Dipsit Donald and the art of “I thought we had a deal”

“We're not happy with Putin. I'm not happy with Putin, I can tell you that much right now. He's killing a lot of people, and a lot of them are his soldiers. His soldiers and their soldiers, mostly. And it's now up to 7,000 a week. ... We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

-- Pres. Donald Trump, 07/08/25, Reuters. No one ever sounded dumber in stating the obvious. If you want to know the truth... Dude, we wanted YOU to know the truth for the last 10 years! Don't know how the scales finally fell from your eyes but I'm glad they did. And yes, Dealmaker Don, just because someone's nice to you doesn't mean they're nice. Some people lie. Some of those people are Russian dictators.

FURTHER READING

• “Did Trump Really Just Break Up With Putin?,” Susan B. Glaser, The New Yorker

I don't know if any actor in the last 30 years could show up on screen and make me go “Uh oh” more than Michael Madsen. There was a vibe, man, and as iconic as he was, I don't think he really took advantage of it.

Didn't even matter who he was playing. He was the good boyfriend in “Thelma & Louise,” the good brother in “Wyatt Earp,” the good soldier (the one who can turn the key) at the beginning of “WarGames.” I never saw “Free Willy” but he plays the dad there, and a good dad, but I'm sure if I'd seen it I'd be like ... Get away from him, kid! Don't you know that's Mr. Blonde? He'll cut your ear off!!!!

Yeah, Madsen will always be known for that. It's such an iconic, horrifying moment that no one ... Oh, for fuck's sake, IMDb:

Shit, he's even third-billed in “Reservoir Dogs”! Where is he in “WarGames”? Zillionth?

Fuck 'em, the rest of us know. We'll never forget. It's not just cutting off the ear, it's the dance beforehand (a little like Trump's schtick, isn't it?); it's how he matter-of-factly toys with the cop, jokes, taunts, talks into the ear he's cut off, while Stealers Wheel's “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays on the transistor radio. Tarantino then takes it to another level but having the camera follow Mr. Blonde outside, to get the gas can from the trunk of the car, and in that moment we lose Stealers Wheel and see it's just an ordinary afternoon in LA, with cars driving by. This horror is happening in the middle of this ordinary fucking day. Can't somebody stop it? But everyone keeps moving. And Mr. Blonde returns to the room, and when we hear Stealers Wheel again it's like Alex DeLarge hearing Beethoven in “A Clockwork Orange” after he's been programmed: nauseating. Fucking brilliant. 

That character, ultimately shot to death by Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), the undercover cop, had a name: Vic Vega. In those days Tarantino was imagining a noirish/pulp fictiony version of the world of J.D. Salinger, who included members of the Glass family in different short stories before he brought them all together in “Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” For Tarantino, for example, Vic was supposed to be the brother of “Pulp Fiction”'s Vincent Vega. And the guy he originally wanted to play him? Madsen. But Madsen was busy playing Virgil Earp is Lawrence Kasden's “Wyatt Earp” and couldn't do it. He's called it the biggest mistake of his career since the role went to John Travolta and remade him a star. But here's the thing: Would it have done that for Madsen? Would he have brought what Travolta brought? To be honest, I'm not seeing it. I can't imagine him flirting with or hanging with or doing the twist with Uma Thurma's Mia Wallace in the same goofy, breezy manner. Not seeing it. Sorry, bud. Could be the ear still talking to me. I still haven't gotten over the ear.

He was Virginia's sister. I never knew that until reading the obits. And he was the guy who reprised the role of Mickey Rourke's Boogie from “Diner” for the Barry Levinson-directed TV movie? That makes some sense. Show didn't catch on so he had to play Bump Bailey, the most charmless prima donna ballplayer ever in “The Natural.”

Madsen also went deep into crap. He has 327 acting credits, 17(!) upcoming, and so much of it is straight-to-video or straight-to-the-garbage-can awfulness (“DinoGator”? “The Wraith Within”? “Demon Pit”?) that you wonder if he didn't have gambling debts or a drug addiction or just bad judgment. But he deserved better. Someone needed to tell him that. Or he needed to hear that. He deserved better. 

Mother and children reunion

“Oren Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, who has defended Trump's protectionist trade policies but has argued that Republicans need to embrace higher taxes on the rich, was on the right track when, according to The Economist, he joked that the bill is 'zombie Reaganism' or 'zombie Ryanism.' If it proves to be the last significant piece of tax-and-spending legislation passed while Trump is President, a possibility that is far from remote, he could go down in history—or at least in fiscal history—not as the disrupter and agent of change that he likes to see himself as but rather as someone who simply extended the agenda of Ronald Reagan, Grover Norquist, and Paul Ryan to its logical conclusion: utter incoherence and irresponsibility.”

-- John Cassidy, “The Economic Consequences of the Big Odious Bill,” in The New Yorker. Much of the article is about the feint toward closing the carried-interest tax deduction loophole for hedge-fund managers. It was a campaign promise, they seemed interested in doing it, and then POOF they didn't. Would've been a drop of the $3 trillion in red ink that Trump's bill created, but it would've sent a message. Instead, a different message was sent. Or the same message: the rich get richer and the poor die.

An ordinary-looking man with extraordinary talent

I should have written this months ago, but I kept waiting for more info on the circumstances of his death and then life kept getting in the way. Plus I was a little intimidated by the length and breadth of his career. But I couldn't ignore this one. 

As a kid in the 1970s I wasn't into Gene Hackman. He represented the grown-up world in a way that didn't seem palatable with how a weak kid like me might navigate it. He implied it was dangerous in a decidedly unromantic way, corrupt probably, a little mean, exhausting, and amoral if not immoral. And those were his heroes.

