“As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

”Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. ...

“The unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.”

-- “Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says” by Isaac Stanley-Becker

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is this the first in-your-face Minnesota accent in a movie? The kind the Coens would make famous, or infamous, with “Fargo”?

More, the guys who sound Minnesotan are the Hanson brothers, bespectacled enforcers on the ice, the opposite of Minnesota Nice, who help a moribund franchise, the Charlestown Chiefs, become relevant again. They help them win games, fans come out, and at one point we hear the following conversation: 

Woman #1: Aren’t those Hansons something?
Woman #2: Aren’t they, though?
Woman #1: They’re sort of funny looking.
Woman #2: Real funny looking.

No way the Coens didn’t see this growing up.

Bad News Chiefs
“Slap Shot” would make a great double-bill not only with “Fargo” but with the original “Bad News Bears,” which was released about a year earlier: April 1976 rather than Feb. 1977.

There, a disinterested coach takes over a moribund little league club that can’t win a game, but the losing, and the damage it’s doing to the kids, eventually gets to him. So he hires some ringers and does what he can to win. They make it to the championship game, where, halfway through, he realizes what an asshole he’s become and puts in all the lesser players he’s held back; they wind up losing, but poignantly. The ending is joyous.

Here, player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) slowly realizes that when the steel mill in Charlestown closes, the moribund Chiefs aren’t long for this world. He also realizes that the weird nerdy guys the team has hired at a discount, the bespectacled Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David Hanson), are ringers who bloody noses and win hockey games. And that becomes Reggie’s mantra. The team becomes nasty and brutish, and they make it all the way to the championship game. Except beforehand, Reggie talks to the owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker), who thanks him for making her franchise profitable, but she’s still going to fold the team. Because she can make more money with the Chiefs as a tax write-off than as a championship franchise. So now Reggie decides to go out the right way, and that becomes the mantra. And in the first period they get clobbered. So second period, they come out bloodying noses. Which is when the team’s moral authority, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), decides to sell sex rather than violence: He does a striptease on the ice, which so disgusts one member of the opposition that he punches the ref. Meaning that team forfeits and the Chiefs win! Plus Reggie gets hired by the Minnesota hockey club! Happy ending!

It's basically the same storyline except for when the coach sees the light and what happens afterward.

“Bad News Bears” is better to me—more poignant—because it’s one of those “we lose but really we win” movies. In “Slap Shot,” the team wins via technicalities, and Reggie wins via another technicality: an 11th-hour job offer in Minnesota.

But it’s still fun. The shocker? This violent, profane film was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She grew up in New England, and her brother played hockey for one of these leagues, and she put it all down. “I used the exact same language that the players do,” she told The New York Times in 1977, adding:

“The world has a weird view of women. People seem to believe that we have to write about divorce or suicide or children—so‐called ‘women's topics.’ But we've been around. … You know, when the script first went out in Hollywood. there was talk around town that ‘Nancy Dowd’ was really a man using a pseudonym.”

Shame she didn’t do more. She went uncredited on “Straight Time,” “North Dallas Forty,” “Ordinary People,” “Cloak & Dagger,” and “White Nights.” She got credits for this, “FTA,” “Swing Shift” “and “Let It Ride.” She won an Oscar for “Coming Home,” which was based on her years as an antiwar protester and living in military-base towns, but she hated how they mangled her original script. “It’s message seemed to be that doves are better than hawks in bed,” she apparently said. “And it was pious as well as sentimental.” 

Redford, Newman, Chase
Newman is great here but the part is definitely not tailored for him. At one point a woman tells him, “You look a thousand years old,” which makes you wonder how the rest of us look. Plus, let’s face it, he doesn’t have the legs of a hockey player. But he makes do. He acts. It’s the kind of role Newman seemed to prize: a dude who wasn’t particularly educated but with some smarts, and some persistence, fighting a battle against the powers that be. Cool seeing Strother Martin, Newman’s bête noire in “Cool Hand Luke,” as the hapless, dead-weight manager of the Chiefs.

