“Donald Trump doesn't so much run for something as he runs against somebody. His latest attacks are aimed at Haitian immigrants, but what we're seeing is a playbook previously used to target other ethnic or religious groups, and with a similar goal: to make the MAGA base feel like they're under attack.

”'The followers must feel besieged,' as the late Italian writer Umberto Eco, who grew up in fascist Italy, wrote nearly three decades ago in The New York Review of Books. 'The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.' Indeed, in order to enact much of his radical right-wing agenda, Trump needs his people to think America is on the brink of collapse—and to associate that collapse with an 'other.' The goal is to panic the base, and since there isn't a scary enough truth, lies will do.“

-- Molly Jong-Fast, ”Donald Trump's Springfield Scapegoat: Haitian immigrants in Ohio are just the latest target in Trump's long-running ploy to convince his supporters they're under siege,“ on the Vanity Fair site. Cf., Doctorow's words in ”Ragtime." 

A confused man walks out of the American desert. How did he come to this state? That's a driving force of the film.

WARNING: SPOILERS

How long has it been since I’ve seen this film? This long: I thought it was the one where Nastassja Kinski was married to John Savage. That’s “Maria’s Lovers.” This is the one where she’s married to Harry Dean Stanton.

The confusion makes some sense. Both are independent films, released in 1984, from foreign directors. Andrey Konchalovsky, a Russian, directed “Maria’s Lovers” while here it’s Wim Wenders of Germany. That might make a good filmfest, by the way: movies set in America, with American actors, directed by foreigners.

A lot of “Paris, Texas” went over my head when I first saw it in 1984. It’s a story of a crazy, maddening love, and I hadn’t experienced my own crazy, maddening love yet. It’s about a responsible man trying to save his ne’er-do-well brother, and that would’ve fallen on deaf ears for me back then. Now it resonates too deeply. 

I’d forgotten it won the Palme d’Or. I’d forgotten it was written by Sam Shepard—though much of the dialogue seems improvised. Watching it the other night at SIFF Egyptian, a 4K rerelease on its 40th anniversary, I kept liking it, and liking it, and then Nastassja Kinski shows up looking more beautiful than any woman has a right to … and it kind of dragged for me. Apparently Shepard was on set and adapting the story as it went along but he couldn’t be there for the final scenes in Houston. It shows.

Red cap, shirt, car, sweater
Does the opening resonate more in 2024 than in 1984? Out of the American desert, a confused man emerges wearing a suit and a bright red baseball cap. Unlike most of the MAGA crowd, though, this guy is all but mute. (Stanton doesn’t say anything for the first half hour.) He collapses, is revived by a doctor, keeps going. He’s not so much wandering as making a beeline for something and somewhere.

From the scraps of paper on his person, the man who revives him, the Pennsylvania Dutch-looking Dr. Ulmer (Austrian actor Bernhard Wicki), calls his brother, Walt (Stockwell), in LA, who flies out to get him. His wife Anne (French actress Aurore Clement) asks what they should she tell their son. Walt says to say he’s away on business but the wife nixes that idea. Then just tell him the truth, Walt says. It takes a while for this conversation to make sense.

When Walt arrives at the makeshift desert hospital, which looks like a sad little motel, his brother Travis has already flown the coop and Walt is left to pay for his belongings. Then he tracks him down in the desert—no mean feat. Then he coaxes him into the car. He goes to buy him clothes but Travis bolts again. One wonders what Travis is thinking. Does he just need to keep moving? Away from his past maybe?

This scenario repeats itself several times: Walt as responsible but exasperated adult, Travis as blinking, innocent troublemaker. They’re going to fly to LA but Travis suddenly can’t stand being in an airplane. They’re going to drive but Travis wants the exact same rental car they had before. Eventually they make LA, where Travis is greeted warmly by Anne and warily by their son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, son of co-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and actress Karen Black). Hunter turns out to be Travis’ son.

The middle of the movie is whether father and son can reconnect. There’s a heartbreaking scene where Travis waits on the corner opposite Hunter’s school to walk him home, but Hunter is with a friend, is embarrassed by the old man, and gets into a car with his friend. When admonished by his parents, he says “Nobody walks.”

Eventually he warms to the old man. The family watches Super 8 footage of all of them, plus Hunter’s mom, Jane (Kinski), from a trip five years earlier. Despite the difference in ages (35 years separate the actors) and looks (he’s normal, she’s Nastassja Kinski), Jane and Travis seem in love. Everyone seems so happy. So what happened? How did he become the confused dude in the red cap in the desert? That’s the question we wonder throughout. It’s like the shark beneath the surface in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”

I assume Anne tells Travis about the money they’ve been receiving from Jane—via a bank in Houston—because she’s worried they’ll lose Hunter and she wants to push Travis toward Jane. It works, but not in the way she wants. Now Hunter wants to go with him—and does. And the camera follows them. And we don’t see Walt and Anne again. Shame. Something goes out of the movie when they go out of the movie.

