Fool's Paradise - Charlie Day - 2023

★-Not good. In fact, very bad. It's there with Pootie Tang on the bell-curve of cinema. At least movies like that and Freddy Got Fingered have cult value. “Sepatow!” 

Seems like it's supposed to be an ode to silent film actors as well as a Hollywood satire, but it really doesn't work. The gist is a mute mental patient played by Charlie Day happens to look like this pain in the ass star and gets thrown into stardom after the other guy dies while autoerotic asphyxiating himself. We then follow this still silent, non-actor guy's rise to fame and fortune. 

Movie sort of relies on cameos to provide humor. It feels like one of those, dude calls in every big name he knows, and they come out and phone in a day of shooting. People you'll see in this flick: Jason Bateman, Kate Beckinsale, Adrien Brody, Common, Edie Falco, Glenn Howerton, Ken Jeong, Ray Liotta in his last role, John Malkovich, and Jason Sudeikis, among others. Something like Santa's Slay, for example, which also has cult appeal. 

More than anything, it was an unfunny satire about the type of douche bags that we hear about in these Hollywood inside baseball movies that become hot every few years. These have been coming out forever. Examples off the top of my head: The Player, Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Hail Caesar!, Barton Fink, The Aviator, Bowfinger, Ed Wood, the Eddie Murphy Dolemite movie, The Artist, The Disaster Artist, Movie 43, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (a must-see), Get Shorty, Sullivan's Travels, The Bad and the Beautiful, Singin' in the Rain, Babylon (which I thought was underrated)... All of those movies are infinitely better than Fool's Paradise, which bummed me out. 

So, yeah, unfortunately a shockingly bad movie, Fool's Paradise was pretty much unwatchable. Dull-witted, unfunny, aimless. Avoid. 

Babylon - Damien Chazelle - 2022

★★-Babylon. Yet another film set in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Hollywood, during the transition from silent films to “talkies.” As such it is a movie I feel I've seen multiple times before. Also, not great, though interesting. 

Directed by Damien Chazelle whose claim to fame was La La Land. Overrated. It features an ensemble cast including Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Tobey Maguire, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Rory Scovel (probably the best comedian I've seen live), Jovan Adepo, and Li Jun Li. 

Has multiple Singing in the Rain references. This film also tells that story from much grimier perspective. When the lone character who survives into the 1950s sees the film when visiting Hollywood with his family, he cries. Well, I sort of wanted to cry watching Babylon for being such a waste of talent and potential. 

As someone who loves Pitt and Robbie as well as this time period, the movie was a mixed bag of enjoyable scenes that lacked a cohesive narrative. Overall, it felt like a movie with a bunch of great scenes (the opening dance/orgy bit on the outskirts of Hollywood and the closing credits bit both come to mind) that doesn't do a good job of coming together. Any one scene I probably found enjoyable, but the sum of them felt shallow. One of those flicks that seems entertaining, but at the end it doesn't quite come together to form a complete or even halfway decent story and you leave it feeling shitty. 

“The asshole of Los Angles” scene is incredible. Tobey Maguire was great and disgusting here. Dudes in over their heads have to go into a horribly dangerous situation because of their idiocy that practically screams “get the fuck out.” Also, having to deal with an unhinged rich maniac drinking booze and ether. This is McGuire's character, who is unsettling. Reminded me of Boogey Nights with the “Wonderland” scene based on John Holmes's bullshit that got a bunch of people killed. 

It's said to be a love letter to Hollywood's golden age, which is quite a claim. It also tries to be a commentary on the industry's historical and ongoing issues with diversity and representation. Okay. Glad I didn't set through its over three hour runtime in an actual theater. Underwhelmed is all I'm saying. 

You're Only as Good as Your Next One: 100 Great Films, 100 Good Films, and 100 for Which I Should Be Shot - Mike Medavoy

My December reads were essays and a book on film, You’re Only as Good as Your Next One by Mike Medavoy. Medavoy is a long-time Hollywood studio executive who began his career in the 1960s and is still in the biz to this day. His resume includes Oscar-winners, the universally loved, and the downright hated. This fun, long read tells of his time in the industry from his start to the early 2000s. 

After getting his start at United Artists, he helped found multiple studios that went bellyup, usually a few years after firing him. Might recognize these: Orion, TriStar, and Phoenix Pictures (which is still around). He goes through the pictures he green-lit at each of these and goes into some detail about why they worked or didn't. He also walks the reader through how the business changed while goiing through his work, using these films as examples of something larger that was going on in Hollywood or the world. It's all pretty eye-opening.  

Some of the films he brought to the screen include: Amadeus, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now, Dances with Wolves, Hook, Legends of the Fall, Network, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Philadelphia, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepless in Seattle, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Thin Red Line. 

He doesn't shy away from his duds either. He details why they didn't work and ultimately bombed in usually hilarious fashion. Take1984's The Cotton Club, my personal favorite annecdote from the book. This film got started when legendary producer Robert Evans more or less got fired from Paramount for cocaine trafficing. He called up Medavoy saying that he had a movie he wanted to get made and he could sell it with three words: gangsters, music, and pussy. 

With a pitch like that, of course this movie got made. Almost immediately, predictably, everything went to shit. Evans originally was going to direct but had no idea what he was doing. Orion (i.e. Medavoy) and Evans eventually brought in Francis Ford Coppola who was deeply in debt and despirate for money. He accepted though he and Evans had hated each other since The Godfather. The film ultimately took five years to make and went way over budget before losing money at the box office. Both Coppola and Evans blamed each other for the shitshow. Medavoy clearly sides with Coppola as Evans appears to be completely unhinged during this period.

With all the budget woes, Evans went to shadier and shadier backers as more respectable types started to cut ties. Eventually, Evans was taking money from Arab arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and a guy named Roy Radin that Evans met through his former drug dealer, Karen Greenberger, who was dating Radin. Radin was murdered about a year before the film was released. This became known as "The Cotton Club Murder." 

It gets weirder. In 1989 a contract killer and three others were sentenced for shooting Radin in the head and blowing up his body with dynamite to make identification by authorities more challenging. Among them was Greenberger who was angry about being cut out of a producer's role. Evans was considered a person of interest when two of the killers said that Evans and Greenberger hired them to take the guy out. At the trial, Evans pled the Fifth and refused to testify, though Greenberger later testified that Evans had no involvement in the crime. You can read more about in "The Cotton Club: A Scandal in Two Acts." 

