Just over 14 years ago I posted a relatively short riff called “Respectful Sirk Takedown” (2.22.10). Through the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and aughts I had been constantly berated and belittled by elite film mavens. telling me it was my fault, not Sirk’s, that his films had never come together in my head as wondrous servings of lush “ironic” cinema.

So in my head I finally said “enough!” and posted my critique, and boy, did I get shat and spat upon by the dweebs. I was called a lowlife troglodyte, a vomiting dog, a man without a soul.

So it feels very gratifying that Paul Schrader has just posted along the same lines, saying in effect “is it time for a reassessment of this overpraised mofo?” For years I’ve stood alone against the fiercest of winds. Now, at long last, I have good company.

HE’s original piece: The German-born Douglas Sirk has long been considered a world-class, pantheon-level filmmaker. That’s because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)

The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.

There’s no winning against this mindset, which is somewhere between a schoolyard bully move and an intellectual con. The dweebs (and I’m talking about a very small and cloistered group of big-city critics) have put one over on us. And I’m suggesting, due respect, that the time has come to push back on Sirk and to consider him once again as the Guiding Light-level director that some (myself included) believe that he always was.

Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.

In his praise of Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote that “to appreciate [this film] probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman‘s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”

Aaaah, the old concealment game! For this is the essence of the Sirk con. John Ford used to “conceal” also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality). If Ebert’s comment isn’t Orwellian film-dweeb speak, I don’t know what would be.

Poor Ava Gardner had recently turned 36 when the filming of On The Beach began in January of ‘59. She looked at least 45…more than a bit puffy, the ravages of a fast life. Stanley Kramer’s apocalyptic drama opened 11 months later, and it lost money, you bet — $700,000 in the red. Educated folk gave it a tumble; Joe and Jane Popcorn mostly said “no thanks”. The fertilizer line is still a howler.

Of all the films allegedly destined to play at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the only one I’m exceptionally interested in is Ali Abassa‘s The Apprentice. Co-written by Gabriel Sherman and Abassa. Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Martin Donovan as Fred Trump.

…but not his granddaughter Sydney…no offense. There’s much, much more to the feminine mystique than the mere possession of a nice rack.

An excerpt from Bernard Girard‘s Dead Heat on a Merry Go-Round (66) in which James Coburn‘s Eli Kotch is speaking to Camilla Sparv‘s Inga Knudson, his love interest:

Coburn: “Bean Sweeney? Did you ever read him?”
Sparv: “Who?”
Coburn: “Bean Sweeney! Fantastic. The first time I read him, I couldn’t write for six weeks. Beautiful man. Said it all.”

Before global warming March in the tristate area tended to prompt morose meditations — more wintry than springy, damp, occasionally mild but just as often a climate best ignored. Daydreams of South Beach, Key West, Turks & Caicos.

But within the last few days the air has become warmish, standing on the Westport train station platform feels less miserable and trees are starting to think about sprouting leaves.

I’ve never seen Big Jim McClain (‘52 — John Wayne vs. Hawaiian Communists) but the term “treason trail” has recently become a mental irritant. James Arness and Nancy Olson costarred.

Robert Downey, Jr.’s bordering-on-bizarre evening wear (maroon tuxedoes, broadly flared suit pants, heavy-soled shoes) should be cause for alarm among decent Americans everywhere.

Some have been saying over the last 48 hours that if Kevin Costner‘s two-part Horizon: An American Saga is deemed Best Picture-worthy, guild and Academy members will have to either vote for Part One (which is opening on 6.28.24) or Part Two (opening on 8.16.24)j, but they can’t vote for Horizon as a single long film with two parts. One or the other.

What are they talking about? Of course they can vote for Horizon as a single entity!

The unified Lawrence of Arabia that we all know is a 227-minute, two-part film separated by an intermission.

After Part One ended at the two-hour mark, the music swelled, the word “Intermission” appeared, the film came to a stop and the lights came up. And then, 15 minutes later, Part Two began and ended 107 minutes later. That’s how it was shown. A lot of industry people voted for it in early ’63, and Lawrence would up winning the Best Picture Oscar.

But let’s imagine that instead of showing Lawrence in one big nearly-four-hour package (including intermission), Lean and Columbia Pictures decided to release Part One in early October of ’62 — a two-hour, World War I-era film about T.E. Lawrence, titling it Lawrence: Cairo to Aqaba. And then in early December they released Part Two, an 107-minute film called Lawrence: Despair and Downfall.

Lean and Columbia explain that they simply felt that the film could be better appreciated in two separate viewings. It’s still the same 227-minute movie — they just decided to show Part One and Part Two separated by two months rather than 15 minutes.

What kind of idiot would say “oh, no…you can’t do that! You can’t show Part One and Part Two eight weeks apart. If you show these films as a pair on a single evening, separated by a 15-minute intermission, fine, But if you can’t show two separate parts and expect us to vote on them as a single film experience….no way!”

What’s the difference between this and how Costner is planning to unveil Horizon, as a two-parter separated by several weeks between openings? Who would prefer it if Costner announced that both parts of Horizon will screen as a single experience, except it will last nearly five hours or maybe longer with an intermission? That sounds like a sore ass to me. I would rather see it in two separate viewing experiences.

Sydney Sweeney and Simona Tabasco‘s offensively empty “eff, marry or kill” video doesn’t register on HE due to the eff word.

Michael Mohan and Andrew Lobel‘s Immaculate opens on 3.22. Is it okay if I pass? Of course it is. I don’t know which genre I hate more — Millennial/Zoomer horror or big-studio animation.

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39,000 TikTokers have watched and presumably approved of this childish, pathetic and deeply racist video. The message, obviously, is that the world has too many whiteys, but this drooling moron doesn’t mention the various percentages of white people vs. communities of color in various countries. It’s the percentages that matter. Of the 120 million people living in Brazil, for example, 56% are Black. 14.2 % of the U.S. population identifies as Black, and roughly 59% are white.

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