The bank in Houston turns out to be a drive-thru, but they know the day she makes her deposits and stake it out, with walkie-talkies, like kids in a caper. The red of his cap reappears in the red shirts father and son wear, and in the red compact car Jane drives. They follow it to a sketchy section of town.

I’ll cut to the chase: She works at a peep show, like in the Madonna video “Open Your Heart,” where men watch women in different fantasy outfits and settings (nurse, waitress), the women can’t see them, and the men talk through a phone. Travis orders up a blonde with short hair, gets the nurse, tries another booth, and bingo, there she is. He asks several halting questions, she attempts to take off her sweater and he stops her, then leaves. At his earliest convenience, he goes to a bar. Hunter tells him he reeks and walks out. The kid is the adult in the room.

But Travis returns to the peep show, gets Jane again, and this time, without specifically telling her who he is, he tells her who he is. This is the moment we’re supposed to get the shark from “Jaws” but it turns out to be a big fish. He relays a story about a man so crazy in love with a woman that he couldn’t leave her alone to go to work, so he kept quitting his jobs, and then getting another when he needed money again. Over and over. Then he began to drink, and get mean, and he tied a cowbell to her ankle so he’d always know where she was. And it’s a long, drawn-out monologue. And throughout, there’s a dawning look of realization on her face. Then it’s her turn for a long drawn-out monologue. The climax of their intermingling stories is when he wakes up and finds himself on fire. She’d set fire to their trailer home and left with the boy. And in a way he remained on fire. How she began working in a peep show, who knows.

It's an ending that peters out. The mystery was better as a mystery.

Widening gyre
You’ve got to hand it to those Henderson brothers, though. They look like Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell but somehow managed to land Nastassja Kinski and Aurore Clement. Nice work, boys. 

As a 61-year-old—older Harry Dean in the movie—I liked it better than I did as a 21-year-old, and Wenders has some nice moments in those peep show rooms, where Trevor’s face is silhouetted by her head, and vice-versa. I like the detail of the exposed insulation on the woman’s side of the one-way mirror, too.

But it’s not top-tier for me the way it is for some. I’m remembering this period now. I was coming of age into a time when popcorn movies became a little dumber, and important movies became a little more boring. That center, where we’d get a good movie with a story that resonated, wasn’t holding.

“In our nation's 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again. As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

-- former vice-president Dick Cheney in his endorsement of Kamala Harris for president

When was the last time a former president or vice-president from one party endorsed the candidate for the other party? Ever? Curious who else will step up, now that Cheney has. (W. has said he won't make an endorsement.) What I like about the above? No punches pulled. Dems could learn from this. Niceties are for peacetime. 

“On any given day it is difficult to measure desperation. Polling offers a snapshot of what voters think, but not how the campaigns view the arc of the race. Official statements from campaign officials are rightly viewed with some skepticism.

'In the final weeks of an election, you should focus on what the campaigns do, rather than what they say. Pay particular attention to what they are spending money on. [And] there is nowhere Republicans are spending more than in the courts. In recent weeks they have filed a flurry of lawsuits targeting the voting process. They can call their voter suppression program whatever they please, but it is still a massive voter suppression effort.

”Consider this: when the Democratic National Convention began, there were 88 pro-voting lawsuits and 85 anti-voting lawsuits that had been filed during this election cycle. Three weeks later, anti-voting lawsuits now outpace pro-voting 99 to 90. Adding to the GOP's troubles is their dismal record of success. By the first night of the DNC, pro-voting forces had won 167 cases and lost 73. That record is now 184 wins and 76 losses.

“Republicans are in real electoral trouble and they have turned to the courts to bail them out. And with less than 60 days until the election, that strategy is failing.”

-- Voting rights attorney Marc Elias in his newsletter today. More here. I hope he's right.

This morning, I walked the several miles down to Lake Washington. I usually do it in the afternoon but, you know, late-summer heat wave. Plus let's shake things up a bit, Erik. Write another time. Get off your keister.

Since I walk east to Lake Washington, I was walking toward the rising sun, partially obscured by morning fog and/or mild wildfire smoke, so it looked like a big red ball in the sky. It also meant, when I got down to the lake, I got to see the light glinting off the waves in ways I didn't normally see at 3-4 PM. It was quite lovely. So I sat on one of the benches at Madrona beach and just watched the light glinting off the waves and tried to find some inner peace.

And then them.

Their noise was distant at first. A couple talking? No, arguing. It was a black couple arguing very loudly in a very white area of town—most areas of Seattle are very white, but this area was super so—but as they got closer I realized they weren't the man-woman couple I envisioned but two guys. Dave was the guy with the bag and he had something the other guy, Donovan, wanted. (They kept using each other's first names in their discourse.) I guess Dave had several of whatever the thing was. At one point they almost brokered a deal—Dave was about to give Donovan one of the things but then Donovan had to be rude about it and so Dave held back. I'm pretty sure it was beer. Dave had a beer, open, and he had more beers, but he wouldn't share them with Donovan. It was 8:30 AM. Neither man sounded drunk.

