I recently came across the unbelievably sad stat that the Chicago White Sox, established in 1900, never had a 40-homerun guy until Frank Thomas did it in the 1990s. That seems so White Sox. And for all of the Big Hurt's homers—and he hit 521 of them—he never led the league. But the ChiSox did kinda own the homerun title in the early 1970s: Dick Allen won it twice, and before him, Beltin' Bill Melton topped the charts in 1971.

It was a bit of a fluke. In Melton's second season, 1969, he hit 23 homers. The following year he upped it to 33, which was good enough for fifth in the American League and 15th-best in the Majors. And the very next season, he won the homerun title.

With 33.

What happened in the American League between 1970 and '71? Mostly, the big AL boppers from the previous 10 years, Harmon Killebrew and Frank Howard, aged out. Ditto Carl Yastrzemski, who went from 40 to 15. Ditto his BoSox teammate Tony Conigliaro, who is his own sad story. He went deep 36 times in 1970, including 10 times in September, was traded a month later, and played only 95 more games, hitting a total of six more homers. There was a void, in other words, and Melton stepped into it. As a result, he loomed kinda large in my youth—even over in Minnesota.

His career was surprisingly short, and always with moribund teams. He never sniffed the postseason. Here's how his teams, mostly the ChiSox, finished:

• 1968: 8th of 10
• 1969: 5th of 6
• 1970: 6th of 6
• 1971: 3rd of 6
• 1972: 2nd of 6 (!)
• 1973: 5th of 6
• 1974: 4th of 6
• 1975: 5th of 6
• 1976: 4th of 6 (California)
• 1977: 5th of 7 (Cleveland)

Yes, for a brief shining moment, in August 1972 (when Melton was injured), the White Sox were actually in the lead in the AL West. On August 26, they were up by 1.5 games. By Sept. 1, they were down 2.5 games to the resurgent Oakland A's, who not only won the division (by 5.5 games), and the pennant, and the World Series, but the next three World Series—the only non-Yankees team to do that. So the ChiSox were attempting to buck history. Didn't happen.

Melton never hit more than 33 homers, and only hit 154 with the team overall, but that was a club record until Harold Baines (and then Frank Thomas, and then...) overtook it. He never hit .280, never slugged .500, never hit 30 doubles or drove in 100, and never won a Gold Glove, but he was always solid. Apparently Melton feuded with Chicago announcer Harry Caray, which led to the trade to the Angels. But per The New York Post, Melton returned to the team in the early 1990s as a scout/ambassador, became one of Michael Jordan's hitting instructors, and then joined the broadcast booth in 1998. He stayed there for more than 20 years. He died last week, aged 79, following a brief illness. 

His 1960 Topps baseball card, before the curse.

Here's a confession for which I'll probably have to hand in my SABR card: I sometimes get Rocky Colavito and Ted Kluszewski mixed up. Both were power hitters for Ohio teams with “C” caps in the 1950s (i.e., before I was born), who got traded around and never won an MVP nor made the Hall of Fame nor crashed a big number like 500 career homeruns. Both were big (Rock: 6'3“, 190; Klu: 6'2”, 225) with names that sounded big, but Kluszewski was the guy who cut off the sleeves of his jerseys because his biceps were too big. I sometimes thought that was Colavito. Klu was Polish, a first baseman, and nearly 10 years older; Rocky was Italian, and a right fielder who grew up in New York idolizing Joe DiMaggio. 

Another difference: Kluszewski went to Indiana University, where he was discovered by the Reds groundskeeper, while Colavito never finished high school. He left at age 16 to play semipro ball. “He would spend the rest of his life telling kids not to follow in his footsteps,” Joe Posnanski writes in his beautiful obit.

Rocco Domenico Colavito was born in 1933 and came up for a cup of coffee in 1955, the year after Cleveland won a pennant. That would be a theme: missing the postseason. In his rookie season he slashed a .276/.372/.531 line, with 21 homers and more walks than strikeouts (49-46), but he finished second to White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio in Rookie of the Year honors. That would be another theme: never quite getting the accolade. Two years later he finished third in MVP voting despite 41 homers, a 1.024 OPS, and a Major-league leading .620 slugging percentage. The next year he led the league in homers and total bases but finished fourth in MVP voting to three players on the resurgent Go-Go White Sox—including Aparicio. But he did make the cover of TIME magazine in an article about young players in the grand old game.

