Seven days ago I raved about the Kino Lorber Bluray of Marty Feldman‘s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (’77), which is considerably enhanced by Alan Spencer‘s delicious, I-was-there-because-I-was-Marty’s-friend commentary track.

A day or two later I watched a KL companion disc — a Bluray of Feldman’s In God We Tru$t, a 1980 anti-religion, anti-corporate satire that proved to be Feldman’s undoing.

The film contained a brief riff that insulted Universal/MCA by comparing it morally to the Ku Klux Klan. Feldman was told to remove the bit but he refused, contractually fortified as he was with final cut. In so doing he effectively terminated his five-film deal with Universal.

Plus In God We Tru$t wasn’t very funny. Not a total wash (it’s an inventive effort and carefully assembled) but that mescaline-in-the-blood feeling was in low supply.

Spencer’s commentary is just as first-hand candid and knowledgable as his Beau Geste shpiel, but the God We Tru$t saga is basically a downer. I’m sorry but it’s hard to feel intrigued, much less turned on, by a story about a comic genius who simultaneously killed himself (Feldman smoked five to six packs of cigarettes per day) and deep-sixed his career at roughly the same time. It’s an emotional tale from Spencer’s perspective, but tinged with a wasteful residue.

Feldman died of a heart attack in a Mexico City hotel in 1982, while filming Yellowbeard.

An occasional drama or comedy will acquaint us with a young kid version of a lead character. Every so often the young actor won’t look like the older actor at all, and sometimes (or usually) he/she will offer a reasonably decent resemblance (like the kid who played young Vito Adolini/Corleone in The Godfather, Part II).

And every so often (as in very rarely) a young actor will bear such a close resemblance to the older actor that you can’t help but say “wow, amazing…where’d they find that kid?”

Example #1: Micheal McConkey was cast as a young version of Marty Feldman‘s “Digby” in Feldman’s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (’77).** A fairly astonishing resemblance. McConkey later adopted the name Mícheál Mac Donncha and became an Irish (Sinn Fein) politician, rising to the title of Dublin’s Lord Mayor between ’17 and ’18.

Example #2: Buddy Swan‘s casting as the eight-year-old Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane hits the bull’s-eye. It was easy as pie to imagine Swan growing up into Orson Welles.

Worst casting of a teenage version of grown-up lead character: Jeff East as high-school version of Chris Reeve‘s Clark Kent-slash-Superman. Born in late ’57, East was 18 or possibly 19 when Richard Donner‘s Superman began shooting in March 1977. Reeve, who was a young-looking 25 at this point, could have easily played his own teenaged self and nobody would’ve blinked an eye. East didn’t resemble Reeve in the slightest. It was 100% INSANE of Donner to have cast him.

Which other kid castings, good or bad, deserve mention?

Roughly 30 years before Hollywood Elsewhere became a huge, earth-shaking deal, I ran into the great Marty Feldman at Izzy’s Deli (1433 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica). It was sometime in early ‘75, 9 or 10 pm. The place was fairly crowded. I had ordered and eaten, and was alone at a table for four. On top of which I was in a sullen mood, reading something. The gracious thing, of course, would have been to sit at the counter.

Anyway suddenly there was bug-eyed Marty Feldman, half leaning over and asking if I was feeling well and good. “Good?” I replied. “Yeah, I guess. Why do you ask?” Marty (not missing a beat): “Because we’d like to join you.”

I knew who he was, of course. And I knew, of course, that he was basically nudging me along. He was saying what Eyegor’s father used to say to his son…”What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don’t you get out of there and give someone else a chance?” Except he was actually saying “uhm, Izzy’s is very crowded and here we are, four fine people looking to spend a bit of money on Izzy’s food, and you’re being a table hog.”

Being the sullen type, I ignored Feldman’s suggestion about sharing the table because it seemed inconceivable that he and his wife (accompanied by another couple) were even vaguely interested in my company. So I grumpily took the hint, got up, paid the bill and walked out.

After watching the Last Remake of Beau Geste Bluray I was saying to myself, “Idiot! You could’ve smiled and said ‘sure, sit down!’ and spent a few minutes with a great fellow and his wife and friends before beating a graceful exit. Brilliant, Jeff!”

But that was me back in those days. Morose, depressed, vaguely self-loathing.

