— Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century, 1954

I was moved to look up this largely unforgettable quote because people, including my colleague and friendly now-acquaintance (I don’t see him much at all since he moved out of New York) A.O. Scott, are talking about (and in Scott’s case, with) David Thomson about his book, dropping on Tuesday, called A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, in which Thomson delivers the message “the condition of movie has an extraordinary way of telling us we don’t matter,” which isn’t exactly Hecht’s complaint, but I’m sure you get where I’m coming from here. One way the movies have bamboozled us, Thomson tells Scott, is that they compel us to like or identify with characters like the Corleone family, who are, you know, really pretty bad people.

No seriously. He says this. It’s almost as if dramatic irony didn’t exist. Coppola intercut the baptism of Michael’s nephew with the brutal assassinations of Michael’s mob rivals in vain, because we’re too stupid to get what’s going on, which is that Michael lies about renouncing Satan while Michael’s own minions are up to the devil’s work. How one’s heart brims with admiration for Michael as we watch Joe Spinell sneer as he fires his gun through a revolving door window. “For me what the film is about is persuading men that they want to be in the gang and in the family,” Thomson says, “and they want to do the terrible things the guys do and they want to shut the women out of the room.”

All righty then, as Jim Carrey, the star of The Truman Show, another film Scott and Thomson viewed on their journey through space and time, would say. From where I’ve always sat, that’s one facet of what it’s about, and scarcely the most crucial one.

Maybe I’m just bitter. Because I myself have written two entire books addressing the question that Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks pondered after giggling through Howard Hawks’ Scarface: “Why do we like these guys?” Those books, Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas’ and The World Is Yours: The Story of ‘Scarface’ explore the lure of vicarious transgression and how those pictures satisfy it. My thesis is that even the most upstanding among us want to experience the thrill of getting away with, if not murder, then robbery, adultery, any of the deadly sins really. But of course one only gets away with it for so long. Where Goodfellas and Scarface diverge is in the comeuppance department: Henry Hill has to live the rest of his life like a “schnook” while Tony Montana (who’s played by the same guy who played Michael Corleone! Hey!) goes out in a blaze of…well, something. One can argue that he exited on his own terms, but he might have preferred an alternative. And while the third Godfather film is hardly ideal, one can see that Michael is made to pay in a rather awful way for his crimes against his own family. It’s true that there are viewers of the Godfather films and of Scarface that don’t get the message, just as there are guys who want to gloss over what happens to Tommy Simone when he shows up for his becoming a made man.

I interviewed Thomson myself back in the day, and he’s a genial fellow and a brilliant conversationalist — I trust I don’t need to also mention that he’s a spectacular writer. I thought of Thomson a lot last year, when I was preparing an audio commentary for the Vinegar Syndrome/Cinématographe editon of Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, which was scripted by Thomson’s dear friend James Toback, and was highly autobiographical in nature. I didn’t mention Thomson in the commentary, but I think it speaks very well of him that he was able to maintain such a close relationship with a guy whose behavior could be, well exasperating. (As I mention in my commentary, I’m acquainted with Toback’s charm and erudition, so I get it on some level.) Anyway, it’s the last day of a long holiday weekend. You whould watch a movie or something. Maybe one written by Ben Hecht.

The new Blu-ray from WA is a splendid presentation of what is, for quite some time before the raid, an engaging hangout movie, with Robert Mitchum, Don Defore, and Scott McKay among the comrades. Romance is supplied by Lawson’s marriage to plucky Phyllis Thaxter. The movie’s finale treats a theme that will be more thoroughly fleshed out in Wyler’s The Best Years Of Our Lives a couple of years hence. Tracy’s General Doolittle gives inspirational speech number one to a group of fliers, and inspirational speech number two to Johnson alone. He sells them both without breaking a sweat. Buy with confidence.

Besides impressing Bresson (the other picture he liked in that interview was Brief Encounter — “at least half of the film is admirable — the half in which the characters’ faces come toward us as they plainly reveals their secrets”), Thirty Seconds also inspired a Cleveland rock musician then going by the moniker Crocus Behemoth. Crocus, once Big Ed, later David Thomas, formed the band Pere Ubu for the express purpose of recording the story-song “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” whose snaking riff would turn into a sort of heaving calliope for its chaotic instrumental breaks. “We flew off early in the haze of dawn,” the song begins. By the end the air is buzzing with electricity and fire bombs, and the last thing we hear is a pilot yelling “Mayday!” (In real life, not a single plane was downed by Japanese forces during Doolittle’s raid proper. Ditching the planes was another matter, and a messy one, but only three airmen were killed in action.) A memorable trip and a notable debut in Rock.

I’ve written in the past about the roots of my cinephilia as related in family lore. The most fanciful concerns my having seen Hitchcock’s Psycho at age one or so, stuffed (really — at that age I actually weighed 35 pounds) between my parents at a drive-in theater as my mom suffered a trauma that would compel her to only take baths for the next six months or so. Mom also happened to be pregnant with my sister at the time, and much mirth was eventually made with respect to her trauma somehow affecting my younger sibling’s bearing. (Like myself, she was a colorful personality in her childhood and teen years.) Then there’s the first screen image I remember, that of Cary Grant in North By Northwest trying not to drive off a cliff. This, too, was at a drive-in, this time from the back seat of my folks’ Country Squire station wagon. I suppose the movie was in re-release; in any event, it was, as most drive-in attractions were at the time, part of a double feature. But again, this didn’t compel me to actively seek out more cinema.

In March of 1967 I was seven years old, the eldest of three kids. My dad himself was the youngest of four kids, and while his older brother was an airline pilot and his sisters married men of means, my dad shrugged off college and took up working class jobs. “Your parents loved each other very much,” my aunt Catherine told me a couple of years ago, when I decided to ask her directly just what the deal was with my folks getting married in November of 1958 and me being born in August of 1959. So it’s possible that my dad had had other things in mind. But. There I was, and then my sister, and then my brother, and because my dad and mom aspired to a middle-class mode of life — a house in the suburbs, the kids would go to college as they could not, etc. — my dad worked several jobs at once for a spell. In the day he was a route man for National Foods, which accounts for my lifetime partiality to Wise Potato Chips. And on weekend nights he parked cars at the legendary Hing’s China Inn, or as I knew it, Mr. Hing’s, in Englewood Cliffs. Good restaurant. I have vague memories of Mr. Hing himself, looking a little like Ho Chi Minh. If you get old enough you realize that even if you’re not losing your mind, you are somehow just making up your memories, so that could be the case here.

Anyway. March 12 of 1967 was a Sunday night, and it was the network television premiere of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, which had hit theaters four years prior, and my mom, who liked pictures and followed them to some extent — to a WAY bigger extent than my dad ever did — was keen to watch, but a little antsy about watching it herself. Because it was reputed to be almost unbearably frightening. So she did what any responsible parent might have done, which is invite her eldest son, age seven, to watch it with her. And of course I was keen. I really loved my mom and enjoyed spending time with her (although I drove her crazy, and would continue to do so for many years).

The movie lived up to its rep, even with it being edited to fit in a two-hour time slot with commercials. I didn’t quite get the erotic overtones of the narrative, but the strange faces in the walls worked on me. I knew about Bond films, but I hadn’t seen one yet, so Lois Maxwell was a completely new performer to me; her reveal through an attic opening at the movie’s climax scared the bejeezus out of me. (It goes without saying, of course, that I had little to any inkling of the masterful Shirley Jackson novel upon which the picture was based.) I did not recognize any of Wise’s stylistic flourishes, such as his diopter shots (as dramatically inert as his 1975 The Hindenburg is, one can profitably watch it for diopter shots alone). But I’d learn.

So I think, yes, this is where I first learned to love the horror film. I’d revisit the movie whenever possible. When I met my friend Joseph Failla in grade school a bit later, we enthused about the picture; later, in high school, we watched in in the A/V office with our older friend Nelson Page. I remember in the scene when Russ Tamblyn drops his whisky bottle, which we see from an overhead angle, Nelson exclaiming “What a shot!” So here was where I started learning. (Nelson would go on greater things, as we’ve seen.)