Anyway, those are the kinds of stories I loved the most, though that one was especially scandalous. In the book you'll get more of Evans behaving badly as well as famously poorly behaved John Milius and Jon Peters. Milius is mostly known for his work as a screenwriter for such films as Apocalypse Now, and for being the inspiration for the character Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. Peters, on the otherhand, is known for being the inspiration for the film Shampoo and for the insane stories Kevin Smith tells about him in An Evening with Kevin Smith. His fuckery has since been put to screen in one of my faves from the last few years, Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Peters is portrayed by Bradley Cooper in the 2021 film and is completely unhinged. This period was during Peters's long domestic partnership with Barbra Streisand. He has since been married to Pamela Anderson, this in 2020, though Anderson said she was "never legally married" to the guy because the paperwork wasn't filed. 

It's the stuff like this that I find super interesting. Hollywood, however, doesn't give us that juicy goss. Instead, we get bullshit stories that are only half true. Rarely is much of Hollywood star mythmaking accurate. Get discovered off the street or what have you. Lot of nepo babies out there. 

Book ends Medavoy's early days with Pheonix. He mostly details his work on The Thin Red Line in 1998. This epic war film written and directed by Terrence Malick after a 20-year absense despite his reputation as a genius was a very big deal at the time. The movie rags I read at the time, Premiere and Flicks, and the message boards were losing their minds over it. It ended up being fine but somewhat disappointing. So it was nice to get some of the inside scoup on what all went down.

The final movie he details is The 6th Day which he talks about like it was Andrei Tarkovsky or something. I saw this in the theater with a couple dudes from my high school basketball team. It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle where he plays a family man in the future who gets accidentally illegally cloned as part of a vast conspiracy. A billionaire's goons come for him, but come on, it's Arnold. We thought it was unintentially hilarious. 

He then ends the book discussing the causes of the steady decline in theater attendance when he was writing the book, which has only gotten worse, esqecially with the pandemic and all. He says it mostly comes down to the economy, technology, and the bullshit Hollywood was putting out which they saw as more marketable as opposed to riskier films that might offer better rewards in the long run. According to Medavoy, the cost of marketing and producing now requires outside partners for high cost films which lowers the upside. Thus making all the choices of which pictures to make more difficult. The decision to rely on remakes and sequels at higher costs either makes people feel that they have seen a movie and can either wait and see it on the after-market or miss it all together. Obviously, this has only got worse. 

The Cat and the Canary is the greatest movie of all time

The Cat and the Canary. Third film in the Greatest Years in Cinema Project. Fourth film from 1939 in total. Fulfilling the obligatory horror portion of the project, it is a fun little comedy horror flick. No Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein but it is solid enough. Probably shan't be watching it again any time ever, but it was fine.

Was based on a 1922 stage play by John Willard. This was the third of  six versions based on the play. Others included a 1927 silent version, The Cat Creeps from 1930 which was the first Universal horror film with sound and dialogue (it is considered a lost film), 1941's The Black Cat which has a different ending, and 1979 British version with people you've never heard of.

The look of someone who's had enough of this shit

Stars Paulette Goddard, a pretty lady known for her work with then husband Charlie fucking Chaplin (they divorced in 1942), she was the lead lady in both Modern Times and The Great Dictator, which came out in 1940, the no introduction needed Bob Hope who yucks it up throughout the whole flick, and Gale Sondergaard (she plays the mistress of the estate, Miss Lu) who was originally cast in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's classic The Wizard of Oz, which you may have heard of, in the role of the Wicked Witch of the West. At that point in the production, the character was conceived as a more glamorous type witch, like the Snow Queen of Narnia or something, but when they decided on the green skin and prosthetics, she called bullshit on that. Honestly, even with how beloved the film is now, probably a good call on her part, which I will get into in more detail when I write about that movie. But Sondergaard didn't hurt for work. In her early 40s when this movie was released, the lady cranked out 39 roles in 10 years but most of the movies were of the B-horror variety.

Gist of the movie is that 10 years after old rich guy Cyrus Norman his family and a random actor, one wisecracking actor Wally Campbell (Hope), gather for the reading of Norman's estate which he has left to distant relative Joyce Norman (Goddard) who gets everything so long as she can stay sane for like a night and a day, which proves difficult as a bunch of shit goes down. If she can't keep it together, it all goes to someone else whose name is sealed in an envelope, supposedly unknown. Yeah, this doesn't make a lot of sense. The point, it seems, was to make her look crazy but it's hard to be like, "she is cray, give me the money!" when the executor of the will gets murdered within an hour proving that someone is out to get her.

Goddard is solid enough in this though she wasn't really asked to carry the movie. A bit more on Goddard's 1939, she was originally considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind and even did some Technicolor screen tests. Producer David O. Selznick and original director George Cukor liked her enough that they were willing to set her up with an acting coach. That was until Vivien Leigh auditioned for the part. There are, however, rumors that her relationship, both personal and professional, with Chaplin played into the decision to go with Leigh over Goddard. As it goes, Selznick was worried about the scandal of Chaplin and Goddard's relationship status, living in sin, supposedly, there are questions about the legality of their marriage, but that seems like bullshit because everyone involved here knew that Leigh and Lawrence Olivier had the same shit going on. There was also Goddard's pre-existing contract with Chaplin's studio which may have had legal implications with casting her. That too seems like horse shit. It's more likely that Leigh was just too perfect for the role and Goddard was considered slightly too old. You can read more about all this in The Atlantic article "The Making of Gone With The Wind (Part I)" which is a hell of a read.

Overall, a pretty enjoyable watch with some pretty solid suspense, especially at the end. The set design is what I walked away most impressed with. Dark passageways and a foggy estate in the Bayou where a mysterious monster lurks. Supposedly this and the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers which also starred Hope and Goddard and sounds like more or less the same movie were what inspired the design of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland.

