WARNING: SPOILERS

A lot of the tropes of early gangster flicks are here. I’m assuming they began here since there’s not much before here.

Start with those tin pails for beer drinking and transportation—the original growlers—which turn up in the Frankie Darro scenes of “The Public Enemy.” That’s more historical convention than movie one, but it’s still cool that “Public Enemy” got the historical details right.

We get a version of the 1904 General Slocumb disaster, New York’s biggest mass killing before 9/11—as seen in the 1934 Clark Gable gangster flick “Manhattan Melodrama,” the movie that ended John Dillinger’s life.

How about a hunchback/little person as attaché to the gangster? He turns up as Humpy (John George) in “Outside the Law” (1920) and Miller (Snitz Edwards) in “The Public Enemy” (1931), except those guys were snitches for the bad gangsters. Here, Hughy the hunchback helps redeem the gangster hero, Owen (Rockliffe Fellowes), not only by encouraging his relationship with the social reformer Marie (Anna Q. Nilsson), but by killing the bad gangster himself.

Oh right, the basement hideout. It’s an almost exact replica of the hideout the Dead End Kids will use in “Angels with Dirty Faces.” Or theirs was a replica of this.

Most important, anticipating “Public Enemy” and “Angels with Dirty Faces,” “The Regeneration” gives us a gangster’s coming-of-age story as sociological study. We see Owen at ages 10, 17 and 25, with the child father to the man. He’s not a bad kid, he’s just given a bad break. Or a series of them. Or a series of awful ones. The beginning of this movie should be required viewing for libertarians. To show them what life was like before any sense of governmental regulation. To show them what dumb shits they are.

Drinking beer
This part: When Owen’s mother dies, the authorities arrive to cart away her body and … that’s it. That’s all they do. “Hey, what about that barefoot, 10-year-old boy (John McCann) in rags in the dilapidated apartment upstairs? Any reason for us to check on him?” “Nah, he’ll get by.”

Except it’s not exactly by the kindness of strangers. Maggie, a fat neighbor lady, muses a bit, then says to her drunk husband, Jim, “The kid’s alone now. I’m going to bring him in here.” Is it a kind gesture? Not really. Owen is immediately put to work and slapped around. He’s sent to fetch more tin pails of beer for the old man and his drunk friend. He’s less son than servant.

“And then years pass,” we’re told via title card, “and Owen still lives in a world where might is right—and where the prizes of existence go to the man who has the most daring in defying the law…” That’s what the title card says. What the movie shows us? On the waterfront, when a bully mocks a hunchback, Owen, now 17 (Harry McCoy), beats him up. It’s not exactly “defying the law.” Not exactly gangster stuff.

To be honest, Owen is never much of a gangster. We’re told he becomes a gang leader at 25 because of “a complete assortment of the virtues the gangsters most admire.” And what are those? That we see? Well, he bullies one guy into paying for their beers. And he drinks beer. That’s about it. He’s not far off from Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

But DA Ames (Carl Harbaugh) pledges to sweep the city clean of such trash! One night, he attends dinner with the Deering family, which lights the imagination of social butterfly Marie (Ann Q. Nilsson), who declares she wants to go seean actual gangster. It’s socialite-slumming a la 1929’s “Chinatown Nights,” but Ames proves an unheroic chaperone. His picture’s been in the paper, the gang doesn’t like it, and when he has to go back for Marie’s wrap he’s set upon by the gang. Marie is horrified. Her eyes plead with Owen—who’s been making eyes with her—and win. Owen stops the bullying. The next thing you know, Marie is involved in the social reform movement at the Settlement House.

At this point, the movie turns episodic. Marie lets the gangsters join their group aboard a boat, and Skinny (William Sheer), Owen’s eyepatching-wearing right-hand man, tries to impress some girls. They remain unimpressed, so he flicks his cigarette into a pile of ropes. It starts a fire. This is the General Slocumb-esque disaster, and we get several minutes of panic while the patina of the film changes from yellow to red.

Then the Settlement House has a problem with a brutish husband, so they send the little bespectacled guy. Nope. So Owen goes. That works. Afterwards, he sees GOD IS LOVE on the House chalkboard and leaves. He knows he doesn’t belong in such a place.

But Marie thinks he does. She goes to the gang’s hideout, where he’s doing his usual midday drinking, and points out a nearby drunk sleeping it off, with insects crawling on his face. Is that what he wants for himself? That’s when Owen joins the social reform movement while Skinny takes over the gang. Done and done.

Except Skinny ain’t exactly smart. His first act as gang leader? Knifing a cop. His second act? Pleading with Owen to hide him. The third? Attempting to rape Marie. Making a lot of friends, isn't he?

Why Owen hides Skinny is interesting if you’re a Cagney fan. It’s more than gang loyalty. Owen flashes back to when they were younger, getting chased by the cops, and Skinny trips and is caught—but doesn’t squeal. It’s basically Rocky and Jerry from “Angels with Dirty Faces.”

Though the cops don’t find Skinny, Marie finds his cap, can’t believe Owen lied to her, and retires crying. The DA, who’s shown up again at the 11th hour, cackles with glee, while Owen—and, again, shades of Father Jerry—visits a priest. Meanwhile, Marie overcomes her grief and tries to find Owen. Instead, she finds the gang, who eye her menacingly. Then Skinny tells her Owen is upstairs. He ain’t.

The real hero is the hunchback. He alerts the cops, he alerts Owen to Marie’s predicament, and Owen goes after Skinny. Fleeing, Skinny fires at Owen, misses, and hits Marie hiding in a closet. In the hospital, surrounded by Owen and others, Owen vows vengeance, but she points to an image floating above her bed in Biblical tablet form:

VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE LORD
ROMANS 12-13

I think she’s saying let God handle it.

He seems to abide by her dying request. Tossing the gun aside, he goes after Skinny to bring him to justice rather than kill him. He comes in through the skylight (another great early trope), they fight, and just as Owen is about to strangle Skinny he sees the distraught image of Marie counseling goodness.

So how does Skinny get it? Surrounded by cops, he tries to scale the clothesline to another building, but the hunchback spots him and shoots him down. Then he and Owen commisserate over Marie’s grave.

Just who is this diminuitive hero who keeps doing the right thing? I mean, who is the actor playing Hughie? I don’t know and I can’t find out. Nobody seems to know. He’s not listed in IMDb, Wiki, AFI. Go back via newspapers.com to contemporary reviews and still nothing. Somebody somewhere must know, I’m just not finding it.

Irish rose
Apparently the film was lost for many decades until it was ressurected (or, you know, regenerated) by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s. Not sure how/where they found it. The movie is of particular interest not just because it’s an early gangster film, and not just because it’s one of the first features from famed director Raoul Walsh, but because it was filmed on location and often used Lower East Side gang members as extras. It’s truly historical.

Nilsson, an early Swedish import, had a long career, appearing in more than 200 films—mostly in the 1920s, when she was a star—but her best-known modern role is probably as one of the silent-era “waxworks” playing bridge with Norma Desmond in “Sunset Blvd.” Her last film was an uncredited part in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” She died in 1974, age 85.

And the fellow with all the extra “e”s? Rockliffe Fellowes of Otawa, Canada had a shorter career (62 credits) and a shorter life (he died in 1950, age 65), but I was delighted to find out I’d seen him before. He played Joe Helton, a retired gangster, whose daughter is kidnapped by a rival in the great Marx Bros.’ film “Monkey Business.”

He’s not a bad straight man, but for some reason, two years later, his film career was over.

At the end of this film, over the graveyard, Owen says Marie was the noblest and purest thing he ever knew, and then calls her “my Mamie Rose.” That sounded off to me. Made her sound like his mother. But that’s actually the title of the memoir on which this movie is based, published in 1904 by Owen Frawley Kildare. Wait, not novel? Memoir? Yes, Kildare claimed Owen’s story as his own, though some say he was born to wealth in Maryland but fled and became a newspaper hawker and itinerant everything before becoming “the Kipling of the Bowery,” as newspapers of the era called him. “My Mamie Rose” wound up being adapted for the stage in 1908, though Kildare didn’t much like the actor playing him. At least he didn’t have long to fret. Shortly thereafter, he fell in the subway, suffered a series of breakdowns, and in 1911 died in the Manhattan state hospital for the insane on Ward’s Island. In one newspaper, news of his death is next to an article on the continued incarceration of the murderer Harry K. Thaw. Does that name sound familiar? Yep: “Ragtime,” which was the last screen role for James Cagney. Full circle.

SLIDESHOW

Joe Posnanski is in the midst of counting down all the MLB teams from worst (Rockies, right? Right) to best (Braves, probably), and today he landed on No. 14, the Arizona Diamondbacks. With each team, he starts out with an anything topic that's usually fun and fun to read before getting to the nitty-gritty: who's good, who might be good, what's working and what isn't. The anything topic is just where his mind goes with that particular team, and today it went to: Were the D-Backs the most suprising team this century to win the pennant? No other pennant winner this century has had a negative run differential, for example, so they're certainly in the running. Last season, they eked into the post, had a good run—through Brewers, Dodgers and Phillies—and made it to the Series. Pos then goes into our two baseball seasons: the long, 162-game one, where the best teams rise, and the short sprints of October, where teams like the D-Backs can surprise.

And he asks: Is this good for baseball? 

He asks because he doesn't think it is. Those two types of seasons are fine for other sports, but other sports always get to play their best players (unless injured), and that's not baseball, certainly not with pitchers. He writes:

If you're going to make baseball a playoff sport, then do it—140-game season, eight playoff teams in each league, 15 seven-game series filling September and October, just go all in. This will allow more teams to try and have Diamondback-like runs to glory.

And if you want to keep the 162-game season at the center of the sport, and better reward the teams that play well throughout, then scale back the playoffs to four teams in each league and have them play a seven-game series in October.

I'm with Joe on this, but I think the current Lords won't cut back on either revenue stream (reg. season or playoffs), and so won't fix the problem. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is Dune the text at the fulcrum of popular culture? Feels like it. It’s the midpoint of the journey of our heroic journeys.

Which go something like this. 

In David Lean’s 1962 Oscar-winning film, “Lawrence of Arabia,” a blue-eyed member of the elite goes native in a desert community and prospers; he winds up attacking his own empire and is exalted by the desert people. They chant his name.