These musings were touched off by a couple of things: first, the really great 4K Ultra disc of the movie recently issued by Shout/Scream! Factory, which you should add to your library. Also, I watched Jaws a few days after watching The Haunting, and of course I’m aware that Spielberg once considered remaking the picture; he eventually remade Wise’s West Side Story instead, but his admiration of Wise is well known. Looking at a Wise film and a Spielberg film so close together I’m struck by the fact that in each film every shot is charged and specific. There’s very little, if anything, that looks like something the director could delegate to a second unit. The movies are utterly alive from stem to stern. Which was not entirely common even then, and is arguably even more uncommon now, alas. (And for what it’s worth, I am very much in the pro camp with respect to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and I continue to see him as the best camera director in American cinema today.)

In conclusion, let me say: Thanks, Mom.

P.S. My pal Larry Blake, whose own Sub, “What’s A Binky” is informative, provocative, and all that other good stuff, reminds me that the sound design of The Haunting is also central to its scare power. IMDB’s listing has eight individuals contributing, four uncredited. Larry tells me that in an interview back in the day, he tried to get Wise to spill some audio secrets but the maestro would not budge.

One can credibly assert that for a long stretch of the 20th century, MGM’s reach never exceeded its grasp. Two new titles from the Warner Archive, which possesses a great deal of MGM’s output, are fairly remarkable demonstrations of this. 1931’s Possessed was directed by Clarence Brown, well-known among cinephiles and relatively unsung in critical circles, although lord knows his name is attached to several classic Garbos, some delightful comedies, and the ineffable Intruder in the Dust. Possessed is one of two Joan Crawford pictures with that title; the second one, made in 1947 by Curtis Bernhardt, is a psychodrama with Van Heflin and Raymond Massey as the male romantic leads. Yes, that really is a “wait…what?” proposition but we need not concern ourselves with it here. Crawford’s romantic lead in Brown’s Possessed is Clark Gable, and one can merely swoon over their combined star power and not notice a thing about the rest of the picture. Which would be a shame, as it’s a juicy melodrama whose potential scandal for Gable’s would-be politician is something that wouldn’t even raise and eyebrow in today’s atmosphere of porn star sex, mushroom head male genitalia, Nazi tattoos, etc etc etc. The problem is that Gable’s rich Mark Whitney, just like the guy in The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” has, with respect to wandering small-town striver Crawford, picked her out, shook her up, turned her around, turned her into someone new, as his kept woman. He’s even given her a new identity, and told her that “a divorcee living on alimony need make no explanations” So far so good, until Frank Trevor, as Horace Travers, a creep acquaintance of Mark, brings a tramp from Joan’s past, Vernice LaVerne as Marjorie White, over to the crib. Things get worse when Wallace Ford, as Joan’s small-town yokel boyfriend (who never wasn’t some kind of pain in the ass) turns up thinking he’ll just take up where they left off. Ford would go on to play a much more sympathetic character soon in Freaks but here he’s just a drag. The actions of Ford’s character, in which he is certain he’s got every right to walk back into Crawford’s life, imply a certain feminist thread about social mobility.

Brown’s direction is fluid, more in the service of Crawford than Gable, but Clark need do little more than stand back and look devastating while Crawford shows her range embodying a striver who not only makes good but gets herself an education in piano playing, French, and more, in three mere years. And shows her adoration for the man who enabled all of it by giving him the best moon-eyed looks in the Crawford arsenal. Also of note: Crawford’s mom is played by Clara Blandick, who you might know better as Auntie Em. And the staging and shooting of Gable’s speech when he runs for office seems to anticipate a similar scene in Citizen Kane, check it out.

Metro made It’s A Wise Child the same year as Possessed; it was produced by and stars Marion Davies, wriggling out from under the thumb of William Randolph Hearst to perform what she liked best, which was comedy. In this Robert Z. Leonard picture, Davies’ Joyce isn’t quite a madcap heiress but definitely part of an affluent family, and she’s quite carefree. We first see her driving on a back road like a maniac while testing out a roadster. The plot is powered by small-town talk: a mishearing by a local busybody fuels the idea that Joyce is pregnant. She isn’t; her loyal maid, played by Marie Prevost, is. Prevost is sadly rather puffy-faced here, looking substantially different than she did in Milestone’s The Racket only three years earlier. (Have you ordered your Blu-ray of that film from Flicker Alley yet? You should…) But her heart-to-heart with Davies here is comedy gold. And everything works out in the end thanks in part to Sidney Blackmer, the future Roman Castavet, as a family friend who has long loved Our Girl. Clara Blandick is in THIS picture too, and at one point a character actually calls her “Auntie Em,” and who knew the MGM multiverse was a thing. Also delightful is James Gleason as and iceman who’s got a way with a malapropism.

THE LATE SHOW

This is the second directorial effort from Robert Benton, whose career started as a first-rate screenwriter — you know, Bonnie and Clyde, What’s Up Doc, and more. His first solo directorial picture, Bad Company, remains a shockingly “revisionist” Western, dark as pitch. Benton didn’t get to direct again for another five years, and this is what he came up with. Art Carney plays a Ira Wells, a perpetually small-time gumshoe whose former partner Harry (Howard Duff, later to turn up as an attorney in Benson’s Kramer Vs. Kramer) all but drops dead in the boarding house Ira lives in. (His landlady, the great Ruth Nelson, is remarkably understanding about this, and more. ) At the partner’s funeral, Ira meets acerbic flake Margo, whose case Harry had been working on. The case concerned a missing cat, hardly a thing to get killed over. Obviously the whole thing runs deeper, and Benton constructs a case that has more than a touch of Chandler to it, but also a fair amount more clarity in plotting than Chandler could manage. The comedic chemistry here is unusual; Carney plays straight man to Tomlin playing a character who doesn’t understand that what’s coming out of her mouth is inanely funny. The whole movie is poignant fun that doesn’t go where you necessarily expect, and is all the better for that. To get a load of Carney’s range, try watching this with House Calls, the Walter Matthau/Glenda Jackson vehicle made in the next year, in which Carney plays a head surgeon who’s aging into incompetence and doesn’t want to face it. He’s both hilarious and mildly terrifying.

Indeed, Richard Fleischer had chops to spare almost from the very start, as two recent Warner Archive Blu-ray releases splendidly testify. 1949’s Follow Me Quietly, form a story in part by Anthony Mann, stars William Lundigan as that noir staple, the obsessive killer-stalking cop (see also Victor Mature in The Big Combo, Russell Crowe in L.A. Confidential) tracking down a serial strangler who sends the cops taunting notes after each murder. Partial eyewitness evidence gives Lundigan the bright idea to construct a dummy of the killer, a hauntingly faceless figure that he at one point seats looking out a window on a rainy night. The dummy provides a substantial share of visual chilliness, while Fleischer’s direction is ruthlessly brisk in its linearity.

The movie’s title comes from the ending, when the real killer comes to light, and he’s creepy as hell. (Douglas Spencer, who we all remember fondly as the reporter Scotty in Nyby/Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, does great work here as a nutjob who confesses to the killings early in the investigation and is determined to be, well, a nutjob.) The solution to the case opens the way for Lundigan to finally date the pesky female journalist (Dorothy Patrick) who’d been bugging him for a scoop.

Fleischer settled into a very rewarding (for viewers, at least) crime movie mode after this. He made one excellent picture, Trapped, for Arthur Rank’s Eagle-Lion Film, starring the fascinating Barbara Peyton, released on Blu-ray by Flicker Alley a few years back. The Clay Pigeon he was unhappy with; Armored Car Robbery, on the other hand, was something he enjoyed making, particularly in the staging of a getaway on an authentic location, near Chicago’s L.A.’s own Wrigley Field. Fleischer wasn’t crazy about RKO’s title, which he considered a bit of a spoiler.