Believe there are shades of this movie in Murder Mystery, a Jenifer Aniston Adam Sandler Netflix movie, also maybe the New Orleans haunted house/demon baby movie Hell Baby. At the end it is hard to say who is against her and who has her best interest in mind. Not super surprising who the killer is but you are kept guessing until the reveal at the end. Hope was sort of funny in a dad joke kind of way and probably won the movie. He is solid, I guess, but way over the top.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is seriously the greatest movie of all time

Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood. Oh my fucking gawd ya'll. Two lines from the movie sum up my reactions to the movie, "That was the best acting I've ever seen in my whole life" and "You're real, right?" Or something like that. Sort of Tarantino's way of telling you what he thinks about the film. Like when Aldo at the end of Inglourious Bastards says, "I think this just might be my masterpiece." At least the first one, any way. Lot of chicken mole, amigos. Rotten Tomato score is 85% Fresh. This is a travesty. In no frame of mind to definitively say this, but after one viewing, it is my favorite Taratino movie. At least on this night.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Thrillingly unrestrained yet solidly crafted, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tempers Tarantino's provocative impulses with the clarity of a mature filmmaker's vision.

Gist of the movie is that a "has been" actor (who lives next door to Sharon Tate), one Rick Dalton played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his stunt double, Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt, who is more than a brother and not quite a wife go about and hang around, doing their things in L.A. in 1969, building up to the violence that you know is coming at the hands of the Manson Family. The trailer makes it look like a Manson flick mostly dealing with the murder of Sharon Tate, played wonderfully by Margot Robbie, but it is really a buddy hangout movie. Great one at that. Minimal violence for a Tarantino movie and then we get what we were waiting for.

The Tate family, notably sister Debra, was originally pissed that Tarantino and company were making this movie that they planned on being released on the 50th anniversary of Sharon and company's murder. Then the director met with her and she gave the film her blessing. Now she come down firmly in Tarantino's defense, saying that the movie made her cry and how touched she was by Robbie's performance. She has even gone as far to say that she wished he would make a movie completely dedicated to her and what not. So really came around on that one. After seeing, you can totally see why.

Some of the bullet points. Leo and Pitt. These two together are the perfect duo and their performances are amazing. They should both be nominated for Best Actor.

First, Pitt. Cliff is one of the great Tarantino characters. Little bit of Aldo in him from GB. Also some shades of Rusty Ryan and Tyler Durden. He and Tarantino both independently saw the character as a Billy Jack type which he totes is. If you haven't seen that, it is basically about an extremely masculine but cool dude who can kick some fucking ass. We find out maybe halfway through the movie that he has done some shit that makes him a bastard. But he is such a great dude otherwise and is so fucking cool, you don't care. A personal fave scene with him is the one where he ends up at the Spahn Ranch, taking one Pussycat back to her people. It is tense as fuck as Manson Family members come out of the woodwork and ominously stare him down. You feel that he is in real danger and there are red flags popping up everywhere but he is a coffin nail, this guy. When he kicks the shit out of Steve "Clem" Grogan for slashing his tire, this is the guy who in real life was recommended to die after the Manson Family trial but then sentenced to life (he would get out on parole in 1985, incredibly) because as Judge James Kolts said during the sentencing, "Grogan was too stupid and too hopped on drugs to decide anything on his own," for slashing his tires when one of the hippy chicks runs off to get Tex Watson (the kid that plays Tex is one Austin Butler who was also in The Dead Don't Die whom I had never seen before a month ago and is now everywhere) who hauls ass back to the scene. The way he moves and the crazed look he has about him, you know shit was really about to go down. Plus, all this echos what happened to the real life stuntman Donald Shea at the hands of the MF. Shea was checking on George Spahn just as Cliff does in the film and calls the police on them. After the cops raided the ranch, Manson and company murdered the guy, burying his body near the property. Anyway, yeah, if you know about this shit it is even more ominous and you are even more freaked out. Also, him being a guy who never was in shit sort of follows an alternative path for the actor. Like if he was just a guy who played little roles like the one he had in True Romance.

Now Leo. Dude wins the film. Pitt was fucking sick. It is almost unbelievable, these two together, acting the shit out of this movie. A cool ass actor doing good ass work. That's Leo and his character, Rick fucking Dalton, in the film. Best when is sort of losing his shit. His is career is basically over with the arrival of New Hollywood (also called the "American New Wave") ushered in in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde. No more Rick Dalton as a leading man, he is now relegated to television, playing a big that gets his ass kicked by the next big thing that comes along. The show that his character is acting in with the movie, Lancer, was a real show that ran from 1968-70. In the movie Lancer looks amazing.  I tried to watch an episode, "Blue Skies for Willie Sharpe," and it was fucking terrible. Production wise it was like watching someones home movie or something. I was expecting Howard Hawks. I think it was Tarantino joke. Having Dalton telling himself in the mirror that if he doesn't get his lines right, he was going to go home and blow his brains out, taking this shit so goddamned seriously for a show that was meh. That's his best scene in the movie. Might be saying it is a job and this guy fucking takes it seriously. In any case, love all the acting stuff with character. This is where he really shines, Leo that is. So many layers there. Pretending to be a good actor doing a shitty job and then freaking out. Then acting as this guy acting and fucking killing it. It was mind blowing how good that stuff was. So much so that they address it in the film.

Finally, there is Robbie as Tate. Her portrayal is so bubbly and likable, you feel protective of her. She is almost larger than life at first. Hanging out with Mama Cass and Michelle Phillips at the Playboy Mansion. Driving around LA with Roman Polanski. She is New Hollywood and very cool. But then were see her out and about. Stopping at a theater to watch a movie that she is in. No one knows her. It is sort of humbling but she is just excited to be there and hear people's reactions to her work. She isn't famous at this point, but this isn't something she seems to really care about. More just happy to be a part of it. She doesn't say a lot but she does such a good job and it is all done so delicately, you really get a sense of who she is and what she was like. You want her to live and you think of what she could have become. It feels like this is a woman picked for stardom for a new era, she just hasn't gotten there yet. Plus, Robbie is so pretty and that 1969 look is good for her. I don't mean to objectify her because she is so talented. But she is like painfully beautiful in this movie. Some critics have made a big deal of her character's lack of lines and shit. This is bullshit and sort of demeans her performance. She doesn't need to say a lot to knock it out of the park, which she does.