Three years later, Frank Herbert published his novel, “Dune,” in which a member of the elite goes native and blue-eyed on a desert planet. He learns mind-control and the desert people exalt him as the long-lost messiah. They chant his name. He is deemed The One as he takes on the Empire—only to realize that he is related to his enemies.

Twelve years after that, in George Lucas’ “Star Wars,” a boy on a desert planet learns mind-control in order to take on the Empire—only to realize, mid-journey, that he is related to his enemies.

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” movies really underline how much Herbert’s story owes to T.E. Lawrence, and how much “Star Wars” borrows from it. But the journey of our heroic journeys feels less than heroic to me. Once upon a time, our stories were grown-up and historical, rooted in life on Earth; then they gave way to childhood fantasy.

But these are good movies. This is arthouse “Star Wars.”

How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?
My favorite moment of revenge, by the way, didn’t have anything to do with the demise of Baron Harkonnen (though the insects on his corpse were a nice touch), nor making Christopher Walken’s Emperor bow and literally kiss the ring (because, like in “Star Wars,” the Emperor was unseen in the first film and a last-minute addition to the second). No, it was when Paul used THE VOICE against the all-powerful and shrouded Rev. Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), the seer who orchestrated most of the tragedy we’ve been watching for the past three years:

Rev. Mother: Consider what you are about to do, Paul Atreides …
Paul: SILENCE!
[The force of the voice knocks down the Reverend Mother]
Rev. Mother: [fearfully] Abomination.

God, that was great. And maybe my reaction is indicative of the true power in this universe. It’s not with this bloated man, nor that decrepit old one, nor the young, bald psychopath. It’s with the women. The seers. The Bene Gesserit. And now a man has joined them.

“Dune: Part Two” totally worked. It’s a great story, the visuals are amazing, and while it’s long (nearly three hours) I felt like it wasn’t long enough. I felt like, to truly tell this story, you need a miniseries. Maybe we’ll get that someday. Though I do recommend watching the first movie again before you see this. Unless, of course, you already know the story. I just know it helped me.  

Hell, even with rewatching it, I missed the part where Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) survived. I thought he bit it along with Leto (Oscar Isaacs) and Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa).

So, in our last episode, the Atreideses were assigned by the Emperor to replace the Harkonnens as fiefholders on the desert planet of Arrakis, the source of “spice,” a psychotropic substance that also allows for interstellar travel. It’s as if LSD also powered automobiles, I guess. But it was less promotion than set-up. The Emperor feared Leto’s growing power and wanted him eliminated. The Harkonnens do just that. But Paul Atreides (Timothy Chalamet) and his Bene Gesserit mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), escape into the desert.

There, they meet, and are almost killed by, the native Fremen peoples, who know how to fight and survive in the desert. Jamis, the warrior, challenges Paul, Paul wins. That’s where we left off.

Now they’re going native. And as Paul goes through various rituals and adopts the name “Muad’Dib” (Desert Mouse), and his eyes keep getting bluer from the spice and he keeps outfoxing Baron Harkonnen’s inept nephew (Dave Bautista), we periodically cut to other planets, where we see:

• Baron Harkonnen plotting ponderously amid the mudbaths designed to excrete the poison inhaled in the last movie
• Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) journaling, and realizing that Paul Atreides may be alive, and that her father, the Emperor, caused the whole fiasco
• The rise of the youngest Harkonnen nephew, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who is pale, hairless, brutish and insane

Lady Jessica also goes through rituals, drinking yadda yadda, and oh no, she shouldn’t have done that when she was pregnant! But whatevs.

Increasingly, and via Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem), amusingly, or maybe heartwarmingly, the natives think Paul is the return of the Messiah. This is particularly true in the south, which is why Paul doesn’t want to go there. Lady Jessica does. She figures, hey, nothing safer than being considered the Messiah. But Paul is disturbed by visions: millions dying in his father’s name. He doesn’t want that. Or that Paul doesn’t want that.

I’d forgotten he gets corrupted. Is that why I never finished the trilogy? The hero stopped being the hero? Watching this, I was also disappointed when Paul reunites with Gurney Halleck. I liked him alone with the Fremen.

Eventually, though, he’s forced to flee south, where for some reason he drinks the Water of Life, goes into coma, comes out of it, and now he’s less Paul than he was before. He can see the future clearer and he believes in the prophecies more. Or does he merely use them? I’m unclear. How much is calculated and how much is he buying into everything? Or maybe he should be buying into it all, since he is what he is. 

Anyway, massive forces move against each other, Paul and the Fremen overwhelm the Harkonnens and retake the planet, and Paul kills the Baron. Then he agrees to fight Feyd-Rautha, who, I don’t think, the movie played up enough. His one big battle before Paul is with three creatures in an arena, but the decks are stacked—two of them are drugged. He seems less menacing than pampered. Or he’s menacing for being pampered. Either way, he proves a tougher battle for Paul than anyone else in these movies. But he loses. 

A lot of what happens in the last hour I was confused by. Why does he demand Princess Irulan’s hand in marriage? To unite families? He’s already defeated her family. Is he trying to avoid the holy wars he sees in his visions or doesn’t he care about that anymore? Maybe he’s a big fan of journaling. 

Books of Thomas, Paul, Luke
I shouldn’t make fun. I liked it. I particularly liked Javier Bardem’s Stilgar: the crumbling of his curmudgeonly nobility as more and more he wants to believe. Chalamet is great, too, in a tough role for such a skinny malink. Zendaya works as Chandi, the Fremen guide and love interest. Lea Seydoux is in this too? What a cast. Anya Taylor-Joy even shows up in a vision as Paul’s grownup sister. Yes, like Luke, Paul has a sister. Maybe this one will prove more useful. (Sorry, Leia fans.) 

I’m interested in seeing where this goes. Maybe it goes to places the “Star Wars” movies should have but didn’t. And I’m curious how this, the outsider in the desert, the T.E. Lawrence story with superpowers, became the heroic journey of all of our voyeuristic lives. Not enough has been written about that.

The first time Donald Trump's name appeared in The New York Times, back in 1973, in an article about his father entitled “A Builder Looks Back—and Forward,” it was accompanied by a lie:

The Donald graduated first in his class at Wharton? Impressive!

Yeah, no. From The Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper, in 2019, in article entitled: “Mary Trump says 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump cheated on SAT to get into Penn”:

The Times still hasn't corrected their 1973 story. But don't worry: There's way more where that came from.

WARNING: SPOILERS

There’s a surreal quality to watching the original 1931 version of “The Maltese Falcon.” It’s like explaining a dream to a friend: You were you, but not really you. Here, Sam Spade is Sam Spade, but not really Humphrey Bogart. 

Actually, not at all Humphrey Bogart.

All his teeth
He’s Ricardo Cortez (nee Jacob Krantz), a wannabe Valentino by way of Zeppo Marx, and his Sam Spade isn’t exactly the cool, professional hero of John Huston’s 1941 classic. He’s a lothario—leering at the pre-code women with all his teeth.

At his office he kisses goodbye to a midday tryst (legs only) before nuzzling the neck of his semi-resistant secretary, Effie (Una Merkel), who then ushers in the movie’s femme fatale, Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels), with the familiar line, “You’ll see her anyway—she’s a knockout.” In the midst of this he gets a call from Iva Archer (Thelma Todd of Marx Bros.’s fame), the pain-in-the-neck wife of his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long), and yes he’s banging Iva, too.

All of which makes us aware of the great lie in the ’41 version: Sam Spade is a skunk. Sure, no midday tryst, and he and Effie banter like pals, but he is banging his partner’s wife. That shit ain’t cool. But Bogie gets away with it because, well, he’s cool. He doesn’t leer at anyone or nuzzle anyone’s neck; he’s a professional throughout. Plus he’s friends with everyone in town: this cop, that cab driver, the other hotel dick. It’s the ’41 Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) who acts the skunk—checking out Ruth Wonderly and all but going hubba hubba. “You’ve got brains—yes, you have,” Spade tells him sardonically, and next thing you know Archer is killed in cold blood and no one cares. He had $10k in insurance, Spade says, no children, and a wife that didn’t like him. Plus, we could add, a partner who couldn’t wait for the body to get cold before taking his name off the door.

The ’31 version of Archer is way more sympathetic. True, he’s got a face like a Mack truck, but when he overhears his wife confessing her love to his partner we feel his pain. Once Ruth leaves, we figure he’s going to wipe the floor with Sam. Instead:

Archer: Any phone calls for me, Sam?
Spade: Ohhhh, yes. Your wife called.
Archer: Yeah? What did she have to say?
Spade: Ohhhh, wanted to know when you were coming home. And she said she missed ya an awful lot!

Is that an unintended irony of the Production Code? When you sweep sex under the rug, you lose accountability. You lose morality. You kind of make it OK to covet thy neighbor’s wife. Way to go, Catholics.

Here, Archer’s body is found in a back alley near a chop suey joint—rather than down a construction site—but like with Bogart’s version Sam has no time to check on it. Unlike in the Bogart version, he stops and exchanges a few words of Cantonese with the owner of the chop suey joint, Lee Fu Gow. This is crucial info, it turns out. Spade now knows (even if we don’t) that Archer was killed by a woman. None of this was in the Huston version, by the way, because none of it was in the Dashiell Hammett novel. You can thank the ’31 screenwriters: Maude Fulton (“Other Men’s Women”), Brown Holmes (“I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”) and an uncredited Lucien Hubbard (“Smart Money”).

There’s a lot of such little differences between films. We get no opening title cards about the Knight Templars of Malta and Charles V of Spain, we don’t see Archer being killed, there’s no shaking Wilmer's tail or booting him from the lobby of the Hotel Belvedere. Wilmer doesn’t even show up until the big meeting with Casper Gutman, and that meeting is a one-fer. Gutman begins it, then Joel Cairo shows up in the next room, returning to the fold, as it were, with intel that the black bird is arriving on the ship La Paloma, docking that day. So we better understand why Gutman slips Spade a mickey—he doesn’t need him anymore. What we don’t get is why Joel Cairo bothers to return to the fold. If he has the intel, why share it with the Fat Man?