I remember seeing “Bonnie and Clyde” in my early 30s and being struck by how genuine he was. Warren Beatty's Clyde was basically doing Beatty schtick, and then Hackman's Buck Barrow shows up and you go, “There's your fucking gangster.” He was so no bullshit. He was life as it is not as you want it to be. Life without the pretty face. He kept showing movie stars the way it was: Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer,” Willem Dafoe in “Mississippi Burning,” Will Smith in “Enemy of the State.” At the same time, he played the perfect comic foil, schlock movie producer Harry Zimm in “Get Shorty,” who trots out Chili Palmer's “Look at me” line on Ray Barboni but can't sell it because he's not really looking at Ray. He is looking at him but his eyes are elsewhere. They dim, they don't announce. I don't know how Hackman did this but it's genius. Particularly since those are the same eyes that announced themselves with such authority in every other movie.

He won his Oscars for grit and toughness (“The French Connection,” “Unforgiven”), but man his comedies. What a triumverate: “Superman,” “Get Shorty,” “The Royal Tenenbaums.” That's a master class. Add on his great cameo as the blind man in “Young Frankenstein,” and you wonder why he wasn't cast in comedies more.

I keep looking at his oeuvre and going, “I want to rewatch that ... and that ... and that.” I've seen “Hoosiers” only once. That seems wrong. When Hackman died at the end of February, Joe Posnanski wrote a nice piece that included an aside on why his Lex Luthor was the perfect supervillain (“they need charm and charisma and the ability to convince people that they're actually NOT supervillains”), but the brunt of the piece was about “Hoosiers” and one scene in particular. He called the piece “My Team is on the Floor” but that's not the scene. It's not when his best player disobeys him and gets benched, and then another player fouls out leaving only four, and he still refuses to let the best player on the court. He goes with four. That's when he says the line. But the scene, Posnanski writes, is the next day, when some townies outside a barbershop razz him: “You gonna play with three next time?”

There's something in the way he smiles and ignores them that feels profound to me. This is a coach who has already seen it all, one who understands that fans will be fans, and that it's his job as a coach to acknowledge them with good humor but never let them think their opinion is worth more than it is.

My father interviewed him in 1984 in Chicago, part of Hackman's first press tour in 10 years. Dad relayed some of Hackman's then decade-old wish list back to him—how he wanted to direct, to return to the theater, to act in musicals and comedies—and Hackman was no bullshit in response:

“You get locked into the Hollywood deal,” he explained, placing a cowboy boot on the edge of a coffee table in his hotel suite as he chose his words carefully. “Not really, but you do get lazy. It takes so many years to get successful, and when it happens, you don't want to to give it up. You're afraid it may go away.” 

It didn't go away for Hackman but it took many years to get successful. He was friends with Dustin Hoffman at the Pasadena Playhouse, where, infamously, they were both voted least likely to succeed. This was in the 1950s when the Troy Donahues of that troupe didn't see the 1960s and '70s coming. Both men wound up in New York, along with Robert Duvall, scrounging around for gigs. It was the worst of times and it was the best of times. “Simpler and easier to deal with,” Hackman told Dad. “Dusty had a job as a salesman at Macy's, so we'd do improvisation in the aisles. I'd come up and pretend to bother him on my lunch hour. Things like that.” 

At 16, he was so bored with high school that he quit to join the U.S. Marines. This was in 1947. He wound up stationed in China and was there when Mao took over. It was his job to destroy leftover Japanese weapons so the communists didn't get them. You see the former Marine in him in many of his roles.

I can't think of another actor like him. I'm glad we had him for the time we had him. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go watch “Hoosiers.”

Dad's Hackman article. He wrote the article not the hed.

Walters between two horrors: “He had fascinating friends.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” doesn’t tell us everything. It’s insular. It’s written and directed by a woman (Jackie Jesko), most of the talking heads are female TV journalists (Oprah, Katie, et al.), and most of what they say is supportive. She’s their shining star and they buff her up. It doesn’t help that it was produced by ABC News Studio, the network/news division where she worked for decades. It could’ve used, as we say in the biz, fresh eyes.

Example: The doc talks up early criticism of how Walters blended celebrity and hard-news interviews. We get her in voiceover—reading from her autobiography, I assume, since she died in December 2022:

I was criticized for doing specials that had people in the news along with celebrities: You can’t do both. Well, you can, and I did. And today we see it all the time.

As your parents will tell you, “We see it all the time” isn’t exactly a justification, particularly since that was the very fear behind the criticism. That those realms would blur and it would become the norm, and we wouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. That we would become a less-serious country.

Others in the doc come to her defense but it’s not much of a defense: 

Cynthia McFadden: This was very controversial to put hard-news interviews next to celebrity interviews. And there were many who felt she was just lowering standards.

Bob Iger: She had a vision back then that celebrities are news. She was criticized in that regard because she actually believed it—and I think she turned out to be right, that they were newsmakers.

Sure, but what news? Relationships? Gossip? What Angelina Jolie does won’t affect my taxes or healthcare coverage for my father.

Tellingly, as McFadden says “hard-news interviews” above, we get a shot of Pres. Reagan, and for “celebrity interviews” it’s movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Shortly thereafter, of course, Schwarzenegger would become hard news himself when he was elected governor of California, just as Reagan had once been celebrity news as a B-movie actor for Warner Bros. in the 1940s. The lines were already beginning to blur when Walters arrived but she helped erase them.

Here’s what the doc doesn’t begin to ask: Did lowering those journalistic standards to the point where celebrities and U.S. Senators were interchangeable personalities on the idiot box, did that help create an environment where, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say a two-bit huckster TV host and raging misogynist and racist could get himself elected president of the United States and then systematically curtail minority rights, women’s right, and the rule of law?

That was the fear. The fear is what we’re living through.

