WARNING: SPOILERS 

The first half is ur-“Dirty Harry.” Walter Huston plays Jim “Fightin’” Fitzpatrick, a tough-as-nails cop who will do anything to clean up this dirty city, damnit, and who is thus forever in trouble with the higher-ups and the press. Some of his lines are straight out of the Clint Eastwood playbook. “What do you expect me to do with gunmen, dope peddlers, and sneak thieves—kiss ’em on the forehead or slap ’em on the wrist?” Fitz says. Eventually he’s shunted off to a dull, nothing post, where they figure he can’t do any harm.

The second half is “Blue Angel”-lite. Fitz’s younger brother, Ed (Wallace Ford), falls for the sexiest moll in town, Daisy Stevens (Jean Harlow), and keeps falling and falling. She gets him involved in drink and crime. She corrupts and ruins him. And when big brother comes back as police captain to clean up this dirty city, damnit, and is too honest to give his brother a sinecure, the kid, pushed by Daisy, works with the big gangster in town, Sam Belmonte (Jean Hersholt, of the humanitarian award), to rob a bank-delivery truck. It leaves three dead: a robber, a cop, a little girl. 

“Beast of the City” is not a good movie but it’s got moments. It opens well with a tracking shot of calls coming in and being dispatched to cops around the city. Most of the calls are inconsequential and/or humorous until we get to a murder: four men hung in a basement warehouse. The dead are gangsters, Fitz suspects Belmonte and drags him in without evidence. And we’re off and running.

The movie is most intriguing today for its by-the-way racism. From the hero. When two good cops, Mac and Tom (Sandy Roth and Warner Richmond), volunteer to follow Ed on his ill-fated assignment, Fitz smiles and tells them: “That’s mighty white of you guys.” It’s not a one-off, either. Near the end, Fitz is interrogating one of the men behind the heist, Abe (Nat Pendleton), and goes off on him. “You forgot to tell me about shooting a little girl down in the gutter! You forgot to tell me about killing one of the finest white men that ever lived!”

A cop obsessed about race. Glad we got over that.

Hoover Mayer ’32
The movie opens with a quote from Pres. Herbert Hoover: 

Instead of the glorification of cowardly gangsters, we need the glorification of policemen who do their duty and give their lives in public protection. If the police had the vigilant, universal backing of public opinion in their communities, if they had the implacable support of the prosecuting authorities and the courts, I am convinced that our police would stamp out the excessive crime which has disgraced some of our great cities.

It’s taken from a speech Hoover gave in October 1931 before the International Association of Police Chiefs, so initially one assumes MGM and Cosmopolitan Productions (William Randolph Hearst’s outift) simply tacked on the quote to give their film gravitas—a presidential seal of approval, as it were. But there was more at work here. Louis B. Mayer was friends with, and an active supporter of, Hoover, and several sources (here and here) say that Hoover and Mayer talked about “the need to educate the public to have a greater respect for law enforcement officers.” So were they working in lockstep? I’ll give the quote, you make the movie? It certainly benefitted both men. The president of the United States got to attack lawlessness and Mayer got the president of the United States to attack Warner Bros.

Huston played a lot of stern authority figures in the early 1930s, didn’t he? Missionary, judge, warden. He played one of the first screen Wyatt Earps, dubbed “Saint” Johnson, in “Law and Order,” as well as two presidents of the United States: one fictional (“Gabriel Over the White House”), one historical (“Abraham Lincoln”). Some of his sterner roles, as this one, veered toward the fascistic. It’s an interesting heyday for an actor whose best-known scene today is laughing and dancing a jig in the dusty Mexican mountains.

He’s a family man here, too, with two comic-relief daughters (they try to make him pancakes), a younger son in on the joke (Mickey Rooney, quite good), and a dull, supportive wife, (Dorothy Peterson of “Mothers Cry”). Unlike city homes in Warner Bros. movies, their home already seems suburban. You feel like it could’ve been the set of a 1950s TV sitcom.

The big question for most of the movie is how far Ed falls. The answer turns out to be “all the way,” and when Fitz finds out Ed was part of the gang behind the heist, he has him arrested, too. Belmonte figures the best way to get back at Fitz is to get his men off, so we get courtroom scenes in which the truth is garbled and witnesses and jurors have obviously been threatened and/or bought off. MGM was big on these. It’s basically the same as in “The Secret 6,” MGM’s gangster flick from the year before, right down to the judge (Murray Kinnell) chastising everyone involved. “I see your hearts are made of water,” he says. 

Afterwards, we get an odd scene of Fitz siting alone in a dark room, sweating and in obvious emotional pain, when someone enters. “Is that you, Tom?” Fitz asks, referring to one of his good cops (Warner Richmond), but he almost sounds panicky. Then it cuts to a different take, where Fitz is less sweaty and more in control of himself. “Who’s there?” he asks sternly. Turns out it’s his brother, contrite, but Fitz is unforgiving. “You sold the whole town into his greasy hands,” he says.

This is when he comes up with the worst plan in the world. He tells Ed to go to Belmonte, who’s partying with his pals, and say he’s going to confess, which will force Belmonte’s hand. Fitz and his men will then show up. And it works. Belmonte’s hand is so forced, in fact, it leads to a shoot-out, almost Old West style, in which the lawmen walk slowly forward with guns blazing. What happens? Everyone dies: good cops with bad gangsters, Ed and Harlow (balcony, stray shot), Belmonte and Fitz, who, as the movie fades, reaches and touches his brother’s dead hand before expiring himself.

It’s supposed to be a great self-sacrifice. But it’s so unnecessary, such a lousy plan, that one wonders if our hero should’ve been the hero in the first place.

For some reason, they all wind up dead.

Scanditalian
The movie’s screenwriter was the legendary W.R. Burnett, who wrote the novels on which “Little Caesar,” “High Sierra” and “The Asphalt Jungle” are based, and whose screenplays included the original “Scarface” with Paul Muni and “The Great Escape” with Steven McQueen. Helluva career. Basically the man helped create the gangster film, and then helped recreate it as film noir. In “Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age,” by Patrick McGilligan, he’s amusing on this film:

Who directed that?
Charles Brabin, an Englishman. Everything about it was wrong. Making an American hoodlum picture, giving it to an Englishman. We’d have a story conference and he’s go to sleep right in your face.

But Brabin did a good job directing?
Strangely enough, he did.

He also thought that while there were no good Al Capone-type pictures, this one was pretty good, and that “Hersholt was a greasy, offensive Capone.” Respectfully, no. Hersholt makes a ridiculous gang leader—Italian with a Scandinavian accent. His right-hand man, Pietro Cholo (J. Carrol Naish, who would play every ethnicity over the years), seems way more dangerous. As does Harlow. Belmonte just seems comic, not much of a threat at all, but in the logic of the film he runs the city.

The movie’s working title was “City Sentinels” but MGM went with something more sensationalistic. Some irony: Its earlier film, “The Secret 6,” focuses on the Al Capone-like gangster (Wallace Beery) even though the title highlighted the movie’s little-seen sentinels, while this one focuses on the city sentinel but its title highlights the little-seen Al Capone-like gangster. Further irony: the movie that was all about glorifying cops gave title credit to the bad guys. Maybe MGM decided that's where the money was.

“Good ol' days.” 

“Big Nurse ain't so bad, right?”

Apparently China has broken the first, second and third rules of “Fight Club”: It's gotten everyone talking about “Fight Club.”