Some other things that really stand out include the cool as shit 1960s world that Tarantino builds, (getting into spoilerish territory here) the crazy ass ending, and the fucking insane cast. Not sure there has ever been a cast like this. There are three above. Fucking sick, right? Then there are the other people that kill in the couple of minutes where they are on screen. Folks that play historical figures like Bruce Dern as George Spahn, Emile Hirsch as Jay Sebring, and Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen. Random industry people some of which are real and others not like Zoë Bell and Kurt Russell play a stunt coordinating couple, Nicholas Hammond as Sam Wanamaker, Timothy Olyphant of the TV western Lancer James Stacy, and Al Pacino as a film producer. Various recognizable faces in the Manson clan, like Butler as Tex, Lena Dunham, Dakota Fanning as the notorious Squeaky Fromme, Danielle Harris from Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Margaret Qualley was sort of the biggest standout from the Family as Pussycat. A few kids of famous people like Kevin Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith (still sour on him after he was an asshole at a comedy club appearance in town) who was a random Manson Girl--whom I found out is a vegan, so totally in my cool book--and Rumer Willis, the spawn of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, who played Joanna Pettet. A couple of 1990s people that were tapped for stardom that never came, in this camp were Rebecca Gayheart (Urban Legends star/Noxzema Girl from the 1990s) as the wife Cliff kills and Luke Perry as Wayne Maunder who shows up as an actor on Lancer. Then there are a lot of people that would maybe get second billing in a lesser movie, guys like Clifton Collins Jr. and Michael Madsen and James Remar, for example, that are basically just extras in this flick. Hell, even Clu Gulager makes a cameo as the bookstore owner.

Also, Tarantino doesn't seem to like Bruce Lee (portrayed in the film by one  Mike Moh). The character is sort of a prick and overall looks ridiculous. Plus, Pitt's character makes him look like a loudmouth who can't really even fight. That is a fantastic scene by the way. Everyone in the theater I watched it with was losing their minds when Lee challenges Cliff to a fight and has a random guy hold his jacket and the guy tells him that Cliff has a rep for being crazy. "What did he do?" "Killed his wife and got away with it." Lee looks at him like WTF. Fucking great. Apparently, Lee's surviving family is pissed.

A personal aside I think is relevant on how good I felt the movie was. So I am definitively an ex smoker. However, I allow myself one a year which I've not partaken in for some time. So, yeah, great Tarantino movie, second to last, supposedly. So I had my first cigarette since 2013 to commemorate it. I smoked about half of it and tried to really enjoy it which I sort of did. Could go for one of those acid dipped ones though. That I'll tell you.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the greatest movie of all time

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I know what gold does to men's souls... Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges! John Huston movie from 1948. Amazing film. Winner of three Academy Awards. One for the father of Huston, Walter, for Best Supporting. Two for John, one for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay. When daughter Anjelica Huston won for Best Supporting in 1985 for Prizzi's Honor, haven't seen it and looks terrible, they became the first three generation family to win Academy Awards. The Coppollas have since done this as well. Filmed on location just because Huston was an adventurer and wanted to go to Mexico. Also get away from the studio. Humphrey Bogart is completely fucking deranged in this extremely dark flick. Huston's old man, Walter, becomes what we collectively think of when we think olde timey prospector. A first time watch, this instantly became one of my favorite films. Been on a John Huston kick since watching the documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead about the until recently unreleased film The Other Side of the Wind by one Orson Welles. Huston is like the Dos XX guy except not irritating and real. His look and his voice. Cool shit. Fathered the lovely Angelica Huston, hands down my female companion's favorite. Also, you may have heard, he's a pretty solid filmmaker. This film is considered one of his best though this is one of four he directed with a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes (along with Fat City, The Maltese Falcon, and The Misfits).

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Remade but never duplicated, this darkly humorous morality tale represents John Huston at his finest.

Gist of the movie is two dirt poor Americans living in Mexico, Bob Curtin played by Tim Holt and wild man Fred C. Dobbs played by Humphrey Bogart, desperate for money, decide to join a old prospector, Howard who is played by the director's father, Walter Huston, in the Sierra Madre Mountains to mine for gold. The three make a fortune but bandits and greed brings it all crashing down.

While Huston the elder won the Academy Award for Best Supporting, it is Bogie's deranged performance that is most memorable. First off, dude looks like complete shit. It is rumored that he was taking fertility drugs, he and wife Lauren Bacall were trying to conceive, but that may or may not be bullshit. What is known is that he showed up bald and aged which doctors blamed on heavy drinking and a vitamin B deficiency. Huston rolled with it though as it just made the character that much crazier. He goes from being a shortsighted bum asking an American, played by the director, multiple times for money for food, never bothering to look the guy in the eye, to a completely uncontrollable Gollum type figure, completely obsessing over his newfound wealth.

I mean, at first he was a guy who couldn't pick the guy giving him handouts out of a lineup, begrudged the guy keeping him alive rather than being thankful. Then he and partner Bob get a gig that involves a lot of work from an American contractor with a huge payday at the end which never comes. The guy completely suckers them. Next thing you know, they run into the guy at a bar where he tries to sucker them again. An extremely clumsy and realistic fight breaks out when the labor boss knows he's fucked and goes on the offensive, attacking them with a bottle. They eventually kick the shit out of the guy with Bogart's character reaching into the guy's wallet and taking only the money they were owed. Later in the movie, after they have found enough gold to support the men for a lifetime, not long after buddy Bob saves Dobbs's life when he gets trapped in a mine, the unhinged Bogart character comes completely undone, obsessively fixed on Bob and Howard cutting him out and taking his share for themselves. Late in the movie, when Howard is living it up in a Mexican village after saving a child's life, it is just Dobbs and Curtin making their way to town. But Dobbs is already gone by that point, his mind clawed out, he tells Curtin, whom he has attacked and has him at gunpoint, that once he falls asleep, he is going to kill him. The wild look in his eye after staying up for days is fucking chilling. You sure as shit don't want him in your party, you outlasting him in an endurance contest for your life. Yeah, he totally wins the movie.

A young Robert Blake, passing as Mexican

All of that stuff with the three guys finding all that gold and it destroying at least one of them and them ending up with nothing in the end reminds me of "The Pardoner's Tale" from the Canterbury Tales, my favorite among them. In that three men search for Death whereupon they encounter an old man who says he saw Death behind a tree. When they go to that tree they find gold and guard it overnight. At first all is good but when they draw straws, sending the youngest one to town for food and wine, the two left behind plot to kill him, which they do. But they soon discover that the younger man has poisoned their provisions and die a painful, grueling death. The difference between this tale and the movie, however, is that only Dobbs had murder on his mind. The other two, though they lose everything, literally laugh it off in the end at the absurdity of the situation.