Not recorded here
If you’d asked me beforehand what stands out about Barbara Walters I would’ve said Gilda Radner’s “Baba Wawa,” the infamous “If you were a tree” question to Katherine Hepburn, and how the “Barbara Walters Special” aired every year after the Oscars. We get 10 seconds of Gilda and none of the rest. I mean, yes, the specials, but no mention of that prestigious timeslot. And no tree question.

I could’ve used more on her early steps in journalism before the “Today” show. We get the childhood—her father ran a NYC nightclub, he went broke, she had to become breadwinner—but this is mostly used in a pop-psychology way to explain her behavior. It’s why she was so driven (breadwinner), why she liked scoundrels (her father was one), why she had a longtime friendship/relationship with Roy Cohn (he helped her father with a tax issue).

The Cohn revelation was a shocker to me, particularly because, per Walters, it went beyond friendship. Peter Gathers, who edited her autobiography, says, “They talked about getting married. I have no idea how serious it was, but I would say to her: But he’s gay.” Her response? Not recorded here. Instead, another BW voiceover:

Roy was very well-known and had a great deal of power. He would take me to the Stork Club, to some of the great restaurants, he had fascinating friends.

Where do you fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? That’s Roy Cohn in “Angels in America." That’s what he cared about, and that’s what she cared about.

Which is why Walters had such a problem when Diane Sawyer showed up all tall and blonde on ABC in the 1990s. She was “a goddess,” per Walters, and Walters was frosty with her. As for what Sawyer thought? Not recorded here. Instead, the doc talks up how Walters opened doors for women everywhere even though she herself admits that wasn’t the goal.

We get her daughter, adopted. We get the example she set for the likes of Oprah and Katie Couric, even as each took the opposite lesson from her: Oprah saw her fumbling motherhood because she was married to work, and decided she herself couldn’t do both and never had kids. Couric thought Walters seemed lonely and became determined to have a family.

We get the exclusives: the first joint Sadat-Begin interview (landed, I assume, because Begin had the hots for her); the first Menendez brothers; the first Monica Lewinsky. That’s our trajectory: from stories that matter to tabloid crap. We’re less serious every day.

And the rest
You know who’s really good in this? Bette Midler. She’s also one of the most articulate about why Walters was good at what she did. Walters made the interviewee comfortable, and familiar, and then suddenly, bam, the tough, rude question. To Harvey Fierstein: What’s it like to be a homosexual? To Muhammad Ali: Are you faithful to your wife? To Midler: Do you do drugs? Do you think you’re good looking? Do you think you’re sexy? The doc also gives us Midler today looking at her responses from back then. Nice touch. I would’ve liked more of that.

The mid-1980s interview with Clint Eastwood is charming, too, particularly the way he flirts with her. She was good at these. She was good with the rich and famous and powerful. I don’t know if she did the rest of us any good.

“Is that a man?” “You damn right it is.”

I knew the 1970s Minnesota Vikings defensive line was called “the Purple People Eaters” long before I knew of the 1958 Sheb Wooley novelty song, “The Purple People Eater,” that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in June-July 1958; but once I put two and two together, I had real admiration for whoever came up with that moniker. It's obvious in retrospect—the unis were purple, they clobbered people—but still, kudos.

A newspapers.com search says it goes back at least to 1966. Al Larson, a staff writer at the Press-Telegram of Long Beach, Calif., calls them that in a recap of a 24-10 Vikings preseason victory over the Rams. He also calls them “Stormin' Norman's hungry hitters” and “the Dutchman's defensive gang.” Something would stick, right? At this point, those guys were Jim Marshall, Carl Eller, Paul Dickson and Gary Larsen; but Dickson was soon replaced by Alan Page, and that was the Purple People Eaters that I remember—though I'd always forget Larsen. But the other three? Legends. They formed the backbone of our defense for a dozen years together. Marshall played with the Vikes 1961-79, Eller 1964-78, Page 1967-78. Eller was a five-time All-Pro; Page, too, along with becoming the first defensive player to win the MVP in 1971. Marshall? Two Pro Bowls and one second-place finish as All-Pro. But he was the acknowledged leader of not just the d-line but the team. He was named its captain by Bud Grant.

In a Nov. 1968 article from the Associated Press, on the “Purple People” nickname and why they didn't like it, you understand why he was held in such high regard:

“We're satisfied as being the Vikings defense,” says Marshall, the 258-pound dean of the Vikings foursome. “We like to think of ourselves as an entire team. When you start naming the front four you kind of cheat the linebackers and the defensive backs. ... We would just like to be known as the Vikings defense,” he said, enunciating Vikings. 

Class act.

The Purple People Eaters, a moniker they didn't like (but I still do), in the late 1960s.

Marshall was also the Lou Gehrig of the NFL, setting the record for most consecutive games played in its history: 270. For years, no one was close. The closest was his teammate, Mick Tinglehoff, at 240, and then another teammate, Alan Page, at 215, and then finally a non-Viking, Raiders center Jim Otto, 210, whose record Marshall had broken. Eventually Brett Favre broke Marshall's record, because it's in the nature of Brett Favre to spoil things, but he did it as a QB not a lineman. Marshall is still the No. 1 defensive player in consecutive games. He's still No. 2 all-time. Amazing.

For more bonafides, I give up the floor to Joe Posnanski, who had the class to talk up Marshall's Hall of Fame case months before Marshall passed away on June 3. Poz was passionate about it:

Now that I look at it more closely, I believe that Jim Marshall is, far and away, the biggest snub in any sports Hall of Fame. ...

He didn't just start 270 games in a row — a defensive record that will never be broken — he started those games for Minnesota's legendary PURPLE PEOPLE EATERS defense, who were top three in fewest points allowed in 1969, 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1976. How in the world is the defensive end who started in every single one of those games not a Hall of Famer? Were the other 10 players just making up for him?

