It Was 25 Years Ago Today: The End of The Houston Post

At around 10 am on April 18, 1995, one of my Houston Post editors called me at home while I was eating breakfast to break the bad news: The Post was shutting down, effective immediately, and we had until 5 pm to get all of our belongings out of the building.

It was a shock. But it wasn’t a surprise. 

Truth to tell, The Post had been on shaky financial ground long before the owners opted to pull the plug. And by the way: By “closing,” the owners were able to sell all their assets for a hefty sum to the Hearst Corporation, owners of the competing Houston Chronicle, allowing Hearst to avoid any inconvenient anti-monopoly regulations that might have kicked in had Hearst simply bought The Post. There were rumors that other companies had made offers to purchase our paper, and keep it afloat, but Hearst evidently dangled a bigger check than anyone else.

That the fourth largest city in the United States had suddenly become a one-newspaper town was really big news for, oh, I dunno, maybe 24 hours. The next day, however, the Oklahoma City bombing occurred — a much worse tragedy, I would readily agree — and people stopped paying attention. Nowadays, I suppose, the Post closing might have remained fodder for cable TV chat shows for a week or so. But that is now, this was then. I vividly remember being interviewed by a headhunter for an out-of-town paper — one of several that descended on Houston the day after the closing, to see who might be worth recruiting — in a Holiday Inn hotel room. The guy was polite, and seemed truly sympathetic. (He represented the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and I did wind up landing a few free-lancing gigs from that paper.) But throughout our conversation, it was obvious that while he had one eye trained on me, he had the other eye trained on a TV across the room that was telecasting live reports on the Oklahoma City horror.

For years afterward, I likened what happened to me 25 years ago today to being aboard a ship that had suddenly been shot out from under me. Instead of grasping for any debris that might keep me afloat, I lunged toward anything, anywhere, that might keep me, at least temporarily, solvent. The Post closed on a Tuesday. By the following Friday, I had a free-lance piece in the Houston Chronicle — an interview with director Nikita Mikhalkov, whose Oscar-winning Burnt By the Sun was the opening-night film that year for the WorldFest/Houston International Film Festival. The following Sunday, I was one of a small group of Post survivors who were interviewed on the morning news show aired by KPRC-TV, the NBC affiliate. When the show ended, I approached the producer and suggested that, hey, wouldn’t movie reviews be a swell addition to his program? The following Sunday, I was on the air.

And yes, I have no doubt that had there been podcasts then, I would have launched one of those, too.

To this day, I can tell you who called me within hours after news of the Post closing broke to offer condolences, job leads and/or, no kidding, office equipment. I can also tell you who returned my calls during the days and weeks afterward. And I can tell you who immediately stopped taking my calls.

Clint Eastwood had one of his people call me to promise that he’d make himself available for an interview to promote his next movie, and he didn’t really care when or even if I could sell it. (He made good on that promise, and I did sell the interview pegged to the release of The Bridges of Madison County.) Todd McCarthy, then my editor at Variety, called with a fistful of free-lance review assignments — I had been writing for The Showbiz Bible since 1990 — and a promise that the paper would cover my expenses for the next Sundance Film Festival. (Again: Promises made, promises kept.)  Saundra Saperstein of the Toronto Film Festival called to assure me that I would get my press credentials for that festival the following September, no matter what. 

It was during the 1995 Toronto Fest, incidentally, that (with a little help from fellow critic Jami Bernard) I did an interview with Denzel Washington (tied to Devil in a Blue Dress) for the New York Daily News. Not long afterwards, when my son George asked me how he was able to have such a swell 9^th birthday party even though daddy was, ahem, unemployed, I responded: “Uncle Denzel came through for us.” Years later, when I told Washington that story, he laughed heartily.

It helped a lot that, within days of the Post closing, Hunter Todd of WorldFest/Houston gave me an aging IBM PC that had been gathering dust at his headquarters. Up to that point, I had been getting by in my free-lance work for the better part of a decade with a Kaypro 2X. The upgrade increased my productivity immeasurably. (On the other hand: I still have 5-inch floppy discs of WordStar files from my Kaypro that I haven’t been able to access in a very long time.)

I worked so fast and furiously to assemble a patchwork of free-lance gigs, I didn’t have or make time to truly mourn the Post. The impact of what I had lost didn’t fully hit me until, while I was at the Toronto Fest, I got a call from my wife telling me she had gotten a call from the editor at a newspaper where I had been absolutely certain I would get my next film critic job. Except I didn’t. And somehow this shocked me even more than the closing of The Post.

