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The death of Christopher Hitchens hits like the 2008 death of Tim Russert. Both were men you really wanted to hear from during  a looming presidential election.

The word being tossed about in reference to the passing of Hitchens is “contrarian,” and that strikes me as a little unfair. Hitchens could be infuriating and even wrong, but there was nothing dishonest or insincere about the man. Though it’s not the perfect definition of contrarian, I don’t believe for a second that Hitchens ever once took a stand simply to be provocative or contrary.

Hitchens was a truth-teller. Whether it was the war in Iraq, Mother Teresa, or Bill Maher’s trained seal audience, Hitchens always told what he believed to be the truth.

It was never as simple as opinion with Hitchens. What he was for or against rose above opinion. Again, he wasn’t always right (especially when it came to Mother Teresa), but his arguments never failed to be so beautifully designed that even when he was wrong, you had to respect the fact that so much study and thought and reasoning went into them.

Hitchens was incapable of lying and of insincerity, which is more complicated than being a contrarian, and that’s why I both admired and respected him.

Besides his battle with cancer, during his final years, Hitchens became most famous for his atheism; going so far as to take the act on the road with a series of highly publicized and very engaging debates. There was something different about Hitchens’ atheism, though. His lack of belief wasn’t a pose,  but at the same time I always felt that his being so open and public and willing to engage on the subject said something more. It wasn’t so much that Hitchens was trying to prove believers wrong as much as he wanted believers to prove him wrong.

“Seek and you will find.”

In his own incomparable way, Hitchens did seek. And if he was wrong about the existence of God (and I believe and hope he was), I’m guessing that counted for something and that we haven’t heard the last from him.

New York Times:

Harry Morgan was born Harry Bratsburg on April 10, 1915, in Detroit. His parents were Norwegian immigrants. After graduating from Muskegon High School, where he played varsity football and was senior class president, he intended to become a lawyer, but debating classes in his pre-law major at the University of Chicago stimulated his interest in the theater. He made his professional acting debut in a summer stock production of “At Mrs. Beam’s” in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and his Broadway debut in 1937 in the original production of “Golden Boy,” starring Luther Adler, in a cast that also included Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb.

After moving to California in 1942, he was spotted by a talent scout in a Santa Barbara stock company’s production of William Saroyan’s one-act play “Hello Out There.” Signing a contract with 20th Century Fox, he originally used the screen name Henry Morgan, but changed Henry to Harry in the 1950s to avoid confusion with the radio and television humorist Henry Morgan.

Mr. Morgan attracted attention almost immediately. In “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943), which starred Henry Fonda, he was praised for his portrayal of a drifter caught up in a lynching in a Western town. Reviewing “A Bell for Adano” (1945), based on John Hersey’s novel about the Army in a liberated Italian town, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Morgan was “crude and amusing as the captain of M.P.’s.”

He went on to appear in “All My Sons” (1948), based on the Arthur Miller play, with Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster; “The Big Clock” (1948), in which he played a silent, menacing bodyguard to Charles Laughton; “Yellow Sky” (1949), with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter; and the critically praised western “High Noon” (1952), with Gary Cooper. Among his other notable films were “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956), with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford, and “Inherit the Wind” (1960), with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, in which he played a small-town Tennessee judge hearing arguments about evolution in the fictionalized version of the Scopes “monkey trial.” In “How the West Was Won” (1962), he played Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

After a personable performance as Glenn Miller’s pianist, Chummy MacGregor, in “The Glenn Miller Story” (1954), starring James Stewart, he often played softer characters as well as his trademark hard-bitten tough guys. There were eventually a number of comedies on his résumé, among them “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home” (1965), with Shirley MacLaine and Peter Ustinov; “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967), with George C. Scott; “Support Your Local Sheriff!” (1969), with James Garner and Walter Brennan; and “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (1975), a Disney movie with Tim Conway and Don Knotts.

He returned as Bill Gannon, by now promoted to captain, in the 1987 movie “Dragnet,” a comedy remake of the series starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks.