“Slap Shot” was directed by George Roy Hill, who directed Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting,” then directed Redford in “The Great Waldo Pepper” and Newman in this. Not a bad run. The ’80s were less kind. After completely reversing course two years later with “A Little Romance,” he had the impossible task of converting John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” onto the big screen, then did a Diane Keaton-led Mossad movie. Four years later, he directed Chevy Chase in “Funny Farm.” He deserved a better end than that. We all do.

I read this bit the other night in Brian Jay Jones' “George Lucas: A Life,” about the period in the late 1960s when Francis Ford Coppola was trying to put together his Zoetrope commune, and George Lucas was his protege with a sci-fi script, “THX-1138,” based upon his student film, that had already been rejected by Warner Bros., the studio Coppola was working with:

But the savvy Coppola knew something Lucas didn't: Warner Bros.–Seven Arts was about to be bought out by Kinney National Services, which until 1969 was known largely for its parking lots and cleaning services. “What we'll do is we'll wait until these new guys come on board,” Coppola told Lucas. “We won't tell them [THX] has already been turned down. We'll just pretend that we've already started it.”

Which is how the career of the man who changed Hollywood began.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

This is pretty superficial criticism so bear with me.

When hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) leaves for a new assignment, he goes through various machinations to make sure he isn’t followed. He quietly steals a car and takes it to a back-alley garage, where a man with a cigarette dangling from his lips wordlessly changes the license plate. He gets his woman to provide alibi #1 and the poker-playing men in the back room to give him alibi #2. (Though if he hadn’t been there, would he have been picked up in the first place?) Only after all that, does he go to the nightclub to kill the target. All of it is very smart, very careful, very methodical.

So why does he wear the fedora?

I get it: It helps hide his face. But it’s Paris in 1967. The only men wearing fedoras anymore are ancient, not handsome hipsters like Alain Delon. He stands out like a sore thumb.

Yes, there’s that scene in the police station where all the suspects show up with their own trenchcoats and fedoras, but that’s really the only time we see anyone else wearing one. In the scenes in Paris? On the streets or in a nightclub? Nobody’s wearing one. Jef wearing one is like a flashing red light to any passerby. Notice me! I don’t fit in! You expect someone to ask, “You heading to a costume party?”

In a way, he is. It’s the French New Wave, and they want to Bogart up the joint. But it makes everything else nonsensical. 

Ce n’est pas lui
I keep wanting to like the movies the cool kids like, like this one, which was shown in a 4K restoration at SIFF Egyptian last month. And I liked it well enough. “Le Samourai” is a not-bad procedural, and I like procedurals. It’s a procedural from both the criminal end and the cop end. I liked the parrot. I liked the girl. All the girls, really: Jane (Nathalie Delon), La pianiste (Cathy Rosier), La jeune fille du vestiare (Catherine Jourdan).

But did I like Alain Delon? Did I like the cop (Francois Perier playing Le Commissaire)? I guess I liked how unlikeable the cop was. He's not exactly Louis Jouvet in “Quai des Orfevres.” 

So Costello does the hit, he’s seen by both the pianiste and the hatcheck girl, he goes to the card game for his alibi but is immediately picked up by the cops. In the round-robin version of “Is this the guy?” some finger him, some shake their heads, nah, while the pianiste totally refutes what we know she saw: Ce n’est pas lui. Jef is released.

Except the next day, when he goes to collect his payment, he’s nearly killed by the courier. Apparently the bad guys now see him as a liability. And he doesn’t know who the bad guys are. He doesn’t know who hired him.

So he returns home, treats the wound in his arm, returns to the club to meet the pianiste, Valérie, because he figures she didn’t finger him because she knows who hired him. She doesn’t deny it but delays her response. She says call me in two hours. Not sure why he agrees to this but he does. And when he does, there’s no answer.

All this time, people are breaking into his nondescript flat. The police plant bugs, bad guys hole up there ready to ambush him, and his parrot keeps letting him know—by being agitated, losing feathers, etc. The bird is the smartest thing in the film. The bird and Jef’s bird—Jane. The cops try to squeeze her but she ain’t having it. She remains loyal. That’s a good scene.

