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Sunday April 30, 2023

Harry Belafonte (1927-2023)

I believe I first heard about Harry Belatonte from Archie Bunker on an episode of “All in the Family.” I remember the line, I just don't remember what prompted it:

“Harvey Belafonte ain't black. He's just a good lookin' white guy dipped in caramel!”

My mother or father (or both) may have laughed at the line, which I didn't get at all. Who is Harry Belafonte? Why is he not black? Oh, he is black? So why did Archie say it? Why is that funny?

I grew up in the '70s, not Belafonte's heyday, and I didn't see either “Buck and the Preacher” or “Uptown Saturday Night,” so where did I next come across him? Somewhere in the '80s. Through...

  •  His daughter Shari?
  • “Beetlejuice,” featuring “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and (my personal favorite) “Jump in the Line”?
  • “Parting the Waters” by Taylor Branch?

That's part of the irony of Archie's line: that good-looking white guy dipped in caramel was all over the Civil Rights Movement. He was a front-line man. He was a race man. In the index to Branch's book, under “Belafonte, Harry,” these are some of the subcategories:

  • Albany Movement and
  • Atlanta concerts of
  • Birmingham campaign and
  • Freedom Rides and
  • King's imprisonments and
  • King's meetings with
  • March on Washington and
  • 1960 elections and
  • R. Kennedy's meeting with
  • SNCC and
  • voter registration and

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s great 1996 New Yorker profile of Belafonte begins with that week in Feb. 1968 when Belafonte hosted “The Tonight Show” for the vacationing Johnny Carson. At the time, Gates was a young college student, radicalized, and Belfaonte didn't disappoint. He brought the truth. He talked bluntly about race and power. He welcomed guests such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy. It seem an era of possibilities. And within four months both men were dead of assassin's bullets. One wonders how '68 didn't break him. How do you deal with all that? How do you go on?

From Gates' profile, I learned that in the late 1940s Belafonte was friends and rivals with Sidney Poitier at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, and the two men were befriended by the already legendary Paul Robeson, and all three would meet a bar on Fifth Avenue off of 125th Street and drink and talk. How is there not a play about that? “One Night in Miami” but in Harlem in the late 1940s. “He was very fond of Harry,” Poitier said of Robeson. “And Harry loved him.”

While Poitier was starring in Hollywood movies by 1950, Belafonte wound up with another path to stardom. Here he is on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956. It's a year after Emmett Till. He's shirtless but for a vest, and gorgeous, and romantic, and one can only imagine how this fucked up the racists of the world—not to mention their wives.

He had six gold albums between 1956 and 1961. He had #1 singles in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium. He had TV specials and sang with Odetta. And he organized.

I didn't know until recently that the whole “DAAAYYYY-O” thing was about laborers; and I didn't figure out until writing this that “Mr. Tally Man” was just the guy who tallied the bananas that the laborers brought in. I thought it was a spectre of some kind. But it's just another way of saying “accountant.” 

Everyone always talks about lowering the ladder for those coming after you. Belafonte manned the ladder. He built more ladders. He wondered why others weren't manning and building more ladders. He spent a lifetime doing this.

Posted at 08:35 AM on Sunday April 30, 2023 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Saturday April 29, 2023

Chinatown I

Bad for glass. We're forever behind the detective who's forever behind.

I've seen “Chinatown” about half a dozen times, maybe more. It's the movie I keep returning to these days, as I once kept returning to “The Insider” or “All the President's Men.” Maybe it just resonated more during the Trump era. Forget it, Erik, it's the GOP.

I thought I got it, too. The movie is an updated film noir, except the femme fatale is the victim and the cynical private detective has no idea how awful the world is. Brilliant. I got it.

Then I read this quote from production designer Richard Sylbert in “Hollywood: An Oral History” and realized I wasn't seeing half of “Chinatown”: 

You say to yourself, “Okay, Chinatown is about a drought, so all the colors in this picture are going to be related to the idea of a drought. And the only time you're going to see green is when somebody has water for the grass.” ... All the buildings in this picture will be Spanish except one. And they'll all be white. The reason they're white is that the heat bounces off them. And not only will they all be white, they'll be above the eye level of the private eye. Above eye level means, for the private eye, that he has to walk uphill. It is always harder emotionally to walk uphill. You then decide what the colors are going to be and why they're going to be that way and what the range should be, let's say, from burnt grass, which is a terrific color, to white, which you know you're already going to deal with, to umber. Umber is interesting, because it's the color of a shadow. And in a movie like this, the more shadowy the better. You use the layers, the planes, use everything you can. All these things are available to you to structure a movie. Even opaque glass. You know what's interesting about opaque glass in a mystery? You can't quite see who's behind it, and it looks like frozen water. And in a picture where they're talking about water, it's an interesting object to get involved with. And you just keep doing that wherever you can.

How fucking brilliant is all that? Sylbert also worked on “Splendor in the Grass,” “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Graduate,” “Rosemary's Baby,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Shampoo,” “Reds,” “Frances,” “Breathless,” “Dick Tracy,” and “Carlito's Way.” Not a bad CV.

Posted at 11:29 AM on Saturday April 29, 2023 in category Movies   |   Permalink  

Friday April 28, 2023

Movie Review: Chinatown Nights (1929)

WARNING: SPOILERS

It begins with one of those old-fashioned traffic signs—the word STOP comes up as the word GO retracts—and intentionally or not (not), it speaks to the movie’s troubled production. “Chinatown Nights” began as a silent film, but morphed into one of the first “all-talking” pictures, mostly through dubbing. And the dubbing is awful—out of synch and nonsensical. In these early traffic scenes, for example, we barely hear traffic. Instead we hear, very loudly, an unseen newsboy shouting “Extra, extra, read all about it!” And then suddenly we don’t hear him at all. We just hear a Chinatown tour bus guide’s schpiel about “sacred joss houses” and “ancient secret orders of the great Tong.” What happened to the newsboy? Where’s the traffic noise? It’s like an odd dreamworld. I felt a little nauseous trying to make sense of it.

Is this the movie that nearly ended Wallace Beery’s career? It was, at least, his first sound production, and sound is why Paramount dropped him. His voice was resonant, but, they felt, too deep and slow. So MGM’s Irving Thalberg picked him up and immediately made him one of the biggest stars of the early 1930s. (MGM also picked up the Marx Brothers after Paramount dropped them. Go know.)

Either way, “Chinatown Nights” did end Florence Vidor’s career, though not for any Lina Lamont reasons. Apparently she loathed what sound did to the moviemaking process, so she didn’t even bother to dub her own voice here; Nella Walker did that. And yes, she was Vidor as in King Vidor, her husband from 1914 to 1926. She did OK on the rebound, though, marrying famed violinist Jascha Heifetz in 1928.

Despite the movie’s troubles, it’s still kind of fascinating. I would love to see a crisp copy on a big screen rather than—as I did—a small muddy copy on my computer. It’s William Wellman, after all, making a gangster flick two years before “The Public Enemy.” How fun is that? 

Dueling Shakespeare
Isn’t it also a kind of gender-reversed “Blue Angel”? The society dame brought low by the gangster. Though with a happy ending, if you can imagine. 

