Do The Right Thing -- Stand Up For Excellence
September 25, 2024
I Would Have Preferred A More Challenging...Okay, A More Insulting Tone
September 25, 2024
Opposite Peas in Polish Travel Pod
September 25, 2024
Friendo: “Neil Burger’s TheMarshKing’sDaughter (Lionsgate/Roadside, 11.3) is ostensibly a thriller, and I love thrillers. Good director, talented stars — but Bezos wants $19.99 to RENT the damn thing.”
HEtoFriendo: “The combination of Daisy (‘who’s Cary Grant again?’) Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn plus that awful title (who would want anything to do with a marsh king, much less his daughter?) sounds lethal.”
Supportingplayer #1: “So this guy rules the marshlands, you’re saying? Residents pay tribute, owe him their lives, work for him, fear him?”
Supportingplayer #2: “Yeah, pretty much.”
Supportingplayer #1: “I’m taking a film crew into the marshlands next month. We have permits from the state film commission but…what are you saying, we also need permission to shoot in this guy’s territory? We need to butter him up, pay him off?”
Supportingplayer #2: “I wouldn’t recommend not doing that. He’s a ruthless, powerful cat. You need to show obeisance.”
On the morning of Sunday, 3.25.62, N.Y. Times readers may have scanned a mild little Tom Wickerstory about President Jack Kennedy having briefly chatted with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the El Dorado Country Club during a weekend visit to the Palm Desert area.
Quoting press secretary Pierre Salinger, Wicker reported that the Kennedy-Ike discussion had lasted “fifty-one minutes.”
Wicker’s story discreetly observed that JFK was “spending the weekend nearby.” What Wicker meant but was professionally obliged to ignore wasn’t “newsworthy” by Times standards, but was certainly legend-worthy. For the Palm Desert dish that Wicker side-stepped was comprised of three tasty intrigues.
Two, he had decidedontheCrosbyestate and against staying at Frank Sinatra’s nearbydeserthome after being told (by either J. Edgar Hoover or Attorney General RobertF. Kennedy or both) that Sinatra had been maintaining close ties with certain mafia figures, and that Kennedy couldn’t afford the tainted association.
And three, that JFK and Marilyn Monroe had not only attended a party the night before (Saturday, 3.24) at the Crosby estate but had spentthenighttogether at a separate cottage on the property.
This is how things worked in the Kennedy era. Big-time, well-connected reporters didn’t touch this kind of material. That was the understanding.
The book focuses on Hollywood’s traumatic, ethically fraught Red Scare era of the late ’40s and ’50s, and particularly the trials and tribulations of this once-blacklisted producer and author of High Noon‘s allegorical screenplay as well as several other classic, hard-hitting films (Champion, Home of the Brave, Young Man with a Horn, The Men, A Hatful of Rain, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Victors).
I hadn’t seen Chetwynd’s film since an invitational Academy screening 21 years ago, but I keenly recall the excitement and controversy.
The controversy stemmed from Chetwynd’s doc having delivered a persuasive, highly damning portrait of High Noon producer Stanley Kramer, who went on to direct a string of urgent and respected social-political dramas including The Defiant Ones, On The Beach, Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg.
Chetwynd’s film (assembled from Foreman’s corner) accused Kramer of cowardice and personal betrayal, and there wasn’t much of an argument to be made as Chetwynd had done his homework and then some.
I recall praising Darkness at High Noon in my then four-year-old column, which was then berthed at reel.com. The film is narrated by Richard Crenna with Foreman’s first-hand account read by Richard McGonagle.
My initial search this morning yielded a YouTube version that was posted a year ago by Carl’s daughter, Dr. Amanda Foreman. Alas, it looks like hell due to having been horizontally taffy-pulled. Chetwynd’s original version was composed in 1.37.
I’m figuring that a version that represents the original aspect ratio has to be accessible. (A MUBI version has disappeared.) I’ve just reached out to Chetwynd, etc.
From Todd McCarthy’s 4.10.02 Variety review of Chetwynd’s film: “Pic pivots on the charge that Kramer essentially robbed Foreman of his rightful credit as producer of High Noon after the latter had left the U.S. for England to escape the snare of the blacklist (his writing credit was protected by the Writers Guild).
“After firmly establishing Foreman’s right to that credit on what was bannered ‘A Stanley Kramer Production’ and demolishing the long-standing rumor that the film’s much-noted cutaways to clocks to reassert its real-time structure were not in the script but added in post-production, Chetwynd backtracks to relate his protagonist’s biography, from Chicago upbringing and apprenticeship in FrankCapra‘s WWII filmmaking unit to rising late ’40s screenwriting rep on Home of the Brave, Champion and The Men.
“That outspoken Hollywood conservative Chetwynd should be taking up the cause of former Communist Party member Foreman may raise an eyebrow or two. But the doc assumes a vigorously pro-Foreman position not only in opposition to HUAC but especially against [Kramer’s] alleged weak-spined duplicities.
“Kramer’s family is now disputing the film’s characterization of him, and while his side of the story goes unrepresented here, the sort of thorough documentation Chetwynd offers on Foreman’s behalf will be hard to refute.”
I had gotten to know Chetwynd in ’94 and early ’95 while writing a long Los Angeles magazine article titled “Right Face“. It focused on various Hollywood actors and screenwriters who had experienced varying degrees of suspicion and discrimination due to being conservatives in an overwhelmingly liberal town.
They’re like racehorses in the stall, going “whurhr-huhr-huhr!” and kicking the wall and champing at the bit…“we want to push back at all those elite industry know-it-alls and Telluride tastemakers so badly!…we can’t wait to set them straight.”
There are days when I feel like DennisHopper‘s Tom Ripley in The American Friend — “I seem to know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is.”
But that’s just the proverbial doubt dog tugging at my overcoat. Mostly I feel fine.
Thanksgiving dinner at Jett and Cait’s was warm and cool and soothing, and familiar in the best ways imaginable.
I've just decided to re-watch Lawrence Kasdan's Mumford (Touchstone, 9.24.99). It's about a fraudulent but extremely charismatic small-town therapist (Loren Dean), whom almost everyone loves to chat with and confess to. I loved it from the get-go (it has a dead perfect ending), but too many critics disapproved and it managed only a lousy $4.5 million gross. But it's a really, really good film, I swear. Exudes a certain sly, low-key charm.
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I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for today, just because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. For I feel thankful 24/7/365.
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“In the early scenes [of RidleyScott‘s Napoleon], the titular figure seems to be another of JoaquinPhoenix‘s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men.
“The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.” — from Manohla Dargis’s 11.22 N.Y. Times review.
It’s fairly uncommon for critics and the ticket-buying public to feel exactly the same way about a new release. To go by Rotten Tomatoes the elite know-it-alls and your Joe Popcorn types agree that Napoleon is the same kind of problem.