Overall, there’s less playfulness with Cairo. Or the playfulness is Effie’s rather than the movie’s. She tells Sam he has a gorgeous new customer, and as Sam gets ready to sink his teeth in, in walks Joel Cairo (Otto Matieson). There’s no “Gardenia,” no lilt to the soundtrack, no supposition that he’s gay; and after Sam knocks him out there’s barely anything in his pockets. Just the wallet. Lorre has the wallet, three passports, foreign coin, a ticket to the Geary Theater and a scented handkerchief. (Cue lilt again.) He has a storyline in his pockets. He has a life. Plus he’s played by Peter Lorre. (No offense to Matieson, a Dane who played Napoleon Bonaparte several times in the silents.) Gutman, meanwhile, is played quite sweatily by Dudley Digges, who is memorable as the evil “boys prison” warden in “The Mayor of Hell.” Wilmer? That’s Dwight Frye, the original Renfield in Universal horror flicks, as well as Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant (Fritz/Karl) in the first Frankenstein films. They’re no slouches, in other words. They're also not Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook, Jr. Not close.

One improvement? While Mary Astor is great at playing a school-marmish type who can suddenly get into a catfight with Lorre’s Joel Cairo, I have trouble seeing Bogart’s Spade losing his heart to her. She’s not the “knockout” she’s made out to be. Bebe Daniels is closer to that, and Cortez’s Spade doesn’t really fall for her that hard. It’s more lust than love. Daniels, who played the star who has to break her ankle so Ruby Keeler can rise in “42nd Street,” was 30 years old at the time, but had been acting in movies for more than 20 years. In 1910, in just her second movie, she played Dorothy Gale in a short version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” One wonders if she was destined to play roles that, in later, better productions, would be made more famous by someone else.

Repping SF
And the hits keep coming—if slightly off-key:

• “We didn’t believe you, we believed your $200.”
• “You’re pretty good. As a matter of fact, you’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and the throb you get in your voice when you say, ‘Oh, be generous, Mr. Spade.’”
• “A statuette. The black figure of a ... bird.”
• “Permit me to remind you, Mr. Spade, you may have the falcon, but we most certainly have you.”
• “Why, I feel toward Wilmer exactly as if he were my own son.”
• “You palmed it, Gutman. ... I said you palmed it.” 

Each line is great, but you miss Greenstreet’s harrumph, Lorre’s whine, Bogart’s cool.

The ’31 version is directed by Roy Del Ruth, who directed some good early Cagneys (“Blonde Crazy,” “Taxi!”) and crappy later ones (“West Point Story,” “Starlift”), and it’s still early in the sound era so the camera doesn’t do much. Everything feels two dimensional. It’s straight-on shots, often with just one person in the camera frame. There’s no sense of humor to the movie, and no sense of tragedy. When the Falcon is finally uncovered, there’s nothing monumental about it. You don’t lean in the way you do in the Huston version. And that great ending, where the elevator gate clangs shut on Mary Astor like the bars of a jail cell, and then descends as if into hell while the soundtrack pounds, well, there’s nothing close to that here. Huston ended it like the best of Hitchcock—ripping the Band-Aid off—while this one just keeps going. Spade, now the chief investigator for the DA’s office, visits a disheveled Ruth/Brigette in her cell, and she tries to coax some of her moxie back. No go. Afterwards, he privately tells the female guard to give her everything she wants. When the guard asks where to send the bill, his mood becomes oddly buoyant: “The district attorney’s office!” he practically shouts. Not exactly “The stuff dreams are made of.”

Oh, another difference? How they open the film. How do you let viewers know we're in San Francisco? Huston opens with a nice shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course. They don't do that here or the simple reason the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t exist in 1931. They began building it in ’33 and it opened to traffic in ’37. So what repped San Francisco in 1931? The Ferry Building.

SLIDESHOW

Voting rights attorney Marc Elias recently posted an excerpt from a 2022 New Yorker profile of him on social media. Worth reading the excerpt:

One evening, when I was talking to Elias, trying to glean what he does when he isn't working—nothing, apparently, except play with his four dogs (Frost told me that Elias “probably needs more hobbies”)—he told me a story. It was about a man whom Elias met around the time of his bar mitzvah. “This guy, an American prisoner of war, who was Jewish, in Nazi Germany, was put in a work camp where he had to pick potatoes,” Elias said. “He and the other men would take little pieces of barbed wire from the fence, and stick holes in the potatoes” to make them more perishable. “Just imagine an undernourished prisoner of war, in a thin uniform, with no gloves, in the winter, taking barbed wire in his bare hands and poking holes so the potatoes would rot and the German Army would not have fresh potatoes.”

This is what Elias recalls when people say that his litigation won't make a difference, or that he's bringing too many cases during a time when the courts lean overwhelmingly conservative. “I'm still going to try,” Elias continued. “It may not work. But I'm going to poke holes in the potatoes for as long as I have to, until democracy is either safe or I no longer can serve any useful purpose.”

Worth reading the whole profile, entitled “The First Defense Against Trump's Assault on Democracy,” by Sue Halpern.

BTW, I can't imagine meeting or knowing Elias and your reaction to his work—to his face!—is “It won't make a difference,” rather than shame that you yourself are not doing more. 

Number nine... number nine... number nine...

WARNING: SPOILERS

This is the ninth and final film Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre appeared in together. Chronologically:

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Casablanca (1942)

Helluva one-two punch. Warner Bros. probably thought “Hey, why not put them in a movie with George Raft? He’s another Bogart, isn’t he?”

• Background to Danger (1943)

OK, so back to Bogie. 

• Passage to Marseille (1944) 

Wait, what if we made them the stars?

• The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)

Or remade “Casablanca,” kinda, with Paul Henreid reprising, and Hedy Lamarr in the Ingrid Bergman role?

• The Conspirators (1944)

And then the rest:

• Hollywood Canteen (1944)
• Three Strangers (1946)
• The Verdict (1946)

Nine movies in five years. If that seems like a lot, consider that Greenstreet appeared in only 24 films and all of them within one calendar decade: from “Maltese Falcon” in 1941 to “Malaya” in 1949. He died in 1954.

Puffy and wan
I wish “Verdict” were better but at least it’s not bad. Greenstreet is well-cast as an 1890s Scotland Yard superintendent, while Lorre is miscast as a devil-may-care artiste and libertine. That role has Claude Rains written all over it.

The movie exudes its Britishness so much that it feels a bit like a Gaumont production. Nope. Filmed on the Warner Bros. lot by montage director Don Siegel, given his first helming gig, with perpetual fog, close streets, top hats, overcoats and London cabs, along with Cockney 101: “I (fill in the blank), I did.”

It opens with an execution at Newgate Prison, congratulations from a constable to Supt. Grodman (Greenstreet), followed by Grodman’s lament that artists create symphonies and paintings while he, if he does his job well, merely creates death. Then he goes to Scotland Yard and discovers the man they’d just hanged was innocent. He’d claimed his alibi was in Wales, but they’d never found him. Because he’d gone to New South Wales—in Australia. For some reason, Grodman becomes the scapegoat for all this, he’s asked to resign, and the opportunistic John R. Buckley (George Coulouris), all but paddling his fingertips together, takes his place.

And with what great underlying contempt Greenstreet annunciates “Buckley” for the rest of the film.

Initially stunned at being let go, Grodman pivots to writing a memoir of his 30 years of policing, which might prove a manual for new Yard recruits, with illustrations by his artist friend Victor Emmric (Lorre). One evening, the two are drinking with Arthur Kendall (Morton Lowry), the nephew of the wrongfully executed man, when Clive Russell (Paul Cavanaugh) shows up. Russell is an MP working with the miners of Brockton—one assumes he leans left—and Kendall despises his politics. And vice versa. Outside, Russell threatens Kendall. Then showgirl Lottie Rawson (Joan Lorring) shows up and she threatens Kendall, too. And the next morning Kendall is found dead and the movie becomes a classic whodunit.

Turns out, three of the men—Emmric, Kendall and Russell—live across the street from Grodman in a rooming house run by the vaguely hysterical Mrs. Benson (Rosalin Ivan). She’s the one who bangs on Grodman’s window when Kendall can’t be roused, and Grodman is the one who busts the door open to find Kendall dead—knifed in the chest. But how? The door and windows were all locked. And there was no other exit. 

Part of the fun is Grodman watching Buckley fumble the investigation. He brings in a thief (Clyde Cook) to theorize how a man could be murdered in a locked room, but the thief discounts all of his own suppositions. For a time, Lottie is his prime suspect. Clive has an alibi—he was on the train to Brockton—but then they find out: No, he was with a married woman but refuses to name her, and anyway Buckley finds circumstantial evidence in his desk, and he’s charged and sentenced to hang. Grodman travels to France in pursuit of the married woman. Alas, she’s dead. And all the while we begin to suspect Emmric. Why is he hiding in Grodman’s study? Why is he lurking in the stairwell outside Lottie’s dressing room? And isn’t he Peter Lorre? Surely, he did it.

Or did Grodman concoct the whole thing to make Buckley look bad?

Grodman concocted the whole thing to make Buckley look bad. 

Kendall, you see, was drugged, not dead, when Grodman broke in his door. And when he sent the suggestive Mrs. Benson screaming for police, that’s when he killed him. He confesses all to Emmric in the end.

Again, it’s not bad, it’s just not quite right. Shouldn’t Grodman seem more insane to do what he does? In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther gets it exactly right: “Neither gentleman approaches his assignment with apparent satisfaction or zest. Mr. Greenstreet is puffier than usual, and Mr. Lorre more disinterested and wan.”

Little bit
What I found of historical interest? During the Clive Russell jury deliberations, you have a mini-“12 Angry Men,” as one juror holds out on conviction. He doesn’t buy that a man could be smart enough to knife a man in a locked room but dumb enough to leave evidence refuting his alibi in his desk. But he folds more quickly than Henry Fonda.

Per 1940s Warners, we also get a song, sung from Lottie, in a music hall. It’s called “Give Me a Little Bit” by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl, and damn if it doesn’t prefigure, in almost litigious ways, Lerner and Loewe’s “With a Little Bit of Luck” from “My Fair Lady.” Particularly the “little bit” part. Which is the catchy part. I see no evidence that it ever led to a lawsuit. Maybe there were plenty of “little bit” songs? Maybe it’s too little of a bit to count as plagiarism? If “My Fair Lady” were released today, though, with “The Verdict” within memory, social media would be all over it. Not to mention IP lawyers.

“I think one of the failures of the media is that they've tried to explain Trump in the way you would explain a normal, healthy, or somewhat eccentric human being. But he is completely off his rocker. ... The problem we're going to have with Donald Trump—and I think the floodgates are going to open—is that people have tried to normalize him for too long. He is definitively, manifestly, unwell. He's a sick person.”