Joan Fry (Vidor) is on a bad date with the drunk and handsy Gerald (Freeman Wood) when she becomes intrigued by the Chinatown tour bus. She also figures that, with Gerald, a public bus is safer than a private limo:

Gerald: You know, Chinatown is all a fake.
Joan: Then you should feel right at home.

The tour bus winds up running into a Chinese falldown artist. Except no, he’s actually dead, the victim of a brewing Tong War between Chuck Riley (Beery) and Boston Charley (pre-Charlie Chan Warner Oland, in yellowface). It’s Riley who shows up and orders the tour bus to scram, but Joan’s feisty so she sticks around. Then the cops show up and question her. Love that. There’s a dead body, there’s a known gangster, but wait, who’s this society dame? Maybe she had something to do with it!

After that, it’s late, there are no taxis, and men are being killed on the streets. Riley is the devil she knows. “Where are you taking me?” she asks, worried. “You’re following me,” he responds correctly.

Riley has a room above his nightclub with a giant war map along one wall, and a Chinese assistant, Woo Chung (Tetsu Komai), who doesn’t seem to do much. For her safety, Joan is locked in an adjacent room, from which she: 1) tries to escape; 2) emotes wide-eyed behind one of those speakeasy windows; 3) browses the bookshelf. There she finds a volume of Shakespeare with “C. Riley, Class of 1908” written on the title page. We get a nice scene of dueling quotes. She points out this one to Riley:

Upon what meat doth our Caesar feed
That he is grown so great?

He counters with “Richard III”:

Teach not they lips such scorn, for they were made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt

Unlike the handsy Gerald, Riley doesn’t make a play, and in the morning she leaves reluctantly. Later, she returns to check out the Chinese Theater with society friends, who are already worried Joan might “go native.” Yes, they say that. It’s 1929. 

By this point, a stuttering reporter, Williams (Jack Oakie), has instigated a meeting at the theater between the two Tong gangsters (cf., the scheming reporters in “The Racket”), Joan and her friends get in the way, men are killed. There’s a great shot of her caught in the mayhem afterwards—pushed along the crowd like someone caught in river rapids. So it’s Riley to the rescue again, even though he sees her as a slumming society dame, “down here looking us over like animals in a zoo.” Cake-eaters like her and her friends would faint if anyone slapped them in the jaw, he says, at which point she dares him to do it. So he does. Hard. And she? She holds her cheek and looks at him with something like love brimming in her eyes.

Yes, they do that. It’s 1929. 

The Shadow
After they spend the night together, we get a particularly odd sequence that speaks to the jerryrigged nature of this production, the unknowability of relationships, or some really bad editing. Or all three.

Joan is about to leave for good but in the hallway heading downstairs there’s another society gal whom we’d seen earlier laughing at a Buddha statuette. Here, near the Buddha, she looks back at Joan and intones in a sing-songy voice, “Going … my way?” For some reason, that line causes Riley to burst out laughing, which causes Joan to spin and stare at him with hurt and tears in her eyes. Then the camera is on him. He seems upset that she’s crying. Or stunned? Maybe he’s stunned because in the next shot she’s closing the door from inside and letting her coat drop slinkily, sexily, to the floor. Except in the very next shot, from a completely different angle, with completely different lighting, she’s beatific, eyes cast up, as she intones in a sing-songy way, “I’ve changed my mind, Chuck. I’m going … your way.”

(For oddly slow, sing-songy voices, cf., Harlow in “Public Enemy.”)

But will she? She’s used to getting her own way, and now she’s just a moll. When he attends a potentially dangerous Tong funeral he refuses to bring her along. So she drinks. So she’s a drunk. (It happens that fast.) And when the cops show up to end the Tong war, and Riley refuses to help, she blurts out something he’d previously mentioned to her—that the cops just need to demand papers from all the Chinese and deport those who don’t have them, and that would end things. For that betrayal, Riley throws her out. But to where? “I can’t go back uptown now!” she cries.

As weird as Wellman’s sing-songy molls are, he’s really good with street kids: Darro and Coughlan in “Public Enemy”; the whole bunch in “Wild Boys of the Road”; and Jack McHugh here. He plays “The Shadow”—two years before the creation of the radio character—a street urchin who works for Riley and warns him when danger’s afoot. I kind of flashed on Brandon Cruz a bit. He’s not just loyal but cool. At one point, Riley throws a pot at him and he doesn’t flinch. He’s also empathetic. By now Joan is an alcoholic getting kicked out of Chinatown bars, so he takes her to his basement apartment and sleeps on the floor next to her.

The next day, he tries to get Riley to take her back, and that’s when Riley throws the pot. A second later, the kid is shot on the streets outside, the latest victim of the Tong war Riley won’t end. The kid’s dying words are addressed to him.

“Beat it, Chuck,” he says. “The cops are coming.”

The movie’s not much, but that scene is poignant.

So long Tong
The wrap-up is quick and odd. Boston Charley dumps Joan in front of Riley’s place—alive, with a taunting note about rotting fruit pinned to her—and a doctor, dressed like a milkman, tells Riley the only way she’ll survive is if he takes her away from all this. So he does. Like that. Snap. “We’re going … your way,” he intones. Then it’s back to the tour bus in Chinatown, which Boston Charley now rules, while new cake-eaters mock the proceedings. 

And that’s it. No comeuppance for Riley. To be honest, it’s kind of refreshing.

Again, I’d like to see a good-quality version of this. Even better if someone removed the bad dubbing and restored the intertitles. How does it work as the silent film it was meant to be?

Early Hollywood really loved the Tong wars, didn’t they? They’re all over these plots but begin to die off in the 1930s. What happened? I guess the exotic storyline morphed into familiar heroes (Charlie Chan) and villains (Fu Manchu). Would be interesting if a modern filmmaker, Chinese or Chinese-American, took up the mantle. Particularly if we got something historically accurate. If that’s even possible.

Ever had the feeling you wanted to go, but also had the feeling you wanted to stay? Florence Vidor stayed in the movie, then left the movies.

Posted at 08:36 AM on Friday April 28, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - Silent   |   Permalink  

Thursday April 27, 2023

Why Tucker Wasn't Fired

In his SubStack, Judd Legum runs through some reasons why Fox News might have fired their biggest ratings draw, Tucker Carlson, unceremoniously by loudly, earlier this week. Was it Ray Epps (whom Tucker alleged was responsible for Jan. 6) airing dirty linen on “60 Minutes” Sunday night? Was it the lawsuit from Abby Grossman (who alleges a hostile and offensive work environment on Tucker's show)? Was it fallout from the Dominion lawsuit (where, during disovery, it was revealed that Tucker sent disparaging texts about Trump and others in the right-wing biosphere)? Was it D) All of the above? Right now, Fox isn't talking. The one time we want them to say something, they've zipped their pieholes. Would that they kept it up. 

Legum adds the following:

More importantly, we know what was not a firing offense for Carlson. He spent years promoting racist, white nationalist conspiracy theories. Not only was Carlson not fired, but top Fox News executives defended his conduct.

Exactamundo.

Upon finding out the good news, on the two newbie social media sites I'm on, I talked about Tucker as basically a street corner kid: eminently replaceable and there to draw your fire—not to mention ire—as he has done so well. And even though he's gone, someone else will take over that 8 PM slot and they'll be awful, too. That's the role of the 8 PM slot: to be awful. I said it's not O'Reilly or Hannity or Megyn or Tucker, it's the Murdochs. Follow the money.