Update: HE commenter “Jeff” reminds that Izzy’s was called Kenny’s in the mid ’70s, and that Kenny is/was the dad and Izzy is the son. I’d forgotten this completely.

Except for the Four Fakers aspect, Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story was pretty much a purely pleasurable experience for everyone who saw it during the summer of ’19. It’s been on Netflix ever since, of course. And now Criterion has a 4K Bluray version coming on 1.19.21.

What’s my richest musical recollection from Scorsese’s doc? Easy — Joni Mitchell playing the then-recently composed “Coyote” for Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Gordon Lightfoot and others at Lightfoot’s home during the tour. The clip, originally shot for Dylan’s misbegotten Renaldo and Clara, is on YouTube, of course. “Coyote” would go on to open Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira but was in the early stages while Mitchell was performing on the RTR tour.

From “The Four Fakers,” posted on 6.10.19: To my mind the only serious problem with Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue doc is that he includes four phony talking heads among several real ones, and thereby violates the trustworthiness that we all associate with the documentary form, and for a reason that strikes me as fanciful and bogus.

The doc acquaints us with 22 or more talking-head veterans of the tour (Dylan naturally included) but among this fraternity Scorsese inserts what Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is calling the “four fakers” — made-up characters portrayed by real, recognizable people.

Sharon Stone, who was 17 when the Rolling Thunder Tour was underway, seems to be speaking as herself but she’s actually “playing” The Beauty Queen. At first Michael Murphy seems to be speaking from his own perspective, but then you realize he’s playing The Politician. Actor-performer Martin von Haselberg (the husband of Bette Midler) plays The Filmmaker. And Paramount chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos portrays The Promoter.

Some of what they say to the camera might be factually correct in this or that anecdotal way, but it’s all basically bullshit — made-up, written-out or improvised recollections that are performed for a chuckle, for the hell of it.

Scorsese explains his decision to include the four fakers in the press notes: “I wanted the picture to be a magic trick. Magic is the nature of film. There’s an element to the tour that has a sense of fun to it…doing something to the audience. You don’t make it predictable. There’s a great deal of sleight of hand.”

Who says RTR was driven by a sleight-of-hand, put-on mentality? I never heard that before. I thought it was about keeping it real, small-scale, people-level, driving around in a small tour bus, passing out pamphlets, etc.

Scorsese’s doc isn’t some fanciful, mask-wearing thing. 96% of it is just footage of Dylan’s ’75 Rolling Thunder tour throughout New England intercut with visual-aural references to what life was like back in the mid ’70s. The fact that it contains invented testimony from four fleeting fakers doesn’t dilute the basic composition. Perhaps the four fakers idea came from Scorsese’s regard for Italy’s Comedia dell’arte tradition.

Guys like Jeff Sneider don’t understand the concept of owning Blurays, and to be honest half the time I question it myself, given the excellent quality of high-def streaming these days. But I’ve just ordered Kino Lorber’s 60th anniversary Bluray of William Wyler’s The Big Country, and for two good reasons: (1) It’s been newly remastered in HD (the last Bluray version surfaced in 2011, from MGM Home Video) and (2) it’s been completely de-mumpified.

Besides removing the horizontally-stretched “mumps” effect, this upgrade process also pulls in extra visual information from both sides of the frame.

But the mumps taffy-stretch effect that afflicted The Big Country‘s 2011 Bluray wasn’t a CinemaScope issue, as William Wyler‘s 1958 western was shot in 8-perf Technirama and then printed down to 35mm.

The problem was caused, rather, by the MGM Home Video geniuses who transferred the film, which had been restored in 2007 by the Academy Film Archive with support from the Film Foundation, to a high-def Bluray format.

I reached out Tuesday evening to Kino Lorber’s senior acquisitions vp Frank Tarzi, hoping to discuss the technical particulars. (Tarzi had previously helped with factors leading to Kino Lorber’s decision to issue their Marty Bluray in 1.37 rather than the dreaded 1.85.) But it was late by the Manhattan clock, and Tarzi didn’t respond.

Comparison images stolen from DVD Beaver review of Kino Lorber Big Country Bluray.

Mumps above, no mumps below

After 91 and 1/2 years, the feisty and flinty Jerry Lewis is gone. The indisputable king of comedy during the Martin & Lewis heyday of the early to mid ’50s (although their partnership actually began in Atlantic City in ’46), and a boldly experimental avant-garde comedic auteur from the late ’50s to late ’60s. And a truly delicious prick of a human being when he got older, and oh, how I loved him for that. Refusing to suffer fools can be a dicey thing when you’re younger and have to get along, but it’s a blessing when you’re an old fart with money in the bank.