-- George Conway on CNN

Amen. The mainstream media, legit journalism—The New York Times, The Washington Post, WSJ and NPR—have had 10 years in which to figure out how to cover Donald Trump. They've failed. The Times in particular, particularly with their headlines or their focus, continue to soften his rough edges, normalize his abnormalities, or ignore his batshit craziness altogether. If Biden did 1/10 of what Trump did, it would be blaring headlines. With Trump, it's barely there. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Just as “Pale Rider” was “Shane” with an avenging angel, this is “High Noon” with an avenging angel. You have a town of cowards, newly released prisoners coming toward them, and a lone man with a gun. Right, it’s not exact. In order to be more exact, Marshal Will Kane, rather than imprisoning Frank Miller, would’ve been killed by Miller and his brothers, the town would’ve been complicit in the killing, and as “High Noon” began, Gary Cooper would’ve ridden into town to enact revenge: to humiliate every man and rape every woman, before killing his killers and then riding off into the sunset.

It's a little sick, to be honest.

In Clint Eastwood’s previous film, “Joe Kidd,” he outmans everyone. This is that on steroids. Every man is weak and sweaty but him. Every woman resists him until he kisses them. Nobody can shoot anything and he can shoot everything.

Oh, he also stands up for Indians and little people—as he stood up for Mexicans in “Kidd.” Who knew Clint Eastwood was our original virtue signaler?

Rape and a haircut
I think I first saw “High Plains Drifter” in the late 1970s, edited for television, but probably not edited enough. Even then it was a little unappetizing for me. Maybe I empathize too much with cowards or people who can’t shoot straight.

I’d forgotten the town was next to a picturesque lake. I’d obviously forgotten the name of the town, Lago, which is Spanish for lake. It hardly looks like a mining town—more like a future tourist destination, as it is: Mono Lake in the California Sierras. The shooting location was actually scouted by Eastwood himself. Then he had the town built there. The man in charge of construction/design was Henry Bumstead, who also built the town of Sinola for “Joe Kidd” and Big Whiskey for “Unforgiven.” He was an art director for 30 years, 1949-1979, then kept going with production design—though most of his work in the ’90s and ’00s was strictly for Eastwood. Which speaks well of Eastwood.

This is Clint's first western as director, and there’s an eerie, shimmering quality to it, augmented by an ethereal score, but also a blunt, sweaty palpability. The Stranger rides into town, past a graveyard that includes the names of Clint's past directors—Sergio Leone, Don Siegel—which is either homage or declaration of independence. Or both.

Everyone watches him and no one says a thing. Finally he goes into the saloon, orders a beer and a bottle, says he wants a peaceful hour in which to drink it. He doesn’t get it. Three yahoos interrupt him. Turns out they’re the men the town hired for protection against the three main baddies, Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis in his first Eastwood) and the Carlin brothers (Anthony James and Dan Vadis), who are about to be released from prison. But they’re yahoos, and for some reason—the same reason young subway juvies pick on Charles Bronson—they decide to pick on the tall, quiet stranger. He deflects and walks away—to the barber, a sweaty, shaking, man with a greasy combover (William O’Connell), for a shave and a bath. This is an iconic scene. Mid-shave, the yahoos appear. They taunt and threaten and attack. And the stranger shoots them all with the gun he’s holding beneath the barber sheet. (Hey, a little Han Solo from “Star Wars,” isn’t it?) 

After that, we get the first rape. Callie Travers (Marianna Hill) bumps into him on purpose, chastises him, insults his manhood; so he takes her to a barn. Later, in his room, as he closes his eyes, he sees a man being whipped to death and begging the townspeople for help. This, it turns out, is Marshal Jim Duncan, played by veteran stuntman Buddy Van Horn, and the stranger is either his brother, his ghost or his avenging angel. The town is more than cowardly; it’s corrupt. Its mine is on government land, meaning none of the riches are theirs. Marshal Duncan planned on going public with it, so (I think) the town hired Bridges and the Carlins to kill him, then turned them over to the authorities. That’s why they’re worried about their return.

And that’s why they look to hire the stranger. He’s uninterested … until they say he can have anything he wants. “Anything?” he asks. So he keeps upping the ante. These boots, these blankets and candy for the Indians, a round of drinks on him. He makes the town dwarf, Mordicai (Billy Curtis), the sheriff. When the mayor laughs, he makes him mayor, too. He keeps requisitioning material: your barn, your bedsheets, your wife. He does try to train them—putting snipers on this and that roof—but they’re hopeless shots. Mostly he humiliates them. It gets bad enough that several band together to try to kill him. Instead, lighting a stick of dynamite with his cigar (a la Leone), he blows up most of the hotel.

Oh, and he has them paint the town red (literally), then renames it (unsubtly) “Hell.” And just before the baddies arrive, he leaves, going the other way. 

And now it’s the baddies’ turn with the town.

That night, the stranger returns. Against a hellish backdrop of burning buildings, he whips one to death, hangs another with a whip, and takes down Bridges in a gunfight. As he leaves the next morning, exiting the way he entered, he passes Mordecai making a grave marker for the fallen Marshal. “I never did know your name,” Mordicai says, to which the stranger replies, “Yes, you do.” Then the camera pans to and holds on the tombstone.

So yeah, not the brother.

True spirit
According to Richard Schickel in “Clint Eastwood: A Biography,” the initial script IDed the Stranger as a sibling, and Clint started out playing it that way. But “I thought about playing it a little bit like he was sort of an avenging angel, too.” All of which adds to the ambiguity.

“High Plains Drifter” did well at the box office, while critics were mixed—though its Rotten Tomatoes score is 94%, with one of the rotten reviews ironically coming from Schickel. But it did gangbusters with teens of my generation. That, I remember.

Who didn’t like it? John Wayne. Again, from Schickel: 

Clint recalls Wayne saying to him more than once, “We ought to work together, kid.” So when he found a script in which he thought they might costar Clint sent it on to Wayne, noting in his cover letter that the piece, though promising, needed more work. Too much more, in Wayne’s estimation. But in rejecting the proposal, he launched into a gratuitous critique of High Plains Drifter. Its townspeople, he said, did not represent the true spirit of the American pioneer, the spirit that had made America great.

Schickel sees this as “an argument between modernism and traditionalism, but I think it’s something more specific. “High Plains” riffs off of “High Noon,” which Wayne hated, because it’s a metaphor for the blacklist. Which he was in favor of. I think Wayne was still fighting that fight.

The movie is well-directed, cleverly directed, and the story is tight. It's just the other stuff I have a problem with. But apparently we will never tire of a seething moral righteousness given license to act immoral. We love that story so much we carry it into the world. 

Yeah, I thought he was Jewish, too. It was the name, the fact that he directed “Fiddler on the Roof,” the kindly disposition. Go know.

He was nominated best director three times without winning, though one of his films won best picture: “In the Heat of the Night.” Jewison lost out to Mike Nichols, who'd directed “The Graduate.” Did that make it better for Jewison ... or worse? I assume the former but it's got to stick a little, particularly since that was a rare schism back then. The last time it had happened was 1956, I think: George Stevens got it for “Giant,” but “Around the World in 80 Days” won best picture. The Academy gave it to the old hand and the new tech. In 1967, they gave it to the new kid and the traditional fare.

His three nominations were in three different decades: 1967 for “Heat,” “Fiddler” in 1971, “Moonstruck” in 1987. What's his best? “Fiddler” is his highest-rated on IMDb (8.0), followed by “In the Heat” (7.9), then “The Hurricane” (7.6) and, oddly, “And Justice for All” (7.4). I say oddly because the day Jewison died, January 20, before we'd heard the news, we were watching “And Justice” and couldn't finish. We got halfway through. It just seemed too over-the-top to be interesting. 

I should see “Moonstruck” again. It's a helluva oeuvre. He started out doing '50s TV, and not even the television playhouses. More musicals and glitz. Then he graduated to romcoms with a '50s veneer (“Send Me No Flowers”) before breaking bigger, or more serious, with Steve McQueen in “The Cincinnati Kid.” His mid-70s outpout is all over the place: from “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “F.I.S.T.” Meanwhile, Hollywood kept going to him, a Canadian, for movies about race in America: “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier's Story,” “The Hurricane.” He was tapped for Malcolm X's story, too, but Spike Lee said nuh-uh. He kept getting entrusted with new stars: Stallone in '78, Nic Cage in '87, Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei in '94. Sometimes it worked.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The town name is a joke, right? From screenwriter Elmore Leonard? Sinola? Apparently there’s a Sinaloa, Mexico, but this is New Mexico, circa 1902, and I’m not seeing anything. Or maybe I just don’t know shit from Sinola.

This is the movie Clint Eastwood made after “Dirty Harry” and it’s not bad, despite its 6.4 IMDb rating. Maybe it’s so low because Eastwood himself didn’t much like it, or didn’t like making it with director John Sturges, who was often drunk on set. Sturges, for his part, didn’t much like trying to direct Eastwood, either.

Do we even know what the title character does? We know he used to be a tracker and bounty hunter, and we see how he’s dressed, in tweed suit and derby, a more citified look than we’re used to from western Eastwood, but I don’t think we ever find out his current occupation. Cattle rancher, maybe?

Eastwood v. Nosotros
Joe Kidd begins the movie sharing a jail cell with two Mexican yahoos after getting drunk and losing a fight with Sheriff Mitchell (Greg Walcott). He begins down. He then proceeds to outman everybody. Whatever a man is, Joe Kidd is more:

• He protects the townsfolk more than the sheriff
• He protects the Mexican people more than the Mexican revolutionary
• He’s more ruthless than the ruthless landowner

It’s the second one that made me shake my head. “Naw, don’t go there, Clint. Naw … Aw, fuck.”

He’s in the courtroom, sentenced to 10 days for the contretemps with Mitchell, when Mexican rebels, led by Luis Chama (John Saxon), burst in. They’re tired of losing their land to the Anglos; they’re tired of white men going back on their word. So Chama decides to kidnap the judge (John Carter) to make things right. Why the judge? Who knows? But in the confusion, Kidd rescues the judge, then, behind the bar of a saloon, sipping a beer and holding a shotgun, he waits for the Mexican rebels—in particular Naco (Pepe Callahan), with whom he’d had an escalating tete-a-tete in jail. Naco wouldn’t let the hungover Kidd have coffee, Kidd pours slop stew on him, Naco tries to clock him but Kidd knocks him out with the pan. He figures Naco wants revenge. He does. He doesn’t get it. Blam.