It was a bit of a downer post, to be honest. I should've reveled more.  

“Whatever the reason Fox News cut ties with Tucker Carlson,” Legum writes at the end of his post, “it was not a moral stance. That ship sailed long ago.” Exactamundo.

Posted at 06:58 PM on Thursday April 27, 2023 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Wednesday April 26, 2023

GOP To-Don't List

I like David Frum's lede in this Atlantic article, talking about the five things Republicans knew they needed to do to make 2024 viable:

  1. Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.
  2. Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.
  3. Offer plausible ideas on drugs, crime, and border enforcement.
  4. Reassure women worried about the post-Roe future.
  5. Don't be too obvious about suppressing Democratic votes, because really blatant voter suppression will provoke and mobilize Democrats to vote, not discourage them.

And they haven't done any of them: Trump leads the pack, the GOP's debt-ceiling recklessness is the biggest U.S. economic problem, they have no good ideas for anything, and, as the clickbait goes, “No. 4 is the worst one!”

Frum, or one of his editors, calls the piece “The Coming Biden Blowout,” which I initially thought meant Biden would blow out. Or maybe the Atlantic is hedging its bets. Either way, here's hoping all of this backfires on the GOP. Awful things should happen to awful people for a change.

Posted at 01:37 PM on Wednesday April 26, 2023 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Monday April 24, 2023

PRISON W. GATE

When Spiro T. Agnew landed on the national scene as the VP nominee for Richard Nixon in 1968, my father thought the name sounded like a fake name in a detective story—an anagram of something else, something that would, per detective stories, reveal all. So he tried to figure out what the anagram was. Which is so him. He loves word games. Still does, age 91. And because he was a reporter at The Minneapolis Tribune, and because columnist Will Jones heard about the effort, and because columnists forever need a new idea for a column, it wound up in the newspaper. 

All of this was hardly family lore, by the way. I don't even think my Dad remembered doing it. But a few months back, while I was searching for something else on newspapers.com, I came across the columns. They're amazing.

One of the strongest of the anagrams is TOWERING SAP. There's also PORING SWEAT, which, given Nixon, is spot on. But one anagram is shockingly prescient:

No, Agnew didn't go to prison because of Watergate, it was extortion and tax fraud, and he wound up pleading guilty to one count of tax evasion and resigning office in Oct. 1973. But so many of Nixon's inner circle went to jail because of W. GATE. Hell, just having PRISON is prescient enough. But W. GATE, too? Wow.

And how about those late '60s door prizes? “Laugh-In” and Polanski and bad kids shows and Pigmeat Markham. Amazing. Half of it would be canceled today.

As for the winning entry? That, too, was prescient. It was announced Oct. 5, 1968, five years almost to the day before Agnew resigned office. The most common response was GOP RATES WIN, so Dad went for imaginative from Peter Hepokoski of 1327 SE 7th St. Dad wrote: “I especially liked his 'go 'n' tap wires' (it's constitutional!).” 

GO N TAP WIRES
PRISON W. GATE

Apparently we never needed Woodward and Bernstein, just Will Shortz. I'll leave it to others to figure out the tea leaves from DONALD J. TRUMP.

Posted at 07:42 AM on Monday April 24, 2023 in category U.S. History   |   Permalink  

Sunday April 23, 2023

Before Escobar

Recognize the guy with Cagney on the set of “Mister Roberts”?

It's fucking Escobar, man. “Chinatown.” The guy who kills Evelyn Mulwray*, allowing her father to put his Grinch-like claws on the granddaughter. It's the guy who unknowingly gives us one of the saddest endings, with one of the greatest last lines, in movie history. The one who didn't listen to the lesson of Chinatown: do as little as possible. He thought he was upholding the law but he was creating injustice because he believed the lies. For a time, I guess, so did Jake. 

IMDb's photo gallery for actor Perry Lopez includes only 16 shots from a 40-year career but man are they cool:

  • Three from “Chinatown”
  • Four from “Mister Roberts,” where he played Rodrigues
  • One from the “Shore Leave” episode of “Star Trek,” where he played Rodriguez
  • Four hanging out with Natalie Wood and/or James Dean on the set of “Rebel Without a Cause”

From that last, I assumed he played one of the hoods in “Rebel,” but he's not listed, so not sure why he was visiting the set. Was he going out with Wood? Or Dean? Not seeing connections.

Oddly, after “Chinatown,” he doesn't have many credits. He was working working working, then he gets an important role in a great film, and then nothing for five years. Did he return to the stage? After “Chinatown,” he's in four TV episodes (late '70s, early '80s) and four movies (late '80s, early '90s), including a reprise of Escobar in the disappointing “Two Jakes.” And that's it.

Lopez was born in 1929, two years before “The Public Enemy,” so he probably grew up idolizing Cagney. He certainly looks happy in the photo.


* My wife and I just watched the film again, and apologies to Lt. Escobar: He missed. It was fucking Loach that killed her. 

Posted at 10:08 AM on Sunday April 23, 2023 in category Movies - Screen Credits   |   Permalink  

Saturday April 22, 2023

Movie Review: Amsterdam (2022)

WARNING: SPOILERS

How many actors have spent an entire movie imitating another actor who has nothing to do with the movie? Kurt Russell doing Clint Eastwood in “Escape from New York” comes to mind. Anyone else? Feels like there’s more but I’m drawing a blank. 

In “Amsterdam,” Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a Jewish doctor and wounded Great War veteran who tends to the wounds of other Great War veterans in 1933 New York. His friends include other vets such as Harold Woodman, Esq. (John David Washington) and Milton King (Chris Rock), and initially I was worried this was another example of color-blind casting in a historical setting. Not a fan of that. As if we can just level history. As if we can raise an entire generation thinking the Civil Rights Movement weren’t no big deal since everyone’s been the same forever and ever. Wait, and Zoe Saldana is a coroner, too? And they’re all hanging with … is that Taylor Swift? Wow, this cast. But c’mon.

Thank god Chris Rock says something about the dangers of Black men hanging in a room with a white woman and a dead white body. So not quite color blind. But definitely wishful thinking. 

Washington has never done much for me. He’s the son of Denzel, given two dull first names rather than one memorable one, and he’s twice dull rather than once memorable. Sorry. His father had snap; he snapped you to attention. Maybe I’m being too tough on the son. What am I basing it off of? This and Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.” Maybe I need to see Chris Nolan’s “Tenet.” Top directors seem to dig him.

Anyway, early on I thought, “Oh, Christian Bale is doing a Jewish accent.” But I began to realize he wasn’t doing general Jewish but particular Jewish. He was doing someone. Drove me crazy. I kept flashing on Martin Short as Jiminy Glick doing Larry David to Larry David—and, to be honest, that’s not far off. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t realize it. Or I did but dismissed it. At one point, he was crouched over, looking up, and I went “Peter Falk? No.” Yes. Bale is doing Peter Falk throughout. And it’s fun but also distracting.

But not as distracting as Zoe Saldana.

Right, them
The movie’s not much, which is a shame because it should be something. It should’ve resonated hugely.