Dave wanted to be left alone, too. He kept walking and Donovan kept following. And where did Dave stop walking? Right near me, of course. He stood on the lake side of where I was sitting, while Donovan remained behind me, out of my vision. And for about five minutes they argued over me. The same words. Round and round.

I'd been sitting there trying to find some inner peace because it was already a frustrating day amid a sad and painful year. I'd woken up in the middle of the night (again) and then our kitten Maise woke me up at 6 AM (again). She's in the habit of crawling under the bed and scratching at it, like a scratch pad, to get us up, and probably because she likes doing it, too. She wants us up but not in the way cats normally want people up. It's less FEED ME than LET'S PLAY. It's the feeding that's the frustrating part. She needs gastrointestinal canned food because of a tendency toward looseness (which killed Clem), and even then we mix it with a probiotic, and even then it's only successful 50-70% of the time. As a result, the other cat, Griffey, has to have the same canned or she'll go for his. He's bigger and stronger but she's alpha. It's the oddest thing—particularly after Jellybean, who could never get enough food—but you often have to place Griffey physically in front of his dish before he'll dig in. And lately he hasn't been digging in. Lately he'll take a sniff and walk away. So it's been frustrating.

Last night Patricia suggested giving him some other canned food but then what do we do with Maise? Plus we'd tried different canned food before and Griffey didn't go for it. Patricia had forgotten that. Even so, this morning I tried one of those other canned foods, some beef puree thingee, and again physically set him before his dish. He sniffed at it and walked away. Maise, meanwhile, made a beeline for it. Something new! So I had to put it in the fridge. The kibble bowl was empty, so, at some point, I thought, Griffey will get hungry enough and we'll try again. But then Patricia got up and filled the kibble bowl and Griffey chomped through it. So we argued. The same words. Round and round.

Eventually Donovan and Dave moved off. Or Dave moved off and Donovan followed. When I left, they were still in Madrona Park, still circling each other, still reiterating the same excruciating minutiae, still drawing worried or annoyed looks from people who just wanted to walk or run down by the lake on a Saturday morning and now had to deal with all this. Hell, they're probably still circling each other, still at it, on a different part of the lake or in a different part of the city. But they helped me this morning. They helped me find the humor in it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Most critics at the time, Dad included, wrote that Neil Simon’s “Seems Like Old Times” was an homage to screwball comedies of the 1940s. The plot specifically recalls the 1942 Cary Grant vehicle “Talk of the Town”: falsely accused man hiding in the home of a judge about to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court—that old gag—except in the updated version the guy is hiding in the home of his ex-wife whose husband is in the running for attorney general of California. The ex-wife, a public defender, winds up repping the man in court while hubby prosecutes him. So toss in “Adam’s Rib.”

It was a true tribute to those old movies, Dad wrote, because it stunk: “Watching it makes us long for the original, most of all when Chevy Chase is trying to be Cary Grant.”

Yeah, it’s not a good movie. It actually reminded me less of 1940s screwball comedies than 1960s sitcoms—particularly “Bewitched”: Oh no, the boss is coming over to dinner and … you know, chaos. Followed by flustered attempt to keep the chaos in the kitchen. 

Dogs + minorities
This is one of those rare Neil Simon-penned screenplays written straight for the screen rather than adapted from one of his plays. So it’s odd that most of the action takes place in one location. We can’t get away from the home of Glenda and Ira Parks (Goldie Hawn and Charles Grodin). Odder? That’s its main problems—that we don’t leave there. Or that he doesn’t leave there.

Nick Gardenia (Chase) is a writer staying at a friend’s home along the California coast when he’s kidnapped one afternoon by two men who force him to rob a bank. Why do they pick Nick? Never answered. But he’s photographed by bank cameras, has a drug charge against him already, and goes on the lam.

Why does he pick his ex-wife’s house to hole up in? Because he’s injured and it’s nearby? Or because he knows she has a thing for strays?

Her strays include dogs (the family has six) and former clients (the family has three). Chester (T.K. Carter) acts as chauffeur while Thomas and Robert (Joseph Runningox and Ray Tracey) are … gardeners? I forget. Is it problematic that the people strays are people of color? Dad thought so. “The film is full of stereotypes—Indian car thieves, uppity blacks—that seem designed to show that charity is wasted on undeserving minorities,” he wrote in 1980. Oh, and the Hispanic maid, Aurora (Yvonne Wilder), disappears just when the governor is coming to dinner for her famous chicken pepperoni dish. You can’t count on these people for anything. 

But the movie's biggest problem is Chase. Nick never has our sympathies because he seems less terrified man on the lam than privileged SOB poking at other privileged SOBs while trying to get into his ex-wife’s pants. “He seems to have two basic schtiks,” Dad wrote: “a dopey-looking deadpan that barely conceals a smirk, and a propensity for pratfalls, including one tumble down the side of a California cliff.” And most of these pratfalls are now done by stuntmen.

For some reason, we’re supposed to cheer him on. He’s the star, Glenda’s current husband is uptight, so we’re supposed to want her to wind up with Chase. We don’t. I didn’t anyway. Watching, I begged Neil not to do it.

