My friend Andrew Reed forwarded this one to me. It's about as bad as anything I've seen from IMDb's algorithm.

My nephew Ryan cuts IMDb some slack if the movie is right but the role is wrong. See: John Huston, known for playing the American in Tampico in “Treasure of Sierra Madre.” He thinks, “Well, at least they got the movie right.” This isn't even that. This is: wrong movie, wrong role. One of the greatest directors of all time is known as a writer. And writing which movies? Surely some of the greatest, most influential, most known movies in the history of moviedom? Naw. “Seven Samurai,” “Rashomon,” whatevs. “Ikiru,” “Yojimbo,” big deal. Don't you get it, dude? “The Hidden Fortress” influenced George Lucas! That's ur-“Star Wars,” baby! That's why it's there. Not that other crap.

If you pass a ghetto mart would you get me a pack of Dentye or cinnamon gum?

That was a text message from my wife as I was doing my usual 5-mile walk from our place in First Hill, through Seattle U and the Central District, and down some steep hills and public steps to Madrona Park on Lake Washington, while listening to Joe and Mike talk stupid fun stuff on the Poscast. That routine is kind of my palette cleanser for life. It recalibrates me as much as I can be. Getting the gum for my wife? That was just annoying. I'd have to go out of my way somehow. But she'd been sick for 2+ weeks, so yes, c'mon, be a man. In better times I would just go to Bartell Drugs on the corner of Boren and Madison, but Rite Aid closed that back in 2023. So I needed to scope out other options. 

I decided to try Whole Foods on Madison and Broadway. I'd never seen gum there but I had a habit of not seeing what I didn't want, so maybe it was right in front of me. It wasn't. I asked one employee, she guessed by the candy in aisle 5. Nope. I asked another employee in aisle 5 and he said it was over by the cash registers. By the way, there is no phrase that trips off the tongue less than “Do you have gum?” Maybe because it rhymes with dumb? Maybe because nobody ever says it? Maybe because I never say it? 

Turned out the gum at Whole Foods on Madison and Broadway was tucked away in an odd place, and they didn't have Dentyne or anything remotely cinammon, so I kept moving.

I thought about the Amazon To Go place on Madison but ... meh. I didn't like the idea of taking stuff without paying because censors would scan me, figure out what I had, and charge me somehow. I'm too old for that world. I passed.

So I walked to our actual ghetto mart, the Union 76 station on James Street. They had gum, and they even had cinammon gum, but it wasn't sugar free. And the wife wanted sugar free. 

Stockbox across the street? Nope. Metropolitan a block up? Bunch of Trident Sugarless but no cinammon. This is how I returned home empty-handed—but with a story to tell. Not an interesting story, I admit, but a story nonetheless.

As for Dentyne, I've since found out it was discontinued in 2023 by its parent company, Mondelez, who, per Google's AI Overview, “decided to focus on chocolate and baked goods, citing a decline in gum sales during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

This world. I'd much rather that Dentyne existed and “AI Overview” didn't. 

I'm reading a book by Superman's father, F.D. Reeve, “Robert Frost in Russia,” about a trip the great poet made to the U.S.S.R. in 1962 during the coldest part of the Cold War, and only months before Frost's death on January 29, 1963 at age 88. It's not exactly Truman Capote. Capote mocked everybody in “The Muses are Heard,” to our great amusement, while Reeve seems too polite for that. He's like most of us that way. He's also too cards-to-the-vest, which is not what you want in a writer or narrator. I keep waiting for something and not having it arrive. I keep waiting for the concrete. Maybe I'll find it in the second half. It's a slim volume. It looks and feels beautiful, a relic from an era of adults, but I'm mostly reading it because the author's son, Christopher, became a great hero for children, and for the child in all of us.

In that regard, there's an amusing exchange, midflight, when Frost asks Reeve if he likes airplanes—meaning does he like to fly—and Reeve says no. “I used to fly, but I like ships much better.” 

Reeve came along as Russian expert and translator, and the two men were accompanied by Frederick Adams, director of the Morgan Library in New York, and a good friend of Frost. This exchange resonates more than it should.

