Increasingly it feels like nothing works anymore.

Yesterday afternoon I was meeting a friend at the Mountaineering Club, a rooftop bar atop the Graduate Hotel in Seattle's University District. It was a beautiful day, Seattle's first 80-degree day of the year, and I drove over, parked, starting walking, then ran into what we often run into in Seattle: a bit of unpleasantness. This time it was a shirtless, shoeless man, 30s probably, vociferous and angry, sitting on the sidewalk. Was he talking to me or just talking out loud? I could see blood on his forehead and blood on one of his bare feet and he was asking me to call 911. It was more demanding than beseeching, but I stopped, took in the scene. Yes, he seemed to be bleeding. Yes, I guess I should call.

So I did. I explained to the female operator: I'm passing by, a guy on the sidewalk, bleeding—sotto voce: he might not be all there—and he asked me to call. 50th and 11th. Then there was a bit of a delay. She was asking more questions than I'd anticipated and eventually a male operator got on the line, too.

Male Operator: Are you near the Fire Dept.?
Me: Yes, it's across the street.
Male Operator: Well, can't you just walk him over?

I was a bit stunned. Was 911 part of the Fire Dept.? I thought it was—I guess cops? Or its own entity? Plus I'd never heard a 911 operator make this kind of request before. Wasn't it usually “Wait there.” Instead I got: “We're a little busy, how about coming over here instead.”

Me: Well, I...
Male Operator: Can he walk?
Me: I guess? It's just...
Female Operator: Sir, do you feel safe?
Me: It's more—he's not very responsive. I don't know if he would go. Again, he's not really all there.

Mostly I didn't relish the idea of trying to convince him. Because I didn't care that much. I wanted to do bare minimum. Plus, as I looked over, he no longer seemed to be bleeding from his head. And the blood on his foot seemed pretty red. Too red? Like fake? Was the whole thing a scam?

But I walked across the street, rang the doorbell of the Fire Dept., explained what was up. Everyone seemed confused by my presence, and in the end it turned out an operator had already dispatched someone, and that was that. Just another odd moment in another odd day in another odd, awful year. Walking away, I had this thought: “Even 911.”

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Today's post is brought to you by Immaculate Grid, about which, yes, Tim and I used to do a SubStack, and may again in the future. In the meantime ...

The grid today included a column on players who got 200+ hits in a season crossed with three original-16 teams: Reds, Cards and A's. I went with Frank McCormick, Lou Brock and Al Simmons. McCormick was a guess. Well, all three were, but Brock got 3,000 hits and didn't walk much, and Al Simmons had those amazing early 1930s years, so those weren't fingers-crossed guesses as much as McCormick. I just didn't want to do Pete Rose ... which, yes, turned out to be the No. 1 answer for that square: Something like 85% chose him.

With reason. This is how many guys hit 200+ in a season for each of those franchises:

• Cards: 21
• A's 8
• Reds: 6

SIX?? And get this: no one since Pete Rose in 1977. That's shocking for two reasons. It means Rose didn't get to 200+ hits the year he hit in 44 straight games AND no Cincinnati Red has gotten 200+ hits in a season since 1977! I.e., since “Star Wars” came out! Since Jimmy Carter's first year in office! Since The New York Times first began to let Donald Trump lie all over its pages! That far back. 

It made me wonder if that's the longest 200+ hit drought for any team. Yep, and it's not even close.

LAST PLAYER TO GET 200+ HITS FOR EACH FRANCHISE

The Tampa Bay Rays are the only franchise that's never had a 200+ hit guy. They topped out with—believe it or not—Aubrey Huff, about to embarrass himself yet again a social platform near you, who got 198 in 2003. He and Carl Crawford (194 in 2005) are the only Rays/D-Rays to top 190. 

But the Rays have an excuse. They've only been around since 1998. The Reds have been swinging bats since basically the Civil War—the 19th century one. In case you're curious, here are the Cincy Six:

1. Cy Seymour (1905)
2. Jake Daubert (1922)
3. Frank McCormick (1938, 1939)
4. Vada Pinson (1959, 1961, 1963, 1965)
5. Frank Robinson (1962)
6. Pete Rose (1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977)

So is Cincy being punished for all the 200+ seasons it got with Pete Rose? Or because of what Pete Rose became? Or is? Is it the Curse of Charlie Hustle? 

What stunned me about the Twins, meanwhile, is that their last guy to do it, Paul Molitor, did it in his age-40 season, just three seasons from retirement, and he managed *225*. Wow. Even Luis Arraez, when he won the batting title as a Twin in 2022, managed just 173. That's how hard it is to do this thing. 

It helps to be a free-swinger, of course. There's a reason Miguel Tejada and Vlad Guerrero are on the above chart twice. There's a reason, too, that Ted Williams, Barry Bonds and Frank Thomas never got 200+: too many walks. That's probably why, in the Moneyball age, the 200+ stat doesn't seem to have the cachet it used to.

But that's no excuse, Cincinnati. 

Rule No. 1: This isn't Ray Harryhausen

WARNING: SPOILERS

For years, as if in a dream, I remembered a film my brother Chris and I saw at the Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis. Mostly I remembered two scenes. At one point, the hero cuts through the villain with a sword but it has no effect. The blade is pulled clean, and the villain laughs and reveals that his heart is locked in an impenetrable tower far, far away. As a result, at the end, the hero treks to the tower, takes the beating heart—entombed in glass—and tosses it over the side. I had no idea the movie’s name, its stars, or when we saw it.

Thanks to the internet, I now know all of that.

The movie is “Captain Sindbad,” a 1963 King Brothers Production filmed in Germany, with an extra “d” in the title character’s name to avoid copyright infringement. It starred TV’s Zorro, Guy Williams, and German actress and songstress Heidi Bruhl, and Chris and I probably saw it in Oct. 1971—probably Saturday, Oct. 16, or Sunday, Oct. 17—since it looked like it played only one weekend. I would’ve been 8, Chris 10. Third and fifth grade.

