Smiling faces and two-faced enemies. Or, in Marlon Brando terminology, one-eyed jacks. Some actual friends or “friendos,” of course (and thank God for those few) but mostly fair-weather types, transactional allies, etc. Like any other big-city racket. Grow up.

I’m a fool for slick, modernized trailers of classic films, and Lord knows there are easily a couple hundred out there. But when Dan McBride’s One-Eyed Jacks trailer surfaced four years ago, I knew right away that it was triple grade-A. McBride: “[Looking to] breathe new life into older, forgotten or overlooked films. Mainly to spread awareness and hopefully inspire more people to seek them out.”

The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, High Noon, The Naked Spur, Shane, The Searchers, The Big Country, (not Rio Bravo), The Magnificent Seven, North to Alaska, One-Eyed Jacks, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Professionals, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Silverado, Unforgiven, Open Range, The Assassination of Jesse James, No Country for Old Men, The Revenant, Hell or High Water. (22)

On the set of One-Eyed Jacks, sometime in the fall of ’59. I presume they were speaking French, which Brando became fluent in…uhm, sometime in the early to mid ’50s.

Posted on 12.21.15: Back in the 20th Century people used to ask actors for autographs instead of cell-phone selfies. Eccentric as it may sound, fans would actually carry around autograph books for this purpose. It’s been suggested that now and then hardcore fans would ask for more than just a signature — they would ask the celebrity to write a quote he/she is famous for uttering in a film.

If you ran into Gloria Swanson, let’s say, you would ask her to write “I am big…it’s the pictures that got small.” If you bumped into William Holden you’d ask him to write “if they move, kill ’em.” And so on. I would never do this, of course, but some allegedly have.

Today Daily Beast contributor Tom Teodorczuk posted an interview with 45 Years costar Tom Courtenay, and about halfway through Courtenay mentions that he was recently approached by an autograph hunter asking him to sign a piece of paper underneath the words “the personal life is dead” — one of the utterances of Strelnikov, his character in Dr. Zhivago. Courtenay tells Teodorczuk that the quote is “a load of bollocks,” but did he oblige?

Four years ago I recalled a moment in ’81 when I ran into In Cold Blood costar Scott Wilson in a West Hollywood bar, and that I stifled an instinct to ask for an autograph along with the words “hair on the walls” — a Dick Hickock line from Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel.

If I could persuade Brad Pitt to give me an autograph, I’d ask him to write “don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” If I’d run into Marlon Brando in the ’70s, I would have asked him to write either “whatta ya got?” (a line from The Wild One) or “Don’t be doin’ her like that” (from One-Eyed Jacks). If I’d enountered Montgomery Clift I’d ask him to write “nobody ever lies about being lonely” — a Robert E. Lee Prewitt/From Here To Eternity line. If I saw director-actor Alfonso Arau I would ask him to write “damn gringos!” Further suggestions along these lines?

Robert De Niro: “Are you talkin’ to me?” Samuel L. Jackson: “I don’t remember askin’ you a goddam thing!” Seth Rogen: “Heh heh heh heh yuk yuk yuk!” Bruce Willis: “Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!” or “Welcome to the party, pal!” Al Pacino: “Hoo-hah!” Jonah Hill: “Are those my only two options?”

I’ve written a few times about the four different kinds of film scores — (a) old-school orchestral, strongly instructive (telling you what’s going on at almost every turn), (b) emotional but lullingly so, guiding and alerting and magically punctuating from time to time (like Franz Waxman‘s score for Sunset Boulevard), (c) watching the movie along with you, echoing your feelings and translating them into mood music (like Mychael Danna‘s score for Moneyball), and (d) so completely and harmoniously blended into the fabric of the film that you’ll have a hard time remembering a bridge or a bar after the film ends.

We all understand that the era of classic film scores — composed by Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrman, Waxman, Max Steiner, Maurice Jarre, Alex North, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bronislau Kaper, Ennio Morricone, Leonard Rosenman, Nino Rota, Elmer Bernstein, Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer and Jerry Goldsmith — is over and done with. Their work (i.e., the artful supplying of unmissable emotional undercurrents for mainstream, big-studio films that peaked between the mid 1930s and late ’70s) belongs to movie-score cultists now. It’s sad to contemplate how one day these awesome creations will be absent from playlists entirely.

But I’ve always enjoyed these movie symphonies the most because their composers — most of them classically trained and European-born — didn’t just write “scores” but created non-verbal, highly charged musical characters. They didn’t watch the film in the seat beside you or guide you along as most scores tend to do — they acted as a combination of a Greek musical chorus and a highly willful and assertive supporting character.

These “characters” had as much to say about the story and underlying themes as the director, producers, writers or actors. And sometimes more so. They didn’t musically fortify or underline the action — they were the action.

