Son of Duelling Thompson Sagas

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Initially posted on 4.21.21: After re-watching Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen‘s The Getaway (’72) a couple of nights ago, I’m all the more certain that Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake, in which Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger took on the same Doc and Carol McCoy roles that McQueen and Ali McGraw played 22 years earlier, is a smoother, more involving watch.

The Peckinpah version has a few moments, but it’s also nonsensical at times.

Why doesn’t McQueen shoot Al Lettieri in the head after the bank job?

Those middle-aged, cowboy-hat-wearing goons who work for Ben Johnson and his moustachioed brother are ridiculous.

There’s no reason for McGraw’s bizarre lurching the car when McQueen’s about to get in.

The sappy ending with Slim Pickens after crossing the border…c’mon.

And why would Richard Bright‘s train station con artist, who’s pocketed a couple of wads of cash, go to the cops just because McQueen beat him up? He can’t find a local clinic?

Huisache: “With the exception of Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs all of Sam Peckinpah’s films are messes of one magnitude or another, with Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia the biggest mess of all.

“The Getaway is enjoyable but the Slim Pickens ending is emblematic of Peckinpah’s resort to just saying ‘screw it, how do I get out of this mess? It was just nailed on. Sam had a mess and he called Pickens for help and the old feller bailed him out with a glorious good-ole-boy bit.

“I saw the film when it came out and was living in the area where it was filmed in central Texas. I thought it a very enjoyable mess and the Pickens ending a hoot. But that’s all the film is — an enjoyable hoot. Acting like it’s some kind of worthy project is a bridge too far.

“I suppose Sam’s problem was his alcoholism and his anti-social personality disorder. Either way the guy had a hard time making the pieces fit into the holes.”

HE reply: “Thank you — 100% correct about the nagging ‘mess’ factor. Totally dead-on. That said, Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and, as you noted, Straw Dogs are not messes. And there are many reasons to respect Junior Bonner. And I’ve never even seen Noon Wine.”

By the way: At the end of The Getaway Slim Pickens’ character tells Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy that he makes around $5K annually, or roughly $31,683 in 2021 dollars. That works out to roughly $2640 a month — an impoverished lifestyle. McQueen offers Pickens $10K or over $60K in 2021 dollars for his beat-up, piece-of-shit pickup truck. Pickens figures they’ll pay more so he says “how about $20K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $120K…for a shitty pickup truck! And then Ali McGraw counters with “how about $30K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $180K…for a piece-of-shit pickup truck! That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as a messy ending.

Had Honestly Never Heard This Colloquialism Before Last Night

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“Momala of the country”…

In a May 2019 letter to Elle magazine in celebration of Mother’s Day Sen. Kamala Harris explained the origin.

“When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella and I agreed that we didn’t like the term ‘stepmom’ [so] they came up with ‘Momala.'”

Fine and good but Kamala Harris‘s rickety whiney voice still grates. Her speeches lack a certain musical quality…a gift that Barack had in abundance. We all know there’s a reason she dropped out of Democratic primary contention in December 2019. Women (particularly women of color) are in her corner but that’s about it.

While Rome Burns

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In other words: General reporting about Supreme Court righties having side-stepped and folded on Donald Trump‘s behalf was brief and unsustained, while college activists ignored this acquiescence in favor of strident and agitated pro-Gaza occupations. We’re just about cooked.

20 months hence the obviously lucid, thoughtful and charming Dick Van Dyke will turn 100.

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Gladhanders Lead The Charge

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If Emily (Jungle Cruise) Blunt has anything to do with it, it’s not funny — this is HE’s hard and fast rule.

Give Clayton Davis credit for at least admitting out of the gate that The Fall Guy (Universal, 3.3) is empty jizz-whizz. I proudly steered clear of last night’s all-media showing, and will mournfully submit to it Wednesday night like an Egyptian sphinx. I don’t care how many easy lays come out of the woodwork to insist how “funny” or “purely pleasurable” it is. So much of present-tense movie life is about spiritual drainage. Douse me with anhydrous butter fat, Leitch…pour gasoline, light match.

Karaszewski is Flush Enough To Stay At The Brando!

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Life is good on Tetiaroa! Only for fat-wallet players, but as Max Bialystock said in The Producers, “That’s it, baby..if you’ve got it, flaunt it!

Seinfeld Is Officially Onboard

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“This is the result of the extreme left and p.c. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committee, groups…’here’s our thought about this joke’…well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

HE to psychotic, head-in-the-sand, comment-thread wokesters (“Radewart” and that ilk): Here’s your chance to bash on crazy, wackjobby Jerry Seinfeld and his baffling tendency to view everything with a preconceived bias against the progressive left.

Sasha Stone, “Yes, Jerry Seinfeld Is Right Again“:

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Woke Cannes Jury: Top Awards Will Go To Films & Filmmakers With Progressive Identity Credentials

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In short, the festival hasn’t even begun but from an ideological, social-political perspective the fix is already in, more or less. Greta Gerwig + Lily Gladstone + Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Monster, Broker, Shoplifters) will presumably fill the role of the jury’s urgent humanist crusaders…the Batman + Robin + Commissioner Gordon social-inequity problem solvers…do the right thing, ”holy fruit salad!”, etc.