It’s framed as a mystery. Did someone kill their former platoon leader Gen. Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), and why, and why kill his daughter (Taylor Swift), too? The dude from “Deadwood” (Timothy Olyphant), with crazy eyes and bad hair, pushes her into traffic, then blames the Jew and the Negro, and mobs being mobs, everyone goes along. So our heroes are on the run during perilous times but their own investigation doesn’t feel sharp; it feels soft and blurry. She says something about Rose? Or Voze? The Vozes are richie riches. But first we get an extended flashback about how our principles know each other.

Woodman and King were both in the All-Black 369th Infantry Regiment fighting in France, but their superior officer is a cracker. So Gen. Meekins, a kindly man, brings in Berendsen, another kindly man, whose gentile in-laws want him dead anyway. Nearly happens. But Woodman saves Berendsen, and Berendsen saves Woodman, and they both become friends with a crazy beautiful nurse, Valerie (Margot Robbie), who makes trinkets out of the torn metal she pulls from soldiers’ bodies. She and Woodman wind up romantically linked, and all three party for a while in Amsterdam, the idyllic place that allows such partying in 1918. But then Berendsen has to return to the States. Something about loving Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), the awful woman whose upper-crust family is even awful-er. And for some reason Woodman has to return, too. Maybe because that partying in Amsterdam actually looks kind of dull.

At the Voze estate in 1933, guess who they run into? Valerie! She’s a Voze, but suffering medical/mental issues. And yes, she was the one who suggested Taylor Swift seek out Woodman and Berendsen. So that mystery is solved. But what to do now? Valerie’s brother Tom (Rami Malek) suggests they contact the legendary Gen. Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), who might be helpful in exonerating them. Um, how? But OK? Along the way, they also find out something about the Committee of the Five, or the Committee for the Sound Dollar, that is involved in a kind of eugenics and has a weird symbol—a combo of “C” and “5” that looks like it might be a drunk version of a swastika. Which … yes.

At some point, trying to figure out the plot, I’m thinking, “OK, so is it a bunch of richie riches who don’t like FDR’s New Deal and like what Hitler is doing in Germany, and want to bring Fascism to the U.S.?” Bingo. Better, it’s actually based on a historical incident, the Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch of 1933, in which businessmen apparently wanted Gen. Smedley Butler to take over from FDR as an emergency measure. But he spilled the beans on them—just as Gen. Dillenbeck does here. The question is: Who’s the betrayer? Turns out: Tom. Rami Malek. Shocking. Meekins was going to spill the beans, too, which is why he was killed. His daughter learned of it, which, ditto. Berendsen and Woodman were allowed to live because the Committee wanted Dillenbeck on board, and as decorated war vets they had a better chance of reaching him.

Given Trump, Jan. 6, Proud Boys and Fox News, this should resonate, but it doesn’t. Not close. It’s historic horror overlayed with contemporary feel-good. True, nothing happens to the Committee, as in real life, but Berendsen finally blows off Beatrice for the shockingly gorgeous Irma St. Clair (Saldana), and Woodman and Valerie are reunited, and they all have their own little Amsterdam in 1930s NYC.

Meanwhile, across the ocean… 

Ten years
But what fun seeing Matthias Schoenaerts again! He plays the good cop. I haven’t seen him since “The Mustang” in 2019, which feels like forever ago. Also Michael Shannon as a T-Man. When did I last …? Right, “Knives Out” in 2019. Mike Myers should act more. He has a bit part as undercover MI-6 with a bird fetish, and he’s fun. Zoe Saldana should let us see her face more. She’s a good actress, too. Christian Bale is amazing. All for nothing.

This is David O. Russell’s first movie since “Joy” in 2015, which I never saw, and which came on the heels of “American Hustle” in 2013, which I loved. So I haven’t seen Russell in 10 years. A bad 10 years. I wish he’d had something more profound to say about it than “Amsterdam.”

Posted at 10:26 AM on Saturday April 22, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - 2022   |   Permalink  

Saturday April 15, 2023

'Center Stage'

I meant to post this last week, but then I went to Ohio to see the play my nephew wrote and directed (this nephew, btw), and when I returned there was a lot of catch-up at work, and, well, here it is more than a week since I took these screen shots from The New York Times website and I'm only posting them now. The nice thing? They're still relevant. Fuck, they're evergeen. This will always look bad, Times.

Huh. And why does Donald Trump have center stage?

This:

Going forward, that'll be my euphemism for being charged, indicted, imprisoned. Al Capone has center stage. I hear author Michael Lewis had front-row seats when Sam Bankman-Fried was pulled onto center stage. Hey, anyone know if anyone has center stage on [latest mass shooting]?

One thing seems certain: It's not the last time this year Trump will have center stage. And the Times will be there with a shitty clickbait take on it. 

Posted at 10:32 AM on Saturday April 15, 2023 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Friday April 14, 2023

All the Diminutives

Fun fact: Jimmy Cagney didn't like being called Jimmy. Professionally he was James, his friends called him Jim, but early on Warner Bros. tagged him with the diminutive “Jimmy,” which, in their defense, made him seem like family. He was the kid down the street, your tough little brother, your ne'er-do-well son. Ruffle his hair why don’t you.

This is well-known is you know Cagney. Less talked about: Warners did the exact same thing with his character names. For about 10 years they were, if not diminutives, at least -y or -ie names.

For his big breakthrough he played Tom Powers, but the women in the film often called him Tommy. Then Warners gave him monosyllabic names like Jack, Bert, Matt and Joe. But starting in ’32, they put all their chips on the diminutive, calling him, for his next films, Jimmy, Lefty, Danny, and Patsy. He was Chester Kent for “Footlight Parade” and Dan Quigley for “Lady Killer” but then then they were back with Jimmy, Jerry, Chesty, Eddie and Tommy. As a G-Man, he was Brick, but in “The Irish in Us” he’s Danny again. Even when he broke from Warners for two pictures, he played a Johnny (Cave) and a Terry (Rooney). Once he returned, he played, among others, Rocky (Sullivan), Eddie (Bartlett), Jerry (Plunkett) and Danny (Kenny).

That last one was “City for Conquest,” a big production that went awry, and that was it for Cagney's diminutives. Did he put his foot down? “I'm 40, c'mon, guys.” 

For the last decade of his career, he didn't have much of a choice of character names since he increasingly played real people: James Cagney (a cameo in “Starlift”), Martin “Moe the Gimp” Snyder in “Love Me or Leave Me,” a George M. Cohan reprise in “The Seven Little Foys,” Lon Chaney in “Man of a Thousand Faces,” and Admiral Bill Halsey in “The Gallant Hours.” Even his ballyooed return to movies after 20 years was a non-fiction role: Rhinelander Waldo in “Ragtime.”

I am curious if Warners gave him all the diminutives because it made business sense or because it annoyed him. He was afraid to fly and they kept making him a pilot, too.

Posted at 12:34 PM on Friday April 14, 2023 in category Movies   |   Permalink  

Wednesday April 12, 2023

Movie Review: The Racket (1928)

WARNING: SPOILERS

A cop and a gangster lock horns until the cop is reassigned to a tranquil precinct (because of corrupt ward politics), while the brother of the gangster is led astray by a woman. That’s this movie in a nutshell.

Four years later, in MGM’s “The Beast of the City,” a cop and a gangster lock horns until the cop is reassigned to a tranquil precinct (because he’s too gung-ho), while the brother of the cop is led astray by a woman. 

So should Chicago scribe Bartlett Cormack, who wrote the play on which “Racket” is based, have gotten a writing credit on “Beast”? Who knows? Maybe the above is general enough. Also, the WGA hadn’t been created yet. Who was he going to complain to?

