WARNING: SPOILERS

I rented this from Scarecrow Video—yes, I still do that—because of a screen credit that might not have been a screen credit.

Thomas E. Dixon Jr. is infamous as the white supremacist lawyer-minister who wrote the 1905 novel “The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” which became the 1915 D.W. Griffith movie “Birth of a Nation,” which rejuvenated the KKK in the first half of the 20th century and led to who knows how many lynchings and how much more American misery.

And on IMDb, “Nation Aflame” is listed as Dixon’s last screen credit.

Here’s the thing, though: the synopsis of the film seems the opposite of Dixon’s earlier work:

Believing they can make a ton of money, a gang of opportunists uses the country’s racial and ethnic tensions to start a Ku Klux Klan-type organization.

So did Dixon, who died on April 3, 1946, have a change of heart about race matters?

Well, it turns out his prejudices were kind of complicated. He thought Black people were inferior but Jewish people superior. He never understood anti-Semitism, reminding people that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was Jewish. As for the reconstructed Klan he helped popularize, he saw it as “a growing menace to law and order.” Which is maybe why he helped write “Nation Aflame.”

If he helped write “Nation Aflame.” From the American Film Institute:

Although onscreen credits read, “Story by Thomas Dixon, author of Birth of a Nation,” and the film’s reviews state that the film was based on a story by Dixon, a 29 Jun 1936 HR [Hollywood Reporter] news item claims that the story was an original written by Leon d’Usseau.

OK, so who was Leon d’Usseau? According to his 1963 obit, he was a producer-director and sometime screenwriter who helped found RKO Studios. He was married to actress Ottola Nesmith and was the father of Arnaud d’Usseau, a playwright-screenwriter who was blacklisted in the 1950s, refused to name names, and left for work in Europe. Apparently the son roomed with another blacklistee, Zero Mostel, for a spell, too.

So what evidence is there besides the 1936 Hollywood Reporter article that the story came from d’Usseau and not Dixon? Not much. A search of “d’Usseau” and “Nation Aflame” on newspapers.com brings up literally nothing. And Dixon is on the poster—prominently. And, as we’ve seen, he wasn’t exactly a fan of the new Klan. So … who knows? It’s a question for a college professor on sabbatical. (I really should’ve been a college professor with sabbaticals.)

As for the movie?

The suckers’ll eat it up
A bunch of grifters with a real-estate scheme get run out of town and need to come up with a new scam; and though they’re led by the portly, jovial Roland Adams (longtime character actor Harry Holman), it’s newcomer Frank Sandino (Noel Madison) who figures out that the next great grift is a very old one: xenophobia.

Sandino: We’ll capitalize on jealousy, intolerance and patriotism. We’ll form a secret lodge, and band our members into a legion of patriotic avengers: the Avenging Angels!
Adams: That’s a great name! The Avenging Angels: plenty of mystery, secret meetings, secret oaths, mysterious robes and phony rituals. [Laughs] Boy, the suckers’ll eat it up!

They wind up descending on a town where Adams was once mayor, and where Adams’ daughter, Wynne (Norma Trelvar), is now—inexplicably given his down-and-out status—a kind of socialite running the upper-crust party scene. Very quickly, Sandino, who has Americanized his name to Sands, has the rubes in his clutches, and Wynne turns out to be one of those rubes. She even begins a relationship with him. When Adams objects, Sands shuts him up by making him governor. Dad of the Year right there.

The forces aligning against the fascists are typical for ’30s Hollywood: the intrepid local DA (Arthur Singley) and the intrepid local newspaper editor (Allen Cavan). The latter goes an editorial too far and winds up being killed by Angels’ hatchet man Dave Burtis (Roger Williams). Both Adamses are appalled, and when Gov. Adams breaks from the group he—in a seeming nod to the 1935 assassination of Louisiana populist Huey Long—is gunned down.

So what finally stops Sands? The same thing that derails many a powerful man: a sex scandal. Except this one is kinda-sorta manufactured by Wynne, who sacrifices her reputation to bring down Sands.

Someday it would be nice if fascists were undone by, you know, their fascism, but apparently that's too much to ask.

The shame of my lifetime
“Nation Aflame” is not a good movie. It was directed and produced by Poverty Row brothers Victor and Edward Halperin, who probably deserved their Poverty Row status. It’s edited poorly, and, after years of neglect, the quality of the film isn’t the best.

But it’s worth watching for how much the arguments of its villains wouldn’t be out of place today on Fox News or at a Republican convention. Here’s an early speech of Adams’:

“We’ve been traveling all over the country studying the unemployment situation and the growing recklessness of our nation’s youth. After an extensive study of those conditions, Mr. Sands and I have concluded that their basic cause is primarily: foreigners. Too long have we permitted aliens and foreigners to prosper by whatever means they choose!”

And here’s Sandino/Sands:

“The only way that we can save the youth of our nation is to organize them in one single group, and through them, enforce the precepts of 100% Americanism! Corruption and politics must go! Civic virtue and patriotism must be our goals! We must enforce a reverence for our flag and our Constitution, and what is more, protect our American womanhood, and guard the sanctity of our homes. We must guarantee that the wealth of America must be shared only by real Americans! To maintain and declare absolute boycott against foreigners is our only salvation!”