Eventually, the courier pays him and offers another gig. Instead, Jef forces the name of his employer from him: Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier). Sure. Jef evades half the Paris police force to go to Rey’s place, which also happens to be Valérie’s place, and kills the guy. Then he shows up at Valérie’s job and seems ready to kill her, too. Was that the secondary job? Except from the get-go it’s more suicide mission: he gives up his beloved fedora, hangs next to Valérie’s piano in full view of everyone, and pulls his gun. After he’s mowed down by half the Paris police force, it's discovered that the gun was empty.

So it was a suicide mission. Because? French shrug.

Trente-neuf
Anyway, it’s got a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and all the cool kids like it. In 2010, it was ranked the 39th greatest film of all time by Empire magazine. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote:

 “Jean-Pierre Melville involves us in the spell of Le Samourai before a word is spoken. He does it with light: a cold light, like dawn on an ugly day. And color: grays and blues. And actions that speak in place of words.”

The light thing is true, and that's a good description of it. But I’m curious if the young cool kids consider the title cultural appropriation. Not to mention Bogie’s fedora—if cultural appropriation goes in that direction.

Except for a makeup doubleheader this afternoon between the Mets and Braves (currently tied for the second wild card spot with identical 88-72 records), the 2024 regular season is now over. Amazing things happened: things that have never happened (50-50) or rarely (Jarren Duran leading the league in doubles + triples). But one thing remained dully the same. 

This is a list of teams with the best record in the American League who fell short of the postseason:

• 2020: Seattle Mariners
• 2021: Toronto Blue Jays (Mariners second)
• 2022: Baltimore Orioles (Mariners make the postseason for the first time since 2001!!!)
• 2023: Seattle Mariners
• 2024: Seattle Mariners

Cue Seinfeld: “Of all the losers, you came in first—of that group. You're the No. 1 ... loser.”

I found this piece via that SFGate piece on how self-satisfied The New York Times is its coverage of Donald Trump and the 2024 presidential race. And you could sub in the 2020 race, too, or the 2016 race, or go back to 1973 and the first time they covered him, via an article on his father, and how they bought the lie and printed the lie and didn't correct the lie, because just look at him, just look at that blue-eyed boy, Mister Death.

Anyway, in that SFGate piece, there's a reference to “sanewashing,” a new term for me, that was linked to a website called the defector, and an article by Tom Scocca entitled “Where Racism Goes to Become Rhetoric.” The “where” there, well, that, too, is The New York Times, or the mainstream media generally. It's about something Scocca heard Donald Trump say that he thought was the most racist thing he'd heard any major presidential candidate—including earlier incarnations of Donald Trump—ever say. He said it to a crowd on Long Island, N.Y., about how the U.S. is being overrun by immigrants released from prisons in other countries:

“They're coming from the Congo, they're coming from Africa, they're coming from the Middle East, they're coming from all over the world—Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia. And what's happening to our country is we're just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people.”

Scocca initially thought someone was simply exaggerating what Trump was saying, since no one was reporting on it; and when he found the speech verbatim on C-Span he dug further and discovered that Trump had been saying this exact thing for months. And no one was reporting on it simply because he'd been saying it for months. It wasn't news. When they wrote about it, they wrote to dismiss it:

The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March (“no such decline in Congo's prison population is shown in the data”); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a “Critic's Notebook” item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: “A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America's streets.”

Yet the Times hadn't ever directly reported on those remarks, and it still hasn't. In its story from Nassau Coliseum, the paper wrote that Trump had “continued to stoke fear around immigration,” and then quoted only the later part of the passage: “We're just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats' immigration policies. “And we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people.”

But the truly telling point, which I admit I missed on first glance, is the part I've highlighted, which isn't a quote from Trump but reportage from the Times, so supposedly a fact. But it's the opposite of a fact. It's the Times doing Trump's heavy lifting for him. “What Trump was referring to,” Scocca writes, “in the literal text of his speech, was some agenda by which the United States is importing convicted criminals released from other countries' prisons. The Biden administration has no policy that does anything like what Trump was talking about.”