In case you haven't heard: It was recently discovered that on a Chinese streaming service, Tencent, the ending to the dystopic, cultish 1999 Brad Pitt-Ed Norton movie has been changed/censored. Instead of the Narrator (Norton) realizing that Tyler (Pitt) is a figment of his imagination, and he and the girl, Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), watching the tall financial buildings around them blowing up and imploding like a precursor to 9/11, we get a title card with the following revision:

“Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to [a] lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”

You'd think a movie about the decadence and economic disparity of the west would fit the Communist Chinese narrative, but apparently not. Also, whoever wrote the above didn't seem to know that Tyler didn't really exist. Also, they didn't have it copy-edited by a native speaker, since they make the classic ESL mistake of leaving out the indefinite article. They play into the stereotype.

Anyway, the whole thing makes me wonder how China might change the ending to other classic Hollywood movies.

The Godfather
Kay went to police and all the Corleone family was arrested. She remained loyal to Michael, and visited him, and he promised to go straight. He was discharged from prison in 1977 and returned to making a living in the olive oil import-export business. Fredo became a successful manager in Las Vegas. Connie remarried to a nice man.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy was only faking the lobotomy and he was fine. Then he and Bromden realized that Big Nurse was strict but big-hearted and they decided to behave themselves for the good of society. They were discharged from the hospital in 1981.

Chinatown
Noah Cross convinced Jake that the irrigation project was a glorious project that will bring many benefits to the people. Katherine is his granddaughter and Evelyn misspoke before. They were all happy to be together. When Jake suggested getting an American meal, Noah told him, “Forget it, Jake, let's go to Chinatown.”

Alright, this kind of thing isn't my forte, but, in my defense, the whole thing seems beyond satire. Joseph Breen had nothing on these guys.

I was with Patricia and one of her friends and there was a ballgame on television, Yankees vs. Marlins, and I was trying to see the situation and the score but it was all a bit blurry. Wait, what inning was it? Was that right? The 19th? When was the last time I'd seen a game go to 19 innings? The year before MLB had adopted that stupid ghost-runner-in-extra-innings rule, as if professional baseball players were little leaguers who had to make it home in time for supper. But here was a bona-fide extra-inning game. 19 innings!

Later, I was telling Patricia and her friend what happened. They weren't interested but I kept talking and they indulged me. I told them it was the bottom of the 19th, Yankees were up, bases loaded and two outs. I kept thinking of the ways they could win without even a hit. A passed ball. A misthrow back to the pitcher. And just as I was thinking it, it happened. The first pitch was a ball, or called a ball, though it seemed to catch the upper right corner of the plate. (We hadn't really seen the pitch on TV; we'd only seen its electronic recreation from behind the plate.) The catcher threw back to the pitcher, who wasn't paying attention—maybe he was mad about the call?—and the ball bounced off the back of his glove and ricocheted into left field. The guy on third trotted in with the winning run as the crowd went wild and the Marlins right fielder jogged disgustedly after the ball. I noticed he was tall and wore number 99, most likely in homage to the Yankees' gargantuan right fielder, Aaron Judge.

A thousand times this. 

“That year, [Joss] Whedon took a job doing rewrites for the Warner Bros. film Justice League, a DC property directed by Zack Snyder. For two white men in their 50s making comic-book flicks, he and Snyder could hardly have been less creatively or philosophically aligned. While Whedon's superhero epics were leavened by irony and wordplay, Snyder's were brooding and self-important, with a visual style that combined the artificiality of a video game with the fascist aesthetic of a Leni Riefenstahl production.”

-- from New York magazine's “The Undoing of Joss Whedon” by Lila Shapiro, which is one of the more evenhanded, post-MeToo articles I've read. Yes, Whedon comes off as a jerk, and someone who has used his position to take advantage of women, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's 99% of men in positions of power. It also feels like Whedon was singled out because of Zack Snyder and his bizarro fanbase, but that could be my prejudices at work.

Main point: I've spent years trying to nail what was wrong with Zack Snyder's films and I never did it as succinctly as Shapiro does here. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I tend to like coming-of-age stories, and even better if they have an uncle figure that shows the kid the ways of the world. Sam Rockwell in “The Way Way Back” was a great recent example. So I was looking forward to this movie.

Oh well.

Nothing at stake
The kid is JR (Daniel Ranieri), all big dark eyes and passive curiosity, who is forced to move into his grandparents’ house with his mother (Lily Rabe), after his father, a radio DJ known as “The Voice” (Max Martini), abandons them in the early 1970s. It’s Manhasset, Long Island, a working class neighborhood, but good working class: loud but not racist; good-natured busting chops rather than ball-busting.

Mom hates the move back—she seems broken and way too self-pitying to care about—while JR loves it. Along with Grandpa and Grandma (Christopher Lloyd and Sondra James), other prodigal children live there: a non-descript aunt, and Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck), who owns and runs the titular working class bar, The Dickens, named after Charles, with Dickens’ books lining a top shelf. JR hangs there and the regulars are nice to him. Uncle Charlie teaches him about life. Don’t carry your money like a drunk. Hold doors. Change tires. Keep your shit together.

It’s sweet, but you kind of wonder about Uncle Charlie’s living situation. Doesn’t he have a business? Doesn’t he keep his shit together? Shouldn’t his advice on being a man include “Don’t live with your parents”?

We get mini-dramas. Dad is supposed to take JR to a Mets game but never shows. A school shrink tells JR he has no identity because he’s “Jr.” to a father with no name, so Uncle Charlie takes him down a peg. There’s a father-son lunch at the school so Grandpa dresses up and impresses everyone. “Don't tell anybody I’m a good grandfather,” Grandpa tells JR afterwards. “Everybody will want one.”

That’s a nice line—and it’s great seeing Christopher Lloyd again—but overall there’s not much at stake here. Does JR have friends? Is he bullied? This small, smart kid with big dark eyes shows up in a tough working class town and nothing? Do we even see another kid in the first half of the film?

His mom wants him to go to Harvard or Yale and become a lawyer. Meanwhile, Uncle Charlie is an autodidact who’s got a whole closet stacked with books and keeps pushing him to read. He leans toward Charlie. He creates a family newspaper. He shows promise on the Wordy Gurdy puzzle.

Then he’s a teenager, Tye Sheridan, all full lips and long nose, and he gets into Yale on a scholarship, but even here there’s not much at stake. Despite his working-class background, a lot of shit comes easy to him. He makes friends easy, he gets a beautiful girl, Sidney (Brianna Middleton), easy, he loses her easy, she breaks his heart easy. He graduates, is aimless, Sidney suggests he get a job at The New York Times, and he does. Then he finally has it out with his father, now a drunk in North Carolina. That’s when there’s a little something at stake, because Max Martini just emanates potential violence. In NC, he drinks too much, beats his woman and JR finally stands up to him. He yells at him. And then? That’s it. There’s no fight. The father just walks away. Next we see, he’s arrested. Easy.

In the end, JR decides to move to Manhattan and become a writer, and Uncle Charlie gives him the keys to his beautiful sky-blue 1968 Cadillac Deville—which would seem to be the last thing you’d want in Manhattan. As he drives away, in voiceover (Ron Livingstone), JR muses about how lawyers become lawyers after they go to law school and pass the bar. But writers?

You’re a writer the minute you say you are. Nobody gives you a diploma. You have to prove it—at least to yourself.

Another movie romantic about writers from an industry that never was.

Good ideas
“The Tender Bar” is based on a popular memoir by J.R. Moehringer but the movie feels like someone read the book and was recounting bits back to us. It’s all surface. I cared a little about the kid, not much about the young adult, not at all about the mom. Affleck is good but he’s not Sam Rockwell in “The Way Way Back.” Whatever digs into you and makes you care about characters isn’t here.

Certain anachronisms jarred. “Do puzzles, and you don’t get Alzheimer’s,” Uncle Charlie declares in the Wordy Gurdy scene, and I’m like “Did people talk much about Alzheimer’s in the mid-1970s? And its connection with puzzles?” (They didn’t.) JR is off for Yale, class of ’86, which makes this 1982, and he’s got a Farrah Fawcett poster on his wall? And Sidney has one of Leif Garrett? Uncle Charlie is Uncle Charlie and no one references “My Three Sons”? 