Huston, looking fly

This is also one of those films with lots of great stories coming out of the production. Like how John Huston adopted an orphan child. Or how Italian American Our Gang child star Robert Blake, who would later go on to star in such films as In Cold Blood/play a minor but pivotal part in Lost Highway and eventually murder his future wife, played the little Mexican boy selling lottery numbers, which Bogart's character wins. But the weirdest of this has to be the story of one Hal Croves's presence on set and the theory surrounding his identity.

The gist of this is that the author of the novel that the movie is based on, B. Traven, was extremely reclusive with all the details about him, including his name or real identity, subject to dispute. As I read about this guy, I became certain that this is who Roberto Bolaño based his novelist character Benno von Archimboldi in the book 2666, one of my three favorite books of all-time. (A quick Google search showed I wasn't alone in this theory). Anyway, the author was supposed to show up on set and work as a technical advisor for $1000 a week but instead a guy claiming the name Hal Croves, said to be a close friend of the author, showed up in his stead. Pretty much everyone was like, uh, this is obviously Traven, though he denied it, but Huston didn't want to make a big deal about it. He was getting a knowledgeable adviser and translator for $150 a week instead of a grand and respected the guy's privacy. He later even wrote in his autobiography that he ultimately didn't think they were the same person because of the way he spoke and acted IRL was so different than their correspondence via letters and such. Huston further explained that a lot of this theorizing was the result of people on set asking Croves if he was Traven and him denying it in this bullshitty way that made people think he was indeed full of shit. However, Huston's wife at the time, actress Evelyn Keyes, who was apparently cool with Huston's impromptu adoption of a Mexican child, by the by, was sure they were the goddamn person. According to her, Croves said "I" instead of "he" and basically sounded exactly like the guy in the letters he had written to Huston. Fascinating shit you can read about along with who Traven may or may not have really been in "The Mystery of B. Traven," a nice piece of journalism, at Vice.

Gone With the Wind is the greatest movie of all time

Gone With the Wind. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Starting 1939 in my Greatest Years in Cinema Project with the behemoth. Seen cherry picked scenes all my life but never sat down from start to finish. That four hour runtime has always been a bit intimidating. After my first true watch, oh, it's dope. Groundbreaking and epic. Clark Gable (sort of reminds me of a George Clooney, who also reminds me of Cary Grant) as Rhett Butler is really fucking good. So are Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Wilkes nee Hamilton, Leslie Howard (sort of a 1930s Michael Fassbender) as Ashley Wilkes, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. But I'm not sure it really says anything. Slavery. Meh. Rape. Eh. The South. Take it or leave it. The overwhelming thing I walked away with is that Scarlett is a bitch who will apparently never go hungry again.

Rotten Tomatoes Consensus: Filmed and presented on a scale not seen in modern productions, Gone with the Wind is, if not the definitive Hollywood film, then certainly near the top of the list.

Unsure of how to describe the movie. The first half is a Civil War flick while the second is one dealing with Reconstruction. All the while plantation heiress and Kim Kardashian prototype Scarlett O'Hara, whom I'm pretty sure was called a "whorlet"which I am totally going to use, pursues one Ashley Wilkes who marries his cousin Melanie but marries a couple of fucking losers who can't even stay alive and rich badass Rhett Butler who rapes her and she eventually comes to love only to have him leave, telling her he doesn't give a shit about her no mo.

Now for some of the bullet points...

Some of the most impressive feats of the film come in the first half of the flick, before the intermission. First we get this scene right after the war breaks out where everyone gathers in town to hear which of their sons and husbands have died. It is super heavy with old folks sort of losing their shit and little kids crying. After it is over, the band, mostly children, standing with their instruments at attention, play "Dixie", most of them crying. By the by, based on this one scene I am convinced the movie is supposed to be ironic. Then we have the big dance that was a fundraiser for the war efforts that is decadent and awesome. The truly moving scene where Scarlett goes to find the doctor to help Melanie who is in labor and she crosses a street with thousands of wounded soldiers lying there dying and hopeless. Then the burning of Atlanta which is incredible by any standard. The second part, the sequel, I guess, sort of drug and was mostly a bunch of preachy talking. Like the Old vs. New Testament. There's some sacrilege for ya.

Early in the movie, after Ashley tells Scarlett he is into incest at this big Confederacy pro-war meeting of the minds (of note, while the dudes have wargasms all over the place down stairs, the ladies nap with slaves fanning them, of course not batting an eye at having human air conditioners), she goes off and marries some dipshit who practically creams his pants at the prospect of war (and he basically calls Butler a pussy), and breaks up his relationship, I think,  just to make the dude she really likes jealous. He immediately dies in the war of pneumonia, which he was fucking really into, and she doesn't give a shit and is more upset that she is too young to be a widow than anything else and decides to try to break up that other guy's marriage. When she is "in morning" it is sort of like in Seinfeld when Susan dies from glue poisoning from licking their wedding invitations and the doctor tells him and he realizes that he doesn't have to marry her, because, you know, she's dead, and he has a look that the guy later describes on the stand during "The Finale" as "restrained jubilation." That is what we get in Atlanta. She is pissed and sad but she is only pissed that she has to pretend to be upset and sad that she is too young to be a widow. And that is the first half hour of the movie. She only becomes more of a bitch as the movie goes on and she becomes wealthier (going from the use of one type of slave labor to another first having the traditional black slaves and then hiring the prison for the newer kind of slave labor that we still have today) and more "independent" which is bullshit. Rhett dodged a fucking bullet. I'll tell ya.