Frost: You know, Freddy's a real aristocrat. Related to Roosevelt, too. ... They don't have any like that over there, do they?
Reeve: No aristocrats.
Frost: Yeh, it's all workers and such. Yeh, I knew that. Though I bet you they have some. You got to have aristocrats.

I don't think he meant it positively. Either way he wasn't wrong—they had some. They have more now, though none are very aristocratic. They're so bad they make us long for aristocrats.

How many '70s movies had title graphics like these? Certainly many of the futuristic dystopian ones. Mouse over: Connery not amused by the future.

WARNING: SPOILERS

We get the tropes of a heist movie—guy gets out of prison, cases a joint, gathers a team, and they pull off the job with efficiency and still come to a bad end—but there’s a distinction: The gang is watched and recorded throughout. Every step of the way. The watchers, though, are different entities who aren’t working together, don’t know from each other, and could care less about the heist. Each is after something else. It’s an in-joke from the Watergate era that speaks to ours. Everything is being recorded and no one sees what it means.

The movie is also shockingly dated: rape and “fag” jokes are peppered throughout.

“The Anderson Tapes” is significant for being the last feature film of Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West, and the first feature film of Christopher Walken, AKA fill in the blank. Plus we get an early turn from pre-“SNL” Garrett Morris as a cop. Oh, and it’s fun. 

Accepting charges
The movie opens with John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery), James Bond to the rest of the world, equating safe-cracking with rape. “I used to blow ’em open and plunge right in,” he says in his slushy Scottish brogue. As he matured, he adds, safe-cracking became more of a seduction. There was more finesse. He seems to be enjoying his monologue.

Turns out it’s on tape. Prisoners, including him (embarrassed by his younger self), are watching it in a group therapy session facilitated by a shrink (Anthony Holland, who had a memorable early M*A*S*H role as a shrink). The footage was taken when he first arrived in prison, and now it’s 10 years later and he’s getting out. Also getting out are the young and the old: The Kid (Walken) and Pop (Stan Gottlieb). The latter reminds me of James Whitmore’s Brooks from “Shawshank Redemption,” saying he was incarcerated in “19 and 32,” and entering a world he can’t fathom nor handle. The former reminds me of no one, since Christopher Walken is already very Christopher Walken—just thinner and fuller-lipped. More jungle cat. When they step out of the bus station (which is being recorded by cops), he shouts, in that Walken manner, “America, man, you know it’s so beautiful I want to eat it!”

Anderson, being Sean Connery, wants to eat something else, and shows up at the swanky pad of the swankier Ingrid Everly (Dyan Cannon). “I haven’t been laid in over 10 years,” he greets her, and she moves her hair aside so he can unzip her dress. Oof. 1970s-era Dyan Cannon does something to me. Post-coital is when Anderson gets the heist idea: Why not rob the entire upper-class apartment complex? Go room to room? Just take? They’re being recorded, too, but by a private detective hired by Werner (Richard Shull) to keep an eye on his mistress. He worries more about the heist of her than of the place.

And so Anderson gathers his team, including The Kid and Pop, as well as Spencer (Dick Anthony Williams), a Black Power activist being watched by the FBI, and Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam), a fun, swishy antique dealer. It leads to a lot of “fag” jokes but Tommy remains himself and sympathetic throughout. I loved Balsam in this. The operation is being bankrolled by mob boss Pat Angelo (Alan King), who is being watched by the IRS. He owes Anderson a favor but demands one in return: take along Rocco “Socks” Parelli (Val Avery) and kill him. He’s a liability to the mob and becomes one for Anderson.

The apartment complex is fill of characters: a spinster couple, one afraid, one gungho; a fussy shrink (Conrad Bain); an upper-class “I want to speak to the manager” couple. It’s that couple’s son, Jerry (Scott Jacoby of “Bad Ronald” fame), that undoes the gang. An asthmatic paraplegic, they don’t bother to tie him up but leave him alone in his room. Behind cupboards he has an extensive ham radio setup and calls for help. I like the circuitous way it arrives. Someone in the Midwest, like in Kansas, hears him, and phones NYPD to let them know about the robbery in progress, but nobody at NYPD wants to accept the charges. The Kansas dude winds up picking them up. Basically every enforcement outfit is doing the minimum—recording everything and seeing nothing—while the crooks are pros but still lose. They all wind up dead.