And it's not like he lacks the numbers. He had 131 unofficial sacks in his career — more than Von Miller, Derrick Thomas and even Dwight Freeney, who was just elected to the Hall of Fame in 2024, based almost entirely on his sacks. Or how about this: He STILL holds the NFL record for most fumbles recovered in a career with 30.*

*Actually, the NFL record for most recovered fumbles is held by Hall of Famer Warren Moon with an astonishing 56, but recovering your own fumble doesn't count.

PLUS, he has one of the greatest lines in sports history. After his famous wrong-way run after he recovered one of those fumbles, he told reporters that his teammates asked him to fly the plane back to Minneapolis. “That way,” he said, “we'd up in Hawaii instead of Minnesota.”

No, I didn't intend to go all-in on Jim Marshall today, but remembering that he's not in the Hall of Fame has really set me off. It's a disgrace. Jim turns 88 in December, and I am making it a JoeBlogs mission to get him elected before we lose him.

We lost him. Godspeed, No. 70.

A more Minnesota photo may not exist.

The other day my friend Mike and I were texting each other about what might make a good Seattle Mariners bobblehead giveaway—this in the wake of the upcoming George Costanza offering at Yankee Stadium—and after several misfires (Frank Costanza complaining about the Buhner trade, Lenny Randle blowing a ball foul), we agreed on one concept, what Mike called “the Double Diego”: Diego Segui pitching on Opening Day for the Seattle Pilots in 1969 and the Seattle Mariners in 1977. I'd suggested this idea not knowing that Segui had passed away at the end of last month, while I was still in France.

As Mariners fans know, Segui is the only player to play for both Seattle MLB teams, but he had his best years with the A's—both in Kansas City, where, as a rookie in 1962, he went 8-5 with a 3.86 ERA, and in Oakland, where in, 1970, he led the Majors in ERA with a 2.56 mark. But he was itinerant. He was born in Cuba, was signed and then quickly dropped by Cincinnati in 1958, made his way to the Arizona-Mexico League for a season, then was picked by and made his way through the Athletics' system. After a few seasons in the big, he was purchased by the Washington Senators (II) in April 1966 and then traded back to the Athletics that July. He was then taken by the nascent Seattle Pilots with the 14th pick of the expansion draft in October 1968.

Though primarily a reliever in 1969, he was the Pilots' best pitcher by bWAR (2.4), going 12-6 with a 3.35 ERA and 12 saves. What did this mean to an org that was so poorly run it traded the eventual 1969 Rookie of the Year (Lou Piniella) before the season even began? Right, trade bait. They sent him back to the Athletics for not much, and he promptly led the league in ERA. He kept pitching not poorly for the A's but in the summer of '72, just as they were beginning their great run, they sent him to St. Louis for a season and a half. Then he was part of a six-player deal to Boston. His '75 season wasn't great (2-5, 4.82 ERA), but he was on the postseason roster and pitched a mop-up inning of the 1975 World Series. In Game 5, with the Reds leading 5-1, Boston's Dick Pole walked Johnny Bench and Tony Perez to start out the bottom of the eighth, so Segui was called on and got three straight fly outs (Foster, Concepcion, Geronimo) that allowed Bench to score but otherwise minimized the damage. The next game was a doozy.

Might that have been his last MLB appearance if the Seattle Mariners hadn't thundered their way into existence? Maybe. He was released by Boston in April '76, spent a not-bad season in AAA for the Padres, who then sold him to this new Mariners club in October 1976. And yes, he was on the mound, the starting pitcher, for the first game at the Kingdome on April 6, 1977. First pitch? A strike on the outside corner. Everything went downhill from there—for him and the M's. He played the entire season without winning a game, going 0-7, and in his last start, Sept. 24, he lasted just 1/3 of an inning against the Chicago White Sox: single to Ralph Garr, double to Chet Lemon, wild pitch scored Garr, K to Royle Stillman but double to Oscar Gamble. And that's all she wrote. He was replaced by Sept. callup Greg Erardi, who pitched only six games in the Majors.

Though now 40, Segui kept going. From '78 to '84 he pitched in the Mexican League, where his ERA was under 3.00 every season except for the last. In the 1984 edition of Jim Bouton's “Ball Four,” which is mostly about that 1969 Pilots season, there's a kind of “Where are they now?” section at the end, with Segui's entry reading: “He's living in Kansas City but no one seems to know what he's doing. Except that he still pitches in the Carribean Winter League.” His son, David, also became a Major Leaguer, and had a good season and a half with the Mariners at first base. We traded him to Toronto, mid-1999, for not much. Plus ca change. 

I still like the “Double Diego” idea.

FURTHER READING:

• More in-depth history on Segui from RIP Baseball
• Segui's Baseball Reference page
• His bio via SABR

I shouldn't care. They're just division rivals. But when I was the right baseball age, meaning 9 to 11, the Oakland A's broke big, becoming the second franchise to win three World Series in a row—and they did it in inimitable fashion: sporting long hair, moustaches, great nicknames, those beautiful gold-and-green unis, and all-time memorable players. So I do care. And it's why I don't like what their current owner, John Fisher, heir to the GAP fortune, is doing to them.

Summation: He moved them out of Oakland for Las Vegas, but Vegas isn't nearly ready, and may never be ready, and in the meantime he stuck the team in a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento; but then he refused to call them the Sacramento A's, pissing people off there. No Oakland, either, or Vegas. He just said they're the Athletics. One name. Like Cher. 

We knew all that going into this season. So how is it going now? Yesterday Joe Posnanski pointed me to a Guardian article by David Lengel, whose title, “Debacle in the Desert,” gives you an idea. The mucky-mucks, including COB Rob Manfred, had a groundbreaking ceremony in Vegas that was all show. Construction costs are already going up—particularly since so much construction in this country is done by immigrants, who are being deported, or who are so fearful of being deported they don't want to leave their homes. People don't know what Fisher's endgame is—whether he miscalculated or is just dumb. Lengel mentions that Oakland's final offer was $750 million in infrastructure and grants to build a new stadium but he walked away from it.