The Narrow Margin is of course a more enticingly ambiguous title. Charles McGraw, who Fleischer had worked with and liked on Robbery — McGraw, says Fleischer biographer Jason A. Ney, “was Dick’s kind of actor: always on time, always prepared;” he’d also been a regular on Anthony Mann pictures, from T-Men to Side Street — plays no-nonsense Sergeant Walter Brown, whose rectitude makes for a perhaps unhealthy disdain for Marie Windsor’s Frankie Neill, a mobster’s widow who’s en route to Los Angeles to deliver evidence to a grand jury. The studio having been too thrifty to give Fleischer a train set that he could actually rock, “to invent the appearance of movement, he employed a bit of old-fashioned movie magic. ‘I made sure to hang something in every scene: a coat, a jacket, sleeper curtains,’ he later recealed. ‘We put little wires on them and moved them back and forth so in the background you had the feeling that the train might be moving.” Fleischer and cinematographer George Diskant also did a good amount of very effective handheld work, hardly standard operational procedure in non-documentary pictures of the late ‘40s. The result is commendably brisk — barely over an hour and ten minutes — and bristling with tension. You’d never expect a film character rebuffing a breakfast-carrying porter to elicit so much anxiety. The film’s linear ruthlessness inhibits the film from milking all too much poignancy from its climactic twist, but when, on the other hand, have you ever expected sentimentality (near-spoiler alert) via the great Marie Windsor?

Both pictures are sparkling in their recent Warner Archive editions and absolutely library-worthy. Fleischer’s eclectic filmography led him to be undervalued by the likes of Sarris, and God knows he lived up to the title of Ney’s biography, Journeyman, almost excruciatingly often — yep, he did direct the Neil Diamond Jazz Singer. But he also directed the jaw-droppingly grim 10 Rillington Place, the almost equally gnarly See No Evil, The Boston Strangler, Elmore Leonard’s favorite film adaptation of his own work, Mr. Majestyk, from a script by Elmore Leonard, one that Leonard subsequently turned into a book (both the picture and the prose were released within months of each other in 1974, and Leonard was pleased with the picture); Robin Wood favorite Mandingo, and Conan The Destroyer and Red Sonja, which I swear to you aren’t as bad as you’ve heard.

I’ve linked to this piece elsewhere, so I do so here adding a little extra value to “Why I Am Not Writing A Biography of Robert Quine.” Which is, a snapshot of some of the CDs I would have been using in my research.

From top down are records he played on, after Hell we’ve got bands he produced or was otherwise affiliated with. Toward the bottom we’ve got some key influences, or Other Guitar Players Quine Could Actually Stand, including James Burton, Scotty Moore, Mickey Baker. Quine was mildly obsessed with Burton, who still walks among us. That is, having heard stories about how upon hitting Japan during a world tour with some singer or other, he would just stay in his hotel room and watch television rather than see the town. This incuriousness staggered him. Quine was also keen on the work Grant Green did with pianist Sonny Clark, which I myself play so often that I wouldn’t have had to refresh my memory of the music. I plan on getting in to a little Mickey and Sylvia today if I’m able. (Mickey being Mickey Baker, and if you’ve never heard the job he does on the “Third Man Theme” you really ought to.)

There are any number of potentially problematic aspects to this 1964 period fantasy directed by the great Hungarian-born animator-producer-director George Pal, whose film career began with whimsical Puppetoons shorts and evolved with the terrifying apocalyptic features including War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide. Like the 1958 Tom Thumb and the 1962 The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, 1964’s 7 Faces of Doctor Lao blends the mildly scary with the whimsical, and is squarely pitched at children of all ages. Most appropriately here, as the title “Doctor” is the proprietor of a circus. A circus that shows up in the seemingly godforsaken 19th-century American Western town called Abalone, at a particularly crucial time. A rapacious real-estate developer played by Arthur O’Connell has just about convinced the town’s residence that the burg isn’t worth a plugged nickel and that they’d all be better off selling out to him. Small of stature, with stringy white hair and beard and wire-rim spectacles, Doctor Lao initially speaks in a high-pitched voice that’s not too far removed from the stylings that got Rosie O’Donnell in a heap of trouble several decades hence. And this stereotype isn’t even perpetrated by an actual Asian actor, as is the case in, say, Sixteen Candles. No, it’s the great Tony Randall. Arrrggghhh.

The thing is, and I am hardly the first person to point this out, Doctor Lao isn’t exactly real but more along the lines of a mask. The character is one of several masks, each one personified by Randall. This is a bravura multi-role performance not QUITE in the spirit of Alec Guinness’s in Kind Hearts And Coronets but not entirely removed from it either. Randall often speaks in more or less his own orotund Mid-Atlantic tones in his Lao getup. And Tony also plays legendary magician Merlin, blind seer and truth-teller Apollonius of Tyana, and others. While the serpent animated by Jim Danforth has the face of O’Connell, Randall provides its voice. And so on. I was one of the kids on whom the picture did its job of enchantment back in the 1960s, and so was pal Joseph Failla. (No small amount of that enchantment, incidentally, is provided by the lovely Barbara Eden, personifying the, well, Hot Librarian trope that would be further entrenched by Raquel Welch in 1965’s A Swingin’ Summer.) When Joseph died in 2022, I helped get his estate in order, which meant, among other things, finding a new home for his massive laser disc and DVD collection. I kept his standard-definition DVD of Doctor Lau because I knew how much he treasured the movie, and I watched that version pretty much as soon as I brought it home. I’m also a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan, and I fondly remembered that when Joel Hodgson gave up hosting that show, he left his ‘bots a plaque with the speech Dr. Lao gave to youngster Mike. Here’s a bit of it: “The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it. The way the sun goes down when you're tired, comes up when you want to be on the move. That's real magic. The way a leaf grows. The song of the birds. The way the desert looks at night, with the moon embracing it. Oh, my boy, that's... that's circus enough for anyone. Every time you watch a rainbow and feel wonder in your heart. Every time you pick up a handful of dust, and see not the dust, but a mystery, a marvel, there in your hand. Every time you stop and think, ‘I'm alive, and being alive is fantastic!’ Every time such a thing happens, you're part of the Circus of Dr. Lao.”

Let me tell you, the older I get, the more often I stop and think, “I’m alive, and being alive is fantastic.” Lao’s message is ultimately more important than his mask.

Dr. Lao was shot in Metrocolor, which meant that it was shot on Kodak’s Eastmancolor film but processed in an MGM lab. The new Blu-ray looks, well, fantastic.

Here’s my much-missed pal Joseph Failla scoping out the lobby of the Stanley Theater in Jersey City, some time in the 1980s. The photo was taken by My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, clearly an accomplished photographer, and more recently the author of the terrific short story collection Next Year In Paterson. Joe and Ron were on a location scout. Along with entrepreneur Nelson Page, they were aiming to produce a low-budget motion picture, titled The Scream Palace according to Ron and Terror Behind the Screen according to Nelson. Ron would write the script, Joseph would contribute story ideas and visual treatments, and Nelson would produce. And the Stanley would be the haunted movie joint. I don’t know why I wasn’t involved, especially since I’d introduced a couple of the parties to each other, but I don’t recall being particularly out of sorts about it, so I won’t complain now. The project was ultimately unrealized, but more than half the fun of such undertakings is the dreaming anyway, especially when accompanied by Italian food. As Nelson said in conversation the other day, “Everybody in the deepest part of their soul has a horror movie in them, they really do.” I know what he means. He reminded me that the story was to be based on that of the turn-of-the-20th-century theater impresario David Belasco, to be renamed “Horvath” for the picture. (“Horvath” is really a great horror movie name, I must say.)

Joseph died in February of 2022. Nelson went on to several triumphs, including managing the Lafayette Theater in Suffern, N.Y. (featured in David Chase’s Not Fade Away; on weekends Nelson would do rep screenings, and it was a wonder to see the likes of Anatomy of a Murder and The Ten Commandments on its huge screen) and building his dream movie house in Fort Lee’s Barrymore Film Center, where we held a memorial to Joe some time after his passing. He’s now retired, and we’re planning lunch some time.

Below, the Stanley today — it was restored by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and is now a Kingdom Hall. (This development would not have pleased Joseph.) And below that, a plaque commemorating Joseph near the administrative offices of the Barrymore.

The picture, starring Hugh Jackman and a score of terribly well animated ovine simulations, is unalloyed delight. I thought the phrase “unalloyed delight” originated in Blake, but apparently not. Maybe I made it up my own self. But go, seriously. We laughed, we cried, I almost forgot the theater was filled with poorly behaved children and their errant Brooklyn parents.

Also worthwhile is Tuner, a sharp thriller with a novel premise. I review it for Ebert.com right here.

Not so sharp is the latest Jack Ryan adventure. I don’t think moral ambiguity is supposed to be Jack Ryan’s bag. I don’t think being a little boring is supposed to be Jack Ryan’s bag either. Apparently the filmmakers see it differently. My Times review is here.