Would’ve been great if the only one who survived was “Socks,” but Anderson takes him out. The survivor is Pop, who is more than grateful to return to prison. It’s a world he understands.

And introducing...

Prefiguring
“The Anderson Tapes” was filmed on location in New York City in August 1970 and opened the following June—a year before the Watergate break-in. So all this stuff, bugging, etc., was in the zeitgeist then. It was known. We didn’t need G. Gordon Liddy to show us the way. One imagines movies like this helped the public understand Watergate once it broke.

Based on a 1970 novel by Lawrence Sanders, it was written by Frank Pierson and directed by Sidney Lumet just before his his great run: “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” (with Pierson), and “Network.” Lumet is known for the Pacino movies but actually had a longer affiliation with Connery. Five films in all: “The Hill” (1964), this, “The Offence” (1973), “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, last but last, “Family Business” (1989).

This one is short: 99 minutes. It did the show biz thing of leaving me wanting more. It’s got a great early ’70s vibe: the city, the culture, filmmaking—including yes, the problematic parts. Despite stars, it’s gritty and chaotic and unfolds like life. It’s New York, man, so beautiful you want to eat it.

Just realized that the overall message of the film—government agencies spying and not connecting the dots—prefigured 9/11 by 30 years. So the movie prefigures both Watergate and 9/11. All the national tragedies. I should watch it again to see how it prefigures Trump.

Oof.

PERSON: Who's John Huston?

IMDb: The guy at the beginning of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” that Bogart touches for dough a couple of times. [Scrunches nose] Uncredited.

PERSON: Oh. So bit actor then.

IMDb: I guess.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I saw “Silver Streak” when it was first released in 1976—actually spring 1977, since I saw it at the second-run Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis—and I remember liking it but wondering when Richard Pryor would show up. Wasn’t he the co-star? It takes like an hour. 

I watched it again with my wife after we’d watched “Remembering Gene Wilder.” Beforehand, I was incensed that it had such a low IMDb score: 6.8? C’mon, kids! Turns out, that’s not just generational. My wife thinks that’s about right. Parts of the movie are painful.

I’m not talking Gene Wilder in blackface, by the way—that’s one of the few instances in Hollywood history (maybe the only one?) where blackface works. No, I’m talking the ’70s swinger vibe. I remembered Ned Beatty coming onto Clayburgh and getting comedically rebuffed with a drink to the pants, but I’d forgotten that Clayburgh then comes onto Wilder in a similar manner and everyone’s cool with it. Because she’s female and good-looking, and Ned Beatty isn’t and isn’t. The problem with Beatty’s character, it’s implied, is that he just doesn’t know his place.

Thankfully people begin getting murdered.

WGA nom
I still disagree with the rating; I’d go mid 7s. I don’t know if anyone can be as funny as Wilder repeatedly getting thrown off a train—that exasperated, clumsy, expletive-laden stomping. Meanwhile, Pryor is at that stage of his career when he seems incapable of not acting the truth. When they’re taken to the police station after the third fall from the train (Wilder’s third, his first), Pryor, rather than turn left into the station, keeps walking straight. He has to be redirected by the cop. No way that’s in the script. It’ s a nothing moment but I love such nothing moments. He’s so obviously inside the head of his character.

Why are their lines funny and Clayburgh’s aren’t? They improvised. Pryor would go off-script, Wilder would follow in a funny, believable manner, and then Pryor would riff off that. For their good work, screenwriter Colin Higgins got nominated for a WGA. He wound up having a nice run in the director’s chair, too: “Foul Play,” “9 to 5” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’ Hit, hit, don’t let the door hit your ass.

So George Caldwell (Wilder) is a book publisher taking the Silver Streak from LA to Chicago for a book convention. Is he afraid of flying? “I just want to be bored,” he says with that sweet Gene Wilder smile. 