Why would Fisher leave nearly a billion dollars for a park on a 55-acre plot, in a top-10 television market in love with its ballclub, for nine acres and a minuscule market with fans who don't know their A's from their elbow? We still don't know, but there are plenty of new questions to try and answer about a process that doesn't add up to anyone despite Fisher, Manfred, and the Vegas officials who insist that everything is on time and on schedule.

Posnanski thinks Vegas ain't gonna happen. What was supposed to happen in Vegas won't stay in Vegas. So where? As a Seattle fan, I wouldn't mind a rival that's closer than Sacramento or San Diego, so I'd love Porland or Vancouver, B.C. But if MLB really wants to get innovative, why not continue the westward trajectory of this original-16 team? Yes, there's not much west of Oakland in the United States. But...

PHI –> KC –> OAK –> TOKYO

Probably too many legal and logistical hurdles to jump. Fun thinking about, though. 

In my defense, it did premiere at Cannes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

On the last day of my vacation in France, as a way to avoid the afternoon heat and as a kind of experiment, I did something tres gauche: I went to see “Mission: Impossible ­– The Final Reckoning” at the Grand Rex on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. 

It was a kind of experiment because the film wasn’t VO (version originale) but VF (version francais). It was dubbed. I was curious:

• Did the French voice actor sound anything like Tom Cruise?
• How much would I understand with my shitty French?
• Would I be able to follow the plot anyway?

Well…

• All the voice actors sounded plain, regressed to the mean. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz.
• My shitty French didn’t help.
• I still understood most of the movie.

It’s an action movie, after all, not complicated, and I know the tropes. I’ve been watching these things about as long as Tom Cruise has been alive.

La cle, boss, la cle
He’s showing his age a little, isn’t he? He’s in fantastic shape—entire scenes are him in his skivvies, Joel Goodsen + 40 years—but in some scenes his face is oddly puffy. I assume because of the stunt work he insists on doing? You know that footage of pilots and astronauts with contorted faces from G-Forces? I think it’s hangover from that. Cruise has been hanging off too many planes during his career. He does it again here—twice. He plunges into Arctic waters—twice. He runs superfast and super-upright to try to save a friend’s life before a bomb goes off. Once.

Here’s what the plot of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” seemed like in French with my shitty French.

Ethan Hunt is in possession of the key from the last movie. He and the girl, Grace (Hayley Atwell), are kidnapped from a swanky opera by the villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), and Hunt is tortured, Grace is threatened, but they break free. Hunt is with his IM team when he enters a pod that shows him a vision of the end of the world—nuclear destruction. So now we know what he needs to do: prevent that. But first his computer guy, Luther (Ving Rhames), is trapped with a bomb and Ethan races across empty London streets to set him free. He doesn’t. He and Luther talk through the plastic partition, like Kirk and Spock in “Star Trek II,” with Luther most likely saying some version of the needs of the many outweighing him, even though he weighs a lot. Boom.

Now we’re in the North Atlantic. Ethan jumps into frigid waters, is about to die of hypothermia, but he’s saved by doubtful U.S. military scuba forces, one of whom winds up being a traitor.

Meanwhile, his IM team visits a scientist and his Inuit wife on an Arctic island, but uh oh, other forces are there, too. Russians? Gabriel’s? There are discussions and standoffs and gun battles.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Angela Bassett), keeps debating with her advisers, including Gen. Nick Offerman, about what to do about the impending nuclear apocalypse.

Hunt is doing more than debating. He scuba-dives into a sunken Russian nuclear sub—didn’t we see it sink in the beginning of the first movie?—and that’s the point of the key, you use it there for something, which Hunt does; but he also lets in a lot of water, so on the ocean floor the sub keeps turning and groaning and turning, and it’s about to fall into a deep chasm. Ethan works frantically to escape, but the only way he can do it is to strip to his skivvies and swim through icy waters to the surface. He swims and swims, and slows, and stops. And dies. And that’s it for that.

Kidding. He passes out, and when he wakes up he’s being warmed by Grace and reunited with his team. Somehow.

Then it’s to an underground facility in South Africa, where there are discussions and standoffs and gun battles between Gabriel, IM Forces, and U.S. intelligence repped by that jerk Kittridge (Henry Czermy). Beloved IM dude Benji (Simon Pegg) gets plugged, Gabriel runs away with the doohickey that matters, and Ethan runs after him.

Now we intercut between:

• The IM girls, including Pom Klementieff’s Paris, trying to defuse a bomb with the help of a wounded Benji.
• The U.S. president still arguing with advisers, and being threatened, and Gen. Nick Offerman getting his Sgt. Al Powell “Die Hard” moment—the sudden savior.
• Ethan pursuing Gabriel, who escapes via biplane.

Actually two biplanes. Gabriel pilots the first, his lieutenant(?) the second, which is the one Ethan latches onto. He pulls himself up, decks the pilot, takes control of the plane, and goes after Gabriel. No, Gabriel sees him first, and decides to have fun, like Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. But then Ethan climbs onto Gabriel’s plane and gets the doohickey from around his neck. And as Gabriel gets swept into a propeller (I think), Ethan parachutes out while plugging that doohickey into another doohickey, and that’s the thing that saves the day at the last second. Whew.

Back in London, the surviving IM members, including Benji, look at each other and nod about saving the world, and then go their separate ways.

Not sure if it made more sense in English.

The pill with the poison is in the podkova going nova
In English I’d have the names and reasons for things. The standoff with the scientist on the island, for example? That’s about getting the Russian sub’s coordinates, which are relayed to Ethan so he can retrieve something called the Podkova, which is the thing you need to defeat the Entity.

