Orson Welles' last, unfinished film

I heard somewhere that Orson Welles' last, unfinished feature, The Other Side of the Wind, was locked in a vault somewhere in Iran. He apparently got funding from pre-revolutionary Iranian sources. But, no, the 1,083 reels of film were sitting in a French film lab all this time. The film is now being completed and will reportedly be released on Netflix.

How many movies do film labs have lying around? Someone found out that Ed Wood never had the money to get one of his films back from the lab, so they went and paid the charges and released the thing on videotape.

Welles said in an interview that he didn't know why, but he was always really slow on post-production. He could write a script in a week, but once the thing was shot, it took him forever to edit.

We're all doomed

I've been forced to listen to Rachel Maddow a couple of times a day, then listen to her admirers parrot her nonsense. I've always been repulsed by her. She can't talk about killing people without smirking.

From this weekend's Counterpunch.com:

The Democrats are at risk of making the rest of their already frail political agenda, such as it is, collateral damage in their pursuit of a collective fantasy, a mad quest to find ghostly Russian agents inside the House of Trump. No amateur spy hunter has been more intrepid than the Walter Winchell of MSDNC, Rachel Maddow, who has rebranded her nightly show “The Russian Connection.” For two months now, Maddow (annual salary: $7 million) has been spinning nightly sagas of Russian espionage that twist and turn through the dark labyrinths of Washington and end where they began: nowhere. Predictably, Maddow’s audience is swelling as numbed Democrats, still dazed by Hillary’s defeat, tune in hoping for some kind of explosive revelation that will explain the inexplicable from these paranoid potboilers, which often cast the CIA in the most unlikely role of victim.

I fear our long national hangover is just commencing. The deeper the Democrats descend into the Russian rabbit hole, the farther they remove themselves from the working-class people whose defection cost them the election and the longer the odds grow that they will ever revitalize their party as a real oppositional force to the reactionary freight train bearing down upon them.

Trump has probably had the worst start to a presidency since William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia only 32 days after taking the oath. But by all measures the Democrats have fared even worse than the president, and rightfully so. Since Trump’s win, and despite relentless attempts to invalidate his victory, there has been a steady attrition of support for the Democratic Party. The Democrats are now less liked (35%) and more hated (50%) than Trump (44%/47%) and by a fairly wide margin, according to a recent Suffolk poll.

Why is SNL news?

Every Sunday I look at the news on Google, and every Sunday one of the news items is what was on Saturday Night Live the night before. I can understand people being interested in this, but not THAT interested. Was The Carol Burnett Show ever news?

But, then again, some major events of my life were things I happened to see on TV. I had a teacher who, as a child, ran into the kitchen to tell her mother that she just saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot by Jack Ruby on live television. Her mother said, "No, no, honey---President Kennedy was shot." She kept telling her and she kept not believing her.

I'll never forget the time I was in the living room playing on the floor with my airplanes. The TV was on. They interrupted the program with a special news bulletin. George Wallace had been shot.

The reporter said gravely that there was a man there wearing McGovern buttons. "I asked him if he was happy about this. He said no."

I was happy about it. Even back then, I knew Wallace was a racist monster.

Years later, in high school, the principal announced over the loudspeaker that Reagan had been shot. Teachers were disturbed at how happy students were at the news. They told the class they remembered when Kennedy was shot. Some people were happy about that, too, but they were soon embarrassed and ashamed that they didn't conceal their glee. I don't think anyone ever said that about Wallace.

People really hate Clinton

 
Trump has terribly low approval ratings, but Hillary Clinton's are now even lower. I don't know what it means, but fewer people like her and more people hate her than Trump. My guess is that people before the election were telling pollsters they didn't hate her because they were terrified of Trump and now a truer picture is emerging.

For the moment, I'm glad she's not president. We're seeing the beginning of the end of the war in Syria with ISIS and Al Qaeda on the losing end. The one thing Clinton made clear in her campaign was that she intended to start bombing Syria just to keep the war going and to bring the U.S. into direct war with Russia. Obama and his NATO stooges were massing troops on the Russian border in preparation.