Yes, that sounds impossibly arrogant. But consider: I started writing film reviews for professional publications in 1967, while I was still in high school, and continued while working in various capacities at The Clarion Herald in Jackson, Miss; The Shreveport Times; and The Dallas Morning News. When I landed my first (and, so far, last) full-time job as a film critic at The Post in 1982, I was truly in the right place at the right time. Editors under three different owners saw having a “celebrity” film critic as an asset to exploit while competing with the Chronicle. (At one point, God help me, I even starred in my own TV commercial.) So they encouraged me to attend as many junkets and film festivals as possible — it was not uncommon for me to attend Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, Cannes, Montreal, Toronto, and the Sarasota French Festival within the same 12-month period — review everything from Hollywood blockbusters to art-house obscurities, and accept every interview request from any TV or radio station.

Just how elevated was my profile? One year at Cannes, Bertrand Tavernier introduced me to friends as not merely a Houston film critic, but “the film critic of Texas.” After reading my review of Bugsy, Warren Beatty asked that I be invited to the Love Affair junket, where he granted me one of a very few one-on-one interviews. I had enjoyed similar exclusivity when I got to sit down with Francis Coppola and George Lucas for an hour at the Tucker: The Man and His Dream junket. Harvey Weinstein (yeah, I know) took me aside at a film festival to inform me that I ranked among the handful of critics working at the No. 2 papers in their markets to be considered, by a wide margin, more influential on local moviegoers than their competitors at larger papers.

Fortunately, Jeff Millar, then the film critic at the Chronicle, was… well, it might be unfair to describe him as burnt out on being a film critic. But he had other things on his plate — like authoring novels and writing the Tank McNamara comic strip — so he didn’t attend junkets or film festivals, and he really didn’t write as many reviews as I did. He was nice fellow and a true gentleman — he took me out to lunch the week after The Post closed — but I have often wondered if I would have achieved anywhere near the recognition I did had I been up against a 1980s version of, say, Justin Chang or Inkoo Kang.

Anyway: I got the call in Toronto, and that’s when it hit me: The Post was really, truly gone, and I probably would never again have it as good as I did there. So I lay down on the couch in the living room of the friends with whom I was staying — friends who, fortunately, were not at home at the time — and starting crying. For a long time. And then I got up, wiped my eyes, and headed out to the next screening.

Things weren’t too bad for a while. It was a Wild West period on the Internet in the mid-1990s, and some newly established websites paid astonishingly huge sums for free-lance pieces. (For the better part of a year, I was paid $1,000 for every interview I wrote for MSNBC.com; today, I would be fortunate to earn a tenth of that sum for the same product.) It didn’t take long, unfortunately, for editors to realize how many younger, hungrier free-lancers would work a lot cheaper than veterans in their 30s and 40s (or older). I got a gig writing for the weekly Houston Press that lasted about a year, until the people running the chain that owned it started using the same critics in all their alt-weeklies. The KPRC-TV job actually expanded for a while — I did interviews (many now available on You Tube) and interviews on both the Saturday and Sunday morning shows — but ended in 1999. The same year my wife and I filed for bankruptcy.

(Thank God she remained gainfully employed the whole time I was between jobs — and was able to keep me on her health insurance plan. If she had not been there, I would not be here.) 

And since then? Well, I must confess: When a dear friend introduced me to Coldplay in 2008, and I heard the lyrics, “Now I sweep the streets I used to own,” the shock of recognition was more than a little discomforting. But then as now, I press on.

Truly, I have no reason to complain. I started teaching at the university level in 2001, a job I enjoyed so much that I went back and earned an MA degree so I’d be qualified to teach even more. (I’m still an adjunct, not a full-timer, but that’s the way it goes.) I still write free-lance reviews for Variety — I will celebrate a much happier anniversary, my 30th, with that paper next month — and I’ve been fortunate to discover some fresh talents over the years. Indeed, I am often reminded just how important a Variety review, by me or anyone else, can be. (I once got an email from a cinematographer who thanked me because, after I singled out his work on an indie film, he finally was able to land an agent.) And since 2006, I have held posts as contributing editor and senior writer for Cowboys & Indians magazine, which has put me in contact with many movie and music notables I admire. 

Looking back, I can see that I was a kinda-sorta canary in the coal mine when The Post closed in 1995. Many other newspapers have closed since then; many more no longer employ full-time film critics. I foolishly assumed that I would just leap into another film reviewing gig shortly after the shuttering of the Post. Even now, I remember what a friend and fellow journalist told me at the time: “They’ll be kissing your sneakers to hire you.” Every so often, I remind her of that statement, and we both have a good chuckle.