Right, the Entity. That’s what’s missing from the above. It’s the movie’s main villain—artificial intelligence. Maybe that’s the takeaway from this French-language experiment: AI makes a lousy villain. Because where is it? Here, there and everywhere. But not on the screen.

It’s the Entity that’s going to launch everyone’s nukes, and Ethan needs to jump through all these hoops to make sure it doesn’t happen. But—I’m curious—does Gabriel want the world to end? He certainly keeps getting in the way of trying to save it. So maybe he’s part of the “undercover doomsday cult” Wiki mentions that I don’t remember seeing either. By the way, I totally dig this line from Wiki on the film’s climax: “Ethan finds a second parachute and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair…” That’s a master class in maguffins. Or pornography.

“Final” is the eighth (and supposedly final) of the Cruise “M:I” movies, which seem to have run their course. They're certainly not increasing their take:

* As of June 27-29 weekend

To its credit, it embraces its past. The island scientist (Rolf Saxon), for example, is the CIA analyst Ethan fooled with the zipline-above-the-floor stunt in the first film, while that jerk Kittridge was also a jerk in that first film. Pres. Erika Sloane? Back in 2018, as CIA head, she foisted the traitorous, mustachioed Henry Cavill on IMF. Now she’s the black female president because in real life we can’t have such nice things. Oh, and Shea Whigham and his great skeptical expression turns up as the son of Jim Phelps, the star of the TV series (Peter Graves), and the great betrayer from the first film (Jon Voight). He and Ethan shake hands in the end. Bygones, bro.

After beginning the series with auteurs (Brian De Palma, John Woo, etc.), the last four movies have all been directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the guy who wrote “The Usual Suspects” but now seems in the Tom Cruise business. The last thing he worked on that wasn’t a Cruise movie was in 2013. Since then, it’s the likes of “Jack Reacher,” “The Mummy,” “Top Gun,” “M:I.” They might want to start seeing other people.

Tom Cruise? He was the great brat of the Brat Pack, our forever cocksure cousin, playing guys determined to be the best at a thing—test pilot, bartender, race-car driver—despite the doubt and desperation in their eyes. But he never quite grew up, did he? Did he ever play a father? “War of the Worlds,” I guess. He’s still best-known as a son—“Risky Business,” “Magnolia”—but he’s 63 now and a little old to be hanging off airplanes. Not sure where he goes from here. In the poster for this one he seems oddly serene, the desperation gone from his eyes. Maybe that's a way forward.

In the two weeks I was on vacation in France, my nephew Casey got married and my nephew Ryan graduated from college. That was the good news. Here's some of the other news.

Amazon closed the Whole Foods in our neighborhood because it could, and because it wasn't quite profitable enough, and maybe because a mental health facility is being built across the street and down a block. So there went that. We lost Bartell's in 2023, Whole Foods now. Our neighborhood feels like it's shrinking. Oh, and while I was gone, the U.S. entered another Middle East war, because it could, and because, you know, Trump got all trumpy about being trumped by glowing Fox News coverage of Israel's attacks on Iran and wanted in on that sweet, sweet action. Lookatme lookatme lookatme lookatme. Somebody needs to tell him he's going to be dead soon and most of the world will want to piss on his grave, but the only people with his ear are opportunists, sycophants, and those using his popularity for their own greedy ends. Not that he'd hear anyone else anyway.

Those things made me sad, but what made me mad my first full day back? Like furious beyond all reason? Apparently the two weeks I was gone was when tech bros decided to foist AI upon anyone who needed to write anything.

So yesterday morning I opened my work laptop and began to sort through the 200+ emails there, one of which, from the very day I left, needed a prompt answer. I began to do that. And in the space where I would write, there was a little grayed-out message: “Help me write,” it said. Which distracted me from writing. And it wouldn't go away. I googled it and found out it was part of something called the Gemini program, which, yes, sounds like a doomsday project out of James Bond movie like “Moonraker”: “You will never stop the Gemini Program, Mr. Bond.”

It wasn't just Google, either. When I opened Microsoft Word on my home computer, I was greeted with this:

Worse, it costs. On top of the money you're already paying annually for Microsoft Office. It's an ad. And I couldn't dismiss it. It took opening up an older Word document to create an option to dismiss. So far that's worked for all Word docs but maybe tomorrow it won't. Meanwhile a colleague figured out how to turn off the Gemini thingee so that's gone, too. But both dismissals took several frustrating hours, by which time my morning, not to mention my nerves, were shot.

But the vacation was nice. More on it later.

A few years ago, I posted this about a third-season episode of “M*A*S*H” that took a deep dive into Warner Bros. lore. I recently rewatched a season 2 ep. called “Carry On, Hawkeye,” where everyone gets the flu except Hawkeye, Hot Lips, Radar and Father Mulcahy, and we get the following exchange:

Hawkeye: You know there's a frontier feeling around here? Joel McCrea is in bed, so is Ralph Bellamy and Col. Andy Devine. Now there's just you and me: Frances Dee and Slim Summerville. 
Hot Lips: Why do you talk like that?
Hawkeye: I can't help it, I'm part of the movie generation. I spent every Saturday morning and afternoon in the dark. ... I could easily have been a mushroom instead of a doctor.

Later in the episode, he says, “Maybe we are in a movie. You're Bette Davis and I'm George Brent.”

Some of these references were obscure enough (Slim Summerville) that I had to look them up, so I'm curious who the big movie buff on staff was. There's three listed writers: Bernard Dilbert, Larry Gelbart, Laurence Marks. I'm leaning Marks, but maybe it was all of them? Maybe they just riffed their way into this dialogue.

WARNING: SPOILERS

With these egos, it’s a wonder any Hollywood history is written.

