HERE COMES DISH:  NETFLIX FLUBS ENTICE COMPETITION

Here we go:

At a press conference scheduled for Friday, Dish Network is expected to announce its entry into the streaming-video market via a Blockbuster-branded service that could emerge as a rival to the recently troubled Netflix.

Variety reports that the title for the press event, “A Stream Come True,” suggests such an announcement. Per the trade, the invitation promises the introduction of “the most comprehensive home entertainment package ever.”

Meanwhile, Netflix’ stock was off around 10% on Tuesday.

And guess who has Dish? *points to self with both thumbs*

‘FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS,’ ‘SMURFS’ WILL BE SONY’S FIRST ULTRAVIOLET TITLES

If you recall, “UltraViolet” is also known as The Cloud, a service that stores your purchased films online so you can access them from anywhere. It’s also known as the service that will save the flailing home video market.

Why would we purchase not-very-good movies online for what is likely to be a price of around $15 to $20 when we can stream all we want for month for $10?

Hollywood is desperate to get us purchasing again but I don’t see it happening. They’re just not making the kind of movies people want to own anymore — no one will talk about that, but it’s a bigger factor than anyone wants to admit.

‘PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3′ ARRIVES OCTOBER 21

Making a truly frightening film is probably the most difficult thing to do when it comes to crafting a successful film. This is why so few horror movies ever pull it off and those that do are rarely forgotten.

The first two “Paranormals” scared the bejeezus out of me. Bring on the third (though I am almost completely out of bejeezus).

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SCOTTDS’ EPIC LINK-TACULAR

CHRISTIAN TOTO WONDERS, ‘WHERE DID BRIDGET FONDA GO?’

STEVE MARTIN’S UNSOLICITED OSCAR-HOSTING ADVICE TO EDDIE MURPHY

‘CAPTAIN AMERICA’ BLU-RAY TRAILER INCLUDES ‘AVENGERS’ & S.H.I.E.L.D. PEEK

DISNEY AND JAMES CAMERON TO COLLABORATE ON AVATAR-THEMED LAND AT DISNEYWORLD

JEREMY RENNER TO STAR IN BANK ROBBERY FILM ‘KING OF HEISTS‘

ABC BUYS FBI AND CIA DRAMAS

 IS BARRY LEVINSON TAKING ‘DINER’ TO BROADWAY?

JON TURTELTAUB TO DIRECT ‘THE HANGOVER’ FOR SENIORS

10 THINGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT BATMAN

‘JUNO’ SCREENWRITER DIABLO CODY RESPONDS TO BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT’S CRITICISMS

DECONSTRUCTING THE OPENING TITLE SEQUENCE OF ‘MAD MEN‘

MOMMY: CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF ‘BLUE VELVET’

COOL BLOG: THE SUITS OF JAMES BOND

A LOOK AT FRANK DARABONT’S UNFILMED DRAFT OF ‘FAHRENHEIT 451′

TWO MORE TERMINATOR FILMS PLANNED

WILLIAM SHATNER TRASHES ‘STAR WARS’

JACKIE CHAN GOES BACK TO ‘1911′ CHINA FOR AN EPIC WAR DRAMA

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

Finished “The Closer” Season One. What a fabulous show, especially in showing how Kyra Sedgwick’s Brenda wins the respect and trust of her team. The relationship development is not only believable but ultimately quite touching.

The politics are also complicated — which I like. Some of what I see I agree with, some I disagree with. You know, like real life. In other words: not a problem.

Looking forward to more.

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CLASSIC PICK FOR THURSDAY, SEPT 22

TCM:

6pm EST: White Heat (1949) –  A government agent infiltrates a gang run by a mother-fixated psychotic. Dir: Raoul Walsh Cast:  James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien. BW-114 mins, TV-PG, CC.

At nearly 50 years old, The Mighty James Cagney commands the screen as a menacing, psychotic gangster twisted by his demented mother in one of the greatest gangster pics ever made. Edmond O’Brien might be over-shadowed by Cagney’s notorious scene-stealing, but he’s every bit as good as the undercover agent who infiltrates the gang. Another star of the film is the superb on-location, black and white photography which grounds the story in reality and adds something close to a docu-drama feel.   