What a shame that the rhetoric of stock villains in a 1930s movie is the rhetoric of the right-wing mainstream 100 years later. It’s the shame of my lifetime.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’m curious what I would’ve thought if I’d seen it opening night, with a crowd gasping and cheering and applauding—and if I didn’t already know about the multiverse and the supervillains and the return of Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire as Spider-Man 1 and 2. I’m sure I would’ve been blown away. The concept itself is great. It means anything and anyone might come back. You could do this with the Hulk and bring back Ed Norton and Eric Bana. You could do this with Fantastic Four and bring back Miles Teller (from the disastrous 2015 film) and Jessica Alba (from the disastrous 2005 and ’07 films), and—dare I say it—Alex Hyde-White and Jay Underwood (from the uber-disastrous, super low budget 1994 film). Which reminds me: Did they consider reaching back to Nicholas Hammond for this one? Probably not. But either way I like it. I like anything that makes our culture less throwaway.

Except I didn’t see it opening night; I saw it several months later, when I knew most of the above. And while most of the movie still works, and the meeting of the Spider-Men is sweet and poignant, something kind of ruined the movie for me.

Any guesses? 

Aunt May’s dumbshit argument
It opens as “Spider-Man: Far From Home” closed: with J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), a kind of Bill O’Reilly/Roger Ailes amalgamation on the Daily Bugle Network, broadcasting the final message from Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who accuses Spider-Man (Tom Holland) of the terrorist attack on London and then reveals his secret identity: Spider-Man is … Peter Parker!

And all hell breaks loose. Crowds gather around MJ (Zendaya), he swoops down to rescue her, then swoops them away because the crowd is celeb-crazy—or just crazy. It’s like a Twitter feed writ large. And suddenly there’s nowhere where they’re safe: Manhattan, Queens, anywhere. The FBI bursts in. Why does the agent in charge (Arian Moayed) bug me so much? Oh right, he played that asshole on “Succession.” Anyway, our heroes lawyer up with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), the alter-ego of Daredevil from the Netflix series. So they’re bringing him in? That’s pretty cool. Talk about a multiverse. Can Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin be far behind?

But this particular storyline doesn’t last long: the state has no case, and to get away from the crowds Peter and Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) simply move to one of the Stark Industry safe houses. (Gotta say: Given its power in the world, Stark Industries, in the person of Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), is fairly unhelpful throughout.) The world is still crazy, of course. Half love Peter/Spidey too much, the other half—spurred by Bugle/Fox News—think he’s a monster. First day of senior year does not go well, so Peter, MJ and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalan) escape to the roof. And soon the focus of the movie becomes something else entirely: 

Where are they going for college?

All three want MIT, but all three are rejected. Not because of grades, etc., but because they’re under FBI investigation. I guess you could say that everything that happens afterward is the fault of MIT.

Upset by the disappointment of his friends, Peter gets the bright idea to visit Avengers ally Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to see if he can’t do something about it. And he can! He can cast a spell to make the world forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. But when he’s casting the spell Peter keeps interrupting with “Oh, MJ should still know, and Ned Leeds, and Aunt May…” until Strange has to break off and contain the spell before it goes kabloowy. Except it’s already begun going kabloowy. That is, people who knew Peter Parker is Spider-Man from other universes begin entering ours.

The first is the best, Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), from “Spider-Man 2,” who battles Spidey spectacularly on a Manhattan bridge. Then the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) from the original “Spider-Man” arrives, tossing pumpkin bombs. And just as suddenly, Ock and Peter are transported to the “undercroft” of Doctor Strange’s “Sanctum Sanctorum” in Greenwich Village, where Strange lets him know what’s happening, and how others are sneaking through, too: The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), whom Strange caught, and Electro (Jamie Foxx), who’s causing havoc in the woods somewhere. Spidey goes there, subdues him, transports him to the cells Strange has constructed. Strange also has a cool-looking box, the Macchina di Kadavus, which houses the contained spell; and he’s finally figured out “the proper ritual” to reverse it and send everyone back to their own universes.

Wait, question: Do they have to be in Strange’s undercroft for the the ritual to work? If not, why send Peter out to subdue anyone? And if so, couldn’t there be a lot of people from other universes left in ours when Strange reverses the corrupt spell?

Anyway, that’s not the thing that ruined the movie for me. No, what ruined the movie for me is the reason Peter prevents Doctor Strange from reversing the spell—the thing that keeps the movie going for another 90 minutes. Aunt May convinces him to rehabilitate all the supervillains from all the other universes before sending them back. And that happens because Norman Osborn shows up at her homeless shelter, lost, babbling, and she pulls Peter aside:

May: He needs help. Maybe they all do.
Peter: Wait, you don’t mean... No, May. This isn't my problem.
May: Peter, not your problem? Hmm?
Peter: May, their chance of getting help is way better back where they came from. Sending them home, that's the best thing we can do for them.
May: For them? Or for yourself? 

It’s the dumbest conversation, and the dumbest plot device, I’ve heard in an otherwise standout superhero film.

When May suggests that sending them back to their own universes is only best for Peter, that he’s somehow being selfish rather than altruistic like her, there’s a very easy response he could make: Sorry, Aunt May, but this is best for the universe. For all the universes. For the entirety of creation, which is now unstable, because I asked Strange to help me get into MIT. I love you, Aunt May, but you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

Instead, May’s dumbshit argument wins the day, and Peter actually fights Doctor Strange for control of the box so he can rehabilitate the supervillains before sending them back to…

Wait. Since they’ve all been pulled into this universe the moment before they die, is Peter/May sending them back to simply die rehabilitated? That seems unfair. Or will the rehabilitation change their trajectory so they don’t die? And if so, how does that change the course of events in those universes? I mean, if Norman Osborn’s rehab prevents “Spider-Man 2” I’m going to be pretty pissed. On the other hand, if it prevents the Hitler hair and “Saturday Night Fever” strut in “3,” count me in.