Does he? Well, first there’s a trial before Judge John Channing (Harold Gould), who can’t fathom how interconnected everything is. Then it becomes more so. Those two bank robbers? They try the same stunt with Aurora but don’t get far, so they’re in the courtroom, too, and confess to doing the same thing to Nick. Freed! Outside, Nick kisses his counsel, long and slow, in front of Ira, leaving her dazed. Then Glenda and Ira are heading out on vacation, it starts to rain, he crashes the car to avoid a cow and breaks his leg, she runs through the rain to a cabin. The door opens and she smiles. The End.

If that’s Nick, that’s a helluva coincidence. Also: ick.

Old shtik
“Old Times” is the first and only feature film directed by Jay Sandrich, who came to prominence directing some of the most beloved sitcoms of the ’70s and ’80s: “Mary Tyler Moore” (119 episodes), “Soap” (54 eps.) and “The Cosby Show” (100 eps.). There’s hardly a sitcom during this period he didn’t touch, and he seemed happy doing them, so why did he do this? Who knows. But you get why he didn’t do it again. Reviews were meh, and while box-office wasn’t bad ($44 million, 15th for the year), both stars, that same year, appeared in movies much more acclaimed, lucrative and long-lived: for Hawn, “Private Benjamin,” which grossed $70 million, sixth-best in 1980, and garnered Goldie her only lead actress nomination; and for Chase, “Caddyshack,” where his smirky rich-guy persona fit in better.

At this point, Simon was coming off some of the best years a writer can imagine. He’d been nominated for Oscars in 1975 (“The Sunshine Boys”), 1977 (“The Goodbye Girl”), and 1978 (“California Suite”), which coincided with being nominated for Tonys about every other year since the late ’60s. He was hot. And then not. On Broadway, he’d still do “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers,” and on television “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but he never got another Oscar nom, and his movie output became increasingly less relevant and popular: “Only When I Laugh” ($25m, 31st for the year), “I Ought to Be in Pictures” ($7m, 80th), and “The Slugger’s Wife” ($1.8m, 143rd). I didn’t even know “Slugger’s Wife” was his.

Only two years separate “Old Times” and the original Hawn-Chase team-up, “Foul Play,” but that one felt very ’70s while you can almost taste the coming Reagan years in this one. The ’70s smart ass was still the hero, but nonsensically. His shtik was old and there was work to be done.

Here's Dad’s review. 

At some guy's house near the Uptown area. I was using the house as a quiet place to study and then bounced downstairs into the living room to announce I was heading out to get something to eat. The house owner, watching TV, was abrupt. He seemed angry. Do you want something? I asked. Yes, he said, with an “About time” air. I was dispatched to get him a Clark's sub.

Turning the corner, I watched as a drunk mildly terrorized a couple in a car, throwing bricks, then staggered down the road, where, way in the distance, a cop car drove by. I turned into a diagonal street like they have in Taipei: dirty, hustles and bustles, crowded with Chinese people. In a restaurant, Prof. Solotaroff was making food. He offered to make me some, and I accepted, thinking it would be for there. Instead, he packaged it up rapidly and told me I could eat it anytime—just follow the directions on the side. I made a move to leave, realized I hadn't paid, reached into my back pocket. But he indicated no, it was free. Out of guilt for assuming it was free, I kissed him on the cheek.

At the doorway I came across a tiny, tiny baby, crawling and wailing. I picked it up and tried to calm it. Prof. Solotaroff and I tried to get the attention of the Chinese family that had just entered to see if they knew whose it was, but they seemed preoccupied.

-- from a journal in 1989. When I was in Taiwan, in 1988, I'd heard that some Chinese people believed deja vu was simply visiting a moment in time that your dream self has already visited, and so I began to write down my dreams with the hope that, in the future, I'd recognize the moment: “Wow, this is me in 1989 describing a moment I'd be living through in 1998!” I'll let you know if that ever pans out.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is the movie an argument against women directors? Even though it was directed by a guy? 

I know, it’s just a comedy, shut up. But I kept thinking of that “Godfather” line: “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” While directing her first film, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) does the opposite. She makes it very, very personal.

Eighteen months earlier, we’d gotten intimations of a romance between Jody, then a movie editor, and cocky stunt man Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), who suddenly breaks his back during a stunt and winds up quitting the business and parking cars for a living. (Cf., Wade Wilson getting rejected by the Avengers and becoming a car salesman in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” If your exciting dream job falls through, 2024 movies are telling us, the only fallback is car-related customer service. Beware, beware.) 

Ah, but then Colt gets word from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham of “Ted Lasso”) that they need him on the set of the new big sci-fi action flick, “Metalstorm,” being filmed in Australia. More, Jody needs him, because she’s directing her first film. She’s asked for him. So off he goes. And for his first stunt, shortly after he arrives, he rolls a car eight and a half times—a new world record!

Except it turns out Jody didn’t ask for him. In fact, she’s not happy to see him at all. During his convalescence, we later learn, she tried to nurse him but he disappeared on her. Basically he disappeared. She didn’t see it as a man losing his raison d’etre and thus sinking into depression; she thought it was all about her. And she took it very, very personal.