I know that Lewis was one of my first impersonations when I was a kid….”Hey, ladeeeeeee!” (I performed this for director Penelope Spheeris way back when, and while she could’ve gone “uh-huh” she said “hey, that’s pretty good!”)

If you were born in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s and therefore haven’t a clue who Jerry Lewis was, please, please consider reading Shawn Levy’s “The King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis,” which I’ve long regarded as the best researched, the best written and probably the most honest portrait of the occasionally contentious Lewis. If you get hold of a paperback or Kindle copy, find the passages to do with Bob Crane — hair-raising. Or the business about Levy and Lewis in the epilogue, which, Levy says, “were so infamous that I’m told Marty Short spent an evening entertaining Tom Hanks and Paul Reiser at dinner doing impressions of Jerry from it.”

You also have to read Nick Tosches‘ rhapsodic, utterly brilliant “Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams.”

I can’t sit here on a Sunday morning and tap out some brilliant, all-knowing, heart-touching essay on what a huge electrical energy force Lewis was for 20 years in the middle of the 20th Century. So I’m just going to paste some choice HE posts, starting with an excerpt from my one and only interview with the guy at the Stein Erickson hotel during the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and on through to my last in-person encounter when Lewis did a q & a at the Aero theatre to promote Daniel Noah’s Max Rose.

Posted on 5.1.13: “Jerry Lewis has long been regarded as a difficult man, but listen to him at this recent Tribeca Film Festival appearance. He’s 87 and yet he seems more engaged and feisty and crackling than the vast majority of his contemporaries. There’s something about old show-business buzzards. The scrappy survival instincts that helped them make it when young are the same qualities that keep them sharp in their doddering years. You don’t have to be a prick to be intellectually focused and alert (the elegant Norman Lloyd is in his late 90s and a beautiful man to speak with) but if given a choice between a state of advanced vegetation and being a Jerry Lewis type of old guy, I’d definitely go with the latter. I suspect that Lewis biographer Shawn Levy will go ‘hmmm’ when he reads this.”

Martin Scorsese to BigStory’s Jake Coyle: “Cinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone.”

HE to Scorsese: Grand ornate cinemas showing first-run movies in VistaVision and Super Panavision 70 and at 1.66:1 and via 30-frame-per-second Todd AO…movies made by top-tier, world-class talents and featuring big stars…yes, that era has passed. But cultivated cinema culture is very much a thing, and is definitely still with us in certain regions, within certain theatres — it’s just been marginalized. Adapted and reconfigured into a kind of spiritual sideshow. The popcorn-eating mob that used to show up for sturdy-quality mainstream flicks has moved on to CG-driven fantasy-superhero crapola.

Martin Scorsese, as captured for BigStory piece on 12.9.

Scorsese to Coyle: “The theater will always be there for that communal experience, there’s no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be? Is it always going to be a theme-park movie?”

HE to Scorsese: Yeah, pretty much. The big stadium-seating plexes have become animal houses. Except, thank God, when it comes to award-season fare, which will hopefully continue to be a seasonal event (October through January) that will temporarily upgrade the kind of films that people pay to see in a big screen.

Otherwise the action is focused on (a) film festivals, (b) whatever’s streaming on Amazon, Filmstruck, Vudu, et. al., (c) Curated films playing at Hollywood’s American Cinematheque, or Santa Monica’s Aero, or New York’s MOMA, Museum of Moving Image, Film Forum and the Walter Reade plus certain houses in Paris, Berlin and London, (d) the occasional choice Bluray and (e) the even more occasional counter-programmed spring or summer flick that isn’t aimed at idiots.

Spotlight is not flashy but is fairly dazzling in its efficiency. That’s what I’ve loved about Tom McCarthy‘s film from the start. Clean, true and always on-point. Tom McArdle‘s cutting doesn’t call attention to itself, but every transition is smooth and fleet as a fox. Not for nothing has McArdle, a longtime collaborator of McCarthy’s, been nominated for an editing Oscar. I ran into McArdle at a party the weekend before Sundance, and a day or two later we did a q & a:

Spotlight editor and longtime Tom McCarthy collaborator Tom McArdle

HE: You and McCarthy go back…what, 12 or 15 years? What’s the history?