More immediately, in the universe of this movie, the rehab goes as poorly as anyone would expect. Osborn’s Goblin personality returns, he rallies the others, and they all but destroy the Stark-Industry safehouse. Then the Green Goblin actually kills Aunt May, who dies in Peter’s arms telling him that with great power comes great responsibility. A sad moment. It should be a poignant moment. But it’s not, because of her earlier dumbshit argument. And because we all saw it coming. 

After that, distraught, Peter disappears, so Ned uses Doctor Strange’s ring to find “Peter Parker,” but he winds up finding PP2 (Andrew Garfield) and PP1 (Toby Maguire) instead. I have to admit, it’s great seeing them again. And these Peter Parkers, with MJ, figure out how to find our Peter Parker, and all three Spider-Men agree to contact Doctor Strange to send back the supervillains without rehabbing them because c’mon, hasn’t enough damage been done?

Kidding. They work up chemical formulas to cure the supervillains and lure them out for a fight. And not to sound like J.J.J., but hey why not fight supervillains at an irreplaceable landmark like the Statue of Liberty? Give me your tired, your poor, your superpowered sociopathic… It’s a good battle anyway, and I like the interplay and bonding between all the Spideys. These lonely kids find out they’re not so alone. And in a poignant moment, Maguire’s Spidey stops Holland’s Spidey from killing the Green Goblin; and in the movie’s most poignant moment, Garfield’s Spidey saves Holland’s MJ the way he could not save his own Gwen in “Amazing Spider-Man 2.” Afterwards he asks, “Are you OK?” and she nods, shook, then notices how much he’s tearing up. “Are you OK?” she asks. Perfect. I teared up myself.

But by this point the Goblin has unleashed Doctor Strange’s original contained, corrupt spell, and now more people are being pulled into this universe, and Strange can’t stop it. So our Peter, who had tried to make every little detail perfect, offers a great sacrifice: What if everyone just forgets Peter Parker? It would mean his best friend won’t remember him and the love of his life won’t remember him. It would mean, after bonding with the Spideys, after finding out he’s not alone in the multiverse, he becomes wholly, truly alone in his own—a man with no connections to anybody. But that’s the spell that Strange concocts that saves everything.

And it’s all the fault of MIT, which wouldn’t give these kids a fair chance at the beginning.

No. Well, kinda. But it's mostly the fault of Aunt May and her dumbshit argument. I’m sorry she’s dead, but she almost destroyed the fabric of the universe. Instead, she merely ruined Peter’s life forever.

Easy way home
OK, some mop-up stuff.

I’m curious if it’s just our universe that forgets Peter Parker or if it’s all the universes. Does Tobey Maguire go back and Kirsten Dunst is all “Who are you? Get the hell out of my apartment!” And if she does that, can’t he just point to the mantle and say, “I’m the guy in all those photos with you.”

That’s another thing: Does Strange’s final spell also destroy the historical record—newspaper headlines and YouTube videos and tweets and Tik-Toks and Flash Thompson’s self-aggrandizing book? Think about it: For a time, Peter was the most famous man on the planet. So either people can’t see that part of the historical record anymore, or a lot of the historical record has been expunged. And if neither of those, won’t people come across it and go, “What’s this ‘Peter Parker is Spider-Man’ video? Who’s Peter Parker? Hey MJ, you see all these photos of you with a guy named Peter Parker who’s supposed to be Spider-Man?”

It is interesting to think that Holland’s Spidey never had an Uncle Ben tragedy. He was introed in, what, “Captain America: Civil War,” back in 2016, with Tony Stark showing up at their pad in Queens, and I’d assumed, and I assume everyone assumed, that they’d just skipped over the whole Uncle Ben tragedy, since we’d already seen it in 2002 and 2012. No need to revisit. But it never happened. Which means his raison d’etre never happened.

God, the ways Hollywood screwed up the Uncle Ben tragedy—surely the most poignant of all superhero origin stories. In the original, they actually improved upon it, making Peter’s refusal to stop the thief who would later kill Uncle Ben not the act of a selfish jerk—as it was in Amazing Fantasy #15—but a tit-for-tat. Peter gets to throw the crooked wrestling promoter’s line back at him: “I missed the part where that’s my problem.” We laugh. He’s us here. Thus when the horrible lesson is imparted, it’s imparted to us, too. But in “3,” they blow it completely, saying that the petty thief didn’t even kill Uncle Ben; Flint Marko did. Peter never could have stopped it, so he has no reason to feel guilty about it, so he has no reason to do good and fight crime. It’s as if Bruce Wayne found out his parents died of heart attacks. Guess I’ll become a doctor then.

And in the 2012 version? Pete never avenges Uncle Ben’s death. He never gets the guy. He gets distracted. The movie gets distracted.

And now no Uncle Ben at all. Did May never marry? Maybe not. She was too busy saving the world.

Kudos, by the way, to J.K. Simmons. I know, they included his J.J.J. in this universe before they figured out the whole multiverse angle, but he’s still the only actor to play the same role in more than one universe. An Oscar’s a No Prize next to that.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” is certainly acclaimed. On Rotten Tomatoes it’s got a 93% critics rating and a 98% audience score. And even though it was released in the midst of Omicron part of the pandemic, it opened in the U.S. at $260 million (2nd all-time), grossed $804 million (3rd all-time), and earned $1.9 billion at the global box office (6th all-time). It’s the biggest movie of the 2020s. By far. It’s inventive and panoramic and a helluva roller coaster ride.

But the title is a lie. There was actually a very easy way home. You just had to let Doctor Strange do his job.

Sid Gillman in 1981

Joe Posnanski is counting down his top 101 football players—to go along with his top 100 baseball players—and two months ago he landed on his No. 46 pick, Lance Alworth, who should be there for his name alone but of course has some pretty impressive stats. His career was ending about the time I began to watch the NFL, but I remember the reverence with which he was spoken.