Please let me know with up votes or comments or what have you whether these recommendations of Current Cinema are worthwhile. Thanks.

And while we’re at it, I got more out of Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin the second time out, and my revised observations are here.

My friend Stan Demeski was kind enough to invite me to last night’s (Friday, May 22nd) Feelies show at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City. The venue presents some challenges for the traveler from Brooklyn, but one member of the audience last night had traveled from Stuttgart, Germany to see the show so I’ve got no business even contemplating complaining. And anyway, it’s always worth it.

One of the perks of attending what was then William Paterson College in Wayne New Jersey in the late 1970s turned out to be proximity to The Feelies, some of whose members still reside in nearby Haledon. There were some affiliations between the band and the school — you’d see guitarist and singer Glenn Mercer checking out the premiere of Charles Wuorinen’s Percussion Symphony for instance, and the band, in its Mercer/Million/Clayton [DiNunzio]/Fier, appeared on the cover of Artery, the arts magazine of the school. (About the names: early on Mercer and Million were apt to micromanage the band in a lot of unusual ways; the appeal of “American” sounding surnames was strong, hence they renamed bassist Keith DiNunzio “Keith Clayton” and drummer Anton Fier “Andy Fisher.” Anton, a man of strong inclinations [“‘Fier’ means ‘pride’ in French,” my college chum Bob Nickas, an early Feelies enthusiast and now a perspicacious art critic, reminded me] balked, hard, at the renaming and that was the end of that.) Percussion Symphony was played by the college’s very highly renowned Percussion Ensemble, led by the visionary Raymond DesRoches. One reason the band’s debut album Crazy Rhythms is festooned with woodblocks, timbales, shakers, castanets, is due to that influence. (Which The Feelies passed along to Wire, as you can hear on Chairs Missing and 154; the two bands shared a bill at CBGB when Wire was touring its first album.) Bob Nickas introduced me to Feelies bassist Keith, and we all got Chinese food together one night before the band played a Mudd Club gig. The next year I saw one of the greatest shows of my life, The Feelies and Pere Ubu, at Hurrah. Going to shows was different back then; the set times for the bands (The Feelies opened) was 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. It’s funny to see some other music-consuming journalists of my cohort complain about shows that go on past 11. That is, END past 11.

1979 is a long time ago, and if they asked me I could write a book, as the saying goes, but this is a Substack. A few salient facts: In the early 1980s I formed a band with a college chum and we recruited a couple of unique talents to play with us; we called the combo Artificial Intelligence, ar ar ar. (We still call it that. Too late to change it now.) For a year we were fortunate enough to have Stan Demeski as our drummer. He was spectacular, the only guy who could properly navigate one song that was in NINE (try singing in that time while you’re at it; such was my thankless task) and very easy to work with. He enjoyed playing with us up to a point; I remember a band meeting after a gig where he expressed his disapprobation at our bass player’s outfit, which consisted in part of Bermuda shorts and a trenchcoat. “If that was a joke,” Stanley said, “quite honestly I didn’t get it.” Stanley was the most in-demand drummer in the North Jersey “scene” and while he was with us he was also in two other bands. Needless to say all three bands hated each other with a passion. Once The Feelies regrouped, he stepped away from his other involvements. (As it happens, The A.I. band indirectly assisted in the Feelies reconvening. We had a berth at a local college bar called The Peanut Gallery and had amassed something of a following; when Mercer and Million, as The Willies, and friends and neighbors like The Trypes wanted to do some woodshedding, they booked that joint. Someone decided the name “The Peanut Gallery” was kind of louche, so on their fliers they just called it “The Gallery.”)

The college chum with whom I’d formed the band did a bit of (highly recommended) recording with Feelies percussionist Dave Weckerman, a seeming immortal who once put in front of a percussion kit is capable of playing until the end of time (he did just that at several house parties our band hosted); he also once played violin (definitely a choice, as he was only trained as a keyboardist; I don’t think he gave Ornette Coleman a run for the money) with one band member or another, supposedly, at some New Wave ice cream parlor in Passaic. I’m a little hazy on the details. Once I gave up music making, I took up music criticism, and I broke into Musician magazine with a slightly sour piece on one of the Gallery shows, and I now consider that move an ethical breach and hereby apologize for it. It did get me into print, however, and here we are.

Last night’s show was incredibly moving, a kind of summing up of everything this stupendous band was about. While Mercer and Million are still capable of jumping around like hyperactive school boys when the spirit moves them (and they still wear high-top sneakers on stage), last night they were really dug in, presenting first a rendition of The Good Earth, followed by two more sets, one of greatest hits (minus anything from Crazy Rhythms, because Crazy Rhythms is the album they are playing tonight), another of Special Guests (Richie Barone, James Mastro, Glenn Morrow, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, Trypes John Baumgartner and Toni Baumgartner)…and then, three encores. Including Wire’s Mannequin, It was head-spinning and ear-splitting in the most fulfilling way. On the way out I made a tentative pizza date with Stanley, depending on when our former keyboard player gets to New York. I didn’t get home until 1:40 a.m. It was more than worth it.

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I had never seen this spectacular 1984 documentary, directed and narrated by George Stevens, Jr., until, well, I just did, last Thursday. Quite an abrogation of cinephilic responsibility, you might say. I am a stalwart Stevens fan; back at my old blog, I went to bat big time for The Diary of Anne Frank, which raised a lot of critical eyebrows back in the day. And while I struck a pose of chic skepticism re The Greatest Story Ever Told in my old NYT streaming column, the truth I now share with you is that I admire the hell out of it, not least due to its “frequently awkward earnestness.” And the rest of the Stevens filmography needs no such apologia.

It’s funny that both Leo McCarey and Stevens got their starts directing Laurel and Hardy. Robin Wood, reflecting on Renoir’s observation that McCarey was the best of Hollywood directors because he really “understood people,” imagines the joy that McCarey must have experienced working with Stan and Ollie. I reckon Stevens experienced a similar walking-on-air feeling. Stevens, Jr.’s treatment of Alice Adams highlights a scene both poignant and funny. The appreciation of Swing Time is exhilarating, with both Rogers and Astaire contributing reminiscences. The movie’s shudder-inducing centerpiece of course is Stevens’ work during World War II. As he travels up through France we are buoyed by shots of Stevens and his crew getting love-bombed by French citizens. But we know what’s coming. The duration of the footage from the death camps is short, but what we see we will never be able to forget. In my older piece I quote Godard’s pronouncement in his Histoires du Cinema: “if [Stevens] hadn’t been the first to use the first sixteen millimeter color film at Auschwitz and Revensbruck, there’s no doubt that Elizabeth Taylor’s air of well-being would never have found…A Place In The Sun.” Looks glib on the page, and I’m eagerly awaiting the Radiance blu-ray of the monumental Godard work to hear it again properly.

Even though none of the Sun cast was interviewed for th film, the account of the picture Stevens, Jr. provides is masterful and devastating. Distilling Place down in strong short clips, it clutches the heart almost mercilessly. The effect is almost as strong as watching it whole. In 1969 Andrew Sarris stated that “[t]he technique of Stevens’ American Dream Sun-Shane-Giant trilogy that once seemed accomplished now looks labored. Shane, particularly, now looks overelaborated in terms of its genre and material, particularly in comparison with the greater spontaneity of Ford and Hawks.” It always seemed to me that with Shane the overelaboration is the point.

I wish A Filmmaker’s Journey had found room for 1952’s Something To Live For, both a critical and commercial flop but in my final analysis a pretty good AA movie (the best one is of course Edwards’). And while Warren Beatty contributes a delightfully hilarious anecdote here (his respect for Stevens is such that he delivers it enthusiastically and without a trace of Beatty mysterioso), there’s nothing of Stevens’ final film, a return to intimate scale after the epic period, 1970’s The Only Game In Town, a gambler’s romance starring Beatty and Liz Taylor that’s very much a film out of time. Although I understand the logic of going out here on something like a high.

The movie addresses Stevens’ personal heroism in another way, when Joseph Mankiewicz nearly gets red-baited out of the DGA by fanatic Cecil B. DeMille. The legendary meeting is largely remembered for coining “I direct Westerns,” but the deeper story is even more inspiring.