Great story, great plot twists, superb editing. The perfect bookend to the film that made Cagney’s a star, 1931’s “Public Enemy.”

--Please send tips/suggestions/requests to jnolte@breitbart.com

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Watching it again, lo these many years later, I was struck by several new observations.  First – what a patriot George M. Cohan was!  (And, as is common knowledge, so was Cagney.)   Though Cohan maintained, “I was a good Democrat even [as a child]”… he didn’t feel the modern leftist compulsion to extend the sympathetic lilt of empathy towards one’s avowed enemies.  He knew which side he was on – and said so, in no unequivocal terms. 

Cohan wasn’t politically correct — he and his family put on Minstrel shows!  Innocent, good-natured entertainment back then, offending no one, delighting all; black, white or variegated paisley.  It wasn’t until the class-envy of Marxist political correctness that we insisted on being horrified by such a thing. 

When young George misbehaved, his father – oh shock – turned him over his knee and whooped his butt.   Men treated women with genteel deference and women modestly comported themselves with style, sweetness and class.  Youth respected the wisdom of age…or…they got their butts whooped.

Life-long business deals (Cohan and partner Sam H. Harris) were sealed with a handshake.  My word is my bond.  And if you failed, you didn’t turn to government for a bailout…you just squared your jaw and tried again.

Being patriotic was hip.  The flag was revered.  People sang stirring songs about love of country and teared up – unapologetically.

George M. Cohan…James Cagney…man, that’s what America is about.

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Many theories have been offered as to why the public made b.o. enemies of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, but the real reason, I think, has yet to be articulated.  And it’s this: Mann, perhaps our greatest living director, taught his cast how to do everything – fight, handle firearms, rob banks, ogle Marion Cotillard…

–  except the most important thing:  how to wear a hat like it’s a part of you, not a Page Six fashion accessory.  In other words, how to wear it like you mean it.

Here’s how not to do it:

Johnny always looks great, but the hair sticking out from beneath the brim should never happen (and, in the film, it actually does happen).  In the old days, men wore their hair to make their hats look good, not the other way around.

By contrast, here’s the master, the Great Cagney, explaining the facts of life to Leo Gorcey of the Dead End Kids in Angels with Dirty Faces:

Granted, no American male under the age of 70 really knows how to wear a hat, not the way the average schnook did in the period between the wars, and up until the Kennedy/Sinatra Administration.  For lots of reasons, almost none of them having to do with the myth that JFK didn’t wear a hat to his inauguration (see point 6), one day in the 1960s American men decided en masse to drop an item of apparel that for centuries had been considered as vital  to respectability as wearing trousers.

In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the Decline of America.  For, once men stopped wearing hats, they also stopped being men, which meant they stopped driving the culture, which meant the country was now ruled by fears, worries, feelings and emotions — in other words, by The New York Times — instead of right reason, a whiff o’ the grape and a taste of the lash, with which feminized consequences we are now living.   Although, come to think of it, the Punahou Kid has worn a hat upon occasion:

Now these mooks, on the other hand, knew how to wear hats:

Those are the Diamond brothers on the left, Legs (second in line) and his consumptive brother, Eddie; plus Fatty Walsh (no relation), and Salvatore Lucania, aka Lucky Luciano, all posing prettily for an arrest photograph.  No urban, ethnic thugs (the Diamonds and Walsh were Irish, Charlie Lucky was Italian) would have been caught dead without their hats on, and in fact one of the greatest of them all, the last of the fighting Jewish gangsters – Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz — was, in fact, caught dead with his hat on.

Here’s the Dutchman, still breathing, after he staggered out of the men’s room and collapsed at his private table in the Palace Chop House in Newark, N.J. on the evening of October 23, 1935, having just been ventilated by Charles “the Bug” Workman:

Even near death, and soon to deliver his Jocyean valedictory monologue, the Dutchman knew how to wear a hat.