That said, that Times article by Michael Gold on the Long Island rally isn't bad. I like the lede:

On the day that he was originally set to return to his hometown and receive the sentence for his 34 felony convictions, former President Donald J. Trump found himself a few miles east, basking in the raucous adulation of a packed arena on Long Island.

Standing in front of thousands at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., Mr. Trump received a local hero's reception, as he drew an exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline, made false claims and hammered Democrats over crime, inflation and immigration.

Even this, though, makes you wonder. An exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline? Meaning it's only slightly in decline? Or is it not at all in decline and Donald Trump is a big fat liar?

But again, the article isn't bad: “exaggerated attacks,” “exaggerated claims,” “exaggerated depiction,” “false claims,” “falsely maintain,” “exaggerated claims,” “debunked claim,” “debunked claims,” and “misleadingly claimed.” They're so close.

Who loves Lucy? Not IMDb and its algorithm.

I'm gonna do the conversation bit again. Imagine someone, maybe someone young, asks you what Lucille Ball is known for. What would your answer be? Would it be this?

IMDb: Lucille Ball? Yeah, she's known for producing various Lucy-themed TV shows, such as 'I Love Lucy,' 'The Lucy Show' and 'Here's Lucy.' Often uncredited.
Someone young: So were they named for her? I mean, did she also star in them? 
IMDb: If she did, it's not what she's known for. But she was an actress because she played the seminal role of Tacy Collini in “The Long, Long Trailer.” That is the role, as an actress, that she is known for. 
Someone young: K.
IMDb: But mostly she's known as a producer.
Someone young: Of various Lucy-themed TV shows.
IMDb: Now you've got it.

Remember in “Calvin & Hobbes” when Calvin's dad gave him false history and science lessons—for fun? IMDb does that with our cultural history through sheer ineptitude. And none of it is fun.

It seems everyone is as sick of Times/Post/NPR coverage, particularly RE: Donald Trump, as I am. This article came through the social media transom the other day via historian Kevin Kruse (who, not for nothing, has zero fucks to give): “The New York Times is washed: SFGATE columnist Drew Magary is done with caring about the Times, and you should be, too.”

(I love including author and source in the subhed but couldn't it have used a better hed? What's washed? As in brain-? Is it new slang from the kids I have to look up? Alright, I'll look it up. And it's ... apparently short for “washed up.” Got it. Way to go, kids.)

So Magary begins with the poll numbers, and this one says that or the other, and whatever. But he gets at the heart soon enough, calling the Times, “an institution that has never met a story it couldn't water down” with “its patented strain of prestige clickbait.” Then he gives a brutal example: HOW J.D. VANCE'S COMBATIVE CONSERVATISM IS SHAPING TRUMP 2.0. Good god, that's awful, but they've been doing it for years. Remember this Rick Perry hed from 2011?

Magary is a little too chummy for me, and assumes a little too much about his reader, but he's not wrong. He writes:

“[Readers] understand that the Times has so thoroughly isolated itself from the zeitgeist that it's written itself right out of it. ... In the process, they've left the New York Times alone on its bespoke soapbox, screaming centrist nonsense into the void. I'm done listening to any of it. I'm not going back, and neither are you. The Times doesn't matter anymore, and they're the last people on Earth to realize it.”

Yep. And what a shame. 

The world's biggest pop star when the Mariners last won. (Paul Skenes photo unavailable.)

The Seattle Mariners led the AL West for much of the summer, shockingly, since they were not that good, but everyone else in the division was even worse. Until they weren't. Until the Astros started Astroing and took over the lead again in ... was it August? I guess July and August. Just Googled it and got this via Daniel Kramer at MLB.com:

The Mariners carried a 10-game lead atop the AL West entering June 19 before squandering it on July 19 in just 24 games, the shortest span — by far, per Elias — for any team to lose a double-digit lead in the divisional era (since 1969). A more elongated stretch of struggles pushed Seattle from occupying sole possession of a playoff spot since Aug. 7.

