The play and the film called Mister Roberts were based on Thomas Heggen’s same-titled 1946 novel, which was inspired by Heggen’s World War II endurance in the South Pacific. Heggens was 27 when the novel came out, and 29 when the play opened on Broadway. The poor guy died at age 30.
Explanation: “Bewildered by the fame he had longed for and under pressure to turn out another bestseller, Heggen found himself with a crippling case of writer’s block. ‘I don’t know how I wrote Mister Roberts,’ he admitted to a friend. ‘It was spirit writing’.
“Heggen became an insomniac and tried to cure it with increasing amounts of alcohol and prescription drugs. On May 19, 1949, he drowned in his bathtub after an overdose of sleeping pills. His death was ruled a probable suicide, although he left no note and those close to him insisted it was an accident.”
HE to Heggen in heaven: I feel your anguish, bruh, but all writing is spirit writing. If it ain’t spirit writing it’s probably not very good, and in some cases it’s just typing.
Nobody gives a damn about a 73 year-old Tony Award-winning play called Mr. Roberts. Well, a few boomers do, I suppose, but everyone hates boomers (polluted the planet, took all the money, condemned Millennials to a lifetime of economic anxiety) so fuck them and the play together. Whatever merits the play (co-written by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan) may have radiated during the Truman administration, they’ve long since seemed to matter.
But speaking as someone who long ago watched a degraded pan-and-scan version** of the 1955 Warner Bros. CinemaScope adaptation with Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon in the lead roles, I’ve always been mystified why anyone in the mid ’50s ever thought Mr. Roberts, regarded as some kind of ace-level heart comedy in its heyday, thought it was any good.
A WWII Naval chuckler set aboard a backwater cargo ship called “the bucket” (and based upon some short stories written by Heggen about his war experiences), it’s basically a serving of coarse service humor, sentimentality and painfully sodden slapstick.
And yet the stage version of Mr. Roberts, directed by Logan, won a Tony Award for Best Play. I’ve never read the Heggen-Logan original, but the film must have coarsened the material considerably. It just stands to reason. Broadway sophistos have rarely celebrated the above-described behaviors in any form.
The central idea of the film version is that the enlisted men are eight-year-old children who love their kindly father (Fonda’s Mr. Roberts, a Lieutenant JG) and despise the petty, neurotic and tyrannical Captain Morton (Cagney). Over and over the film conveys what a rollicking pleasure it is to taunt or belittle Morton or better yet make him so furious that he throws up.
Oh, and what a hoot it was to watch nurses undress through binoculars from a distance of several hundred yards. And to make your own liquor with various rotgut ingredients…hilarious!
With the exception of one amusing scene in which the under-educated Morton rants about how much he hates snooty college boys like Roberts and how they treated him when he worked as a bus boy in the 1920s (“Oh, bus boy! It seems my friend here has thrown up all over the table…fetch a mop and clean up the mess, bus boy, will ya?”), there’s nothing the least bit funny in the entire film. You can see what was intended to be funny but none of it lands.
The lead performances are fine in and of themselves (Lemmon won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), but the crew is just awful. The simpleton behavior and mentally-stunted emotions…God.
The principal reason for the failure of Mr. Roberts was John Ford, the genius-level, Oscar-winning director who was also a lifelong alcoholic and a surly old cuss who always brought the material down to his own unpretentious and irreverent level, especially when it came to films about men in uniform. Ford worshipped the idea of getting loaded and being insubordinate and snarly and generally sour-facing everyone.
Alleged Cagney quote: “I would have kicked his brains out. He was so goddamned mean to everybody. He was truly a nasty old man.”
The last time I ordered good Korean food was during my 12-hour stopover in Seoul on 11.14.13. We visited a quaint little place in Seoul’s old town — Bukchon Hanok village. Last weekend a friend and I visited Chosun Galbee (3330 W Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90019), which is just around the corner from the original El Cholo. It’s technically an outdoor patio environment, but it didn’t feel like one. The owners are very strict about masks and wiping everything down and whatnot. Not cheap but good.
Yes, that’s my American flag mask on the lower right corner during the first ten seconds.
Friendo email: “I’ve said this a thousand times, and here goes again: Wokeness, cancel culture, etc., is a pathological disease, no argument…one that’s been building since around 2016, and the fact that Trump was in the White House totally fueled it. He didn’t create it, but he fueled it. That’s obvious.
“I get the fact that the Republicans and the right-wing media — deplorable scumbags, all — are officially against wokeness and cancel culture. But actually, they’re not. That’s an illusion.
“If you gave me a magic wand and told me that within the space of five seconds, I could wave it and cancel wokeness and cancel culture, what do you think I would do? I’d wave that fucking wand. I’d crawl across broken glass to wave that fucking wand. And so would you.
“But do you think, right now, that if Donald Trump or Ben Shapiro had an opportunity to wave that magic wand and cancel wokeness and cancel culture, that they would do it?
“OF COURSE THEY WOULDN’T!!!
“They love, love, love having it to fight against. Because the right in this country isn’t selling policies. It’s selling vengeance.”
It began with photos of clueless Kirkconnell wearing a 19th Century hoop dress at some kind of college sorority Antebellum party, which in turn led to a combative interview between Lindsay and Harrison on 2.9.21, which led to Harrison taking a leave of absence for (a) defending Kirkconnell too vigorously and (b) slagging wokesters. (Update: Harrison is now toast — he’s been replaced by Emmanuel Acho.)