Mr. Morgan’s television credits were prodigious. He once estimated that in one show or another, he was seen in prime time for 35 straight years. Regarded as one of the busiest actors in the medium, he had continuing roles in at least 10 series, which, combined with his guest appearances, amounted to hundreds of episodes. He reprised the role of Sherman Potter in “AfterMASH” (1983-85), a short-lived spinoff.

Full obit here.

New York Times:

Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.

“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Full piece here.

Of course the passing of Dolores Hope is a sad occasion and our condolences go out to her loved ones. But there is some peace in knowing Bob won’t be all alone anymore and that he and his bride of 69 years are side by side once again.    

Washington Post

Dolores Hope, who throughout her 69-year marriage to comedian Bob Hope oversaw their charitable giving and played a key role in establishing the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., has died. She was 102.

Mrs. Hope died Sept. 19 at her home in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, publicist Harlan Boll said. No cause of death was reported.

In the late 1960s, the Hopes donated 80 acres of land near their future Palm Springs estate for the medical center, which opened in 1971. They became “the driving forces behind the creation and long-term growth” of the medical facility, the center said on its Web site.

She served as chairwoman of the center’s board for years, and he raised millions of dollars for the center through the annual golf tournament that used to bear his name and is now known as the Humana Challenge.

When her husband died in 2003 — two months after turning 100 — Dolores declined to estimate how many millions they had given or raised for charity. She did say most of it involved young people.

A great deal of their fortune came from vast property holdings in the San Fernando Valley. At Bob Hope’s death, their wealth had been estimated at as much as $500 million. Their multimillion-dollar Palm Springs estate was built in 1979.

On her 100th birthday in 2009, she attended a party in the back yard of the Toluca Lake home that she and her husband bought in 1938. At the event, daughter Linda Hope theorized that laughter in the family home contributed to her parents’ long lives.

Read the full piece here.

New York Times:

James Arness, who burnished the legend of America’s epic West as Marshal Matt Dillon, the laconic peacemaker of Dodge City on “Gunsmoke,” one of the longest-running dramatic series in television history, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.

A family spokeswoman, Ginny Fazer, confirmed the death. Mr. Arness was terribly shy and had almost no training as an actor. A wartime leg wound made it painful for him to mount a horse. But he became the best-known tin star of his era, portraying the towering, weathered marshal for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. He also made some 50 films and television movies, mostly westerns, in a career that stretched across five decades.

To a generation of television viewers, Mr. Arness and “Gunsmoke” embodied a new, more adult vision of the mythic Old West: a quiet, vulnerable lawman facing not stereotyped villains and clichéd situations but a chaotic frontier freighted with moral judgments and occasional failure. He might be too late to stop a killing. He could save a girl from kidnappers, but not from her father’s brutality.

Audiences had long been accustomed to Western heroes who never were, having been sanitized by the trail songs of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and the righteous gunplay of the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy. But Marshal Dillon never got the girl, did not love his horse, wore only one gun and fired it reluctantly, usually drawing last but shooting straightest in dusty street duels. Over the years, the marshal was shot 30 times.

Full article is here.

But I’m a “deep cut” kind of movie lover, someone who likes to see absolutely everything in the hopes of digging up a gem everyone else appears to have missed. The only thing I love more than my secret stash of  cinematic gems, is the sharing of them. And the beauty of Lumet is that he had a number of sleepers, chief among them one of my wife’s all-time favorites, A Stranger Among Us with Melanie Griffith. The film was written by our own Robert Avrech and not only ranks as a terrific murder mystery/urban thriller, but also a delicately crafted love letter to both human dignity and the Jewish faith. Beneath all the drama and mystery, you’ll find a life-affirming subtext and thematic drive that tenderly examines the big issues of  fidelity, faith, and loyalty in ways movies then, and especially now, simply don’t anymore. For this reason it stands out in Lumet’s work, which is both a credit to the director and my friend Robert.  