His trade to Detroit two days before the start of the 1960 season became the stuff of legend. He didn't want to go (he loved Cleveland), the fans didn't want him to go (Cleveland loved him), but general manager Frank Lane felt, as he said, “The home run is overrated.” Thus Colavito, the 1959 homerun champ, was traded for Harvey Kuenn, the 1959 batting champ. If you squint, and are cold-blooded, it kinda makes sense. Overall, Kuenn had led the league in hits four times, in doubles three times, and batting average once, and he was coming off that .353 season, so if you felt BA > HR, as Lane apparently did, then pull that trigger no matter what the fans felt. If you win a championship, they'll forgive you. Cf., Nomar and the 2004 Red Sox.

Cleveland didn't win a championship. They went from 89-65 in 1959, second in the league, to 76-78, fourth, and wouldn't make the postseason again until .... wait for it ... 1995. Fans traced it all to the Colavito trade. It became known as “The Curse of Rocky Colavito.” Books were written.

I love this litany of fan anger, per Posnanski, upon hearing the news:

• “My teeth almost fell out,” South Euclid's Marvin Jones said.
• “I'll never go to the ballpark again,” Robert Intorocio on 165th Street said.
• “Tie Lane to a boxcar and run him out of Cleveland,” 88th Street's William Scott suggested.
• “The most stupid thing I ever heard,” Beachwood's David Magner said.
• “I belong to one of the Rocky Colavito fan clubs,” eighth grader Carol Kickel said, “It's all over. We're going to start a new one, the Lane Haters.”

It didn't help that in 1960 Kuenn was less effective than he'd been, .308 with no power, and it also didn't help that Lane turned right around and traded him to the San Francisco Giants for Johnny Antonelli, a pitcher who went 0-4 with a 6.56 ERA and was gone, and Willie Kirkland, an outfielder who lasted three years with the team, slashing a .232/.299/.414 line. “I felt this trade would help us,” Lane said, “because it gives us a starting pitcher and an outfielder who hits with power.” Kirkland was eventually traded for half a season of Al Smith, meaning this is what the Indians got for their beloved player by bWAR:

• One season of Kuenn: 2.4
• Half a season of Antonelli: -1.1
• Three seasons of Kirkland: 3.6
• Half a season of Smith: -0.9
• TOTAL: 4.0

This is versus about 22 bWAR for the rest of Colavito's career, which included leading the league in total bases in 1962, and in RBIs in 1966. The latter was when he was back in Cleveland. He also played for the KC A's (in 1964), the White Sox ('67), and Dodgers/Yankees ('68). He never went to the postseason.

Remember in Ken Burns' “Baseball” doc when Bob Costas mentions how all his father's friends said stuff like, “You never saw DiMaggio, kid, you never saw the real thing”? Posnanski got that in Cleveland about Colavito. “The recurring theme of my Cleveland childhood was that I had arrived at the party too late,” Pos writes, “that I had missed all the good stuff, I had missed Jim Brown running through defenders, and I had missed Bob Feller and Sudden Sam McDowell throwing fastballs at the speed of sound, and I had missed Lou the Toe Groza booting the football when successful field goals felt like something of a magic trick. 'Aw,' adults would tell me, 'you shoulda seen the Rock play.'”

Except, in a way, he did. This is how he begins his obit:

When I was 10 years old—that most magical time for baseball fans—I saw a 44-year-old baseball coach (he looked so much older to me then) stand at home plate at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and throw a baseball over the centerfield wall. It remains to this day the closest I've come to actually seeing Superman fly or Spiderman climb or Bugs Bunny defy the laws of gravity (because he never studied law). The throw was a feat so mind-boggling, so utterly impossible, that for years I would actually dream about it, only in the dreams I was that coach at home plate, and I would throw the ball, and it would never come down.