Another famous gangster, this one from Chicago by way of Brooklyn and the old Five Points gang in Manhattan, also looked great in a hat, even though he was big and fat and had a scar running across his face.  Which is why they called him Scarface:

So what’s wrong with this picture?

No rake, that’s what.  No tilt, no swagger, no signature.  No torpedo would ever have worn his lid this way, especially not a bank robber or an urban gangster caught up in some gunplay. You didn’t wear your hat as if it were a beanie with a propeller on it, or a party favor — something that was likely to fall off your noggin at any moment.  You wore it like you meant it.  Like your life depended on it.  You wore it with panache. Just as each of today’s gang-bangers seeks his own individual identity in his baggy clothing, his gold chains, even his choice of arms, so did his criminal counterparts back then.  As Sinatra once said: “Cock your hat – angles are attitudes.”

The old gangsters made a statement with the way they wore their hats.  My own personal hero, Owney Madden (somebody should write a novel about him!), always cocked his chapeau sharply to the left, a trait he passed on to his childhood buddy from Hell’s Kitchen, Georgie Ranft, a man later to win fame as Guino Rinaldo in the original Scarface and, later, infamy as the Dumbest Man in Show Business for all the great roles (Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, maybe even Casablanca) that he turned down.  In other words, this guy:

A good hat, a classic hat, a real hat – and if you want to buy one, go here: it’s where I buy all my hats, and you should, too – ought to fit a man’s head like a glove.  It should be made of fur felt, with a sculpted brim, a proper crease in the crown, an interior sweat band, an external band, and a button (attached to an anchored string on the band, which was meant to go through the buttonhole on your jacket on windy days to keep your hat from blowing not only off your head but down the road).  You should be able to wear it on the street, in the bar, in bed, in an open car, on the sideboard during a getaway, while firing a Colt Detective Special .38, or even seated at the typewriter.

You should never wear it indoors (unless you’re alone or in an all-male environment without the boss present), or in the presence of a lady, which is why we have the semiotics of hat etiquette, now as much of a lost art as cigarette etiquette.  Alas, the young actors – the ones with the workout bodies and the hairless chests – often look and act as if they’re playing dress-up with Grandpa’s old clothes.  Like this guy:

As opposed to this guy:

So come on, Hollywood – let’s get with the program.  If you’re going to make The Black Dahlia or Public Enemies or any picture set in this period, the least you can do is hire a coach who can teach all the young dudes that once upon a time a whole world of wonder, class, character, style and refinement — even among the bad guys — antedated the year of their births in the 1970s, when people looked like this:

Forgive me for often thinking that we would all be much better off returning to Depression-era style, before the advent of the Flower Children, when men were men, and when a real man also knew what to do when in the presence of a lady.  Hint: it starts with taking off your hat.

[Ed. Note: Michael Walsh has assumed the role of Editor-In-Chief of  Andrew Breitbart's latest "Big" sibling, Big Journalism, which launches this coming Wednesday, Jan. 6th.]

Jimmy Cagney in the early 1930s

Produced in 1949, within just a few minutes “White Heat” announces itself as something unlike anything that came before starting with the introduction of Verna Jarrett (29 year old Virginia Mayo), a striking, almost regal beauty shown fast asleep in a close up. Walsh immediately knocks the bark off his perfectly groomed leading lady by having her snore like a sailor after a three day bender. The message is clear: don’t believe everything you see. In just a few more minutes things will move even further beyond normal and straight into disturbing.  

You know something, Verna, if I turn my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there’d be a hole in it.

Verna’s 50 year old husband is Cody Jarrett (Cagney), a thumb-shaped psychotic holed up in the middle of nowhere with a half-dozen cabin-fevered gunsels eager to split the loot they scored in the opening sequence, an audacious train robbery that ended with Jarrett shooting two conductors in cold, grinning, steel-eyed blood. Jarrett’s five-foot-nothing stature means nothing. Swaggering brutality is his currency and though outnumbered he looms over his mutinous gang with the promise that any challenge can only end in death, very likely theirs. They back off.

I told you to keep away from that radio. If that battery is dead it’ll have company.