McArdle: In 2002, my agent sent me Tom McCarthy’s Station Agent script. It was really good. Very thoughtful and funny. I’m L.A.-based but I travelled to New York to meet with McCarthy. We talked about the script and other films that might have a similar feel. I brought up that I was a fan of Local Hero (’83) and that it felt somewhat comparable in tone to The Station Agent. Tom also liked Local Hero a lot, so that was a good thing. We got along well. The Station Agent was a quick edit — 13 1/2 weeks total, due to the Sundance schedule and the budget. We followed The Station Agent with The Visitor in 2006, and then Win Win in 2010.

HE: I for one would love to see a longer version of Spotlight. Was there a longer cut that you personally liked but had to be trimmed down for the usual reasons?

McArdle: We cut out about 18 minutes total from the film. The final version that you see is also my favorite version of the film.

HE: There must have been some scenes that you or McCarthy loved but which didn’t strictly serve the narrative. What were those scenes?

McArdle: We cut out five scenes plus some other shots here and there. We cut out a scene of Robby (Michael Keaton) and his wife after golf where she mentions that the church is important to the community. We dropped a scene with Marty (Liev Schrieber) and the publisher Gilman (Michael Countryman) where Gilman asks to be kept in the loop about the church story. We also dropped a scene of Marty and Ben (John Slattery) talking about getting back on the case after 9/11. We dropped a scene between Mike (Mark Ruffalo) and the receptionist for the judge where Mike gets frustrated that the judge is not around. We also dropped a scene of Mike getting the morning newspapers and ignoring a phone call from his estranged wife.

Two days ago Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh posted about 11 under-the-radar performances “that haven’t been buzzed about enough, but deserve Oscar consideration. To my surprise I agree with six of his assessments. I’ll start with these and conclude with my four disagreements. No comment on Helen Mirren‘s Woman in Gold performance as I haven’t seen the film.

AGREEMENT:

(1) Robert De Niro, The Intern. As a retired windower who becomes a chauffeur and trusted confidante for online-fashion tycoon Anne Hathaway, DeNiro “injects this comedy with so much soul he’s almost as impressive as Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give,” Setoodeh writes. HE comment: Definitely a winning supporting performance. It’s odd to think of Jake LaMotta or Neil McCauley playing a correct and well-mannered Mr. Belvedere, but that’s what this performance essentially is. But two things may happen. One, DeNiro’s performance as Jennifer Lawrence‘s dad in Joy may outshine his Intern-ist. And two, a Norbit-like effect from Dirty Grandpa, a throwaway horndog comedy in which DeNiro costars with Zac Efron, may spoil the soup.

(2) Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria. HE comment: Yes, 2014 was a banner year for Stewart with three striking performances in Clouds, Camp X-Ray and Still Alice. She definitely upped her game. But nobody paid the slightest attention to Olivier Assayas’s film, which I found glum and meandering when I saw it in Cannes 17 months ago. Stewart’s Best Actress Cesar award for her performance as Juliette Binoche‘s personal assistant will have to do.

(3) Robert Redford, Truth. HE comment: Redford is one of those actors who can’t change his appearance or accent, but he captures Dan Rather with that particular, very familiar cadence that the former CBS Evening News anchor used on the air for so many decades. Plus he conveys a affecting sense of dignity. Truth has been killed by the liberal media and is currently buried in a 20-foot-deep pit so Redford hasn’t a prayer, but this is one of his best post-1990 performances.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s American Airlines flight landed at Dulles around 4:10 pm, and 20 minutes later at the baggage carousel I ran into producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa (Nebraska, Little Miss Sunshine) and Steve Golin (The Revenant, Spotlight) plus four or five industry-related ladies whose names I didn’t solicit or have forgotten — no offense. We threw our bags into a dark-chocolate Middleburg Film Festival shuttle and off we went. (Golin told me during the 70-minute drive that The Revenant has just locked, and that the final running time is two hours and 31 minutes.) We pulled into Middleburg’s Salamander Resort & Spa, which is owned by BET co-founder and billionaire Sheila Crump Johnson, around 6 pm. Ten minutes later I was speed-walking into town (roughly 1/3 of a mile) to pick up my press pass.