On board, George meets vitamin salesman Bob Sweet (Beatty), who tells him “the action” on trains is great: “All that motion makes a girl horny,” he says with a horndog smile. It’s supposed to be awful but he’s not wrong here. Hilly Burns (Clayburgh, with a name amalgamated from the leads in “The Front Page”) certainly isn’t shy with George. It helps that they have adjoining rooms with a door that doesn’t quite latch.

But just when skyrockets are in flight, he sees a dead body out the train window—there and gone in a flash. Hilly tries to dismiss it. Probably an old newspaper, she tells him. You just imagined it, she tells him. Is she trying to calm him or just get back to sex? Next morning, as he’s leafing through a book in her bag, like the good publisher he is, he sees the author photo—her boss, Prof. Schreiner (Stefan Gierasch)—and realizes the dead body was him. Is she worried now? “Why don’t you go down the hall and discuss it with him,” she mumbles before turning over. Apparently we’re at that stage when women in film can be sexually aggressive but zero help otherwise.

In the professor’s compartment, no professor, just goons turning the place upside-down. They’re led by Ray Walston as a Runyonesque gangster with perpetually dangling cigarette, who sics Reace (Richard Kiel), a giant enforcer, on George. I like how disbelieving George is as he’s being manhandled and thrown off the train. This is not a thing people do! He winds up walking the tracks until he spots a farmhouse run by Rita Babtree (Lucille Benson), who keeps calling him “Steve” and gets him to milk her cow for her. “Cut the gas, Steve, you’re a grown man, I'm sure you’ve had some similar experience.” Then she takes him into the nearest town by biplane. Benson is great—one of the many fun supporting actors in this thing. And because they actually beat the Silver Streak to the next town, George jumps back on without talking to the cops.

Rushing to Hilly’s compartment, he finds her with supersuave art dealer Roger Devereau (Patrick McGoohan). No, first, he finds her alone, and they argue. Over whether the professor is actually dead. The awful thing? She knows, yet she still gaslights him. To protect him? No, to protect herself. Later she says this:

They told me they’d killed the professor and that, unless I cooperated, they’d kill me, too. And I thought that I’d go along with them and then you’d get away.

Great plan, lady. 

It's Bob Sweet who lets him know he isn’t crazy. Because Sweet isn’t Sweet; he’s Stevens, a federal agent, who’s been tailing Devereau for two and a half years. (So is the horndog personality his cover or his true personality?) The maguffin of it all is pretty funny. The professor’s “Rembrandt Letters” would reveal that paintings the Art Institute purchased on Devereau’s advice were phonies, which is why the professor was killed. Plus Devereau killed 10 in Germany a few years back for similar reasons. The funny thing: I could never tell if Devereau was guilty of fraud or incompetence. The former makes more sense but I love the idea of the latter. He’s an art dealer who has bad taste and kills anyone who realizes it. 

Investigating, Stevens gets it and George is chased onto the train roof, where he kills Reace with a spear gun, stands, and, bango, is knocked off the train a second time. (It’s the shot from the opening credits of Lee Majors’ “The Fall Guy.”) The good news is he finally finds a sheriff. The bad news is it’s Clifton James, who played dipshit southern sheriffs throughout the decade—from “Live and Let Die” to “Superman II.” An APB has gone out on George for murder, so the Sheriff pulls a gun on him. George takes it back and steals a police car. And out of the backseat, emerges—finally!—Richard Pryor.

Grover Muldoon is a car thief who doesn’t mess with “the big M,” for which George is wanted. But then in another nothing moment, Grover looks at him, really checks him out, and figures he’s harmless. Again, that’s all Pryor.

The blackface scene is brilliant. They need to get back on the train, George’s face is all over the newspapers, so how? It’s Grover who figures it out.

George: I can’t pass for black!
Grover: Who you telling? I didn’t say I was gonna make you black. I said I was gonna get you on the train. We got to make them cops think you’re black.

So shoe polish, a derby, a transistor radio for the ear, and Grover’s purple, shiny “82nd Airborne Division” jacket. The jewfro helps. 