Too much staring
At the first Oscars—created to stave off guilds like the WGA—“The Racket” was one of three films nominated for “Best Picture, Production” (as opposed to “Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production”), which it lost to “Wings.” Its director, Lewis Milestone, did win a “Best Director” statuette, but for “Two Arabian Knights,” another Howard Hughes production featuring Louis Wolheim. When Milestone won again for “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 1930, he was the first director with two Oscar. Milestone was a milestone, you could say. A year later, he was nominated again for “The Front Page.” He also did  “Of Mice and Men” in ’39, a version of “Les Misérables” in the 1950s, and “Ocean’s Eleven” in the early ’60s. And he was the director who was called in to replace Carol Reed on “Mutiny on the Bounty” when Marlon Brando went nutso. It was his last feature film.

“The Racket,” a silent film, has it moments, but there’s altogether too much staring between the principles. I also got the feeling that they should know each other from childhood but we never get that backstory. The movie opens with a man walking down the street, eyed by several men in tall buildings with rifles. One takes a shot and misses. On purpose. It pushes the man into a stoop, where, out of an adjacent door, another man emerges, and they exchange greetings.

  • Hello, Mac.
  • Hello, Nick.
  • Take a tip, Mac—change your racket.
  • I like my racket—and I haven’t shot yet.

The one who’s told to change his racket turns out to be, alley oop, a cop: Capt. James “Mac” McQuigg. The other, Nick Scarsi (Wolheim), has a framed certificate on his wall from “The Anti-Liquor League of America,” so of course he’s a Prohibition-era gangster who specializes in trafficking booze. Right from the start, the movie has a nice cynical sensibility.

Between staredowns with McQuigg, Scarsi is trying to take over the territory of rival gangster Spike Corcoran (Henry Sedley). He’s also throwing a birthday party for his younger brother Joe (George E. Stone), whom he warns away from two things: women and slang—like “swell flash” for a ring—since he’s a college man. He’s the relative the tough gangster hopes will go straight and legitimize the family. Cf., the kid brother in “The Doorway to Hell” and Michael in “The Godfather.”

If he’s trying to keep Joe on the straight and narrow, throwing a booze-filled party isn’t exactly the best path, particularly since the entertainment is Helen Hayes. No, not the actress. That’s the character name, played by Marie Prevost. She’s a Mae West-y singer-dancer who goes full Roaring Twenties by singing on stage with a megaphone. Before that, she does an odd dance number with a male partner, both in grotesque peasant masks like it’s 19th century Eastern Europe. Was this a thing in the ’20s? So creepy.

Mac has been invited to the party—to be mocked, I suspect, more than anything—but Spike and his gang show up, too, and we get another long staredown. Just as the tension is dissipating, Scarsi shoots Spike from beneath the table, then surreptitiously passes the gun to an underling. Mac still hauls him in, but his attorney, Sam Meyer (uncredited, even among IMDb's uncrediteds), is waiting at the police station with a writ of habeus corpus. More staredowns. Mac tells him it’s the last murder he’ll get away with in his district—a qualification that cracked me up—while Scarsi calls him “a dumb harp” and tells him he’s through.

Scarsi’s right: A newspaper headline trumpets, CAPTAIN MCQUIGG SENT TO STICKS, i.e., the 28th precinct, which Mac calls “the country” as well as “to hell and gone.” Even from a distance, though, Mac and Scarsi taunt one another, which two Chicago reporters aid and abet. But what finally brings our principles together again is Helen Hayes and the kid brother. Out for a drive, Joe tries to make a move but she’s not having it. So he proposes marriage and gives her the ring Scarsi gave him. She accepts it but won’t accept a kiss, so he tells her to shove off. Problem: Apparently there was a law back then against abandoning women on the road, since a cop sees this, gets involved, Joe panics and drives his car into a wall. There might’ve been a hit-and-run, too. All of this happens in Mac’s precinct. It's his jurisdiction.

Oddly, Mac doesn’t recognize Joe, whose party he was recently at, and Joe’s not talking, even though it’s implied they bat him around. It’s Helen who finally IDs him as Scarsi’s brother, but she’s put in jail, too, without a phone call—the Chicago Way.

Seriously, no group comes off well here. Ward politics is corrupt, the press is sensationalistic, the law excuses the powerful and the police bat people around. When Scarsi’s lawyer shows up with another writ, Mac, our hero, actually tears it up, saying “I’m sick of the law!” Then the cops trip the attorney, claim he’s intoxicated, and throw him in jail. They make Eastwood’s Dirty Harry look like a card-carrying member of the ACLU. 

From her jail cell, Helen is romanced by a dewy-eyed cub reporter, Dave Ames (John Darrow), as Mac works to get intel from recalcitrant sources while protecting eyewitnesses such as the arresting officer. Which means the officer is all alone in the precinct when Scarsi saunters in. After a failed bribery attempt, Scarsi shoots him and lams it—but he’s picked up and brought back. Will justice be served? Will DA Welch (Sam De Grasse) let him go? What does the ultimate ward boss, the Old Man, think? 

In the end, the Old Man decides he can’t carry Scarsi and the upcoming election, so Scarsi will have to cool his heels for a week or so. He’s not having it and threatens to squawk. So they open the window for him—the DA and the hoodlum-y Sgt. Turck (Wolheim’s brother, Dan), and, yes, he’s killed “trying to escape.”

Now everyone has to file in to view the body and wrap things up. First it’s the reporters.

Reporter 1: But why shoot him?
Reporter 2: So government of the professionals, by the professionals, and for the professionals, shall not perish from the earth.

Then it’s the kids, Helen and Dave Ames. Though he’s been puppy doggish around her, when she tells him she’s not going his way he’s almost like “OK, see ya!” She stays behind, Mac looks wrecked, she says a few snide things. Then it’s just Mac and a fellow cop, who literally asks “What now?” Mac says he’d like some sleep but he has to do X, Y and Z, and by then “It’ll be time to go to Mass.” Fade out. 

Yeah. Not a good ending.

Scarsi/Scarface
What did I like about the movie? Some of the lingo. When they capture Scarsi, for example, Mac says to the other cops, “Did you fan him?” I guess that meant “frisk” back then.

Wolheim is great as Scarsi. He’s got a bulldog face and a smashed nose—from an old football injury—and exudes a Capone-like toughness. I also like Lucien Prival as his dandy-ish right-hand man Chick. Was he a Frank Nitti clone? Was Nitti known then? Because I flashed on Billy Drago’s great turn in “The Untouchables.” Prival also has a bit of Wallace Shawn and Pee Wee Herman in him, believe it or not.

John Darrow as the cub reporter isn’t a bad looking kid. He became a mid-level star but then chucked it in the mid-1930s to become a talent agent. There’s a throwaway bio snippet on IMDb that feels like a tale worth telling: “Darrow and his partner Charles Walters were together from 1936 until Darrow’s death in 1980.” 