The coach was Rocky Colavito.

One of the questions on today’s Immaculate Grid—or one of the squares, and yeah, I’m still doing these things every other day or so—was the intersection of a pitcher with 200+ career wins and a player born outside the U.S. I put down Bert Blyleven (Netherlands) without much thought. After I got dinged for 5%, I chastised myself for not going deeper.

Once I got the answer, I wondered if you could go deeper, since there are only 11 guys who fit that definition—and four of them are from the early years of baseball, so I don't know them. This is them chronologically:

1. Tommy Bond, Ireland
2. Jim McCormick, Scotland
3. Tony Mullane, Ireland
4. Jack Quinn, Slovakia
5. Juan Marichal, Dominican Republic
6. Luis Tiant, Cuba
7. Ferguson Jenkins, Canada
8. Bert Blyleven, Netherlands
9. Dennis Martinez, Nicaragua
10. Pedro Martinez, Dominican Republic
11. Bartolo Colon, Dominican Republic

So wait, no Fernando? No, he won just 173. How about Nomo? 123. My man King Felix? 169.

The Dominican Republic is only No. 1 on this list by a whisper—basically by the difference between Ireland and Scotland. But I assumed the DR and other Latin American countries would soon flood the list.

And then I realized: Nobody wins games anymore.

Only three active pitchers are 200+: Justin Verlander (262), Max Scherzer (216) and Clayton Kershaw (212), and a more All-American trio would be tough to find. Next guy on the list, another All-American, is Gerritt Cole, and he’s way back at 153. For foreign-born active pitchers? The DR’s Johnny Cueto is tops with 144, but he’s 38 years old and last season went 0-2 with a 7.15 ERA. I have trouble seeing him getting to 150+ let alone 200+. Then it’s two guys with 110, Carlos Carrasco from Venezuela and Yu Darvish from Japan, but they’re 37 and 38 respectively.

How about Ohtani? 38 wins. 38!

So right now I’m thinking that unless the game changes in unexpected ways, this is the list—forever and ever, amen.

Trivia question: Which foreign-born pitcher won the most games in MLB history? It’s the guy I chose, Blyleven at 287, and it’s a record that’s never going to be broken.

My grid, a Palmer away from an all-Twins sweep.

Here's a baseball trivia question with an obvious answer: Between Ted Williams hitting .388 in 1957 and Rod Carew hitting .388 in 1977, who had the highest single-season batting average in the Majors? Yes, that would be Rico Carty's .366 in 1970. Only a handful of players ever got into the .360s during that time. The others: Norm Cash in 1961 (.361), Joe Torre in '71 (.363), and Rod Carew in '74 (.364). Nice company.

I remember being impressed by that .366 number—and loving the name. Turns out he's the only “Carty” in MLB history. “Rico,” short for Ricardo, is less unique (cf., Petrocelli, among others). 

1970 was the only year he led the league in anything. Why? Injuries. Victor Mather in The New York Times has a nice obit on the man, letting us know “Carty's progress was impeded by broken bones, hamstring problems and even tuberculosis.” Mather also gives Carty's birthdate without underlining its historical significance: Sept. 1, 1939. What a world to be born into.

As a kid, he was a boxer but soon switched over to baseball. He signed with a bunch of teams, the Milwaukee Braves won him and switched him to the outfield, and in his rookie season he hit .330, second in the Majors, with 22 homeruns. Normally that's enough to win Rookie of the Year, but this was 1964 so Carty finished second to Dick Allen of the Phillies. But what a bumper crop that season: Those two plus AL Rookie of the Year Tony Oliva. 

Then injuries. He played in only 83 games in '65 (hitting .310), bounced back in '66 (hitting .326), suffered in '67 (.255), lost all of '68 and a third of '69 (.342). But in 1970, as if making up for lost time, he tore out of the gate and after two full months was hitting (wait for it) .436! He was so good, Mather lets us know, that he became the first write-in starter to the All-Star Game. It would be his only All-Star appearance.