What neither of us could have foreseen, of course, is the paradigm shift that led to the drastic reduction of print film critics, and the massive increase of online film critics. For years, I continued to apply for film critic positions that sporadically opened up until… Well, I’m embarrassed to say just how long I kept sending out messages in bottles. But I do remember the day when I heard about a job, felt momentarily excited — and then told myself, “No, that time has passed. And you ain’t ever going to play Hamlet, either.”

Of course, to be brutally honest, it’s entirely possible that I was never as good as my friend thought, or I hoped, and that’s why I never landed another full-time gig. But even if that’s true, hey, I haven’t done too badly for a mediocrity, have I? Call me the Bob Uecker of film critics, and you won’t be far off the mark.

This probably is the last time I will mark the anniversary of the Post closing with any post this long-winded and self-aggrandizing. After all, I am not entirely bereft of shame. Still, I am a melancholy frame of mind right now that has little or nothing to do with the current COVID-19 pandemic. Well, actually, there is some connection: Because of the drastic cutback in advertising for newspapers and websites that can be traced to the pandemic and the accompanying lockdown, I know a lot of my younger colleagues (and a few older ones) currently find themselves in the same position I was 25 years ago today. As bad as I had it then, I fear it may be worse, much worse, for them. 

To the newly unemployed, I can only offer my condolences because, literally, I can feel your pain. I wish I could be more encouraging. But trust me: You’ll be much better off if you don’t expect anyone to kiss your sneakers anytime soon.

Rewind: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

As we muddle through the current lockdown, Doug Harris, president of the Houston Film Critics Society, has been lifting his and other people’s spirits by hanging on his balcony banners emblazoned with quotes from classic movies. He’s also been encouraging fellow HFCS members to post reviews of spirit-lifting movies available for streaming. Therefore, suitably inspired by my favorite currently sitting president: Here is my original 1989 review of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Totally, just as it appeared back in the day in The Houston Post.

How far can a comedy get on a single joke? Just about 90 minutes, judging from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, an exuberantly goofy farce sprinkled with moments of inspired silliness.

The plot is simple, if not simplistic: Two chuckleheaded teen-agers, Bill and Ted, are given a magical telephone booth that allows them to travel back and forth in time. The gift arrives at a fortuitous moment — the boys are in danger of flunking a history class, and they need some impressive exhibits to ace their final exam. So off to the past they go, to corral Napoleon, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid and assorted other “personages of historical significance.”

Scriptwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon obviously are fans of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and fondly recall the scene where an awesomely stoned surfer (played by Sean Penn) took a make-up test in American history. Bill & Ted offers two Valley Guy students instead of one, and allows them unrestricted use of an amusingly polysyllabic vocabulary: “Ted, it’s pointless to have a triumphant video until we have decent instruments!” “We are about to fail most egregiously, Bill!”

Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are the heroes of the piece, would-be rock musicians who react with amazing sang-froid when a futuristic visitor (George Carlin) makes the past available to them. Occasionally, the boys are slightly rattled by what they encounter in their time-travels. (“Whoa! Check it out! We're in the middle of a war, dude!”) More often, though, Bill and Ted are highly entertained, if not noticeably educated, by their first-hand research.

Under the energetic direction of Stephen Herek (Critters), Bill & Ted gets by on high spirits even when its invention flags. There is a very funny sequence that places the “historical personages” in a shopping mall — Joan of Arc joins an aerobics class, Beethoven tickles the ivories at a music store, Billy the Kid and Socrates try to pick up girls. The finale, staged very much like a heavy metal concert, is guaranteed to please the party animals in the audience when Bill & Ted makes its inevitable debut on the midnight movie circuit.

To be sure, there are a few slow stretches where time is marked and patience is tested. Overall, though, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is an exceedingly pleasant surprise. And the best moments are those where our heroes try to interpret history in their own terms. Socrates, they figure, lived in ancient Athens, “when most of the world looked like the cover of the Led Zeppelin album, Houses of the Holy.”

Like, totally visionary, dude.

Farewell to A Man Obsessed: Brain Dennehy

I once joked with Brian Dennehy that we had him to blame for the whole Rambo franchise. After all, if his small-town lawman hadn’t pushed Sylvester Stallone’s troubled Vietnam vet to the brink during the original First Blood (1982), John Rambo wouldn’t have gone on the rampage in the first place.

