As mentioned on 12.30, German all-region Blurays of The Big Sleep and Key Largo will pop in early February, although I’m told the release might be delayed just a bit. (I’m expecting my package between 2.15 and 2.19.) I’ve also learned that Warner Bros. Home Video will release domestic Blurays of both titles sometime during the first quarter, or before 3.31. A posting for Warner Archives’ Key Largo Bluray appeared this afternoon.
If this is the actual cover art for the forthcoming German Blurays of The Big Sleep and Key Largo, I’m appalled.
Jacket cover of Warner Archive’s Key Largo Bluray, as posted this afternoon on Facebook.
Telluride Fact #1: I was in a Tellluride market a couple of hours ago and ran into Elizabeth Berkley and her husband Greg Lauren. (They’re here to attend the Sunday wedding of Andrew Lauren and Lauren Bush .) And she said that Johnny Depp is here. Telluride Fact #2: A connected indie film guy told me he’s heard that Depp’s Rum Diary is one of the not-yet-announced secret screenings. Do the math = maybe.
The Patron Brunch, to which I’ve been invited, is tomorrow morning from 10:30 am to 12 noon. Tomorrow’s films: (a) The Turin Horse (2:30 pm, Palm); (b) Living In the Material World (6 pm, Palm — Martin Scorsese isn’t here); (c) Albert Nobbs (9:15 pm, Galaxy).
The finest Hillary-trashing pot high of the day has already been provided, again, by the glorious Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. It’s not just a hunger for a daily Hillary hate-on that articles like Noonan’s greatly satisfy, but an almost Biblical-level feeling of clarity, cleansing, righteousness. There’s no way to not feel good about this.
All last night I thought about the Clinton campaign’s communications director Howard Wolfson stating yesterday that, if necessary, Hillary is ready to burn the house down all spring and summer long in order to fulfill her clawing ambition. That first, the fair or decent thing second. But more and more people, thank God, seem to be understanding who she is.
“‘This is death by a thousand cuts,'” Noonan begins. “That’s what they keep saying about Hillary Clinton.
“Her whole life right now is a reverse Sally Field. She’s looking out at an audience of colleagues and saying, ‘You don’t like me, you really don’t like me!’
“Although of course she’s not saying it. Her response to what from the outside looks like catastrophe? A glassy-eyed insistence that all is well. ‘I’m tested, I’m ready, let’s make it happen!’ she yelled into a mic on a stage in Texas on the night of her latest defeat. This is meant to look like confidence. Whether or not you wish her well probably determines whether you see it as game face, stubbornness or evidence of mild derangement.
“In Virginia last Sunday, two days before the Little Tuesday voting, she suggested her problem is that she’s not a big phony. ‘People say to me all the time, ‘You’re so specific…why don’t you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?’
“I thought it an acknowledgement that loss might come,” Noonan writes. “But by Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton was furiously stumping through Ohio using the same line of attack, but this time it wasn’t a marker. The race is about ‘speeches versus solutions.’ Her unnamed opponent stands for the first, she for the second. He is all ‘words,’ she is ‘action.’ ‘Words are cheap,’ she said.
“If they were so cheap, her inability to marshal them would not have cost her so dearly.”
Or as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said yesterday, there’s never been a U.S. President commonly regarded as great who hasn’t been a great orator. What U.S. President who wasn’t a great orator and a profound uplifter of spirits is considered great by historians and the general public?
Noonan also underlines a relationship between Clinton’s way of doing things and that a certain departed U.S. president. She quotes “an old Richard Nixon hand” observing that “Nixon [didn’t] always think honesty is the best policy, but he [did] think it’s a policy.” Like Clinton, she implies, Nixon “saw it as a strategic gambit, to be used like any other.”
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.
Robert Wilke almost always played foul-tempered, sandpaper-voiced bad guys. He just had one of those faces. He’s probably best known as the High Noon “gunnie” whom Grace Kelly shot in the back during the final ten minutes. He also stood out as the loudmouth whom James Coburn killed with a fast flying knife in The Magnificent Seven.
In a career that spanned almost 50 years only once was Wilke called upon to show emotional vulnerability and anguish, and that was when he portrayed the conflicted farm foreman in Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven (’78). Only Malick saw a bit of depth in the man…only Malick asked him to step beyond the usual conventional shithead realms.