After the 1970 season, this was Rico Carty's career split: .322/.389/.507. That's a Hall of Fame line. But then more injuries and more problems. He missed all of '71 with a broken leg, and when he returned he was diminished, hitting .277 without power for half of the '72 season. Plus he'd had an altercation with Atlanta cops in '71, and maybe with Henry Aaron sometime in there, and Atlanta wound up basically unloading him—to Texas for a pitcher named Jim Panther, who went 2-3 with a 7.63 ERA over one season and was done. Carty wasn't. He hung on throughout the 1970s, though he was basically a hot potato. Everybody wanted him but never for long.

• 08/73: Purchased by the Chicago Cubs
• 09/73: Purchased by the Oakland A's
• 12/73: Released by the Oakland A's
• 08/74: Purchased by the Cleveland Indians (from the Mexican League)
• 11/76: Drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays
• 12/76: Traded to the Cleveland Indians
• 03/78: Traded to the Toronto Blue Jays 
• 08/78: Traded to the Oakland A's
• 10/78: Purchased by the Toronto Blue Jays
• 11/78: Granted Free Agency
• 01/79: Signed as a Free Agent by the Toronto Blue Jays
• 03/80: Released by the Toronto Blue Jays

His final career line is pretty good: .299/.369/.464. He died November 23, age 85. Rest in peace.

Biden's Unpardonable Hypocrisy: The president vowed not to pardon his son Hunter—and then did so anyway.

That's a headline on the Atlantic site in an article by one-time New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait. It's been said that headlines scream, and sometimes they do, but this one simply tsks. It tut-tuts. It demands purity on the losing side of a very dirty game.

Chait owns up to the fact that one of the charges against Biden's son (lying on a form to obtain a weapon) is something that rarely gets charged, and Hunter Biden was charged for it probably because he's Joe's son. The other charge, tax evasion, well, that gets charged, but who cares? Biden promised he wouldn't pardon his son but who cares? That was six months ago when he was running for president, and he assumed he would win it again and the world would remain semi-stable—meaning wobbly. Nope. He dropped out, Kamala entered, Trump won. Trump is now in the midst of weaponizing the Justice Dept., the FBI, the IRS, everything he can get his small, piglike hands on, as he works on his stated policy of “retribution” and to be “a dictator from day one.” What father would leave his son hanging out there to face that crap? A bad father. Joe made the right move.

I say more. I say encore. This is war. Time to get dirty. 

“In Wiley Hall [on the University of Minnesota campus] the eletronic board that tells the time as well as the news has been stuck—the news part anyway—since June. It's comforting in a way. Nothing ever changes. The July 13 shuttle mission is still on schedule. The New York Times has still reported that Madonna and Sean Penn will marry in August. The NAACP  is still meeting in Texas with its chairman saying it's up to black people to pull themselves up. 

”For people who feel life moves too fast: Wiley Hall."

-- Journal entry, fall 1985.

This year, after sorting through my brother's and mother's stuff, I decided to try to minimize that task for whoever followed me, so I've going through old crap, including journals, and throwing away what I can. Most of the journal entries are embarrassing but I do like this nugget. We could use a Wiley Hall news kiosk these days—set to some time before 2015.

“One of the most dread-inducing things for me about the impending Trump presidency is the way he and all the insect people who feed on the shit-crust of need his being continually sheds (like harlequin icthyosis) form a secondary crust that is always, sometimes aggressively more often passive-aggressively, advising anyone who disapproves to be quiet about what's true. I'm thinking of the Horta from the O.G. STAR TREK episode THE DEVIL IN THE DARK — that's how TrumpWorld looks in my head; and TrumpWorld, like the Horta (that's what that fictional space creature ”is“), left to its own devices, can do a lot of damage to soft human beings out there just exploring their galaxy.”

-- Craig Wright, “Dry Turkey,” on his Substack. Craig and I are both fans of Salinger, and when I read this I think of that intro to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” when Buddy Glass recounts older brother Seymour reading a bedtime story, the one about Po Lo and looking for horses, and seeing the essence of things rather than their coverings, and how Buddy ends the section by writing of Seymour, now deceased, “I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead.” That's how I often think of Craig, and maybe even more so its martial opposite: I can't think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to do battle with all of the liars and misinformers and yuck of the GOP than him. I see him cutting through their bullshit like a phaser. 

