erik lundegaard

Thursday March 28, 2024

Opening Day 2024


  • SLIDESHOW: Opening Day! Whooo! ... OK, so technically it was last week, when the Dodgers beat the Padres 5-2 in Seoul, South Korea. Great idea, poorly executed. I barely heard about it until it was over. But now that everyone is playing, let's figure out who our active leaders are. We don't have Albert and Miggy to kick around anymore. Also: No Nelson Cruz, Josh Donaldson, Adam Wainwright, Eric Hosmer, Andrelton Simmons and Mike Zunino, to name some of the official retirees. Then there's the question marks. Is Evan Longoria done? Zack Greinke? Will Joey Votto rehab that ankle injury and make the Blue Jays roster? Either way, a lot of NEW! faces on the active leaderboard. Let's get to it.

  • NEW! BATTING AVERAGE: Altuve (at .307) finally took the title from Miggy midway through last season, so even if Miggy hadn't retired it would've changed hands. Altuve still gets boos for his part in the trash-can scandal but I'm a fan of the short and scrappy. Sad fact? There are only two other actives in the .300s, and one of those, Mike Trout, isn't much of a threat to Jose—less because of the .300 BA than because he doesn't hit .300 anymore. (Just once in the last five seasons.) The other guy, Freddie Freeman, at .301, is a threat, since he's been hitting at a .328 clip since joining the Dodgers. After them it's: Trea Turn at .296, Charlie Blackmon at .295, Mookie at .294. 

  • NEW! ON-BASE PERCENTAGE: Last year I assumed Juan Soto would get the 333 PAs needed to reach the qualifying 3,000 career and take the mantle from Trout, and he did just that. Shame about the new uniform, though. Like with BA, there are just three actives above the magic number: Soto (.421), Trout (.412), and Joey Votto (.409). Then it's Judge, Harper, Goldschmidt, Freeman, Acuna Jr. 

  • NEW! SLUGGING PERCENTAGE: I guessed Trout might get usurped here, too, by Aaron Judge, and lo and behold. If BA and OBP have few actives at the benchmark number, SLG isn't suffering: 17 active guys are above .500: Judge (.586), Trout (.581), Acuna Jr. (.536), Stanton (.529), Arenado (.527), Betts (.526), Soto (.524), etc. Though he's fallen a bit from his lofty heights, Trout is still the only active with a career .300/.400/.500 line.

  • OPS: Which is why he's on top here at .993. Judge is about 10 points behind (.982) and Soto about 40 behind him (.945). Then Votto (.920), Acuna Jr. (917), Harper (.911), Goldschmidt (.907), and Freeman (.902). Those are our only .900+s. All-time, Trout is 12th. That includes the recently adde Negro Leagues, otherwise he's ninth.

  • NEW! GAMES: Counting numbers! Who had Elvis Andrus on their bingo card for this one? Not me, but he's atop the ... Whoops, no, the D-Backs released him. OK, so then it's Joey Votto at 2,056. Is he still with the Blue Jays? He's followed by Andrew McCutchen at 2,007. Those are the only guys above 2,000. After them it's Carlos Santana, Freddie Freeman, Paul Goldschmidt, Jason Heyward. 

  • NEW! HITS: This is the first year since 2010 we don't have an active member of the 3,000-hit club. Votto's total (2,135) is actually the lowest active since ... wow ... 1952, after Joe DiMaggio retired and Stan Musial took over with 2,023, on his way to 3,630. That's assuming Votto's active. Second active (or first, depending) is Freddie Freeman at 2,114. The way Freeman's come on, I'm reminded of my feelings about Adrian Beltre from 10-12 years ago: from “Great career, but probably not HOF...” to “Wow, maybe,” to “JFC, the guys' first-ballot.” Be interesting to see where FF's numbers finally land. 

  • NEW! DOUBLES: Freeman is also a doubles machine. He's led the league four times, including last year when he nearly became the first player in 80 years to hit 60, falling one short. Career, he's at 473, and 88th all-time. Barring catastrophe, he'll become the 65th player with 500 career doubles. Could he become the 19th player to 600? Or the fifth to 700? Goldschmidt's second at 413, Altuve is third with exactly 400. 

