Fate brought me to Washington and in Washington there is a certain street, with exactly the same housing block and apartment, without which I would never be happy.
Links:
In Vulture, Matthew Jacobs interviews Sissy Spacek about 3 Women (1977):
Jacobs: With that beer in the bar, Robert Altman asked you, kind of spontaneously, to down the entire thing, and apparently it didn’t go too well on the first take. Do you remember that story?
Spacek: I remember when I went through the saloon doors I fell and broke my tailbone.
Jacobs: Oh my gosh.
Spacek: Then I walked around with one of those little circle pillows.
Jacobs: Okay, I didn’t know that. I was thinking of the story Altman has told about you throwing up after downing that beer for the first time.
Spacek: You know what? I must have blocked that out.
Jacobs: He talks about it in the audio commentary on the film. Then he said, “Do you think you can do it again?” And you said yes. The things we do when we’re young, right?
Spacek: Isn’t that the truth? But if he’d said, “Jump off the building,” I probably would have.
In the Journal, an excerpt from Elenor Coppola’s memoir (Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving, November):
Our nephew Nicolas Cage came to live with us for a year when he was 14 and his parents were divorcing. I was anxious for him to feel as little displaced as possible. We created a room for him in our attic. I let him select a new bedspread and I can still remember the hippie patchwork red velvet one he chose. I felt guilty that he was on our third floor while Gio and Roman were on the second, but I didn’t want to put Nicolas in with one of them and have any resentment. Nicolas was a good sport, although he told me he saw a ghost standing at the end of his bed: “She looked like you, but as an old woman.” I could see his wild imagination at work and his interest in being an entertainer as he pranced around the house doing Elvis impersonations.
In The American Scholar, Dennis Drabelle on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks:
In the interview with Bogdanovich, Hawks explained his penchant for relationships in which the woman is the aggressor: “I do that on purpose every once in a while because it amuses people. . . . It allows you to make a scene that’s a little different. Hitchcock tried it in North by Northwest (1959).”
Film historian David Thomson goes so far as to call North by Northwest a screwball comedy. He exaggerates, but the movie does have its wickedly funny moments, such as when the audience is made privy to a hush-hush meeting of the (fictional) United States Intelligence Agency to discuss a festering problem: Thornhill, an advertising executive, is being confused with an invented government operative named George Kaplan and is the object of a nationwide manhunt. “How could he be mistaken for George Kaplan,” one of the spooks scoffs, “when George Kaplan doesn’t even exist?”
Reviews:
- reviews Mr. Soft Touch (1949):
All of the success of Joe, the character, can be put down to Glenn Ford. This movie unites so many disparate tones that without the right cast it’s going to fall apart. Glenn Ford is the right man for this job. He is so damn likeable. He has a smile he can never suppress for very long, even when things get dark. He has an instinct for the right gesture, the right tone, the gallant move, though he does these things so correctly you can’t always tell if he’s sincere. There’s a kind of movie star whose charisma comes from the way they don’t seem like a movie star; they are not the Everyman, which is too exalted-sounding, they’re more like the Everyguy. James Garner is an Everyguy and Glenn Ford is an Everyguy. They exude a natural ease and flirtatiousness that extends even to the camera.
Evelyn Keyes, playing Glenn Ford’s romantic interest and foil, had starred opposite Ford several times before Mr. Soft Touch and that gives the two of them a natural chemistry, albeit a chemistry they each find alarming at different times and for different reasons. In a non-literal sense, Keyes’s Jenny forms the bridge between the very real violence of the criminal underworld and the funny antics of the settlement house, because she walks in both worlds. When Joe cruelly accuses her of slumming it, she pushes back her hair to reveal that she has to wear a hearing aid; her father beat her as a child so badly she went deaf. She knows the police (and Joe) view her as an easily manipulated bleeding heart, but she doesn’t live in denial of human evil or violence. She just thinks she’s stronger than they are. She can stand out like a good deed in a naughty world, as Shakespeare puts it.