But the stress of confrontation brings headaches, horrible ones, migraines that throw Cody in a disoriented spin of suffering. He mewls like a cat, bounces off the walls and finds comfort in only one place: the lap of his aged mother (a ghoulish, shark-eyed Margaret Mycherly). Pouty and feeling sorry for himself, he sits there like a toddler with a boo boo as she rubs his ailing head.

Creepy can’t begin to describe the haunting scene of a middle-aged man cradled in the arms of his cold, manipulative mother. The staging of the moment is what makes it so effective and memorable. Nothing prepares you. No score or camera movement announce anything out of the ordinary and the actors play the scene as matter-of-factly as a walk down the street. The net effect is to make you feel like the unlucky witness to something very, very wrong.

Top of the world, Son.
Don’t know what I’d do without you, Ma.

“White Heat” has a whole lot of plot to get through so not much time passes before the cops find Cody and he lands in the Big House. Only thing is that he outsmarted them coppers with a pre-planned alibi to avoid a murder-one rap and the electric chair. Jarrett confesses to a nothing crime he set up in another state and in return receives an air-tight alibi and a two-year stretch. The Los Angeles Treasury Department is on to Cody, however, and arrange for undercover agent Vic Pardo (Edmond O’Brien) to befriend Cody as his cellmate.

And that’s all the plot you’re getting from me.

The Mighty Cagney and The Mighty Edmond O’Brien

Cagney is so good, so overwhelmingly, blazingly good that you have to watch the picture a few times before the greatness around him can come into focus and receive the appreciation deserved, starting with an outstanding story loaded with exciting, unpredictable turning points and paced with precision. Much of the production is filmed on location with a number of impressive shots of downtown Los Angeles.

It’s always “somebody tipped them.” Never “the cops are smart.”

Better still, ‘White Heat” takes you deep into the gears of the then-modern world of investigative procedure and does what great movies do, shows you around on a tour of how things work. The Treasury Dept. uses all kinds of interesting stuff to locate and track Jarrett: Fingerprinting, facial casts, this coolio gizmo called a spectrograph, and this even cooler thing called an oscillator that’s about the size of a toaster and works as an automobile tracking device.

Yes, on top of all that flinty dialogue, elaborate heisting, a visit to the Big House, and Cagney at his menacing, charismatic best, you’re watching “CSI: Fedora.”

You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood, would ya?
No, I’ll let ya warm up a little.

Max Steiner is his usual genius setting the proceedings to a score that enhances without ever getting in the way and as Verna, Virginia Mayo gives the performance of her career as the worst of the bunch. Other than her own pleasure, Verna is loyal to nothing and no one – just a beautiful, dangerous, not very bright, bundle of relentless need.

Edmond O’Brien – an Oscar-winning character actor who deserves more recognition – plays it cool and professional, an excellent plan for any actor hoping to not get swamped by a Jimmy Cagney who excelled at scene stealing, and was never above using a prop to do so. One of my favorite actorly moments is a scene where as soon as his lines begin Cagney grabs O’Brien’s prop (a stick). Believe me, Cagney understood the power of an actor fiddling with something, which brings me to that chicken leg…

There are three unforgettable scenes, my personal favorite being Jarrett’s cavalier revenge-killing of a man locked in a car trunk.

How ya doin’, Parker?
It’s stuffy in here, I need some air.
Oh, stuffy, huh? I’ll give ya a little air.

As Jarrett gives Parker a little air with four bullet holes through the trunk, he munches a chicken leg – the kind of touch that adds a vibrant dynamic to the scene whether you consciously notice it or not.

Remarkably, Cagney wasn’t even nominated for his now-iconic work here. Not to begrudge those who were but did any one of these nominees carry off a moment even close to this?

Or this?

“White Heat” remains as powerful and entertaining sixty-years on because the goals of its creators are grounded in the modest, timeless idea of gathering together the most gifted of artists to tell the best story possible. That might sound like an old-fashioned concept among the sophisticates, but long after the intellectual fad of postmodernism joins the hula hoop and the lava lamp, Cody Jarrett will live on.