12/12 is the Birthday of one of the world's greatest entertainers/icons/singers/bon vivants, Mr. Frank Sinatra, a true hero of mine and many others. Here are 3 clips that sum up for me some of what made him great. As Louis Armstrong once said about jazz and I think life itself, "If you don't get it, then you never will...." Cheers Baby!
Here's Howard Cosell's brilliant ad-lib introduction of Sinatra from his Main Event Live Concert from Madison Square Garden.
This is Sinatra in 1965 with the mighty Count Basie Orchestra performing one of his greatest song with the furious Quincy Jones arrangement of "You Make Me Feel So Young." If you're not familiar with Sinatra here he is at his swinging best.
Pete Hamil in his great book Why Sinatra Matters, writes that the greatness of Sinatra's singing was how he projected the heartbreaking sadness of lost love or the euphoric joy of a love that is found. Here he is performing the epic torch song by Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer; "One For My Baby (and One More For the Road)." Quite possibly my favorite song. A Hemingway short story as song. Sinatra truly owns it and performs it brilliantly. As one musician said during a recording session of Sinatra's genius for torch songs, "he really believes this shit..." Radio personality Sid Mark had a Sinatra radio program throughout the 50's until the 90's would devote an hour every week to just Sinatra doing torch songs and it became nicknamed famously, "the suicide hour..."
Enjoy, you if you don't get why Sinatra is great or matters after seeing these clips amongst hundreds of other, then you never will. Cheers Baby!
Below is an extra that I added to this post with the wonderful NYC writer and acquaintance of mine Pete Hamill discussing Sinatra and his excellent book Why Sinatra Matters.
RIP Andrew Sarris. America's finest film critic and theorist. A man who
changed the face of how films are made and seen. He was a lovely and
gracious gentleman whose brilliantly written books taught me more about film and how to think than
anyone else. Reading his books and
watching the films that he wrote about by the directors he championed were the best film school anyone
could want. I used to sit in on his classes at Columbia and they were
days that I'll always remember. It was a real highlight. He was very nice to this interloper. I
told him that if movies are my religion, he's the pope....
Andrew Sarris and I when I used to sit in on his classes at Columbia for a few years back in the 90's.
"I consider Andrew Sarris to be one of the most fundamental and valued teachers," writes Martin Scorsese. "His writings led me to see the genius in American movies at a time when
the cinema was considered a mindless form of entertainment, worthy of
serious attention only if it came from Europe or Asia."
I will be doing a long form piece about this great man in the near future, there were tributes from all over today to this man. Below are some links to some of the very good ones that I read. A very nice piece ran in the Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy was posted today.
Lastly there's a link from 2001 from the Columbia News celebrating the collection of essays by various writers including Martin Scorsese and 39 other contributors, Citizen Sarris:
As I remember upon meeting the excellent director Sam Fuller once, I asked him to autograph "the bible" Sarris's seminal book The American Cinema, and Fuller said "sure, this is a very good book..."
Upon reading the vast amounts of tributes today remembering this man's life and his contribution to movies as a serious art form, I can say that he was a true touchstone to mine and many other's lives.
When I was a kid and movies would come on TV some of the
ones that always fascinated me were the weird, crazy movies that seemed and
looked like westerns but were somehow much different. Obviously they were dubbed into English, had really cool
music soundtracks, were very violent, the women were really sexy and everybody
was very sweaty and had lots of makeup and unique costumes on. Yeah, these cowboy movies were
different all right from lame "Bonanza," or "Gunsmoke," they were made in Spain and Italy financed by Germans,
with an American star directed by Italians with Italian crews and using actors
from all over Europe, these were Spaghetti Westerns. Originally this term was derided by the craftsmen who made
these films on shoestring budgets but the genre became such a hugely successful worldwide box office sensation,
that they didn’t mind. From the
Mid-Sixties until the Mid-Seventies, these movies were very, very popular with
worldwide audiences making international superstars out of some unlikely actors
like Lee Van Cleef who spent years appearing in small parts in features and
television and Clint Eastwood who co-starred on "Rawhide" for years, Franco Nero, Tomas Milian, Terence Hill, Bud Spencer and Charles Bronson. In the upcoming posts, I’ll be going through this wonderful genre
of films. Right now the great Film
Forum will be showing a bunch of these films and if you get a chance to see
these crazy movies on the big screen do yourself a favor and go see them.