In the calm afterwards, the wealthiest man in New Mexico, Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall), shows up with an entourage of sureshots and jerks, and they attempt to hire Kidd to help them track and Kill Chama—whom Duvall keeps calling “Chay-ma.” Kidd begs off. He’s got nothing against Chama. But then he finds out Chama, as payback for Naco, invaded his ranch home, rustled his horses, and hurt his right-hand man. So off he goes with them.

Damn, if Naco had only let Joe have that cup of coffee.

Kidd regrets his decision quickly. The men reveal who they are, killing some Mexicans in cold blood, then, with leers, kidnapping Helen Sanchez (Stella Garcia), who, unbeknownst, is Chama’s girl. They take a small Mexican village hostage and shout out to Chama—hiding in the nearby mountains—that they’ll kill five hostages in the morning unless he surrenders himself. Then five at noon, then five at … .You get the idea. Harlan choose this moment, stupidly, to betray Kidd, who’s disarmed and put in with the hostages. But of course he finds some arms, kills some men, including the loudmouth Lamarr (Don Stroud), and brings the girl to Chama in the mountains.

Which is where she finds out Chama had no intention of sacrificing himself for the people below. Becoming martyrs in his name, he says, would be a good way to die.

The original script wasn’t like that. Per IMDb:

John Saxon said “Clint needed to be the guy who dealt with all the action, so in the end Chama was smeared with self-serving and cowardice, so it was clear who the main hero was.” Saxon attended a NOSOTROS meeting, a Latin American organization opposed to stereotypes, and publicly apologized for playing such a dubious character.

Then it just gets dumb. Chama doesn’t want to sacrifice himself but somehow Kidd convinces him to turn himself in? Kidd shouts down the deal to Harlan and everyone heads back to Sinola, but Harlan and his men stop a train to get there first. Oh right, one of the men, the sharpshooter Mingo (James Wainwright) stays behind to kill Chama and crew before they reach Sinola, but he’s killed instead. By Kidd. Who out sharpshoots the sharpshooter.

Jesus, Clint, leave something for somebody.

Judge, jury, executioner
In town, Kidd sends the rest of Chama’s men away (why?), then rides a train into the saloon and starts killing the bad guys. Then he tracks Harlan to the courthouse, and, from the judge’s chair, kills him in cold blood. After Chama turns himself in, Joe decks the sheriff. He tells him, “Next time, I’ll knock your damn head off.” Don’t really get his anger at the sheriff—who suddenly turns into a goober at this point. I guess it’s payback for the stuff we didn’t see at the beginning? It's outmanning everybody.

Beautiful scenery, though. And apparently the weaponry is very accurate for the time it’s set. Duvall is his usual impeccable, awful, oddball self. The gang is great, particularly Wainwright as Mingo, the sharpshooter, who’s both cool and casually cruel. I like Lynne Marta as Elma, Harlan’s concubine, who is kissed by Kidd in the early going and doesn’t mind at all. She’s cute. Died this year, sadly.

This was the phase of Eastwood’s career when he was popular with the crowd but called a fascist by the critics—before he became a critic and Academy darling whose movies did so-so box office. Before his movies became shitty and no one went to see them.

I get his appeal. It’s just problematic. In his next one, “High Plains Drifter,” it’ll be worse.

And I don't mean the late-life Trump craziness. Or the mid-life Scientology craziness.

Last month I watched “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” for the first time in forever, and I was like, “Oh right, Kirstie Alley as Lt.—or Mr.—Saavik.” I'd forgotten how sexy she was. To be honest, I'd also forgotten she'd died in 2022—age 71. Cancer. But while perusing all of this on her IMDb page, I, inevitably, came across this.

What's missing from this “Known For”? Just what she's known for.

That algorithm really disrespects TV, doesn't it? That algorithm really disrespects us, doesn't it? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Did anyone tell Christopher Nolan, as politely as possible, “Hey Chris, you might want to take a breath”? Probably not. Breathless is Nolan’s default. 

Last summer my twentysomething nephews asked me which of the Barbenheimer films I liked best, and for a moment I pondered the joys and issues of both films before side-stepping toward what felt like the truer response: “I’m happier that ‘Oppenheimer’ was made.” It’s a movie for adults about some of the most serious topics of the 20th century: the creation of the Atomic bomb and McCarthyism. And it was done hugely and beautifully and released in the summer. My god, the summer! What a joy that is. How much we should be kissing Nolan’s ring for giving us a big, serious film in July. 

And yes, you could say “Barbie” was a movie for adults about important topics. But it’s several times a fantasy whose interest in the end is about power and partying. “Oppenheimer” is about power and intellect. It luxuriates in smarts. It’s an ode to genius.

Chain reactions
“Oppenheimer” has three intercut storylines:

• The main one: the journey of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) from studying quantum physics in Europe to leading the Manhattan Project and beyond
• His interrogation in a 1954 closed-door congressional session, masterminded by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), that leads to his dismissal from government service
• Strauss’ interrogation before Congress in 1959, when his appointment as Sec. of Commerce is rejected

Live by the congressional hearing, die by the congressional hearing. That old saw.

Are there too many “gotcha” moments? Too many “reveals”? Oh, so Strauss isn’t a good guy? He’s the main villain? And David Hill, tossed up as a potential enemy, and whose clipboard Oppenheimer sends clattering across a train station floor, and, lest we forget, is played by Rami Malek, he stands up for him? And oh no, Oppie’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), is going to testify, but she drinks too much, and now she’s hemming and hawing and looking down at her lap and maybe itching to get the flask out of her purse as the prosecutor digs in. But wait! She totally turns things around! She makes him look bad and gets the congressmen on Oppenheimer’s side! Yay!

I also don’t get Alden Ehrenreich’s role. He’s supposed to advise Strauss during his congressional hearing but turns against him, or at least roots against him, when he finds out what a jerk he is. I guess he’s just there to signal what we’re supposed to feel. “Chris, what’s my motivation in this scene?” “You don’t have a motivation. You don’t even have a name.”

With all this carping, you’d think I didn’t like the movie. I did. It opened up (as much as anything could) the world of early 20th century quantum physics for me. And it was fun seeing characters excited to see Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). Hell, it was fun seeing someone portraying Niels Bohr. Or Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) or Edward Teller (Benny Safdie). And those are just the names I know. Imagine you’re a scientist watching this. It would be like me and “42”: Hey, Clyde Sukeforth! Cool!

So I liked all that and the early amazement at Oppenheimer’s intellect: learning Dutch in six weeks, knowing Sanskrit, reading Proust and Eliot and quoting Donne. And I just loved David Krumholz’s Isidor Rabi, the fellow Jewish-American physicist who humorously chastises Oppenheimer for learning Dutch while not knowing basic Yiddish, then feeds him like a Jewish mother. That’s a supporting role I could’ve seen expanded. I smiled every moment he was on screen. (Rabi’s relatives, apparently, felt otherwise.)

And when Matt Damon’s Col. Groves shows up? So fun. The “We need to get this done by any means necessary so get out of my fucking way” attitude, but with a glimmer in the eye.

Does the movie lose itself about 90 minutes in or did I just get tired? More, does the tripart structure (the trinity structure?) take away from the magnitude of the discovery—the moment when we realized that all that intellect and progress was just leading us toward global destruction? These are its last lines, a flashback to Princeton 1946:

Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world …
Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

Then he stares into the void and feels the horror of the accomplishment. Some have criticized Murphy’s performance as too wide-eyed and one-note, and, given everything Oppie did, he does feel passive. But Cillian is amazing for staring into the void and feeling the horror. (Cast him as Col. Kurtz.) But should that moment have been at Princeton 1946? Is there a reason it’s Princeton 1946?

The constant reference to Oppenheimer’s post-Hiroshima fame is a little odd, too. Before he visits Pres. Truman (Gary Oldman), he sees a TIME magazine cover story on him: Father of the Atomic Bomb. Then Truman greets him with “How does it feel to be the most famous man in the world?” Because of TIME? Oppenheimer’s TIME cover story was actually from Nov. 1948, not Oct. 1945, and its subhed is a little less grandiose: Physicist Oppenheimer: “What we don’t understand, we explain to each other.” He certainly got more famous. According to newspapers.com, “Robert Oppenheimer” was mentioned in seven articles in 1944, and 1,490 in 1945, but it doesn’t top 2,000 much. That’s not exactly “the most famous man in the world.” It’s science fame. He was famous for a scientist. His high-water mark, again per newspapers.com, was set during those 1954 security hearings, when he’s mentioned 22,042 times. You know who was written about more that year? Lewis Strauss: 30,504 times. He’s written about even more in 1959. 

The Strauss affair was a huge story at the time, written about constantly, not to mention historically important: the only cabinet nominee between 1925 (Charles B. Warren) and 1989 (John Tower) to be rejected. What I find fascinating? I’d never heard of it. I was born in 1963, sure, but I read a lot of history, and a lot about that period, and … nothing. Even in Robert Caro’s thousand-page tome, “Lyndon Baines Johnson: Master of the Senate,” it’s mentioned only once, and off-handedly, not to mention parenthetically. In the lead-up to 1960, LBJ had to placate both right-wingers “and the great Senate bulls (he paid off a lot of debts to Clinton Anderson by cooperating in Anderson’s efforts to defeat President Eisenhower’s nomination of Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce…”).

Should that have been the lesson of the film? If your power stays in the shadows, your legacy might, too? Or is that too “Amadeus”? Oppenheimer’s name continues to resonate while Strauss’ winds up in the dustbin. “Do you know nothing of my music?” It might’ve helped if Strauss had made music.

Teller’s hand
“Why aren’t you fighting?”

Kitty says this (repeatedly?) during the ’54 hearings, but it seems an odd question since Oppenheimer is never portrayed as a fighter. He’s a scientist who somehow falls into the Manhattan Project gig. (The film assumes he’ll get it—because he does—but I’m curious who else Gen. Groves considered, and why, in the end, he went with Oppenheimer.) Oppie’s a man with an open mind who listens to everyone around him and tries to keep the group together. Teller wants to work on his H-bomb theories? Sure. Have at. He’s a diplomat.