Some of Poz's piece talks up Alworth's Chargers coach, Sid Gillman, who remade the NFL by focusing on the passing game. He was also one of the first coaches to buy his own movie projector (for $15) and use it to watch football film; to figure out what should and shouldn't be done. Poz adds this story:

In 1991, when Sports Illustrated's Paul Zimmermann went to see the master, he found Gillman in a dark room watching film, even though he was 80 and no longer coaching.

“Sometimes,” Gillman said, “I think, Why am I doing this? I'm almost 80 years old. Why am I evaluating these quarterbacks?” And then, after letting the thought sink in, he would say, “Well, why not? What else would I be doing?”

I was never a football player and stopped watching the NFL seriously after 1980, so it's odd seeing a sliver of myself in such a legend—a coach who reinvented the most popular sport in America. But there I am. Why am I doing this? I'm almost 60 years old ... Well, why not? What else would I be doing? That's probably most of us at the end of the day.

The idea was to stay in an agriturismo, an old stone farmhouse converted for tourism, in a small town in Tuscany, and from there spend a week visiting the neighboring hill towns: Montepulciano, Pienza, Arezzo, Cortona. That, it was decided, would be a good European intro for the niece and her boyfriend, who'd never been off the continent.

There would be six of us, in all, and Italian cars are not that big, so we'd need two drivers. Alex, my wife's brother, would be one. Was I comfortable being the other?

Of course, I said.

That was months before we went, when it was all a vague, fun, future thing; when I knew I'd learn some Italian; when I was totally on top of things and the master of my domain.

And then I showed up at Amerigo Vespucci Airport in Florence not speaking a word of Italian, running on maybe one or two hours of fitful airplane sleep, and feeling nauseous from breathing my own masked fumes for 20 hours straight. My wife was there to greet me. She'd just spent two weeks hiking through southern France and knew the whole layout and was enthusiastic. This is where we wait for a cab, she said. So we waited. For five minutes. Until a helpful cabbie told us, no, it's around the corner.

From there we took a cab to a Hertz rental place 0.7 miles from the airport rather than the Hertz at the airport, since, I'd determined a month earlier, in my master of my domain phase, that it was much, much cheaper. Except there was no Hertz 0.7 miles from the airport; there was just an IKEA. After some backseat cursing, in defeat, we had the cabbie drive us to the Hertz at the airport, where we explained the problem.

Oh, there's a Hertz there, we were told. It's inside the IKEA.

Of course there is.

We eventually got our car, a Clio, a cute hybrid so quiet I couldn't tell when it was running, and we set off for the agriturismo in Rapale, a small village 90 minutes south of Florence. Well, “set off.” It took a bit to navigate ourselves out of the area. We went in a few circles. But eventually we got off the busy, narrow, Florentine streets and onto a highway of some kind. But what was that string of booths we just passed? Wasn't it like toll booths? Except I chose the path of least resistance and just drove through them. That wasn't a mistake, was it?

It was.

A short time later, navigating via Google Maps, we got off this highway, which, yes, turned out to be a toll road, and now we were at a booth with its arm down and we didn't know what to do. And since we spoke zero Italian, we didn't know what it was asking us for. Money, no doubt. Do we try a credit card? Patricia said she had euros. Give me five euros, I said, and fed that in. Nothing. We tried another five. Nothing. Now we're panicking. Patricia got out and asked the car behind us what we needed to do. “You need to give it the ticket,” she was told. The ticket, it turned out, was the thing I didn't stop for.

Around the same time Patricia spotted an employee at a booth several lanes over and made a beeline for him, the machine we were at suddenly spewed out a long piece of paper. For all I know it was a summons but I assumed it was a receipt of some kind. I stared it, looked at Patricia several lanes over, looked at the passenger side door, still wide open, and said to myself, “Don't take it. If you take it, the gate barrier will go up, and you'll have to drive through without Patricia. So don't take it. Wait. Don't take it. Wait.”

And then my mind wandered and I took it.

And the gate barrier went up.

Cursing, I yelled Patricia's name, and inched forward, being careful not to bang the passenger-side door against anything. I reached over to try to pull it shut but couldn't. I yelled Patricia's name again.

Finally she heard me, saw me, gushed thanks to the booth attendant that was walking over with her, jumped into the open passenger-side door. And we sped out of there, the most incompetent Bonnie and Clyde team ever.

And that was the first hour of my vacation in Italy.

“The analysts who keep flogging Biden for his inability to pass more ambitious legislation through Rooseveltian persuasion and Johnsonian party discipline tend to ignore the fact that F.D.R. and L.B.J. enjoyed immense congressional majorities. Biden has Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. His stimulus bill, a significant achievement, attracted zero Republican support. The members of the political class of the G.O.P., with rare exceptions, have determined that their voters are with Trump, and so they must be, too. These men and women have all the political independence and moral courage of the trembling members of Putin's national-security council. They have traded the principles of a liberal democracy for a job.”

-- David Remnick, “A Role Model for the Midterms,” The New Yorker

“Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country's core institutions. ...

”Short-lived victories, however, came at a long-term cost. Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. ... Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that Christians, like Americans from every walk of life, are self-selecting into cliques of shared habits and thinking. But what's notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines. ...

“Meanwhile, other pastors feel trapped. One stray remark could split their congregation, or even cost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader's stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered 'woke.' His command of scripture is less relevant than suspicions about how he voted in the last election.”

-- Tim Alberta, “How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church: The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it's at war with itself,” in The Atlantic. Recommended reading. It's a scary article. 