  • TRIPLES: For most of the 10+ years I've been doing this, the triples numbers have gone down down: from the 120s (Carl Crawford, Jose Reyes) to the 90s (Ichiro) to the 80s (Dexter Fowler) to, last season, the 50s with Charlie Blackmon. The good news? Blackmon is still hitting triples at age 37. Last year he ripped five more for a total of 63. Kevin Kiermaier is second at 57, with Starling Marte and Mike Trout tied for third with 52.

  • NEW! HOMERUNS: Giancarlo hit his 400th career homer on Sept. 5 and finished the season with 402. He also finished with a .191 BA after hitting .211 the previous season, so one wonders how much longer he's going to be around. He's been having so many troubles he has me rooting for him. Trout is second among actives at 368. Then it's Goldschmidt (340), Arenado (325), and Freddie Freeman (321). Where's Aaron Judge? Believe it or not, 12th at 257. 

  • NEW! RBIs: Albert retired No. 2 on the all-time list (2218), and Miggy went 13th (1881). Which leaves? It would be Evan Longoria, 183rd, with 1159 RBIs, if he signs with anyone. Then it's Joey Votto, at 1144 if he makes a team. And if it's neither of them, then it's ... Freddie Freeman at 1143—a guy who's batted No. 2 most of his career. When was the active RBI leader above the No. 3 slot in the lineup?

  • NEW! RUNS: The top (or second) RBI guy actually has more runs scored, too: 1217. After FF, it's Andrew McCutchen (1173), Votto (1171), Goldschmidt (1134), Trout (1106). 

  • BASES ON BALLS: Can you guess No. 2 on the list? It's Carlos Santana, now with the Twins, at 1231. He's about 150 behind Votto but younger by 2 1/2 years, so this might be his title soon. Career, Votto is 34th while Santana is 60th. That's right: In BBs, Carlos Santana is just behind guys named Dave Winfield and Ty Cobb. How cool is that? 

  • NEW! STRIKEOUTS: I will always be grateful to Giancarlo Stanton for being on top of the world, 59s HRs and 1.000+ OPS in 2017 with the Marlins, and then going to the Yankees and vastly underperforming. He's also our active leader in Ks with 1820. It's not the title Yankee fans want, but it's the title they get. They haven't had the K title since A-Rod's final season. Before that—Reggie? No, he was with the Angels when he took the crown. Gotta go back to Mantle in '68. No. 2 is Goldschmidt (1706), then McCutchen (1642), Freeman (1536), and Trout (1458).

  • STOLEN BASES: Last year I didn't know if Dee Strange-Gordon was done (he was ... I think), and this year I don't really know if Elvis Andrus and his 347 steals is done (he got cut by the D-Backs March 22). So let's just assume, with Baseball Reference, that the active leader is Starling Marte (338). Whither Billy Hamilton (326)? Two plate appearances last year for the ChiSox, no hits, cut in August. Altuve is fourth (or third, or second) with 293. Then it's the man with the smoothest slide in baseball history: Trea Turner at 260.

  • HIT BY PITCH: Anthony Rizzo is eighth all-time here, with 213, but yes it was an HBP too far last season and he lost half of it with a concussion. Wait, no, that was a pickoff attempt, right? That's some irony. All these HBPs but it's a Fernando Tatis hip that does him in. No active player, btw, is close to Rizz. Second is Starling Marte (154), and if you can guess the third active on this list, kudos. Ready? It's Mark Canha. Of Detroit. Used to be with Oakland. Then the Mets. Canha. I know.

  • NEW! DEFENSIVE WAR: With Andrelton Simmons gone (whoosh), the active leader is ... NOT Nolan Arenado? That's weird. No, it's high-wire act Kevin Kiermaier with 19.9 bWAR (and four GGs), followed by Arenado at 19.1 (and 10 GGs). Then: Sally Perez (15.5), Brandon Crawford (14.3) and Manny Effin' Machado (14.0).

  • WAR FOR POSITION PLAYERS: Not exactly news, but Mike Trout is already in the Hall of Fame. His 85.2 bWAR is the 33rd greatest ever for position players, ahead of the likes of Ken Griffey Jr., Rod Carew and Joe DiMaggio. Is Mookie in the Hall yet? He's second active with 64.8. Paul Goldschmidt is at 61.5 but he's five years older than Mookie. Even so, a few more 3 seasons and he might get there. Then it's Freddie Freeman at 56.1.