But since the film raises the question, what’s the answer? The obvious one is he feels the need to pay for his sins: A-bomb, Hiroshima, bringing us into the nuclear age, destroying the entire world.

I’m curious why he didn’t make more of the thin window between the end of the war in Europe (early May 1945, when our need for the A-bomb kind of ended) and the Trinity test (July). Was there too much momentum? I get the political calculus: You save countless U.S. GI lives and send a warning to the Soviets. But what was Oppenheimer’s calculus? To just see it through? Was it a bit of Stockholm Syndrome? He’d drunk the military Kool-Aid? Or did he, the perennial theorist, just want to see if it would work? Because if he’d wanted, he could’ve put the kibosh on it pretty quickly. Just resurrect the whole  “Yeah, we might set the entire atmosphere on fire” scenario. “What are the odds of that?” “Oh, less than 10%.” 

The most famous line Nolan has ever written, or filmed, is probably from “The Dark Knight”: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Back in 2008, that felt like bullshit to me—in the film it comes out of nowhere—but, man, the times have proven it true. “Oppenheimer” adds an addendum: resurrection. For a time, J. Robert is the hero. But he lives long enough, and through reactionary times, to become the villain. Then the times shift again, his enemies are smited, and in the 1960s his wife stares daggers at Edward Teller’s proffered hand.

I suppose I should finish the book—it might answer some of my questions. I got 200 pages in last summer but got distracted. Either way, I’ll always have a fondness for the film. It’s the last movie I ever saw with my brother.

The other day, walking around a city that is increasingly full of homeless drug addicts, Bob Dylan's “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” came on iPhone shuffle, and these words hit me in a new way:

When you think that you've lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more

Chris and Jellybean last fall, Clem last month. And, as the man said, it doesn't have to end there. There's more to lose. “Not single spies but in battalions,” as another man said.

And here's yet another man, Craig Wright, who, the other day on his SubStack, gave us an ode to living with uncertainty and a warning about its opposite.

“...every time I've seen a properly sad and searching human being stop searching quite so desperately because he believes he's finally found enough of what he needs that he can rest his soul for a bit, I've seen those human beings lose some of their human being: most pertinently, their ability to listen. The machinery in them that used to be for listening gets repurposed...

”But I have some news for you, those of you who are (thankfully) still sad and searching, who don't quite believe what you believe and have no place to rest: you're supposed to be sad and searching and there's no time to rest. You're doing great! If you're doing your job as a real human being, the job should get harder. You should know less every day and move with ever more caution and quiet through a landscape about which you should be increasingly suspicious. That Grief that children (and inner children) want to flee should look bigger and more unjust as we grow in awareness, and nothing that claims to quell it should be trusted because that Grief is actually where the Hope and Love we need most to keep searching forever live.“

That is a balm to my soul—assuming I'm still a sad and searching human being, as opposed to just sad. Either way, it spoke to me. In a way, it was better than Dylan's or Shakespeare's lines. Theirs are basically ”Tough luck, kid.“ Craig's is ”Welcome to the party, pal," but he means it. He wants us at that party. Because the other party is just assholes.

I recommend the whole article. Pass along if you know someone who could use it.

Task No. 1, Billy: Don't let something like this happen.

Hey, it's the Oscars today! Remember those? Also Daylight Savings! I can't forget those. Not because I'm agin it but because of the neverending bitching. Maybe more on this later. I just know we have a big country, and the north ain't the south, and people in the north don't want the sun to come up at 4:30 AM nor have it pitch dark at 8 AM. So I don't mind. It's a ritual. Learn to set your clocks. Figure something else to bitch about.

Related (to the Oscars thing): I recently finished Michael Schulman's “Oscar Wars,” a book that delves into the history of the Academy Awards via eight or nine focal or pressure points, including:

1. the creation of the Academy as an anti-unionization mechanism, when the awards were an afterthought
2. the Robert Rich debacle, when the 1957 best story award was presented a guy who didn't exist (it was a pseudonym for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo)
3. Gregory Peck's 1969-70 attempt to add youth to the Academy membership while letting some of the older, less active members fall by the wayside (repeat every 10 years)
4. the Allan Carr debacle
5. how the Academy was unable to save “Private Ryan” from Harvey Weinstein
6. #OscarSoWhite
7. the envelope-gate debacle

Schulman goes deep into each topic. I mean, I've read a lot about the blacklist but he was providing context I'd never heard before. So too with recent history like EnvelopeGate. I knew there were two versions of each envelope, for stage right or stage left, but not some of this:

The Friday before the show, an Academy staffer showed Todd and De Luca a prototype of the winner cards, which for the first time weren't printed by the Academy's regular stationery company. Todd, who wears glasses, asked that they be reprinted in a bigger font, so that the presenters wouldn't have to squint. “But,” she recalls, “Mike and I never saw the outside of the envelope,” on which the categories were printed in a gold-on-maroon color scheme that was difficult to read. And instead of a faux-wax seal with an easy-to-pull ribbon, as in past years, the new envelope was sealed with a cumbersome piece of tape.

Gold on maroon! JFC, that's like a John Mulaney joke: “I hope that you can read pink on purple, as that is the layout that we have chosen.”

In the aftermath, everyone was trying to figure out what happened, and Warren Beatty was refusing to give up the card he'd been holding and that he knew was wrong because it was for best picture but read: EMMA STONE, LA LA LAND. Apparently Faye Dunaway just saw the LA LA LAND and blurted it out. In the rehearsal, Dunaway had initially said she wanted to read the nominees, then said no, she wanted to read the winner, for which Beatty teased her. And maybe she thought he was now letting her do just that.

(Here's my day-after take, defending Beatty from all the sharks in the water.) 

Backstage, everyone was trying to figure out the why of it, and it was director Glenn Weiss who zoomed in with his iPad and realized they'd been given the wrong envelope. And eventually a culprit was found: PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant Brian Cullinan:

Cullinan was concerned that the presenters would futz over the tape on the back of the envelope and was showing each person that it was easier to slip a finger under the flap and pop it open. After Emma Stone won, Cullinan had two envelopes left in his hand: Best Picture on top and the Best Actress duplicate on the bottom. He flipped them over to show Beatty the trick with the tape, which put the Best Actress duplicate on top. He then mistakenly handed the duplicate Best Actress envelope to Beatty and tossed the Best Picture envelope in his briefcase and forgot all about it. In the greenroom, Dawn Hudson turned to Cullinan. “Your one job was to give Warren the right envelope.” “No,” the accountant said, bewildered. Minutes before the screwup, he had tweeted a backstage photo of Emma Stone. “The lesson here is we're too celebrity-obsessed as a culture,” De Luca says. “It's even poisoned accountants.” Cullinan deleted the Emma Stone photo and was gone before anyone noticed. “He basically disappeared,” Kimmel says.

And now you know ... the rest of the story. I like that level of detail.

This year, for the first time since 2019, I've seen all the nominees, and even wrote about most of them, and yet I have no real dogs in the hunt. My sister's family asked me to rank my pics and I went with “The Holdovers” but I also like “Poor Things” and “American Fiction,” “Zone of Interest” and frontrunner “Oppenheimer.” Each has plusses and negatives. I'd vote for Paul Giamatii but I loved Cillian Murphy, too. (Actor is stacked.) I'd vote for Sandra Huller or Emma Stone but I'm resigned to Lily Gladstone. I'd vote for the Hulk but I'm fine with Iron Man.

Let the debacles begin. (Kidding, Billy.)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is “Poor Things” the funniest movie of the year?

It starts out trading elements of “Frankenstein,” “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and some 19th-century gee-whiz wonder emporium—a pre-Great War belief in science and progress, before all the pop-culture scientists became mad and all the real-life progress became radioactive. Then Mark Ruffalo shows up and it’s the funniest movie of the year. The ending? A little too “Freaks” mixed with feminist self-satisfaction for me. But still OK. 

The movie is basically a picaresque, and, as such, deserves a superlong subtitle out of the 18th century: “Being of the erotic and philosophical adventures of Bella Baxter, a rogue and foundling.” It’s beautiful to look at and completely unique.

But does it mean anything?

Poor Max
Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a 19th century Scottish doctor/scientist who operates/educates out of a London medical theater with arena seating, where he suffers no fools and draws at least one acolyte, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), whom he subsequently hires as an assistant. If Godwin suggests Dr. Frankenstein, his face, a patchwork of deep scars, suggests Frankenstein’s monster. Before he was experimenter, you see, he was experimented upon. By his own father. Who, among other things, made him a eunuch.

Maybe that’s why, despite everything, the movie never loses sympathy for him.

The enclosed grounds of Baxter’s estate are populated, Max finds, by creatures out of one of those flipbooks where you match the heads, torsos and legs of different animals. Here it’s bulldog/goose, duck/goat, pig/chicken. Then there’s Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a full-grown woman who cannot walk or talk properly, and who pees on the floor without embarrassment or awareness. “My, what a very pretty retard,” Max says. It’s his job to educate her, and she seems to learn freakishly fast. She goes from wondering about the places of the world to climbing to the rooftop to see what lies beyond the gate of the mansion.

She’s a prisoner, Max finds out, and an experiment. That opening scene of a woman jumping off a bridge in London? That was Victoria Blessington (also Emma Stone), who was pregnant, and Baxter animates her body with the brain of her infant, which is why she acts as she does. He keeps her on the grounds, he says, because he needs a controlled environment in which to gauge her progress. But as she chafes against these strictures, he seems to pivot. He allows—even suggests—a marriage proposal from the besotted Max. Then he brings in a lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), to make sure everyone agrees to the terms. Everyone does. Except Duncan.

He's a rake, with, as the housekeeper Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine) says, the scent of a 100 women on him. “She undersells it,” he responds vaingloriously when he hears. Enamored, ready for another conquering, Duncan whisks Bella away to Lisbon. She’d already begun her own sexual adventures, onanistically, and these continue with Duncan. Part of the humor in the middle section is the straightforward way she talks about it all. She calls fucking “furious jumping,” wonders why people don’t do it all the time, and when Duncan begs off after three rounds, laments the physiological weakness in men. On a cruise, she introduces an older woman, Martha von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla, Maria Fucking Braun herself), as someone who has not fucked in years, and then adds, “I hope you use your hand between your legs to keep yourself happy?”