The week after the election, I posted this on Threads:

Someone born in one year, 1946, has led this country for 20 of the last 32 years—and if Tubby lasts his term it'll be 24 of 36. All from one year. All from a few summer months. All from some postwar fucking in the fall of '45. And we've been fucked ever since. 

In the post, I mention '50s babies because my wife is one, but '30s babies (my father) haven't exactly been represented, either. If you expand it to incude every U.S. president born in the 20th century, you get this by decade:

• 1900s (1): LBJ (1908)
• 1910s (4):  Reagan (1911), Nixon (1913), Ford (1913), JFK (1917)
• 1920s (2): Carter (1924), H.W. Bush (1924)
• 1930s (0)
• 1940s (4): Biden (1942), Clinton (1946), W. Bush (1946), Trump (1946)
• 1950s (0)
• 1960s (1): Obama (1961)

JFK was famously the first 20th century president, “born in this century” as he stated in his inaugural address in January 1961, which is pretty crazy. We're 61 years into the 20th century before getting a 20th century baby? Even crazier: four of the next five presidents were older than him. We went young in '61 and then ... “Nah.” That's our story. Great leap forward, retreat. Progress, regress. Change we can believe in, make American great again.

The regress has gone from Nixon to Reagan to W. to Trump. The arc of American history is short but it bends toward stupidity.

“Please note that the swagger of Trump and those who love and serve him has rarely anything to do with well-earned rights or with having achieved by your own lights anything, it has only to do with privilege. To get your trophy for completing a Trump marathon, you don't have to run 26.2 miles, you don't have to do anything but assert your willingness to trip someone else.”

-- Craig Wright, “When We Fight, We Fight”

Someone must have traduced erikl1963 because without having done anything wrong he found his Instagram account permanently suspended one fine morning. 

Well, apparently I did do something wrong. My account, or activity on it, wasn’t following Meta’s “Community Standards on account integrity.” I know. Meta has Community Standards? That are important enough to use the title case? But there it is, in the email, with a link to a page that explains nothing. 

There’s also a “Review details” button that leads to a webpage:

How we made this decision
Our technology found your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules. As a result, our technology took action.

Our technology found out so our technology took action? Yeah, we’re doomed.

But like Josef K., I was allowed to appeal my case—whatever it was. First, I was asked for my email address so a confirmation code could be sent. So a robot could determine I wasn’t a robot, as John Mulaney succinctly put it six years ago.

Then it asked for my phone number. At this point I triple-checked the email addresses and URLs to make sure everyone was who they said they were. At this point, too, I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a scam, by Instagram, to get me to give up my phone number. Or had I already given it up? I didn’t remember.

I’ve only been on Instagram since Sept. 1, 2023. I left Facebook in 2019 because Meta is awful, and I left Twitter in 2022 because Elon Musk is awfuller. I experimented with other social media sites, hating myself all the while—that I actually have this need now, this daily need, to engage without engaging, to see what’s going down, kinda, to drink the salt water because I’m so, so thirsty, and these other sites, sadly, pathetically, didn’t help much with that thirst, not even in the awful salt-watery way that Twitter or Facebook had, which is why, eventually, I re-upped with Zuckerberg, opening an account on Instagram, tail tucked between my legs.

I wasn’t a fan. I’m a word guy, it’s a picture site. It’s worse than a picture site, it’s a video site. It’s worse than that as we all know and for all the reasons we know. But once in a while someone I like posts a picture I like.

I tried to do the same. It was on Instagram that I posted photos of my older brother Chris and I at Mount Rainier when he came to visit me in Seattle in Oct. 2023. And it was on Instagram that I posted childhood photos of Chris and I with a link to his obituary after he was murdered in a random attack at a busstop in Edina, Minn. on November 22, 2023. And it was on Instagram that I posted various photos of my 16-year-old cat Jellybean in the hallway of our condo. And it was on Instagram that I posted a link to Jellybean’s obituary when we had to put her to sleep—kill her—in December 2023 after she continued to suffer following a cancer diagnosis. And it was on Instagram that I posted photos of our new kitten, Clem, short for Clemente, in Feb. 2024. And it was on Instagram that I posted a link to Clem’s obituary after 11 days of dysentery and four vet visits with 4-6 different vets, none of whom realized the scope of his problem, the last of whom couldn’t stabilize him at 5:00 on a Saturday morning. 