I’ve written a fair amount in the past about my friend Joseph Failla, who died in 2022. For a very long time he presided over the laser disc and then DVD and then Blu-ray department at the Tower Video on Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey. He served a pretty high-end clientele — a lot of New York Yankees roosted in Jersey (I suppose this was before the property taxes got so high), and a couple of film people as well. The film people included Ernest Dickerson and Gordon Willis, the “prince of darkness” himself. Joe described Dickerson as being personable and good-humored, and Willis as guardedly friendly and a bit on the stern side. He was, as it happens, generally displeased with how his work looked on home video. Particularly All The President’s Men, the 1976 masterpiece he shot for director Alan J. Pakula. If you read the interview Willis did with Steven Soderbergh back in the day — 2012, to be exact; the director posted it on his site in 2014, about a month after Willis passed — you might be inclined to credit Willis as a co-director on the film. Given that therein Willis tells how he invented a gizmo called a sliding diopter that enabled him to adjust focus on one side of the frame while maintaining focus of the other while actually moving the camera. [My friend Larry Blake, a far more technically sophisticated person than myself, suggests a more accurate account of this innovation would be “[Willis] had them make it so he could move the split diopter during the shot, sliding it to align with the pillar in the background as the camera moves in until it’s finally gone.” If you don’t subscribe to Larry’s own fantastic Substack “What’s A Binky?” you absolutely ought to.] This for the scene known as “the Dahlberg call,” which I regularly teach in my Language of Film class to demonstrate how cinematography itself can be a powerful narrative tool.

“They got the colors wrong,” Willis complained to Joseph. When I’ve taught the film in class, I’ve used an old Blu-ray sometimes, and other times the version available from my school’s streaming site. The students get the point of the demonstration (and also recognize the slight imperfection in that the ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights don’t “match” in the shot), and are duly impressed.

Warner Home Video issued a new 4K Ultra disc of the film in February, and I’ve just gotten around to looking at it. One hesitates to fall back on cliché but yes, this new edition is a revelation. Supremely crisp, healthy grain content, rock-solid and realistic colors, the whole deal. For the first time ever, I can read the words “National Desk” behind Redford’s Bob Woodward as he dials Kenneth Dahlberg’s number and the other Post reporters gather around a television to watch Eagleton resign. (One of the shot’s many salient narrative points is that they’re watching a story that will turn out to be irrelevant, while Woodward is stumbling on to some real goods.) If you’ve got a 4K setup at home you want this disc. If you don’t, this may well justify the purchase. Kudos to all the parties who made this happen, including Warner hero George Feltenstein, as well as a party who prefers to remain anonymous. I’m only sorry neither Joseph nor Gordon are here to see it.

As a showbiz-addled kid in the 1960s of course I read a lot of Rex Reed, and indeed I read enough of his early stuff that I could say I knew of him when he was a “serious” writer. You know (or perhaps not), when he was deconstructing Lester Maddox alongside his showbiz work. One detects a certain almost mocking self-awareness in the title of his first book of collected pieces, Do You Sleep In The Nude? A little over 10 years later he issued Travolta to Keaton, whose very title indicated a certain diminishment of vitality.

Reed was also, at the time, a notable staple of late-night talk, and while one couldn’t say he invented the concept of the newspaper columnist as media megastar, he certainly took it to new heights. Or lows, depending. Whereas all of Walter Winchell’s movie appearances were as himself, Reed’s early adventures in movie acting entailed real acting, or something like it. As a stunt bit, for a piece no doubt, he cameoed as a farmer in Preminger’s 1967 Hurry Sundown (Winchell appeared, as himself of course, in Otto’s stupendous Daisy Kenyon 20 years prior), and then really made the grade by playing Myron in the 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s gender-smashing satire Myra Breckenridge. Directed by Michael Sarne, a failed pop singer who had dated Brigitte Bardot, Breckenridge is truly one of the most special motion pictures ever made, in that is is packed with incredibly scintillating components — Racquel Welch! John Huston! Mae West! George Furth! Farrah Fawcett! Andy Devine! John Carradine! A John Phillips score! Cinematography by the guy who co-founded Panavision! — but nevertheless is almost completely unwatchable. The picture famously bombed in almost every respect and if I recall correctly Reed was a pretty good sport about the whole thing. It’s worth noting, however, that Reed did not phone in his performance, not in the least; his line reading of “Where are my tits?” is one I can still recall down to the last syllable. (In the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon opined “Any film that opens with John Carradine as a doctor surgically removing Rex Reed’s cock has got the right idea even if it did go wrong.”)

The reason I felt a kinship with him was because in 2009 I joined him in the small fraternity of film reviewers/critics turned temporary film actors, when I played the “Erotic Connoisseur” in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. Other notables in the field include Eugene Archer, who in 1950s Paris wrote the “Who the hell is Howard Hawks” letter to Andrew Sarris that kicked off the American branch of auteurism; Archer, credited as Seymour Hertzberg, plays a rich dyspeptic idler who sneers at the erotic aspirations of the film’s male protagonists in Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse, a few years before Breckenridge. There’s Leonard Harris in Taxi Driver, Chuck Stephens in Citizen Dog, Mark Peranson in Serra’s Bird Song, Joseph McBride in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and earlier/later in The Other Side of The Wind, and so on.

While one wouldn’t go so far as to call Reed a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, he was more than reasonably collegial. Once greetings were exchanged after encountering him at some screening or party or other, his default mode was that of eyeball-rolling; something was always testing his patience with the world. I never brought up our ostensible affinity because I knew he wasn’t at all keen on Soderbergh’s films; check out his review of Logan Lucky, which really reads like he’s doing a bit rather than engaging the actual picture. I reckon a fair amount of his later work has that quality. So let’s remember the good times, like when he met up with David Bowie in the mid-70s expecting to be appalled — rock hater Rex didn’t like the tunes — and was instead charmed, of course he was, and tickled when Ziggy told him that he gave up serious saxophone studies when he realized he just wasn’t gonna be the next Eric Dolphy. Or the occasion when Rex got busted at the Tower Records near Lincoln Center — man, I still miss that joint — hiding a few CDs under his overcoat (discovered while he was paying for several others — I think Tower security was being a little draconian here) and said the whole this was a “senior moment.” He was only 67 at the time! It is somewhat comforting that Reed died at the Dakota, where he bought a pad back when one actually could — there was a period when one didn’t have to pledge one’s first-born to Satan to reside there — and was apparently a very good neighbor to John Lennon and a help to Yoko Ono on the evening Lennon was murdered. For a variety of reasons, we will not see the likes of Rex again.

According to Tag Gallagher’s biography of John Ford, Sinclair Lewis, whose 1925 novel is the basis for Ford’s 1931 Arrowsmith, preferred the film version to his own book, telling screenwriter Sidney Howard, “The picture’s great accomplishment, and its definite advantage over the book is the mood it creates of paranoiac helplessness in confrontation with disease.” It’s entirely arguable that the picture only really comes to life after Ronald Colman’s title protagonist heads to the West Indies with his miracle serum. Before he can dispense it, there’s a montage that inspired me to note “I’ve seen fire and I’VE SEEN RATS.” There’s not much else in Ford’s filmography to which it might compare. Highlights include the young Arrowsmith’s instruction that the ideal physician’s library consists of “Gray’s Anatomy, the Holy Bible, and Shakespeare” and Richard Bennett’s performance as a mentor of Arrowsmith’s. The actor’s Swedish accent takes some getting used to, but the characterization deftly balances between gravitas and a near-comedic lugubriousness. We may recollect that Welles told more than one interviewer that the directors who influenced him most were John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford, and that he screened Stagecoach umpteen times before embarking on Kane. The fact that Welles cast Bennett as Major Amberson for his second feature suggests he gave Arrowsmith a good going-over as well. Other cast highlights include Helen Hayes before she was a Nice Old Lady, Myrna Loy as a low-key vamp, Beulah Bondi, Ward Bond, John Qualen. Colman himself really Colmans it up; when he speaks of feeling like a “a new man” my brain fast-forwards to those mid-40s Disney cartoons where Donald Duck’s voice changes to that of Colman’s (or that of a Colman impersonator I suppose. The new Warner Archive disc is a beautiful presentation of what some Ford scholars consider a compromised film — Joseph McBride says “Ford’s unhappiness and distraction while making Arrowsmith was reflected in its extreme stylistic unevenness, its highly episodic nature, and its schizoid variations in mood.” I don’t quite agree but I’m not in a position to argue too much. See for yourself, in any event.