Here are some others worth seeking out if you haven’t already…

Garbo Talks (1984): One of Lumet’s few escapist films with a perfectly cast Ron Silver as a Manhattan worker bee who drops everything to fulfill his dying mother’s (a never better Anne Bancroft) wish to meet the elusive Greta Garbo.

Running On Empty (1988): A sleeper and near-masterpiece I ranked as #18 in my countdown of the Top 25 Greatest Left-Wing Films of All Time. 

Q & A 1990: A relentlessly brutal noir piece with an unforgettable central performance from Nick Nolte as a depraved police detective slowly spiraling out of violent control as a young district attorney (Timothy Hutton) attempts to bring him down. Armand Assante and Luis Guzman were never better in a couple of supporting roles that made me a lifelong fan of both.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007): The best compliment I can pay this unbelievably engrossing thriller (on of the best of that year) that stirs your guts with a stick, is that it plays like the kind of movie a first-time director would create to make his mark and take his place in the world of cinema. This is Lumet’s “Reservoir Dogs,” a young man’s film made by a then 83 year-old living legend with nothing to prove.

Sure, Lumet was a left-wing filmmaker, but he was so damned brilliant you didn’t notice and after you did, you simply didn’t care. My thanks to Mr. Lumet for the many, many, hours of pleasure he has brought — and thanks to DVD, will continue to bring into my life.

May he rest in peace.

I now turn you over to… The New York Times.

Though most famous for his two films with director Alfred Hitchcock, “Rope” and “Strangers on a Train,” I would nominate Granger’s performance in  Nicholas Ray’s terrific noir piece “They Live By Night“ as his best and Anthony Mann’s “Side Street” as the best film Granger did that not enough people have seen. 

Granger’s Hollywood career-high was, unfortunately, short-lived. Though it was his own decision to buy his way out of a contract with producer Sam Goldwyn in order to work on the stage, it’s hard to imagine that inner-tremble quality he brought to his best roles was as effective on the stage as it was on the screen.

Our loss.

The New York Times:

Elizabeth Taylor, the actress who dazzled generations of moviegoers with her stunning beauty and whose name was synonymous with Hollywood glamour, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 79.

The cause was congestive heart failure, her publicist, Sally Morrison, told The Associated Press.

In a world of flickering images, Ms. Taylor was a constant star. First appearing onscreen at age 9, she grew up there, never passing through an awkward age. It was one quick leap from “National Velvet” to “A Place in the Sun” and from there to “Cleopatra” as she was indelibly transformed from a vulnerable child actress into a voluptuous film queen.

In a career of more than 70 years and more than 50 films, she won two Academy Awards as best actress, for her performances as a call girl in “Butterfield 8” (in 1960) and as the acid-tongued Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (in 1966). Mike Nichols, who directed her in “Virginia Woolf,” said he considered her “one of the greatest cinema actresses.”

When Ms. Taylor was honored in 1986 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “More than anyone else I can think of, Elizabeth Taylor represents the complete movie phenomenon — what movies are as an art and an industry and what they have meant to those of us who have grown up watching them in the dark.”

Ms. Taylor’s popularity endured throughout her life, but critics were sometimes reserved in their praise of her acting. In that sense she may have been upstaged by her own striking beauty. Could anyone as lovely as Elizabeth Taylor also be talented? The answer, of course, was yes.

Given her lack of professional training, the range of her acting was surprisingly wide. She played predatory vixens and wounded victims. She was Cleopatra of the burnished barge; Tennessee Williams’s Maggie the cat; Catherine Holly, who confronted terror suddenly last summer, and Shakespeare’s Kate. Her melodramatic heroines would have been at home on soap operas.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who directed her in “Suddenly Last Summer” and “Cleopatra,” remembered seeing her for the first time, in Cannes, when she was 18. “She was the most incredible vision of loveliness I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “And she was sheer innocence.”

Read the full article here.

