Decency and kindness

At NRO, Giancarlo Sopo recommends "What to Watch on the Fourth of July." I really like this one and I think I'll watch it tonight:

The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999)

Though Lynch is often drawn to the darkness beneath American life, The Straight Story stands apart as his quiet tribute to its goodness. Based on a true story, it follows elderly Alvin Straight (an extraordinary Richard Farnsworth), who, upon learning that his estranged brother is gravely ill, sets out to cross 240 miles of Midwest farmland on a lawnmower that crawls along at three miles per hour. At its heart, it’s a film about fraternal reconciliation, but what holds the story — and Alvin’s journey — together are the decent Midwesterners he meets along the way: among them a bus driver who gives him a ride, a preacher who offers him food, and a fellow WWII veteran who buys him a round. In Farnsworth’s gentle performance and the kindness of strangers lies a reminder that sometimes the grandest American odysseys unfold at a pace slow enough to watch the fields go by.

Giancarlo Sopo, "What to Watch on the Fourth of July," July 4, 2025.

Frederick Forsyth, RIP

I did enjoy his novels, especially Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War (both made into excellent films). He also narrated the BBC series Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. I used the first episode of that as an introduction to a unit on the military in an international relations class. From the Washington Post obituary:

Frederick Forsyth, a mega-selling British novelist of political thrillers, cunning spy craft and globe-trotting intrigue who used his own background as a foreign correspondent to inspire such page-turners as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, died June 9 at his home in Buckinghamshire, a county in southeast England. He was 86. ....

For a half-century, Mr. Forsyth was one of the most successful authors of the cloak-and-dagger circuit. He wrote more than 20 novels, short stories and other works, reportedly selling more than 75 million copies in more than a dozen languages. ....

.... Mr. Forsyth, who had mulled for years the attempted assassination of De Gaulle as scaffolding for a novel, spent a little over a month at the typewriter and finished the manuscript for The Day of the Jackal with the aid of many packs of Rothmans cigarettes.

The book was about a French paramilitary outfit that hires a remorseless British hit man known only as “the Jackal.” The tensions build on a collision course between the hired killer and an unassuming French police detective racing to stop him. The first four publishers who were pitched “Jackal” didn’t understand the book, Mr. Forsyth later told The Washington Post: “The point was not whodunit, but how, and how close would he get?” ....

In 1972, Mr. Forsyth won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. An acclaimed 1973 film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, starred Edward Fox as the Jackal and Michael Lonsdale as the French police official. .... (more)

Brian Murphy, "Frederick Forsyth, thriller writer of ‘Day of the Jackal,’ dies at 86," The Washingtyon Post, June 9, 2025.

"Cooler than Cool"

I'm not sure when I first discovered Elmore Leonard, but it was after the time he was writing Westerns (but I do have DVDs of some films based on his Westerns). I believe I own copies of all of his crime novels, all eminently re-readable. I once gave old paperback copies of several of Elmore's books to a graduate student who aspired to be a screenwriter. A new biography of Elmore was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal today. From that review:

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So reads the 10^th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. ....

Leonard’s style was Hemingway-like in its economy and reveled in the unexpected delights of the American language. His stories often began in the middle of a scene, and where they went after that was anyone’s guess. His opening lines, such as this one from 1980’s Gold Coast, were collectible: “One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”

His crime stories, filled with oddball crooks and moody cops, were hard to pigeonhole, but Leonard’s audience grew to bestseller proportions, boosted by screen adaptations and near-idolatrous reviews. Many of his later works—among them LaBrava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), Out of Sight (1996) and Tishomingo Blues (2002)—have been reverently republished via the Library of America. Martin Amis would write that Leonard’s prose rang with the “American rhythms” of Robert Frost and Mark Twain. Ann Beattie compared his fiction, in its moral complexity, to Flannery O’Connor’s. .... (more)

Tom Nolan, "‘Cooler Than Cool’ Review: Elmore Leonard’s Life of Crime," The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025.

"Romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress..."

Occasioned by a new release of Richard Lester's Three Musketeers comes a review of a film I thoroughly enjoyed in a theater when it was first released, and have owned in some form ever since home video became affordable. The review reminded me that the screenwriter was one of my favorite authors. I just ordered Criterion's new edition, coming next week.