Sadly, the three principles were all dead within a decade:

  • Wolheim in 1931, age 50, from stomach cancer
  • Meighan in 1936, age 57, from cancer
  • Prevost in 1937, age 40, from malnutrition and alcoholism

Maybe the thing I liked most about “The Racket” was finding out who played Scarsi when it hit Broadway: a little up-and-comer named Edward G. Robinson. It was his first gangster role. In fact, he didn’t want to do it because he didn’t know from gangsters. “I had no yardstick by which to create him,” he wrote in the autobiography. But when another play he was in, “The Kibitzer,” folded, he says, “I accepted with considerable misgiving. … Boy, did that play change my life.”

Edward G. Robinson (left) as the original Scarsi, see?

Posted at 06:14 PM on Wednesday April 12, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - Silent   |   Permalink  

Monday April 10, 2023

Michael Lerner (1941-2023)

In “An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler wrote about the six Jews—most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe—who founded Hollywood. Fun fact: Michael Lerner played half of them. In 1980, he was cast as Jack Warner in “This Year's Blonde,” a TV movie about Marilyn Monroe, and in 1983 he played Harry Cohn in another TV movie, “Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess,” but all of that was mere prep for his great, Oscar-nominated turn as Jack Lipnick, a fictionalized version of Louis B. Mayer, in the Coen Bros.' “Barton Fink” in 1991. Someone—his agent?—should've realized this and helped him get roles as William Fox, Adolph Zucker and Carl Laemle to complete the cycle. Or maybe that's just the completist in me talking. But has any actor done all six? Lerner totally could've done it. To be honest, the biggest reach was the moustachioed Warner, and Lerner nailed that one first.

Oh, and if anyone thinks Lipnick shouldn't count as Louis B. Mayer, Lerner also played Mayer in a 2022 Russian film “Pervyy Oskar,” about the first film to win the Academy Award for best documentary. Per the Times, he was working on a biopic of the man as well. 

Lerner was in my life for a while. I was looking over his 183 credits and seeing familiar shows I probably watched in the 1970s: “The Odd Couple,” “Lucas Tanner,” “Rhoda,” “Wonder Woman.” Then I caught a few that I knew I'd watched. Lerner played Pierre Salinger in that mindfuck of a TV movie (when you're 10) about the near-death of the world, “The Missiles of October”; and maybe more importantly, he played the Japan-loving Capt. Futterman in that classic season 2 episode of “M*A*S*H,” “For Want of a Boot.” Futterman is one of the many links in a chain that Hawkeye builds so carefully, with each quid pro quo, so he can get a pair of non-leaking boots, only to see it all fall apart in the end. 

Related to the original Hollywood moguls mentioned above, Lerner also played his share of Jewish gangsters: notably Arnold Rothstein in John Sayles' “Eight Men Out,” the man who played with the faith of 50 million. 

Rest in peace. 

Posted at 08:50 PM on Monday April 10, 2023 in category Movies   |   Permalink  

Thursday April 06, 2023

Amen

Posted at 06:15 AM on Thursday April 06, 2023 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Tuesday April 04, 2023

Movie Review: Blonde Crazy (1931)

WARNING: SPOILERS

This was James Cagney’s first lead role after he became a star in “The Public Enemy”; and though gangsters like Tom Powers are what he’s known for, Bert Harris is actually more indicative of his early screen persona. In the precode era, Cagney was more grifter than gangster.

“Blonde Crazy” (née “Larceny Lane”), a tale told in four or five grifts, is not much of a movie but it’s fun. It feels like a B picture or exploitation flick in the way it’s steeped in the culture of the moment—as if it didn’t have the money to extract itself from the culture of the moment. You feel it mostly in the lingo. “You’re not a collar ad, but you're not bad looking.” “I could eat the hip off a horse.” “Aw, you’re as wet as he is.” And of course Bert’s term of endearment for any and all women: “Huuuuuhhh-ney!” 

But my favorite example is the use of dynamite as metaphor. It’s not a compliment yet:

“I’d stay away from those bellhops, they can’t do a girlie any good. And the worst monkey of them all is that guy Bert Harris. He’s dynamite. Everyone in this joint owes him money from those crooked dice of his.”

Dynamite as a pejorative makes way more sense, doesn’t it? Makes you wonder when it become a positive. And why. And what that says about us.

Scrapbooking
Bert Harris is both ass man and a bit of an ass. He’s a bellhop joyously checking out every passing blonde in the midst of myriad smalltown scams. We never see those crooked dice of his, but we do see the machinations involved in getting Anne Roberts (Joan Blondell) hired—sweet-talking, fast-talking and bribery—and then trying to get into her pants. For the latter, he winds up with his face slapped. That happens a lot. Consider the movie the revenge of Mae Clarke in the beating Cagney takes from women.

Bert may be dynamite but he’s still an amateur—he even keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings involving various grifts he’d like to try. When does he begin to think big? I guess when A. Rupert Johnson Jr. shows up (Guy Kibbee, in his first of five Cagney movies). He’s a hotel guest who also expects a little something-something from Anne, and harrumphs mightily when he doesn’t get it. So Bert shows him some Prohibition-era hootch, says it’s $10 a bottle, and when Rupert wonders if that isn’t a little steep, Bert intones slyly: “Not if the blonde chambermaid likes it.” Then with a pal (Nat Pendleton) playing cop, they catch Rupert canoodling in the back of his car with both Anne and the hootch. Desperate to avoid a scandal, our grifters are suddenly $5,000 richer.

All of this takes place, per an early title, in a “leading hotel of a small mid-western city.” The $5k bankrolls their move to a better hotel in a bigger city—Chicago. Except before Bert took the suckers; in Chicago, he’s the sucker. He and Anne fall in with two other grifters, Dapper Dan and Helen (Louis Calhern and Noel Francis), and they make a chump of him. While Helen flirts, Dan pretends he’s passing phony $20 bills—gets them from a guy at three-to-one—and Bert wants in. The $15k they get—real money, it turns out—winds up in a drawer in Bert’s hotel room—along with the previously earned $5k. Except they’ve already cut through the wall on the other side. So instead of cash, Bert is left holding a taunting note:

Darling:
paste this in your scrap book
love and kisses
Helen

Because he can’t bear to let Anne know he’s been taken, he grifts again—though later, Anne oddly sees the enterprise as beneath him. “Out-and-out thievery is not your style, Bert,” she says. “The worst thing you did was take from a lot of wise guys, cheat a lot of cheaters.” Which … sorta? Rupert was a lech, not a cheater. Plus the new grift isn’t bad. He finds out about a high society wedding, goes to a jeweler as a rep of the family, has an expensive necklace sent to the family home, then shows up as a rep of the jeweler saying, “Sorry, we sent this to the wrong house.” Now he’s got the expensive necklace, which he hocks. When the very Jewish pawn shop owner tries to chisel him down, we finally see a bit of Tom Powers. He grabs the guy by the back of the neck, calls him “Three Balls” (for the traditional pawn shop logo) and strongarms him into a better deal. “My, but you’re a tough guy,” the pawnshop owner says. “Not tough. Just mercenary,” Bert sneers before slapping the man with the dollar bills.

Now it’s onto New York, and guess who Anne runs into? “Einstein?” Bert jokes. Nope, Dapper Dan. That’s how she finds out Bert got grifted. Helen is already out of the picture so now it’s time to take Danny boy with another not-bad scam. Dan thinks Anne is working with him to grift the florid Col. Bellock (William Burgess), but it’s the opposite; she’s working with the Colonel. Late to the racetrack, Dan suggests some friendly wagers on races they’ve already missed, knowing one of their gang will call ahead to find out who won, then switch numbers on passing license plates to clue Dan. But the Colonel has the real winning numbers, and at the track Dan discovers he’s out $7500. He can’t figure what went wrong until he finds the taunting note Anne leaves behind.