And last night, the Astros clinched—for the seventh time in eight seasons—and fittingly against the Mariners. Care to guess who won the division the time the Astros didn't? It was 2019, 'Stros were wild card and wound up in the World Series, but the division winner was ... the Oakland A's. Soon to be Vegas or Sacramento A's. Or Portland A's? That would make way more sense but MLB is into the gambling these days. There's no addiction they won't push on fans already addicted to baseball.

Anyway, while figuring out the A's answer, I came across this Wiki page on the AL West and its winners: all that strata, all those epochs. I could go into the usual on how much time has passed since the Mariners last won it in 2001: eggs cost this, Kamala Harris worked for the city attorney in San Fran, Taylor Swift was 11, Paul Skenes was in utero. The Astros weren't even in the division at the time, and wouldn't be for another 10+ years. Meanwhile, the A's were being followed by Michael Lewis, and the Angels were just beginning their phase of going through about 12 name changes before deciding on ... I can't even remember. The Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles in California?

Here, let's just focus on the stats since 2002. It ain't pretty:

* since 2013 

Seriously, heads in Seattle should be rolling. Like 10 years ago.

I heard about Mercury Morris' death via Joe Posnanski's blog:

At an event the other day, we talked about great nicknames, and I said the greatest football nickname of all time is Night Train Lane. I do still believe that... but Mercury Morris has to be right up there. His full name was Edward Eugene Morris, and he was a running back and kick returner for the Dolphins during their glory years, 1969-75. He's best known for 1972, of course, when he and Larry Csonka provided the lightning and thunder for the undefeated Dolphins. 

The New York Times obit digs deeper (Joe is on a book tour), reminding us that there were three men in that Dolphins backfield: Morris, Csonka, and the wonderfully named (and spelled) Jim Kiick. I tend to associate Csonka and Kiick. They were both white, thick, low to the ground grinders who barrelled through the line. Mercury was opposite in every respect: black, lean, and (in my memory) forever dancing along the edges and down the sidelines. He was beautiful to watch.

He started out mostly as a kick returner but his star began to rise in 1972 when coach Don Shula decided to use him more. And then five games into the season, Bob Griese got injured and was replaced by the ancient Earl Morrall, and, as the Times obit reminds us, the running game became more important than ever. Kiick's attempts actually went down that season, from 162 to 137, while Csonka's rose (195 —> 213), but Morris was the real difference:

Those 12 rushing TDs over 14 games led the league, Morris and Csonka became the first backfield to both gain 1,000 yards, and the Dolphins went undefeated on their way to a Super Bowl VII victory over the overmatched Washington Redskins, 14-7. The next season, Morris led he league in yards-per-attempt (6.4!!) as Miami repeated as Super Bowl champs by dispatching my overmatched Minnesota Vikings 24-7. Yeah, I hated them. The oddity is I that liked a lot of their players, particularly Morris and wide receiver Paul Warfield. I don't know why. They had grace. They were fun to watch.

How many guys from that '72 club are in the Hall of Fame? I read six, not including Shula. In order of induction: Warfield, Csonka, offensive lineman Jim Langer, Griese, guard Larry Little, and linebacker Nick Buoniconti. Not Morris. His career was too short, I guess. Csonka, for example, played from 1968 to 1979 while Morris began a year later and was done by '76. He made the Pro Bowl three times.

The Times obit goes into his post-career drug problems which I vaguely remember. In the '80s he was busted for cocaine trafficking, sentenced to 20 years (!), but evidence had been suppressed at his trial and he was released after three. Did he sue the state? He should have. No reason was given for his death Sunday at age 77.

WARNING: SPOILERS

After I became aware of that great triumvirate of 1933 Warner Bros. backstage musicals (“42nd Street,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Footlight Parade”), each with lavish, risqué choreography by Busby Berkeley, and each featuring a a Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler romance backstory with a different male lead (Warner Baxter, Warren William, James Cagney), I wondered whatever became of them. Yes, the Production Code killed the more risqué aspects of them. But before Joe Breen brought the curtain down, did Warners fit in one final version ?

They did! This one. And it’s awful.

