Whatever happened to the Peck’s bad boy of North by Northwest? The earplug kid, I mean. Who was this little Southern California jackass and what was his basic malfunction? And what happened to the production associate who should have spotted this bad business during repeated takes?

The kid’s place in history is secure. NXNW was shot in ‘58, and he appears to be nine or ten. If he’s still with us the little fucker with the obstinate (or playfully sociopathic?) attitude and the Brylcreamed hair is in his early ‘70s now. Once you’ve seen that green plaid shirt and those nail-bitten adolescent fingers plugging those Jerry Mathers-type ears…there’s no un-seeing any of it.

Does anyone know his name? Or how his life turned out? Did he work his way into a good profession or achieve some measure of financial security or whatever? Did he get married and have kids? Did he wind up serving in Vietnam or participating in anti-war demonstrations in the late ‘60s? Given his mischievous inclinations the kid almost certainly grew up into a leftist. This was no obedient rule-follower. Maybe he became a writer or a politician or a Wall Street guy…who knows?

The plugged-ear kid is right in there with all the various dialogue-speaking characters invented by screenwriter Ernest Lehman…right in there with Glen Cove police sergeant “Emile Clinger” (John Beradino) and the older “good woman” with the CIA whose humanistic concern for the fate of Roger Thornhill is casually and patronizingly dismissed by Leo G. Carroll’s “professor” and with the unseen midtown Manhattan cab driver who dryiy and confidently states his ability to lose the pursuing followers (“Yes, I can”) only to fail to do so. Or the hot blonde (Patricia Cutts) in the Rapid City hospital room (“Stop!”)

“Kid Ears” is as much of an iconic NXNW presence as anyone else…as memorable as the Madison Ave. building custodian (Tommy Farrell‘s “Eddie”) who’s “not talkin’” to his wife, or the Plaza Hotel itself or “Victor” (Harry Seymour), the bald-headed Oak Bar maitre d, or “Elsie” the Plaza maid (Maudie Prickett), or the suspicious and somewhat surly overweight detective (Tol Avery) on the 20th Century Limited who questions Eva Marie Saint, or the slender, reedy-voiced farmer (Malcolm Atterbury) who chats with Cary Grant at Prairie Stop Highway 41, or the cultured hotel concierge at Chicago’s Ambassador East (can’t find his name) or “Sergeant Flamm” (Patrick McVey), the fleshy beat cop who co-arrests Grant at the Michigan Ave. auction only to drop him off at Midway Airport…

Earplug kid doesn’t speak, of course, and is the only discordant note in the entire film…the only accident that wasn’t corrected. He’s probably the only NXNW veteran besides 98 year-old Eva Marie Saint and maybe one other who isn’t dead as we speak. Or maybe he too has passed on. Either way he certainly belongs to the ages.

What discipline was handed out to the guilty party who failed to notice this Leave It To Beaver-aged troublemaker…who failed to spot this potentially disruptive behavior in front of those costly VistaVision cameras? Hitchcock’s continuity person or the 1st assistant director or whomever — somebody was responsible, and someone must have spotted him. My guess is that Hitchcock may have been told about the kid after Grant, Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau had satisfactorily performed the scene on an MGM Culver City sound stage, but he blithely ignored the potential for narrative interruption, figuring no one would notice (and nobody did until NXNW appeared on DVD, which allowed for easy freeze-frame capture).

Avatar The Way of Water opens on Friday, 12.16. The very first NYC elite-critic screening happens on Tuesday, December 6th; there’s a subsequent all-media screening on Monday, 12.12.

Critical Drinker: “As hard as I try, I just can’t escape the feeling that recreating the success of the original Avatar [will be] like trying to capture lightning in a bottle…all the elements that came together to make the first film a success are either absent or compromised now, and it’s facing a hell of a battle to earn that $2 billion [it needs to break even].