Few works have sparked the cinematic imagination as routinely as Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. A hasty count indicates some 40 movie versions (the first and latest from France, in 1903 and 2023) and many more made just for television. But by common consent, the best yet is Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), originally conceived as a single film with intermission but ultimately released as two separate pictures. ....

Three seasoned actors in their prime—Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay—were cast as the world-weary musketeers: Athos, Aramis and Porthos. Michael York, fresh from his central role in the soon-to-be Oscar-winning Cabaret, nabbed the plum part of the callow D’Artagnan (ultimately, the fourth musketeer)....

Raquel Welch, the very essence of feminine sexuality at the time, so her participation—as Constance, the queen’s dressmaker and the object of D’Artagnan’s ceaseless affections—was non-negotiable. Who knew then that this screen goddess, often as not wooden in dramatic parts, had talent as a comedic foil? ....

Landing Faye Dunaway after Bonnie and Clyde but before Chinatown and Network was a coup, and she portrays the ruthless Milady de Winter, an agent of much misery, with such unforgettable hauteur that it’s hard to imagine anyone else inhabiting the role. Christopher Lee lends her lover, the fearsome one-eyed Comte de Rochefort, exactly the kind of menace that made him irreplaceable on screen for so many decades. ....

...[T]he real casting masterstroke was placing Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood’s leading leading men, in the pivotal role of Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind the throne and the figure discreetly controlling most of the saga’s action. Heston plays Richelieu with a welcome light touch, giving just the right weight to sotto-voce comments, asserting authority by never raising his voice and letting an arched eyebrow or a sidelong glance serve his character’s needs. ....

...[T]he Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser, whose early “Flashman” novels, with their outlandish bounder protagonist, served almost as dry runs for his spirited condensing of Dumas’s massive chronicle into two efficient pictures, each running less than two hours. It was Fraser who, when Mr. Lester asked how a particular scene should look, said, “like a Breughel painted by Rembrandt”—a comment the director clearly took to heart.

None of this makes these pictures high art, but they are consummate entertainment. Few of us want a meal of Bergman and Bresson every night. Sometimes, the menu calls for romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress, and, of course, sexy women and dashing men. And when you want to dine out on that, Mr. Lester is happy to serve you. (more)

David Mermelstein, "‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Four Musketeers’: Richard Lester’s Spirited Swashbucklers," The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2025.

“Whistle While You Work”

Comparing the 2025 Snow White to the one released in 1937, Disney's first full-length animated film:

.... The 2025 film brazenly removes the heart of the original film’s princess. It was dead on arrival.

The 1937 Snow White is the only Disney princess film that includes a literal depiction of prayer. Many age-old stories contain allegories for divine intervention (fairy godmothers, for instance), but in the original Snow White, the princess kneels at her bedside and prays. She prays for the seven dwarves, for Grumpy to like her, and for her dreams to come true—namely, that someday, her “prince will come.” (Lest we forget, the prince was a man she knew and liked from her time at the castle, not a complete stranger.) She prays for safety.

And her prayers are answered. The evil queen is vanquished by a lightning strike from the heavens. Divine help is integral in the 1937 film; the dwarves, the prince, and the princess just participate in it.

In the live-action film, there is no prayer for love and marriage. Not only that, desiring such things is ridiculed. ....

In the classic, Snow White sweeps while singing “Whistle While You Work.” In the remake, she noticeably offloads the broom to one of the dwarves. The filmmakers are clearly trying to remove any insinuation that cooking and cleaning are women’s work. But the Snow White in the original is defined by cheerful acceptance of such duties—performed in gratitude for the dwarves’ hospitality—and hopeful optimism in the face of hardship and persecution. In the new version, Snow White is despondent and worn down by injustice. The impression one is left with is that the filmmakers rewrote the character because they simply do not like Snow White. .... (more)

The illustration is from the 1937 version. I do have the '37 Snow White on Blu-ray. I should watch it again.

Mary Rose Somarriba, "How Disney Killed Snow White," First Things, April 4, 2025.