“Yeah,” Dennehy responded with a wolfish grin, “they’ll probably wind up putting that on my tombstone: ‘He Pushed John Rambo Too Far!’”

But, then again, maybe not. By the time of his passing Wednesday evening at age 81 — a good 30 years after we shared that exchange at the New York press junket for Presumed Innocent — Dennehy had amassed an amazing number of impressively diverse stage and screen credits, most of them dutifully noted in my Variety colleague Carmel Dagan’s obituary tribute. To put it simple and gratefully: He was too prolific and prodigious to ever be name-checked for a single role.  

The first time I spoke with the late, great actor was at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, shortly after the world premiere of Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect. I am posting this interview, which originally appeared in a slightly different form in The Houston Post several weeks before that movie’s U.S. release, not because of his extraordinary performance in that drama, but rather because of what Dennehy revealed about what acting meant to him. I’d be willing to bet he always had that same fire burning inside him.

Brian Dennehy, character actor extraordinaire, currently can be seen as a part-time author and full-time cop in Best Seller, an offbeat thriller in which he co-stars with his friend James Woods. Next year, he’ll be seen in The Return of the Man from Snowy River, in a role Kirk Douglas played in the first Snowy River adventure. “Kirk’s cleft fell out,” Dennehy jokes in his

typically gregarious fashion, “and they had to replace it. So I’m filling in for him.”

But during interviews at film festivals in Cannes and Toronto this year, Dennehy spent most of his time talking about a far more esoteric project: The Belly of an Architect, Peter Greenaway’s bizarrely stylized drama about a middle-aged American architect who loses his dignity, his sense of purpose and his much younger wife while overseeing an exhibition in Rome.

Dennehy stars in the film, which will be released later this year, as Stourley Kracklite, the architect who comes to question the value of everything, and everyone, he has held dear. It’s a character Dennehy could identify with very easily.

“When I read this script a year and a half ago,” he told me at Cannes, “I was going through a period — which I'm still going through, to a certain extent — of trying to deal with the fact of being 48, of having achieved a certain success, a certain celebrity. And having to come to terms with the fact, which everyone has to come to terms with, that's it's all bullshit. It doesn’t really mean anything.

“In other words, you spend 20 years of your life saying, ‘If I ever get to this place, if I ever get what I want, I'll be happy. All the mysteries of the world will be solved, and I will know what’s right.’ Well, you get that. And then you say to yourself, ‘You know something? The mysteries are not all solved. And I’m not particularly happy. And it really doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference that you get what you want.’”

Not that Brian Dennehy is a bitter man. Not at all. He ppreciates the respect and acclaim he has earned in such high-profile supporting roles as the friendly alien in Cocoon, the cheerfully corrupt sheriff in Silverado, and the hard-charging New York cop in F/X. And he is extremely grateful to director Peter Greenaway for casting him in Architect, the first movie where he has received top billing.

But for Dennehy, there's something more important than the billing, the good reviews and the public recognition. For him, the most important thing is simply acting.

“The first thing I noticed about Kracklite is, Kracklite is a man who is obsessed. And I am obsessed — I am obsessed with acting. I'm obsessed with what I do. And I have come to terms with that. There was a time, four or five years ago, when people would say to me, ‘You’ve got to find something else. Get yourself a nice girlfriend, get on your sailboat and sail away, find something else. You can’t just care about this one thing.’ But eventually, I got to the point where I figured, ‘This is the only thing I care about. This is the only thing that interests me. Yes, I am obsessed with it.’

“If you're really lucky, after going to a psychiatrist three times a week for 20 years, the psychiatrist says, ‘You're not changed, but now you know what you are, you know how you are. And you can live with that.’ Well, that’s the way I feel.”

Rewind: Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Throughout the final quarter-century of her life, in countless feature films, TV dramas and talk-show appearances, Bette Davis (1908-89) went out of her way to sustain a self-satirizing image as a bug-eyed, raspy-voiced, age-ravaged eccentric. For movie buffs who came of age in the wake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the career-reviving gothic-camp extravaganza that permanently recast her as a cantankerous harpy, it may sometimes come as a shock to be reminded of the unconventionally beautiful and uniquely charismatic superstar that Davis was in her prime.

Fortunately, film is a medium that ensures even the dearly departed are always in the present tense, at their very best. In Dark Victory, the must-see 1939 tearjerker directed by Edmond Goulding (Grand Hotel), Davis continues to delight and dazzle in a role that she ranked among her favorites. And despite the passing of years — not to mention the abundance of remakes, rip-offs and spot-on parodies — the movie itself still packs a potent emotional wallop.