1946’s Crack Up begins with Pat O’Brien’s art critic character breaking into the fictitious Manhattan Museum, convinced he’s just escaped from a train wreck. The convoluted scenario, based on a Fredric Brown short story, establishes there was no such train wreck, then contrives to stage a train wreck later. The only thing straightforward about the movie is its didactic streak, which disdains surrealism in favor of a good-old-fashioned sorta classicism, as when O’Brien delivers a lecture in which he places Millet’s “The Angelus” side-by-side with a bad Dali pastiche. (Ironically, Dali had written essays in appreciation of Millet in the ‘30s, and would incorporate “The Angelus” into his own canvases. It’s possible the screenwriters were aware of this, but not necessarily probable. Anyone who has a line on this, do let me know in comments.) The cast includes, whadya know, two Welles/Mercury Theater vets, Ray Collins and Erskine Sandford, an ultra-suave Herbert Marshall, and tough-but-tender Claire Trevor. The director is Irving Reis; when Farran Nehme and I got together to record a commentary for All My Sons, directed by Reis just two years after Crack-Up, we noted that Reis has lenser Russell Metty light the picture as if it were a noir; Crack-Up is an actual if minot noir, and the cinematography by Robert De Grasse is entirely apt for that purpose; hardly a surprise if you recollect that De Grasse also worked on Lewton’s The Body Snatchers and The Leopard Man. And later, Fleischer’s low-key great Follow Me Quietly…which is coming soon from the Warner Archive and will be summarily reviewed here.

I recently finished reading Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky Tonks by Jimmy McDonough. It’s a startling portrait of a startling life, a supremely readable account of an outsize talent that was more or less strangled by the outsize personality of the guy who possessed the talent. If you choose to look at it that way. One of the many virtues of McDonough’s account is that it doesn’t offer any pat conclusions/explanations. Stewart died in 2007 at the age of 59, and not due, or directly due, you could say, to his copious drug intake. While you could certainly call him an alcoholic if you wanted to come down to it — his drugs of choice were pills and powders and what he washed them down with varied; in any event, no one even suggested he stop drinking as such. I’m sober sixteen years myself, and I agree with the idea that anyone can achieve sobriety provided they have the willingness. But Stewart seems a person to whom such willingness would ever occur. He wasn’t like Bill Evans, consciously pointing to the junkie life and saying “that’s for me;” a combination of genetics and circumstance and inclination put him in the addict’s lane and he just put the pedal to the metal from there. And made spectacular music pretty much all the while. All through his career he balked at the idea of being a “pure” country singer. He liked rock and roll, and admired the hell out of Jerry Lee Lewis, who felt and practiced likewise. His tastes ran to his near-contemporaries, including the Allman Brothers Band; Gregg Allman was only three years Stewart’s junior.

I had the privilege of interviewing Gregg in 2011, almost a decade after Stewart’s death. I knew almost nothing of Stewart at that time, or I would have asked about their friendship, maybe. I was asked to interview Allman by his management, who got in touch through MSN’s media outlet, which I wrote for at the time. Allman was promoting his T-Bone Burnett-produced album Low Country Blues, a superb, intimate session marked by an understatement that wasn’t consistently within Gregg’s reach throughout his career. The record has stood the test of time. I think Allman would be pleased to know that. (He died nine years back.) Below, I’ve pasted the text of the Allman piece as it appeared on the website.

“It’s a funky day outside,” Gregg Allman observes of the grey cold Manhattan afternoon he sees from his 15^th-floor window at a quiet Upper East Side hotel. The rock legend himself is relatively cozy, albeit a little on the tired side. He’s in town to flog his new solo album, Low Country Blues, his first such effort in 14 years and a project instigated largely by near-ubiquitous producer T-Bone Burnett, who of late has specialized in revitalizing both the careers and muses of rock gods of a certain age (c.f., Robert Plant’s collaboration with Allison Krauss, Raising Sand). Allman, whose main project, a little combo known as The Allman Brothers Band, still gets plenty of work (the group will return to New York in March to resume its much celebrated sort-of residency at the Beacon Theater for a marathon run of concerts), didn’t necessarily need the stretching, but after meeting Burnett (of whom Allman had in fact very little consciousness of) the singer, guitarist and organist figured a little artistic adventure might be in order. Which meant working with some new musicians (including Burnett’s much-vaunted rhythm section of bassist Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose, and guitarist Doyle Bramhall II) and one old friend (Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John, on piano) to lay out a selection of vintage blues tunes in a very intimate and old school recording style. The making of the record was followed by another, more frightening milestone in Allman’s life, which has already seen plenty of tragedy and trouble (including the death of his beloved brother, the great guitarist Duane Allman, in a motorcycle accident in 1971, not to mention a half a dozen marriages): the musician, after long battling hepatitis C via medication, was obliged to undergo a liver transplant. Today, ruddy and red-cheeked, soft-spoken and just a trifle abstracted, he seems less a man with a couple of new leases on life than a troubadour wise in the ways of musical enchantment who’s just happy to have been given the chance to keep on keepin’ on.

MSN MUSIC: In preparation for this talk, I was listening to The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore ‘71 and hearing all the different things that were going on in the music at that time: there’s blues, there’s improvisation that’s almost in a Coltrane style, there’s a little bit of psychedelica. And it reminded me that the late producer Tom Dowd, who you worked with so extensively, was intimately connected with those styles--he was in the studio for both Cream’s Disraeli Gears and Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Thinking about how all that music must have affected you made me wonder if you still listen to a lot of those different things yourself?

GREGG ALLMAN: From time to time I do. In my car, I keep a real good stash of music, as well as having the XM and Sirius radio. ‘Cause if I’m going to drive in a car, man, I want to hear some sound. That’s the best time to listen to it. So I don’t know why, but for some reason I was getting some gas at this place and I went inside and saw on the counter, it said “Pavarotti;” there was one of his records there for sale. I thought, “I think I’ll just go, man, I’ll listen to that.” And it was like 2 weeks before I was through with it. And God, it was so many great licks going down in there. I mean this guy’s got a throat. Ooh. I mean man, I don’t see how Sting ever got up the balls to sing with Luciano Pavarotti. Whoa. I think he might have held his own. He did. But there are not too many other bass players I know could have done it!

MSN MUSIC: No, that’s for sure. Let’s talk about how this record came into being. Your manager hooked you up with T-Bone, is that correct?

GREGG ALLMAN: I was just going to meet him, and I did figure the idea of recording would come up. I wasn’t sure ‘cause Michael [Lehman, Allman’s manager] didn’t tell me he was a producer. He just said, I want you to meet this fellow. I wasn’t too keen on it, because I’d just finished a long tour and I just wanted to go home, and I didn’t want to step in Memphis on my way home. I had never heard the man’s name. I didn’t know who T-Bone Burnett was. I mean I’m just one of the ones that hadn’t. I learned he’s had some big things, and a lot of them were recently. But our paths had never crossed.

He has some very, very different, very old school ways of recording. Some of them are old school enough you could say they’re back in the school that my grandfather went to. I mean, for room tone he would use one of those old square RCA mikes, with those letters on top, you know. I think it was next door to a ribbon mike! I remember that being the funkiest microphone, but I mean it picked up that warm sound that he wanted. And once he got that, he could bring it up or down, that particular quality. It was like, “How much cheese do you want on this pizza?”

MSN MUSIC: Elvis Costello has worked with T-Bone extensively, and also very recently, and when I spoke with Costello last fall he was saying that T-Bone creates an environment where all the players can really hear each other.

GREGG ALLMAN: Oh yeah. Oh, definitely. He does that. I didn’t really know that anybody had been there in that studio before us, but after I got thinking about it, I said, you know, “Everything is laid out here perfectly. This is getting scarier by the moment!” It seems like the most obvious thing, to set up the room so that all the players had to be looking at each other. We were able to see everybody right in the face but were still separated sound-wise. That was the most fun I ever had recording, I think, in my life. The only thing I can compare it to is, well, I was a spectator and a partial player on [Derek and the Dominoes’] Layla or at least with that band, because we did a long jam and recorded that and it was released later on. But prior to that, I stayed down there and watched the sessions. And it was something else, watching Layla. It was great. Making Low Country Blues really reminded me of that.