Drowned in noise and nonsense

I loved this, on Oliver Stone's film:

Stone’s film — one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1990s — has a grasp of history that’s about as loose as David Ferrie’s wig in a hurricane. It doesn’t merely twist New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s botched investigation; it hog-ties the truth and dumps it on Bourbon Street to get pancaked by a sousaphone section and a guy in a gator suit.

.... Who killed Kennedy? Stone’s answer: Who didn’t? The CIA, LBJ, the Mafia, the Secret Service, the Pentagon, right-wing wackjobs, crazy Cubans (my peeps), angry Texans, oil tycoons, “Tricky Dick” Nixon, and — why not? — even the Caddyshack gopher was spotted behind the picket fence, cheeky little rascal.

Mechanically, Stone’s three-hour Gish gallop mirrors how social media influencers lobotomize their audiences: it drowns you with a barrage of noise and nonsense that you can’t possibly untangle, so you surrender — and paranoia sets in. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made about conspiracy theories because it is a conspiracy theory....

By the time you realize that there’s no way Julia Ann Mercer could have seen Jack Ruby near Dealey Plaza, you’re already sitting across from Donald Sutherland’s “X” spinning a monologue for the ages. Next, you’re knee-deep in the debunked “magic bullet” theory — which rests entirely on the fallacy that Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally were seated at the same height (they weren’t) — right before Kevin Costner, channeling Jimmy Stewart, pleads, “It’s up to you.” ....

JFK was a warning, but, instead of heeding it, we turned it into a business model. Minutes after Tuesday’s JFK files dropped, Twitter lit up like one of Ruby’s neon signs outside his strip joint: we saw Ramparts clippings sold as fresh intel, antisemitic bile disguised as “just asking questions,” and even a forged JFK memo about UFOs. .... (more)

Giancarlo Sopo, "From Camelot to Clickbait: America’s Dealey Plaza Syndrome," National Review, March 20, 2025.

Mr. Belvedere

Clifton Webb was one of the actors I really enjoyed from the studio era. He starred in several very good films, including Laura, one of the best films noir, another noir I liked was The Dark Corner, there was a World War II thriller, The Man Who Never Was (based on the Mincemeat plot), and he starred in many others. I also enjoyed him in his Mr. Belvedere comedies. The first of that series was Sitting Pretty (1948), and then Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951), and Mister Scoutmaster (1953). Each of them can provide an undemanding, enjoyable, afternoon or evening.

Wikipedia's description of the plot of Sitting Pretty (which I intend to watch again tonight):

In the suburban Hummingbird Hill, lawyer Harry King and his wife Tacey have trouble retaining a nanny for their three young, rambunctious boys: Larry and Tony, both of whom get into frequent mischief with the family dog Henry; and baby Roddy. When the latest in a string of servants (all women) quits, Tacey advertises for a replacement and hires Lynn Belvedere sight unseen. However, she discovers that Lynn Belvedere is actually a man upon his arrival, a mysterious one with many skills and achievements – and who declares himself to detest children. Nonetheless, the Kings reluctantly agree to a trial period during which Belvedere quickly wins over the boys. However, his mysterious nature intrigues both of their parents, and Harry becomes annoyed by his condescending attitude. ....

In the meantime, we learn that Belvedere has spent the past few weeks secretly researching and writing a salacious account of the goings-on among the residents of Hummingbird Hill. In fact, the book's blurb describes it as "a screaming satire on suburban manners and morals". The published tome becomes a national bestseller, upsetting everyone in the community. ....

Alec Guinness’s George Smiley

Alec Guinness is one of my favorite actors. Not the Alec Guinness of Star Wars, particularly, but the Guinness of the Ealing comedies, or the films he made with David Lean, and especially his role as George Smiley in the television series based on the le Carré books. I revisit those at least once a year. I like the BBC version far better than the 2011 film with Gary Oldman. From someone who, apparently, hadn't seen the 1979 version before:

The thing about spy shows is you can’t do anything else while you’re watching; to miss a micro-expression is to miss the plot. Such is the case with 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries based on the le Carré book of the same name, which I recently watched in full. As in the case in real-life espionage, the series features very little in the way of action. Only one episode features gunfire; occasionally, a man jogs. It was, sincerely, riveting. ....