The most fascinating thing about this revenge grift? It’s about 10 minutes of screentime and we don’t see Cagney. At all. It’s all Blondell. Can’t imagine a modern star taking such a backseat.

Now that that’s solved, what’s the drama/conflict? All along, Anne has complained that Bert just cared about money, blondes, and grifts.

  • “Oh Bert, you’re such a boy. You’ll never grow up!”
  • “Oh, Bert, sometimes you act like a kid.”

Now he wants to get married, he wants to travel to Europe, but Anne tells him he's too late: "I’m in love with someone else.” It’s the guy who helped her get the cinder out of her eye on the train, banker Joe Reynolds (played by a young and very good-looking Ray Milland). Bert watches their wedding from a nearby taxi cab, and when the cabbie asks if it’s a wedding or a funeral, Bert responds: “Both.” Nice line. Then he’s off to Europe by himself. When he returns a year later, he’s lost the spark.

What gets him moving again? Anne. She’s in trouble. OK, Joe’s in trouble. He embezzled $30k, invested it, lost it. Bert figures a cover: Since no one knows the funds are missing, have someone else—him—steal the rest, and they’ll figure it was all just part of the same robbery. Would’ve worked, too, except Joe is not just a cheat but a rat. He and the cops are waiting for Bert. That’s gotta be one of the worst ways to say “thank you” ever. Not to mention moronic. Imagine they’d actually caught Bert. He could’ve spilled the beans, and when Joe objected, he could’ve just said, “Check the satchel. There’s $30k missing in negotiable bonds. That’s on him.” At which point, Joe would’ve bolted like the rat he is. Instead, here, Bert lams it, there’s a car chase, he’s shot in the back, his car goes into a storefront. But he lives.

This is another way Bert Harris is more indicative of early Cagney than Tom Powers: He doesn’t die. We always think of Cagney getting plugged in the final reel, but in the 22 starring roles between “Public Enemy” and “Angels with Dirty Faces,” he only dies twice: “He Was Her Man” (1934) and “Ceiling Zero” (1936). Both deaths are sacrificial/heroic. Generally what happens to him is Hollywood 101: he beats the bad guys and gets the girl. He also has a tendency to repeat his catchphrase at the end, too: “Why, if I thought you meant that…” to Loretta Young; “I’ll put a gold spoon right in your kisser” to Mary Brian.

Here, too. He may be in prison, but Anne shows up, tells him about Joe’s perfidy, tells Bert she loves him and will wait for him. Once she leaves, overjoyed, he returns to the Bert we’ve always known. He tells the female prison guard:

If I had the wings of an angel, huuuuuu-ney
Over these prison walls I would fly! 

It’s not just a return to his catchphrase, it’s a tweak on “The Prisoner’s Song,” a 1920s staple that several years later the Dead End kids would sing at the end of “Dead End” in 1937. That song is probably why, in their next big role, they became angels with dirty faces—playing against Cagney, of course. The connections never stop.

You dirty rats
We all know the ’60s-era variety show Cagney imitation, “You dirty rat,” and we all know it’s a line he never said, but it didn’t come from nowhere. He probably came closest to saying it in “Taxi!,” when he says to the guy who killed his brother, “Come out and take it, you dirty yella-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to ya through the door!”

Here, too. When Anne tells him about Joe’s treachery, he says this:

Why, the dirty, double-crossing rat! I’d like to get my hooks on him I’d tear him to pieces!

Both movies were written by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon (née J.J. Glassman), Chicagoans who also wrote “The Public Enemy” and helped make Cagney’s career. They gave us the early Cagney lexicon, and were assigned to the budding star until Bright ran into trouble with Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, et al. and that was that. They were also different types: the Polish-born Glasmon tended toward respectability, the American-born Bright toward rebellion (he helped create the WGA). I don’t know if this is a lesson but the respectable Glasmon wound up dying of a heart attack at age 40 in 1938, while the rebellious Bright, who wound up in B pictures and then blacklisted, spent decades pickling himself and lived until 1989. His memoir, “Worms in the Winecup,” has nice nuggets but is indicative of a scattered mind. He kind of disses Glasmon, calling him “at best semiliterate,” but he adds that he had “a feel for character … his ear for speech patterns, particularly seamy street talk, was accurate and captured flavor.” One wonders if that’s where some of the flavor of this movie came from.

-- A shorter review of this film can be found here. It's from July 1999.

Posted at 02:19 PM on Tuesday April 04, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - 1930s   |   Permalink  

Monday April 03, 2023

John Brockington (1948-2023)

This is a little weird, but John Brockington was the first Black guy I remember parting his hair. I was born in 1963, became cognizant (more or less) in the late ’60s, a time of Oscar Gamble-ish natural afros, and Brockington had that, but tighter, shorter. And on his 1974 football card, a posed shot, helmetless, his hair was parted. “Huh,” I thought. “Didn’t know that was an option.”

When I first became a football fan, around 1972 or so, the Green Bay Packers were past their Vince Lombardi-era, “frozen tundra of Lambeau Field” heyday, but they had Brockington. He was the best player on mediocre Packer squads from 1971 to 1975. His rookie year, 1971, he rushed for 1,000+ yards and was Rookie of the Year three ways: AP, UPI, Sporting News. He made the Pro Bowl the next two years, rushing for 1,000+ each time. According to his New York Times obit, it was the first time in NFL history that a running back broke the 1,000-yard barrier in each of his first three seasons. 

1974 is when he began to falter. His rushing attemps were about the same (266) but his average per went down by a yard: from 4.3 to 3.3. The next year, his attempts were cut in half and his average dropped to 3.0. Was it the Packer offensive line? Was he losing a step? Can’t imagine that grind. After one game in 1977, he was traded to Kansas City. That was his last season.

The Packers went to the postseason once in his run—1972, and lost 16-3 to the Washington Redskins in the divisional round. The 1970s was the era of Minnesota Vikings dominance—divisionally speaking, anyway. The Pack didn’t make it back until 1982, and then not again until ’93.

I remember he was my friend Dave Budge’s favorite player. I wonder if he wore #42 for Jackie? 

Posted at 06:58 AM on Monday April 03, 2023 in category Sports   |   Permalink  

Sunday April 02, 2023

M's Manage 3 Hits in 40-Degree Temps, Lose Quickly

The last Mariners game I went to was Game 3 of the 2022 ALDS, an 18-inning affair against Houston that the M's lost 1-0. It took 6 hours and 22 minutes and ended their season.

Last night I went to my first Mariners game of the nascent 2023 season, a 9-inning affair against Cleveland that the M's lost 2-0. It took 2 hours and 5 minutes. Thank you, pitch timer. If I'm going to see my team get shut out in low 40s temps, I'll take the speedy variety.

Initially, the game felt like it was going to be zippy in action as well as gametime. In the top of the 1st, the Guardians' best player, Jose Ramirez, lined a two-out single to right and then promptly stole second against the Mariners' backup catcher Tom Murphy. In the bottom of the 1st, the Mariners' best player, Julio Rodriguez, led off with a seeing-eye single to left and then promptly stole second against the Guardians' backup catcher.

