Posted on 2.22.12:

Friendo: “Neil Burger’s The Marsh King’s Daughter (Lionsgate/Roadside, 11.3) is ostensibly a thriller, and I love thrillers. Good director, talented stars — but Bezos wants $19.99 to RENT the damn thing.”

HE to Friendo: “The combination of Daisy (‘who’s Cary Grant again?’) Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn plus that awful title (who would want anything to do with a marsh king, much less his daughter?) sounds lethal.”

Supporting player #1: “So this guy rules the marshlands, you’re saying? Residents pay tribute, owe him their lives, work for him, fear him?”

Supporting player #2: “Yeah, pretty much.”

Supporting player #1: “I’m taking a film crew into the marshlands next month. We have permits from the state film commission but…what are you saying, we also need permission to shoot in this guy’s territory? We need to butter him up, pay him off?”

Supporting player #2: “I wouldn’t recommend not doing that. He’s a ruthless, powerful cat. You need to show obeisance.”

On the morning of Sunday, 3.25.62, N.Y. Times readers may have scanned a mild little Tom Wicker story about President Jack Kennedy having briefly chatted with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the El Dorado Country Club during a weekend visit to the Palm Desert area.

Quoting press secretary Pierre Salinger, Wicker reported that the Kennedy-Ike discussion had lasted “fifty-one minutes.”

Wicker’s story discreetly observed that JFK was “spending the weekend nearby.” What Wicker meant but was professionally obliged to ignore wasn’t “newsworthy” by Times standards, but was certainly legend-worthy. For the Palm Desert dish that Wicker side-stepped was comprised of three tasty intrigues.

One, Kennedy was staying at Bing Crosby’s sprawling, Spanish–style home located within the grounds of Palm Desert’s Ironwood Country Club,

Two, he had decided on the Crosby estate and against staying at Frank Sinatra’s nearby desert home after being told (by either J. Edgar Hoover or Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy or both) that Sinatra had been maintaining close ties with certain mafia figures, and that Kennedy couldn’t afford the tainted association.

And three, that JFK and Marilyn Monroe had not only attended a party the night before (Saturday, 3.24) at the Crosby estate but had spent the night together at a separate cottage on the property.

This is how things worked in the Kennedy era. Big-time, well-connected reporters didn’t touch this kind of material. That was the understanding.

Three days ago I began tearing through Glenn Frankel‘s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,” an essential, smoothly readable history (published in February 2017) of the legendary Carl Foreman.

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 thought I knew the High Noon saga top to bottom, but Frankel’s well-researched book taught me quite a few things.

I finished it last night, and immediately wanted to re-watch Lionel Chetwynd‘s Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents (’02), a two-hour PBS documentary that dug into more or less the same Foreman saga.

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 Frank Capra‘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.

They’re like racehorses in the stall, going “whurhr-huhr-huhr!” and kicking the wall and champing at the bit…“we want to push back at all those elite industry know-it-alls and Telluride tastemakers so badly!…we can’t wait to set them straight.”

…but not always.

There are days when I feel like Dennis Hopper‘s Tom Ripley in The American Friend — “I seem to know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is.”

But that’s just the proverbial doubt dog tugging at my overcoat. Mostly I feel fine.

Thanksgiving dinner at Jett and Cait’s was warm and cool and soothing, and familiar in the best ways imaginable.

I’ve just decided to re-watch Lawrence Kasdan‘s Mumford (Touchstone, 9.24.99). It’s about a fraudulent but extremely charismatic small-town therapist (Loren Dean), whom almost everyone loves to chat with and confess to. I loved it from the get-go (it has a dead perfect ending), but too many critics disapproved and it managed only a lousy $4.5 million gross. But it’s a really, really good film, I swear. Exudes a certain sly, low-key charm.

Roger Ebert, 9.24.99: “There are no earth-shaking payoffs here. No dramatic astonishments, vile betrayals or sexual surprises. Just the careful and loving creation of some characters it is mostly a pleasure to meet. And at its deepest level, profoundly down there below the surface, it is something more, I think: an expression of Kasdan’s humanist longings, his wish that people would listen better and value one another more. It is the strangest thing, how this movie sneaks up and makes you feel a little better about yourself.”

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I’d love to re-see Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8) next week, but I’m obliged to wait until Monday, 12.4.

Just don’t forget — it’s eight or nine times better than Barbie!

I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for today, just because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. For I feel thankful 24/7/365.

I’m especially grateful, very grateful, for the luck that has come my way. And for the bad luck, in a way, as all misfortune is character-building. And for the daily opportunity to show love for my two sons and the overall community (old friends, business pallies, colleagues, cats) and the general feeling of loving or liking or aligning with others in whatever way.

Plus I’m hugely grateful that I wasn’t born to a downmarket family in Nebraska or Montana or to some resigned, lethargic, drinking-class environment. I’m very thankful, in other words, for what my parents and grandparents bequeathed.