  • WINS: A few years back, when he was at 226 victories, Justin Verlander said he would win 300. I guess never doubt the man who won the Kate Upton sweepstakes. He's now at 257 and playing for a team that wins. After JV, it's a bit of a dropoff: Max Sherzer has 214, Clayton Kershaw has 210. Then it's a BIIIIG dropoff: Gerritt Cole is fourth with *140*. Where are all the wins going? To middle relievers, I guess. There are only 10 actives in triple digits and one of them is Kyle Gibson. Exactly.

  • ERA: No surprises, really, among the top six: Kershaw (2.47), deGrom (2.52), Sale (3.10), Scherzer (3.14), Cole (3.16) and Verlander (3.24). Then a few surprises, at least to me: Zack Wheeler is seventh at 3.44, followed by Sonny Gray (3.47) and Kyle Hendricks (3.47). I would've thought No. 10, my man Luis Castillo (3.54), would've been ahead of them.

  • STRIKEOUTS: In the 1970s, Minneapolis kept flipping mayors. Republican Charles Stenvig was replaced by Democrat Albert Hofstede, who was replaced by Stenvig, who lost it to (yes) Hofstede. Leading to a great cartoon by Dick Guindon: a middle-aged man in his doctor's office. Doctor says, “You need to lower your stress level. Why don't you run for mayor?” Well, Verlander and Scherzer are the Stenvig and Hofstede of the active strikeouts title. Verlander had it in 2021, Scherzer in 2022, Verlander again in 2023, and now Scherzer. And no, I'm not going to update his photo.

  • BASES ON BALLS: JV has been No. 1 in this non-hit parade for several years now but he's 146th all-time with 925. He barely walks anyone anymore. Then it's Scherzer at 746, Charlie Morton at 722 and Kershaw at 669. The best don't walk anyone anymore.

  • WHIP: Three qualifying players have career WHIPs below 1.00: Addie Joss (.967), Big Ed Walsh (.999), and sandwiched between them is the oft-injured Jacob deGrom (.993). God, if he could only stay healthy.

  • NEW! COMPLETE GAMES: Verlander is at 26 and Kershaw is at 25, and one wonders if they're the last guys with 20+ complete games in baseball history. Our great hope is the Marlins' Sandy Alcantara, who has 12 at 28 years old, and is usually among the league leaders. Scherzer also has 12, while Chris Sale has 16. They're the only actives in double digits. I'd tell you where Verlander's 26 is on the all-time list, but Baseball Reference's career list only goes to 1,000. It's literally off the charts.

  • HIT BY PITCH: In which category did Charlie Morton just pass Cy Young? Hint: It wasn't complete games. Yes, Morton, with 168 HBPs, is now 12th all-time and fourth among post-WWII pitchers. The recents ahead of him? Two guys you wouldn't mind getting hit by, Charlie Hough at 174 and Tim Wakefield at 186, and one you would: Randy Johnson at 190. Randy's fifth all-time. Who's No. 1? The great Gus Weyhing! Among actives, three other guys are 100+: Sale and Scherzer (111) and Verlander (109). Where's Kershaw? 33rd! Clay don't play that.

  • NEW! SAVES: There are two guys at 400+, Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel (420 and 417), three at more than 300 (+ Aroldis Chapman at 321), and four at more than 200 (+ Edwin Diaz at 205). And that's it. Jansen and Kimbrel keep racking up saves, Chapman seems pretty much done with that portion of his career, Diaz, we hope, is just getting started. BTW: I don't think we talk enough about this: Aroldis was with the Yankees longer than any other team (seven seasons), but to get rings he had to pitch for the Cubs and the Rangers. When was the last time something like that happened? Never.

  • WAR FOR PITCHERS: It's the big three, Verlander (81.4), Kershaw (76.8) and Scherzer (74.1), Hall of Famers all, and then a big drop-off to the oft-injured (Sale and deGrom at 47.2 and 42). Gerrit Cole, shockingly, is back at 40.7 despite having pitched more innings. Is bWAR off? Or how off is bWAR? Last season, the Braves' Spencer Strider led the league in wins, strikeouts, and FIP, and he didn't finish in the Top 10 in Pitcher bWAR. He didn't even crack 4.0! Seems wrong. Should be more of a conversation around this. Maybe there is.