Wilke to Richard Gere (speaking about wealthy wheat farmer Sam Shepard): “I know what you’re doin'”…beat, beat…”that boy’s like a son to me.”
Wilke was a great amateur golfer.
Incidentally: Criterion’s 2010 Bluray of Days of Heaven has looked glorious from the get-go, and you’ll never convince me that the new 4K UHD version is going to look that much better on the 65″ Sony OLED. Maybe in subtle little ways but nothing that will lift me out of my seat. All the same there’s a little part of me that wants the damn thing anyway.
I feel sorry for any guys out there who've never known the deep pleasure of walking around with a serious, old-fashioned, heavy-leather gun belt, holster and Shane-style six-shooter.
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In a September ’78 issue of Film CommentMartin Scorsese stated that Pharoahs was one of his guilty pleasures. It’s certainly “big” and colorful — it was partly shot in Egypt — and boasts a lot of great-looking sets and costumes, and Hawks used something close to 10,000 extras.
But the only thing that’s truly great about Pharoahs is Dimitri Tiomkin‘s score.
The musical accompaniments by the Russian-born Tiomkin often had a soaring, grandiose, even bombastic quality, but his scores were so rousing they almost served as characters in and of themselves.
The greatest Tiomkin scores: Duel in the Sun, It’s a Wonderful Life, Red River, The Men, The Big Sky, High Noon (film historian Arthur R. Jarvis, Jr. once claimed that Tiomkin’s music “saved” that Oscar-winning Fred Zinneman film), The High and the Mighty, The Guns of Navarone, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, The Thing from Another World, Giant, Rio Bravo, The Alamo.
I just tapped these out off the top of my head, and when I get back to Connecticut I’ll probably add several more…I’m just roughing this out as I go along:
There are many, many female characters and performances that I will always treasure, but let’s start with Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty. And then…aww, hell: Carey Mulligan in Suffragette, An Education and She Said. Rachel McAdams in The Wedding Crashers. Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings and Shane. Greta Gerwig in Greenberg and Frances Ha, Amy Adams in The Fighter, Teresa Wright in The Best Years of Our Lives. Katy Jurado and Grace Kelly in High Noon. Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story. BarbraStreisand in Funny Girl and What’s Up, Doc. Sally Field in Places of the Heart. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, Network and Mommie Dearest. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce and Johnny Guitar. Katherine Ross and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. Frances McDormand in Fargo, Almost Famous and Nomadland. Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. Charlize Theron in Monster and Mad Max: Fury Road. Sigourney Weaver in Alien (1979) & Aliens (1986).
Okay, not "heartbroken" but kinda sorry. FOMO'ed. I never really thought there was anything especially irksome or substandard about the 2015 Bluray version, but I love the idea of watching a richer, more vibrant version inside the big Chinese and basking in the whole Hollywood lore of it all (Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Angie Dickinson).
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Lurie started me off with a taste of 20 performances, and right away I was saying to myself “these are too familiar, too boilerplate…where’s that special-passion choice that defies conventional thinking?”
What is a greatest-ever performance anyway? My theory is that picks in this realm have less to do with skill or technique or even, really, the actor, and a lot more to do with the viewer and what they choose to see. The choices that people make tend to reflect their intimate personal histories on some level. Because they’re choosing performances or more precisely characters who closely mirror and express their deepest longings, fondest hopes and saddest dreams.
My late younger brother was tremendously moved by Mark Ruffalo‘s portrayal of a loser in You Can Count On Me, in large part because my brother was that character. I know a lady who’s always felt close to Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind for the same reason. Bill Clinton once said on a High Noon DVD documentary that Gary Cooper‘s performance in High Noon is his all-time favorite because Will Kane‘s situation (everyone chickening out when things get tough and leaving him to stand alone) reminded him of what it’s often like for a sitting U.S. President.
When I began to assemble my pantheon the first nominees that came to mind were Gandolfini, Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (I’m dead serious), George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Alan Ladd in Shane, Brad Pitt in Moneyball, Marilyn Monroe in Some like It Hot and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings. This is without thinking anything through or second-guessing myself.
Another pleasant hang. We’re all accustomed to Piers Morgan being a tart, adversarial figure, but here he’s entirely personable and relaxed.
At the 31:30 mark, Maher blanks on Thomas Mitchell, the actor who played Scarlett O’Hara‘s father in Gone With The Wind. Mitchell’s two best performances — “Kid” Dabb in Only Angels Have Wings and Mayor Jonas Henderson in High Noon, who stabs Gary Cooper in the back.