“But [if it works] I’ll be happy to sing its praises and give it all the credit it deserves. At this point I’ll take a generic sci-fi action movie about blue alien cat people, made by a guy who seems to actually care about his craft….[I’ll take this] over basically anything being shat up by Marvel these days.”

Singer-actress Irene Cara, the New York City wunderkind who popped through as a Fame costar in 1980 and later sang the Flashdance anthem (“Flashdance…What a Feeling”), has passed at age 63. I’m very, very sorry. Her magical five-year breakout period (’79 to ”83) happened between ages 19 and 23.

Is there anyone who doesn’t regard 63 as an unnaturally young age from which to bid farewell? The reason for Cara’s untimely passing is being kept under wraps, of course. Whenever someone passes too soon the first question that always comes to mind is “what happened?”; the cause eventually leaks out but is never announced in the immediate aftermath. It’s the new obit etiquette.

And yet Elon Musk’s assessment of the current state of things (“woke mind virus”) is essentially correct. I wouldn’t say that civilization is edging towards “suicide”, but I know for a fact that the occasional surges of joy and even transcendence that I got from movies for so many decades have become fewer and farther between over the last six or seven years, and that this is largely due to (I need to occasionally refresh my doomsday terminology) the influence of the Maple Street seed pod monsters, and the chickenshit corporates who are afraid to show a little backbone.

It’s an occasion for a kind of mourning (i.e., my own) when a film that sent me fleeing after 90 minutes has bagged $321,770,596 domestic and $279,200,000 overseas for a total of $600 million and change.

I know exactly how it feels when a film is doing everything just right and thereby building trust and affection with an audience. Or at least is up to something exceptional. I’ve experienced it hundreds of times over decades, and the first 90 minutes of Wakanda Forever (I couldn’t tolerate any more than that) definitely wasn’t doing this. A director friend told me “you missed the best part”, ands I’ve no reason to think otherwise. But dear God in heaven…who are we? What is our life when an obviously mediocre film like this is celebrated as a great “success”?

The over-praising of The Fabelmans among mainstream media types…what is there to say except “what else is new”? We’re all familiar with the industry-wide instinct to kowtow to the lore of Steven Spielberg-directed films…a syndrome that’s been locked into the psychological Hollywood bloodstream for several decades, as natural and inevitable as a mountain stream or even the weather.

It’s not that The Fabelmans is a bad film — of course not! It’s a fairly good one in several respects, but you also have to qualify this with a sensible “yes, okay but calm down.” I’ve said this two or three times, but a truly fair-minded, non-obsequious opinion would have to acknowledge that the saga of Spielberg’s teenage years (mostly Phoenix, some Saratoga) is neither boring nor hugely interesting. It’s diverting in an on-the-nose, broadly performed way, but it mainly boils down to “decent with three pop-throughs — the Judd Hirsch rant, filming the Nazi war flick in the Arizona desert, and John Ford lecturing 17-year-old Steven about horizon lines.”

Face it — that’s what The Fabelmans is. It’s not a put-down to call it “good enough” or “reasonably decent.” And Matt Patches is correct — the major roles (including Ford at the end) could have been eccentrically performed by Eddie Murphy in white-person makeup.

Chris Evangelista is also spot-on about The Fabelmans 2. I would truly love to see Spielberg’s struggling years at Universal dramatized — Amblin, directing that Night Gallery episode with Joan Crawford, SS bonding with his “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” colleagues, filming Duel and then The Sugarland Express.

This would have to be followed, of course, by The Fabelmans 3, which would cover the glory years of ’74 through ’82 — the making of Jaws, Close Encounters, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T..

Steven Spielberg discusses his new film, The Fabelmans, with fellow director Paul Thomas Anderson in a Q&A at the DGA theater in Los Angeles.https://t.co/cVXYZxSizi

— Cinephilia & Beyond (@CCinephilia) November 25, 2022

Jesus. This guy is definitely up for asshole of the year. And it is a very short leap to see how he drive his son to this heinous, self-loathing crime. https://t.co/smnq4FkNKz

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) November 24, 2022