But what’s fantastically funny is how she undoes Duncan by outdoing him. He considers himself a free spirit and libertine who scoffs at the conventions of polite society, but she is all of this many times over. When she doesn’t like food, she spits it out. “Why keep it in my mouth if it is revolting?” she says. She is impolite in polite company and insistent on new experiences. The more he tries to grasp her, the further away she gets away. “I have become the very thing I hate,” he admits at one point. The humor is in his frustration, his slow-burn jealousy, and his creeping awareness of what a conventional man he really is. One night she finds him at a bar, where he admonishes her for spending time with another man. 

Duncan: Did he lie with you?
Bella: No. We were against a wall.
Duncan: Did you furious jump him?
Bella: No. He just fast-licked my clitoris. I had the heat that needed release, so at my request it was.
[Duncan bashes head against bar]

Duncan is vain, Ruffalo is glorious.

Bella’s education moves beyond the sexual to include food, drink, music and philosophy. She meets a cynic, Harry Astley (Jerro Carmichael), who shows her the deprivations of the world in Alexandria. Distraught, she bankrupts Duncan with money that, yes, doesn’t wind up with the poor anyway, and the two are set ashore in Marseilles and wind up penniless in Paris. There, Bella resorts to prostitution. That sounds like comeuppance, but for her it’s almost a win-win: a place to experiment with other lovers while making the money to survive. The sex is both graphic—for a mainstream film—and fantasy, in that pregnancy or disease never really enters into it. Maybe she can’t get pregnant? I think that might be implied at one point. She returns to London when she finds out her creator, Godwin, whom she calls God, is dying (of cancer) as the 20th century is set to begin.

An important character is introduced at the 11th hour, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), the former husband of Victoria. With Duncan in tow, or alternately hiding behind him, he interrupts Bella’s marriage to Max with the announcement that Bella is in fact already married to him. Upon hearing the tale, Bella agrees to go with him for the same reason she does most things in life: to find out answers. She’s truly Godwin’s daughter in that respect. 

And she finds the man is surely insane. He pulls rank stunts on servants, levels guns at them at all hours, and expects Bella to get a clitorectomy. No wonder Victoria threw herself off that bridge. But Bella, as she is wont to do, turns tables. She tosses the drugged drink in his face, the gun goes off on his foot, he passes out. And this is when she truly becomes Godwin’s daughter. His foot is repaired but so is he: He’s given a goat’s brain. What happens to his own? Is it put into the goat? Did they try to film that and it was too creepy? Either way, I pity the poor goat. It doesn’t want a human body. Imagine the first time it tries to jump.

But this is our feel-good feminist end: Bella presiding over the grounds and its mostly female denizens: Toinitte (Suzy Bemba), her Black, Parisian prostitute friend/lover; a second Bella experiment, Felicity (Margaret Qualley); and Mrs. Prim, Oh, and Max, of course. Poor emasculated Max, poor thing.

Poor Wednesday
So it’s a ride. It’s beautifully photographed—often with a fish-eye lens—and intelligently made. The early shots are in black-and-white, and expand to color once the adventures begin. It’s mostly fantasy, as stated, with race-blind casting. Is that odd given Alexandria? Race issues go away but class issues don’t. Maybe they’re our bigger problem.

I love the principles. On a ship, there’s a dance between Bella and Duncan that is their relationship in joyous microcosm. It’s more battle than dance. Still a child, really, she hears music, begins to dance in unconventional ways, and he, with a desperate smile, tries to segue it into smooth, conventional patterns. And she keeps fighting him. I flashed on the Wednesday Addams dance that made the rounds last year, but Bella makes Wednesday seem like Duncan. Even so, expect a mash-up between the two. I’m shocked it hasn’t been done yet.

Despite the feminist ending, there are inevitable feminist complaints about the film: graphic sex, women with child’s brain, a trio of male creators: director Yorgo Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara and novelist Alasdair Gray (RIP). It’s still vaginal-forward, unique, beautiful and hilarious. It’s my wife’s favorite film.

But does it mean anything? I keep coming back to that. What’s it all about, Alfie? I thought in the writing, I would write my way to some deeper meaning, but I’m not feeling it. It’s a lark. Even so, more larks like this, please.

Earlier this year I received a text from a woman running for office in a Democratic primary somewhere. Apologies I’m not more specific, but I quickly deleted it, or STOPped it, or STOP TO QUITted it, so I never got all the details. All I knew was she was running “against the odds,” she said, but she’s running anyway, damnit.

And that’s what made me lose interest.

I flashed back to February 2020 when I met my friends A. and B. for drinks in Seattle. All three of us are white, liberal, 50+, politically engaged and/or (in my case) vaguely aware; we’re all journalists or journalist-adjacent; and the conversation inevitably turned to the Washington state primary for the upcoming presidential election—one of the most consequential elections in our history. 

A. and B. are more politically engaged than I. Put it this way: They actually watched the primary debates to figure out which candidate aligned best with their vision of where the country should be heading. At the restaurant, they wrangled this out: Well, this candidate says this, and the other says the other, and that’s why I support the other. Washington is a mail-in ballot state, with ballots due in early March, and neither had filled out theirs yet, but I think one leaned Elizabeth Warren and the other Bernie.

And at some point they asked me who I planned to vote for.

“I already voted,” I said.

“Who?”

“Biden.”

Long pause.

“Well, you just threw your vote away.”

“Yeah, he’s already out of it.”

This was before the South Carolina primary on February 29, when Black voters saved Biden’s campaign, and (you could argue), the United States of America—let alone March 3, Super Tuesday, when ditto. I think it was before Nevada, too. Which means we’d had two contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, and in both Bernie had come out on top, with Pete Buttigieg a close second, and either Warren or Amy Klobuchar a close third. Biden had finished a distant fourth in Iowa and a distant fifth in New Hampshire. He was done. I’d thrown away my vote.

I should add: I didn’t necessarily think they were wrong. But among the Democrats running, I knew Biden was the best bet to beat Trump. Everything else was just blather. 

Who … can … win?

That’s the question Democrats don’t ask themselves nearly enough. Here’s another question Dems should be asking themselves: Who’s the Kirk?

OK, I’m going to go even further back now, to around 2000, when I used to go to the post office fairly regularly. There, I often had conversations with one of the employees, a super smart, super friendly guy, about movies and politics. Maybe this was around the 2000 election, I don’t remember. All I remember is what he said: If you want to figure out who’s going to win a presidential election, ask yourself this: Who’s the Kirk and who’s the Spock? Because Kirk wins.

My immediate reaction was “Naw, it’s not that simple.” But then, I began to backtrack.

• 2000: Al Gore vs. George W. Bush. Gore is the epitome of Spock. Bush wins.
• 1996: Bill Clinton vs. Bob Dole. Clinton is clearly Kirk-esque. Clinton wins.
• 1992: Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush. Clinton: Kirk. Clinton wins.
• 1988: Michael Dukakis vs. George H.W.  Bush. Did I say Al Gore was the epitome of Spock? Apologies. I forgot about Dukakis. Bush wins.

“Damn,” I said.

And since then? John Kerry was another classic Spock in 2004—and lost. Obama muddled the metaphor a bit, since he tends Spock with some Kirk swagger. I mean, Mitt Romney was definitely no Kirk but you could argue John McCain was, so 2008 was the only time the post-office guy’s handicap didn’t work. Otherwise he’s been dead on. 

Admittedly, some years, it’s tough to parse the Kirk-Spock divide—2020, for example, seemed more good Capt. Kirk vs. Evil “Enemy Within” Kirk—so for the past 10 years I tend to take a step back, squint, and ask: OK, if these two candidates were running for high school student body president, who would win? Most Americans take it as seriously as that. And that’s why I was so worried in 2016. In one corner, you had the girl with a perfect attendance record, who showed up every day to every class, got straight A’s, and maybe even reminded the teacher when they forgot to assign homework. And in the other? The rich guy who threw keggers at his house.

I’m still worried about 2024, but at least Biden seems the right candidate for the Dems. He’s Kirk with a touch of McCoy. The other guy, “Enemy Within” Kirk, is crazier than ever. He’s ready to take the Enterprise down with him as he rants away into the viewscreen.

And my friends A. and B.? The latter is in California now, and I’m not sure which way he’s leaning. But A. is still in Seattle and hasn’t changed much. On Instagram he recently posted a selfie of himself mailing in his ballot. “Uncommitted,” he wrote. Another winning choice. Boldly going where Democrats have always gone before.

Via Preet Bharara's Cafe Insider site, former U.S. attorney and current law professor Barb McQuade talks up the continuing difficulties of determining, for legal purposes, what exactly social media companies are. 

Are they town squares, where anyone can speak? Are they publishers, which can regulate content? Can states such as Texas and Florida, in the NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, pass laws saying they can't regulate content because they are in fact town squares, and doing so would impinge upon free speech?

My decidedly non-J.D. thoughts: Social media platforms are both town square and publisher, and of course they can regulate user-created content, and Texas and Florida saying they can't is the violation of free speech, not the other way around. I'd go further and amend the immunity conferred to platforms by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which made them not liable for user-created content the way publishers are liable. I'd actually like to see the world where that immunity was never conferred in the first place. I get the feeling it would be a good sight better, or at least less disingenuous, than this one.

McQuade makes her own case for how to better regulate the Facebooks of the world, including:

• Requiring social media companies to disclose their algorithms
• Requiring disclosure of paid content: not only who is paying for ads, but the communities they are targeting

God, yes. This experiment is not working, kids. We were never ready for it.

Clinching the pennant, age 19.

When I was a kid I'm pretty sure I kept getting Don Gullett and Don Sutton mixed up. I was in an American League city, they were both National League pitchers, and their names weren't dissimilar: Don and then two syllables: Uht-en or Uhl-et.

Talk about opposites, though. Sutton is the quintessential longevity Hall of Famer. He led the league in Game Starts once, ERA once, and never finished higher than third in Cy Young voting; but he kept plugging away: 15-13, 14-12, 11-11. He debuted in 1966, bade farewell in 1988, and in every full season until the last he appeared in 30+ games.

Gullett was more nova. He debuted in 1970 at age 19 and was done by age 27. Twenty-seven! What a rip. But in his nine seasons he pitched six times in the postseason, and in five of those the World Series: Reds in 1970, '72, '75 and '76, and, after signing a $2 million dollar deal, with the Yankees in '77. He last pitched July 9, 1978 vs. Milwaukee. He didn't get out of the first inning. It went: flyout, single, single, walk, walk (run), flyout, double (two runs), walk, walk (run), and that was it. He last faced Buck Martinez and he was replaced by Bob Kammeyer. And that was it. There would be fingers-crossed press reports about him in the NY papers for a few years but the fingers never uncrossed.