As a director, George Clooney started out with a bang: “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Then he did “Leatherheads,” “The Ides of March,” “The Monuments Men.” Blah, blah and blah. All of those films seemed like good ideas, too.

Reading Joey Poz on the first round of the dopey new NFL playoff system, he began by talking about upcoming changes to Major League Baseball, and it sent shivers down my spine:

OK, so as you probably know, when baseball returns — whenever that happens to be — there will be more teams making the playoffs. The specifics are still up in the air, nobody has agreed on anything, but it looks like 14 MLB teams will start making the playoffs beginning in 2022. That's 14 out of 30. That's almost 50%. ...

I long ago stopped fighting the baseball playoff fight because it's clear that I'm just not in the same place as most baseball fans. American sports fans, in general, love playoffs. And I get that. Hey, I love October baseball as much as anybody.

It's just that, I love regular-season baseball even more, and the more teams that make the playoffs, the less that baseball from April through September means. I can't for the life of me make sense of playing 162 games basically to eliminate the Pirates, Orioles, Diamondbacks and Marlins. 

I'm with Joe. It's ridiculous to play a 162-game season to eliminate only half the teams. One third of the teams—our current system—is bad enough. But half? And I'm saying this as a Mariners fan whose team hasn't made the postseason in 20 years. But I wouldn't want them to do it cheap. I certainly wouldn't want to pay for playoff tickets for a team that shouldn't even be there. We get in cheap and pay expensive. 

Can you imagine a team with a losing record winning the pennant? Or the World Series? 

But the greedy fucks who run things don't listen to us. I'm getting sick of it. If they did this, expanded to 14 teams, would I lose interest in the game? I might. Between all the strikeouts and homeruns, between the steroid scandals and spider-tack scandals, my interest is already waning.

“We are better off in a very big way now. Trump is not president. We don't have to react to his fucking insanity every goddamned hour of every goddamned day. That guy kicked the doors into people's brains, right and left, all around. Had a different effect on each. Some people, who never knew what the president did, and still don't, or don't have a firm understanding of how government even works, just let that guy into their brain and fucking kick it around and get them all excited. What Trump did ... through persistence, and aggravated will, and full-on narcissistic intent, was destroy people's understanding of the necessity of tolerance. Democracy can't work without tolerance. Civic duty, civic responsibility, civic structure—if this is supposed to work it's supposed to work for everybody. Now it's a fractured fucking mess. Because no one feels like they have to tolerate anything anymore. ...

”Personally, I'm fine with [President Biden]. I like not knowing what the president is doing every five fucking minutes. But this fucking monster we had for four years was so entertaining to so many craven idiots, they just got excited. They felt part of it. 'Hey, let's be part of the Big Fuck You. And now let's be part of the Big Lie. Hey, we were on board for the Big Fuck You, let's be on board for this bullshit.'"

-- Marc Maron, WTF Podcast, Jan. 6, 2022, on the one-year anniversary

WARNING: SPOILERS

“These were his people,” the narrator (Angelica Huston) says of the writers that Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), the Editor in Chief of The French Dispatch, coddles, coaxes and ferociously protects. This was early in the film, and as she said it I thought the same. My kind of people. My kind of topic. My kind of movie.

And then … not.

Where does the movie go wrong? It's divided into three different stories that are all part of a single issue of the titular publication, a New Yorker­­­-like weekly that hails from, of all places, Liberty, Kansas, the near-geographic center of the United States. So rather than one complete film we get three or four shorts connected through this conceit. So that's part of it. 

But where writer-director Wes Anderson truly loses me is with the writers. Or the writing. It doesn’t seem very New Yorker­-like. It doesn’t seem very literary.

OK, I’ll just say it: They're lousy writers.

Foreigners
Here’s an example of the writing of The French Dispatch writers:

What sounds will punctuate the night? And what mysteries will they foretell? Perhaps the doubtful old maxim speaks true: All grand beauties withhold their deepest secrets.

Ick. It’s annunciated by Owen Wilson, who plays Herbsaint Sazerac, a writer who keeps riding his bicycle down Metro stairs and waxing philosophic and nostalgic about the seedier side of life in Ennui-sur-Blasé (great name), the French home of The French Dispatch. His section is the first in the magazine, and thus, after intros, including the death of Arthur Howitzer Jr., the first in the movie. It’s how we learn about the town before learning about its tales.

Sazerac is supposedly based on Joseph Mitchell of “Joe Gould’s Secret” fame, who often wrote about the seedier side of life in New York: its hoboes, bars, rats. Except Mitchell was a great, great writer:

Joe Gould was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years. 

Is that unfair? Picking a classic opener? Here’s a less well-known lede:

Within a few blocks of virtually every large newspaper in the United States except The Christian Science Monitor there is a saloon haunted by reporters, a saloon which also functions as a bank, as a sanitarium, as a gymnasium, and sometimes as a home. 

I was expecting more of that in “The French Dispatch” and we didn't come close. I suppose it’s a lot to ask of Wes Anderson: to recreate three or four great writers and their styles, or imagine three or four great writers and their styles. But it’s the one detail he doesn’t get right. And it might be the most important.

These are the three main writers and their stories:

1. J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), who gives a lecture on Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), a convicted murderer and celebrated modern artist, and Rosenthaler's relationship with his prison guard/muse Simone (Léa Seydoux) and the art dealer who recognizes his genius, Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody).
2. Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), based on Mavis Gallant, who is the no-bullshit chronicler of young revolutionaries Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) and Juliette (Lyna Khoudri) during a student uprising in Ennui-sur-Blasé.
3. Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), apparently some combo of James Baldwin and A.J. Liebling (and Capote for his memory recall?), who recites verbatim his story about the kidnapping of the child of the police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric), as well as the haute cuisine of his chef, Nescaffier (Stephen Park), which is designed to be eaten by cops.

The first was the longest and a lot of fun. Not sure who Berensen is based on, but at the lectern Swinton gives the writer a Barbara Walters-type speech impediment.

It’s the second story where I lost energy. Mavis Gallant reported on the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, one of many such uprisings during that turbulent year, and most of the world took it all so seriously. Gallant did not. She viewed the student revolutionaries with a jaundiced eye. “Did they really think that they could destroy capitalism by setting the Bourse on fire?” she wrote, among other things. Of course, McDormand is the perfect choice for such a no-bullshit writer; the problem is the rest of it. The kids in the story are obviously just kids. They’re play acting. They’re revolutionaries in the way that Max Fischer in “Rushmore” is a playwright— Chalamet’s Zeffirelli in particular would rather play chess and smoke a pipe that storm any Bastille. Hell, their slogan is “Les enfants son grognons”: The children are grumpy. They know it. So using McDormand to pop their pretensions, such as they are, is like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. What was revelatory for Gallant’s readers is obvious to Anderson’s viewers.

The third story restores some balance. It's absurd in a way that has motion. (The second section was also too static.) There are cops and robbers and chases. And Roebuck seems a better writer than the others. Or maybe his prose sounds better coming from Jeffrey Wright.

Plus it's poignant. The standoff between kidnappers and cops ends when Chef Nescaffier is sent to cook a meal for the kidnappers, but he’s made to taste the food first. He does even though it's poisoned. Most of the bad guys die, he and his strong stomach survive, and afterwards, to Wright, he tries to describe the new and piquant flavor of the poison. I love that bit: this new and exciting taste which is deadly. And then we get the best dialogue of the movie:

Wright: I admire your bravery, lieutenant.
Nescaffier: I’m not brave. I just wasn’t in the mood to be a disappointment to everybody. [pause] I’m a foreigner, you know.
Wright: This city is full of us, isn’t it? I’m one myself.
Nescaffier: Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind.