And now, after all these years, I’ve seen it again. 

Horrors beyond imagination
Why did I bother? Nostalgia. Curiosity. Basically it was a chance to revisit a childhood dream and see if there was anything there. To see if it explained anything about me to me.

Bruhl plays Princess Jana of the Arabian kingdom of Baristan who is awaiting the return of the titular hero, whom she loves and plans to marry. Unfortunately, Baristan is no longer ruled by her father but by the evil El Kerim (Pedro Armendariz, Kerim Bay in “From Russian With Love”), who wants to marry her. (Yes, marry. This is a kids story.) Apparently El Kerim stole a magic ring from the king’s wizard, Galgo (Abraham Sofaer), and he uses it to control both king and wizard.

Not that Galgo needs much controlling. The movie begins with him creating a rain cloud to water a parched plant and then haplessly losing control of the spell. Everyone’s acting style here is different: Bruhl is earnest, Williams is so self-assured as to be somnambulant, Armendariz is over-the-top but fun, while Sofaer is the Everest of over-the-top. He chews his scenes to bits.

His next trick? He turns Jana into a “firebird” (a small creature with a tuft of blonde hair) so she can fly to Sindbad’s ship and alert him to Kerim’s machinations. Two problems: Sindbad has no idea this is her and he isn’t smart enough to notice the message tied to her feet until it’s too late. Because Kerim, who is smart, gets wise, and after punishing Galgo (twisting his ring spins the wizard’s head around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist”), he has Galgo turn his guards into hawks, who then bombard Sindbad’s ship with boulders. For some reason, the hawks are normal-sized while the boulders are huge.

Shipwrecked, and moving through Baristan with his ever-loyal men, Sindbad has himself arrested for stealing a melon in order to get into the palace and get close to El Kerim. Ah, but Jana tears up when he’s lashed, and anyway Kerim knows what’s up, and after they duel and Kerim is bloodlessly run through, Sindbad is sentenced to fight in the arena. Did they have Roman-style arena battles in Arabia? Sure, toss it all in.

His opponent is a giant, slathering, invisible monster, which is both tougher for Sindbad and easier on the film’s budget. After tense moments backing away from giant footprints, Sindbad climbs the arena walls and dumps an oil cauldron on it, then makes his getaway. But how to defeat the literally heartless El Kerim? It’s Galgo, more than halfway through the film, who delivers the great, cheesy line that sets Sindbad and his men on the real adventure:

There, in that tower, surrounded by horrors beyond imagination, lies the living bleeding heart of El Kerim.

That’s the line we were waiting for. I liked it so much I added it to the film’s quote section on IMDb. 

So what are these “horrors beyond imagination”? Everything a low budget will allow:

• After trekking through a desert, they wind up climbing big stairs covered with vines and busted pottery, and half-hidden in fog
• Past a chained door, they encounter a swamp with ferocious animals sounds (monkeys, frogs), where a man-eating plant nabs one guy and a team of slow-moving, animatronic crocodiles another
• Now it’s fire and lava, one man dies, another shouts “We’re all finished! Let’s go back!’ and he gets it
• Sindbad battles a multiheaded dragon with glowing red eyes until his men drop a rock on it
• Inside the tower, Sindbad climbs a thick, dusty rope with the aid of a hook, but at the top, protecting the living bleeding heart of El Kerim, he must fight A GIANT HAND!

Meanwhile, in Baristan, El Kerim gets ready to marry Princess Jana, but only with the blessing of her father—which is charmingly old-fashioned for a dictator. Except the King doesn’t give his blessing. Rebuffed, Kerim’s plans shift from marrying Jana to executing her. This is the point, however, when Sindbad is climbing the humungous dusty rope, and his actions clang the tower bell, whose reverberations shake not only Kerim’s heart but Kerim himself. Figuring it all out (he really is the movie’s smartest character), he has Galgo fly them to the tower to prevent Sindbad from skewering the heart. A duel ensues until Sindbad yells at Galgo to make himself useful and throw the heart over the side. Which he does. And Kerim, already run-through by Sindbad, finally bleeds and dies.

Then Jana gets her fairytale wedding with Sindbad. THE END.

The arena scene, not exactly teeming with extras

Almost inspiring
Yes, my memory was slightly off: the heart has no glass case and it’s Galgo rather than Sindbad who destroys it. The best thing? It’s shaped like a valentine. It’s how you imagine hearts looking when you’re 5 years old.

So did “Sindbad” help explain anything about me to me? Nah. Before she can turn into a bird, Jana has to disrobe, but manages only one layer before the camera pans discreetly away. I’m sure my blood jumped at that. At another point, Galgo concocts a potion that lengthens his arm, and it creeps through the castle to Kerim’s room where it tries to remove the magic ring. Instead, Kerim wakes up, burns the hand and laughs maliciously. I’m sure that creeped me out.

So why was this 1963 movie playing in Minneapolis in 1971? Turns out it was part of the MGM Children’s Matinees series, which ran from 1970 to 1972, and included “Tom Thumb” and “Treasure Island.” I don’t know if Mom shooed us out of the house for this one, or if I, a fan of a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt,” insisted we go.

Its producers, the King Brothers, née Morris, Frank and Hyman Kozinsky, had a several-decade run pursuing the cheap and profitable, generally a step behind whatever the curve was. They made gangster movies in the’40s (including “Dillinger”), westerns in the ’50s, and, post-“Godzilla,” produced the U.S. version of Toho’s “Rodan” as well as the Godzilla knockoff “Gorgo.” “Captain Sindbad,” with its extra “d,” came about in the wake of the 1958 box-office success of “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” According to AFI, Variety kept touting the movie’s preproduction promise, including “a chariot race, a battle between two elephants, and an arena scene requiring 3,000 background actors.” Nope, none of it. There’s talent here, certainly. Its director, Byron Haskin, did the original “War of the Worlds,” while its assistant editor became one of the great directors of the 1970s: Hal Ashby. But the budget was low and whoever did the special effects wasn’t exactly Ray Harryhausen. Or wasn’t allowed to become him.