...Alec Guinness’s George Smiley, a dour, droll cuckold and high-ranking intelligence officer whose devotion to England is only superseded by his commitment to social propriety. Smiley, recently and unjustly fired from his position as second in command of the Circus—the nickname for the cadre of top officers within the UK’s intelligence services—is tasked with ferreting out a mole leaking British secrets to the Soviets. It’s believed that the mole is one of the remaining members of the Circus, so Smiley and his few allies can’t let anyone know what they’re up to. (Rather, being professional spies, they can’t let anyone know even more than usual.) For his part, Smiley has to pretend to still be in forced retirement. Not the easiest way to go about an extremely high-stakes mission set at the height of the Cold War.

Even bearing these constraints in mind, Smiley sets about his mission with extreme delicacy. You could be forgiven for mistaking the setting of Tinker Tailor as an alternate-reality London where any act of rudeness sets off the offender’s exploding ankle monitor and blasts their component atoms into the mesosphere. Most of Smiley’s conversations with his various sources and suspects are comprised of intimation, allusion, and tactical civility. ....

Throughout this process Guinness’s Smiley never raises his voice; not once does he rise from his seat. By weaponizing formality, he’s obviated the need for blunter instruments. Why steal secrets when you can ask politely? (more)

 Calvin Kasulke, "Tinker Tailor Soldier... Shifgrethor," CrimeReads, Feb 24, 2025.

T.E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was one of those films—spectacular, but (more or less) based on history—that enthralled teenage me (another was A Man for All Seasons). I did learn more of the actual history as time passed. The movie was directed by David Lean who also directed my favorite films of Dickens' novels, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, as well as the film of Doctor Zhivago, another wide-screen spectacle. The Telegraph reports today about a re-creation of one of Lawrence's most heroic WWI feats:

It was a journey immortalised by Peter O’Toole in the epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia – and now four military veterans have become the first people to recreate T.E. Lawrence’s 700-mile (1,126km) trek across the sands of the Middle East.

Howard Leedham, James Calder, Craig Ross and Martin Thompson spent 25 days on camelback crossing the Nafud desert in Saudi Arabia to mark 90 years since Lawrence’s death.

The four men, who served in the British special forces, endured 37C (98F) heat, sandstorms and sheer cliffs on the trek from Al Wajh in Saudi Arabia to the Aqaba in Jordan.

They collected sand from four significant areas on the journey to spread on Lawrence’s grave in Moreton, Dorset.

Lawrence was a First World War hero who led the Arab Revolt against German-supporting Turkey. In 1916 he swept across the desert to Jordan and rewrote the map of the Middle East.

His remarkable feat was described in his autobiographical account Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the classic film Lawrence of Arabia. ...

On the penultimate day, the group, with 40 locals, re-enacted Lawrence’s attack on an Ottoman train that was transporting friends and family who had travelled to celebrate the end of their journey. The staff on the train were aware of the attack, but the tourists were “somewhat startled”. ....

Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident near his home at Bovington, Dorset in 1935. He is buried in the graveyard of St Nicholas Church in Moreton. (more)

Telegraph Reporters, "Veterans retrace Lawrence of Arabia’s epic 700-mile trek across Middle East," The Telegraph, Feb. 13, 2025.

"Witness" is forty years old!

Before Master and Commander Peter Weir directed Witness, forty years ago. It's an old film by now, I suppose, but it doesn't seem so to me. Like Master and Commander it isn't just a story, it immerses the viewer in an unfamiliar (to most of us) culture:

Before we see a gun, a bullet or a drop of blood, we see tall grass swaying in the breeze. Amid the grass there is a mass of men, women and children walking peaceably but confidently. We soon discern, from their unmistakably austere manner of dress, that they belong to the Amish community; we quickly realize that they have gathered for a funeral.

These images constitute the stirring, surprising opening of Peter Weir’s peerless thriller Witness. The film, which was released by Paramount Pictures 40 years ago this month, will eventually develop into a police procedural of rare drama and intensity, but not before Mr. Weir lays the firm foundation for the setting with which it begins and to which it returns: an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 1984. ....

In the film’s early stretch, Mr. Weir exercises great patience in establishing the principal Amish characters: Rachel (Kelly McGillis), a widow whose late husband was being mourned in the opening scene, and her little boy, Samuel (Lukas Haas). By the time Rachel and Samuel have made their way to a Philadelphia train station, Mr. Weir has engendered such audience identification with them that, although they are outsiders in this environment, we no longer perceive them as such. Instead, Mr. Weir makes alien and unsympathetic the other travelers, some of whom cannot suppress their stares.