[I watched this at BDM’s urging and can report that it is now on the list of movies I say I’m going to rewatch around Christmas—and then I watch maybe half of them. Also on the list, besides the subject of this month’s Movies across the decades, are (in chronological order) Remember the Night (1940), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), A Christmas Carol (1951) (the Alastair Sim one), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Fanny and Alexander (1982), A Christmas Story (1983), A Christmas Carol (1984) (the George C. Scott one), Metropolitan (1990), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and The Holdovers (2023). —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller review Radu Jude’s two most recent (Kontinental ’25, 2025; and Dracula, 2025):
This anticlimax is where Kontinental ’25 most bluntly defaults on its debt to its ostensible model, Europa ’51 (1952). Rossellini’s film pictures Irene as a bourgeois housewife, whose choice to surrender her comforts rather than tolerate the inequities on which they depend is legible to others only as a form of madness or saintliness. Her own humanity is sacrificed either way. The film concludes with a close-up that turns Irene’s mute agony into the sign of an insoluble social system—one that ignores or ennobles human suffering sooner than redress it. But Orsolya, finally, isn’t asked to carry such conflict for Jude’s cinema; she accepts the specious reconciliation of moving on. Her face will never fill the screen as Irene’s does, scaling up from the individual to the collective, signifying calamity for a whole continent or world order.
The buildings of Cluj shoulder that load instead. All along, Jude has punctuated the story with cryptic architectural interludes—assorted shots of city facades. Some are fit for a tourist brochure; others, luxury apartments, look like residences at the Kontinental Boutique before the fact; still others are the cheap, ugly boxes that now full Cluj as they do any megacity in China. The film ends with a long, affectless montage of such buildings, many under construction. But they no longer look cryptic, only banal. “Real estate developers,” Orsolya says during her crisis of conscience, “run Romania”—and the closing images seem to confirm it. There is, certainly, a lot of development. The shelters will remain full.
Alex Ransom reviews Kelly Reichardt’s latest (The Mastermind, 2025):
What follows is a quick, unsuccessful stop in Cleveland and then a concluding sequence in Cincinnati, where Mooney’s flight is finally halted—but not in the way you’d anticipate. Reichardt has always had a talent for eluding her audience’s expectations, denying any sort of heightened drama in favor of a humbler realism, and often truncating her narratives at their most confounding points. River of Grass (1994) ends with its protagonist stuck in traffic after committing an abrupt and wordless murder; Meek’s Cutoff (2010) with its cast of pioneers possibly as lost as they were at the beginning, or possibly saved; and First Cow (2019) with its two main characters lying down for a rest and presumably about to be murdered, though we don’t see the act. Here Reichardt closes the film on a shot of policemen after they’ve violently broken up a peace rally, Mooney having been mistaken for a protester and driven off in a paddy wagon. One of the cops picks up a marcher’s fallen hat with his billy club, dons the hat himself, and does a mocking little dance with it. Rather than a tidy conclusion, we’re given a poignant and unsettling joke.
Reviews of books:
In The New Statesman, George Monaghan reviews Cameron Crowe’s memoir (The Uncool, October):
Cathy never grew beyond adolescence. Crowe remembers her as an “awkward but sincere” teenager with a “romantic sense.” She introduced him to his favorite emotion, the one all his art seeks: what he calls “happy/sad.” It came when she first asked her parents: “Am I not normal?” It also came when he confided his first crush to her and she made him ask out the girl, who rejected him. He felt “like a hero, even for losing,” “part ache, part exhilaration.”
As a journalist, too, Crowe was reluctant to flatten feelings. His colleagues believed that their job was to tear down the mirage of stardom and expose the ordinary people behind it. Crowe understands that “mystique” amounts to little more than not being seen—in Almost Famous (2000), David Bowie is hurried through a lobby with his face concealed—but part of him still wants to let it stand. Of all his articles, he is proudest of an interview with Joni Mitchell where he broke the cardinal rules of rock journalism: he “sinned” by letting Mitchell edit the piece and thereby control her image. At one point in the interview, Crowe asks if Mitchell had a moment when she knew she was no longer a child.
N.B.:
The pope’s favorite movies.
A history of the workplace as depicted in movies.
An interview with Noah Baumbach.
An interview with Laura Dern.
Critical notes:
Cultural facilities, such as cinemas and theaters, are the beating hearts of our communities because they contribute to making them more human. If a city is alive, it is thanks in part to its cultural spaces. We must inhabit these spaces and build relationships within them, day after day. Nonetheless, cinemas are experiencing a troubling decline, with many being removed from cities and neighborhoods. More than a few people are saying that the art of cinema and the cinematic experience are in danger. I urge institutions not to give up but to cooperate in affirming the social and cultural value of this activity.
The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.
Movies across the decades:
The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (dir. Eldar Ryazanov, 1976)
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