The cast is kind of fun—both Starsky and Hutch's harried captain and Stonn from the “Amok Time” episode of “Star Trek” make appearances—and it is truly international. Sofaer was born in 19th century Burma, Armendariz during the Mexican revolution, and Bruhl in Nazi Germany during World War II. That people from such diverse, turbulent backgrounds could come together in a time of peace to make a piece of crap like this, well, it's almost inspiring.

As the camera pans discreetly away

Pinch-hitting for Superman

The last time I saw Chris Sale pitch in person was in July 2017. He was tall and lean and calm, and he dealt with the Mariners at Safeco Field rather handily: 3 hits over 7 innings, one walk, 11 Ks. It was his 13th victory that season—his first season with the Red Sox after seven with the White Sox—and the 87th of his super-promising young career.

Wednesday afternoon I saw him again, a 35-year-old in a Braves uniform, and his interim, like a lot of ours, hasn't exactly been stellar. I guess 37-27 is nothing to sneeze at, but it's over 6+ seasons, which rounds out to about 6-4 per, and that's including a pretty good romp in 2018 when he went 12-4. Injuries, of course, a way-too-common contemporary baseball storyline, are the reason. But is he back? Wednesday he handled the Mariners well enough, allowing 1 run over 5 innings, with zero walks and 9 strikeouts, as the Braves avoided a sweep with a 5-2 victory. He's now 4-1 on the season with a 3.44 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP. More power to him. I miss the days when the best pitchers in baseball stuck around for more than a few years. 

The Mariners, for their part, threw out 24-year-old Emerson Hancock for the ninth start of his career, but a lot of that five-spot wasn't his fault. Yes, he kept walking guys. In fact, in the 1st, the Braves didn't even put the ball in play: K, BB, BB, K, K. I yelled: TRUST THE GUYS BEHIND YOU! Bad advice, it turned out. The game got away from us in the 4th, when, with one out, shortstop Orlando Arcia lofted a high popup into shallow right, and three guys converged. It was RF Mitch Haniger's, but for some reason he didn't seem to be tracking it well, and the ball plopped out of his glove for a two-base error. It was as close to a Charlie Brown moment as you'll see at the professional level. If he'd caught it, Hancock would've had a 1-2-3 inning. Instead, with two outs, Ronald Acuna Jr. singled to left and Arcia scored from second. Then Ozzie Albies singled. Then Austin Riley tripled over Haniger's head—a tougher play, but another where he got his glove on the ball—and that was it for Emerson.

Hancock wasn't stellar but a lot of the loss belongs to Haniger. Besides the Charlie Brown play, he went 0-5 with three strikeouts, and now his season line is down to .217/.278/.368. Mid-April, he was .300/.382/.500. Since April 17, he's got four hits in 41 at-bats. Ouch. Is he injured? Either way, should he be batting second, Scott Servais?

I went to the game with my friend Tim, never a Servais fan, who noticed that the Braves kept tossing left-handers at us: Sale, Dylan Lee, A.J. Minter. And then in the 8th, they tapped rightie Joe Jimenez to face our 6-8 guys, none of whom are hitting above .200, and who bat rightie, rightie, and switch. Tim assumed it was a good time for a lefty pinch-hitter like Josh Rojas, who's been knocking the cover off the ball. Which is exactly what happened. For the switch-hitter. 

“Does that make any sense?” Tim asked the air.

“Maybe he's weaker from the left side?” I offered.

And he is: .211. But the others aren't exactly great shakes against righties, either: .218, .197. Plus the switch-hitter was EL.com favorite Sam Haggerty, he of the “Godfather” walkup music, who made a nice Superman catch earlier in the game. Now that I think about it, so did the No. 6 guy, Dylan Moore, our shortstop. The Braves did blister the ball. I guess we were lucky it was only 5-2. 

“I guess we knew a lot of this, but it's jarring to hear it directly from a witness—that through all of these allegations Donald Trump has made about fake news, and about the media and lying and everything else, there was a whole system he had in place for literally the planting of fake news and the killing or the deep-sixing of correct and true news. I mean, at some point, Pecker testifies on the stand that Michael Cohen would call me and say, 'We would like you to run a negative article on a certain—let's say for argument sake—Ted Cruz. Then he, Michael Cohen, would send me information about Ted Cruz or Ben Carson or Marco Rubio, and that was the basis of our story. And then we would embellish it from there.'

”So I guess there's nothing necessarily unlawful about that. I guess there's a potential seed of a defamation or a libel claim there. But this whole machinery of the creation and dissemination of fake news against the backdrop of Donald Trump making those allegations against the mainstream media, it's a little jarring, isn't it?“

-- Preet Bharara, ”Trump Fined and Weinstein Overturned,“ The Cafe Insider Podcast. 

Completely agree. At the same time, I'm old enough to remember when ”fake news" became news. In the runup to the 2016 election, The New York Times ran several stories about how, particularly on social media sites, misleading information or fake news was being disseminated, and post-election, when we saw the real damage it had done, there was much national hand-wringing over fake news and (Mark Zuckerberg notwithstanding) a brief attempt to come to terms with it. And then Trump took ownership of the phrase. Any story that included negative inferences to him became fake news. He repeated it, over and over, and his acolytes repeated it, over and over, and that became the drumbeat, drowning out any real discussion. And now here we are. And it's a beautiful day.

But I'm glad Preet pulls back like this occasionally for a bigger picture. Not enough commentators do. 