So for the next stunt, while telling him the backstory of the romance within “Metalstorm”—which, in key details mirrors their own—she has him do a stunt where he’s lit on fire and, post explosion, slammed against a giant boulder. And then she has him do it again. And again. And again. She’s like a cat toying with a trapped mouse. She uses precious time and studio resources to wage a personal vendetta against a man who—let’s not forget—was attempting to return from a broken back! For her!

What a fucking dick. 

Anyway, that’s why women shouldn’t direct movies.

Fall from a tall building
“Fall Guy” is flip and flippant. Cars flip, people are flippant. It’s movie insider-y and popculture-y. Since it’s based on an ’80s TV series, we get references from that awful decade (from hair-metal music to “Miami Vice” homages), as well as post-credit cameos from the TV series’ stars Lee Majors (looking great at 85) and Heather Graham. We also get a snippet of bionic sound-effects from Majors’ previous series, “The Six Million Dollar Man.” I liked that bit even if it was nonsensical. But you get the idea: the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t take anything seriously except stunts.

The movie also gives us a double meaning for the title, since Colt is being set up to take the blame for a crime. If you unpack the plot, though, it makes zero sense. But who would do that? That’s not nice. Let people have their fun.

Yeah, here I go.

While partying in Australia during the filming of “Metalstorm,” movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)—who, it turns out, sabotaged Colt’s stunt 18 months earlier out of jealousy or something—is taunted by his stunt double Henry Herrera (Justin Easton, Gosling’s own stunt double) about not doing his own stunts, and they get into a drunken fight that Ryder wins. Yayyy! Except he’s kicked Henry into an end table and killed him. Ooops! Plus it’s all been filmed on his phone. He’s guilty of murder. What’s a poor movie star to do?

This one calls producer Gail Meyer, forever sucking on the straw of something Starbucks-y while literally chained to her cellphone. And she, or they, decide to pin the blame on someone else. They’re going to use AI to deepfake the phone video so it appears someone else did the kicking. Sure, why not? More, they’re going to do this not with someone at the party—and there were, what, about 20 people there?—but with someone who wasn’t even in the country. They’re going to make Colt Seavers the fall guy. 

Why not a stuntman who’s in country? Cuz that’s not the story. As is, Gail has to call Colt, get him to give up his life, buy a ticket, and fly to Sydney—a 15-hour nonstop flight—and then be driven to the movie set, where tests are done, including the CGI stuff so they can duplicate his face. Then he begins to work. He does the rollover record and the numerous lit-on-fire takes. He doesn’t discover the body of Henry on ice in a bathtub until that evening. So that’s what, 24 hours? At best? And is a corpse on ice really going to fool forensics about time of death?

Plus, whey are they assuming everyone in the room will keep quiet? If it were me in that room, seeing what I saw, and then reading that Colt Seavers was arrested for the crime, I’d mull it over for all of five seconds before heading to the police. Or the press. Or both. Moral reasons, sure, but also self-preservation. I’d know I was a loose end. Sooner or later, I’d feel, they’d come for me, too. All to save the career of a worthless movie star making a worthless movie in the Australian desert.

Roll a brand-new car
So is Tom Ryder supposed to be Tom Cruise? After he kicks Henry, but before he realizes he’s killed him, he shouts at the camera, “Do I do my own stunts? I think I do!” That’s very Cruise. Elsewhere, they use Cruise’s name twice, maybe to suggest, “No, see, not him, he’s over here,” and thus avoid litigation, but I’m not convinced. Is Cruise known for having riders in his contracts? Maybe about doing his own stunts?

The director was a smart choice anyway. Before he began helming such actioners as “Atomic Blonde,” “Deadpool 2” and “Bullet Train,” David Leitch was a longtime stunt man. Looks like he never doubled Cruise, but he was the longtime stuntman for Brad Pitt.

Overall, Gosling’s great, Gosling and Blunt have good chemistry (even if her character is a dick), and I liked “Black Panther”’s Winston Duke as stunt coordinator Dan Tucker. Teresa Palmer’s in this? I guess she played the chick with the sword who attacked Colt? Here’s a wake-up call: I think of Palmer as one of the newbies, someone the kids dig. Turns out she’s nearly 40. 

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is another good choice. He feels like a movie-within-a-movie star rather than the real deal. Out in the wild, he doesn’t survive. Waddingham’s Gail Meyer is the movie’s true villain but you wonder over her motivation. Is Ryder important enough to orchestrate all this? To implicate yourself? To ruin your life?

The theme song, once sung by Lee Majors, has been given an update by Blake Shelton. References to Farrah, Bo, Cheryl Tiegs, Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood have understandably been removed—even though, wow, 45 years later, Redford and Eastwood are still making movies. No new movie stars’ names have been added. Not even Tom Cruise.

My friend Josh K. would say it's “Rockford Files” but I didn't watch “Rockford” much. Whenever Stuart Margolin would show up in something, I'd go, “Hey, it's the 'Love American Style' guy.”