A few days before I flew to Florence, Italy, to spend two weeks in Tuscany with my wife and her family, a Trump-appointed U.S. district judge ruled that the Covid federal mask mandate for airlines and other modes of public transportation was unconstitutional. So the voyage was slightly different from what I'd anticipated. Only about 1/3 of the people at SeaTac Airport were wearing masks. Many on the flight didn't wear them. But there were still complications. About nine hours into the 10-hour flight to Paris, a Delta attendant told us, almost apologetically, that there were certain “red countries” where you have to wear a mask before arriving, and France was one of those, so please mask up for the last 40 minutes of the flight. It was like territorial waters for Covid.

U.S. policy at the moment seems kind of nuts to me. You don't have to mask up but you do have to present a negative Covid test before entering or re-entering the U.S.—regardless of vaccine status, regardless of citizenship. It's a policy that encourages both personal irresponsibility (mask schmask) and xenophobia (the problem is out there), and does nothing to clarify whether our pandemic is now an endemic. For Europe, the policy is the opposite: Come on in, just don't be an maskhole.

That U.S.-mandated Covid test loomed large during my trip. If I failed it, I'd be gone from work for five more days. Or 10 more days? Or more? How would that work? And how does one find a Covid hotel? And are you policed or can you still visit museums? Some part of me wondered whether I should try to get Covid early in the trip so I wouldn't have the problem later; so I wouldn't spend my vacation worrying about it.

To be honest, I probably should've gone maskless more often during that first leg of the trip—Seattle to Paris to Florence. That's a long slog. Add in extra hours at SeaTac, and the trip on light rail to SeaTac, and I was probably masked for nearly 20 hours straight, and during my last hour at CDG I think my own fumes were beginning to get to me. I felt nauseous. Even the usual standby of Coca-Cola and Pringles didn't help. When I finally landed in Florence, and we exited onto the Tarmac, I ripped that sucker off and breathed in deeply.

Anyway, all that masking helped. Or didn't—who knows? The day before we came back, we walked to a pharmacy near the Uffizi, paid 22€ apiece, got tested by a cute pharmacist with stylish brown ankle boots, waited outside for 20 minutes. Patricia got a cappuccino. Back at the pharmacy, they handed each of us a piece of paper folded into a little booklet: Certificazione verde COVID-19. It took a while to find the result—halfway down the second page: Risultato del test: Negativo. We celebrated. I complimented the pharmacist on her boots.

While I was in Italy, Miguel Cabrera, one of the most beloved players currently playing the game, got his 3,000th hit. I was following a bit of it from there. I knew he was sitting on 2,999, and I knew there was some controversy about the Yankees intentionally walking him in a game—Joe Posnanski writes about it here—but then I lost the thread. I assumed Miggy had done it, I just didn't hear about it, and none of the Italians were talking about it. Turns out he did it in the very next game. The IBB was in the 8th inning against the Yankees on April 22, the day I arrived in Tuscany, and No. 3,000, a single to right, happened in the 1st inning against the Colorado Rockies on April 23. Miggy is the 33rd man, and, after Cobb and Kaline, the third player wearing a Detroit Tigers uniform, to reach 3,000 hits.

Here's a sad thought: Will he be the last? At least for awhile?

It feels like it, which is odd since 3,000 hits have become more common, not less, over the years. Until 1970, only eight players had ever reached the plateau: Anson, Wagner, Lajoie, Cobb, Speaker, Collins, Waner, and Musial. Shorter careers didn't help. Seasons lost to world wars didn't help, either. Then in the 1970s alone, seven players joined those eight: Aaron, Mays, Clemente, Kaline, Rose, Brock, and Yaz. The '80s added one (Carew), the '90s seven more (Yount, Brett, Winfield, Murray, Molitor, Gwynn, Boggs), then four and five for the first two decades of this century (Ripken, Henderson, Palmeiro, Biggio, Jeter, A-Rod, Ichiro, Beltre, Pujols). Miggy is the first to do it in the 2020s. And I don't see anyone else who might do it soon. 

Robinson Canó is next on the active list, with 2632. But he's 39 years old, lost all of last year to a PED suspension, and hasn't exactly been a hitting machine recently—getting 94, 100 and 42 hits from 2018-20. That won't cut it. More importantly, last week he was cut by the Mets, who paid $45 million for the privilege. And though another team could pick him up for a relative song, so far no one has. 

And only two other players are in the 2,000s: Yadier Molina and Joey Votto, and both are in their late 30s, and neither has 2200. Don't see it. Elvis Andrus is only 33, and has 1880, but over the last three seasons he's got a .603 OPS. A few 32-year-olds are maybes: Jose Altuve (1791), Freddie Freeman (1734) and Eric Hosmer (1662). A few years ago, Altuve seemed the likeliest candidate, leading the league in hits from 2014 to 2017, always with 200+. But then fallow times. He'd have to turn it around but he's already been on the IL this year. Trout? Walks too much, gets injured too much. He's 30 and isn't halfway there (1446). Bryce Harper will turn 30 in October, but he's even further back, at 1297, and he's only gotten more than 150 hits twice in his career, his two MVP seasons, and his high was 172. A guy who might have a shot is Manny Machado. He's also 29, but with 1465 hits, and he doesn't walk as much as Trout and Harper.

All of which points out just how difficult it is to do this, particularly in this age of defensive shifts and falling batting averages. So congrats to Miggy, one of our favorite players in recent years, a man who brings real joy to the game. This past weekend he also became just the 19th player in baseball history to get his 600th career double. Last month, 3,000 hits, last season, 500 homeruns. So how many guys have done all three—3,000 hits, 600 doubles and 500 homeruns? The answer is Miggy, Albert Pujols, and a guy named Henry Aaron. That's it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s not often that someone makes a classic better, but I guess most people aren’t Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner.

