck’s role. Affleck looks fat, of course — his breasts are bigger than Lady Gaga‘s and he could play Harvey Weinstein if he were to add 25 or 30 pounds — but he’s still Affleck.