Davis earned her third Academy Award nomination for her cunningly dynamic portrayal of Judith Traherne, a fast-living, hard-drinking Long Island socialite who lives her life as one long New Year's Eve party until she realizes her occasional dizzy spells and blurred vision can’t be blamed on hangovers. Dedicated surgeon Frederick Steele (George Brent) — who, not surprisingly, falls in love with Judith – identifies her malady as a brain tumor. But, of course, the audience knows better: Judith has Old Movie Disease, a humbling affliction that strikes only carefree and capricious leading ladies. Victims become progressively more beautiful, and increasingly less self-absorbed, as they stoically approach a peaceful quietus. (Sporadic spasms of kookiness are common symptoms.) 

For no very good reason, her doctor and her best friend (Geraldine Fitzgerald) opt to keep Judith blissfully ignorant of her death sentence. When she inadvertently learns the truth, she turns against her confidants, and resumes her wastrel ways with bad influences. (Chief among the latter: a pre-Presidential Ronald Reagan, who’s unsettlingly convincing as a party-hearty libertine.) Ultimately, however, Judith decides to spend her final months as a supportive wife for Frederick. During the profoundly affecting final scenes, she refuses to tell him of her abruptly fading eyesight – the telltale sign, alas, of a rapidly approaching demise. Instead, she sends him off to an important medical conference, so she can die alone — to the accompaniment of Max Steiner's heart-wrenching musical score — in bed.

Dark Victory is a textbook example of the glossy Hollywood product that rolled off dream factory assembly lines during the heyday of the studio era. And like most similar product – especially the brand produced by Warner Bros. – it features a strong supporting cast of contract players. Brent, an actor best remembered for providing handsome window dressing in movies built around remarkable leading ladies, is impeccably noble as Frederick. Fitzgerald makes the most of a largely thankless part, while Reagan is amusingly lightweight as Alec, a feckless fellow who spends most of the movie in various stages of inebriation. And third-billed Humphrey Bogart struggles manfully with an on-again, off-again Irish accent as Michael O’Leary, a virile horse trainer who’d like to corral Judith.

The main attraction, though, is Bette Davis. Whether Judith is gliding coquettishly through a country-club gathering, or bravely comforting a weepy buddy before striding off to her solitary destiny, Davis demonstrates just what being a gloriously larger-than-life movie icon is all about. An under-rated element of her timeless appeal: She’s not afraid to appear infuriatingly selfish, if not aggressively unlikable, when a scene calls for potentially off-putting extremes. That alone is sufficient to set her far apart from most image-conscious stars of any era. If they don't make movies like Dark Victory anymore, maybe it’s because there’s no one like Davis — this Davis, the luminous immortal of 1939 — to star in them.

And by the way: Never argue with a star who has a sharp eye for spiffy vehicles. Bette Davis saw Dark Victory on the stage, and pressed mogul Jack L. Warner to buy screen rights for her. Warner reluctantly agreed, even though he famously groused: “Who wants to see a dame go blind?”

Some random thoughts about Robert Duvall, Horton Foote, Tender Mercies and COVID-19

Today I received an advance copy of the May/June Cowboys & Indians magazine featuring my cover-story interview with Robert Duvall. And I must admit: When I opened the FedEx envelope, I felt at once extremely happy and unspeakably melancholy.

I felt happy, of course, because I always enjoy interviewing Robert Duvall — and not just because he always insists on my calling him “Bobby.” (Which I do, even though I cannot help thinking: “I am not worthy! I am not worthy!”) And seeing the cover reminded me of our most recent conversation, when we talked about everything from his plans to attend the Western Heritage Awards celebration at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City — where he was slated to receive a lifetime achievement honor — to his experiences working with director Steve McQueen on 2018’s Widows. (“He’s a terrific director — one of the best I've ever worked with! I love working with that guy!”)

But I also felt sad when I remembered that we’d had that conversation before the full fury of COVID-19 began to be felt in this country — and, indeed, before the Western Heritage Awards had to be cancelled because, as long as we’re stuck in this Brave New World of The New Normal, such events are being postponed indefinitely, if not cancelled altogether.

So my mind started to wander. And I couldn’t help thinking of something I wrote about my favorite Robert Duvall movie of all time — Tender Mercies, the 1983 drama that earned Academy Awards for Duvall’s lead performance and Horton Foote’s original screenplay — just three years before Foote’s death in 2009.