It didn’t hurt either that they were adapting the work of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents. And Shakespeare.

I mean, look at that fucking roster.

Grounded, soaring
Spielberg and Kushner clarify things about “West Side Story” that I didn’t know needed clarifying. I never got a sense from the original that the Jets and the Sharks were anything other than gangs in a slum fighting over turf, but here there are historic reasons for what’s going on. Robert Moses’ urban renewal program is destroying neighborhoods, their neighborhoods, so the Jets and the Sharks have less turf on which to exist. The powers that be are essentially pushing them together, and they’re blaming each other rather than the powers that be. 

In the ’61 original, the territories seemed amorphous. In real life, there are lines—“Yeah, you don’t go into that neighborhood”—and at the beginning of this one, the Jets cross that line, 68th and Broadway, to cause trouble in the Latino neighborhood: to take back what they feel is theirs. Down goes the Cocina Criolla sign covering up the Irish Pub sign; up goes the paint to cover the Puerto Rican flag mural. Then it’s back to their hangout, Doc’s, which is already at the edge of the urban renewal destruction. It looks like the last store standing in a war zone.

How about Anybodys? In the original she was just a girl trying to hang with the boys. She was a punchline. Here, played by Iris Menas, she’s obviously trans and packs a punch. Literally. I love the moment at the end, after Riff and Bernardo have been killed, when she, a figure flitting in the shadows, delivers intel on Chino and the gun and is finally accepted into the gang. The myriad emotions that wash over her face: gratitude and pride, and then … confusion. As if to say: Is that all there is? 

Officer Krupke isn’t just comic relief. As played by Brian d’Arcy James, he’s allowed dignity. He’s a good cop in a bad situation. The “Dear Officer Krupke” bit has been transferred to the police station, without Krupke present, and it’s insanely good. The Jets aren’t doing it to get back at Krupke; they’re doing it to amuse themselves. They’re doing it to mock every authority figure that thinks knows them: cop, judge, shrink, social worker.

I like how the songs come out of nowhere. Just a thought, a whisper, a kind of stumbling, before finally catching and going full-blown. “Deeeeaaarrr kindly Sgt. Krupke…” Or Tony by the schoolyard, repeating the name of the girl he just met, under his breath, before breaking into song, soaring into song, with “Maria.” Kushner’s script grounds us in the historic realities of 1950s New York while Spielberg’s direction makes it soar.

Everyone talks up Mike Faist as Riff and Ariana DeBose as Anita, not to mention the pipes on Rachel Zegler’s Maria, but Ansel Elgort’s Tony feels like an overlooked performance to me. Is it the toughest role? He has to be someone who’s leader enough to start the Jets, tough enough to still be pursued by the Jets, and someone wholly, fully in love. Elgort nails all of this. The balcony scene, “Tonight,” makes me believe in love again. I also believe he could kill. He talks about his regret at nearly beating another kid to death, how one more punch might’ve done it. And then we see him nearly do it again with Bernardo. Does this take away from the tragedy? In the original it just seems like a bad string of events, unlucky circumstances, and if they’d made it past this point things would’ve been OK. Here, I thought, “You know, if it wasn’t Bernardo it would’ve been someone else. He would’ve gone zero-to-60 with someone else at some other time.” Which, I guess, is tragedy enough.

I could go on: the photography, the shots, the camera angles. The overhead of the gang fight at the salt mines, with the long shadows of the gang members meeting in the middle before they do. Then juxtapose it with the overhead of the cops coming in afterwards: their long shadows falling upon the dead bodies of Riff and Bernardo. My nephew Jordan talked up the puddle shot and I was like “What puddle shot?” He: “As Tony’s looking up the puddles take on this surreal colorful quality. Gorgeous.” 

The dancing? The toreador bit from “America” has been tossed for something more muscular and boxing. All the choreography feels harder now. And those songs? Those seemingly effortlessly beautiful songs? The playing/praying of “Maria” really got me in a new way this time. And city/committee from “I Feel Pretty.” 

Is “I Feel Pretty” misplaced? We get it after the gang fight, but before Maria knows her brother is dead. Feels like the wrong time. And something felt off, not quite connected, between Maria finding out Tony killed Bernardo but sleeping with him anyway. I love Corey Stoll but his Lt. Schrank added little. But I loved Rita Moreno as the widow of Doc, running Doc’s, mentoring Tony. We see an old photo of her and Doc, and for a second I wondered if that was the original Doc, Ned Glass, next to her. Then I wondered if it might not be Spielberg's dad, who died in 2020, age 103, and to whom the movie is dedicated. Wouldn't that be a nice present? Hey dad, I fixed you up with Rita Moreno. But it seems to be neither of those men.

I didn’t get a strong sense of the Sharks as a gang. In the original, you see how the violence of the Jets helps create the Sharks. Here, when are the Sharks ever together as a gang? A bit during the dance but it feels loose and unaffiliated. We see the Jets creating havoc in PR territory, singing about being a Jet, singing about Office Krupke, watching Tony and Riff battle over a gun on the docks. The Sharks don’t even get their own song. Or their songs are dominated by women. That’s another big difference. The Sharks’ girls, Anita and Maria, are main characters, while the Jets’ girls barely register; they barely have a line.

The sweet spot
The ending requires everyone to act their worst selves. Maria never should have sent Anita, still grieving for Bernardo, with a message for Tony. Anita’s good deed then goes punished when the Jets attempt to rape her—a scene that’s always tough to watch—and so she acts her worst self, delivering the message that Maria is dead. That leads Tony into the streets crying out for Chino to end his misery. I like that even after he’s shot, as the life ebbs out of him, Tony’s eyes still shine with happiness because he’s in Maria’s arms.