Here’s My Top 30
Spaghetti Westerns:
For A Few Dollars More
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Great Silence
A Bullet For The General
Duck, You Sucker
The Big Gundown
Death Rides a Horse
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Django
Fistful of Dollars
The Hills Run Red
Companeros
Django Kill
Sabata
Face to Face
The Hellbenders
Django The Bastard
Day of Anger
Vengeance
Requiescant
The Mercenary
Navajo Joe
If You Meet Sartana, Pray For Your Death
Keoma
And God Said to Cain
Return of Ringo
Any Gun Can Play
My Name is Nobody
Adios Sabata
The Ruthless Four
Alex Cox’s Top Twenty
Spaghetti Westerns
1. For a Few Dollars More 2. Once Upon a Time in the West 3. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 4. Django 5. The Great Silence 6. Requiescant 7. Johnny Hamlet 8. Arizona Colt 9. Django Kill 10. A Bullet For the General 11. Tepepa 12. Cemetary Without Crosses 13. California 14. Today It's Me... Tomorrow You 15. Black Jack 16. The Ruthless Four 17. $1,000 on the Black 18. Bandidos 19. And God Said to Cain 20. Dont Touch the White Women
Quentin Tarantino’s Top
Twenty Spaghetti Westerns
1.The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
2.For a Few Dollars More
3.Django
4.The Mercenary
5.Once Upon a Time in the West
6.A Fistful of Dollars
7.Day of Anger
8.Death Rides a Horse
9.Navajo Joe
10.Return
of Ringo
11.The
Big Gundown
12.A
Pistol for Ringo
13.The
Dirty Outlaws
14.The
Great Silence
15.The
Grand Duel
16.Shoot
The Living, Pray For the Dead
17.Tepepa
18.The
Ugly Ones
19.Viva
Django
20.The
Machine Gun Killers
Sir Christopher Fraling's (genre expert) Top Ten Spaghetti Westerns
1. Once Upon a Time in the West
2. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
3. The Great Silence
4. For a Few Dollars More
5. Django Kill
6. The Big Gundown
7. Django
8. My Name is Nobody
9. The Mercenary
10. A Bullet For the General
Most of these movies will be playing at the Film Forum here in NYC for the next three weeks. I hope that you might catch them there on the big screen or on DVD or streaming on Netflix or YouTube. I sure that you will thoroughly enjoy them, they're a lot of fun. Feel free to comment. Enjoy!
Hey friends, sorry for the absence but have been in production and have had a full plate. Anyway, just posting a quick one but a great set of clips from one of my favorite shows of all-time! "Deadwood," created, written by and executed by David Milch. One of the main characters of the crazy ensemble from this lawless town in the old west was the owner of the Gem Saloon, "Al Swearengen" masterfully played by Ian McShane in an award winning performance. I think "Deadwood" was one of the finest works of film/tv in the past 20 years. David Milch has a new show on HBO called "Luck." I hope that it can approach the quality of his western saga. Enjoy McShane doing the words of David Milch in a terrific performance in these following clips.
A great performance in a very missed series. I hope that David Milch and the ensemble reunite for maybe a "Deadwood" movie. One can only hope.
My personal favorite of Jean-Luc Godard's films. The great, crazy, "Weekend." One helluva ride! If you love the movies, go check out this film. It will make you feel something...
ROBERT RYAN at Film Forum in New York City http://www.filmforum.org/films/robertryan.html#817 "Life, death, loneliness, loss: these were some of the things we learned from the quiet art of Robert Ryan." – Pete Hamill
When I was a kid, I used to watch movies with my dad. He used to work a lot so when he and I would watch a movie on TV it was quality time. Despite being in a remote town in PA, he was a good movie guy. He got the ball rolling by making me watch "On the Waterfront," with the great Brando, Burt Lancaster in "Elmer Gantry" and Howard Hawks' "Red River," with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift that he told me were all great actors. But one actor that he always told was the GUY, was Robert Ryan, his personal favorite. Robert Ryan is indeed a great actor, Jeff Bridges who was in "The Iceman Cometh" with him as a young man, says that Ryan was the greatest actor that he'd ever seen on screen or worked with. Robert Ryan was an actor's actor who never was an "A-Lister" but when paired with such stars as Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, James Stewart, Lee Marvin and Spencer Tracy, he more than held his own.
Ryan often played conflicted, ambiguous characters in such films as Nicholas Ray's "On Dangerous Ground," Anthony Mann's great western "The Naked Spur," Fritz Lang's version of Clifford Odets' "Clash By Night," or Max Ophuls' "Caught," in those great director's movies and many others he simply dominates the screen even though his characters are not very nice people.
In other films like the adaption of Melville's "Billy Budd," Richard Brooks' "Crossfire," Robert Wise's "Odds Against Tommorow," and "Bad Day at Black Rock" with Spencer Tracy, Ryan is just downright mean, cementing himself as possibly the screen's greatest heavy. However all of his characters brought an intelligence and gravitas that gave dimension to all of those characterizations.