Mr. Weir’s approach of acclimating us to the Amish worldview pays dividends in a pivotal scene. After entering the train station men’s room, Samuel observes, through a slightly ajar stall door, a murder.... (more, with spoilers)

Peter Tonguette, "Peter Weir’s Witness: Crime and Community," The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2025.

Marple

Last night I watched two of the Joan Hickson Miss Marple mysteries. I think Hickson is by far the best Marple on screen. I've owned the DVDs of that series for some time but last night, I watched streaming on Britbox and was glad I did — the episodes have been restored and are beautiful. I saw "The Moving Finger" and "A Pocket Full of Rye," neither of which I had watched recently and much longer since read. Speaking of the books, today I came across one reader's ranking of the twelve Agatha Christie's in which Miss Marple appears:

• 
  A Murder is Announced (1950)
• The Moving Finger (1942)
• The Body in the Library (1942)
• A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
• The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
• Sleeping Murder (1976)
• The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
• A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
• 4.50 from Paddington (1957)
• They Do It with Mirrors (1952)
• Nemesis (1971)
• At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)

Not bad, although I would rank The 4:50 from Paddington a bit higher.

Jose Ignacio Escribano, "My Ranking of the Twelve Miss Marple Novels," A Crime is Afoot, Feb. 4, 2025.

David Lynch’s only Disney movie

Among the notable deaths reported today is that of filmmaker David Lynch. I've watched several of his films and TV series. Enjoyed some of them but I haven't revisited any except this: 

The Straight Story (1999)

It’s David Lynch’s only Disney movie, which is delicately illustrated with scenery that looks like it’s been pulled out of the pages of National Geographic. The story concerns an aging man who travels across the heartland on a dilapidated lawn mower, hoping to reunite with his brother (played by Harry Dean Stanton). It’s not only Lynch’s most romantic film, it’s also the only one where his strange interpretation of Americana becomes almost Rockwellian. There is nothing Lynchian about Alvin Straight, who’s a swisher-smoking wiseman who shares his thoughts over crackling campfires and warm meals—each time his eyes filling up with tears. Though it’s based on an unusual story that made headlines in 1994, Lynch’s interpretation of Straight’s story is elegiac. This is a film about an aging outlaw taking his last ride towards the sunset.

Not really about an "outlaw" at all, but a decent old guy played by Richard Farnsworth who wants to see his brother at least one more time. It was filmed in Iowa and Wisconsin where the real events happened.

Art Tavana, "Nineteen of the Loneliest Films Ever Made," Quillette, April 19, 2020.

Alone against a warship

I've seen the film and own a DVD of Sailor Of The King, a pretty good film based on a book by C.S. Forester, Brown on Resolution, that just entered the public domain. It was one of the first Forester books dealing with nautical subjects. The text is available at Standard Books with this description:

Albert Brown was fated to enlist in the British Navy, his destiny set by his unusual birth and upbringing. While on operations in the Pacific during the First World War, his ship is sunk—but he survives, and is taken on board the German cruiser that sank them. It too has suffered damage, and heads to the Galapagos Islands to effect repairs. In this unlikely and hostile setting, Brown, alone, pits himself against the German ship and its crew, seeking to delay its progress while British naval reinforcements make their way to the region.

C.S. Forester became famous for his Horatio Hornblower series, but Brown on Resolution is among the first of his works of nautical fiction. In it, he weaves together the gritty social themes of his earlier work with meticulous accounts of naval adventure.

The book is set during World War I but the film moves the story to World War II.

"A slayer of Communists"

John Podhoretz is not particularly fond of Bob Dylan but liked A Complete Unknown because of a theme Podhoretz isn't sure the director understood. Who knew that electrified guitars were anti-Communist? From the review of the film:

The hidden story of A Complete Unknown is that Bob Dylan is a slayer of Communists—maybe not because they’re Communists, but I’ll take what I can get.

His rebellion against the elders in the folk movement of the 1960s was a rebellion in part against the static conformity and dreary humorlessness of the far-left politics that had dominated that corner of the music world for a quarter-century.