“But no one gets everything wrong. I made three huge mistakes early on in my trip around this love shack that radically shaped my life. I see myself (when I look at myself this way) as a just-under-mid-size sea cucumber of clay left behind by a quitter on a wheel in a friendly neighborhood pottery studio, drying to crumbling uselessness in the dark, never to be finished, fired and glazed. But even just going THAT far with it, sparing us all the paralyzing embarrassment of cataloging my three fatal mistakes, even just going so far as to NUMBER them the problem becomes apparent, namely: Wherever the searchlight goes, the prisoner is. By which I mean: ”If you look for the causes of your despair, you'll find them (nevermind that there's only one); and if you go looking for reasons to persevere, you'll find those too! Wherever the searchlight goes, the prisoner is.“ 

-- Craig Wright, ”The Worst Postivie Record Review" on his Substack

WARNING: SPOILERS

A few memories.

After Steve Martin hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the second time, so around Feb. 1977, I took the bus with my friend Peter to buy comics at Shinders in downtown Minneapolis. There was a shoe store across the street that we never went to, but on this day, for some reason, we stopped in. I think Peter needed something. And we began telling the salesgirl about this ad plan we’d concocted about how some shoe store—hey, maybe this one!—could team up with Steve Martin on a Happy Feet campaign. We probably did the little insane dance, too. Poor salesgirl. She didn’t know from Steve Martin (“Who's Steve Martin?” she said) and we didn’t know how the world worked. 

That same year (yes, just checked: Nov. 11, 1977), my brother Chris and I went to a Steve Martin concert at the 5,000-seat Northrop Auditorium on the University of Minnesota campus. I think we got Star-Tribune seats, because we were second row center. At one point, Steve asked for a volunteer with a big voice from the audience, and while I dithered in my head (“Oooh, I don’t know, that’s really putting myself out there…”), my brother shot his hand up. And was chosen. He talked with Steve Martin:

Steve: What’s your name?
Chris: Chris Lundegaard!
Steve [chuckles]: No, what’s your full name?

(I think that’s how it went. I wish Chris were here to corroborate.)

Here's why he was chosen: Steve had Chris pick a card, the King of Hearts, and Steve said he wanted everyone to concentrate on the card; and when the vibes were just right, Chris should shout as loud as he could, “KING OF HEARTS, COME DOWN AND DANCE!!” I think it was a kind of satire on the paranormal shit popular at the time. Because after my brother shouted the line, Steve took the card and danced it down his arm and around the stage, making dopey “Doop-de-doo” sounds.

A month later Steve made the cover of Rolling Stone (“Bananaland’s Top Banana”), and the following spring he was on the cover of Newsweek (“A Wild and Crazy Guy”). His album “Let’s Get Small” (1977) went platinum and his follow-up “Wild and Crazy Guy” (1978) went double platinum, while “King Tut,” reached No. 17 on the billboard singles chart. And suddenly all the kids in my ninth-grade class were huge fans. In English, I remember Tim F. imitating him ad nauseum: “Wild and crazy,” he’d say. “Wild and crazy.” He made the last word sound like creh-see. It drove me nuts. Guy was late to the party, his imitation sucked, and girls liked him better?

Anyway, that’s how Steve Martin broke from my perspective. “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces” is how he broke from his. Basically, he kept butting his head against the massive indifference of the world until slowly it began to crack and something trickled out. And then it became a deluge.

Chaplin no Chaplin
Here’s that journey, per the doc:

• Young Steve had an early visceral need to be on stage
• His magic act seemed a dead end unless he added comedy
• He liked a girl who told him to go to college, where he applied the methodology of philosophy to stand-up comedy and became an early disruptor; he broke down the Bob Hope-ian elements, removing the cue to laugh; there was tension without release
• His onstage persona shifted to a parody of the overconfident untalented showman
• He struggled for 10 years

He struggled, in part, because he was doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing. This was a conscious decision. Everyone’s doing politics, so I won’t. Everyone’s serious, so I’ll be silly. Everyone dresses down, I’ll dress up. I’m curious what drove that urge. It’s so smart.

“I always thought of him as the door out of the’60s,” a talking head says in Part I. “You could be silly again.” Yes, but there were a lot of such doors. Our most popular TV shows went from working class and multi-ethnic (“All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son”) to white and cleavage-filled (“Three’s Company,” “Charlie’s Angels”), while our most popular movies went from serious and scary (“The Godfather,” “The Exorcist”) to safe and uplifting (“Star Wars,” “Superman”). That was the zeitgeist. That was the wave. Steve anticipated it and rode it. 

So why did he quit doing standup after he’d succeeded beyond his or anyone’s wildest dreams? When he’d become, per Jerry Seinfeld, the most popular comedian ever? I always assumed he got tired of it. But he also admits he didn’t have anywhere to take it. He’d spent 10 years creating this persona, this concept, and now everyone knew it. Audiences repeated it back to him. He didn’t see a path in standup—except out.

That’s part I—his search, rise and supernova status—and it’s a particular kind of documentary: historical footage and talking heads as voiceovers. We hear Jerry Seinfeld, Lorne Michaels and Adam Gopnik; we don’t see them.

Part II is a different particular kind of documentary. It’s recent footage, filmed by documentarian Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom”), of Steve living his life with his wife, a former New Yorker fact-checker, and their daughter, represented as a stick figure to protect her. He makes a poached egg. Martin Short comes over and they gibe each other and then work on their routines in which they gibe each other. They go to the dry cleaners, they go for a bike ride, they work on “Only Murders in the Building.” It’s not exactly wild and crazy, but it’s sweet and sometimes funny, and anyway Steve was never a wild and crazy guy. One of the big reveals of his great memoir, “Born Standing Up,” was, rather than being the hippest dude in the land, which is what he seemed to us in 1977, he was the squarest. That’s underscored here.

Steve talks through his post-standup life: the movies, the relationships, the depression. He recounts seeing “Flashdance” in a movie theater in London in 1983, and one of the characters, a standup, says he wants to be Steve Martin, and Steve Martin, watching, thought, “No, you don’t.” If part I is the search for success, part II is the search for happiness. It’s less deluge than revelation: “Oh, it’s right over here. I should’ve looked over here before.”