If the composers of these scores were allowed to share their true feelings they would confide the following before the film begins: “Not to take anything away from what the director, writers and actors are conveying but I, the composer, have my own passionate convictions about what this film is about, and you might want to give my input as much weight and consideration as anyone else’s. In fact, fuck those guys…half the time they don’t know what they’re doing but I always know…I’m always in command, always waist-deep and carried away by the current.”

Eight and a half years ago I wrote the following about Rosza in a piece called “Hungarian Genius“: “Rosza sometimes let his costume-epic scores become slightly over-heated, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rosza really had soul.

“Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch Nicholas Ray’s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rosza described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and it’s obvious that Rosza came closer to capturing the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than anyone else on the team (Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan, producer Samuel Bronston).”

If someone were to manufacture classic action figures made from 3D printing, I’d probably buy two or three. Cool characters like William Holden‘s Pike Bishop from The Wild Bunch, Tom Cruise‘s Vincent from Collateral, Jean Arthur‘s Bonnie Lee from Only Angels Have Wings, Lee Marvin‘s Walker from Point Blank, Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce, Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill from North by Northwest, James Cagney‘s Cody Jarret from White Heat, Gregory Peck‘s Tom Rath from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Humphrey Bogart‘s Fred C. Dobbs from Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Alan Ladd‘s Shane, Robert DeNiro‘s Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver or Neil McCauley from Heat, Marlon Brando‘s Rio from One-Eyed Jacks, etc.

Nothing tiny-sized, mind, but figures that stand a good eight or nine inches tall. Maybe even a foot. It’s a fairly common technology these days, but so far most of the manufacturers have aimed at the vanity/selfie market.

As a title, Baby Driver is definitely too literal-minded. It would have been cool if Ansel Elgort‘s character wasn’t literally called “Baby” and if he wasn’t a gifted getaway driver, but this is precisely the case in Edgar Wright‘s film. Baby Driver isn’t quite on the painful level of John Singleton‘s Poetic Justice (’93), but it’s close.

The tendency to literalize or de-poeticize movie titles hit me for the first time in ’84 when Taylor Hackford decided to drop the original Out of The Past title by calling his remake Against All Odds. Out of the Past stirs and haunts; Against All Odds promises some kind of pitched battle or macho grudge match. If only Witness had been titled Amish Hide-Out: Be Careful Among The English or One-Eyed Jacks had been called Rio Settles Score.

Today’s assignments: (a) Name other titles that have embraced explicit references rather than metaphors or allusions and (b) name titles that were too metaphorical or vague, and could have used simpler, plainer terminology.

HE to Criterion’s Peter Becker (who’s on vacation): “Peter — Could you please tell me what Criterion’s plans are for offering 4K versions of its library, if not via physical media (4K UHD Blurays) then at least via 4K streaming files on Filmstruck? I’ve been floored by Amazon’s 4K streaming versions of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and I would love, naturally, to see L’Avventura, Blow-Up, One-Eyed Jacks, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and all my other favorite Criterion Bluray titles on 4K. A Filmstruck app, by the way, still isn’t available on the Roku box. A tech support person recently wrote that the Filmstruck app will arrive on Roku sometime in May. Is that true? I realize that you’re not exactly a vigorous communicator when it comes to direct questions from persons like myself, but is there any chance you could reply this time? Or at least ask someone to provide answers on your behalf? Many thanks — Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere”

Posted by TCM chatroom guy named “TopBilled” in thread about when Roku will finally carry the Filmstruck/Criterion app. A Filmstruck rep told him sometime in May, but you never know.

The 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival (Thursday, 4.6 thru Sunday, 4.9) announced its schedule today, but somebody on the staff screwed up as far as their 4.7 showing of John Huston‘s Beat The Devil is concerned.

The 1953 black-and-white release is showing on Friday, April 7, at 11:15 am. A restored 94-minute version of this initially misunderstood camp classic, recovered and refined by Sony’s Grover Crisp, was screened at the annual Reel Thing symposium on 8.19.16. In keeping with the TCM festival’s longstanding tradition of showing recent restorations, Crisp told me this morning that the 94-minute version will indeed screen on 4.7. And yet the TCM Classic Film Festival website not only says the running time will be 89 minutes (the length of the somewhat faded and bleachy public-domain version that’s been playing on TV for decades) but fails to mention Crisp’s restoration. Brilliant!

6:10 pm update: The Beat The Devil running time has been corrected to say 94 minutes, but still no mention of the fact that the film has been restored.

The restored version played at Manhattan’s Film Forum last February.

Crisp said he hasn’t been told when his 94-minute version will be made available via HD streaming or Bluray.

Sony has a history of disregarding Crisp’s classic film restorations. They waited until October 2013 to release HD streaming and Bluray versions of Crisp’s restored From Here To Eternity, even though the first screening of Crisp’s version happened at the Academy in the fall of ’09.