The best part is when he gets into it—when he tries to walk and talk black—it’s just so beautifully unrhythmic and wrong. Think Elaine Benes’ party dance. Tons of white guys tried their “black walk” in the ’70s, including me, based on nothing more than Richard Roundtree in “Shaft” or Huggy Bear on “Starsky and Hutch”; and this is that but so hapless that no white guy should’ve tried it afterwards. (We did.) When Wilder says he doesn't see them getting past the cops, Pryor responds, “We’ll make it past the cops. I just hope we don’t see no Muslims.”

Back on the train, we get the confrontation scene with the villain where he details his plans like in a James Bond movie; it’s Grover, dressed as a waiter, who rescues them. Then another shoot-out, with Pryor and Wilder leaping from the train and into a river. They’re pulled out by the cops—but the feds know what’s going down. Indeed, George is chastised for not figuring out that the APB was a way to bring him in. Which: 1) he’s a book publisher, leave him alone, 2) the newspaper headlines could’ve gotten him killed, and 3) his name is forever besmirched. 

I think he might have a lawsuit.

Outwitting businessmen
Why does Devereau keep fighting after the train is stopped by the feds? His goose is cooked. But I guess that’s what villains do. And why does he have the emergency cords cut? Never got that. But it sets up our big finale—a huge selling point when the movie was released in 1976: a train crashing through Union Station in Chicago. Why doesn’t the train keep going even after the crash? Never got that, either. Did the toolbox get knocked off the gas pedal? Or doesn’t it work if the train isn’t on the tracks? At least it sets up another fun cameo: pre-“Fernwood Tonight” Fred Willard as incompetent middleman who insists a runaway train just isn’t possible.

“Silver Streak” was the fourth-biggest box-office hit of 1976. When Wilder/Pryor reteamed for “Stir Crazy” in 1980, it was the third-biggest box-office hit of the year. Why didn’t they keep going? Make as many as Hope/Crosby? Who knows? Schedules, plans. Pryor was on the way up, Wilder on the way down. Plus tragedies for both: Pryor burned his entire body during a freebasing accident in 1980 and was diagnosed with MS in 1986; Wilder acted as caretaker to his wife, Gilda Radner, who died of cancer before the decade was over. The two men reunited twice more, in 1989 and 1991, but it wasn’t the same. The cultural distance between 1976 and 1989 is forever.

But this is the kind of thing I grew up on, a Jew and a Black guy outwitting a corrupt WASP businessman, and I’d like more of it, please. Doesn’t have to be Blacks and Jews, could be whatever, as long as they’re outwitting corrupt businessmen. We deserve it in the movies since we don’t get it much in life.

April 1977

Isaac: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Male: There is a devastating satirical piece on that on the Op-Ed page of the Times. It is devastating.
Isaac: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.
Female: Oh, but really biting satire is always better than physical force.
Isaac: No, physical force is always better with Nazis. It's hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots. 

-- “Manhattan” (1979), written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

I came across this the other day, remembered it fondly, but man does it speak to me today. I'm with Woody here: bricks and baseball bats is way better than anything in the Times.  I want to live in a world again where Woody Allen is relevant and Nazis are distant things. 

More from Michael Lewis' podcast, “Against the Rules,” whose fifth season is all about how sports betting became the multibillion-dollar business it is.

That began with New Jersey trying to overturn a federal law that one of its own senators, Bill Bradley, wrote and enacted in the early 1990s. Jersey harnessed the power of Ted Olson (RIP), and he and his Federal Society buddies, including those on the bench, overturned the law in 2018. And the floodgates opened.

They didn't open uniformly. It's state to state—legal in 38 of the 50. And they're not open uniformly to just anyone in those 38 states, either. These companies want to maximize profit, of course. And how do they do that? By minimizing the amount that smart gamblers can bet and maximizing the bets of the stupid. The stupid even get VIP treatment. They get a “host,” who invites them to events, concerts, what have you. 