A lot of his unhappiness stems from his relationship with his father, Glenn, who was, like many fathers of the day, emotionally distant. He was also wary of the path his son was taking. “I always thought my father was a little embarrassed by me,” Steve says. “He couldn’t quite be proud of an unconventional showbiz act that he didn’t quite understand.” It’s a reasonable concern but oddly it doesn’t go away even when the son becomes a phenomenon. After the premiere of “The Jerk,” family and friends went out to dinner to celebrate, and one of Steve’s friends asked Glenn what he thought of seeing his son in the movie. “Well,” Glenn said, “he’s no Charlie Chaplin.”

Watching, I wondered if we all weren’t a little hard on Steve Martin’s movie career. There was this expectation that because he’d remade standup comedy he would remake movie comedy, too, and that’s a big ask. It’s a bit Paul McCartney after The Beatles. “What's this Ram shit?” Interestingly, or poignantly, Martin did become one of the most gifted physical comedians since Chaplin, particularly with his mid-80s output: “All of Me” and “Roxanne,” in particular. A personal favorite of mine was his insanely joyous and childish dance after his son makes a catch in a little league baseball game in “Parenthood.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen it without laughing. 

The wave
What I’d like to know that Neville doesn’t ask? Did Martin anticipate anything with film the way he did with standup? Did he try to do the opposite of what everyone else was doing? Or is that not possible in such a collaborative and established medium, where failure means millions of dollars rather than a rough night?

There’s no inkling in the doc of this grand irony, either: The less-serious, post-sixties wave Steve rode to massive success never ebbed; and it kind of stranded him in the 1990s as he tried to smarten up—doing essays for The New Yorker, Mamet on film and Beckett on stage. When, that is, he wasn’t doing meh reboots of “Sgt. Bilko,” “Cheaper By the Dozen” or “The Pink Panther.” (I know Scorsese talks about doing one of them and one for yourself, but those are some extremes.)

I’m also curious why the doc contains no mention of Carl Reiner, Robin Williams and Bernadette Peters. I could’ve used some discussion there rather than more shots of Steve putzing around the house. But we do get a poignant remembrance of a John Candy speech that was cut from “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” and that, even to this day, moves Martin to tears.

Is that his most beloved film? Seems like it. 

I am surprised that “Roxanne” is so ill-thought-of while “Grand Canyon,” which felt insufferable to me three decades ago, makes the cut. Maybe I should rewatch some of these.

Today is my brother's birthday. First time he's not around to celebrate it. He would've been 63.

I talked to my sister the other day, and she has a bit of a phantom-limb thing going: “I should see if we should pick up Chris on the way to Dad's.” That kind of thing. I don't. For most of the last 30 years, Chris and I didn't live in the same city, so there's not those automatic thoughts for me. I'd say I'm painfully aware that he isn't here but after five months it's more numbly aware. I also know, more than before, that Death doesn't stop to let you lick your wounds. It doesn't care. It keeps going. And going. And it'll get to you soon enough. And it's not personal. Life keeps going, too. That litter box still needs cleaning. Groceries still need buying. 

Here's what I keep thinking: “I wish Chris were here to see this.” “I wish I could talk to Chris about this.” “I wonder what Chris remembers about this.”

There's no real point to this post. Just another day where I feel like I should do or say something and don't know what that is.

“It's important to recognize the historical moment: that notwithstanding all the dilatory tactics, the delays, the whining, the yelling, the motion practice, that even though you have three trials that are delayed for some reason—whether it's the Supreme Court or this ethics issue that was raised in Georgia, or other appeals issues in the DC case—this trial is going forward, and someone who was the president of the United States, aspires to be the president of the United States again, with secret service agents in tow, is finally facing accountability. ... That's something I think is important and special to acknowledge.”

-- former U.S. attorney for SDNY Preet Bharara, on his podcast “Cafe Insider,” last week as voir dire began in the Trump hush-money trial in Manhattan

WARNING: SPOILERS

Clint Eastwood became a major movie star the year after I was born. I’m 61 now and he’s still a major movie star. He’s had a run like almost no one in Hollywood history.

And he owes it all to James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Eric Fleming.

Those are among the actors who turned down the lead in “Il Magnifico Strangero” a western to be helmed by some sword-and-sandals Italian guy, Sergio Somethingorother, and filmed in the backwater of Spain—get this, without an audio track. It would be dubbed. Oof. Plus they were about to get sued by Akira Kurosawa for plagiarizing “Yojimbo,” so the movie might not even be seen in the States anyway. Thanks but no thanks.

Eastwood, 34 years old and on hiatus from another season of playing callow junior partner Rowdy Yates in the TV western “Rawhide,” was initially a no, too. But he agreed to read the script, caught the whiffs of “Yojimbo,” and overall liked its roughness. He liked how, in the opening scene, the hero, Joe, witnessed a cruel act—a child kept from his mother, who was apparently a concubine—and did nothing. He just kept getting the lay of the land. That made sense to him. He wound up reasoning: If the movie bombed, most people in the States wouldn’t even know it existed; and he’d get to see Italy and Spain. So why not?

Here’s what Eastwood brought to the project:

• The guns, belt, boots and spurs he wore on “Rawhide.”
• Several boxes of thin, foul-smelling cigars that he cut into thirds. “They put you in the right mood—cantankerous,” he later told his biographer, Richard Schickel
• The leather vest he wears more often than the iconic poncho
• His dialogue trimmed to its essence

What he brought, in other words, was the Clint Eastwood persona—as if he already had it fully formed in his head. Indeed, when director Sergio Leone tried to get him to act more like Toshiro Mifune in “Yojimbo,” Eastwood told him, “Sergio, I’ve got to do my own thing here.”

The anarchic threat
I’ve never seen “Rawhide,” but apparently it was a bit like “The Lone Ranger” in that Bob Dylan way. In each episode, Rowdy Yates and Gil Favor, leaders of season-long cattle drives, would encounter folks on the trail, often name guest stars, and help them solve whatever problem they had, then move on. But Schickel identifies a deeper theme:

Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian and The High Chaparral featured all-wise elders rallying a real or surrogate family against the anarchic threat posed by the outsider, the other.