Yeah, it hasn’t been a good year. Oh, and the notice of my permanent suspension on Instagram came one year after my brother’s murder. To the day. Nice touch, Meta. 

Anyway, I entered my mobile number so its technology could send me a confirmation code to prove my identity to its technology one more time. Nothing happened. Instead, beneath the fill-in box, there appeared a little red message:

Code not sent: Try again later or use a different mobile number. 

Somewhere, Kafka smiles.

If I ever find out what I did to warrant permanent suspension from a social media platform I don’t like, I’ll let you know. But at this point, it feels like a gift.

**

UPDATE: Same day, evening, the “Code not sent” glitch—if it was a glitch—was fixed, Instagram sent me a code to verify my account, I did, and for one brief shining moment it let me know I was appealing its decision. And then this, literally a second later. 

As I suspected, it just wanted the phone number. “Sometimes we need to take precautions to ensure that everyone's data on Instagram is safe and usable and sellable by Instagram.” 

I know: It sounds like the setup for a Bob Hope joke. Instead, it's just another IMDb joke:

“The Outlaw,” kids. She's known for “The Outlaw.” Good god, know your cultural history.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s not a bad premise. In the titular Portuguese-Chinese colony, we see a man being pursued by crime lord Vincent Halloran (Brad Dexter) and several henchmen, including Itzumi (Korean-American actor Philip Ahn), who delivers the fatal blow, tossing a knife into the man’s back. Except the dude was a cop. Now New York is sending another cop to bring Halloran to justice. (Not Itzumi? It’s almost an insult.)

Cut to: a boat making its way from Hong Kong to Macao, where we run into three Americans:

• Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum), a down-on-his-luck adventurer
• Julie Benton (Jane Russell), a down-on-her-luck chanteuse
• Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), a happy-go-lucky salesman of coconut oil, stockings and cigars

One of them, of course, is the cop.

That’s the fun part—trying to guess. The crime boss assumes it’s Nick, and who wouldn’t? Look at him. I assumed it was Trumble/Bendix, because he’s comic relief, but I was holding out hope the cop was Jane Russell. Wouldn’t that be amazing? The movie would be so ahead of its time.

Nope. Of its time.

The nonsense crescendo
Another example: They were still doing the post-WWII narration thing. That was disappointing—hearing Truman Bradley’s stentorian voice at the open over nondescript establishing shots:

This is Macao, a fabulous speck on the earth’s surface, just off the south coast of China, a 35-mile boat trip from Hong Kong. It’s an ancient Portuguese colony, quaint and bizarre. The crossroads of the Far East, its population is a mixture of all races and nationalities—mostly Chinese. Macao, often called the Monte Carlo of the Orient, has two faces: one, calm and open; the other, veiled and secret. Here, millions in gold and diamonds change hands, some across the gambling tables, some mysteriously in the night. Macao is a fugitive’s haven, for, at the three-mile limit, the authority of the International Police comes to an end.

A lot of unnecessary info amid that mess.

On the boat to Macao, the first person we see isn’t any of our three stars, but a guy dancing—not badly but somewhat comically—in his stateroom. He’s dancing before Julie, on whom the camera slowly pans up until we see her face, looking bemused and sardonic in that great Jane Russell way. She’s taking the boat to Macao on his dime and he wants a little something-something in return. A dance? Nah. Another drink? Nah. That’s when he gets all handsy. She takes off her shoe as a weapon but her aim is off: it goes through the ship portal and hits a passerby—Nick. That’s their meet-cute: attempted rape. The whole thing is treated lightly. When Nick saunters in, for example, Handsy is still getting handsy. 