Yesterday Lindsay deleted her Instagram account over intense harassment from traditional anti-woke Bachelor fans. This has led Lindsay’s “Higher Learning” podcast co-chost Van Lathan to defend her on Instagram.
Lathan: “Leave Rachel the fuck alone. Rachel is not responsible for Chris Harrison, a 49-year-old man who can’t read the room in these present 2021 times. It’s not her job to make excuses or provide cover for somebody who doesn’t understand what fucking triggers people in today’s world. This harassment is going too far. My co-host has zero today with the words of a grown-ass man who still doesn’t get it.
“@chrisbharrison are you okay with people getting at Rachel to the point she can’t even exist on [Instagram]. Is anyone from the entire Bachelor Nation going to stand up and condemn this harassment of a Black woman? Yo it’s just a fucking TV SHOW, y’all need to relax for real. I love you RACH. Fuck these people.”
“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which has a reputation for making occasionally head-scratching choices when picking Globes nominees and winners, has faced further criticism for this year’s slate of nominations, which did not include several Black-led Oscar contenders such as Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Judas and the Black Messiah in the nominees for the group’s top award.” — from another Perman-Rottenberg 2.21 article, this one titled “Golden Globes voters in tumult: Members accuse Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. of self-dealing, ethical lapses.”
Everyone understands the current system of check-list requirements when it comes to major org memberships and the big awards shows, which is why it’s perplexing that the HFPA doesn’t just wise up and play along.
HE especially believes that Shaka King‘s Sidney Lumet-like Judas and the Black Messiah completely merited a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture, Drama, and that Lakeith Stanfield‘s performance as the traitorous Bill O’Neal — far more mesmerizing and penetrating than Daniel Kaluuya‘s Fred Hampton — should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
And I’m still lamenting the absence of Steve McQueen‘s Mangrove — easily the finest feature film of 2020, but wrongly lumped into Emmy contention because it was originally offered on British TV last November as part of a five-part anthology called Small Axe.
THR‘s Scott Feinberg: “Will the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, shamed by the backlash, not just add a couple of Black members, but also make substantial structural changes?
“It seems the organization could address multiple concerns about its current composition — among the lifetime members is at least one who is legally blind — by taking a page out of the film Academy’s book and significantly expanding its membership to include people who are more active and legitimate. But to make it possible for such people to join the organization, the HFPA would also have to reform its ethics rules, and it is a big question mark if it would be willing to do so.
“Alternatively, studios, networks and talent could band together and boycott the Globes until things change — but it seems unlikely that anyone would want to risk being identified as the organizer of such a movement in case it fails to yield results.
“At the end of the day, it will probably once again fall upon the HFPA’s broadcasting partner for the Globes, currently NBC, to decide whether or not all of this behavior and attention is so bad that it needs to take action. I haven’t been able to obtain a copy of the broadcasting deal that was signed in 2018, but I suspect that NBC must have an out if it wants one — or wants to use one as a threat to demand change. Because without TV money, the HFPA would be cooked.
“I, for one, want only the best for all of my fellow journalists, both inside and outside of the HFPA — but I also want all of my fellow journalists to behave in a manner befitting our profession. Now, more than ever, we don’t need to give people a reason to dismiss us as ‘fake news.'”
Koji and Gustav, Lady Gaga‘s two kidnapped French bulldogs, have been returned unharmed by a mystery woman who…what, just happened to find the them on the street? Or who maybe read about the $500K that Lady Gaga had offered to anyone who returns the dogs, even if the person in question “finds them unknowingly”? **
The dogs were dropped off at the LAPD’s Olympic Station (1130 Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90006 — near corner of Vermont and 11th Street). The thieves are still on the loose, according to the fuzz. What are the odds that the woman who returned the dogs knows a little something about something?
“Cancel culture is real, it’s insane, it’s growing exponentially, and it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. If you think it’s just for celebrities, no. In an era in which everyone is online, everyoneisapublicfigure. It’s like we’re all trapped in The Hills Have Eyes…and wifi.”
Or should I say “here’s hoping”? God and vaccines willing, the 2021 Telluride Film Festival (Thursday, 9.2 thru Monday, 9.6) will be a humdinger, you bet. Too few days, too many films. At least 20 hotties.
Among the titles that could play over this five-day gathering: 1. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom; 2. Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth 3. Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch; 4. Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley; 5. Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde ; 6. Robert Eggers‘ The Northman; 7. Leos Carax‘s Annette; 8. Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog; 9. Terrence Malick‘s The Way Of The Wind; 10. Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter; 11. Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta; 12. Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins; 13. Celine Sciamma‘s Petite Maman; 14. Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island; 15. Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater; 16. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis; 17. Ruben Östlund‘s Triangle of Sadness; 18. Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden Move; 19. Ridley Scott‘s Gucci; and 20. Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho.
What other possibilities? And what are the realistic odds that screenings will be able to happen in the old-fashioned, pre-pandemic way?
This may be the ugliest pair of upscale men’s loafers I’ve ever seen in my life. The Bruno Magli / Bloomingdale’s people are actually asking $350 for them. If I was roaming around Bloomies and a sales person came up and said “as a valued customer would you consider accepting a pair of these loafers as a special gift?”, I would say “thanks very much but no thanks…no offense but I find that white stitching appalling and that silver clasp ornament offensive…these are loafers for 95 year-old mafia guys playing shuffleboard in a retirement community.”