There’s a sweet spot between art and commerce, identification and fantasy, fine and bold lines, that's tough to hit. In literature I think of “Gatsby” and “Garp” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” It has to be accessible, maybe even breezy, but deep, somehow. I think Spielberg’s “West Side Story” hits it. It should've won best picture. I watched it and felt filled.

It’s Spielberg’s first musical after more than 50 years in the biz. Encore.

The above screenshot is from Warner Bros.' 1934 actioner “Here Comes the Navy,” the first pairing of James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, and it seems to show bathroom attendant Sam McDaniel, brother of future Oscar-winner Hattie, presenting a man (Cagney, playing Chesty O'Connor) leaving the restroom. But that's not what he's doing. McDaniel is actually breaking the fourth wall.

Cagney's character is a riveter in, I would guess, Bremerton, Wash., who gets into it with Pat O'Brien's Navy man. And at a dance, which Chesty expects to win, they fight in the alley to a standstill—until Chesty's girl calls him, he turns his head, and O'Brien clocks him. Then O'Brien wins the dance and steals the girl. Chesty, meanwhile, winds up in this restroom, where he's awakened via Black Narcissus, a perfume, then consoled, cleaned up as well as possible, and, as he's sent on his way, the man doing all this, McDaniel, holds out an open palm for a tip. Which is completely ignored. It's not even seen. It's not even a concept. So he turns helplessly toward the camera as if to say, “You see this shit?” 

Anyway, it made me laugh.

I don't know if much has been written about Sam McDaniel, other than being Hattie's brother, but according to IMDb he appeared in 223 movies and TV shows, 179 of which are uncredited. Five of the uncrediteds were Cagney pics:

• Public Enemy (1931): Headwaiter 
• Footlight Parade (1933): Porter in ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ 
• Lady Killer (1933): Porter 
• Here Comes the Navy (1934): Washroom Attendant 
• A Lion Is In the Streets (1953): Moses, Bolduc’s Butler 

At least by the time of “Lion,” he got a name. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’m curious if they did it on purpose.

The movie opens at a reform school, where Ann Sheridan’s onetime-delinquent kid brother, Gabe (Frankie Thomas, quite good), is the foreman of the machine shop. He compliments one kid working a lathe, then gets into a fight with another kid who is fashioning a knife. 

The kid he compliments is Frank Coghlan Jr., who played James Cagney as a boy in “The Public Enemy.” The kid who’s making a knife is Frankie Burke, who played James Cagney as a boy in “Angels with Dirty Faces.”

It’s as if Warner Bros. was saying: “OK, so we don’t have Cagney, but … here you go. Right? Close enough, right?”

Grups
“The Angels Wash Their Faces” isn’t a sequel to “Dirty Faces.” Its working title was the more apt “The Battle of City Hall,” but I’m sure someone figured, “Hey, let’s glom off the hit movie from the year before.” Like that one, it stars  Ann Sheridan and the Dead End Kids (and Burke), but they’re playing different characters. Well, “different.” Their names are different.

Gabe/Thomas is the new kid in town. We’re told he grew up in a bad neighborhood, blah blah, which is why he went bad, blah blah; and besides, Remson (Henry O’Neill), the man in charge of the reform school who moonlights as the city DA, knows a good kid when he sees one. So despite the fight with Burke, Remson paroles him—with a warning that turns out to be prescient: “Watch out for the grown-ups.” Then Gabe and sis, Joy Ryan (Sheridan), move into a newer, better neighborhood.

Well, “better.” The Dead End Kids still prowl the joint. We see them de-pants one kid before picking a fight with Gabe. He fights back. Thomas, with curly hair parted on the side, looks like a pushover but he gets a good determined look in his eyes. He’s so good in this role, in fact, I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him before. Turns out he played Ted Nickerson, boyfriend to Bonita Granville’s Nancy Drew, in a four-movie series in the late ‘30s; then he did some cadet movies before serving in the actual Navy and Coast Guard during World War II. When he returned, it was mostly to TV. His big role was the titular “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” in the early 1950s. After that, he gave up acting for writing and production, but mostly he made a living as a bridge master: teaching it and playing it. He died in 2006, age 85.

Bonita Granville, by the way, is also in this one. She plays Leo Gorcey’s kid sister Peggy, who is forever running to keep up with/join the Dead End Kids. She’s basically a precursor to Anybodys two decades before “West Side Story.” She could've been the inspiration for Anybodys.

Leaving reform school, Gabe had promised to stay out of trouble, so it feels odd he joins the Dead End Kids’ gang, “the Termites,” without a second thought or a scolding from his sis. But by this point in their Warner Bros. career, the Kids have had their rough edges smoothed, and, though they're still rough-and-tumble, and sometime bullies, the movie takes a boys-will-be-boys attitude about them. The true crooks, anyway, are higher up.

Gabe’s initiation into the gang involves fake guillotines and a fake dousing with gasoline, which is bad luck for him. Because the real gasoline he bought winds up being used in an arson, which makes him a suspect, and which leads to the assistant DA nosing around and knocking on doors. And not just any ADA: Pat Remson, the son of the DA. And not just any actor playing him, either: It's Ronald Reagan, future president of the United States. He shows up at Joy’s door and makes a play while gabbing away. At one point he says:

You know there’s more than a bunch of kids playing with matches back of this fire situation. Some organization in the background. Some one man running the whole show. But it’s all very elusive, I can’t get my teeth into anything.

That's a lot of leaps there without much information. Reagan's way.