That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if co-writer and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against "Masters of War"—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown. ....

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.

It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)

The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic "Which Side Are You On?" nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the "side" in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.

A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.

John Podhoretz, "REVIEW: ‘A Complete Unknown’," The Washington Free Beacon, Jan. 3, 2025.

A Complete Unknown

I may wait until it is streaming, but I will see A Complete Unknown. From a Wall Street Journal review of the film:

Among the many music greats who’ve gotten the biopic treatment, Bob Dylan presents an especially tough multiple choice problem. He’s an artistic deity whose output made a real mark on history. He’s also a living cartoon character with a rasp and patter that has inspired countless bad impressions. And he’s a shapeshifter with many musical phases and a habit of tweaking his own mythology. ....

“[Timothée Chalamet] was really excited to be the one to be able to introduce this music and these lyrics to a new generation.” Chalamet, who has said he knew little about Dylan before landing the part, got good enough with the material to do some 35 songs live on camera, including guitar and harmonica work, and for those on-set performances to make the final cut, the filmmakers say. ....

He’d been practicing the music since 2018, when he was cast in the role, and had extra time to get better thanks to pandemic and Hollywood strike delays. Along the way, he became the movie-star equivalent of that dude in your college dorm who was always noodling on a guitar. His “Dune” co-star Oscar Isaac has said that Chalamet demonstrated his stuff by playing “Girl From the North Country” for cast-mates. ....

“When someone does an impersonation of Dylan, what they’re often missing is the sincerity with which he sings those lyrics,” Vetro says. “He was getting a message across, and that’s what people gravitated to, not because they were like, ‘Oh, I love that nasal voice.’”

Chalamet studied Dylan’s vintage performance footage as well as his body language and his attitude in press conferences. “We’d be watching an interview and Timmy would start speaking the lines just like Bob did. So then he would go into singing it like Bob, but the Bob of that specific time period” ....

...“A Complete Unknown” focuses on four precipitous years. The story starts with a 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival in New York City and ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he rocked out with a band and blew up his image as a lone prophet with an acoustic guitar. ....

Dylan, who is now 83, never got involved in Chalamet’s performance, Mangold says, but the singer reviewed the screenplay. He circled instances of people calling him “Bob” in the script, and changed that to “Bobby” for most characters. Dylan also crossed out a section of lyrics to “Masters of War” that he would skip when singing it live, the director recalls. “He was like, ‘Oh man, I never did this verse.’”

When they met (in a Santa Monica coffee shop that was closed to the public during the pandemic), Dylan said the decision to go electric at Newport had been less about shaking up the music scene than his craving for the camaraderie of playing in a rock band. .... (more)

John Jurgensen, "How Timothée Chalamet Learned to Sound Like Bob Dylan," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2024.

"The quintessential spy thriller"

About John Buchan's first thriller and its subsequent influences:

A century after publication, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps remains the quintessential spy thriller. There is no need to rediscover this novel, since it has never gone away. No work of fiction published during the Edwardian period is more widely available in bookstores in as many mass-market and scholarly editions. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is the forerunner to countless subsequent spy thrillers and action movies where a lone hero is pitted against the forces of darkness, which is the scenario used by virtually all of them.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has spawned four feature-film adaptations, the first and best-known of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935. ....

A refreshingly uncomplicated tale of a manhunt that lasts a couple weeks, is set mostly in the Scottish Highlands and is told in around 40,000 words, The Thirty-Nine Steps has proved, so to speak, a runaway success. Indeed, the imperative of brevity and speed was something new and notable that Buchan brought to the thriller genre. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is remarkably cinematic for a novel published in the early days of the silent-film era. Certainly the thriller formula developed by Buchan had a profound influence on Hitchcock, who knew Buchan and whose “wrong man” style of thriller is derived from the model of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitchcock’s own film version of the book forms the basis for several of his subsequent Hollywood films, most notably the 1958 masterpiece North by Northwest.

In that film, as in Buchan’s original, the protagonist, played by Cary Grant, is caught up in a wider international conspiracy and through a series of unfortunate events is obliged to avoid both sinister foreign agents and the local police. He realises that he has become a decoy in a full-scale espionage operation designed to expose enemy spies operating on home soil.

