Quote of the day

"Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it."

 -- Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey"

P.S. It's almost Friday, y'all!

Here's to the Duke...

I'm sitting here on one of those spring mornings that makes your eyes ache with its beauty, listening, appropriately, to "In A Sentimental Mood," and wishing a happy birthday to Edward "Duke" Ellington.

He earned his nickname, it is said, because his mother taught him to be mannerly. As Garrison Keillor has written, "(It) came from his dapper demeanor and easy grace."

Ellington was my first serious exposure to jazz, a perfect starting point for what has proven to be a life-long love affair. I'll never forget the feeling of rapture after listening to the Newport '56 album -- particularly Johnny Hodges' solo -- and thinking, "oh, yes, this is music."

I went nuts over the "Anatomy of a Murder" soundtrack -- perfect for Otto Preminger's motion picture. I played it over and over one summer, remembering Lee Remick's sultry sexuality and Jimmy Stewart's quirky charm.

So today is Duke's day, and here's to him, "Mood Indigo" and all that marvelous music, a Schubert tune with a Gershwin touch, "Prelude to a Kiss."

Hitchcock, headaches, NASCAR and Nancy Drew

So it's Saturday night, and I'm finally starting to feel better.

Haven't done too much today. Slept mostly.

I'm alternating between NASCAR on TV and watching the old "Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries" on DVD. When I was a kid, I had a big crush on Pamela Sue Martin's Nancy Drew. I wanted to grow up and marry a girl just like her -- good looking, smart, feisty, full of vinegar.

Ahh, the sweet bliss of youth.

Last night, I watched the underrated Hitchcock classic "Rope" while I was sick. May be one of the best movies of the director's distinguished career. If you love Hitch and have never seen the film, give it a look.

I know one thing. It has one of the most ingenious trailers of any movie I've ever seen. A couple is sitting together on a park bench. They agree to meet later at a party. The woman watches the man walk away.

Cue Jimmy Stewart:

"That's the last she will see of him. And that's the last you will see of him..."

"Rope" is best known for Hitchcock's experimentation with shooting a film in "one take." That was, of course, impossible in 1948, so Hitch shot a series of extended takes, hiding the breaks by zooming in on an actor's clothing.

The plot is rather simple. Two friends (Farley Granger and John Dall) murder a school chum (Dick Hogan) and temporarily place him in a chest in their New York apartment's living room.

The duo then host a perverse dinner party -- with the food laid out on top of the chest! Dinner guests include the boys' school headmaster (Jimmy Stewart), an old girlfriend (Joan Chandler), another schoolmate (Douglas Dick) and the murdered boy's father (Cedric Hardwicke) and aunt (Constance Collier). Providing comic relief is the smarmy housekeeper (Edith Evanson).

Stewart, whose offbeat philosophy has inadvertently inspired the boys to commit the murder, eventually unravels the deed in this true classic of a picture. It made me forget all about my migraine.

Tonight, I may screen Hitch's 1943 classic (and a film he considered his favorite), "Shadow of a Doubt," starring the great Joseph Cotten and the beautiful Teresa Wright -- that is if I can take my eyes off Pamela Sue Martin long enough to find the DVD.

Schoolboy crushes die hard. Sigh.

(What's sad is Pamela Sue Martin is probably about 50 years old now. I've led a screwed up life, what can I say?)

'For years I was smart; I recommend pleasant'

Here's a crazy theory for you.

I believe that a person reads a certain book, or hears a certain song, or watches a certain movie, or bumps into a certain person, at a particular moment in time for a darn good reason. The book, song, movie or person brings with them a message, or a smile, or a laugh, or a tear, just for you, right when you need it.

It may sound nuts, but I think it's true. Happened to me last night.

Got home late from another crazy workday. Put the groceries away (God, I hate being domestic) and flipped on the TV. Wanted to watch baseball, but the Braves were in a rain delay and the Tigers were blowing out the Mariners. (Detroit decided to play offense for a change. We'll see if it lasts.)

So, I remembered that it was Jimmy Stewart's birthday, fumbled through my DVDs and found "Harvey." And, I must say, that silly little picture was exactly what I needed last night.

Stewart shines as Elwood P. Dowd, an alcoholic but charming middle aged man who spends most of his time in a downtown bar with his unseen 6-foot, 3-inch pal, a rabbit named Harvey. Of course, this drives his sister Veda (brilliantly portrayed by Josephine Hull) and niece Myrtle Mae (Victoria Horne) crazy, not to mention scaring off virtually everybody with which Elwood comes into contact.

One day, when he and Harvey ruin a clambake Veta was throwing for Myrtle Mae, Elwood drives the final nail in the coffin. Veta decides to have him committed.

Well, the film turns into a screwball comedy from there, but along the way, it manages to make some gentle and quite humanistic points about life. Elwood may be off-center, but in the film's universe, he might just be the most normal -- and certainly the nicest -- human being around.

At one point he tells the psychiatrist from the mental hospital, "My mother used to say to me...'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant."

And also:

"Well, I wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy to state that I finally won out over it."

In the end, Veta realizes that Elwood is too special a human being to change. She releases him from the hospital, forbids the doctors to shoot him up with their serum.

As the cab driver tells Veta just before she saves Elwood from the psychiatrist's hypodermic, "After this, he'll be a perfect normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are."

Sometimes it's difficult to look at the world through a romantic lens. You're often let down, regularly disappointed, sometimes broken-hearted, by what you see. Nothing stings quite so badly as some cynical or snide comment, or snub, or rejection, especially from those you love.

What Elwood and his rabbit teach us is that you can't let the pettiness of others, or the innate cruelty of this ol' world, get you down. You gotta keep going, be true to who you are, keep caring too much and singing too loud and laughing too often, regardless of whatever pigpen the legions of the miserables want to wallow in.