Lewis talks to a sports gambler he names Rufus, who uses “mules” to place bets for him, since he's limited in how much he can bet. But he has to be careful with the mules, too. They can't keep making smart bets—bets that after they're placed, the odds move in their favor. Stuff algorithms would flag. He has to mix it up. He has to lose in order to win. 

“The gambling companies,” Lewis says, “treat Rufus as a kind of cheater, a card counter at the blackjack table. But I don't think of him that way. He's actually figured out stuff about sports—about why things happen in sports—that other people don't know. He's more like a smart stock market investor. He knows better than the market knows, the right price for some bet. And what kind of market refuses to let the smartest people in? This market, it turns out.”

But it's worse than that. “In theory,” Lewis says, “these new companies are required to flag people with gambling problems and limit them, guide them to shrinks who can help them, and end the cycle of misery caused by gambling addiction. In practice, it seems, not so much.”

He talks to another sports gambler, whom he dubs Beckett, who, rather than using mules, creates different personas for himself and gambles that way. Same deal, though. He has to lose in order to win. 

I was developing my character as a very frustrated, losing gambler, who'd keep throwing money in. One day, I sent this host a flurry of messages after some really heavy losses, you know, over the previous few days. I sent message after message and the host called me absolutely exasperated and said, "Hey man, look, look, look, I know you're really frustrated. I'm sorry you lost. Don't worry, I'm going to take care of you. But please, please do not put messages like that in writing. Compliance might see it. They might get worried. They might have to close your account and you know we don't want that to happen. So just call me next time. Don't put it in writing. And hey, I'll give you 40 percent on your next deposit.

Then we get this exchange:

Lewis: It's unbelievable.
Beckett: It's disgusting. It's absolutely disgusting.
Lewis: How important to those companies do you think the addict is?
Beckett: Incredibly important.

In a serious country, this might be dealt with seriously. But we haven't been a serious country for a while.

Anyway you should listen to Michael Lewis' podcast. Totally worth it. 

“The fact that [the Mariners] missed the playoffs by one game, and didn't go out and add an impact bat or two when you have the best pitching staff in baseball, just seems absurd to me. There's never going to be a better time in the history of that franchise to have added a couple of bats to make a run than this year. And they missed it.

”I thought Alonso was a slam-dunk. How can you not go after him? You kidding me?... Honestly, as much as I wanted to be back there, if I was the only piece they brought back in, I would be saying the same thing: What the hell are we doing? Are you trying? There's not going to a better time to go for it. So I don't know what they're doing. I'm very confused. It's a head-scratcher for me.“

-- 2024 Mariners infielder (and LA Dodgers legend) Justin Turner, now with the Cubs, during spring training

100%. Amen. Ditto. The only thing I disagree with is the ”not a better time to go for it" line. There was: 1993-97, say. Back then they didn't need an impact bat but an impact arm. They needed a bullpen that didn't blow up on us. They needed a few missing pieces to go with the Hall of Fame calibre guys they had but couldn't be bothered to go get them. That's why there are no pennants flapping in right field at Mariners Park. But otherwise, god yes, to everything.

I guess there's another part of the statement I disagree with: It's not really a head-scratcher. The Mariners front office has always been this way.

Not much of a rebel but a bit of a cause.

WARNING: SPOILERS

For such an iconic movie, it’s not great.

That was my thinking when I first saw “Rebel Without a Cause” in my early 20s, and it’s still my thinking after seeing it on the big screen in downtown Seattle last week at age 62. It’s a 1950s film saturated in colors and melodrama—basically Douglas Sirk for teens. It’s about spoiled kids who don’t know they’re spoiled, and the adults who are cool with that. 

What’s the timeframe here—36 hours? The three teenagers, strangers all, wind up at the police station in the wee hours of the same morning. Each has parental issues. For Jim Stark (James Dean), it’s a bit all over the place—parents bicker, father doesn’t stand up to mother, father wears apron. It’s more specific for Judy (Natalie Wood), who worries her father doesn’t love her anymore, and for Plato (Sal Mineo), who doesn’t even have parents around to complain about. His father abandoned him when he was young, his mother more recently.

