Easy Lay Fanboys

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I saw red yesterday when the eternally generous Nick Clement (aka “Actionman”) praised Mark Robson‘s The Prize (’65). He called it “very entertaining and quite nutty…lots of fun!” Daniel Waters described it as “the silly, tonally insane, action jawdropper slash forehead-slapper of its day…my wheelhouse!”

HE response: “Bullshit! Stockholm-set international thriller. Aping the Bond aesthetic. Ernest Lehmann’s script stole Foreign Correspondent‘s idea of there being two elderly look-alikes (Edward G. Robinson‘s Dr. Max Stratman and a double). NOT entertaining…a glossy, shallow diversion that loves, loves, LOVES the idea of being buzzed on martinis.”

Facebook is unfortunately crawling with too-easily-impressed fellows who praise all kinds of second- and third-rate movies. Admiration can be a terrible thing when it’s coming from the wrong kind of movie buff.

A few weeks ago I ran across a fanboy who suggested that Barbet Schroeder‘s Kiss of Death remake (’95) holds a candle to Henry Hathaway’s 1947 original with Victor Mature and Richard Widmark. Schroeder’s film actually isn’t all that bad — it’s just not in the same league as the Hathaway.

Nothing makes me feel more deflated than to hear from easy-lay aficionados about anything. People, for example, who enjoy Mark Robson‘s Von Ryan’s Express (’65), which is basically a half-hearted, run-of-the-mill, big-studio throwaway flick, more than John Frankenheimer‘s jewel-perfect, Swiss-watch-like The Train (’64) — easily one of the greatest realistic action films ever made.

Two years ago Bob Strauss had the utter temerity and gall to call Von Ryan’s Express “less boring” than The Train. God!

Posted on 1.16.19: What sane person in the year 2019 would want to watch The Prize, a piece of slick, cheesy, pseudo-swanky escapism with a James Bond-ian flourish?

Paul Newman starred as an alcoholic Nobel Prize winner in Stockholm, sipping a string of martinis as he puts the moves on Elke Sommer, and as they both get caught up in a Foreign Correspondent-type kidnapping caper. Empty, synthetic crap from start to finish.

And what about director Mark Robson? Talk about a tragic fall from grace.

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HE Doesn’t Approve of Union Station…Sorry

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Why oh why would Academy honchos be seriously considering staging the 93rd Academy Awards at Union Station, the deco moderne-ish, not-all-that-cavernous railway station** in downtown Los Angeles? Especially when they could do the show from the soon-to-open Academy museum, which could use the promotion and has all kinds of indoor and outdoor spaces (300,000 square feet!) to fool around with…c’mon!

What, seriously, is so damn great about Union Station apart from the appealing early 20th Century design and the fact that many films have used it for period atmosphere?

Funded in 1926, built during the 1930s and opened in May 1939, Union Station is probably the most storied and nostalgic public access structure in all of Los Angeles. To me it’s a Fred MacMurray environment. I was down there three or four months ago, catching an early morning train to San Diego, and everything I saw, sat on, heard, touched and smelled said “Fred MacMurray, Fred MacMurray, Fred MacMurray.”

I understand the Academy’s affection for the MacMurray atmosphere, but at the same time they surely must realize that Millennials and Zoomers, viewers that the Oscar telecast needs in order to remain viable in the future, don’t give a damn about the guy.

It would be one thing if MacMurray mattered in the ’80s, which most Millennials and Zoomers have at least some vague recollection of (even though they mostly regard the Age of Reagan in the same light as the Dead Sea Scrolls), but he stopped being part of the cultural conversation when My Three Sons was cancelled in the mid ’60s.

Academy CEO Dawn Hudson to Millennials, Zoomers: “It’s not just that Fred MacMurray’s career was peaking when Union Station opened, but the fact that we all need to bring a little Fred MacMurray back into their lives in this, a time of continuing Covid depression and lethargy. We need that droll speaking voice, that overfed look, that hat, those baggy pants, that corrupted Walter Neff vibe.”

Is the Academy museum, slated to open on 9.30.21, still being worked on? Does it still have scaffolding and tarps and whatnot? Fine! Use that still-not-finished atmosphere for a sense of realism and a basis for jokes.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming, posted five days ago: “Nothing is set yet, but sources [are saying] that Union Station is the venue AMPAS and ABC favor at the moment.”

Killer Fleming quote: “Will stars need to wear masks, even if they are properly distanced? Maybe not. It would be a far more visually appealing if masks weren’t part of the fashion.”