  • EXIT MUSIC (FOR A SLIDESHOW):  That's the NEWS from Lake Woebegon. See you in Section 327. *FIN*
Posted at 06:40 AM on Thursday March 28, 2024 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Tuesday March 26, 2024

Rise vs. Surprise: What's Good for Baseball?

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. 

Posted at 01:48 PM on Tuesday March 26, 2024 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Monday March 25, 2024

Movie Review: Dune: Part Two (2024)

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.

Posted at 10:37 AM on Monday March 25, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 2024   |   Permalink  

Sunday March 24, 2024

The First Trump Lie in the NY Times Appeared in 1973

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.

Posted at 08:42 AM on Sunday March 24, 2024 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Saturday March 23, 2024

Movie Review: The Maltese Falcon (1931)

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


  • I've always loved the Vitaphone logo—looking, as it does, like a '20s cheerleading megaphone. Sound, yo! Not to mention the touting of books, a popular convention at the time, during the opening credits. When did that stop? When was the last time the book on which the movie is based was seen in the opening credits? 

  • Girl #1: a midday tryst. We just see the gams and the arms.

  • Girl #2: Effie is younger in this one and resists Spade's entreaties throughout. Smart. Una Murkel plays her with the proper amount of professionalism and cynicism. She knows what Sam is, and loves him less than other Effie does Bogart.

  • Girl #3: Iva Archer is younger, too, and played by Marx Bros. favorite Thelma Todd. She also garners less sympathy.

  • This Miles Archer garners more. He knows what's up between Spade and his wife. He's got brains he has. He lays bare what a skunk Sam Spade is.

  • Girl #4: Bebe Daniels, the original Dorothy Gale, and our film's femme fatale. I guess all the women were younger here. 

  • Where Bogart has cool, Cortez has teeth.

  • Pre-code shenanigans. No woman's money is safe...

  • ...unless she knows where to hide it.

  • This is how this Spade first hears about the black bird. I think '41 Spade first hears it from Joel Cairo...

  • ...played here by Danish actor Otto Matieson. He's not bad, but he's got no backstory, no lilt, no hint of gardenia.

  • Caspar Guttman played by Dudley Diggs: less monumental, more sweat.

  • Wilmer is tougher, and less of a joke than Elisha Cook Jr. He's played by Dwight Frye, the original Universal horror right-hand man: Renfield in “Dracula,” Fritz in “Frankenstein.”

  • It's almost disconcerting hearing these familiar lines spoken by unfamiliar voices.

  • The uncovering of the Falcon. Huston leans us in, Roy Del Ruth stays static.

  • I can't help but hear Lorre's voice. I say this line to myself weekly.

  • An odd game Spade played while they waited on the Falcon. Anyone know what it is? It's basically the original iPhone app.

  • We get more resolution than in the Huston version. Not saying Gutman doesn't deserve it, but he also deserved continuing his search forever and never finding what he was looking for.

  • Ruth jailed. Huston gave us this as metaphor, Del Ruth bangs us over the head.

  • Here's a resolution this Spade deserved. *FIN*
Posted at 09:28 AM on Saturday March 23, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 1930s   |   Permalink  

Friday March 22, 2024

Poking Holes in Potatoes

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. 

Posted at 01:48 PM on Friday March 22, 2024 in category Law   |   Permalink  

Thursday March 21, 2024

Movie Review: The Verdict (1946)

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.

Posted at 02:19 PM on Thursday March 21, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 1940s   |   Permalink  

Wednesday March 20, 2024

'Completely Off His Rocker'

“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. 

Posted at 07:01 AM on Wednesday March 20, 2024 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Tuesday March 19, 2024

Movie Review: High Plains Drifter (1973)

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. 

Posted at 07:27 AM on Tuesday March 19, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 1970s   |   Permalink  

Monday March 18, 2024

Norman Jewison (1926-2024)

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.

Posted at 07:27 AM on Monday March 18, 2024 in category Movies   |   Permalink  

Saturday March 16, 2024

Movie Review: Joe Kidd (1972)

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.

Posted at 07:42 AM on Saturday March 16, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 1970s   |   Permalink  

Friday March 15, 2024

What Is Kirstie Alley Known For?

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? 

Posted at 08:58 AM on Friday March 15, 2024 in category TV   |   Permalink  
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