The next day the three go to school, there’s the field trip to the Griffith Observatory and the knife fight afterwards. The evening is the chickie run and the death of Buzz (Corey Allen), its aftermath a swirl of desires and revenge, leading to the death of Plato as dawn breaks. So not even 36 hours. 

And during that short timeframe, everyone changes. Jim is a drunk until he isn’t, Judy is a jerk (thrilling at men battling) until she turns sensitive, Plato is gay until he just becomes crazy. Buzz goes from bully to bro to dead, while at the 11th hour Jim’s dad (Jim Backus) finds the resolve to man up.

The title isn’t even true. Jim Stark isn’t much of a rebel, and he most definitely has a cause.

Upstanding slouch
What is his cause? He gets provoked by kids calling him “chicken” because he sees his father as one and fears it runs in the family. So his cause is to have the courage to confront the thing, whatever the thing is. Despite the slouch on the poster, he wants to be upstanding. At the same time, he’s part of that run of 1950s sensitive male heroes—he talks about his feelings and listens to people—so there’s a bit of needle threading. He’s sensitive, sure, but, Dad, can’t you take just one sock at mom? For me?

We first see him lying prone on a city street, playing with one of those cymbal-playing toy monkeys. He covets the monkey. He objects when the cops try to take it away so they let him keep it. He’s a kid here. He’s also solicitous and offers his jacket to a shivering Plato in the police station.

Why were the others picked up by the cops? Is it just curfew? Judy has daddy issues, while Daddy (William Hopper, the future Paul Drake of “Perry Mason”) has Judy issues, in that she’s blossomed into Natalie Wood and he may be attracted to her. I tend to think adolescents push parents away but here it’s the opposite; here, they all want to get closer to them. And what understanding they don’t get from mom and dad, they get from … cops? Yes. Particularly Ray Fremick (Edward Platt, the future “Chief” of “Get Smart”). It’s at the police station where backstories are revealed, and where, as his parents bicker, Jim emotes “You’re tearing me apart!” 

It's implied that the Starks moved to the area because of Jim’s problems: he can’t make friends, he gets into fights. (Me at 20 and 62: James Dean can’t make friends?) But it’s more indicative of the Starks’ problem: they don’t confront, they run away. And Jim is trying to stop the running away.

Next morning he starts chatting up Judy, the literal girl next door, and then tries to get in with her friends, Buzz’s gang, but they’re all a bunch of jerks—including Judy. At the observatory he tries to get in with them again, mooing while the lecturer talks up the Taurus sign in the stars, and then looking expectantly at them. Instead of friendship, he gets a knife fight.

Does anything reveal how spoiled American kids are more than the chickie run? The rest of the world is still recovering from WWII while these kids take two stolen cars, race them toward a cliff, and the first to jump out is “the chicken.” Meanwhile, below, a helluva lot to clean up—and that’s if it’s just cars. Here it isn’t. A strap from Buzz’s leather jacket gets caught in the handle and he can’t get out. Cue that great, terrifying shot, from Buzz’s perspective, of the car going down.

It's at the chickie run that James Dean begins wearing one of the most iconic outfits in Hollywood history: jeans, white t-shirt and red windbreaker—which photographs like suede but apparently was thick nylon. Before this, in the film, he was a dress shirt and sports jacket dude. You could say the dress code for young American men changed forever with Jim Stark’s mid-movie wardrobe change. And sure, leather jackets were already a phenomenon: Brando in “Wild One,” Clift in “A Place in the Sun,” John Derek in “Knock on Any Door,” hell, Jean Gabin in “Le jour se leve” from 1939. But Dean popularized the look more than anyone. It never went back.

Then the long evening of swirling. Jim decides to fess up to the cops but he can’t get their attention and doesn’t think to say “I was there when Buzz died.” He only gets the attention of three of Buzz’s gang, including Dennis Hopper as Goon, who are leaving the police station as he’s entering. They think he finked but … finked how? What’s to fink? During the evening, Jim is with Judy, then with Plato, then Judy again. The three find Plato alone and steal his address book, then taunt Jim’s parents by hanging a live chicken outside the front door.