The influence of The Thirty-Nine Steps on Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest may be seen not just in the manhunt theme common to both. In North by Northwest, the Buchan influence is felt also in set-piece scenes such as the crop-duster attack upon the fugitive protagonist at the isolated bus stop. In the original novel, Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay is pursued across the Highland wilderness by a monoplane. ....

Interestingly, the novel ends with Hannay leaving England to serve as a junior officer on the Western Front. Although Hannay was the only man who could have saved the day in The Thirty-Nine Steps, after the German plot has been thwarted he is just another British soldier. It would not be long, however, before he is employed again as an independent secret agent in Buchan’s follow-up adventure, Greenmantle. (more)

Simon Caterson, "A Century of The 39 Steps," Quadrant, Sept. 21, 2024.

"Don't call me stupid"

Some films make me laugh even after many previous viewings. This is about one of them (and it references another):

...A Fish Called Wanda is a movie with many, many things going for it. Kevin Kline, for one; he won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Otto, the Nietzsche-reading, Aristotle-misunderstanding, gun-wielding, armpit-smelling Ugly American who eventually becomes the villain of this movie. John Cleese as the bumbling barrister Archie Leach is another. And Maria Aitken’s as the tough-as-nails English upper-class housewife Wendy Leach is another, particularly when she’s getting the better of both Cleese and Klein. ....

...[T]he film is also the final film directed by Charles Crichton, a legend of British cinema. Working for Ealing Studios in the 1950s, he made The Lavender Hill Mob, one of the loveliest heist/caper movies ever made. Cleese and Crichton, who had been wanting to make a film together since 1969, began writing the script together in 1983. ....

A Fish Called Wanda...is the kind of constantly-propulsive, laugh-a-minute mid-budget studio comedy no one makes anymore. This alone should be enough of a reason for you to revisit it, frankly, but if you need another, how about this: you will laugh. You will. ....

Olivia Rutigliano, "I Don't Know Why, but It's Time to Watch A Fish Called Wanda," CrimeReads, Aept. 20, 2024.

Up to no good

The Wall Street Journal celebrates "Alfred Hitchcock at 125: Still a Cinematic Titan" by posting links to reviews about some of his films and related materials. Hitchcock ranks very high among my favorite directors. From an essay about Shadow of a Doubt (1943):

...Hitchcock always claimed to hold in special regard his 1943 drama of small-town life threatened by the presence of a killer, Shadow of a Doubt. Joseph Cotten starred as Uncle Charlie, a murderer whose preferred victims are affluent widows but who, like so many Hitchcock villains, manages to charmingly conceal his villainy—especially to his worshipful family.

“Shadow of a Doubt was a most satisfying picture for me—one of my favorite films—because for once there was time to get characters into it,” Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview.

Hitchcock efficiently establishes the character of Uncle Charlie, whose natural habitat is presented in the film’s opening: Under a false name, he occupies a run-down rented room in an ugly, uninviting urban environment. Charlie is first seen lying in bed, a cigar in his hand and cash by his side while brooding over his next move. After learning that two men are on his tail, he makes a hasty exit and seeks refuge in the bosom of his adoring relations in Santa Rosa, Calif. We do not yet know the specifics of Charlie’s criminality, but we know he is up to no good. ....

This psychological drama is set against the richest sociological portrait Hitchcock ever attempted. Hitchcock uses the splendid setting of Santa Rosa—its tranquil neighborhoods, gracious front porches, patient policeman monitoring a street crossing—not just as atmosphere but to render Uncle Charlie a stranger in a strange land. He not only hails from a place geographically distant from Santa Rosa, but proves to be far slicker and more sardonic than his homespun kith and kin. Intuitively, Young Charlie says at one point that her uncle conceals an enigmatic inner self....

The picture is preoccupied with ideas of normality and ordinariness, and Hitchcock, making the film amid World War II, makes clear that he sees such all-American qualities as worth defending. In a series of speeches, Uncle Charlie offers a cynical view of life—“The world’s a hell,” he says. “What does it matter what happens in it?”—with which he justifies his actions. ....

Peter Tonguette, "‘Shadow of a Doubt’: Hitchcock’s Tale of Small-Town Evil," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2023.