“Several years ago, a colleague at the now-defunct Houston Post wrote a story about movies that some people – celebrities, mostly – like to watch over and over and over again on videocassette. (Hey, I told you this was several years ago.) When he ran out of really well-known folks to interview, he collared me in the newsroom and asked: ‘What movie do you watch repeatedly?’ And so I told him: ‘There’s something about Tender Mercies that deeply and profoundly affects me on so many levels that, yes, I’m addicted to watching it. Whenever I get depressed, I want to pop the tape into the VCR, and hear Robert Duvall say: “I don’t trust happiness. I never did, and I never did, never will.” God, I know exactly how he feels.’

“Flash-forward a few weeks: I am at Houston’s Stages Theatre for the opening night performance of Talking Pictures, a play by the great Horton Foote, the Oscar-winning scriptwriter of Tender Mercies (and To Kill a Mockingbird). There’s a post-performance party, and I’m off in a corner, munching on fried chicken I obtained from the bountiful buffet, when I spot Foote — who I’ve met maybe once or twice before that evening —across a crowded room. I nod, give him a thumb’s up — the play actually was quite good, and deserves to be revived — and go back to eating. Much to my surprise, however, Foote cuts short a conversation he’s having with someone, walks across the crowded room, makes his way over to me and, without a hint of irony, says: ‘Oh, Joe, I’m so sorry you get depressed…’”

To this day, I cannot understand why I didn’t break down crying right on the spot.

Masterfully directed by Bruce Beresford, Tender Mercies is a spare, subtle film that speaks in a quiet yet compelling voice about faith and despair, regret and redemption, lower depths and second chances, while considering the restorative potential of human and divine love. Duvall is absolutely heart-wrenching in his portrayal of Mac Sledge, a down-and-out country singer who’s redeemed by the love a good woman (Tess Harper), then pushed back to the brink by a devastating tragedy.

But as much as I admire his performance, and the movie that contains it, I’m not sure I can watch Tender Mercies again anytime soon. (And I am pretty damn certain I can't watch 1918, the 1985 film version of Foote's play that deals in part with the Spanish Flu epidemic.) Because, really, it’s no longer a matter of not trusting happiness. Rather, it’s a question of: When are we going to be happy, really happy, again?

Turner Classic Movies Pays 100th Birthday Tribute to Toshiro Mifune

No, it’s not an April Fool: Turner Classic Movies really is celebrating the centennial of Toshiro Mifune’s birth Wednesday with an all-day, all-night marathon of the iconic Japanese actor’s collaborations with the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. There are ten titles in total — I wish they’d had room for The Bad Sleep Well, but let’s not be greedy — and here is a guide to my five favorites in the lineup.

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1959) — At once a straight-faced spectacle and a mischievously sly put-on, The Hidden Fortress follows a fugitive princess (Misa Uehara) and her loyal general (Toshiro Mifune) as they maneuver through enemy territory during the civil wars of the 1500s. Skillfully employing wide-screen compositions for the first time in his career, Kurosawa alternates between elaborate set pieces — a slave revolt, chases on horseback, fire-festival celebrations, hairbreadth escapes —and broadly played comic relief. Much of the latter is provided by two bickering bumpkins (Minoru Chiaki, Kamatari Fujiwara) who go along for the ride without knowing the princess’ true identity — and who  greedily plot to steal the gold hidden among the firewood transported by the general.

George Lucas has made no secret of  his drawing upon Hidden Fortress as an inspiration for Star Wars. The bumpkins, of course, are precursors of R2D2 and C3PO, just as the headstrong heroine — who looks like a rough draft for Lara Croft of  Tomb Raider fame — is the model for the feisty Princess Leia. (It requires a bit of stretch to see Mifune’s general as Han Solo, but never mind.) Lucas learned some important lessons from the master, enabling him to create his own masterwork. But as critic David Ehrenstein has reminds movie buffs in home-video liner notes, Hidden Fortress stands on its own merits as a rousing adventure set “a long time ago’ in a land “far, far away.” (10 am ET/9 am CT)

HIGH AND LOW (1963) — After finding inspiration in the classics of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, Kurosawa turned to a decidedly more contemporary source: King’s Ransom, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct thriller about the kidnapping of a Manhattan businessman’s young son. With the aid of three co-screenwriters, Kurosawa transferred the story to Japan, and infused it with his vision of a modern society undermined by the erosion of traditional values. But even while the film can be appreciated as an absorbing morality play, High and Low also can be enjoyed as a first-rate, noir-flavored police procedural.