So that's what I knew him from but I assume I'm in the minority. Margolin did 29 episodes of “Love” and 38 of “Rockford.” He won two Emmys for supporting acting for “Rockford.” In a long, respected career, they're the only major acting awards he won. So “Rockford” makes sense.

Except to IMDb's “Known For” algorithm.

At least he had an important role in “Death Wish”: the Arizona land developer who reintroduces Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey to guns. It was a famous film, too. It's still a famous film.

But he was sixth-billed.

The algorithm seems to have a thing for “Death Wish.” It's what Charles Bronson, Hope Lange, Steven Keats, Jack Wallace, and Margolin are all best known for. A few weeks back, it was No. 1 for William Redfield, too. To me, he's Harding from “Cuckoo's Nest,” and he'll always be Harding from “Cuckoo's Nest,” and the IMDb gods must've finally listened because they made that the No. 1 answer. So IMDb can actually improve if it wants.

I suppose I should be happy IMDb doesn't say Jeff Goldblum is best known for “Death Wish.”

At the beginning of “Wonder Bar,” a not-good 1934 entry into the otherwise deliciously precode, Busby Berkeley musical, we get a shot of the neon sign of the titular and punny Parisian bar, which then morphs into its name in other languages—including Chinese:

Sometimes these old movies do this OK, sometimes they just toss up some squiggly lines that look Chinese and say, “Sure, why not?” and, at first glance, this looked like the latter.  I mean, at top, we have the “da”/big/大 “ radical with a ”ko“/mouth/口” in there, and the bottom looks a bit like “dian”/store/店,“ which is part of jiu-dian or bar/hotel, but that ain't jiu or 酒 above it. 

Or is it? It's actually not far off. Then I looked up how to say ”wonder" in Chinese. And here's how you'd write it out in traditional or non-simplified characters:

奇異酒店

Qi-yi jiu-dian! Fantastic/odd pub/hotel! It fits! The jiu is slightly off but not by much, and maybe that's how they wrote it then? Or the best they could do with neon Chinese?

I just like that some craftsman on the Warners lot, in the midst of the Great Depression, for two seconds of screentime that 99.99% of the audience couldn't read, worked to get it right. Restores a bit of my faith in humanity.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The most intriguing character isn’t the star, Alice White’s Dee Foster, nor any of her chorus-girl friends, nor her dance-director boyfriend, nor any of the mobsters vying for her attention; for me, it’s Scotty (Tom Dugan), the best friend of the dance-director boyfriend. Why him? Because he’s got a stuh-stuh-stuh … He’s got a stuh-stuh-stuh … He has trouble saying words.

And he keeps doing that: trying to say something, getting caught on a word, pivoting to another:

Bad? It’s gru-gru-gre … It’s: you said it alright.

Which is totally a Porky Pig move—six years before Porky Pig was created. (Sidenote: It took me decades to realize that Porky is trying to say “The End,” at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, but he can’t, which is why he pivots to “That’s all folks!”) I’m sure the trope of a stuttering pivot didn’t begin with Scotty. I could see it as a vaudeville staple. But I like the fact that Porky had antecedents.

The rest of the movie is less intriguing.

Bad girls
How awful are Dee’s pals Florine and Navarre (Marion Byron and Sally Eilers)? They spend the movie pushing their friend away from the guy she loves, and into the arms of a criminal she doesn’t, and to what end? Are they just assholes? The criminal’s got dough and the skinny director doesn’t, but isn’t he at least in the same racket as them? Doesn’t he have connections? Didn’t he get all of them a great writeup in Variety?

A Broadway gal who can take care of herself without help from the sugar boys—she’s a musketeer. A musketeer is a chorus girl who can get along without a cash-and-kiss popup. The three musketeers referred to are Dee Foster, Florine Chandler and Navarre King.

This is what the girls are reading one morning at the rooming house. And Billy (Charles Delaney) was the guy who planted the story! For them. And how is he repaid? “There are too many fat bankrolls flirting with you to go crying over that thin dime!” Florine tells Dee, with a dismissive wave, a few days later. (Great line, btw.) 

These three are part of a show on Broadway for which Billy is choreographer and/or director, and Dee is lead chorus. You know Alice White’s story, right? Charlie Chaplin thought his secretary had pizzazz and suggested she try the acting biz. By the tail-end of the silents she was a star—Warners’ answer to Clara Bowe. Controversies with various men interrupted her career in the early ’30s, she came back as a good supporting comedienne (see: “Picture Snatcher”), and then aged out and disappeared. She died in 1983.

This was her first talkie and it was a hit, but she’s not exactly Ginger Rogers. She has three big numbers, and the catchiest is the most problematic to modern sensibilities: “Jig Jig Jigaloo,” which begins “Down in Bananaland…” The chorus girls carry Zulu warrior/Art Deco shields.