It’s also hard to find. And I imagine it’s hard to find not because it’s awful but because of the big closing number: Al Jolson doing “one of his characteristic numbers, for which he is famous,” per bandleader Dick Powell.

Yes: blackface.

It’s brutal to watch but a good lesson for anyone wondering if we’ve made any racial progress in this country. Or for kids in this era of racially blind casting who might not know just how easy it was to make money off racist tropes, and how the majority of the country was totally fine with it.

Wheeeeeps
So (beyond the racism) why is “Wonder Bar” awful? Why is it different than the triumvirate above?

Those movies are all about struggle. How to put on a show. How to survive. That’s a Great Depression theme, so we identify. Hell, it's a universal theme. It's 100 years later and I still identify. This movie is about rich people falling in love in Paris with the wrong person and who gives a shit. Both Al and Tommy love Inez, but Inez loves Harry, as does Madame Renaud, even though Harry only loves himself. None of them are worth a dime. They all deserve each other, but we don’t deserve them.

Should I start from the beginning?

Acclaimed dance partners Inez and Harry (Dolores Del Rio and Ricardo Cortez) wake up in the same apartment, but he’s leaving her. “You knew it was coming,” he says. “See you tonight at the bar.“

Meanwhile, Madame Renault (Kay Francis) is cheating on her husband with Harry. Meanwhile, Tommy (Dick Powell), sings a love song to the photo of Inez on his piano. Meanwhile, Al Wonder (Al Jolson) awakens with a kiss from Inez … but she dissolves into a fantasy. But he decides, that night, to ask her to marry him!

All these machinations collide that evening at the Wonder Bar.

That’s where we also get comic relief Americans: two couples from Schenectady, New York. The husbands, inebriated, and played by Guy Kibbee and Hugh Hubert, are tired of their wives and prone to the flirtations of Mitzi and Claire (Fifi D’Orsay and Merna Kennedy). Their wives (Louise Fazenda and Ruth Donnelly) keep them in check with stern admonishments and dry wit. Fazenda is great, while Donnelly underused. Then the women become prone to their own continental enticements. We get no resolution on this. We don’t see anyone follow through and/or come to their senses.

Between musical numbers, Al Wonder gladhands with his clientele, but the bits come off as old-fashioned ”bits“ rather than real life. Example:

Man: Where ya been for the last three weeks, Al?
Al: Oh, I’ve been to a nudist colony.
Man: A nudist colony?
Al: Yeah, but I’ll never go again.
Man: Why not?
Al: You get tired of looking at the same faces all the time!

Since Al’s work is never done, he also tries to buck up Capt. Hugo Von Ferring (Robert Barrat), who recently lost all of his wealth—as Warner Baxter did in “42nd Street”—except Baxter kept fighting. Von Ferring just plans to kill himself. Al keeps trying to talk him out of it ... until the moment when he basically gives him a push.

And it’s all because of that third musical number.

In the first musical number, Jolson/Wonder welcomes us with “Vive La France.” Then we get the much-ballyhooed Harry and Inez dance routine … which quickly dissolves into a Busby Berkeley fantasy involving masked blondes and their masked beaus. Finally, the third number, a “Gaucho Dance,” with Harry duded up like Valentino, and equipped with a whip. Al’s intro: “In this dance, monsieur Harry whips her with a whip. He whips her, and he wheeps her, and he wheeeps her. But she loves eeet!” Is that a pun I don’t get? Or just more racism?

Cortez (née Jacob Krantz) played the screen’s first Sam Spade, and he was often posited as a post-Valentino Latin lover, but he’s less Valentino than Zeppo: handsome enough, but c’mon, gals. Yet each of the beauties here is crazy for him, begging him to stay, blackmailing him to go to America with him. Before the Gaucho Dance, Inez says she’d turn him over to the cops if she couldn’t go, which leads Harry, in the number, to coming awfully close with that whip. Sensing this, at its close, rather than fake-stab him, she stabs him for real—and the only one who sees it is, of course, Al Wonder. Backstage, Al assures Inez that Harry will be fine. As if on cue, Harry dies.