The astoundingly versatile Toshiro Mifune is Kingo Gondo, a lordly shoe-company executive who mortgages everything he owns to launch a hostile takeover of his own firm. Pride, not greed, his motive — he’s  determined to defeat rival board members who want to produce cheaper shoes for higher profits. But before he can complete his risky stock deal, Gondo gets a call from a stranger who claims he has kidnapped the businessman’s only son. The good news: The kidnapper mistakenly abducted the son of Gondo’s chauffeur. The bad news: He demands a 30-million-yen ransom anyway. “You're a fool to pay,” he cruelly taunts the bound-by-honor Gondo. “But you will.” And he’s right.

Kurosawa skillfully intensifies the tension inside Gondo’s lavishly-appointed mansion by evoking a sense of claustrophobia. Some individual widescreen shots are framed so that even while other characters — policemen, the anxious chauffeur, Gondo’s loyal wife — circle the businessman, he remains apart in the terrible isolation of his moral dilemma. When Gondo finally leaves his home to deliver the ransom, the movie switches gears to become a visually eloquent and dramatically gripping account of the manhunt for the kidnapper, an embittered medical student who views his crime as fair play in class warfare. Ginji Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), the villain of the piece, remains a baffling enigma until his climactic confrontation with Gondo. Takeuchi made a conscious decision to commit evil, he tells the businessman he has bankrupted, because he felt he already was living in hell. In the end, nothing — not his eminent execution — terrifies him as much as the possibility that he was mistaken. (5:30 pm ET/4:30 pm CT)

SEVEN SAMURAI (1956) — Kurosawa’s stunning epic is one of those rare indispensable films that practically everyone has heard about, regardless of whether they've actually seen it.  Indeed, even if you haven't, you may think you've seen it, given its strong influence on so many other films and filmmakers. Directors ranging from John Sturges (who remade it as The Magnificent Seven) to John Sayles (who borrowed the basic plot while writing a cult-fave Roger Corman B-movie called Battle Beyond the Stars) have drawn from this tale of honor among warriors in 16th-century Japan.

By turns sage and savage, avuncular and authoritarian, Takashi Shimura is Kambei, an unemployed samurai who agrees to help peasants defend their village against marauding bandits. Even though the pay is meager — a few handfuls of rice — Kambei is able to recruit other hired swords who have little else to do after being cast adrift by the lords they once served. By appealing to their pride and sense of justice, he attracts such tough customers as Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi), a taciturn professional who never wastes a word or gesture, and Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a bearish hot-head who takes great pains to hide his less-than-noble ancestry.

Seven Samurai shows Kurosawa at the top of his form, demonstrating an absolute mastery of his medium with an inspired balance of formal precision and kinetic exuberance. His epic opens with fast pans of bandits riding over hills, and climaxes with the chaos of a rain-soaked, mud-and-blood battle. In between, there is scarcely a single shot that does not contain motion. Even when people within the frame are stationary, the camera itself glides, thrusts and recoils. More than a half-century years after its initial release, Seven Samurai makes most other action movies seem positively pokey. (8 pm ET/7 pm CT)

RASHOMON (1950) — A bandit subdues a nobleman in a secluded woodland, and forces himself on the nobleman's beautiful wife. The nobleman dies, the wife flees, the bandit is captured -- and everything else in Rashomon remains open to conjecture. Decades before The Usual Suspects warned moviegoers not to accept subjective testimony as verifiable fact, Kurosawa’s breakthrough masterpiece suggested that no eyewitness can be entirely trusted, that truth itself may be forever elusive.

Four different accounts of the crime — including one offered by the late nobleman through a court-ordered medium — are considered by three strangers stranded under the Rashomon gate by a raging thunderstorm. Was the nobleman truly a man of honor?  Is his wife an innocent victim or a guilty participant? Could the bandit (Toshiro Mifune at his most swaggeringly uninhibited) be twisting the truth for a selfless reason? The possibilities are perplexing. Each testimony is dramatized in flashback, and none seems more credible than the others.  Indeed, Kurosawa strongly hints that all four stories are, to varying degrees, deceptions born of self-delusion. “Human beings,” he wrote in his memoir, “are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves.”