Dee’s playing ingenue here, and I think she’s better with a little snap and crackle. She’s already wide-eyed, so no need to underline it. Her innocence is just a set-up for the men:

Brand: Mr. Gessant is in the importing business from Detroit.
Dee: Really? Importing? Oh, you mean perfume and things like that in bottles?
Stephanos: Yeah. In bottles.

Perc Gessant (Fred Kohler) turns out to be a nice, meaty bootlegger from Detroit who gets roped into card games, where NYC gangsters Brand and Stephanos (Maurice Black and Louis Natheaux) try to fleece him with a scheme involving an upstairs xylophone player. That old gag. To this end, they try to get him to stay in the city longer by shoving Dee in his face.

At the same time, Florine and Navarre are badmouthing Billy. At the same time, Blossom Royal (Jocelyn Lee) can’t keep her hands off Billy. That’s how Dee winds up with Gessant. Hell, she’s going to marry the lug. But this is when Gessant fleeces Brand and Stephanos with the same xylophone bit, and they don’t take kindly to it. On the way to the wedding ceremony—to take place, for some reason, in Dee’s old rooming house—Dee finally breaks it off with him. “I can’t go through with it,” she says. “I thought I could forget Billy, but I can’t.” He doesn’t believe her, but then he’s shot by the other gangsters—a helluva shot, an impossible shot. And at the wedding site, to which Billy has run like an ur-Ben Braddock, a wounded Gessant graciously bows out.

Billy: That’s a pretty big break for me. But that’s pretty tough on you. And I don’t feel so good about that. On the level I don’t, Mr. Gessant.
Gessant: That’s great of ya, kid. But it’s all in the game.

It’s all in the game. Another interesting antecedent. Everything new is old again.

Then Gessant gives his poker winnings to Billy so he can star Dee in a Broadway musical, where we get a closing number that ain’t exactly Ginger Rogers.

Grain of salt
Mervyn LeRoy directed Alice White quite a bit. In his autobiography, “Take One,” LeRoy says it’s because, while she couldn’t act, he could get something out of her:

Poor Alice. You had to tell her everything you wanted her to do, and then go out and practically do it for her. There was a dance scene in the picture, and I wound up waving a handkerchief at her when I wanted her to move one arm or the other. She couldn’t remember her movements without that off-camera semaphore system, but she tried hard.

Take all this with a grain of salt. On the same page, LeRoy claims he directed James Cagney in Hot Stuff in 1929 when Cagney wouldn’t land in Hollywood for another year; and he says he discovered and named Loretta Young for a 1931 picture called “Too Young to Marry,” when, by then, she’d already starred in dozens of film as Loretta Young. 

“Broadway Babies” is one of the many early musicals, almost all of them backstage musicals, that appeared with the advent of sound. They went out of fashion quickly but then roared back with a vengeance with Warners’ 1933 Busby Berkeley triumvirate: “42nd Street,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” and “Footlight Parade.” Apparently the key was an earnest and bland frontpiece romance (Powell-Keeler), a lot of backstage backbiting, and chorus girls flashing skin.

Speaking of: This is from the beginning of the movie. I imagine jaws dropping along with the stock market.

Navarre appreciates the writeup but could you knock first?

WARNING: SPOILERS

In 1976’s “Silver Streak,” written by Colin Higgins, we spend more than an hour waiting for the new hot comic—Richard Pryor—to show up. When he does, we go, “About time!”

In 1978’s “Foul Play,” written and directed by Colin Higgins, we spend more than spend 40 minutes waiting for the new hot comic—Chevy Chase—to show up after a brief, bumbling appearance before the opening credits. When he does, we go, “Uh ... I guess?”

Keeping the big new comedy name at arm’s length, and then springing him on us as if he were Spielberg’s shark, probably wasn’t a theme for Higgins. Just happenstance. Both movies are about innocents (Gene Wilder, Goldie Hawn) caught in someone else’s murderous plot; both comedians are the second-half helpmates. The movies are Hitchcockian homages but this one is underlined. Is that why Higgins began to direct? He felt Arthur Hiller in “Silver Streak” didn’t nail those moments?

Sick transit
This was Chevy Chase’s first movie after leaving “Saturday Night Live,” so I remember it being a big cultural deal: the first Hollywood movie from the first breakaway star of the new big sketch-comedy show. Sadly, my father’s synopsis was echoed by a lot of critics 

Even at age 15 I felt this, but then I didn’t get the game then. I thought “SNL” lampooned the culture because they had better ideas, and once it was their turn, boy, they’d really show everyone. Instead, they became part of the same hypocrisy.

Dad had a whole host of problems with “Foul Play,” I remember. About two-thirds of the way in, the San Francisco cops finally believe Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) that men are trying to kill her because they find evidence of an imminent assassination plot. But who will be assassinated? The cops scratch their heads over this for minutes of screentime. Meanwhile, on a TV in the background, we see that the Pope arriving in San Francisco.