But Rhett, he fucking sucks, too. Early I thought he might be alright as he is (toxically) manly and dashing and what not. It doesn't seem like he has slaves but I may have missed something. And he and Ashley (want to reiterate that he is marrying his cousin, Melanie, who is lovely and the only main white character who isn't terrible, but yeah, your marrying your cousin is fucking gross by today's standards but was socially acceptable then, I guess) are the only two Southerners who are fucking stoked about the War of Northern Aggression. Says "All we've got is cotton, slaves, and arrogance." Pretty cool. And he says "damn". But there towards the end, dude loses us. First he helps cover up what sort of sounds like a lynching that Ashley and Scarlett's second husband, who died there, partake in. This was in retaliation for a deranged attempted rape from a pair of morons in a shanty town. Rhett says Ashley, the doctor, and him were all hanging out at the brothel (also, I feel a Civil War era prostitute would be really disgusting which this one that keeps showing up is not). It is an obvious lie but he is so convincing, I guess, that the local doctor's wife thought they were really at the whore house even though she knew they were going to kill the folks in this shanty town. Supposed to think he is just that smooth but really it just makes the doctor's wife look like an idiot. Once he and Scarlett finally get married and she gets caught throwing herself at Ashley by the sister whose dude she keeps stealing, he gets drunk and rapes her. Not cool, man. I already hate him at that point but then he goes a step further to lose me when after his and Scarlett's idiot child rides off on a pony that she forces to try to jump a fence but instead throws her into it and dies, he fucking shoots the pony. What the hell, dude?

The real Gable, whom was the MVP of the movie, was sort of an enigma like this as well. Like how he was really cool and progressive when it came to the treatment of African Americans, but not so much with homosexuals. Like whilst shooting the movie, legendary producer David O. Selznick’s set had segregated bathrooms which pissed Gable off. He went to friend and director Victor Fleming, who was chosen by Selznick to direct in part to appease Gable, and threatened to walk if that shit didn't stop which it did. Then when Hattie McDaniel, whom he was friends with prior to working with her on the film, wasn't allowed to attend the premier in Atlanta, GA, he flipped and shit and threatened to boycott. Same with the Academy Awards, where McDaniel fucking won (the first black actor to win an Oscar) for Best Supporting, when she had to sit in the back of the audience. So, yeah, as cool as you could be, racially speaking, when you are most known for starring in a deeply racist movie.

Politically he was extremely conservative though he voted for FDR when he was married to Carol Lombard, a liberal democrat. Like how with Gary Cooper, the future president who prior to Trump fucked up the country more than any other in the modern era Ronald Reagan, and draft dodging "man's man" John Wayne he formed the pro-McCarthy bullshit Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. I guess you could be a winger and a Republican and not be a racist back then. Meanwhile, according to David Bret in his book Clark Gable: Tormented Star, dude spent his early years in Hollywood as a sort of gigolo among the homosexuals in Hollywood's elite, "gay for pay," if you will. All of this was probably horseshit but he was known to go on a homophobic rant in his day, t'were the times, I guess. Also, hearsay rumors to this day, the professor of this "1939: The Greatest Year in Hollywood" class I audited earlier this year said this was most likely true, persist that Gable wasn't comfortable with original Gone with the Wind director George Cukor who was openly gay and had him fired. This was likely because of his whole machismo bullshit. How much of this was because of Gable and how much because Selznick and Cukor constantly argued about details, Selznick was famously hard to work for and saw this as his baby. Some had it that Cukor knew of Gable's homosexual hustling, he probably did sort of hustle single older rich woman though, and that is part of why Gable didn't want to work with him. You can read about the book in this review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review since it doesn't appear the book is really worth your time.

Overall, Gable was a pretty interesting guy. Was married to Academy Award nominated actress Carole Lombard who dead in a plane crash in 1941. She was selling war bonds in her and my home state of Indiana. Traveling with her were Lombard's mother and Gable's press agent who were both afraid of flying. Lombard, however, wanted to get back to Los Angeles as quickly as possible because, it is rumored, he was going to be working with supposed sexpot Lana Turner in the movie Somewhere I'll Find You. The mother and publicist left the decision up to chance whether they would would head back by train or fly, flipping a coin at Lombard's suggestion. She won and the group, along with 19 others, mostly soldiers, died when the plane crashed into a mountain outside of Las Vegas due to visibility issues caused by the fact that it was practice at the time for turn off safety beacons at night so that Japanese bomber couldn't navigate the terrain. Fucked. A month later, after a legendary bender, he enlisted in the US Army Air Corp and made propaganda films for the war effort even though he was 41 when America joined the war, put him past the age where he would have been drafted or indeed been able to enlist in today's military. He worked his way up from private to major and even "won his wings" as an aerial gunner flying in five real war missions one in which his plane was damaged in combat. You read more about it at this seemingly nonpartisan military information site Defense Media Network.

Finally, there is Melanie, played by Olivia de Havilland who as of this post is still alive and kicking at 103. Poor, sweet, dumb Melanie. From her perspective Scarlett is the kindest most generous friend anyone could ever have. Everyone else except the dudes she marries minus Butler fucking knows Scarlett is the fucking worst, but to Melanie, Scarlett is the woman who looked after her while Ashley was away at war, delivered her child, supported her financially for a time, and saved her life by shooting a Union soldier in the face in one of the movie's most shocking scenes. But in the end she dies of bullshit as she has been exposed to it all her life.

So that was Gone with the Wind. Great and epic, for sure. Racist and irritating as well. Don't think I'll be watching again anytime soon but I'm glad I finally sat down and watched it from start to finish. Totally deserves being high on the American Film Institute Top 100 list and is a huge part of why 1939 is maybe the greatest year in film of all-time. 

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the greatest movie of all time

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Insanity. Pair of crazy old biddies, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, who play sisters, going at each other. In the film and in real life. So much unhinged from Baby Jane and Mommy Dearest. Davis, as Baby Jane, is fucking terrifying and completely unhinged.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? combines powerhouse acting, rich atmosphere, and absorbing melodrama in service of a taut thriller with thought-provoking subtext.

Gist of the movie is a pair of sisters, Blanche and Jane Hudson, go back and forth relying on and resenting each other. At first Jane is a child star Vaudeville performer and treats Blanche like shit. Later, after film has caught on, Blanche is the star and Jane is the forgotten one. It was then that Blanche ended up paralyzed under mysterious circumstances with Jane in a drunken haze, unable to remember anything. Everyone assumes Jane ran her over with her car but Blanche eventual admits that she tried to run Jane over but instead wrecked her car and paralyzed herself in the process.

Jane's treatment of Blanche progresses from bird killing and cooking to starving/dehydrating and straight up murder. So basically from fucked to completely deranged. Directed by one Robert Aldrich who did Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte which was originally going to put Crawford and Davis back together but they couldn't be in the same room (more on that later), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Longest Yard (1974).