First, I loved the line about not being in the mood to be a disappointment to everyone. Feels like it’s true of half the decisions I’ve made in my life. In fact, initially, I thought the follow-up about being a foreigner was an intrusion, since the earlier line is universal and the foreigner line is not. It muddied the waters, I thought. But that line sets up the rest of it, which is profound. And it's universal again: “Seeking something missing, missing something left behind.” That’s all of us moving through life. All of us are seeking the missing thing; all of us are missing the things we’ve left behind. Maybe it’s universal because, in a sense, in this existence, we’re all foreigners. We all just wound up here. The world is full of us, isn’t it?

Romantics
I hope “The French Dispatch” is one of those movies that gets better on the second viewing. There will certainly be a lot to notice. This is just a sample from the end credits: its New Yorker-y type covers:

What fun. Anderson has a romantic view of all of it—of editors and writers and caring greatly about the written word. Most of that world has long gone away. Writing is now content, and the people who make the decisions aren’t exactly Arthur Howitzer, Jr. But The New Yorker lives. Subscribe.

Joss Whedon was trending the other day on Twitter and it turned out because of an interview Ben Affleck gave to The Los Angeles Times. This part:

In 2016, I interviewed you three times — for “Batman v Superman,” “The Accountant” and “Live by Night” — and I got the sense that you were under a lot of pressure. Shortly after that, you dropped out of directing and starring in “The Batman” and sought treatment for your drinking. Was that when your priorities changed?

Directing “Batman” is a good example. I looked at it and thought, “I'm not going to be happy doing this. The person who does this should love it.” You're supposed to always want these things, and I probably would have loved doing it at 32 or something. But it was the point where I started to realize it's not worth it. It's just a wonderful benefit of reorienting and recalibrating your priorities that once it started being more about the experience, I felt more at ease.

It was really “Justice League” that was the nadir for me. That was a bad experience because of a confluence of things: my own life, my divorce, being away too much, the competing agendas and then [director] Zack [Snyder]'s personal tragedy [Snyder's daughter Autumn died by suicide in 2017] and the reshooting. It just was the worst experience. It was awful. It was everything that I didn't like about this. That became the moment where I said, “I'm not doing this anymore.” It's not even about, like, “Justice League” was so bad. Because it could have been anything.

Don't see why Joss Whedon should trend for that? Right, because there's not much to see. Affleck talks about a lot of personal circumstances surrounding the filming of “Justice League,” plus “the competing agendas” without taking sides, and so fans of Zack Snyder, the Snyderbabies who keep talking about “releasing the Snyderverse,” and who despise Whedon for talking over from Snyder, posited all this as Affleck attacking Whedon. He didn't, but you know fanboys. You know social media. They're another reason why we can't have anything nice. 

If the Snyderbabies want to go after the true culprit, they should probably figure out who the hell screwed up the previous film, “Batman v. Superman.” And if it's Warners, blame Warners. And if it's a combo of Warners and Snyder, blame them both. But if it's just Zack Snyder? Then shut the fuck up and leave us all the fuck alone. 

The requisite gangster poster of the era. Whither Harlow? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

This was MGM’s foray into the world of gangster movies after the sudden success of “Little Caesar” and the adjacent anticipation of “The Public Enemy,” which was being made concurrently. (Filming Jan-Feb. 1931, release in April-May.)

It’s another Al Capone knockoff. Louis Scorpio (Wallace Beery) is nicknamed “Slaughterhouse” because of where he works and what he does. He’s in the Chicago stockyards and he’s good at killing things. That’s not a bad idea: translate the killing of one kind of meat (cattle) into another (human beings). But the filmmakers, including the husband-wife team of director George W. Hill and screenwriter Frances Marion, don’t do enough with it. And there are tons of missed opportunities. 

Let’s just say it’s not exactly Warner Bros.

Like Georges Méliès
One day after work, Slaughterhouse meets his friend Johnny Franks (Ralph Bellamy, in his film debut) for dinner. Franks is a low-level gangster in the Centro district (read: Cicero); and while Scorpio is impressed with himself for his $35 weekly take, Johnny rolls out the $150 he made while hardly breaking a sweat. Plus he’s got Peaches (Marjorie Rambeau) hanging around making nice with him—and decidedly not with Scorpio, whom she refers to as a “missing link.”

At this point Scorpio is an affable, milk-drinking dude, with disheveled hair, a short tie and a rumpled suit. Then he spends a night with Johnny. It’s not a huge success. Johnny threatens Delano (Fletcher Norton) for selling bootleg liquor to rival gangster Joe Colimo (John Miljan) when the cops burst in. Our guys lam it and wind up at the law offices of Richard Newton (Lewis Stone, Andy Hardy’s dad), who’s drunk behind his desk, but who assures them everything is under control. Eventually we realize Newton isn’t consigliere; he’s the gangleader. It’s hard to tell because of poor filmmaking, but his his law office is above Frank’s Steakhouse, a gang hangout, which will matter later.

Again, hardly a successful night, but Slaughterhouse is hooked. So after a montage of generic booze-making and selling, we see him cleaned up, in bowler hat, trim moustache and three-piece suit. He’s still a milk drinker (that doesn’t change) but he’s no longer affable. He’s impatient, irritable, and butting heads with Johnny, who now sees him as his main rival. So when Newton’s plot to take over Colimo’s territory goes awry, resulting in the death of Colimo’s perpetually smiling kid brother, Slaughterhouse is set up. Instead they just wing him, and when he returns to Newton’s office he finds his milk bottle metaphorically dropped in the wastebasket. “Didn’t you … expect me back?” he asks, before plugging Johnny from behind.

Here’s how cheaply or on-the-fly this movie was made. After the plugging, and after Newton talks Slaughterhouse down, there’s suddenly a third man in the room: Delano. It’s almost like a magic act—like something from Georges Méliès. Not there. Poof! There. Either the filmmakers forgot they needed a fall guy and added him without reshoots, or they cut the scene where he arrives. Either way, it’s odd.

After that, Slaughterhouse is all-powerful. He taps a flunky gangster to be the next mayor of Centro, then makes inroads into Chicago. And that’s when we see our titular group.

Who are the Secret 6? They’re powerful Chicago businessmen who fight back against mugs like Slaughterhouse. How do they do it? They gather in rooms wearing masks like Robin the Boy Wonder. And? And that’s about it. To be honest, they reminded me of something out of a Republic movie serial—those ineffective businessmen gathering in the same room for 12 chapters. They don’t do anything—until, with eight minutes left, they suddenly get their act together and announce the following:

• The feds will charge Slaughterhouse and his gang with fraudulent income tax returns
• Also arson
• Also, they’ve got deportation warrants for half of them
• Also, Newton will be disbarred

Nick of time.

Here’s an odd chronological tidbit: According to AFI, the movie was filmed in January and February 1931, and according to Wiki, the arrest of Al Capone on income tax evasion charges occurred on March 13, 1931. So did they anticipate the arrest of Capone on income tax charges? Was it already being bandied about in the press? 

Half of our titular heroes. 

Throughout the film, we also follow two reporters who jaw good-naturedly with each other and come to regret giving Slaughterhouse so much copy: Hank Rogers (Johnny Mack Brown) and Carl Luckner (Clark Gable). Both men vie for the attentions of Anne Courtland (Jean Harlow), the girl who works the cash register at Frank’s Steakhouse.

This is apparently the movie that got Gable his MGM contract. AFI again:

According to a biography of Irving Thalberg, the producer initially cast Clark Gable in a small role, but as filming progressed new scenes were added to bolster his part. The result was a screen presence three times longer than that called for in the original script. 