Even after they figure out the Pope is the target—because some radicals have a post-Sixties disappointment in the wealth of religions, or some such—and the venue is the San Francisco Opera House’s performance of “The Mikado,” starting right now, they can’t just pick up a phone and say “Get the Pope out of there!” Chevy and Goldie have to spend, what, 20 minutes of screentime careening through the hills of San Francisco in three different vehicles, while mocking rural America (the “Far out!” dude) and Japanese tourists (“Kojak! Bang bang!”)? It's kind of interminable.

But it was fun revisiting this, because it reminded of all I didn’t know at age 15. Among the remembered revelations:

• I didn’t know who/what the Pope was, and why he was important
• I didn’t know from albinos

Gloria Mundy (god, that name!) is a recently divorced librarian whose friends are giving her polar-opposite advice. One says you need to get back in the game, girl, take chances, while the other, her colleague, Stella (Marilyn Sokol), constantly warns her about being raped. She suggests carrying mace and brass knuckles.

Gloria winds up listening to the former first. Driving home along the California coast from an afternoon party—with Barry Manilow’s “Ready to Take a Chance Again” playing over the opening credits—she decides the way back into the game is to pick up a hitchhiker standing next to a fizzling car. His name is Scotty (Bruce Solomon), and he seems distracted. He’s less interested in the absolutely adorable blonde who picked him up than in the car that seems to be ominously tailing them. Back in town they agree to meet that night at an arthouse cinema showing an old Alan Ladd picture (the non-existent “Killers Walk Among Us”), but not before he leaves his cigarette pack, with some crucial film, in her purse.

Then he doesn’t show. So she goes in alone. Then he shows up mid-movie and bleeds all over the popcorn before collapsing. She screams and runs to get the manager. They stop the film, turn up the lights, and … nothing. No body. No blood on the popcorn. Nothing. No one believes her. No one saw other men hustling the body out.

Let's pause for a second. Later we find out Scotty was an undercover cop, so … why, when they first get in town, doesn’t he get dropped off at the precinct? Or when he gets mortally wounded—shouldn’t he find a cop? Or a hospital? No, remember the cute blonde who suggested a movie date? Much better! Oh, and don’t tell her all you know, like “Hey, they’re going to kill the Pope!” No, be elliptical. Just say: “Beware of the Dwarf!”

Anyway, now the bad guys are after her—and she doesn’t know why. The film in the cigarette pack, by the way, is a true Hitchcockian maguffin. It never factors in. It winds up in a fireplace and no one ever sees it. It only serves to get Gloria in trouble.

The next day at work, she’s told a dwarf came by to see her while she was at lunch. Cue ominous music. For some reason, she still closes up, which is when she encounters not a dwarf but an albino! Who is trying to kill her! Escaping to a nearby singles bar, she asks a hapless man (Dudley Moore, making his Hollywood movie debut) to take her home. He does. Throughout, of course, he keeps getting the wrong idea. She says things that indicate sex, but in a tone that indicates not, and he keeps ignoring the tone. His pad is also a fount of sad ’70s sexual kitsch. Thankfully, she doesn’t have to escape from him. She just has to look at him, stripped to his undies, binocs around his neck, while a porno plays on the wall, and say, “What are you doing?” and he’s properly shamed. Hey, guess what? She encounters him again in a massage parlor! And then again when he's conducting the San Francisco Opera! So wait, shouldn't he have a better apartment then? Isn't that a prestige gig?

Anyway, like this for a while. Her building manager is the kindly Mr. Hennessey (Burgess Meredith) who knows karate. A dwarf shows up (Billy Barty) and she attacks him and sends him to the hospital—even though he’s just a Bible salesman. Turns out Scotty’s message is even more elliptical than we thought: “The Dwarf” isn’t a little person at all but the nickname of an assassin with the improbable name of Stiltskin (Marc Lawrence). He’s working with a clown college of bad guys, including the twin brother of the archbishop we see killed in the cold open (Eugene Roche), and his housekeeper, the severely German Gerda Casswell (Rachel Roberts), who, with the Albino (William Frankfather), is leading the charge. 

Detective Tony Carlson (Chase) eventually figures all this out after many glib remarks while bedding the woman he’s charged with protecting. Chase’s shtick has aged poorly. Lines like this, which had a cutting-edge insouciance back then, come off differently now:

Listen, it’s Gloria, right? You're a really nice girl and I'm a nice guy, and you're very pretty with or without cleavage. And what do you say … would you like to take a shower?

Or this:

Tony: I play Detective. You play Lady in Distress.
Gloria: Hey, wait a minute. It’s my ass they're after!
Tony: I’m sorry. You're right. That was a stupid, glib, chauvinist remark and I apologize. It is your ass they're after. And it's my job to see to it that …  I get there first.

Hyuk.

Old times
The movie caused controversy, I believe, with the albino community, and maybe the little person community. Did Japanese tourists complain? Or hicks who say “Far out!” too much? They all had cause.

But the movie did well at the box office, and Chase and Hawn teamed up again two years later with “Seems Like Old Times.” That one did less well. Both had bigger hits that same year: “Caddyshack” for him, “Private Benjamin” for her. Writer-director Colin Higgins also hit it big with “9 to 5.” Then he did “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” which tanked. He died young, sadly.