The film feels, in some ways, like the Samuel Beckett play Endgame where the crippled character Hamm asks his servant Clov why he doesn't leave for more or less the entire thing with interludes of trashcan parents popping up and dying, ending with Clov trying to leave but standing in the doorway, unable. Minus the absurdism, both these works of art feature characters that rely on a resentful servant in a home they are all more or less trapped in. At the end of WEHTBJ? we see Jane finally leave the home for good but she still, after everything, feels that she has to take Blanche with her.

Not the look of someone you want to fuck with...
Unless you are Joan Crawford

Davis definitely wins the movie but Crawford does a hell of a job as well. By most accounts, Davis was slightly less of bitch than Crawford in real life but both had their moments and daughters that wrote extremely fucked up tell-alls about their famous moms (Davis's is actually in the movie, she's the teenage girl that lives next door). However, both were pretty progressive for their day as life-long California democrats and have a sort of a status of gay icons. Crawford was especially surprisingly cool and had a very close bond with her silent film co-star from the 1920s, William Haines, whom the studio tried to romantically link her with to keep his sexual preference out of the spotlight. When that didn't work, Haines left acting and became an outrageously successful interior designer and antique dealer with life partner Jimmie Shields. When Haines died in 1973, Crawford unsuccessfully tried to keep Shields out of the throws of deep depression which led to his suicide. Afterward, of Haines, Crawford said, "He had never kept it a secret that he was homosexual. It was never anything that mattered to me, but most people in Hollywood didn’t like it. I can’t imagine why they thought it was any of their business. What mattered to me was that for a long time, he was my best friend." So, yeah, pretty cool there. You can read more about it at much ado about cinema in this excellent article.

One last thing, what wasn't cool though was how Crawford sabotaged Davis's chances at winning an Academy Award for the role of Jane. Not only did she call Oscar voters to talk shit, Crawford reached out to all the Best Actress nominees to see which among them would be unable to attend the ceremony, offering to accept the award on their behalves. Eventual winner, Anne Bancroft for her part in The Miracle Worker, agreed and on the night of the show, Crawford gleefully accepted. Davis's reaction was indignant astonishment. Books have been about this shit.

L.A. Confidential is the greatest movie of all time

L.A. Confidential. Love a period neo-noir flick. This one is one of the best. Up there with Chinatown and The Big Lebowski. Watch this shit once a year(ish). That Kim Basinger is quite a looker. She is a classical beauty, this film well establishes. The soundtrack is killer. LA in the 1950s looks like the shit, even with the crime. Everything about this movie is fucking sick. A perfect goddamned movie.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Taut pacing, brilliantly dense writing and Oscar-worthy acting combine to produce a smart, popcorn-friendly thrill ride.

Oh, cops. They all, like 90% of them, fucking suck. This movie, and like 400 others I've seen, and the news media and my personal experience (luckily I've got white male magic going for me) and anecdotal experience have led me to this position. This movie sure as shit hammers it home. In the end, they are all corrupt. Even the incorruptible. Isn't that right ole buddy boy? It is.

This movie is also one of the best examples of historical fiction that I can think of. Ellroy sort of went off the rails with The Black Dahlia from 2006 but then one was spot on. Atmospheric. Cool. Would have won a shit ton of Academy Awards but was up against Titanic in 1997 and that won nearly everything. Near. Far. And so forth. Though Basinger won Best Actress and somebody won a writing award.

Following three very different police offers in the unpopular straight shooter Ed Exley played by Guy Pearce, cool guy Jack Vincennes played by rapist Kevin Spacey, and thug Bud White played by Russell Crowe who reluctantly sort of join up to investigate a murder within the historically corrupt-ass LAPD. This made all of these guys stars though Spacey was well knownish for The Usual Suspects. Crowe easily wins the movie. He became an A-lister after this performance. But don't sleep on Pearce or Spacey. They are both great as well. Also get solid performances out of James Cromwell who is the Daryl Gates prototype and the spitting image of my grandpa and Danny DeVito who is the spitting image of my female companion's dad.

Bunch of Hollywood in the 1950s stuff in here which is cool. Basinger's character, Lynn Bracken, is a Veronica Lake, the star of Sullivan's Travels, which keeps coming up, lookalike call-girl. The plot revolves around this prostitution ring of girls that look like celebs. This leads Exley to mistake the real Lana Turner for one made to look like her because of the company she keeps, a real-life thug named Johnny Stompanato. Some interesting Hollywood crime shit going on here. This asshole Stompanato was a bad dude. He beat Turner, escalating to the point where her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed the gangster to death in 1958. Yeah, piece of shit. The type of guy that Bud White hates and at one ridiculous point in the film, White grabs Stompanato by the balls, literally, which was one of the dumbest, most unbelievable things in the film. He basically makes Stompanato his bitch. No way this dude gets away with that shit. Cop or not. 

Sunset Boulevard is the greatest film of all time

Sunset Boulevard. Loved it when I first saw it. Soured on it in college. Back to loving it. As has been established, I love self-referential cinema. Back to thinking that this is one of the best. I mean, not quite Singing' in the Rain, but it is unfair to compare it to that wonderful, upbeat film. It also predates that flick by a couple of years making it the first, that I could see, movie that looks back at the old silent era. Old Hollywood looking at an older Hollywood. Not the first meta Hollywood flick, Sherlock, Jr. staring Buster Keaton who makes a cameo in this movie was made in 1924 and 1941's Sullivan's Travels which starred Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake are both movies about the film industry, this is the first of a subgenre that depicts has-beens that time forgot.

About a down-on-his-luck (and dumb as fuck) screenwriter played by William Holden who gets romantically involved with a forgotten starlet, Norma Desmond played by the silent film star Gloria Swanson, in her 50s who believes she is on the verge of a comeback due to a script that she threw together and dude is molding into something coherent. In the first scene we see the screenwriter, our protagonist, floating facedown in the bloody swimming pool. This is, indeed, a fucked up and dark movie.

Still makes the film look like a hilarious comedy, which it is

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Arguably the greatest movie about Hollywood, Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard is a tremendously entertaining combination of noir, black comedy, and character study.