The only jurors I feel a strong cinematic kinship with are J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, Society of the Snow) and Nadine Labaki (Capernaum). With much chagrin HE admits to never having seen Omar Sy’s standout performance in The Untouchables…my bad. Ebru Ceylan is the embedded screenwriting collaborator of her husband, director Nuri-Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, About Dry Grasses).

Dunaway Back In The Spotlight

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Two new pop-throughs on the Faye Dunaway front: (1) A. Ashley Hoff‘s “With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic” (Chicago Review Press, 5.7.24), and (2) Faye, Laurent Bouzereau‘s sure-to-be-softballed profile doc that will premiere during the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. Dunaway and Bouzereau will attend the Cote d’Azur screening.

HE comment #1: Dunaway’s career hit a kind of pothole when Mommie Dearest came out, agreed, but I just re-watched it a couple of weeks ago and certain portions are still a hoot. For my money the film is a hugely pleasurable serving of classic Hollywood Kabuki theatre.

I saw it with several gay guys at the old Columbus Circle Paramount screening room in late August of ’81, and on the down elevator they were all shrieking with laughter, and I don’t mean the derisive kind. They were in heaven…delighted.

Alas, Mommie Dearest has been called an “unintentional comedy” by none-too-brights for so long that it looks like up to me, and I’m sorry but that judgment is just as wrong today as it ever was.

The Mommie Dearest “comedy” is not unintentional. The film basically serves a form of hyper-realism with a campy edge. It’s extreme soap opera, at times overbaked but winkingly so with everyone in on the joke.

If director Frank Perry had modulated Dunaway’s performance, some of the great lines — ‘No wire hangers EVER!,’ ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ — wouldn’t have worked so well. Those lines are the stuff of Hollywood legend, right up there with Bette Davis saying “what a dump!” and Vivien Leigh saying “I’ll never be hungry again.”

HE comment #2: Dunaway has been a first-rate actress since the early ’60s, and at age 83 is still at it, of course. But her peak years were close to 15 — Bonnie and Clyde (’67) to Mommie Dearest (’81). Her other highlights include The Thomas Crown Affair (fellatio simulation with a chess piece), The Arrangement, Little Big Man, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, The Three Musketeers, Chinatown, The Towering Inferno (the second best ’70s disaster flick, right after Juggernaut), The Four Musketeers, Three Days of the Condor and Network (Best Actress Oscar…the absolute peak).

Please understand that while some superstars have enjoyed 20-year peaks (Cary Grant, James Stewart, George Clooney), 15 is far more common so there’s certainly nothing tragic or mortifying about Dunaway’s career cooling down in the early Reagan era. Remember also that she rebounded with her Barfly performance in ’87, and that she landed three Golden Globes in the ’80s and an Emmy in ’94.

Clark Gable’s hottest years numbered 13 — between It Happened One Night (‘34) and The Hucksters (‘47). Humphrey Bogart happened between The Maltese Falcon (‘41) and The Harder They Fall (‘56) — a 15-year run. Robert Redford peaked between Butch Cassidy (‘69) and Brubaker and Ordinary People (‘80) — 11 to 12 years. Tony Curtis‘s hot streak was relatively brief — 1957 (Sweet Smell of Success) to 1968 (The Boston Strangler). Kirk Douglas also had about 15 years — Champion (’49) to Seven Days in May (’64).

Elizabeth Taylor had 15 years — 1950 (Father of the Bride) to 1966 (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Jean Arthur — mid ’30s to early ’50s (Shane) — call it 15 years. Katharine Hepburn — early ’30s to early ’80s (On Golden Pond). Meryl Streep — 1979 (The Seduction of Joe Tynan) to today…over 40 years and counting.

It’s a basic creative and biological law that only about 10% to 15% of your films are going to be regarded as serious creme de la creme…if that. Most big stars (the smart ones) are given a window of a solid dozen years or so in which they have the power, agency and wherewithal to bring their game and show what they’re worth creatively. Dunaway certainly managed that and then some.

Best Flamethrower Moments

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I’m sorry but my all-time favorite flamethrower scene is still the one in William Friedkin‘s Deal of the Century (’83)…the one in which Gregory Hines torches the enraged Latino guy’s car. Because it’s easily the most pleasurable.

HE’s #2 is the Once Upon A Time in Hollywood poolside scene in which Rick Dalton immolates Manson Family psychopath Susan “Sadie Glutz” Atkins. #3 is Sigourney Weaver torching Mama Alien and all of her eggs in James Cameron‘s Aliens (’86). #4 is vAl Pacino using the “flame” word during his Scent of a Woman third-act rant. #5 is Mel Gibson flamethrowing the bad guys in The Road Warrior. #6 is the singed hair-and-wardrobe scene in John Carpenter‘s The Thing (’82).

And the others are…