At 7:30 pm Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight screened inside a large Salamander conference room following remarks by Ms. Johnson and Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. It was my third viewing, and I swear to God I could see it another three or four times without blinking. I feel such a bond with Spotlight that I wish it would run longer, or at least that a longer cut would be available some day on Bluray. It’s a seriously moral and compassionate film, almost in a Bressonian sense. Every scene is about good, reasonable-minded journalists doing the best they can without any monkeying around. No screaming arguments (okay, there’s one flash of temper), no drunkenness, no excessive behaviors of any kind, no car crashes or chases. In a way, Spotlight is a film you want to move into and never leave.

(l. to r.) Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday, Washington Post Executive editor Marty Baron, Spotlight producer Steve Golin following this evening’s screening.

Old-world, country-estate library/lounge inside Salamander Resort & Spa.

After it ended Golin and Washington Post executive editor and former Boston Globe editor Marty Baron (who is perfectly portrayed in the film by Liev Schreiber) were interviewed by WashPost film critic & longtime HE pally Ann Hornaday. The film necessarily compresses the story of the Boston Globe Spotlight team’s investigation into sexual abuse within the Boston archdiocese, Baron said, but it tells it skillfully and accurately. And the filmmakers asked all the right questions and double-checked the facts. Hornaday called it “journalist porn” of the highest order.

There’s such a flush and settled vibe here in Middleburg. Acres and acres of sprawling green meadows and wooded areas everywhere you look, and no ugly shopping malls or fat families or Kim Davis types waddling around. An affluent haven. The outdoors smell wonderful — grassy, earthy, a slight hint of horse dung. This is God’s country, or the kind of country, at least, that the well-off tend to cultivate and tastefully build upon with or without God’s assistance. It’s a bit like the English countryside, which I sampled six years ago during a Fantastic Mr. Fox press junket visit to the late Roald Dahl‘s home in Great Missenden. I don’t belong but I’m glad to be here, and am very gratified to wallow in all this splendor and comfort. Thanks again to Obscured Pictures‘ R.J. Millard for inviting me, and thanks especially to Ms. Johnson. And a tip of the hat to festival programmer Susan Koch for choosing wisely and well.

No question about it — the Salamander Resort & Spa has been built primarily for the swells.

Here’s hoping that the forthcoming Bluray of David Weisbart and Gordon Douglas‘s giant-ant movie, Them! (’54), will be presented in a boxy (i.e., 1.33:1) aspect ratio. I don’t know if work on the Bluray has been completed or if the guys in charge are 1.85 aspect-ratio fascists, but please. Remember the bravery of Kino Lorber’s Frank Tarzi when he released Delbert Mann‘s Marty in 1.33:1 instead of the Furmanek-recommended 1.85:1. Remember how 1.85 fascism was pretty much discredited when Criterion decided to release On The Waterfront in three separate aspect ratios — 1.33, 1.66 and 1.85. And check out the YouTube scene below and imagine how it will look (i.e., all the information that will be lost) if Them! is presented in 1.85. It’ll be nothing less than criminal if that happens.

The most persistent argument against my Beware of Brownfellas piece is that (a) the 2007 Bluray version of Goodfellas was artificially brightened and (b) the new Goodfellas Bluray is a truer, more film-like rendering of what the original answer print looked like — i.e., nice and dark and murky. My response is simple. The 2007 Bluray version, which I’m completely happy with, contains a good amount of shade, shadows and darkness where appropriate. I saw Goodfellas three times in theatres in 1990, and I’m telling you that the ’07 Bluray is by no means an artificially brightened thing. It looks gritty, unaffected, like reality. How in the name of God can it improve the experience of watching Goodfellas by darkening and brown-tinting the image? How is it better for the viewer to remove details that were visible on the 2007 Bluray and bury them in shadows?

This morning I asked restoration guru Robert Harris about the why and wherefores, and his response was that the 2007 Bluray is “totally irrelevant.” What matters is the Scorsese-approved answer print that was supplied for the 2015 Bluray transfer. The 2007 Bluray, he says, “didn’t have stable reds, didn’t have proper black levels, didn’t have proper shadow detail.” The guys who mastered it, he says, “were using a more primitive technology.” And yet 2007 was ironically the first year “in which we had the ability to recreate film on Bluray.” It just wasn’t part of the ’07 Goodfellas. So, boiled down, the new Bluray is a welcome thing because it’s giving us a version that really looks like film, or so Harris and his brethren are saying.