With T-Bone, it was kind of interesting to let him take the reins. When I met him in Memphis, he was staying at the Peabody Hotel, and he was doing a study of Sun Studios, because he was aiming to build a replica of the room on this piece of land that he’s got next to his house. That is so cool. We just got to talking and, man, one of the first few things he said was about Tommy Dowd, and how much he admired him. And then he brought up this idea, he said he had this hard drive that had thousands of old songs on it. And that he would peel off about 45 of them, and I could just sift through that and come up with fifteen I’d like to record. That was fine. And then, the next meeting he had he tells me, “Sorry but you can’t bring your own band.” Well that just about erased it. I said, man, I just--I laughed. I said, I need to think on this. And I did. A couple weeks. I was kind of pissed off actually. And then I thought about something my brother told me once. Something that happened once when we thinking about working with Tommy Dowd. We had met him, and the first thing he says, “I want you to come down to Miami to record.” And we had found out that they had just finished the Capricorn Studios where Duane and I were already at, and we could stay home and record if we wanted to, because we had settled down in Macon there real nicely. And so anyway, I thought at the time, “What do we want to go to Miami for?” Tommy’s studio was in this section of town where they parked all the produce trucks at night, you know. You’d never find it unless somebody took you there. But I remember Duane saying, “Look, it’s his sand box, it’s his studio, it’s what he’s used to working with. We know what we got here. Let’s just take it down and do it.” And I thought about that. And I thought, “It’s been 14 years and you know maybe I ought to just go with this one.”

And so I took off on down there and I mean less than two weeks later T-Bone said, “Wrap,” and it was a wrap. I could barely believe it. And he hadn’t told me who was in the band until I got there. They didn’t tell me it was some of my good old friends that I’ve already played with. Mac Rebennack, Dr. John, who played on the 1976 record that I made, my second solo album, Playing Up A Storm. It was so much fun. It really was.

MSN MUSIC: It was a little different playing with Dr. John now than it was then, I’ve gathered.

GREGG ALLMAN: Yeah, cause we were both up in the clouds back then. Yeah. He’s become quite the fellow. He’s so friendly in his happiness. He’s got happiness. He looks like he found that legitimately happy place.

MSN MUSIC: It was after this record that you had the liver transplant surgery. Before that point, Hepatitis C is treated with the drug interferon, in a regimen of weekly shots over the course of almost a year; that’s pretty brutal.

GREGG ALLMAN: That’s right. It makes you feel so lousy. And then by Saturday night you just start to feel like a human being, here come the fuckin’ shot again on Monday. And then two big pills you take with it. Together. They get in there and cook. That’s some kind of suck.

MSN MUSIC: So to go through all that, and then get the news that the treatment didn’t take; that’s got to mess with your head somehow.

GREGG ALLMAN: Oh yeah. Oh hell yeah. And during the damn thing they would kind of, not joke, but they would kind of touch on the transplant subject. Then I thought to myself, I wonder what this is going to come to. God. That’s the most painful thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life. It’s like when you build a ship inside of a glass bottle. Because you’ve got a rib cage here it’s got to go inside of there. So it’s like they’re building that ship inside my body. They’re actually doing it. They had to get more room, so they had this machine goes down inside your ribs, spreads you inside, so they can get in there and work. And that’s seriously painful. But I came out of it OK. And now I’m just approaching my 7th month. The 23rd of June.

MSN MUSIC: And you’re coming back strong with the live work. I see you and the Allman Brothers Band have got another stint lined up for the Beacon. Are you excited?

GREGG ALLMAN: I really am. That is such a great place to play. I played there recently, actually, with T-Bone and his Speaking Clock Revue. They did shows in Boston, New York, San Francisco. T-Bone asked me to come along. And I was still in bed. I said, “Man, I’m not going to make that.” But then I thought, “Yes, I’m going to make that.” I did. It came off without a hitch. It was really good. It was a little painful, but hey. Where they cut, where they stitched, where it hurts, that’s not the part of the body where you sing from.

Spencer Tracy was arguably the greatest screen actor of most of the 20th century. And he was inarguably a great star for almost his entire career. But as we admire the terrific movies from his early days, like Walsh’s Me And My Gal, co-starring Joan Bennett, and 20,000 Years In Sing Sing, costarring Bette Davis, it’s instructive to remember that both of these pictures — the first a moderately rollicking comedy with some crime, the second a brisk, largely grim prison drama — were flops in their time. The star power that their lead actors accrued in the years after has made them classics. While one eagerly awaits an upgrade on the splendid Gal — Fox released a bare-bones DVD-on-demand of it over a dozen years ago — 1932’s Sing Sing now has a splendid Warner Archive edition. It’s fun to see Tracy play convict Tommy Conners as a straight-up mook. While he’s hardly as manic a prison inmate as Cagney would be, he’s not particularly ingratiating either. The movie is based on a tract by real-life warden Lewis E. Lawes, an argument for prison reform whose title derives from an aggregate of the sentences of the entire Sing Sing population. But the screenplay, co-written by Wilson Mizner (who decades later would become one of the subjects of a late Sondheim show called Road Show, and no, I’m not kidding) and the direction by the mis-en-scene maestro Michael Curtiz push the material into proto-noir territory (in his great Curtiz biography, Alan K. Rode notes, “Curtiz’s staging and compositions are unrelentingly grim […] [t]he shaded lighting — prison-bar shadows are pervasive — and the versatility of the camera shots invigorate every scene”), especially when Bette Davis as Tommy’s devoted girlfriend and a strikingly youthful Louis Calhern as his crooked mouthpiece get in on the action. This would be Tracy and Davis’s only screen pairing, and they make the most of it. The finale involves an electric chair and someone taking the place of the person who ought to be in there; compare and contrast with Curtiz’s Angels With Dirty Faces eight years later, with Cagney trying to set a good example for The Kids, or does he really turn “yellow,” etcetera. Anyway, Tommy doesn’t turn yellow, and the motivation for his turning semi-noble is a novel one.

Five years later, in Victor Fleming’s Captains Courageous, Tracy is heftier, so much so as to be almost cuddly. In this all-star Kipling adaptation (the ensemble also includes Melvyn Douglas and Lionel Barrymore), our hero plays Manuel, the Portuguese fisherman who provides snotty upper-class kid Henry (Freddy Bartholomew) with valuable lessons in how to be a human being. It really is astonishing how poorly young Henry behaves after accidentally stepping off the rear deck of his dad’s ocean liner and being picked up by the schooner We’re Here; he’s such an insufferable snot that one is surprised he doesn’t get tossed overboard by one of the old salts on board. But then you’d have a rather different movie, wouldn’t you.

Bartholomew is so convincing that you kind of forget he’s acting. When you remember that he’s acting, you’re awed at how great he is. It takes you a little while to catch up with Tracy. At first, you can’t believe how ridiculous his “Portuguese’ “dialect” is. But his character is a creature of ever-enveloping warmth, so that by the time he reaches his date with destiny…well, Claire and I weren’t just tearing up, we were blubbering. The emotional impact was such that Claire got a little mad at me for inviting her to watch the picture. Eventually she allowed that it was right that I had done so. But still. Approach with caution.