Eastwood’s role was, of course, restorer of the status quo, but he was bored with it. With “Strangero,” he got to play the outsider and anarchic threat. More, since the town of San Miguel is corrupt, the threat he poses is not only anarchic but moral. It’s necessary. Thus, in a blink, Eastwood went from a ’50s sensibility (the system is good and I'll uphold it) to a decidedly ’60s one (the system is corrupt and I'm going to bring it down). All within the framework of the western genre.

He starts out as a stranger, stopping for water, and silently witnessing the tableau of mewling child and distraught concubine. There’s no dog carrying a human hand here, as in “Yojimbo,” but as he rides into town he sees a noose hanging from a tree, frightened faces in windows, and a somnambulant horserider who’s actually a dead man with a note tacked to his back: “Adios, Amigo.” A bell ringer laughingly tells him he could get rich or get killed. The latter nearly happens when a gang of toughs pick on him but merely spook his horse. As it rides off, he grabs a wooden overhang, swings for a moment, then says his first line of dialogue to a townie: “Hello.” We’re eight minutes in.

The townie, Silvanito (Jose Calvo), tell him two families, the Baxters and Rojos, are fighting for supremacy of San Miguel and creating chaos as a result. The town is dead, Silvanito says, and urges the American to leave as soon as he can. Joe's got another idea.

Baxters over there, Rojos there, me right in the middle. … Crazy bell-ringer was right. There’s money to be made in a place like this.

That’s why he confronts the toughs, who are on the Baxter side of things, and shoots them all dead before they can draw—demonstrating his worth. He’d told the coffin-maker to get three coffins ready, but now, as he strolls away, he adds, in the laconic Eastwood manner, “My mistake. Four coffins." 

You know what’s odd? Before this confrontation, he talks aloud to the Rojos but we don’t see any of them. He’s just a guy in the street talking to the air. It’s like Leone decided they needed that scene after everyone went home.

I’ll just state outright that “Fistful of Dollars” is not in “Yojimbo”’s class. Actions that make sense there, don’t quite here. When the matriarch overrules her husband about paying Sanjuro, I bought the Lady Macbeth vibe. When it’s the younger Rojo brother, Esteban (German actor Sieghardt Rupp), questioning his older brother Don Benito (Spanish actor Antoni Prieto, 25 years older), I didn’t buy it—particularly since the power of the family lies with Ramon (Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte), who’s, what, off getting ready to slaughter armies? The wild card in “Yojimbo” is tech—the gun of Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakaadai)—while here it’s Ramon, who’s crazier and more malicious than the crazy, malicious men around him. Kurosawa went for “A plague on both your houses” feel but most of the evil in San Miguel resides with Ramon. You get the feeling the town wouldn’t suffer much with the Baxters in charge.

Even the concubine isn’t quite on the Ushitora side of the ledger. Sold by a local farmer immersed in gambling debt, Ushitora gives her to Tokuemon, the sake brewer, to curry his favor. She’s transactional, a pawn in the game, who’s only introduced halfway through the film. Leone’s concubine, Marisol (German actress Marianne Koch), is there from the start and is one of the main drivers of the plot. And she belongs to Ramon, not some third party. He wins her through trickery and is obsessed with her. It’s personal.

Why does the hero decide to help the concubine and her family? In the Leone script, there was a prologue about Joe’s mother caught up in a similar situation, but it wasn’t filmed, so Leone tried to add it as exposition. It’s one of those pieces of dialogue Eastwood trimmed. It became: “I knew someone like you once and there was no one there to help.” But Mifune doesn’t even need that much. He just acts. His ronin is disgusted that the situation even exists, so he fixes it. Not out of nobility but disgust. It’s brilliant, and it doesn’t need an explainer. It’s all right there.

I could go on. Ramon’s slaughter of the armies and the stagecoach—with Joe and Silvanito watching from over the hillside—is overlong and dull. So is Joe’s trickery with the corpses at the graveyard. It’s a stupid plan that works because everyone else acts stupidly. Joe is undone only because of a change of plans. And the final showdown works only because Joe games the system with an iron chest-plate beneath his poncho.

Here's the thing: I still like it.

Jesus, this isn’t too bad
In Schickel’s biography, Eastwood describes, better than any critic, why Leone’s films work:

Leone, Clint thought … was trying to recreate the very feelings a child brings to his first experiences of the movies—the enormity of the screen looming over him, the overpowering images of worlds previously only imagined suddenly made manifest, made realer than real in the mysterious darkness of the theater. … Clint sees it in the low angles Leone favored for the characters he played, angles that offered, to put it simply, a child’s-eye view of heroism. He sees it, too, in the vast panoramic views of countryside and town streets that Leone loved, and loved alternating with extraordinarily tight close-ups of faces, of guns being drawn and fired, even of boots carrying their wearers toward their violent destinies, the jingling of their spurs unnaturally loud on the soundtrack. “Everything’s enhanced,” says Clint. “You’re seeing the films as an adult, but you sit and watch them as a child.”

That’s pretty fucking sharp.

Leone’s movie has its share of Christ metaphors: Joe rides into town on a low-slung beast, derided as a mule, as Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; the mewling kid’s name is Jesus, while his parents are Joseph and Mary knock-offs: Julian and Marisol. Julian is ineffectual, etc. The main Christ metaphor, though—rise, death, resurrection—is in the original Japanese. It's storytelling 101.

So what did young Eastwood think after shooting this thing in Spain? He wasn’t sure. “Could be something, could be nothing,” he later told Schickel. During that summer and fall, he didn’t hear at all from Italy, while the American trade publications reported bad news: the western genre was dying in Italy. Only one film was doing well and it wasn’t “Il Magnifico Strangero”; it was something called “Per un Pugno di Dollari.” So much for that, Eastwood thought.