 You get why, too. He just pops. He seems real, natural and sexy. Here he is talking to the new girl behind the cash register at Frank’s:

Carl: Hello honey, where did you come from?
Girl: The stork brought me.
Carl: Oh yeah? (pause, smile) Wish he’d bring me one.

Gable, lighting up the screen, about to play a Mills Two Bits Dewey Jackpot slot machine. 

It’s the first screen pairing of Gable and Harlow, who would heat up the pre-code era, but it’s Hank who wins Anne. Then Hank runs into trouble with the gang and is shot dead on the subway—an apparent nod to the gangland shooting of Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle in 1930.

For that, Slaughterhouse goes on trial, but it’s a fiasco and Newton gets him off. MGM was a real rah-rah America studio but at this point they don’t seem to have much faith in the judicial system. A year later, in “The Beast of the City,” the exact same thing happens—right down to the judge chastising the jury. There, the judge tells them their hearts are made of water. Here, he intones: “In all my experience on the bench, I have never seen a more outrageous miscarriage of justice! Your verdict must remain as a blot upon the courts of this state!” Then all of a sudden the people are fed up, they crowd the gangsters and talk of lynching, but the bad guys get away. Which is when the Secret 6 get their act together.

Like Chief Bromden
Pursed by the cops again, Newton tries to take off with the dough but Slaughterhouse kills him. Then he tries to hide out with Johnny’s old moll, Peaches, who locks him in a closet and laughs until the cops arrive. Another missed opportunity. Peaches kind of disappears after Johnny’s death. A scene where she becomes moll to the repugnant Slaughterhouse, and where you see her helplessness, would’ve made this scene pop.

I almost get the feeling “Secret 6” was re-released in the post-code era, and scenes were cut and lost forever. Take Murray Kinnell (Putty Nose from “The Public Enemy”) as Metz, a man who pretends to be deaf and dumb. When did Slaughterhouse figure out Metz could hear and talk? It’s just suddenly there—like Delano in Newton’s law office. We do get a great shot of Slaughterhouse, in prison, watching the cops sweat Metz, and then the door closing on him. It’s very final shot of “The Godfather.”

The Secret 6 really did exist, by the way—sans Robin masks, one assumes. They organized to take on Al Capone and were dubbed “Secret 6” by the press in homage to the group that bankrolled John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859. Now there’s another Secret 6: a DC Comics superhero group, begun in 1968 and still around. Does that speak to the age or what? 19th century: Let’s end slavery. 20th century: Let’s stop Capone. Today: Let’s play with superheroes while the world burns.

Sweating Metz, one of the movie's most effective scenes but an underutilized character—not to mention character actor.

I was watching the 1931 MGM gangster film “The Secret Six” the other day when we got the following scene. The Al-Capone-like figure Louis “Slaughterhouse” Scorpio (Wallace Beery) has finally been picked up by the cops, and from behind bars he sees them sweating Metz (Murray Kinnell, Putty Nose from “The Public Enemy”), an operative who has long pretended to be a deaf-mute even though he's neither. And as Slaughterhouse realizes what's going on, the danger he's in, the door between him and Metz closes. 

What did it remind me of? The great end shot of the first “Godfather” movie, of course: Kay's realization of what's going on, what her husband has become, and the danger she's in. 

If “The Secret Six” sounds interesting to you, well, let's just say it's full of missed opportunities. Or the version I saw on Amazon Prime is one of those pre-code flicks that got re-released post-code and got chopped up and never put back together. Plus the version I saw on Amazon is soft and blurry. Fucking shame, really. We know who the crooks are now. 

Peter Bogdanovich died last week at age 82. Here are some of the headlines:

• CNN: Peter Bogdanovich, the Oscar-nominated director of 'The Last Picture Show,' dead at 82
• The New York Times: Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies
• Variety: Ellen Burstyn Remembers 'Last Picture Show' Director Peter Bogdanovich: 'He Loved and Understood Film Better Than Anyone'

Director, director, director. And here's what he's “known for” according to the algorithms of IMDb:

One out of four. Given IMDb's known-for history, I suppose we'll take it. 

Tech geeks are kind of screwing up the knowledge of the world, aren't they? “Since Peter Bogdanovich has more acting credits, he's mostly an actor. Since Steven Spielberg has more producing credits, he's mostly a producer. That's what they're known for.” 

Children.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This is a helluva find, a recently restored, pre-code Universal Studios flick that reminded me of Thomas Hobbes’s quote about life: nasty, brutish and short. In 72 minutes, it gives us murder, death by shark, over-the-top racism, and Claudette Colbert tied to a torture rack and forced to kiss the male lead. Don’t worry, she’s charmed by it.

It’s obviously drafting off of other movies, too. The title recalls Warners’ hit from the previous year, “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” and we get elements of “The Front Page,” with reporter and editor forever bickering. But it’s its own thing.

Yellowtail
Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) is a carping reporter who hates his beat, the San Diego waterfront, but as long as he’s there he’s pushing to do a big story on a Chinese smuggling ring. Sadly, his editor, John Phelps (Purnell Pratt), waves him off to go after titillating stories like a girl who swims in the nude. Hey, turns out the girl, Julie Kirk (Claudette Colbert), is the daughter of the guy Miller thinks is behind the Chinese smuggling ring, Eli Kirk (Ernest Torrence). Nice coincidence. One of many.

When I first heard about the Chinese smuggling ring, I assumed it was the Chinese doing the smuggling but they’re the ones being smuggled. It’s 50 years into the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), and illegal immigration is their only way into the country. Oh, and Miller is right: Kirk, a weatherworn fisherman, is the smuggler. “When you can’t make a living off tuna,” he says to his deckhand, Ortegus (Maurice Black), “you just as well might fish for yellowtail,” then nods toward a trussed-up Chinese guy on deck. He adds, philosophically, “You know, they ain’t bad folks. And somebody’s got to do the washing.” 

Brace yourself. It gets worse.

I was trying to figure out why the Chinese guy was trussed up when the Coast Guard, with Miller on deck, steams toward them to search the vessel. Ah, so maybe they hang him off the side so he can’t be found? Nope. Kirk just puts chains on him and sinks him. Afterwards, he feels kinda bad about it but he still keeps the dude’s $700 and the beautiful Chinese robe it came wrapped in. Julie gets the robe.

Miller exchanges words with Kirk and shortly afterwards we get our nice big coincidence. Miller's next story is about an old trawler—a guy in a rowboat who dredges treasure from the harbor. And guess what he brings up?

Trawler: Well, son, this here chink didn’t put them there chains around his feet his self. … Looks like he was dunked. Seeing as he’s used to it, I’ll dunk him again.
Miller: Oh no, you don’t! This poor chink tried pretty hard to get in the United States. I’m taking him in. … Sell me this chink. He’s news!

Even with the dead body, the editor still thinks it isn’t a story. He thinks Kirk needs to be charged before it’s a story. So Miller decides to woo Julie to get inside info.

Now for our third coincidence. Miller and his pal, the perpetually drunk, perpetually grabby One-Punch McCoy (Hobart Cavanaugh, a kind of ur-Walter Brennan), are coming out of a speakeasy when they hear Kirk playing piano and singing in the speakeasy next door. Miller figures a drunk Kirk might spill the beans so in they go. Oddly, they never approach him. Instead: 

• Kirk goes upstairs with a call girl
• Julie shows up
• Miller dances with Julie
• Julie sees her father has been rolled
• Julie beats up the call girl to get the money back

She might look like Claudette Colbert but she spent time on the mean streets of Singapore, baby.

As Miller tries to woo her, we get the best lines of the movie: 

He: C’mon, let’s play a love scene.
She (dryly): Let’s fall in love first.

And later:

He: You wouldn’t go for that kiss now, would ya?
She: Say, I thought you came down here to work.
He: If you don’t think it’s work getting a kiss out of you, you’re nuts.