Who’s the guy who promoted James Cagney from supporting to lead in “The Public Enemy”? Among those claiming credit: studio head Jack Warner, producer Darryl Zanuck, director Bill Wellman and screenwriter John Bright. I’m guessing it was some combo of the last two.

Who first read W.R. Burnett’s “Little Caesar” and thought “Hey, we should make this into a movie”? Let me count the ways.

• Jack Warner in “My First 100 Years in Hollywood”: “I encountered a song writer named Butch Davis in the Santa Fe railroad station. He was carrying a new book called Little Caesar by an unknown writer named W.R. Burnett … I had nothing better to do on that slow, all-night train ride and the story had me well hooked by the time I got off at San Diego early in the morning. I walked into the Western Union office there and sent a wire to our story department in New York asking them to buy the Burnett book and keep it quiet.”
• Producer Hal Wallis in “Starmaker”: “I read the book and was fascinated. … I sent the book over to Jack Warner, and without even reading it, he approved my making it into a film.”
• Director Mervyn LeRoy in “Take One”: “Jack Warner called me into his office. He held out the galley proofs of a new book [and said], ‘I’ve got too much to do to read it tonight. You read it and tell me what you think.’ … I read straight through the night, my excitement heightening with every page. … ‘This is what I’ve been looking for, Jack,’ I said. ‘This guy Burnett must have written this for me.’”

As full of shit as Jack Warner always was—and I think he’s full of shit here—LeRoy is equally suspect. On a different page in his memoir, he claims to have discovered and renamed Loretta Young for “Too Young to Marry” in 1931 and directed James Cagney in “Hot Stuff” in 1929. Except by 1931 Young had already starred in a dozen movies as LorettaYoung, while Cagney was not only not in “Hot Stuff,” he wasn’t even in Hollywood in 1929.

I do side with LeRoy on a different squabble. Warner claims LeRoy wanted Clark Gable for the title role, while LeRoy is like: That was for supporting! Gable instead of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.! LeRoy’s version just fits better—particular if you’re going for a Al Capone-type for Rico. It feels like Warner is attempting misdirection, but it’s also a gigantic self-own. His implied criticism of LeRoy—“You think Gable would’ve made a better Little Caesar than Edward G. Robinson, ha ha”—doesn’t change the agreed-upon fact that Warner Bros. screen-tested Clark Gable and rejected him. They turned away the biggest movie star of the 1930s.

The ruthless rise
Question: If Al Capone hadn’t existed, what would Edward G. Robinson’s career have been like? My guess: great character actor and occasional leading man, maybe nominated for a Tony here or an Oscar there, maybe winning a few. Instead he became a legend: one of the great cinematic gangsters, who wound up nominated for… wait for it… zero Oscars. That’s right. Not for “Little Caesar,” “The Whole Town’s Talking,” “Double Indemnity,” “Scarlet Street,” “Key Largo,” or “The Cincinnati Kid.” None, nonce, bupkis. I don’t know the greatest actor never nominated for an Oscar but Robinson is certainly in the conversation.

He was initially reluctant when first offered a Capone-like gangster—Scarsi in the Broadway play “The Racket”—and not because he feared typecasting. “I had little understanding of larceny and murder,” Robinson writes in his 1973 autobiography. “I would be forced to invent the gangster since I had no yardstick by which to create him.” But he did just that, the play was a smash, and it led to gangster roles in nascent talkies: Cobra Collins in “Outside the Law” for Universal; Dominic in “The Widow from Chicago” for Warner Bros. Meaning Warners didn’t have to look far to find their Rico. He was right there.

“Little Caesar” is simpler than “The Public Enemy.” It’s basically the rise and fall of a sociopath.

We open at a gas station at night, a man goes inside, a gunshot goes off. Now we’re in a diner, and our title character, Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello, is turning back the clock on the wall as an alibi. As they order spaghetti and coffee, Rico talks up a newspaper article about a shindig for big city gangster Diamond Pete Montana. “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” asks Rico’s partner, Joe Massara (Fairbanks Jr.). Plenty, Rico responds. It’s what Rico wants for himself: to be in the big city doing big things in a big way, see? Joe says he wants to be in the big city, too, but … to dance. Right away you wonder why these two are together.

And then they’re not. They go east, most likely Chicago, and Joe is soon dancing professionally at the Bronze Peacock with girlfriend Olga Stassoff (Glenda Farrell), while Rico is over at the Club Palermo, getting in with Sam Vettori (Stanley Fields) and his gang. Joe is only peripherally with the gang. He’s seen as useful because he’s a civilian.

We quickly learn the underworld hierarchy:

1. Rico, et al., report to…
2. Sam Vettori, who, with rival Arnie Lorch, reports to…
3. Diamond Pete Montana, who reports to…
4. The Big Boy

Big Boy (Sidney Blackmer) is apparently based on Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson (1915-23, 1927-31), whose relationship with Capone was well-known.

There’s a good early scene that speaks to the dawning celebrity age. During a pow-wow at the Bronze Peacock, Pete Montana (Ralph Ince) shows up, and Rico advances toward him as if mesmerized. His advance can be read as threat or fandom—or both—and he’s cautioned back, but he can’t take his eyes off the man or his bling. Eventually he’s exiled to the hallway. That’s when Pete Montana spreads the word: Big Boy is telling everyone to lay low because of the new crime commissioner, McClure (Landers Stevens). Everyone agrees. Everyone except the new guy in town, exiled to the hallway, who’s got an itchy finger.

In fact, in the very next job, a bystander is shot and killed. And that bystander is… Well, I’ll let Sam say it.

Sam [dazed]: McClure! You shot McClure! A million guys in this town and you had to pick the crime commissioner.