A very good, recent, World War II film

Greyhound (2020) is a film only recently available here on DVD although subscribers to Apple TV+ have had access to it. I have replaced the possibly pirated DVD I had already purchased, frustrated by the film's unavailability. The movie is based on C.S. Forester's book, The Good Shepherd (1955). Forester, of course, wrote the Hornblower novels about naval warfare in the Napoleonic era. The film script was written by Tom Hanks who also stars. It isn't long—only 80 minutes—but very intense. This review, from The Hollywood Reporter, describes it well:

As screenwriter, Hanks strips down the story to its essence, largely dispensing with both preamble and post-ordeal exhalation, focusing almost entirely on the nail-biting experience of the hellish voyage. The movie fully immerses the audience in battle, owing something to the intensity of both the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan and the combat sequences in Dunkirk. ....

Krause is captain of the Fletcher-class destroyer code-named Greyhound, leader of three other light warships assigned to protect a convoy of 37 merchant vessels carrying troops and crucial supplies across the North Atlantic to England. The action is concentrated on the middle stretch of the journey known as the “Black Pit,” where surveillance aircraft from both sides are out of range, putting the zig-zagging boats at the mercy of German submarines that lurk in a wolf-pack blockade.

The movie charts that treacherous crossing over three days, broken down according to watch hours, at a time when the stealthy U-boats were more sophisticated than the Navy sonar equipment used to detect them. The elimination of almost all the standard scenes of reprieve or personal backstories — aside from Krause’s brief memory flashes of his last encounter with Evelyn — makes for an exciting open-sea combat experience. ....

To Hanks’ credit, his screenplay mostly downplays the heroics while fully acknowledging the bravery and sacrifice of the men who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic, a WWII campaign relatively underrepresented in movies. (The Oscar-nominated 1981 feature that put director Wolfgang Petersen on the map, Das Boot, viewed the conflict from the German side.) With thorough verisimilitude, Greyhound depicts just one crossing among countless over a six-year period in which 3,500 ships carrying millions of tons of cargo were sunk and 72,200 souls were lost. .... (more)

David Rooney, "‘Greyhound’: Film Review," The Holywood Reporter, July 6, 2020.

A gold heist

I just watched a recently acquired Blu-ray of one of my favorite British comedies, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). It was produced by Ealing Studios, a company that became famous for a whole series of great comedies, many—including this one—starring Alec Guinness. Other Ealing films that I always enjoy sharing: Whiskey Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, the original The Ladykillers, and A Run for Your Money, all of which except the first have Guinness in the cast. If you enjoy British humor, you will enjoy any of them. CrimeReads recently published an essay about The Lavender Hill Mob which I excerpt below:

.... It is about two men, neighbors in the small Battersea London neighborhood of Lavender Hill, who become unlikely collaborators, compatriots, and friends by giving into their desires and pursuing a life of crime. Our hero is a mild-mannered bank transfer agent played by Alec Guinness,...and a frustrated artist played by Stanley Holloway (best known as playing Alfred Dolittle in My Fair Lady), who team up to commit an extraordinary heist.

Guinness...is our antihero Henry Holland. He has dutifully worked for the bank for two decades, facilitating the transfer of gold bullion from foundry to vault, every week. Holloway is Alfred Pendlebury, who dreams of being a sculptor but has to settle for carving stone in his off-hours; his day job is making lead souvenir statues. But it’s not long before Holland realizes that, if one wanted to smuggle stolen gold out of the country, all they’d have to do is melt and smelt it into figurines and ship them abroad.

Holland knows that, even if he gets promoted, he’ll never ever make enough money to live a good life. Pendlebury knows he’ll never make it as an artist. So, the realization of an easy smuggling opportunity gives them both a new raison d’être. But they’re going to need help, so they pretend to be tough-guys and enlist the help of two criminals (Alfie Bass and Sidney James), forming a bank robbing gang for the ages. ....

There are many magical tidbits sprinkled through, including a tiny appearance by a young, pre-fame Audrey Hepburn, and a young, pre-fame Robert Shaw. ....

Olivia Rutigliano, "The Escapist Joys of The Lavender Hill Mob," CrimeReads, May 15, 2024.