At that point, they’re on a tourist attraction, the prison ship Santa Madre, 25 cents. Which is how she gets tied up for the kissing scene. He even puts a belt around her neck so she can’t move her head. “Enough torture?” he asks after several go rounds. A big smile from Julie. “Mm-mm. I could take it.”

And that’s how she falls. Afterwards, we get lovey beach scenes and a pre-code evening together (his place, fadeout, breakfast). But they argue about the future. She loves San Diego, he talks up Vermont. So there’s a problem. Besides the fact that he’s pumping her for information to convict her father.

He finally gets the info: He’s told the old man is returning that evening to a Chinatown port after a shark-hunting expedition. But he wonders: Why hunt shark when the tuna are plentiful? Because you’re not really hunting shark! You’re really picking up Chinese in the south! So he alerts the Coast Guard. 

Except Kirk was hunting shark, and those scenes, while primitive, are fascinating. Kirk’s boat seems a forerunner to Quint’s in “Jaws”; and when he and Ortegus go out on a rowboat and harpoon a big guy, they’re dragged along—again like in “Jaws”—and the rowboat goes under. Ortegus is attacked, loses a leg, dies. Did Steven Spielberg ever see this? Definitely feels like it.

All this time, though, we’re wondering, along with Miller, why Kirk is hunting shark, and back in port the Coast Guard find nothing—just the dead shark. Then One-Punch McCoy literally stumbles upon a fish in which Kirk has hidden a bottle of booze—we’d seen that in the first act—which makes the lightbulb go on above Miller’s head. And on the dock, Miller cuts open the shark and out spills a Chinese immigrant. Fleeing the cops, Kirk catches a bullet but escapes; Miller gets the headlines but feels awful for betraying Julie.

All that’s left are the final confrontations and reconciliations. Kirk finds a snooping Miller, shoots him, admits he’s a tough kid. Miller admits he gave Julie a raw deal while Julie admits to her father that she loves Miller. Being the good father, he helps save Miller’s life, then dies. And upon returning from the hospital, Miller finds his dingy room spruced up and Julie emerges from the bedroom all smiles.

As for the Chinese? 沒有了。

“Jaws” 1933

Billing
“I Cover the Waterfront” was based upon a book of the same name by Max Miller, a San Diego reporter, which was apparently so popular it led to a song of the same name, covered by everyone from Billie Holiday to Frank Sinatra.

The billing is interesting. Ben Lyon had been the star of Howard Hughes’ highly touted “Hell’s Angels” in 1930, even flying his own plane in the stunt scenes, and he was still a big-enough star to get top billing here; but he’s on the way down. Colbert, on the other hand, is about to shoot into superstardom with “It Happened One Night” and “Cleopatra” and remains a legend to this day. They’re movie stars passing in the night. You get why it happens, too. She’s effortlessly charming while he’s kind of brittle. She’s attractive while he’s OK. But what a fascinating life. In 1930, he married actress Bebe Daniels, the original Ruth Wonderly in 1931’s “The Maltese Falcon,” and the original Dorothy Gale in 1914’s “The Wizard of Oz”—she was also cousin to DeForest Kelley—and during World War II they lived in England, where they hosted a radio show, “Hi, Gang!” After the war, he became a casting director for 20th Century Fox and apparently suggested that a young actress named Norma Jean Baker change her name. Maybe to something alliterative. With MMs in it.

Third-billed Ernest Torrence was a 6’4” Scotsman who made his name as a silent-movie villain, playing, among others, Capt. Hook and Prof. Moriarity. He was the tough “Steamboat Bill” to Buster Keaton’s “Jr.” as well as King of the Beggars in Lon Chaney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He’s great, but this is his last movie. Four days after its premiere, he died—of gall stones, of all things. It feels like there was a lot of sudden deaths in Hollywood in the early 1930s.

Motion Picture Herald ad using the praise of waterfront reporters rather than critics. 

A dream from the other night.

I had just finished a writing project, needed to do more, but wanted to clear my head so I went for a bike ride. Mid-ride I thought I’d pop in over to Mark Hamill’s house. We were friends—kind of. We’d just done something together earlier that day. Even as I was riding over there, though, I was thinking, “Does this pop-in make sense? Who does pop-ins anymore? And I don’t really know him that well.” But my momentum kept me going. I knew it was a bad idea but I kept moving forward. His house was a big house like the Ollermans near Lake Harriet, I rang the doorbell and came inside. There was a distinguished older man wearing a suit and standing just off the doorway in a book-lined den. He asked me what I wanted and I asked if Mark was home. He hesitated, and—figuring Mark had a lot of fans showing up unbidden and unwanted—I said, “We’re friends. I’m Erik. We just went to …” and then mentioned the place we’d been to earlier that day. He nodded and called for Mark.

Mark and I were in our twenties. He wasn’t happy to see me.

Me: Hey, sorry for popping in like this.
He: Uh huh.
Me: I was just writing and needed a break.
He: Uh huh.
Me: Probably wasn’t a good idea.
He: Uh huh.
Me: I … should probably just go, right?
He: Uh huh.

Then I was outside, walking down the stairs to my bike, chastising myself. I had known it was a bad idea. Why had I kept going? I picked up my bike and tried to find the bike path again. There was a public bike path that wound through their backyard but it seemed one way. Everyone was going around the big house and that wasn’t the way I wanted to go. But it’s the way I wound up going.

According to “Belafonte’s Balancing Act,” an essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, when Harry Belafonte joined the American Negro Theater in Harlem in the late 1940s he met another aspiring young actor, originally from Cat Island, Bahamas, with whom he quickly became friends even though they often competed for the same roles. In one production called “Days of Our Youth,” Belafonte got the lead but he also had a regular job as a janitor’s assistant, emptying garbage, etc., and one night he couldn’t find anyone to cover for the janitor job, so the understudy, his friend, went on in his place. That also happened to be the night off-Broadway producers came to the theater seeking actors for an all-Black version of Lysistrata. They tapped the understudy. Soon his friend had a starring role in the Joseph Mankiewicz movie “No Way Out,” co-starring Richard Widmark, and was on his way.

“As a result,” Gates writes, “Belafonte has long joked that [Sidney] Poitier’s career is ‘based on garbage.’” Good line.

Sidney Poitier was the first the way that Jackie Robinson was the first—but also not. After Jackie broke through he was followed by Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, Roy Campanella and Monte Irvin, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks and Frank Robinson. Baseball was forever changed. After Sidney Poitier broke through as a leading man in prestige Hollywood productions, he was followed by … um … Denzel? Whoever it was, it took a while. We got blaxploitation stars: Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal. I guess James Earl Jones and Paul Winfield had moments, Howard E. Rollins had a moment, but the next crossover stars were comedians: Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. So really it’s Denzel. It took decades.

The point is Sidney was alone on his journey. The point is that while Jackie stopped having to turn the other cheek in 1949, Sidney never really got the chance. Endicott notwithstanding.

He was already legendary but kind of over by the time I came of age in the mid-1970s. Historian Donald Bogle calls him “a hero for an integrationist age,” which is why he was kind of over. No one was fighting for integration anymore. 

Did he ever tire of the routine? Show up, be exceptional, turn racists around? That feels like half his movies. “A Black doctor is assigned to treat two white racist suspects…” “Two escaped convicts chained together…” “A couple’s attitudes are challenged when…” “A blind, uneducated white girl is befriended by…” “A traveling handyman becomes the answers to the prayers of nuns…”

And of course: “A Black Philadelphia police detective is mistakenly suspected of…”

Mark Harris, in his obit, touches on the burden he carried:

For a movie actor, there is perhaps no crueler fate than to be forced to serve as a symbol from the first day you step in front of the cameras to the moment when, more than 50 years later, you give your final performance. Acting is about risk-taking, exploration, struggling all your life with how best to make vivid the humanity of the character you play, for better and for worse. It's hard, maybe even impossible, to do your job when the expectations of an entire industry, and of an entire race, are draped across your shoulders.