Burger King Slapdown

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“If you don’t get the joke here, then you’re stupid. You don’t get subtlety, you don’t get humor, you don’t get perspective. And if you do and yet pretending that you don’t, just so you can have something to be pissed off at, then you’re….both ways you’re gross.” [to Larry Wilmore] “It’s an ad, that’s the point…it got your attention.” — Bill Maher during last night’s [3.12.21] Real Time.

Pivot‘s Scott Galloway: “[Ads like this] should be taken with the intent with which they’re given, and this [ad] was meant to highlight sexism. Unfortunately what we have and my industry is guilty of this, but we’ve created an industrial shaming culture. In which there’s money in dunking on people…making [a] caricature of comments, and then using that to extract an ugly place so you can get virtue points.

“Because the moment that you’re offended in our country, it means you’re right.”

Soviet Righteousness Porn

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From “Death to Me! — The New York Times and the creepy personal and ideological logic of public confessions,” a 2.10.21 Tablet essay by David Mikics:

“If I were Donald G. McNeil Jr., I would want to tell The New York Times, and its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, to go jump in a lake. Instead, McNeil chose to declare his love for the paper and proclaim his guilt for having ‘hurt’ many hundreds of people. For McNeil’s professional death to have meaning, the party—or the paper—must be infallible. Death to me!

“That this kind of groveling confession is not unique to the Times, but rather plays a key functional role in the politics of woke anti-racism, can be judged with the frequency with which such apologies are staged across institutional and corporate settings where wokeness holds sway.

“Untold millions of true believers lived and died in Stalin’s Soviet Union. When told they were guilty, they sooner or later agreed with the charges against them, even if they couldn’t locate their guilt in anything they had actually done. When the exhausted prisoner finally gives in to the party, which has sole grasp on truth, a soothing relief may come: History has spoken. Koestler and Orwell testify as much in their famous novels.

“Admittedly, at times the prisoners were merely surrendering to a superior force that worked through the deprivation of sleep and food and relentless interrogations — and through more baroque tortures. And there were always those who refused and resisted. But the Soviet system stood for decades on the bedrock of shared guilt.

“In the absence of real evidence and reporting, public confessions helped buttress the credibility of the system.

“These days we repeatedly confess our racism and misogyny, suppressing any sense that we are perhaps not as sinful as we are told. Maybe we haven’t harassed, demeaned, or insulted anyone — but the very impulse to defend ourselves indicates our guilt. After all, we are all part of ‘the system,’ and only a thoroughgoing racist would dispute the idea that the system is guilty.

“Of course, America is not Soviet Russia, or, for that matter, Xi’s China. Our new political commissars don’t use torture, prison cells, and executions. Today’s woke ideology can be publicly attacked, unlike communism in the Soviet Union. Its critics are in fact legion: According to polls, most Americans of all genders and ethnicities think political correctness is a problem. But people are afraid for their careers, and so they remain silent — no matter how much ‘power’ or ‘privilege’ they ostensibly have.”

Smothered In Sickly Gold

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There are two versions of John Huston and dp Oswald Morris‘s Reflections in a Golden Eye (’67) — the repellent gold-and-pink-tinted version that was used for the initial release in October 1967, and a follow-up wide release version that used regular color.

I saw the original version at the Carnegie Hall Cinema or Bleecker Street Cinema sometime in ’79 or ’80, and as much as I’d respected the previous experimental color schemes of Huston and Morris (the rose-tinted color palette of Moulin Rouge, the misty grayish tones of Moby Dick), I despised the sickly golden palette (monochrome flooded with gold) in Reflections. It literally made me feel nauseous, and I distinctly recall that this feeling stayed with me the rest of the day and into the evening.

I didn’t “dislike” Huston’s film. I seriously hated it, and was really and truly sorry that I’d submitted. I knew (and still understand) that it was a serious film that was trying to address (i.e., deplore) emotional and sexual repression, but that didn’t help.

Not to mention the vile content of the damn thing — Marlon Brando‘s rigidly closeted Army major, Elizabeth Taylor‘s acidic bitch of a wife, Robert Forster‘s object of erotic desire, Brian Keith‘s easy-going Lieutenant Colonel who’s having it off with Taylor beyond Brando’s gaze, Julie Harris‘s Alison Langdon (Keith’s disturbed wife who’s cut off her nipples with a pair of gardening shears). Talk about your gallery of grotesques!

Audiences felt pretty much the same way about the gold version, which is why Warner Bros. withdrew it and sent out regular-color prints for the wide release in early ’68.

Last year Warner Archive released a double-disc Bluray that included both versions. (Or so I gather.) Right now HBO Max is offering the regular-color version. I tried watching some of it last night; it was half-tolerable.