We lost a another irreplaceable legend yesterday and one of our own, an outspoken Republican — an independent-thinking feminist in the best sense of the word.  Here are some of my favorite Jane Russell quotes:

–”I have always been a Republican, and when I was in Hollywood long ago, most of the people there were Republican. The studio heads were all Republican, my boss Howard Hughes was a raving Republican, and we had a motion picture code in those days so they couldn`t do all this naughty stuff. We had John Wayne, we had Charlton Heston, we had man named Ronald Reagan, we had Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Clark Gable.”

–”These days I am a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist.”

–Asked what she thinks of Hollywood liberals George Clooney, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn: “I think they`re not well.”

–”I had a botched abortion and it was terrible. Afterwards my own doctor said, `What butcher did this to you?` I had to be taken to hospital. I was so ill I nearly died. I`ve never known pain like it.”

–”People should never, ever have an abortion. Don`t talk to me about it being a woman`s right to choose what she does with her own body. The choice is between life and death.”

–Asked why modern Hollywood is so liberal: “I think the Sixties have happened between when I was there and now. A lot of the actors and actresses, their parents were Sixties people and they just have a Democratic left wing – they flipped.”

–Asked about the apparent conflict between her faith and her image, Russell replied, “Christians have bosoms, too, you know.”

Russell starred most famously in “The Outlaw” (1943), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953),  and two terrific comedies with Bob Hope, “Paleface” (1948) and the even better sequel “Son of Paleface” (1952).  For my money, though, her best work can be seen in the two films she did with Robert Mitchum: 1951’s “His Kind of Woman” and 1952’s “Macao,” two of the truly outstanding noir films of the fifties that are just as hard-hitting today as when they were first produced. In fact, there are those who consider the former to be one the greatest noir films period. 

The chemistry and steam Mitchum and Russell generate is off the charts, the kind of starpower you just don’t see anymore. Thanks to DVD and Turner Classic Movies, both films are finally receiving more of the attention they deserve — and Russell’s good in them, very good. She didn’t think much of herself as an actress but she proved herself enough of a screen comedienne that no less than Bob Hope worked with her twice and she more than holds her own in a gritty black and white world convincingly playing the kind of woman capable of getting under Mitchum’s skin.

No small thing.

Jane Russell was 89.

Vanity Fair:

One of the biggest surprises in the book is that, in 1980, you had to convince interviewers you were not just following George’s direction. Obviously no one thinks that today. What was the biggest argument you and George had over a particular scene?

There was really only one disagreement. It was the Carbon Freeze scene when Princess Leia says, “I love you.” Han Solo’s response in the script was, “I love you, too.” I shot the line and it just didn’t seem right for the character of Han Solo. So we worked on the scene on the set. We kept trying different things and couldn’t get the right line. We were into the lunch break and I said to Harrison try it again and just do whatever comes to mind. That is when Harrison said the line, “I know.” After the take, I said to my assistant director, David Tomblin, “It’s a wrap.” David looked at me in disbelief and said something like, “Hold on, we just went to overtime. You’re not happy with that, are you?” And I said, yes, it’s the perfect Han Solo remark, and so we went to lunch. George saw the first cut and said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. That’s not the line in the script.” I said ““I love you, too’ was not Han Solo.” Han Solo was a rebel. George felt that the audience would laugh. And I said, that’s wonderful, he is probably going to his death for all they know. We sat in the room and he thought about it. He then asked me, “Did you shoot the line in the script?” I said yes. So we agreed that we would do two preview screenings once the film was cut and set to music with the line in and then with the line out. At the first preview in San Francisco, the house broke up after Han Solo said I know. When the film was over, people came up and said that is the most wonderful line and it worked. So George decided not to have the second screening.

George was the best producer I ever worked with. He left me alone and only came to England a few times. I told George at one point that I was behind schedule, not that it was anyone’s fault, but because it was so complex. Many of the special effects that were done on set often did not work at all. His answer was, “Keep doing what you are doing. Just keep shooting.” This was the greatest thing for a director to hear from a producer.

Much more here.