It is part of the lasting significance of Poitier that he took on a burden he never asked for not as a curse but as a responsibility, and bore it not with resentment but with unshowy solemnity. 

Then there's Howard Bryant’s tweet on this scene in “In the Heat of the Night,” whose significance I missed:

Did anyone have a year like Poitier had in 1967? “To Sir With Love” was released in June, “In the Heat of the Night’ in August, and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” December. All three were box-office smashes. “Guess Who” was the second-biggest movie of the year after “The Graduate,” while the title song to “To Sir With Love”—which was basically a love song to Sidney Poitier—was the No. 1 song of the year. “Guess Who” was nominated for 10 Oscars and won two (actress; screenplay), while “In the Heat of the Night” was nominated for seven and won five, including actor for Rod Steiger, editing for Hal Ashby, and best picture. It also had the longest legs. Sidney played Virgil Tibbs two more times in the 1970s, and the concept became a TV staple in the 1980s with Carroll O’Connor and Howard E. Rollins.

He was shut out that year. Poitier received just two Oscar nominations in his career: the famous one he won, “Lilies in the Fields,” which probably had more to do with the year it was released—the year of Birmingham, the March, and the JFK assassination—than anything else; and “The Defiant Ones” in 1958. That one was a breakthrough, too: the first nomination for a Black man in any acting category. The next Black actor to win an Oscar after Poitier was Louis Gosset Jr. in 1982. The next to win as lead was Denzel in 2001. Poitier was actually more honored in England, where the BAFTAs had a “Foreign Actor” category—basically anyone not British—and where he was nominated six times: “Edge of the City,” “Defiant Ones,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lilies,” “Patch of Blue” and “In the Heat of the Night.” He won for “Defiant Ones.”

By the time I came of age, Poitier wasn’t doing the integrationist thing anymore; he was directing and starring in a series of comedies with Bill Cosby. I wouldn’t mind seeing those, to be honest, to see if there’s anything there. He also directed “Stir Crazy,” with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, a huge, huge hit. He also directed himself and his old friend, Harry Belafonte, in a western, “Buck and the Preacher.”

Two more things from Gates’ essay. At one point in the late 1940s, still scrambling, Belafonte and Poitier decided that comedy was the way to go and worked on a standup routine. Can you imagine? The comedy stylings of Belafonte and Poitier? The young actors were also befriended by acting/singing legend Paul Robeson, who was impressed with them. “I remember times,” Poitier says in the essay, “when he and I would meet Robeson in a bar on Fifth Avenue just off 125th Street, and sit there and talk.” Feels like it could be a play—a 1940s version of “One Night in Miami.” Someone should be working on that.

One of the saddest things I’ve heard in recent years—which, let’s face it, has been a time of immense sadness—was on the TCM podcast “The Plot Thickens” when they ran a seven-part series on the life and career of director Peter Bogdanovich. 

I already knew some of it, of course. Early career as a movie critic, fascination with the legends of Hollywood like John Ford and Howard Hawks, work with guerilla filmmaker and B-movie legend Roger Corman; and then that early, nearly unprecedented success as a director. In the first years of the 1970s, he came to the plate three times and he hit three homeruns: “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up, Doc?” and “Paper Moon.” Bam, bam, bam. The first was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including picture, director and screenplay, and two in each of the two support categories, both of which it won: for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman. “What’s Up, Doc?” was a comedy so it didn’t get AA consideration—though Madeleine Kahn was nominated for a Golden Globe as “Most Promising Female Newcomer” (losing to Diana Ross), and the trio of top-level screenwriters, Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton, won the WGA. But “Moon” was nominated for another four Oscars, and won a supporting award for Tatum O’Neal, age 10, the youngest recipient ever.

Think of all that. Think of that high. One wonders if he thought it was all so easy. Plus the affair and then relationship with Cybill Shepherd. Dude had it all. Had anyone ever rose so quickly?

Did anyone ever fall so fast? 

You know in “The Natural” when Roy Hobbs keeps hitting homeruns and then meets Kim Basinger and keeps striking out? Maybe Cybill Shepherd was Kim Basinger. Or maybe Polly Platt, Bogdanovich’s first wife and creative partner, was Wonderboy. Either way, in the next three years, he made: “Daisy Miller,” “At Long Last Love,” and “Nickelodeon.” Whiff, whiff, whiff. Yer out. 

And then the sad thing. After he and Shepherd split in the late ’70s, he started up a relationship with Dorothy Stratten, a Canadian model was the 25th Anniversary playmate and then Playmate of the Year 1980. She left her husband, Paul Snider, for Bogdanovich. Less than two months later, Snider murdered her before killing himself. 

Again, I already knew some of this. But from a distance I’d always assumed it was an act of jealousy. “The Plot Thickens” podcast suggests another motive.

Snider was a nothing from nowhere, and Stratten was his ride to unprecedented access, all the way to the Playboy Mansion in Hollywood, California, and face-to-face meetings with his idol, Hugh Hefner, the man who had it all. That was Snider’s real goal: to be like Hef. Apparently he was sad but fine with the breakup; he already had a new girl he was promoting. As long as the gates to the Playboy mansion stayed open.  

They didn’t. In the podcast, Bogdanovich talks about an annual party held at the mansion, a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, where everyone shows up in pajamas. But he and Dorothy, newly minted, newly enamored, didn’t show up that summer. “Neither Dorothy nor I felt like it so we didn’t go,” he says in the podcast. Later, Hefner asked him about it. “He said, ‘Would it help if I told the husband he can’t come here except with Dorothy?’ … And this is where I made a big mistake. I said, ‘Yeah, I guess it would help.’ I thought to myself: She doesn’t want to come here and I don’t want to come here, either, but what am I going to say? No, it wouldn’t help? So I said, ‘Yeah, I guess it would help.’ And then he banned him from the mansion.”

According to people who knew Snider, that’s what did it. It wasn’t the divorce from Dorothy; it was the banishment from the mansion which came about because of a surfeit of politeness. Hef wanted to hang with Stratten and Bogdanovich, they didn’t want to hang with him but were too polite to say so, and Snider was dangled as an excuse. Who wants to hang with whom? Yeah, I guess it would help.

It wasn’t jealousy. It was access. Horrifying.

And then Bogdanovich kept going down; he kept finding tragedy. Dorothy had a bit part in his next film, “They All Laughed,” which starred Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara and John Ritter, but he thought 20th Century Fox didn’t have much confidence in the film and would give it just a limited release. So he purchased the distribution rights, created his own distribution company, and distributed it himself. And lost millions. He declared bankruptcy in 1985.

In the 1980s, Bogdanovich directed “Mask,” which was respected, and the Rob Lowe comedy “Illegal Yours,” which wasn’t. In the’90s he tried to return to form with a sequel to “Picture Show.” Nope. Then the backstage comedy “Noises Off…” Worse. Then tragedy again. He directed “The Thing Called Love,” starring River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in the middle of its release. The movie lost millions. 

And that was that. Bogdanovich wound up doing TV movies. He began to act more regularly, most famously playing the shrink’s shrink in “The Sopranos.” His directing projects in the 2000s often focused on sudden Hollywood death or sudden media disgrace: 1920s producer Thomas Ince, 1960s legend Natalie Wood, baseball great Pete Rose.

In the last year or two I spent a lot of time with Bogdanovich. I bought and read his books of interviews with Hollywood legends, “Who the Devil Made It” (about directors) and “Who the Hell’s In it” (actors). I bought and watched (several times) his 2018 documentary on Buster Keaton, “The Great Buster,” and hoped for more such docs from him—love letters to Hollywood artists.