Bigger bases, fewer throwovers: Gentlemen, start your engines! It's like Oprah: You get a stolen base, you get a stolen base, we all get a stolen base!

Except that was the last stolen base of the game. In the bottom of the 2nd, the M's new right fielder, Teoscar Hernanez, drew a one-out walk and promptly stole second. Well, he looked safe—from 300 level behind homeplate—but I guess they tapped his helmet before he arrived. He disputed, the M's didn't, that was that. And it was the last SB attempt of the game. Not that there were a lot of baserunners to give it a go. Half the game was three up/three down, and of the M's whopping three hits, one was Julio's seeing-eye single, one was Julio's bad hop/E6, and one was a one-out double to right in the 8th inning by Tommy La Stella off of the Guardians' beleaguered reliever James Karinchak.

I'd missed some of that drama in Game 1 Thursday night. Karinchak got called on a pitch-timer violation in the 8th inning of a 0-0 game, seemed rattled, and promptly walked leadoff hitter J.P. Crawford. Then with one out, he hit the M's new second baseman Kolten Wong with a pitch; then Ty France blasted a 3-run homerun. Last night, M's fans, awarer than myself, began taunting Karinchak by counting down the pitch clock before each pitch. That was fun. I forget if it began before or after La Stella's double, but for a second we suddenly seemed to have a chance. And with our 2022 heroes coming up! Alas: PH Cal Raleigh struck out (looking bad) for the second out, and then somehow Karinchak walked J.P. on four pitches—none of them close. Is he afraid of Crawford? That put the tying run on base for our best player, Julio, who promptly struck out on three pitches (looking bad). And that was our three hits: two dribblers from Julio and a ringing double from La Stella. (I hope we all do a Brando imitation every time he comes to the plate.)

That wasn't the worst part of the game, TBH. The worst part of the game occurred in our section, 327, when, in the late innings, as it cleared out from the cold and futility, a gang of drunk/high doofuses came and sat near us. Realizations hit you in stages. Oh, these guys aren't really fans. Oh, they're drunk and/or high. Oh, they're really, really stupid. One guy asked me who we were playing—it was the 8th inning at this point—and I pointed to the scoreboard. “Cleveland,” I said. “The Cleveland Guardians.” “Guardians?” he said, laughing through his nose, and peering at the scoreboard as if through a haze. That was our only interaction. The dude next to him, who looked like he could've been casted as an extra in “Romper Stomper,” then began shouting at the players. Bon mots like “Fuck you, ______!” If I were braver, or simply more foolish, I would've warned them against getting high. Not generally getting high, but, you know, who should probably not partake. Stupid people, for example. Those who can't afford the IQ drop pot brings; who become so stupid a kind of miasma of stupidity surrounds them and infects everyone else. This was that. For half an inning, I think I was more tuned into them than the game, or to my own conversation with my friend Jeff, before I shook loose and just tried to blot them out. Two T-Mobile ushers tried to handle them with not much success. Not fun.

Positive takeaways? Our starter, 6'6“ Logan Gilbert, looked great, going 6 innings, giving up 4 hits and one walk while striking out 7. He was sharp: boom boom boom. He only made one mistake—to Josh Naylor, who nailed it into the right-centerfield seats. The other Cleveland run came off Diego Castillo, another line-drive homerun, this time by Andres Giminez in the top of the 7th, after Giminez turned a nice DP on Julio in the bottom of the 6th.

We also got a good running catch from Teoscar. 

I arrived about 10 minutes before gametime and texted Jeff the goings on: ”The guy throwing out the first pitch is a many-time World Series winner w/the NY Yankees." Yes, Tino Martinez, back in Seattle. I get it, '95 and everything, and not his fault we traded him and Nellie for problem children Sterling and Russ—helping the Yankees pad their late-century dynasty. And if it had been Nellie I would've cheered loudly. Maybe because he came back to us as a free agent? Tino just feels Yankee to me, now and forever. But I have to admit, he looked good. He's aging well. For a Yankee.

The National Anthem was sung by grade school kids from Renton and was adorable. They should do that more often. 

1-2. 

Posted at 12:50 PM on Sunday April 02, 2023 in category Seattle Mariners   |   Permalink  

Saturday April 01, 2023

Lance Reddick (1962-2023)

The first time I watched all five seasons of “The Wire,” I tended to root for the rebellious cops like Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon. Particularly Lester: the intellectual as natural police. I liked the guys taking on the system even though they'd get punished for it. I was young. Well, 46.

The second time I watched all five seasons of “The Wire,” I had, in the interim, become a manager, and man did I identify with Lt. Cedric Daniels, played by Lance Reddick, the officer trapped between those fomenting for change from below and the powerful, calcified (and often corrupt) entities above. The first time through, to be honest, I was a little annoyed with Daniels. Did he care enough? Why wasn't he doing more? Didn't he know who the heroes were? Second time through, I immediately recognized what an awful position he was put in—constantly. How the demands for change made sense but why they were ignored. The people below were interested in quality and the people above were interested in quantify—the numbers game. How you tried to protect your little corner of the world; how you tried to protect your people and yourself. How it usually didn't work out and you wound up in the pawn shop unit. 

This is from Jonathan Abrams' oral history of “The Wire.” It's Reddick on an early meeting with creator David Simon:

I remember him saying organizations can't be reformed, but people can. I remember being struck by it when he said it, because I knew that I had never thought of it that way, and I knew that there was something profound in the insight. Then, over time, particularly when I watched the show, I realized how we see both on the criminal side and on the police side, you see people struggling to live up to the codes of the institutions that they're a part of and seeing how it chips away at their humanity.

Reddick initially read for Bunk Moreland (three times) and then for Bubbles (he'd recently played addicts on other shows). Once he got the Lt. Daniels role, he spent a day with a cop, a narcotics lieutenant who was getting his MBA at night school at Johns Hopkins, and who told a story about busting a dirty cop that stayed with Reddick. The dirty cop lunged for a drawer, possibly a gun, and Reddick's cop thought: Please go for it. Because I'd love to blow your head away. The story made Reddick realize “that level of savagery and ferocity that you have to be able to call up in an instant and be able to tame and put away in an instant.” You'd see that ferocity flash in Daniels' eyes from time to time. But more, there was just a burden on him, a silent burden. A fan has collected scenes of Daniels' “catchphrase,” where he's asked stupid or obvious questions, or questions he can't answer, and just walks away. It's fucking great.

I also remember that episode—I think it's third season—when we finally see Daniels out of uniform. I think he gets a late call some evening, and he's standing on the landing in just pajama bottoms, and ... holy crap he's cut. He looks like a prize fighter. Not an ounce of fat on him.

That's part of what makes Reddick's recent death, “from natural causes,” so bewildering. That guy died of natural causes? At 60? My age? It's almost an argument against being in shape. If it can happen to Lance Reddick... 

I've written about how great “The Wire” is, and how during its run it was only nominated for two Emmys, both writing, never for show, and it never won anything. What I like? That never bothered Simon. If the Emmys were the calcified entity above him, he was the Daniels figure. And the McNulty figure fomenting from below? That was Reddick. “I'll always be angry about [the lack of Emmy recognition],” he said. “I'll be pissed off about it until the day I die.”

Posted at 09:33 AM on Saturday April 01, 2023 in category TV   |   Permalink