What films have made HE regulars literally sick to their stomachs and souls? There must be a few.

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“Vertigo” Peepers Can Stuff It

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The only guided film-location tour I’ve ever taken was a San Francisco Vertigo tour. It was sometime around ’02 or ’03, offered under the auspices of the San Francisco Film Festival. Part of the tour, naturally, was dropping by Scotty Ferguson’s apartment at 900 Lombard Street. The red door was missing but otherwise it half-resembled the original location. No longer — Scotty’s place has since been totally rebuilt and walled off in order to give pesky tourists nothing to see. Go away, we don’t want you around, Vertigo was shot 62 and 1/2 years ago, get a life, etc.

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Who Bill Cosby-ed Kim Novak, and Why?

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There are two…well, one head-turning takeaway from Scott Feinberg’s 3.12 Kim Novak interview (audio + transcript) in the Hollywood Reporter. Plus there’s a vague refutation of a rumor about Novak having been Bill Cosby-ed by Tony Curtis during a late-night party in November 1957. Plus an interesting inference or two.

One, Novak’s fabled interracial “affair” with Sammy Davis, Jr. in late 1957, which was chronicled in a September 2013 Vanity Fair piece by Sam Kashner and discussed in an August 2017 Smithsonian article by Joy Lanzendorfer, wasn’t actually sexual**.

Lanzendorfer reported this on 8.9.17, Novak reportedly repeated the claim to Larry King in 2004, and she says it again to Feinberg in the current THR piece — no salami and, the article indicates, perhaps a hint of stalking on Davis’s part.


Vanity Fair art for Sam Kashner’s September 2013 article about the brief Novak-Davis alliance.

Novak tells Feinberg that her much-whispered-about relationship with Davis had more to do with (a) Davis aggressively pursuing Novak — inviting her to join him for a Thanksgiving dinner with his parents in Los Angeles in late November 1957, and then surprising her by showing up when she invited him out of politeness to a family Christmas gathering in Chicago a month later, and (b) Novak not wanting to discourage Davis out of concern that a racial motive might be inferred if she flat-out rejected his advances.

Feinberg’s article also contains a between-the-lines inference that while Tony Curtis may have slipped Novak a Mickey Finn during a late-night after party at his Beverly Hills home (which he shared with then-wife Janet Leigh), Davis may have been “in on it” and perhaps was the guy who drove Novak back to her home, where she woke up in her bed stark naked the next morning, not having the slightest clue what had happened.

Feinberg excerpt: “One day, Novak left Paramount studios — still in her [Judy Barton] wig and green gown from Vertigo — to attend a charity dinner, where Tony Curtis invited her to an afterparty at the home he shared with Janet Leigh. Hearing that [director Richard] Quine would be there, she said yes.

“When she arrived, Quine [with whom Novak was involved to some extent] wasn’t there. But Davis was, and he offered to help her take off her wig.

“‘By the time he got it off,’ Novak recalls, ‘Tony Curtis had brought me a drink. I don’t know…I only had, I think, one drink there. But that’s the last thing I knew. I do not know anything afterward, cross my heart, hope to die. Don’t know what happened after that or how my car got back in front of my apartment.”

“Does Novak think someone spiked her drink? ‘I really do,’ she said. “I didn’t think of it then because people didn’t talk about things like that, but I could never figure it out…I’ve never blacked out in my entire life.’

“She adds, ‘I think Tony Curtis did it. I don’t want to think Sammy did that.’ And when she awoke the following morning? ‘I’ll just tell you the honest truth: I didn’t have my clothes on.'”

The “tell” is Novak saying “I don’t want to think Sammy did that.”

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Blanket Man

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Over the last two or three days evenings have been fairly chilly in West Hollywood. Sometimes they can actually be brutal. The damp air sinks into your bones, and suddenly you’re shuddering. I’ve sampled some winter weather in Northern Florida and Georgia, and it can be somewhat similar.

Anyway it was around 9 pm on Wednesday, 3.10 (the night before last) when a guy in a slightly soiled white shirt knocked on the door. Older, swarthy, a bit heavy-set and speaking with a thick-as-peanut-butter Mumbai accent. I couldn’t decipher what he was saying. After the third or fourth attempt I finally understood that he was asking if we could spare a blanket. I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head so I said “I’m sorry, but we don’t.”

Five seconds after he left Tatiana asked “do you have a heart?” and pointed out that we could’ve given him a large ugly beach towel she keeps in her closet — an item I’d blanked on. I grabbed the towel and went outside to find the guy. Gone.