He retired with a 109-50 mark and a 3.11 ERA. In his Gullett obit, Joe Posnanski trots out this list of the best winning percentages for pitchers who won 100 games by age 27:

1. Roger Clemens, 116-51, .695
2. Don Gullett, 109-60, .686
3. Dwight Gooden, 142-66, .683
4. Jim Palmer, 122-57, .682
5. Pedro Martinez, 107-50, .682

Poz also mentions this:

Don Gullett was a private person. He was a farmer after he finished playing, he and Cathy had three children. He was the only major Big Red Machine player who declined to talk with me for my book The Machine. He was kind about it. He just said that he didn't really want to look back and didn't think he could add anything. “Other people remember better than I do,” he said.

When he debuted at age 19, players were agog. Willie Stargell said “He could throw a ball through a carwash without it ever getting wet.” Pete Rose said the same thing. He was on the mound, age 19, when the Reds clinched the pennant against the Pirates in 1970. He was the pitcher who set up the incredible Game 6 of the 1975 World Series by shutting down the Red Sox in Game 5—going 8 2/3 while giving up 2 in a 6-2 victory. He was the Game 7 starter, too, before Merv Rettenmund pinch-hit for him in the top of the 5th. He left, down 3-0, but—and you may have heard this—the Reds came back to win it, 4-3, for their first championship since 1940. They won again the following year. He didn't pitch well for the Yankees in the '77 postseason but he got another ring with them. Then the injuries piled up and he couldn't come back from them.

Apparently, growing up in Kentucky, he was some kind of all-around athlete. Posnanski mentions a high school football game where Gullett rushed for 410(!) yards and scored 11(!) touchdowns. In high school basketball, he averaged 22 points a game. “As a pitcher in his senior year,” Poz writes, “he struck out 120 batters in 52 innings and threw a perfect game where he struck out 20 of the 21 batters he faced.”

He died earlier this month, age 73. No cause mentioned. Private to the end.

How much does the ending dictate the story? 

For a week I thought the story was this: a good-hearted couple doing what they could to help a newly adopted two-month-old kitten overcome dysentery and thrive and live a long life. They doubled their laundry load, put warm compresses to his backside, fed him medicines, bought him diet supplements, cooked him chicken and rice, and spent more than $3,000 on five vet visits over a eight-day period to make it right.

Now the story feels like: two dullards who missed the clues and let a small animal suffer and die.

The image I can't escape is one from his final full day. He had been eating well, and filling out a bit. But he'd already begun to leave wet spots and he was still walking slowly and creakily. Because his backside hurt, right? That's what I thought—incorrectly probably. This day, this Friday, he wanted to walk in the hallway outside our second-floor condo, as our cat Jellybean liked to do. And as with her in her final days, I accompanied him on the slow walk. But now I accompanied with a squirt gun. I'd bought the squirt guns in anticipation of teaching him bathroom protocol. He understood the litter box, but not always, but we assumed it was dysentery dicatating the mishaps, including the sudden peeing, and once he got over it, things would self-correct. But just in case, squirt guns. In the hallway, he huddled in a corner, his preferred place for peeing and pooping outside the box, and so I leveled it. In my head I was a responsible pet owner ready to teach bathroom etiquette to a kitten. In reality I was an idiot leveling a squirt gun at a kitten slowly dying from malfunctioning kidneys.

I didn't pull the trigger. But I can't get over that image.

During this messy week, many people suggested we give Clem back to Seattle Animal Shelter, where we adopted him on Feb. 13. He was too much trouble. A question in the adoption papers asked something like “What might make you return your pets?” and we wrote “Can't imagine.” Now we could. But that wasn't us. That's what I said to Patricia one of those nights: “We're not those people.” Now I'm wondering if it would've been better for Clem if we had been those people. Maybe they would've picked up on the clues in time.

I still wonder about all those vet visits. The regimen we went with was: five days of antibiotics, and if that didn't right things, an abdominal ultrasound. He didn't last the five days; he had one dose to go. The final vet said his kidneys seemed off, wrong, but no ultrasound or radiograph was done, per the invoice, so maybe she was guessing. At this place, at the outset, they let you know how much it might cost—the high end of it, Clem's was $5,936—and you pay that before they do anything. And if they don't need to do everything, you get what they call “a refund.” We got a refund. The only new item on the final invoice was euthenasia: $203.11.

Taken together, the vet diagnoses feel like a bad joke. Does he need more extensive care? Not yet ... not yet ... not yet ... too late. 

Some of the real clues, including the sudden wet spots, didn't materialize until after the penultimate vet visit, but would we have known enough to tell them properly? You need a way to relay the facts to someone who has the knowledge to interpet the facts. We didn't have that. Clem didn't have that. Sadly, he just had us.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a better 1950s B-movie beginning than busty blonde Bonnie Parker (Dorothy Provine) disrobing down to her slip to a jangling rock ‘n’ roll beat? The opening credits are on the left, and we see her through a window on the right—with a swinging light above her, lockers behind her, and a bored expression on her face. Where is she? Turns out getting ready to work at a diner in Oklahoma City in 1932. Basically we’re peeping toms. B movies sell sex and boom here it already is.

I remember being surprised—about 25 years ago—when I found out there’d been another “Bonnie & Clyde” released about 10 years before the famous Beatty-Dunaway version, but the real surprise, now that I think about it, is that there was just the one. The Bonnie and Clyde story is made for exploitation. It’s got built-in sex, violence and rebellion, and the majority of it can be filmed in the hinterlands, where it’s cheap to film. Shouldn’t they have made more of them?

He's my all
The focus with this one, as the title implies, is on Bonnie. Clyde isn’t even Clyde. He’s Guy Barrow, with Jack Hogan doing a kind of Elvis Presley thing: anachronistic sideburns, Tupelo twang. If you think of him as Elvis and Provine as Jayne Mansfield, it’s an ultimate 1950s oomph matchup.

Parker is played as a bit of a sneering harridan. All the men make a play for her, and she belittles them all, calling them small-timers. She’s the force behind everything, the will, and does a lot of the killing. She’s a very, very bad person. Then, oddly, near the end, she gets religion in a way that nice guys everywhere will shake their heads over.

A nice guy named Paul (William Stevens), you see, asks to borrow her phone but doesn’t give her the once-over or get too close or sloppy. The opposite. He’s simply phoning a sick friend to let him know the reading assignments. Bonnie assumes he’ a teacher but he’s a night-school student looking to become an architect, and he explains what that is without patronizing her. He’s not just nice but down-to-earth, and the movie implies he’s the chance she blew. Later, when Guy tells her she’s lost her nerve, she responds, “I didn't lose my nerve, I know right where I left it,” and you get the feeling it’s here, talking with Paul, particularly when her dying words are “Paul … Paul…”—which the cops mishear as “Guy… Guy…” He was her potential redemption, the movie implies. Of course, by then, she’d killed nearly a dozen people, some in cold blood, but what the hey. Give a girl a chance.

The filmmakers muck with the history of course. I didn’t know, or I’d forgotten, that the real Bonnie Parker was married before—to Roy Thornton, a burglar—but here he’s named Duke Jefferson (Richard Bakalyan) and doing 175 years in federal prison for murder. The real Bonnie never saw hubby again after 1929 but this Bonnie helps Duke break out of prison—not for anything romantic, mind you, but to help them rob banks. Is it awkward, this threesome? Naw. By this point, Bonnie is cold to Guy, too. Early on, the two go at it hot and heavy but that ends abruptly. Not sure why. Other than him being small-time.

Wasn’t his brother a bigger deal in real life? Here, he’s named Chuck rather than Buck—and played by Joe Turkel, everyone’s favorite bartender in “The Shining”—but he’s barely in it. He and wifey show up at Bonnie and Guy’s ranch house, unknowingly bringing the cops along. After they shake them, the four camp out in the woods, but the cops find them there, too, and, blam, there goes Chuck. He doesn’t pull even one job with his brother.

Frank Hamer? He’s Tom Steel (Douglas Kennedy), forthright, sharp, and right on their heels from the beginning. But they slip through his clutches twice, and then he’s MIA, and then he shows up in the final reel for the big blowout. So odd. He’s supposed to be the hero but the movie makes him look rather incompetent.

Cuckoo’s nest
Other odd choices. It has them dying on June 6, 1934, rather than May 23, 1934. Didn’t writer Stanley Shpetner and director William Witney have an encyclopedia? A local library? Or were they trying to avoid a copyright lawsuit?

Even so, for what it is, a drive-in movie from American International, it’s not bad. We get a few surprising, sharp moments and some not-bad dialogue. I like the kid sticking them up. There’s a fun bit with hiking boy scouts coming across their path whose comical, portly scoutmaster seemed familiar to me. Turns out it's Sydney Lassick, good ol' Charlie Cheswick from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” making his screen debut. Nice to see you, Cheswick.

Production-wise, they don’t do a poor job of it, either. One wonders how they afforded all those 1930s cars and then you do the math: It’s just 24 years prior. It would be like us doing a movie set in 2000. That seems shocking to me. From 1934 to 1958, we extracted ourselves from the Great Depression, went through World War II, entered the atomic age and the Cold War era, and went faster than the speed of sound. We went into outer space. What’s happened since 2000? Yes, 9/11 and COVID, but both led to backbiting and/or problematic policies. Mostly our phones got smarter and we got dumber.

They released the Hunter Biden transcript on Thursday, and amid the bloviating there's some expert trolling of Donald Trump and the monstrously hypocritical Republican party by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Warmed my heart.

SWALWELL: Any time your father was in government, prior to the Presidency or before, did he ever operate a hotel?

BIDEN: No, he has never operated a hotel.

SWALWELL: So he's never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office?

BIDEN: No, he has not.

SWALWELL: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office?

BIDEN: My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge.

SWALWELL: While your father was President, did anyone in the family receive 41 trademarks from China?

BIDEN: No.

SWALWELL: As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family?

BIDEN: No. And I don't think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC.

SWALWELL: Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $355 million by any State that he worked in?

BIDEN: No, he has not, thank God.

SWALWELL: Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the Saudi Government while your father was in office?

BIDEN: No.

SWALWELL: That's all I've got.

Encore.