You're right, Elwood. For years, I tried to be smart, sometimes even tried to be a smart aleck.

And, you know what? If life's taught me anything, it's that I recommend pleasant, too.

FDR, Jimmy Stewart and other things I shouldn't know about...

Americans will go to the polls this November to select a new president, provided the Democratic primaries have ended by then. It feels like an important election, full of real problems and tough challenges.

Which is why "FDR," PBS's 4-part documentary from '94 on Franklin Roosevelt, which concluded last night, seems so timely. We're nowhere near a depression, but this year's electoral burden seems heavy. Thus it was in 1932, when voters took a chance and elected a popular governor from New York to fight its economic woes.

Roosevelt's story is nothing short of inspiring, regardless of one's political affiliation, especially his courageous struggle with polio. The New Deal gave the nation a much needed jolt of confidence, even if it did take the Second World War to pull us out of the Depression.

FDR wasn't without fault. He tried to pack the Supreme Court. He was estranged from his wife. He ran for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, knowing deep inside that he was a dying man; he didn't even tell Truman about the atomic bomb.

But he didn't shirk, to borrow his favorite phrase, his rendezvous with destiny. If ever America elected the right leader in the right place at the right time, it was the patrician from Hyde Park.

Will such a president be elected this fall? Stay tuned...

Today would have been Jimmy Stewart's 100th birthday. That stuttering, "aw shucks" actor was a true American hero, World War II pilot, the kind of guy any self-respecting man would do well to emulate.


The funniest thing I ever heard about him came from, of all people, my mom, who once remarked, "That guy always played weirdos."

Well, I thought about it, and she's partially right. It was an unfair comment, though, because I'm almost certain I was watching "Harvey" at the time she said it...

If I make it home tonight at a decent hour, I think I'll flip on the DVD player and watch Stewart and Duke Wayne tame the town of Shinbone in John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." That movie is great on so many levels, but most especially for this immortal line:

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Happy birthday, James Stewart, wherever you are.

'Anatomy of a Murder'

Mix Jimmy Stewart with George C. Scott. Throw in heaping portions of Arthur O'Connell, Ben Gazzara, Eve Arden and the lovely Lee Remick. Sprinkle doses of Duke Ellington every few minutes. Let Otto Preminger stir the whole thing up.

And that, my friends, is the recipe for one groovy little picture, 1959's "Anatomy of a Murder." I spent a couple of hours with it while waking up last Saturday morning and was quite pleased that a second viewing (I had seen it once before, years ago) didn't disappoint.

Stewart is his usual likable self, this time playing attorney Paul Biegler, a man who loves fishing, jazz music and reading the law, pretty much in that order. Paul has spent a few years as his Michigan UP county's district attorney, but he was beaten in the last election by a near incompetent (Brooks West). He can't afford to pay his secretary (Arden) and spends most of his days fishing and most of his nights reading Chief Justice Holmes with the alcoholic aging lawyer Parnell Emmett McCarthy (O'Connell).

Then the Manion case comes into his life.

Lt. Frederick Manion (Gazzara) is arrested for killing a man that allegedly raped his wife Laura (Remick). As time goes along, you don't quite believe either of them, but Paul takes the case and instructs his client to plead temporary insanity.

The district attorney brings in a star lawyer, Claude Dancer (Scott), from down state to help with the case. And he and Biegler lock horns in one of the most engaging courtroom exchanges to ever be put to film.

Preminger's directing is stellar. This fine cast turns in performances to remember. And somebody had the bright idea to ask Ellington (who appears in the film) to compose the soundtrack.

All in all, it makes for a fine little film, somewhat controversial for its time, a perfect little way to spend a Saturday morning on the couch. File this one under the "they don't make 'em like this anymore" category.

"Anatomy of a Murder" is available on DVD.

One last stand

He rides into town looking for a place to die. He has a cancer. He wants to exit the world with dignity.

But when you're John Bernard Books, the most famous of the Old West gunslingers, things don't work out that way. Instead, he's the talk of the town.

The marshal wants him gone. Old friends want to make a buck off his name. He just wants to die in peace.

I watched John Wayne's last film, "The Shootist," last night. My pal Dean Harned jokes that I always screen this movie whenever I reach a "crossroads." Not so. It's a darn fine picture that improves with age.

There's something real about it, gritty, even prophetic, given that Duke died of the "Big C" three years after this film's release. It's also damn fine moviemaking, further evidence that those who say Wayne couldn't act either have an agenda to advance or just don't know of which they speak.

Don Siegel's picture is loaded with stars. Wayne, of course, and Jimmy Stewart, Ron Howard, Lauren Bacall, John Carradine, Hugh O'Brian, Richard Boone, Scatman Crothers, Harry Morgan and Sheree North.

Pay close attention to the scenes in which Books (Wayne) learns from the Doc (Stewart) that he's dying. You're watching two old pros at the twilight of their careers. They simply don't act this well anymore, y'all.

The best moments, really, are Wayne's mentoring of the young Gillom Rogers (Howard). He's clearly attracted to Books' life of violence. But the old gunfighter steers the young man in a different direction.

"The Shootist" is sad, tragic, even maddening when Wayne meets his fate just before the credits roll. But it's a fine epitaph on the finest of all American acting careers.

It feels like the end of Hollywood's golden era. Not long after this film was released, big-budget, CGI-dominated mindless epics replaced quiet character-driven stories as the dominating movie genre. It's too bad. Those films have their place. But so does something like "The Shootist."

Somewhere amid this brooding character study about dying lies some thoughts on living, and on having true grit in the midst of one final gunfight.

"The Shootist" is John Wayne's last stand. And what a stand it is.