You’d think Rico would get in trouble for doing exactly what they told him not to—and against the crime commissioner—but it doesn’t work that way. Maybe because it was McClure? Rico removed the one guy they were worried about. Either way, shortly thereafter, we see Rico feted at an honorarium the way Diamond Pete was in the newspaper account—and unlike Diamond Pete (but exactly like Capone), Rico welcomes the publicity. By this point, he’s already taken over Sam’s gang, and when Arnie comes gunning for him and misses, he takes over Arnie’s territory, too.

Then a meeting with Big Boy at his mansion, where, amid Rico’s comic uncouthness (tapping cigar ash on the carpet, assuming the high price of art is based upon the frame), Big Boy hands him Diamond Pete’s territory—the whole northside.

He’s risen far and fast. His fall is even faster and stems from two interconnected facts: He doesn’t trust Joe and he can’t kill Joe.

The empathetic fall
Now that Rico has what he’s long wanted, he worries over loose ends. That’s Joe. The cops are investigating the McClure murder (about time, boys) and asking about the dancer at the Palermo. Joe knows too much for someone on the outside, so Rico tries to bring him back into the fold. No go. Rico is soon threatening Olga: “That Jane's made a softy out of you,” and, patting his breast pocket, “There’s ways of stopping that dame!” and “She’s outta the way, that’s what she is!”

Then phonus interruptus. It’s Big Boy offering a right-hand man, and Joe uses the moment as an excuse to split—back to Olga, who wants him to rat. He won’t. So she does. She calls Sgt. Flaherty (Thomas E. Jackson), tells him to come down, and answers the door when they knock. Except it’s Rico and his real right-hand man, Otero (George E. Stone, an early Warner Bros. staple I love), who shouts, “Give it to ‘im, Rico!” Rico's about to. He moves forward—toward the camera and toward the couple clutching each other—until he’s right on top of them. That’s when Joe pushes Olga aside and tells Rico to shoot and get it over with.

And he can’t. Same straight-on camera shot, but rather than menacing, Rico appears stricken. The camera even loses focus as if to underline the softening of Rico’s resolve.

That’s why the fall. The man who rose to power on ruthlessness falls because of … kindness? Love? Later, on the lam, Rico seems to wake from his stupor. “This is what I get for liking a guy too much!” He picked the right guy anyway: Joe never rats. Rico threatens his life, Otero wings him, but when the cops arrive he sticks by the code. It’s Olga (of course) who spills the tea. Apparently her word is enough for Chicago cops, and the Palermo gang is rounded up. 

On the lam, we get Rico’s downfall in three acts:

• I: A cop gives chase, Otero is plugged, Rico is alone.
• II: Holed up in the back of Ma Magdalena’s fruit store, where apparently he’d stashed money. Now she has the upper hand and uses it. She’ll give him a fraction of his money, “If you be a good boy.”
• III: Months later, an unshaven Rico boozes it up at a flophouse at 4th and Commercial.

That third act is a bit of a lie and underscores an oddity of the film. Gangsters in the 1920s rose to power on the back of Prohibition, which “Public Enemy” details exactly, and which “Little Caesar” mentions not at all. I think the first mention is when Big Boy offers a drink to Rico, who responds, “I never touch the stuff.” But in his fall, per the Warners code, Rico becomes a drunkard with five o’clock shadow. (Cf., Cagney’s Eddie Bartlett.) That’s the lie. They couldn’t just make him clear-eyed in the flophouse? And why is he sticking around the city anyway? Why not hop a train? Start all over again but without Joe/Olga to muck it up.

In the flophouse, three rummies pontificate about the day’s news: how Sam Vettori went to the gallows a coward (Rico smiles), and how Flaherty is saying shit about Rico in the press—trying to flush him out. It works. Rico phones him, barks his bark, and they trace the call. By the time they near the joint, Rico is walking the cold dark streets, hands in pockets, a crumpled fedora on his head, but Flaherty recognizes him immediately and we get our final shootout next to a giant billboard advertising Olga and Joe’s LAUGHING SINGING DANCING SUCCESS. Rico takes refuge behind it, Flaherty demands he give himself up, Rico shouts, “If you want me, you’ll have to come and get me!”

They don’t. They machine-gun him through the billboard. Not exactly cricket.

The Legion of Decency is neither legion nor decent: discuss
A good book could be written on how the morality police almost always sends the wrong message in movies. “Little Caesar” is pre-code, so before Joe Breen and the Legion of Decency took over, but it’s still a good example of this phenomenon.

In his rise, Rico is ruthless and successful, so, yes, he needs to fall. You can’t leave him as wish-fulfillment fantasy. Except, in his fall, Rico becomes tragic and thus sympathetic. He becomes us. Weren’t we supposed to go places, too? And now look at us—stuck at 4th and Commercial with these rummies. It’s a great irony that the very thing the morality police demands—showing us crime doesn’t pay—makes us like the guy they don’t want us to like. Particularlywhen you compare him to the cops here—distant, blasé figures that speak in the slow, sing-songy tone of early talkies. Robinson’s Rico is rat-a-tat. He sounds like the streets. He sounds like us.

More, Rico doesn’t fall because he’s immoral. It’s his one decent moment that makes everything unravel. What kind of lesson is that for the kids? Don’t be decent? Rico is also brave and defiant at the end—Come and get me!—while the cops, gunning him through a billboard, aren't exactly brave.

In a short documentary on the film, film historian Alain Silver brings up a salient point about Rico’s famous final words: Despite a life of crime and murder, and the constant threat of being killed, he’s surprised when it happens: “Mother of mercy,” he rasps, “is this the end of Rico?” I like that it’s in the third person. Even dying, he’s still writing his own press releases. But I think Silver is onto something. This scene has resonated for nearly 100 years because of the surprise, which, again, ties him to the rest of humanity. None of us can truly imagine our own end. We all know it’s out there, we all know it’s coming, and when it arrives we’ll all be as surprised as Rico Bandello.