Rashomon has spawned many imitators, including director Martin Ritt’s 1964 Americanized remake, The Outrage, a Western with Paul Newman filling in for Mifune as a Mexican outlaw. But Kurosawa’s film continues to be paradigm for this sort of  beguilingly simple but provocatively complex drama. Even now, the title is used to describe anything from Senate hearings to Seinfeld episodes in which a story is told from multiple — and often contradictory — points of view. (11:45 pm ET/10:45 pm CT)

YOJIMBO (1961) — The steely-eyed stranger rides into a lawless town where bad men rule, loyalty is bought and sold, and the coffin-maker never sleeps. With equal measures of ruthless cunning and lethal proficiency, he cuts a bloody swath through the corruption. In the end, as he prepares to ride off to another adventure, he takes a moment to appreciate his handiwork: “Now it will be quiet in this town.” No kidding: Thanks to the stranger, just about everyone who once lived there is dead.

Yojimbo, Kurosawa's darkly comical Samurai Western, takes the hard-boiled premise of Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest — a tarnished hero encourages two rival gangs to destroy each other — and outfits it with the trappings of traditionally Japanese jidai-geki. But there is nothing traditional about the cynical tone or the sardonic humor of this gleefully savage self-parody.  Sanjuro, the sword-slinging anti-hero played by Toshiro Mifune, is prepared for the worst upon his arrival, when he sees a stray dog trotting down the dusty street with a human hand in its mouth. Later, after he temporarily signs on as a yojimbo (bodyguard) for one of the town’s two warring clan leaders, he overhears the leader’s shrewish wife urging her feckless son to kill Sanjuro: “Do it from behind, and it’ll be quite easy enough!” When Sanjuro finally gets around to pitting one clan against the other, he isn’t motivated by moral outrage. Rather, he simply delights in exploiting the villainy of lesser men to produce an amusing spectacle. The one time Sanjuro performs a selfless act — he reunites an enslaved woman with her husband and young son — he pays dearly for generosity.

Yojimbo has been remade twice, with Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars) and Bruce Willis (Last Man Standing) filling in for Mifune as the impassive protagonist. But even though each of the recyclings has something to recommend, the original remains in a class by itself as an exuberantly misanthropic masterpiece. And by the way: Yes, this is the movie that Kevin Costner takes Whitney Houston to see in 1992’s The Bodyguard. (1:30 am ET/12:30 pm CT)

On the Radio: Movie and TV Tips for the Housebound

The folks at KUHF-FM’s Houston Matters invited me today to phone in a few suggestions for movies and television shows to watch during The Great Shutdown. Host Michael Hagerty and I covered a lot of ground in a short period as we discussed, among other things, the joys of binging on the Rocky and Fast and Furious franchises; watching some of the Westerns I’ve been recommending on the Cowboys &Indians Magazine website; setting up your own compare-and-contrast double bills (like Rear Window and Number 37); using social media for virtual group viewings of everything from Airplane! to Citizen Kane; and tracking down obscure TV series — like Raines, the short-lived, intriguingly quirky cop show starring Jeff Goldblum (pictured above) — on Amazon Prime and NBC.com.


And yes, we did mention, briefly, Contagion and Outbreak — and recalled a scene from the latter film that was spooky even before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Here's the audio. 

Live on Tape: Roger Corman and Me at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Talking with Roger Corman about Edgar Allan Poe, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, taking "a nice trip," and missing the chance to direct Orson Welles. (Of course, I look so huge here, he must have thought his dream finally came true.) The last time I had so much fun, I was interviewing Corman at the Bahamas International Film Festival for Variety.

Coming soon to Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra: Tread, a strange and extraordinary documentary.

When I was asked by my Variety editor to contribute a blurb about one of the best films I saw at SXSW 2019, I had this to say about Tread:

“Paul Solet’s remarkably absorbing and suspenseful documentary plays like the flip side of some 1970s rural revenge movie — think Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever, or Jonathan Demme’s Fighting Mad — in which a besieged protagonist turns the tools of his trade into weaponry while battling oppressors. But Marvin Heemeyer, the vindictive welder at the heart of this true-life drama, gradually comes into focus as a delusional sociopath, not a plucky underdog, as he uses a steel-and-concrete-armored bulldozer to cause damage and settle scores in a Colorado mountain town during a 2004 rampage.”

It will be my privilege to introduce the Houston premire of Tread at 7:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra. But wait, there’s more: After the film, director Paul Solet will join us via Skype for a Q&A.

Check out my full Variety review, check out the trailer -- and then check out the movie.

F9 -- They're still fast! They're still furious! And they're coming back May 22!

“No matter how fast you run,” chrome-domed Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) says at one point in this super-amped trailer for F9, “no one outruns their past.” Maybe so. But really, these guys don’t even appear to be trying very hard, right?

Not that I’m complaining, you understand. I’ve seen all the other flicks in the Fast and Furious franchise. So I’m sure I’ll be in line when the latest one opens May 22.