In real life he was the exact opposite, a private, family man, a fierce liberal who campaigned for many causes like civil rights, against Sen. McCarthy's withchunts, anti-nukes, etc. He did many stage productions at the height of his movie stardom which not too many actors would do including Irving Berlin's last musical "Mr. President." He said, "In movies, I've played pretty much everything that I've dedicated my life to fighting against." A legitimate tough guy in a land of fake tough guys, he was a Marine Drill Instructor and an Ivy League boxing champion who on the set of "The Wild Bunch," threatened to punch out legendary tough guy Sam Peckinpah whom he didn't get along with. Legend has it that he and his friend and total political opposite John Wayne almost came to blows. Shortly after Ryan died in 1973, his estate sold his apartment in the Dakota building to a young couple named John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
The Film Forum on West Houston Street in NYC is doing a very overdue tribute to Robert Ryan's career showing 21 films over 12 days this August, it's going on now. FilmForum.org 2 excellent films where Ryan gets to really show his stuff and are playing in this festival are Roy Ward Baker's 3-D survival tale "Inferno," and Robert Wise's boxing film "The Set-Up." Both films feature tour de forces by Ryan. In "Inferno," he plays a not so nice millionaire who's left to die in the desert with a broken leg by his cheating wife. He's alone on screen trying to survive for most of the movie and one can't help but rooting for his boorish character to survive. In "The Set-Up," considered by many one of the best of all the boxing movies and Bob's favorite role, Ryan plays a real ham and egger in the dead end world of small time boxing. “Bob caught all the nuances of guts and shattered hopes, and small-time aspirations of a never-was beating the hell out of the desperation of being a club fighter.”– Samuel Fuller. I'll be as bold to say that Ryan's performance is the best in any boxing movie.
So I think my old man was right about saying that Robert Ryan was "the man." An actor first, a star second, not afraid to take an unsympathetic role. Ryan brought a dignity and intelligence to any film that he was in and if you love movies and acting you should definitely try to catch some of his films at the Film Forum, TCM or Netflix. You will be entertained. The writer who did Robert Ryan's obituary when he died in 1973, wrote this very lovely summation of Ryan's career, "he left behind a lifetime of roles too small for his talent..." Well said.
Me and millions of others remember exactly where they were in 1979 when they heard that Thurman Munson was killed tragically in a plane crash at the age of 32. It was a very sad day for all of baseball and heartbreaking to Yankee fans who had lost their Captain, their heart and soul. A great player who led the Yankees to 3 straight World Series appearances and winning 2 in '77 & '78. Munson played with a fire that is rare in a player and his style clicked with fans. He was a lunch bucket type of player from Canton Ohio, whose uniform was always dirty, played through injuries and the only time he'd smile on the field is after the Yankees had safely secured a win.
His fight during a collision with his rival, Boston catcher Carlton Fisk is the stuff of legend. In '76, Owner George Steinbrenner named the catcher to be the first captain of the New York Yankees in 37 years succeeding the late, great Lou Gehrig. Munson was perhaps the best clutch hitter of his time leading the '70's Yankees from being an also ran to champion in a short time. Those Yankee teams were something else, a collection of rogues starting from "The Boss" George Steinbrenner, Manager Billy Martin, controversial power hitting outfielder Reggie Jackson whom Munson feuded then befriended, flaky Mickey Rivers, tough guys Lou Piniella and Graig Nettles to quiet superstars like Catfish Hunter and Ron Guidry. They were nicknamed the Bronx Zoo but it was their captain Munson that held the ship together and led them to victory. Thurman Munson a beloved Yankee, team captain, champion. His locker at the old Yankee Stadium remained empty with his number 15 jersey hanging there since that day in August of '79 and that locker was moved to the new Yankee Stadium paying tribute to Munson.
Hopefully the veterans committee of the Baseball Hall of Fame will rightfully place him in Cooperstown. He deserves to be in the Hall of Fame much more so than the recent batch of statistical compilers who've recently entered the HOF. Here's a 3 segment video biography of the Yankee great.
Some of Thurman Munson's accomplishments as a player:
*3 consecutive seasons batting .300 or better with 100 or more RBI each year. He was the first catcher to accomplish the feat in three consecutive years since Yankee Hall of Famer Bill Dickey's four straight seasons from 1936-1939, matched only by Mike Piazza since (1996–1998).
*Munson had a career .357 batting average in the post-season with three home runs, 22 RBIs and nineteen runs scored.
*Munson's batting average in the World Series was .373.
*1976 AL MVP
*7 Time All-Star (1971, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978)
*3 Time Gold Glove Award winner (1973, 1974, 1975)