Worried for Inez, Al remembers his good friend Von Ferring talking about driving his car over a cliff on the way home. So they put Harry in the backseat. In other words, Al decides he shouldn’t stop Von Ferring from killing himself but rather use his suicide to cover up the murder Inez committed.

And this is the movie’s hero.

After the closing number, Al, seeming to realize he’s too old for Inez, pushes her toward Tommy, the Wonder Bar carpet is rolled back up, and that’s that. Think of the crimes swept under that carpet. The greatest of them is the closing number.

The Gaucho Dance: Del Rio and Zeppo.

Goin’ to hell on a mule
Tommy announces the closing number, ”Goin' to Heaven on a Mule,“ the camera pans over, and suddenly we’re no longer on a pristine Parisian stage. There’s dirt and wood chips and a log cabin, and Jolson in blackface talking to a little white girl (also in blackface) about why he loves his mule, Zeke, and why he’d rather ride Zeke than a horse. Then he starts singing:

Ever since I was a little pickaninny
I rode an old Missouri mule
And that’s the only way I’m ever going to travel
I’m a superstitious fool

And when the good Lord tells me
That I’ve sung my closing song
My soul will be on that mule
A’jogging right along

Eventually that comes to pass, and he rides his mule across the rainbow bridge and into an Art Deco heaven. Is it far-sighted that everyone there is black? Or at least blackface? We see St. Peter, Gabriel, the inevitable Warner Bros. gay tailor. Old Black Joe and Uncle Tom are there, too, as is Emperor Jones. Al licks his lips over Pork Chop Orchard, digs into some fried chicken, and takes The Milky Way streetcar to Lennox Ave. and the Big Dipper Cabaret, where, on stage, a giant watermelon is sliced open to reveal a tap dancer. Each second you think, “It can’t get worse,” and then it does. 

Anyway, that’s what killed the Warner Bros. musical: this big number. Everyone was shocked by the racism so Warners stopped making them.

Kidding. “Wonder Bar” was one of Warners biggest hits of 1934. Grossing $2 million worldwide, it was considered a good comeback for Jolson, who all but made Warner Bros. with “The Jazz Singer” but had fallen out of favor with the likes of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum.” In its review, The Kansas City Star felt he was too old for the “Vive la France” number, but that final number, “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule,” they wrote, “is particularly well done.”

People need to see this stuff. Just this closing number, really. See what everyone was fine with—Warners, the Production Code, The Kansas City Star. See what was deemed, to 1934 eyes, ”particularly well one."

Artist Ralph McQuarrie's first drafts of R2-D2 and C-3P0, with the latter looking very Metropolis. Lucas originally wanted the droid to speak like a Brooklyn used-car dealer

Everything below is directly from Brian Jay Jones' “George Lucas: A Life,” which is much recommended. The key point, Padawan, is that Lucas wanted to make this Flash Gordon-type movie because he wanted to watch it, but no one else was making it so he had to do it. But no studio wanted to make it with him because no one else was making it. Get it? Lucas' idea was the opposite of the zeitgeist, and business people only try to tap into the zeitgiest, not what lies beyond the zeitgeist or what the zeitgeist may be missing. Cf., Steve Martin's standup comedy career. Cf., Jackie Chan distinguishing himself from Bruce Lee with comedy. Cf., pretty much anything that shifts the culture. See what everybody is doing and do the opposite. Particularly if the opposite is exactly what you want to do in the first place.