His life would make a great movie. In the 1970s he was called a Wellesian wunderkind, which, rather than a compliment, should be a curse, considering what happened to Welles, and now what’s happened to Bogdanovich. “Follow your bliss,” we are told and Bogdanovich did. It worked for a time.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I don’t know if it should've been Debra Messing but it definitely should not have been Nicole Kidman. Great actress, but, as my wife says, she doesn't have a funny bone in her body. You kind of need that for Lucille Ball. Plus she’s just had too much work done. Her face looks odd. The eyes mostly. And it means she can't really do Lucy's outsized facial expressions. Stop getting work done, everyone. 

But it definitely should have been Javier Bardem as Ricky Ricardo, despite the idiot controversy over his casting. Oh no, a Spanish actor is playing a Cuban character! Right. He played one 20 years ago in “Before Night Falls” and no one said boo. He played a gay, Cuban poet even though he’s not gay, Cuban or a poet. It’s called acting. He’s great here, too. He brings life to every scene. Stop it, everyone.

Hey, maybe it shouldn’t have been Aaron Sorkin?

The week that was
I’d forgotten it was. Then 15 minutes in, I was like, “This feels like an Aaron Sorkin movie,” and in kind of a good way? Sharp, quick. Fifteen minutes later: “Yeah, this really seems like an Aaron Sorkin movie,” and not in a good way: maximizing every scene for argumentation. Then there’s that scene that made me laugh out loud: The three “I Love Lucy” writers want to talk to Ricky Ricardo and he says, “Walk me to the stage, we’re an hour behind.” It’s like Spike Lee’s dolly shot. Is it signature or have you just become a parody of yourself?

In the early 1960s, there was a satirical British show called “That Was the Week That Was” (great title), and that’s pretty much this. At some point during the run of the “Lucy” show, 1) Lucy was accused of being a communist, 2) the network wanted to hide her pregnancy rather than write it in, and 3) Ricky fooled around. Sorkin stuffs it all into the same week.

And that’s not enough. Did Vivian Vance try to lose weight and did Lucy passive-aggressively tell her not to? Did show writer Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat) try to convince Lucy her whole multimillion-dollar shtick—the bumbling and the WAAAH!—was infantilizing women and needed to end? Who knows, but Sorkin shoves all that in, too.

It’s the Pugh confrontation that made me throw up my hands. It felt like a consciousness-raising session from the 1970s rather than a 1953 tete-a-tete between a writer and the biggest star on television about the character they both created. And the timing is ridiculous. “Hey, I know Walter Winchell just floated the accusation that you’re a communist, which is enough to ruin careers and lives forever, not to mention Confidential’s story about Desi’s affairs, which is enough to ruin marriages, but let me nitpick the character that’s bankrolled both of us as if I were a Women’s Studies undergrad in 1987. Because surely you have nothing else on your mind.”

Sorkin doesn’t even get the small things right. We’re going to “tape” the show? Wasn’t it on kinescope? And why did Sorkin pretend “The Big Street” was released in the late ’40s rather than 1942? World of difference. World war of difference. And what was that line about Lucy competing for roles with Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis and Judy Holliday? When were those three, let alone those four, ever up for the same role? “Hey, if Hayworth turns down ‘Gilda,’ see if you can’t get Bette Davis.”

I haven’t even gotten to J. Edgar Hoover yet. Good god. “Being the Ricardos” is, in part, a movie about the blacklist, about how the blacklist destroys lives, and who’s the unseen hero? The guy who shows up at the end to save the day? J. Edgar Hoover. Philip Loeb must be rolling over in his grave.

They should’ve mentioned Philip Loeb. “You saw what this did to Philip.” A line like that. Or Jean Muir? John Garfield? Red Channels? Why not bring in some context? You know, for kids. 

Here’s the context. Loeb was a star on the TV sitcom “The Goldbergs,” basically its Desi, when Red Channels accused him of being a communist. He denied it, but the sponsor, General Foods, wanted him gone, and he was. Then he couldn’t get work. Then he killed himself with an overdose of pills. Hecky Brown from “The Front,” played by his friend Zero Mostel, and written by his friend Walter Bernstein, is based on him. And yes, he killed himself in 1955, and this is set in 1953, but I’ll take this anachronism. Truncate the motherfucker.

Instead, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who with HUAC and Hollywood’s Motion Picture Alliance (hiya, Ayn!) helped create the blacklist, is the hero.

Fuck me. 

What bugs me about Sorkin
I think I’m getting closer to what bugs me about Sorkin. My nephew Jordan, a bigger fan than I am (I believe), hits it on the mark when he says Sorkin rarely seems to be writing for characters. “It feels like everyone is just him being smart.”

I really noticed it in one of the opening scenes, where the cast is gathered around for a table read, and everyone is arguing back against Lucy. Often dismissively. Including director Donald Glass (Christopher Denham), a freelancer, brought in for that one episode. He talks over the biggest star on television and I’m like “Really? I get sexism, I get the egos of directors, but really? A guest on the set?” Turns out Glass is a fictionalization, of course.

Are there no brown-nosers? No hangers-on? Does Sorkin not understand power dynamics?

Compare that with the scene a few years earlier when the execs at CBS Television tell Lucy they want to take her radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” and make it a TV series. She says sure, but only if Desi can play my husband. She was trying to save her marriage, you see, by giving the two of them the same work schedule, but the execs pushed back. A white woman and a foreign man? Won’t fly. But she puts her foot down and wins the day. 

In other words, when she has no power, she gets her way; and when she has all the power in the world, she gets walked over. Stretching out the debate is what matters in Sorkin's world.

In another move designed to placate Desi, Lucy talks to executive producer Jess Oppenheimer (Tony Hale) about having Desi share his credit. Oppenheimer obfuscates. First, he’s condescending to Desi, telling him he’s the title character of the show, since he’s the “I” in “I Love Lucy,” implying he doesn’t need any more, and for that Desi threatens to pull his lungs out. So Lucy goes back to Oppenheimer and says “Why couldn’t you do this little thing for me?” My immediate thought:  “It’s not a little thing. It’s his credit. She should know that.” And then they argue for like two minutes before Oppenheimer yells at her, “It’s not a little thing!” and she gets it. However you maximize the argument, Sorkin takes that path.

But back to Hoover.

Hoover, damn
I knew about the pregnancy controversy. I knew about Ricky fooling around. But I didn’t know that during the blacklist the biggest star on television was accused of being a communist. But yes, it happened in September 1953. 

And J. Edgar Hoover exonerated her?

Kind of. I found this 1991 article about the incident excerpted from Warren G. Harris’ 1990 book “Lucy and Desi.” Apparently after the LUCY IS A RED story broke in the Los Angeles Herald-Express, Desi phoned Hoover, whom he’d met at race tracks, and who assured him that Lucy was “100% clear as far as we’re concerned.” But that was a private conversation. It wasn’t before a live studio audience, as Sorkin has it. No, according to Harris, here’s how it went down. CBS’s PR dept. convinced Desi to convince Rep. Donald Jackson (R-CA) and other members of HUAC to hold a press conference saying Lucy’s been cleared. He did that and they did that. Then Desi asked AP reporter James Bacon to phone him with a report as soon as it was over. Bacon did that. And that’s the big phone call they got in front of the live studio audience. Bacon, not Hoover. 

Afterwards, as was his nature, Hoover kept tabs on Lucy and Desi throughout the ’50s and ’60s. That’s our hero here.

I get why Sorkin did it. J. Edgar Hoover is a bigger name than Donald Jackson or James Bacon. And it’s like Nixon going to China. You’re going to accuse Nixon of being pro-communist? You’re going to accuse Hoover of being a com-symp? But Sorkin still shouldn’t have done it. It’s an insult to anyone who was ever blacklisted.

Debra Messing dodged a bullet.