I haven’t seen Reagan in much, but watching this I get why he never became a bigger star. It made me think of Gore Vidal’s 1983 takedown of the man: “… he was, far and away, Hollywood's most grinding bore—Chester Chatterbox, in fact. Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader’s Digest, which he studied the way Jefferson studied Montesquieu." 

So maybe this line of Reagan’s to Sheridan was a Hollywood in-joke? “That’s the marvelous thing about you. You’re the only person in the world who likes my dialogue.” 

Anyway, while Reagan woos the Oomph Girl, the real power in town, the one man running the whole show, Martino (Eduardo Ciannelli), sets another building ablaze, and one of the Dead Enders, Sleepy (Bernard Punsly), who’s got a thyroid problem, dies. And even though Gabe was the one who nearly got him out, he’s blamed, arrested, put on trial and convicted. And the judge sentences him to 10 years in the state pen. Remember that “watch out for grown-ups” line? Truer words. Oddly, the guy who said this is the guy who convicts him—Reagan’s dad. Leading Sheridan to chastise the old man: “In this city of graft and corruption, you’ve overlooked a thousand lawbreakers to convict one innocent boy!”

I kept waiting for Joy to break up with Ronnie, or for Reagan to show his worth by saving the day, but neither happens. He still wants to marry her, she still wants to marry him (despite his dad convicting her innocent brother), but she can’t because of the disgrace. That is, she doesn’t want to disgrace him.

So if not Reagan, who comes to the rescue? Our stars, of course, the Dead End Kids. There’s some honorary mayoralty a kid can win, and the lead Dead Ender, and future Burt Munson on “All in the Family,” Billy Halop, playing Billy Shafter, runs for it. And between him studying and the Dead Enders threatening the competition, he wins.

I don’t know if they had real such honorariums back in the day, but I doubt they were like what the film shows us: the real mayor giving up his office and going on vacation for a week while Billy and the gang take over. They think they can pardon Gabe but can’t. So they go through various channels, and we get some not-bad lines:

Judge, we want a writ!
Yeah, a writ of hocus pocus or somethin’.

Or after Reagan mentions the fire chief might be in on it.

Billy: Why don’t you go out and arrest him?
Reagan: I can’t arrest him on suspicion. I need proof.
Billy: We’ll get you all the proof ya need!
Huntz Hall: We’ll get you enough to hang the guy.
Leo Gorcey: What’s more, we’ll hang him.

Eventually, they get the rats on the run, they get a confession, etc. etc. Happy ending to a mostly dull film. Sheridan is given little to do, Chester Chatterbox doesn’t help. But the kids are alright.

Dead end
But not for long. This is the sixth movie they made as “The Dead End Kids” between 1937 and 1939—not even including “Dead End”—and there would only be one more. Then Halop went off to become a junior leading man, while Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey and a few others became the Bowery Boys. Most of them were in the war, then there was the end of the studio era and the transition to TV. Most of them didn’t live long. Bobby Jordan died in 1965, Gorcey in ’69, Halop in ’76—all from complications with alcoholism. Sheridan also died young, in 1967, from cancer. Ironically, the Dead End Kid who dies in this one, Punsly, lived the longest: until 2004. 

Chester Chatterbox, meanwhile, kept going and changed the world. Watch out for the grown-ups, indeed.

The Oomph Girl in a less-than-excited clinch with Chester Chatterbox.

Sometimes all it takes is a moment that just lands.

In the mid-80s I was watching “David Letterman” and Gilbert Gottfried came on to do standup. Had I seen him before? Had someone disparaged him before? He had a loud rasping voice and was perpetually squinting. His eyes were all but shut and I kind of wanted to do the same with mine, because I was a little embarrassed for him. What laughs he was getting were awkward. Because he was awkward. I wasn't laughing, either. I think I kept thinking, “When does he stop this bit and go into his regular act? Oh, this is his regular act?” But I kept watching. And at one point (27:20 here) he segued from an Elephant Man joke into this:

“And I said there you go putting everything into your looks! You think everything is your looks! It's not—women do not care about a man's looks! If you read any sex quiz, they care about a personality and a sense of humor! Women love a sense of humor. Women would trample over Tom Selleck to get to Buddy Hacket!”

And I lost it. I laughed so hard. And from that moment on, whenever anyone disparaged him, I defended him. That was all it took. I bonded with him on that. And amazingly, the thing I thought was the awkward bit—that loud, rasping, annoying voice—lasted his entire career. He played it for all it was worth. He parlayed it. Iago in “Aladdin.” Gilbert Gottfried reads “50 Shades of Grey.” When John Oliver realized early in the Trump administration that though Jared Kushner was everywhere, we never heard him speak, who did he tap to be Kushner's voice?

We've lost so many standups in such a short time: Norm Macdonald, Bob Saget, Louie Anderson. All in their 60s. Is there something about standup that shortens your life? It seems to be a brotherhood, too. Which you totally get. It's a tough life, I would imagine, and most people aren't funny, and you need to hang around the people who are. I envy that brotherhood. It would be a great group to hang around. 

After the news broke, my friend Josh told a story on Twitter about interviewing Gottfried for an article in Playboy magazine, and how he was never “Gilbert Gottfried” in those conversatons. He was kind and quiet; he always apologized for bothering him. A few months later, he called while Josh was driving to ask when the article was coming out; Josh had to admit that the piece had been killed for various reasons. “Long silence then he went full Gilbert on me. 'Oh my god' he said in that voice, 'what is it like to have your work rejected by a porno magazine?' He then said 'Have you thought about selling it to Leg Show? How about Barely 18....' He said he might know someone at Nugget and various other skin mags. I nearly drove off the road I was laughing so hard.”