Eventually he realized “Dollari” was the Leone movie, and it—and he—were huge in Italy. A copy of the film was shipped to him in LA. Per Schickel:

Clint booked a screening room at the CBS Production Center and one night after work invited a few friends over to see it. He was careful, he says, not to heighten their anticipation. “You want to watch some little joke?” he remembers saying. “There’s this thing, and it’s all in Italian. I mean, it’s [probably] a real piece of shit.” But then everyone assembled, the lights went down, the picture started unreeling, and “in a while we said, ‘Jesus, this isn’t too bad.’”

No. Not bad at all.

Rowdy grows up.

Bryce, Bryce, baby. 

Well, that's a little better. 

Two weeks ago, I attended my first Mariners game of the season, an 8-0 drubbing at the hands of Cleveland, in which our D kept booting the ball and our O couldn't move a man past second even if he led off with a double. That loss, to a team who did poorly last year but is currently one of the top teams in baseball, dropped the Mariners to one game below .500.

In yesterday's afternoon game, on a super-sunny, mid-50s mid-April day, the Reds and Mariners traded solo shots in the 2nd (Elly de la Cruz for them, Cal Raleigh for the good guys, a no-doubter), then there was nothing for several innings. Immediately after Cal, with two outs, Dylan Moore hit a triple thanks to a misplay by Reds centerfielder Stuart Fairchild, but he was stranded at third. With one out in the bottom of the 3rd,  Julio Rodriguez, off to an abysmal start (sub-.300 everything), ripped a double off the glove of Fairchild but was also stranded at third. Stranding at third seemed our lot. 

Then in the bottom of the 6th, we got another solo shot, this one from clean-up hitter Mitch Garver. Was that our lot? The solo shot? Because in the bottom of the 7th we got another one, from lead-off pinch-hitter Josh Rojas, making it 3-1. Four solo shots, four runs. That inning, though, finally gave way to another way to score. Newbie whippersnapper Jonatan Clase walked, stole second, and scored on a Mitch Haniger line single to left. Fun! Then Reds pitchers couldn't find the plate. Less fun! With two outs, Garver walked, and France walked to load them. Would Cal Raleigh get out the rye bread and mustard? No, he walked, too. Could Dylan Moore hit another triple to clear the bases? No, he struck out. But now we were up 5-1.  

It was my friend Jeff who pointed out that the Reds weren't exactly hitting. Meaning beyond de la Cruz's homer, they didn't have any other hits. 

“Did they even walk?” I wondered aloud. “I guess they're two over the minimum right now, so they must've walked.” They did: catcher Tyler Stephenson immediately after de la Cruz's homer. Those turned out to be the Reds' only baserunners for the day. Every other inning: three up, three down. Bryce Miller pitched six and got the win. Our first series win of the season was a series sweep, and it raised the Mariners record to .... right, one game below .500. This again. But I'll take the W.

Throughout the game, Jeff and I kept moving to stay in the sun. We began on the first-base side of the 300-level and wound up in shallow left field, but I still felt cold and stiff at the end. Maybe I'm getting too old for this shit? I screwed up the game time, too—thought it was a 12:40 start rather than 1:10—but was rewarded with a Griffey bobblehead doll. I normally say no to bobbleheads but I couldn't say no to that.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s a little ironic that after his successes with spaghetti westerns and “Hang ‘em High,” Hollywood’s attempt to bring Clint Eastwood into the modern age feels more dated than any of those 19th-century dramas.

I get what they’re trying to do: take Clint’s cowboy, make him a modern lawman, and tell a fish-out-of-water tale about extraditing a prisoner from New York City back to Arizona. Smart. Coogan shows up in string tie and cowboy hat, way taller than anyone around him, unable to blend in, with everyone assuming he’s from Texas. Even when he politely corrects them, they still say Texas. That’s a good recurring bit.

I also like the luggage routine. The cab driver tells him his briefcase counts as luggage, which is 50 cents extra, while the hotel clerk has a different view.

Clerk: That’ll be $7. In advance.
Coogan: The sign says $5.
Clerk: $7 without luggage.
[Coogan places briefcase on desk]
Clerk: That ain’t luggage.
Coogan: There’s a cab driver in this town that’ll give you an argument.

Good line reading from Clint, too. It’s more amused shrug than angry rube. He’s not being taken for a ride; he knows what’s going on but figures “When in Rome…”

Except, oddly, when it comes to police bureaucracy. The prisoner he wants, Ringerman (Don Stroud), has taken LSD, and is now incarcerated in the prison ward at Bellevue, which means another layer of bureaucracy he has to get through. His gruff NYC contact, Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), tries to lay it out for him. First, Coogan needs a doctor’s OK to get Ringerman out of Bellevue. Then he has to check papers with the DA’s office. Finally he has to go to the NY Supreme Court (?!) so a judge can render him into his custody.

Instead, Coogan sneaks Ringerman out of Bellevue and tries to spirit him out of the state. But at the airport he’s clocked by one of Ringerman's men—David Doyle of “Charlie’s Angels” of all people—and Ringerman gets away. Now Coogan has to track him down, with the higher-ups in both NY and AZ agin him.

None of this is particularly dated. And I’m not really talking about the hippies he encounters, either. That’s just the time period—like flappers in the ’20s or preppies in the ’80s. There’s a scene where Coogan enters a hippie nightclub, with everyone dancing and grooving to Hollywood’s awful version of what 1967-68 rock music is supposed to be, and with Coogan a head taller than the swirling bodies around him. You anticipate something great—like Robocop or Terminator in a nightclub, or when Eddie Murphy goes looking for Billy Bear in a country-western bar in “48 Hrs.” But I got the sense the filmmakers were less interested in culture clash than bringing in the youth market. “Hey, hippies! It’s you guys, look: dudes with long hair and chicks with words painted on their bodies! So come see our movie!” At one point, a near-naked woman swings over to Coogan on a trapeze (you remember those in nightclubs), slides into his arms, and says, “Hey, groovy! …  Ooh, looking for anyone special?”