Maher: “[Gone With The Wind], by the way…entertaining as fuck, and the people who need a disclaimer [about the 83-year-old racist content]…this is the problem, you fucking babies. Can’t you just see by the film stock that things were very different back then? History in general, we evolve. Just celebrate that we are not [as] racist any more. This generation [Millennials] needs a trigger warning and a Klonopin to get through an episode of [something or other].”
Around the 34-minute mark they talk about victim culture and “the end of the empire, what happens to successful civilizations, they get soft and mushy in the mind….weakness is celebrated and the stiff-upper-lip and resilience is now to be condemned.” And they get into pronouns around the 40-minute mark.
Six or seven years ago I began to assemble a list of the greatest lead performances in feature films, and Monica Vitti in L’Avventura was one of them, you bet.
The names that that came to mind off the top of my head were James Gandolfini in TheSopranos, Geza Rohrig in Son of Saul, Marlon Brando in OnTheWaterfront and The Godfather, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (I’m dead serious), George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Gary Cooper in High Noon, George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Alan Ladd in Shane, Brad Pitt in Moneyball, Marilyn Monroe in Some like It Hot, Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and Betrayal, Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote and, last but not least, Vitti in…aww, hell, her entire Michelangelo Antonioni travelogue.
After 90 years and 2 months on the planet earth, Vitti has left for realms beyond. I’m very sorry but then again she really livedalife, particularly during her ultimate star-power and mesmerizing collaboration years with the great Antonioni — a five-year exploration comprised of L’Avventura (’60), La Notte (’61), L’Eclisse (62) and Red Desert (’64).
Were it not for this five-year chapter, we wouldn’t this day be praising Vitti to the heavens. She “lives” today because of Antonioni, and a significant reason for his own exalted early-to-mid-’60s rep is due to — owned by — Vitti’s allure.
In her Antonioni films Vitti always seemed to be thinking “is this all there is?” Or “my God, there’s so little nutrition…I’m sinking into quicksand, withering away…so little in the way or sparkle and joy…nearly every waking minute I’m consumed by the glammy blues.”
Yes, she laughed and loved in L’Ecclisse, but only briefly and anxiously and in a sense ironically. The African tribal dance sequence was the exception — a spoof, of course, but lively and sexy.
Born in 1931, Vitti was 28 or 29 at the beginning of her Antonioni period and 33 when their collaboration ended — no spring chicken even at the start.
From Adam Bernstein’s Washington Post obit: “Her willowy physique, huskyvoice, full lips and mane of sun–kissedblondhair gave her a raw sensual appeal. But Antonioni cast her against type in a cycle of acclaimed films about emotional detachment and spiritual barrenness. He made her the personification of glamorousmalaise.”
Take L’Avventura, for one example. It’s about wealthy Italians wandering about in a state of gloomy drifting, anxious and vaguely bothered and frowning a good deal of the time.
The movie is about the absence of whole-hearted feeling, and it never diverts from this. If there’s a moment in which Vitti conveys even a hint of serenity in her intimate scenes with Gabriele Ferzetti, it barely registers. I don’t remember a single shot in which Ferzetti smiles with even a hint of contentment.
From “Red Desert Return“: “I saw Red Desert for the first time in 2015. I know the Antonioni milieu, of course, and had read a good deal about it over the years, so I was hardly surprised to discover that it has almost no plot. It has a basic situation, and Antonioni is wonderfully at peace with the idea of just settling into that without regard to story.
“And for that it seemed at least ten times more engrossing than 80% or 90% of conventional narrative films I see these days, and 87 times better than the majority of bullshit superhero films.
“Vitti plays a twitchy and obviously unstable wife and mother who’s been nudged into a kind of madness by the industrial toxicity around her, and Richard Harris is an even-mannered German businessman visiting smelly, stinky Ravenna. The film is about industrial sprawl and poisoned landscapes and a lot of standing around and Vitti’s neurotic gibberish and a certain caught-in-the-mud mood that holds you like a drug, specifically like good opium.
“Each and every shot in Red Desert (the dp is Carlo di Palma, whom Vitti later fell in love with) is quietly breathtaking. It’s one of the most immaculate and mesmerizing ugly-beautiful films I’ve ever seen. The fog, the toxins, the afflictions, the compositions.”