By this point Jim and Judy have already lammed it to an abandoned mansion near the observatory—the same mansion from “Sunset Boulevard”—and Plato meets them there. They goof around, talk about being a family, Jim does an imitation of his father—i.e., James Dean doing an imitation of Jim Backus/Mr. Magoo. (I so love that.) Jim also gives Plato his iconic jacket, which Plato cradles like Mrs. Danvers caressing the underthings of the original Mrs. de Winter in “Rebecca.” We get a nice kissing scene between Wood and Dean, she rubbing her lips against his cheeks until he turns toward her. But then the gang of three shows up. One nice thing you can say about them? They haven’t forgotten Buzz the way Judy has. Dude’s body isn’t even cold. 

In panic, Plato shoots one of the gang. Increasingly hysterical, he blames Jim and Judy for abandoning him, as his own parents did, and flees to the observatory. Now the cops are there, and various parents, and Jim and Judy rush inside to talk Plato down. Referencing the lecture they’d seen earlier, Plato asks Jim if he thinks the world will end at midnight and Jim goes “Nah, dawn,” and so it is for Plato. Jim brokers talks between Plato and police, both sides panic, and Plato is shot dead even though—in Dean’s other famous emoting scene—“I got the bullets!” Impressed with his son, Dad promises to be a more standup guy, and gives Jim his jacket as Jim had given his to Plato. All the parental strife is handled facilely, and Jim makes a laugh-out-loud intro as everyone stands over Plato’s lifeless body: 

“This is Judy.”

The George W.S. Trow thing
James Dean famously starred in only three films before his death in a car accident on September 30, 1955, and he was Oscar-nominated as lead actor in two of them. This is the other one. But Mineo and Wood were nominated, both for supporting, while Nicholas Ray was nominated for script (which is so-so) rather than his direction (which is superlative). Nobody won. Ray was never nominated again.

All three are good but it’s Dean who makes the movie. If you don’t believe me, see two other Nicholas Ray films about misunderstood teens, “Knock on Any Door” and “Run for Cover,” both with John Derek. James Dean is able to project the strength, sensitivity, and sense of humor in the whiny little shit; John Derek was just a whiny little shit.

Watching the movie at SIFF Downtown, I kept doing the George W.S. Trow thing and backdating to get a sense of the characters and what they lived through. Let’s assume most are 17. Born in 1938, they grew up and became cognizant during WWII, were 7 when the Atomic Age began and 8 when the Cold War began. In junior high they were ducking beneath school desks against an imaginary Russian attack. And they were exactly this age when rock ‘n’ roll started. The movie was filmed between March and May 1955, so production began with “Ballad of Davy Crockett” at the top of the charts and finished it with Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” there. Everything was breaking.

That timeline actually works for Natalie Wood (b., July 1938), and Sal Mineo (b., January 1939), but not James Dean, who was born February 8, 1931. The ultimate misunderstood teen was older than my father.

“For example, James Burke, CEO of Johnson & Johnson. When he found out that some lunatic had put poison in Tylenol bottles, he didn't argue with the FDA. He didn't even wait for the FDA to tell him, he just pulled Tylenol off every shelf of every store right across America—instantly. [SNAPS FINGERS] And then he developed the safety cap. Because as a CEO, sure, he's gotta be a great businessman, right? But he's also a man of science. So he's not going to allow his company to put on the shelf a product that might hurt people.”

-- Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) to Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) in Michael Mann's “The Insider”

This is the conversation I kept going back to when data from Facebook was leaked to groups that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. I thought, “Well, their product has become harmful. So surely they'll pull it from every shelf and develop the social media equivalent of the safety cap.” Guess what? Not even close. Not even a discussion. They don't care. Zuckerberg doesn't care, Bezos doesn't care, Musk really doesn't care. What CEO today does? I'm curious. There must be a few, right? But they all grew up in a world where there wasn't a sense of shared tragedy and trauma (the Great Depression, WWII) and civic responsibility (FDR, Great Society, mandatory military service); they grew up in a world of get-rich-quick and get your own. Reagan, not FDR.