I don't know how big a nightmare Trump will be. At least the governments of the world will have serious doubts now when the United States tries to lead them into more wars.

Another thing about TV and movie detectives

As I said about 26 Men, "The rangers' characters were never developed. They were just doing their jobs and their personalities were irrelevant."

I might add that this is true in detective stories in general. The detective doesn't set the story in motion and they're just doing their jobs, following the clues other people left behind. Even true crime stories focus on the personalities of the criminals and victims. The detective's personality doesn't matter. He's just following procedure.

But this is why you have fictional detectives like Columbo and Hercule Poirot. They need quirks to gloss over the irrelevance of their personality traits.

I read a teen detective story where the teenage detective liked to cook. I read a Japanese crime novel and the detective would write haiku.

I always wondered about that. I was in a creative writing class in high school and we were required to write a batch of poems, but the teacher told us we could include no more than two haiku, which I felt was disrespectful to the haiku as an art form. But, in this novel, it turns out the teacher was right. The detective cranked out haiku by the dozens. 

Maybe I'm wrong about 26 Men

I'm probably wrong. There have been westerns set in the early 20th century where the cowboys have stayed abreast of the times and that was never the decisive factor in whether it was any good or not.

Forty-six years ago, my sister was dragged by her middle school friends to see Big Jake starring 64-year-old John Wayne in the title role. Set in 1909, they had cars, motorcycles, automatic pistols, telescopic rifle sights. For all the good it did them. The movie was terrible. Considering the plot, John Wayne was way too cheerful as he tended to be in his later films, like he thought being shot in the leg or punched in the face was great fun. He addresses an overweight machete killer as "fatty".

Strange, even in Texas, that tweenagers would want to see an action film about the elderly. 

In the movie, they kept referring to things as being new. "We'll have a rifle on you. With a real fine sharpshooter behind it with one of them fancy new telescopic sights."

There was The Professionals, set sometime around 1917, which had a boring middle part where nothing happened. The Wild Bunch was good, set in 1913. I saw a little of Joe Kidd on TV one time. And I liked Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!

The novelty of a cowboy with a machine gun only goes so far.

26 Men

Watched a pretty bad half-hour TV western from the '50s called 26 Men, about the Arizona Rangers, established in 1901 before Arizona was a state. Kind of amazing that Barry Goldwater was born there in 1909 when the rangers disbanded, because the place was still wild west. My grandparents lived contemporaneously with those people. There's nothing in the show to indicate that it was set in the 20th century. It's like pretty much every other western but even more dull.

It was based on real cases of the Arizona Rangers, kind of a western Dragnet, which was too bad because law enforcement wasn't very interesting back then. Two of the episodes I saw had lynch mobs. The rangers' characters were never developed. They were just doing their jobs and their personalities were irrelevant.

A western set in the 20th century could have Communists, anarchists, trade unionists; Jui-Jitsu was becoming popular especially with Suffragettes.

 

Everyone on the show had a Colt revolver and a Winchester rifle, like in pretty much every other western. They could have freshened it up with Mausers, Lugers, machine guns.

Clint Eastwood with a Mauser in Joe Kidd, set in New Mexico

Years ago, there was a TV western called Nichols set in Arizona in 1914. James Garner played a sheriff who rode a motorcycle.

The show could have had car chases. They could have had a really bad airplane.

It could have been more like the Soviet movies such as White Sun of the Desert, inspired by American westerns but set in the USSR in the 1920s.

26 Men was produced for syndication, never shown on any network. I read that surviving members of the Arizona Rangers introduced some episodes but I didn't see any.

Had a terrible theme song and it used the same stock music as Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Arizona is just a big horrible desert. No offense to the people of Arizona, but I don't know why anyone would go there now. Back then, before air conditioning, it was just awful.

The show is public domain and available on YouTube and more than one Roku channel.