Julie (fending the dude off): Do you mind giving me a hand!
Nick (staring at her appreciatively): Don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy that.

Yeah, Nick isn’t exactly a knight in shining armor. Even after he knocks out Handsy, he notes the whisky, the private stateroom, and suggests they stick around. “One side, Clyde,” she says, but allows herself to be kissed, long and slow, so she can pick Nick’s pocket.

It's out on deck that she meets the gladhanding Lawrence C. Trumble and his suitcase of wares, and all three meet up again before customs, where they’re questioned by Lt. Sebastian (Thomas Gomez). Nick is even more down-on-his-luck now: Julie took his dough and tossed his passport overboard. They still let him into the country. Kinda.

Sebastian actually works for Halloran, and since they suspect Nick is the cop, they try to kick him out of the country for vagrancy—which makes sense—but Julie slips him some of his dough back. So then they try to kick him out for not having a passport. Kidding. That’s never raised again. Instead, we get a crescendoing of nonsensical actions. Halloran lets Nick win at craps, ratcheting it up to $12k before taking it all away. Why? That just leads to a sampan boatride between Nick and Julie, where they canoodle and talk about a life together—though Nick says he wants to support her first. That leads to Julie assuming she’s getting the ol’ brushoff again—as if 1950 Jane Russell was always getting the ol’ brushoff.

More nonsense: Trumble asks Nick to show Halloran a diamond from a necklace that’s in a hotel safe in Hong Kong, in case he’d like to buy it. I’ll cut to the chase: Trumble is the cop and he’s trying to lure Halloran outside the three-mile limit so he can be arrested. Why doesn’t he do it himself? Why does he risk a civilian’s life? Exactly. And Nick’s life is risked. He’s kidnapped, basically, and when Julie tries to spring him, he pretends he’s shacking up with Halloran’s assistant Margie (an underused Gloria Grahame) because he’s got a gun at his back. More misunderstandings. When Nick does bust loose, he’s chased around the waterfront by Itzumi and another hood (Spencer Chan, I believe), but the one who gets the knife in the back is Trumble. Yeah, they accidentally kill the right guy. All of which is foreshadowed by an earlier line: “I'll go back one of these days or my name isn't Lawrence C. Trumble.” It isn’t and he doesn’t.

It's Julie who finally lures Halloran past the three-mile limit, but even here the International Police aren’t much help, flashing lights around and alerting Halloran, so Nick has to duke it out with him. But: bad guy caught, and good-bad guy winds up with good-bad girl. Just like we wanted.

Anyway, it’s not much. 

Sitting out the war
Most cinephiles know Howard Hughes discovered Jane Russell for “The Outlaw,” which had a much-delayed release, mostly because of Production Code and local censorship board difficulties. It was filmed during the winter of 1940-41, had reshoots that spring, but didn’t premiere until two years later, in February 1943, in San Francisco. It set house records but Hughes couldn’t find other theaters to run it, so it didn’t get a wider release until spring 1946. Basically, between when it was filmed and when people got to see it, all of World War II happened.

That’s less bug than feature for Hughes. He was a tinkerer. “Macao,” for example, was filmed in August-October 1950, then additional scenes were shot six months later, and then again six months after that. And even then it didn’t premiere for another eight months—in April 1952. “The Outlaw” sat out WWII, “Macao” the Korean War.

This is Josef von Sternberg’s first feature since “The Shanghai Gesture” in 1941, and one of his last features ever, and it wasn’t even all him; the retakes were done by Nicholas Ray and Robert Stevenson. Nothing really stands out except a shot where the principles’ reflection on the water is filmed rather than them.

I liked seeing Philip Ahn again even though he isn’t given much to do. Ditto Thomas Gomez, who had that great scene in “Force of Evil” but usually plays gangster flunky. Mitchum is his usual seamless self. And then there’s Russell. She’s great when she’s saucy and sardonic—her pouty lip curl is like Elvis before Elvis—but she's even more beautiful when she softens a bit. She’s got beautiful eyes. They probably didn’t get noticed much.

The eyes have it: Elvis before Elvis, Hoffs before Hoffs.