The Clark Gable screen partnership we remember most fondly (and I use the royal “we” only semi-advisedly) was with Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. They got together again in Boom Town, which is not bad, as it also stars Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamaar and goes down easy among viewers who can coast on vintage star power. That’s not the only reason it goes down easy. Another reason is one it shares with Honky Tonk, newly issued by the Warner Archive. That reason being director Jack Conway. A filmmaker who arguably didn’t deserve the contemptuous dismissal meted out to him by Sarris in The American Cinema but who also is not, as a director per se, begging for a sweeping reappraisal. One of those guys whose memorable pictures were arguably more attributable to the “genius of the system” rather than any personal touch. But wait. By 1941, the year of Honky Tonk, Conway (a near contemporary of Griffith who actually started out as an actor for D.W.’s rep company, such as it was) had established himself as something of an old pro, with some more-than-marginally enjoyable pictures behind him — many of them now available courtesy of the Archive: Saratoga, Libeled Lady, Tarzan and his Girlfriend, I mean Mate, A Tale of Two Cities, and more. Clark Gable at the time was, well, Clark Gable, the guy who told Vivien Leigh he didn’t give a damn. I suppose the one-and-done partnership between Gable and Leigh really IS the one “we” remember most fondly, and yes, I am looking forward to GWTW in 4K. What was my point? My point was that Gable’s most frequent female screen partner was and will ever remain Joan Crawford, but that as the thirties drew to a close and Crawford and Myrna Loy were subjected to the ageism that deemed them no longer tenable romantic leads opposite Gable, a relative ingenue along the lines of Lana Turner proved entirely desirable. I say “relative” because by the time she was tapped for Honky Tonk, she had over a dozen films to her credit. (Well do I remember Kenneth Anger’s ribald description in Hollywood Babylon of her debut in 1937’s They Won’t Forget.) Nevertheless, her lack of training caused some exasperation for cast and crew, as she had trouble actually getting her lines to come out of her mouth. She was a quick study, though, as the authority she brings to 1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice testifies. In Honky Tonk she plays Elizabeth, while Gable is card sharp and con artist “Candy” Johnson, who’s an old acquaintance of Elizabeth’s dad. Elizabeth falls hard enough for Candy that she’s compelled to fend off tough girl Claire Trevor, and you know that’s not easy.

I don’t mean an insult to say that there’s nothing major about Honky Tonk. Like Boom Town, it doesn’t do a lot more than, as I said, coast on vintage star power. (Whereas a Conway picture such as A Tale of Two Cities also has a dynamite story going for it.) And support player power: Frank Morgan, Chill Wills, the aforementioned Trevor, and the future Dr. Cyclops, Albert Dekker, all contribute admirably. The movie proved a box office smash, and so Turner and Gable starred in three more pictures together; the production of the immediate follow-up, Somewhere I’ll Find You, was disrupted by the death of Gable’s wife, the great Carole Lombard. All three Gable/Turner vehicles after Honky Tonk had World War II as a backdrop, and while, as I said, Honky Tonk is hardly major, it does make one regret that the pair didn’t make another period Western together; the genre suits them especially well.

It’s been a week, as in, it’s BEEN a WEEK, very busy and involved, wrapping up a couple of commissioned pieces, doing revises on one of those, teaching of course, and CHILD SITTING, and a lot of other stuff. As a result of the child-sitting, I can recommend without qualification Hoppers, the new Pixar film directed by Daniel Chong, in his second feature helming gig. The guy, and the movie, have the goods — the story, which is not about rabbits as you might presume but beavers — is a feisty hoot and so are the characters. We were all entertained. Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is a brisk and pacey documentary about what would have been maybe the world’s longest theater piece, outdoing Stockhausen and even the old joke about how when LaMonte Young says “take it from the top” he means last Tuesday. It’s a thoroughly drilled-down account of “putting it together” — for all his insane artistic ambition Wilson conducts himself like a very collected pragmatist almost the entire time — that ought to convince even the most mainstream philistine that it isn’t easy being avant garde. Back in the day when early-60s mandarins sneered at Cage and Cunningham and called them frauds while they were literally starving and going broke and hauling ass to the hinterlands to show off their work…well this laid the groundwork for what Wilson attempted, but even with widespread respect the money couldn’t get in fast enough. The punchline to the narrative is an irony both ghastly and hysterical.

In the meantime I implore you to get tickets to see Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, a film I cannot officially review but can deem splendid on this blog as much as I like I suppose because it’s my blog and I’m not bound by ANY ETHICS on it. Okay, by some ethics, but, you know. Stay tuned. I’ve also been digging in to a recent box from Severin called Exorcismo, which collects about 19 films and one expositional documentary (narrated by Iggy Pop!) on ten-discs. It’s amazing stuff, but I fear that certain would-be consumers might be confused by the title, thinking “20 films about exorcism is…a lot.” But that’s not the thing. These are 19 films produced in Spain after the death of Franco, expressing a lot of the pent up fury — political, cultural, sexual — that festered under the strongman’s repression. And hence the title. The manifestations are FASCINATING, and I’ll have more to say about them…later. The week is still packed with action.

The Warner Archive Minnelli campaign reaches an apogee — but hardly a conclusion — with the issue of The Valiant Victor’s truly courageous 1956 Tea and Sympathy, whose trailer announced ““Even the most daring story can be brought to the screen…when done with COURAGE, HONESTY, and GOOD TASTE.” The picture came relatively hot on the heels of the fall 1953 Broadway production of Robert Sherwood’s play, which had been directed by Elia Kazan, who one imagines would have brought different stresses to the film version. Which retains three principal actors: Deborah Kerr, John Kerr (no relations) and Leif Erickson. Erickson is the school football coach who also happens to be the chunkhead husband of Kerr’s Laura; the two of them supervise the dorm house in which John Kerr’s Tom is a resident. Speaking of chunkheads, poor John, an aesthete who likes to listen to classical piano upstairs, is beset by them; they chase him around their school and the dorm, call him “Sister Boy,” and so on. It falls to Kerr to instruct him that one can love Chopin and women both, and before she does there’s a very famous line of dialogue. I sound glib here so I want to stress that the film in fact remains quite moving. And it’s subtext, such as it is, stresses that even if Tom is gay, that’s more than fine in the larger scheme of things. The movie’s argument for tolerance goes hand in hand with its power-of-love message, as well it should — such convictions should be inextricable. Minnelli doesn’t do much to open up the material, but along with ace cinematographer John Alton and art directors Edward Carfagno and William A. Horning, and set decorators Keogh Gleason and Edwin B. Willis, he unreels mise-en-scene for days, so to speak. Alton’s color is vivid and very balanced, and the amber light that fills the frame in the aftermath of “…be kind” is apt and beautiful. The doofuses who put Tom through it include future Disney goof Dean Jones and future Billy Jack Tom Laughlin. Essential cinema.

So too is 1934’s The Gay Divorcee, the first starring vehicle for Rogers and Astaire, commissioned after they stole Flying Down To Rio from its ostensible stars (can you name them? you probably can, but you get my point). Like every Astaire/Rodgers film except Swing Time, which was helmed by George Stevens (and hence deemed the only really great Astaire/Rogers pairing by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema, if I recall correctly; I can’t look it up because all my film books are packed up while my home office space is renovated), this is directed by Mark Sandrich. The narrative formula that serves as a pretext for fabulous dance numbers isn’t quite as seamless here as it would become in later pictures, but the comedic rep company starts falling into place — Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore are featured — and the dance numbers are indeed fabulous, with the climactic “The Continental” flaunting a mild Berkeley influence before ceding the spotlight to Fred and Ginger.

I’ve saw an unduly large number of Warner Brothers cartoons as a kid, and then as a teenager, and then, on home video rather than broadcast TV, as a young adult. Of late the Looney Tunes Collector’s Vault discs have been satisfying my jones for deep cuts. Two of my favorites are included in the new Volume 2. “Boston Quackie” is a parody of the long-forgotten (by the mainstream audience, I hasten to add) film and television detective Boston Blackie, with Daffy Duck in the title role. The Robert McKimson short, from 1957, opens with Quackie and girlfriend and pooch sitting outside of a Paris cafe. “Blackie I’ve got a swell idea,” Mary bubbles. “While we’re having such a scrumptious time in Gay Paree, why don’t you get romantic and marry me?” To which Daffy/Quackie laconically responds, “Not a bad idea, Mary, except I promised Inspector Faraway I’d enjoy my vacation.” Sick burn, as the kids say. The dog starts barking at the duck. Then there’s Arthur Davis’ “Bowery Bugs,” Davis’ only solo Bugs short. (He’d later helm a slew of Pink Panther cartoons.) Herein barrel-chested lug gets the idea that a rabbit’s foot will change his luck in life, and chooses Bugs as a donor. In a variety of disguises, Bugs bamboozles him into getting into serious trouble in several contexts. “Everybody’s turning into rabbits,” he rants at the end. Brodie is voiced not by Mel Blanc but by Billy Fletcher, as historian Michael Barrier informs us in a commentary on the short. Back in the day my layabout pals and I incorporated Brodie-speak into our everyday conversation. An event we looked forward to elicited a raspy “Oh boy!” We’re also partial to “You sappy swami! I’m gonna mobilize ya!” It is truly a blessing to be able to watch this over and over and over again.