Probably a somewhat unpopular opinion here. I fucking hate the main character, Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, and sort of think he had bad shit coming to him karmically. Maybe not murder, but bad shit. He thinks he is playing Norma, ha, but is playing fucking checkers. Thinks he is stringing her along as a meal ticket of sorts. She buys him shit but doesn't pay him and won't let him leave. Yeah, really getting one over on her. So his motivations are fucked, obviously, and he is in a prison of his own making that is so fucking obvious but he barely sees it or doesn't care until the end, when he suddenly does. His leaving prompts Norma to pull out her gun and start waving it around, threatening to shoot herself. He is like, don't care. Obviously should have as we see in the first scene that he is dead from getting shot. Like someone who isn't a fucking idiot, he should have got the fuck out of there when she broke out the gun, instead he is like, "na, I'mma push her over the edge," which he does by talking shit and calling her crazy and what not. Making a bitch shoot him.

Get some solid cameos with director Cecil B. DeMille and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper both playing themselves, said to be somewhat recognizable by Gillis and presumably playing themselves, Buster Keaton (the one who says "pass", Buster was a silent film star who was supposedly famously not allowed to open his mouth in a talkie where everyone else sang, heard this on a podcast but can't remember the film), Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner are all seen in the "living waxworks" scene playing bridge with Norma, and Erich von Stroheim, a "groundbreaking" silent era director, who is fucking great, seems to sort of play a version of himself as a forgot, avant garde director who now works as Norma's butler after the two divorced.

Hebba hebba

Gloria Swanson totally wins the movie. First, don't buy the myth that this is in any way autobiographical for her. While she wasn't the star she was during the silent era, Swanson's transition to sound was fine(ish), continuing to get work and even getting nominated for a Oscar for The Trespasser in 1929, though there were a handful of flops in there. When her career began slowing down in the late 1930s, she started a patent company in New York that was she created to help get Jewish inventors out of Nazi occupied Europe. This kept her busy through the war years. Then in 1948 she began hosting one of the first live television programs, The Gloria Swanson Hour. So yeah, she was doing alright when this part came along though she wasn't exactly the first choice. Director Billy Wilder offered the role to silent stars Greta Garbo, Pola Negri, and Mary Pickford (who was one of the inspirations for the composite character). Also Mae West was Wilder's original choice but was never asked to star in the film. Rumor has it that she was all, "of course a younger man would want to date me! I wouldn't be believable!" which is something I imagine all of these ladies saying and it being pretty true. Swanson, for her part, looks great for 50, though the craziness is pretty off-putting. Also, as a young woman, hubba hubba. And she is still, I think, more attractive in this film than the younger chick that William Holden as Joe Gillis wants to shtoop, Betty Schaefer played Nancy Olson who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and is still alive, that's engaged to his buddy. SB marked her first film in a nine period after Father Takes a Wife, she was that wife, bombed. For the role, Swanson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, her third nomination.

Didn't remember how funny she is, Swanson. Like the way intensely stares at him as he reads her script which he hates. When he goes through the motions like he is really trying to make her script better, taking stuff out and what not, she is like, "why did you take that out?" He says something like, "you can't be in every scene." She leers at him and barks, "put it back," in a way that is like "of course I'll be in every scene." Some more humor comes when the two walk through the giant, creepy-ass house and we hear a sinister music playing in the background. Norma then says "yeah, wind gets in the organ pipe, happens all the time." Love that shit. Also, she is so physical and deliberate with all her movements, sometimes to great comedic effect. Those silent film skills. Really like her. But she is fucking insane. Guys, if a woman has all of your things removed from your apartment, is keeping you from leaving, and claims to be your employer but doesn't pay you, don't fuck her.

Destry Rides Again is the greatest movie of all time

Destry Rides Again. Great flick. Audited a class at IU on the year 1939 in cinema, in the professor's informed opinion, the great year in film. This was my favorite of the films that we discussed. Western that is super fun and funny with iconic performers yucking it the fuck up. Also has two incredible scenes and has Marlene Dietrich as Frenchy, belting out some inspired tunes in her role as the saloon singer. The film is the obvious inspiration for Blazing Saddles with Frenchy as basically the same character as Lili von Shtüpp in that much more well known flick.

I fucking love Marlene Dietrich in this movie and she easily wins the movie. She was a fucking rocking chick. There is a podcast I listen to that goes into Dietrich during the WWII years that I highly recommend called You Must Remember This, which is just phenomenal. From Germany, she defected in the 1930s after the Nazi's came to power. She was a huge star by that point and after a few years of American films under her belt, Nazi Party approached her with an offer of becoming the top German film star of the Third Reich if she came back to Germany but she refused and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937, eventually working to raise money with Austria-Hungary born Jewish filmmaker Billy Wilder (among others) to help Jews escape from Germany and did a couple of USO tours during the war. In her late 30s when this film was made, Dietrich bragged about all the younger Hollywood dudes she banged going into her 70s. Among the men she boned were Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, Errol Flynn, Joe Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne, among many others. Also Jimmy Stewart who seems like sort of a dick. He knocked her up whilst filming this movie. She told him and he said something like, "well, golly, what are you going to do?" She said something about "we" can do this or that and he replied, "well, what are you going to do?" Dickhead. And she was bisexual and sort of a leader in the gay Hollywood scene and frequented the legendary drag balls of Berlin in the 1920s. She called her underground, closeted lesbian clan her "sewing circle." She knew how to live, this one.

In Destry, Dietrich beats the literal pants off a guy and then when his wife shows up, played by the actress Una Merkel, the two get into a tussle that is just fucking incredible. After minutes of cat-fighting, Destry, Stewart, the new deputy cleaning up the town, dumps soapy water on the pair which enrages her more and turns her wrath toward Destry. He tries to wait on her to tire herself out after minutes of throwing shit at him, but she just keeps on going, chasing everyone out of the saloon.

Movie has one of the best setups I can recall. The outlaw saloon owner Kent, played by one Brian Donlevy, kills the sheriff and then has the mayor in his pocket appoint the town drunk, Washington Dimsdale who is played by a guy named Charles Winninger, as the new sheriff. Everyone laughs their fucking asses off when he says he is going to quit drinking and clean up the town but he does what he says he'll do, wasted as he seems to be at that moment in time, bringing in Stewart's character, the son of legendary law man Destry.

Can't say enough about this flick. All around great with a fantastic and epic ending with all the women in the town taking up garden tools and kitchen utensils, marching down to the saloon, and kicking ass all over the place. It is phenomenal.