And that’s the dated part. Not the lingo. The sex and the sexual politics. Coogan has one job to do, extradite Ringerman, but he keeps getting distracted. By girls.

OK, so it's the lingo, too.

Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel
The movie opens a bit like the opening to “For a Few Dollars More“: an unseen rifleman from a high position watches an approaching rider. Here, the rider is in a Jeep. It’s Coogan, and the man in the high position is an escaped Navajo native, who’s thrown away the accoutrements of modern living (jeans, shoes) and apparently wants to live the natural life like his ancestors. Did he commit a crime? Not sure. But for some reason it’s Coogan’s job to bring him back.

After he’s got him in custody, though, Coogan gets distracted. He stops off at the home of a beautiful married blonde for a little nookie. And it’s there, mid-bath, mid-cleavage joke, that his superior finds him and barks at him about the NYC gig.

In NY, the romantic interest is Julie Roth (Susan Clark), whom Coogan first spies outside McElroy’s office in a busy, gritty 23rd precinct. She’s talking to Joe (Seymour Cassel), who’s well-groomed, wearing a suit, and sitting at a desk. Joe mentions the brooch pinned to her chest and touches it. And again. And insinuates. She responds: “Next you’re going to ask me if I make it with all the good-looking fuzz around here,” adding that nothing he says or does will upset her. That’s like an invite. And he takes it. He cops a feel. And again. And when he ignores her polite remonstrations, our hero, Coogan, intervenes. He tells Joe to back off. When Joe doesn’t, Coogan slaps him around.

Which is when Julie gets mad. At Coogan.

Turns out she’s not a cop (as Coogan assumed), and Cassel isn’t a cop (as I assumed). No, she’s his parole officer. And I guess she thought the gentle touch-my-breast approach might mother him into reforming? Who knows? It’s post-sexual revolution but pre-women’s lib, which is a bad period. It's all a little icky.

And it gets worse. After defending her from sexual assault, Coogan does everything he can to get in her pants. She keeps resisting, but with a smile, half caving in. It’s like that until two-thirds of the way through, when she tells him off. Sure. Except at the end, with no reconciliation scene, there she is, waving frantically from the rooftop of the Pan Am building as he flies off. Poor Susan Clark. What a thankless role.

Anyway, Ringerman is on the loose.

So after everyone says “Go home, Coogan,” Coogan questions Ringerman’s mother, Ellen (Betty Field), but apparently blows the cover of a cop pretending to be a junkie. How he blows the cop’s cover, we can’t fathom. Then it’s another date with Julie, where, rifling through the file cabinets she happens to keep in her living room, he discovers the address of Ringerman’s far-out hippie chick, Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling), and leaves to question her. Oddly, not at her pad. This is the scene at the trapeze-swinging nightclub, “The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel”; and it’s only after a confrontation in a back room (with Albert Popwell, the “I gots to know” guy in “Dirty Harry”) that Coogan takes Linny back to her pad, where, again, he forgets about his job. They make out. Sex is implied. Then it's 4 AM and she takes him to a pool room to meet Ringerman. It’s a set-up: It's Ringerman’s gang, all of whom look like rejects from a 1950s B-movie.

At least we finally get a good fight—admittedly with that fake, too-red blood of the first post-production years. When Coogan can’t get David Doyle to talk, he returns to Linny Raven’s place and smashes a fist into her wall. That’s the move that finally jangles free Ringerman’s hideout: Fort Tryon Park in the Heights. They walk there. Gunfire is exchanged, there’s a foot chase, then a motorcycle chase, and Coogan, after so many women, finally gets his man.

Are lessons learned? Yes! From both sides in the culture wars. Bidding farewell on the rooftop of the Pan-Am building, Lt. McElroy finally remembers Coogan is from Arizona. As for Coogan? In the beginning, he’d crushed a cigarette beneath his boot rather than let the Navajo take a puff. Now, in the helicopter, he offers a cig to Ringerman. He even lights it for him. So I guess Coogan realizes that perps are people, too.

That, or he’s racist.

Where have you gone, Willie Mays?
1968 was a tough year to make a Hollywood movie. The Production Code was dead, the studio system was in shambles, the culture was shifting so much that nothing felt solid to the oldsters running things. Three years later, Eastwood and his first-time director here, Don Siegel, would navigate it all better, or at least with a particular point of view, in “Dirty Harry.”

You know what might make a good triple feature? “In the Heat of the Night,” “Coogan,” and “Midnight Cowboy.” Three fish-out-of-water stories from three years in a row: big city cop in the country (1967), a country cop in the big city (1968), and a country gigolo in the big city (1969). Do we try this anymore—navigating this clash of American cultures—or have things worsened too much to even attempt it?

Betty Field impressed, by the way, as Ringerman’s mom, so I had to look her up. She made her name on Broadway in the 1930s (“Boy Meets Girl,” “Room Service”), while her turn as Henry Aldrich’s girlfriend in “What a Life” led to the Hollywood adaptation of same, opposite Jackie Cooper. She played the first screen version of Curley’s doomed wife in 1939’s “Of Mice and Men,” and Daisy Buchanan in the Alan Ladd “Great Gatsby.” In the 1950s, she played moms: to Kim Novak in “Picnic,” to Hope Lange in “Peyton Place." She was also the Grace of Grace’s Diner in “Bus Stop.” She kept doing theater throughout. She’s good here. Her character has layers.

Love the location shooting. That whole “helicopter from JFK to the Pan Am Building rooftop” is a great slice of New York history. You can read more here. It began in 1965, stopped by the time “Coogan” was released, started again in 1977. Then an accident led to five deaths and there went that. Helicopter service over Manhattan traffic is now just for celebs.

During the final chase scene, did they include Coogan’s Bluff—former site of the Polo Grounds—among the shots? I assume so, but probably in the background. It’s still not a bad title, even if the location doesn’t figure in and the man doesn’t bluff much.

Lesson learned.