Sare Says It

The great Diane Sare -- independent candidate for US Senate here in NY -- on Bobby Jr. and the toilet-buildup known as the Democrat Party, a party which stands for nothing other than killing fetuses, killing Palestinians, killing Russians, killing Iranians, killing Chinese, and loving Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Scott Stueber, Gregory Hayes, and every Transfreak, ZioNazi, UkiNazi, and House Negro around.

Beyond Beyondo

Only a used Tampon such as Kamala Harris could've caused this. . .

Love Crazy

At first glance, 1950's Gun Crazy is a mere re-telling of the 1930s Bonnie and Clyde myth, following up on Nick Ray's They Live by Night from the year before and Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937). At heart though, Gun Crazy is one of the most deliriously romantic films ever made.

A young man and young woman are obsessed with guns, and both can shoot out the eye of an eagle at 100 yards. When they first meet, what else can they do but fall in love? Since everything around them in straight society means to rip them apart and put them in their place, they do all they can across the landscape of post-World War II America to make their love burn ever brighter.

Peggy Cummins is the soul and guts of the film, always stoking the flames, director Joseph Lewis making prominent the delicate silvery cut of her face (while eventually betraying her): that delicate girl face below the blonde hair. Love must murder us unless we possess it altogether, is the look she gives us. And yet she has a fear of the man she is in love with, for she senses that his words and gestures, perhaps those she could possess. But him, his private substance — she would never have it, and so her eyes often shudder.

At the end, she is proved correct.

Jerry

Old viper John Simon once joked that Jerry Lewis could cure muscular dystrophy overnight if during his next Labor Day telethon Lewis announced he would disappear forever if everyone watching sent in 25 cents. One of the worst of the two billion degradations in our current cancel culture is that far more people think of Lewis (those who remember him) in terms of "his kids" and that annual telethon than think of him as one of the great movie directors of his age. Which he was.

Lewis's movies are deep and complex and necessary, movies which are especially beautiful to look at, with amazing and ever-changing pace. And it is here where we begin to understand just how deeply and devoutly Jerry Lewis believed in the magic and in the transformative possibilities of movies themselves. His Total Filmmaker is one of the best (and funniest) filmmaking books around.

French filmmaker Gregory Monro has created a lovely documentary celebrating Lewis's art, Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Mask.

The Ladies Man (1961)

Lies, Theft, and Murder

The Last Liberal

50 years ago today, Richard Nixon said goodbye.



Was he the last man standing against corporate totalitarianism and the complete political takeover by the National Security State (yes, on the backs of millions of dead Southeast Asians)?

Three views.





And Chris Floyd's masterpiece essay.

Ghosts

I've never been much of a fan of Rod Serling or his original Twilight Zone. (Its contemporary genre sister One Step Beyond has always seemed more genuinely strange and mysterious and honest). There's a quality of over-literary slumming to most TZ episodes (the same feel I get from Herb Leonard's Naked City and Route 66 -- Method Museums both). Yet, from the position of hate and degradation we're all covered in by our current Commodity Culture, to deny the show's occasional greatness is absurd.

Episode number five was called "Walking Distance" -- premiering October 30, 1959 and starring the sadly forgotten Gig Young (who seems to have once lived in the Amberson mansion). Strange to say for a network television show, but the greatness of "Walking Distance" is in its music -- perhaps the most moving ever written for a single episode of any series, by Bernard Herrmann, coming off of Vertigo and North by Northwest, and preparing for Psycho. An excess of love seems to come from the sound, a kind of abnegation and loneliness which speaks of what is tender and what is lost forever. Herrmann's music contains the ghost of tenderness itself. (And how much better the episode would be without Serling's nail-on-the-head narration.)

Thank You, Bob!

Thanksgiving Day. Football. Moo goo gai pan. And ties, lapels, and collars you could rent space on. What more does one need?

"Over the River and Through the Woods" from November of '75.