I’ve been feeling funny about this ever since. I can’t remember the last time a homeless guy knocked on my door and stood on my welcome mat with a plea — possibly never. He wasn’t exuding any kind of aggressive undercurrents or hair-trigger vibes, but I suppose I was feeling vaguely threatened on some level. The poor guy was simply concerned about his ability to weather the cold.

My reply, as noted, was partly due to his tortured English. If he’d sounded like Ben Kingsley (or even like Kingsley as Don Logan) and said “pardon me for asking in the dead of night but would you happen to have a spare something or other?”, I probably would’ve asked him to wait while I searched around.

So I failed my Good Samaritan test. I wish I could do it over again. I actually could’ve spared one of the chilly weather jackets I have in my closet but never wear. I’m sorry.

“We All Lost Something…”

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From David Brooks‘ “Joe Biden Is a Transformational President“, posted in the N.Y. Times on 3.11:

“This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting. Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them.

“Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems. Income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.”

Not A Good Sign For Cannes in July

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Journo pally #1: “A bad omen for Cannes.” Journo pally #2: “France is a shitshow right now. There are protests every day for President Macron to reopen businesses.”

From 3.7 article by the Guardian‘s Kim Willsher: “Disinformation, distrust and rumors that are downright bonkers have turned what should have been a fairly routine operation into an organizational nightmare. Doctors like mine who have been allocated just 10 doses of AstraZeneca a week – all of which have to be administered in a 48-hour time frame — are spending valuable time and energy trying to drum up just 10 willing patients.

“The reasons for French vaccine scepticism have already been well documented: previous health scandals have sown doubts; the French distrust their politicians and Big Pharma and rail against being told what to do. President Macron’s ill-advised trashing of the AstraZeneca vaccine based on erroneous interpretation of the scientific data didn’t help.”

From “Europe Confronts a Covid-19 Rebound as Vaccine Hiopes Recde,” a 3.12.21 Wall Street Journal story by Marcus Walker, Bertrand Benoit and Stacy Meichtry:

“The European Union’s fight against Covid-19 is stuck in midwinter, even as spring and vaccinations spur hope of improvement in the U.S. and U.K.

“Contagion is rising again in much of the EU, despite months of restrictions on daily life, as more-virulent virus strains outpace vaccinations. A mood of gloom and frustration is settling on the continent, and governments are caught between their promises of progress and the bleak epidemiological reality.”

Wildly Incongruous Theme Songs

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Once in a great while, a film will deliver a closing-credits theme song that is so off-the-mark that it almost destroys the emotional mood of the film that preceded it.

I’m talking about a film that has carefully and strenuously tried to make the audience feel a particular, hard-won thing, and then a stupid end-credits song comes along and pretty much betrays that effort.

I’m talking about bouncy, upbeat melodies that producers have inserted in order to persuade prospective audiences that the film is some kind of rousing, feel-good experience.

Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty ends happily, of course, but mostly this mid ’50s Brooklyn drama is a serving of downmarket, anti-glam realism. It’s mainly a study of people struggling with ennui, boredom and watching their lives slowly turn to salt. IMHO the “Hey, Marty!” song at the very end is an abomination.

Daryl F. Zanuck‘s The Longest Day, a 178-minute epic about the D-Day invasion of 6.6.44, is a battle-and-adventure flick. The idea was to deliver thrilling feats of daring, valor and aggression on the part of Allied invaders without pelting the audience with too much blood or gore. Saving Private Ryan, it wasn’t. 4,414 Allied soldiers were killed that day; 2,000 died on Omaha Beach alone. Yes, the film ignores the body count while emphasizing the “we can do it!” spirit, but I wouldn’t say it plays like an Allied forces pep rally. Until, that is, the awful Paul Anka song that closes the film (the banal lyrics were sung by the Mitch Miller singers) is heard. I’ve no doubt that veterans of the actual invasion were appalled by it.

I’ve never forgotten how perfectly handled the ending of Titanic was, and how Celine Dion‘s “My Heart Will Go On” (music and lyrics by James Horner and Will Jennings) completely ruined the after-vibe. The closing-credits song should have been an Irish tune of some kind, something that alluded to the thousands of men who built the ship at the Harland and Wolff yard in Belfast. Instead audiences were yanked out of 1912 and thrown into a saccharine pop-music girly realm. Yes, the song was hugely popular and that millions still associate it with Titanic‘s emotional current. But the last 20 minutes of James Cameron‘s film were so much richer and deeper than anything summoned by Dion’s singing…it just makes me sick to think of it.

Other ending-credit songs that damaged or diluted the films they were composed for?

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