1973-74

• Lucas began the writing process by making lists of names and locations for his fantasy, scrawling Emperor Ford Xerxes XII—a suitably heroic-sounding name—at the top of one of his notebook pages, followed by single names like Owen, Mace, Biggs, and Valorum. ... Luke Skywalker was on the list from the very start, but he was “Prince of Bebers,” while Han Solo was “leader of the Hubble people.” 
• On April 17 [1974], Lucas began writing another treatment, this one titled The Star Wars. This draft contained the dogfight in space that Lucas wanted to see, as well as a more fully realized plot that channeled bits of Flash Gordon and Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Lucas poured everything he had ever loved about the Saturday morning serials into his treatment, with plenty of chases, close scrapes, exotic creatures, and general derring-do. From The Hidden Fortress he borrowed a few key plot points—namely, a princess being escorted through enemy territory by a wise and battle-scarred general and, more important, two bumbling, bickering bureaucrats to serve as comic relief.
• The main character in this [May 1974] draft is a young man named Annikin Starkiller, who trains to become a Jedi Bendu under 70-year-old general Luke Skywalker. There are two droids providing comic relief, one short and squat, the other a gleaming “Metropolis style” robot ... There's a “huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills” named Han Solo, a feisty 14-year-old Princess Leia, references to “lazerswords” and Wookiees, as well as to a “tall, grim-looking general”—and relatively minor character—named Darth Vader. And for the first time, one character bids good-bye with “May the Force of Others be with you.” Lucas was still holding on to elements from his first treatment that he liked, including a fight in a cantina, a chase through an asteroid belt, a rescue from a prison, and the concluding awards ceremony.

1975

• In this latest [Jan. 2] draft, Lucas had more carefully fleshed out the concept of the Force—still called the Force of Others in this version—dividing it neatly into a good side called Ashla and a bad side called Bogan. He had also decided that the Force could be intensified through the possession of a mystical Kiber Crystal...
• This time Luke is prompted into action when he receives a hologram message from his brother Deak, who asks Luke to bring the Kiber Crystal to their wounded father, the Starkiller. Luke hires Han Solo, now a “burly-bearded but ruggedly handsome boy”—pretty much [Francis Ford] Coppola as a starpilot—and his copilot Chewbacca (“resembling a huge gray bushbaby monkey”) to take him to Cloud City, where Deak is now being held prisoner. Luke and Han rescue Deak, escape with the Death Star in pursuit, then head for Yavin, where they use the Kiber Crystal to revive the Starkiller. Luke leads an assault on the Death Star—and though he isn't the one to fire the fatal shot that destroys the space station, Luke returns to Yavin a hero, to lead a revolution at the side of his father.
• Lucas realized he had no leading female characters—he had shuffled Leia off to secondary status too quickly—and therefore decided that Luke was now a girl...
• By May, Luke was male again, and Lucas submitted to [Alan] Ladd a new, hastily written six-page synopsis in which he'd added a new character, a mystical old man he had lifted straight out of the pages of Carlos Castaneda's 1968 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. ... “Old man can do magic, read minds, talk to things like Don Juan,” Lucas wrote in his May 1975 treatment. By the time Lucas completed the next draft in August, the old man even had a name: General Ben Kenobi.
• In fact, by the third draft, completed in August 1975, Lucas had tightened and improved the script even further, moving Luke more firmly to the center of the script as the hero, and making Leia—instead of Deak—the character who gets captured and needs rescuing. Lucas still had the Kiber Crystal in the script but was beginning to realize that pursuing the stolen plans for the Death Star made for a much more interesting story.
• As 1976 approached, Lucas was finishing up his fourth draft, now officially titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as Taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: Star Wars.

1976

• He had a much better handle on the Force at this point, and had wisely decided to remove the Kiber Crystal from the story altogether, making the Force “more ethereal,” he explained, rather “than to have it solidified in a thing like a crystal.”
• In his latest draft, Kenobi survived his lightsaber duel with Darth Vader by retreating through a blast door that slammed shut behind him. That not only left Vader “with egg on his face,” as Lucas put it, but also made the assault on the Death Star little more than a bit of galactic breaking and entering, with Vader as a flummoxed shopkeeper shaking his fist in rage as the heroes escaped unharmed.
• It was Marcia [Lucas] who had put Ben Kenobi's head on the block, pointing out to George that after escaping the Death Star, the old general didn't have much to do for the rest of the film. Lucas had to agree—“the character stood around with his thumb in his ear”—and Marcia suggested that Kenobi be killed in his lightsaber duel and then offer Luke advice as a spirit guide in the final act. 
• “In the end,” Lucas said later, “I really didn't think we were going to make any money at all on Star Wars.”