"Nuremberg"

 

"Nuremberg" is a movie that certainly can be classified as an "Oscar-bait" movie.  It is being released at the end of the year when the studios release their big gun films, it is about a serious and important subject, it has big stars in the lead roles and it gives each of them large swatches of dialog that they deliver in ways that only Big Stars can, and this is the important part, the movie delivers in every way.

On the day that the war in Europe ends, Allied soldiers stop a chauffeur driven car bearing a Nazi flag.  Its passengers:  Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the highest ranking Nazi official still alive and his family.  Upon his surrender, Goering calmly asks his captors to please get his luggage for him.   That is the first glimpse we get into the personality of Goering.

What follows is the story of a US Army psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek, who is assigned to examine the captured Nazis as an international tribunal comprised of the Allied powers prepares to try them before the world during the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany.  The movie focuses on the relationship and the cat-and-mouse game that develops between Kelley and Goering, played brilliantly by Russell Crowe.  

The movie is filled with great performances by a number of other actors besides Crowe and Malek.   Foremost among them is Michael Shannon, playing US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who proposed that such war crimes trials be held, despite the fact that there was no legal precedent for them and huge questions about under whose jurisdiction the trails should take place.  He was terrific in this role.

The role of the US Army officer who is in charge of the prison in which the defendants are held is played by John Slattery, best known, to me at least, as the guy who played Roger Sterling in "Mad Men", and who always delivered the best lines of dialog in that series.  I couldn't help but see, and hear, "Roger Sterling" as he delivered his lines, particularly his farewell line to Kelley near the conclusion of the movie.  I loved it.

While the subject matter of the film is a hard and a gruesome one, the movie essentially becomes a courtroom drama and a character study between its two main players, Crowe as Goering and Malek as Kelley.  Be warned, though, that at one point during the trial, we are shown films taken by Allied troops as they liberated the Nazi concentration camps.  These films are brutal, horrible, and difficult  to watch, as they show man's inhumanity to man at its absolute worst.  Which is exactly why the world needs to see them and constantly be reminded of what happened, and know that it must be prevented from ever happening again because there exists in mankind people who can cause it to happen again.  This is the point that the prosecutors were making at the time of the trials, and largely speaking, that the filmmakers are making to the audiences of today.

Crowe, Shannon, Malek

I expect that there will be many Oscar nominations for this one.  Picture, Director (James Vanderbilt), and a Best Actor nomination for Crowe for certain and possibly Malek.  I would also be disappointed if Shannon did not receive a Supporting Actor nomination.

The Grandstander gives this movie the full Four Star rating.

An aside about my attendance yesterday,  While visiting the rest room after the movie, a guy in there, who also was at the showing, asked what I thought.  We both said that it was good movie with a powerful message, but then he said this:  "Yeah, it was good, but you wonder how much of it was true and how much was made up."  I wanted to scream.

Aside Number Two.  The 1961 movie "Judgement at Nuremberg" dealt with these same topics and was probably a better movie this one.  It was filled with great performances by stars like Spencer Tracey, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and Maximilian Schell, who won and Oscar for his performance.  Seeing "Nuremberg" yesterday is prompting me to watch this one once again.  If you have never seen it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

For Your Reading Pleasure...

Some books that I have recently read......

In 1870, engineer and inventor Alfred Ely Beach dug out a tunnel under a couple of blocks beneath Broadway, installed a passenger car that would take people from Point A to Point B in New York City via a pneumatic tube, and thus was born the city's first subway.  The amazing thing is that Beach was able to do this in secret!

How he pulled this off is the story that my friend Matthew Algeo tells in his latest book, "New York's Secret Subway".  It is a story of New York at a certain time in history. A city with streets clogged with people, horse drawn "omni-buses" and carriages for hire, horse shit, and sometimes even dead horses.  A city wherein it took hours to travel short distances, distances that could be traversed in minutes if a transit system such as the one Beach was proposing - and building - was put in place.

A sure thing, right?  Well, not exactly because what stood in the way of Beach, and a few other visionaries like him, were a lot of special interests, like the horse carriage trade that might be put out of business, retailers who relied on foot traffic on Broadway, and lots of crooked politicians looking to get their palms greased.  In other words, life in 1870 was a lot like life in 2025, which is one of the points that Algeo makes in this book.

In addition to Beach, the narrative in this book revolves around NYC politician and power broker William "Boss" Tweed, who you may have learned about in your high school American History classes.  Another guy is someone about whom I had never heard, Alexander T. Stewart, a retailer who might have been one of the richest people in America at the time, and who would stop at nothing to make sure that there would NEVER be anything put in place that would cause people to be taken off of the sidewalks and thus be unable to walk past his storefronts.

It is an interesting book about a subject that I knew nothing about, and Algeo tells it in a breezy and oft times humorous manner.  Like his books on Harry Truman, Grover Cleveland, Robert Kennedy (the good one; not the current one), the sport of pedestrianism, the war time Steagles, and Abe Lincoln's pet dog you learn not only about the specific subject, Beach's secret subway, but other collateral issues, like how burgeoning populations that caused people to move further out from city areas created a need for what we now call mass transit, and of course how the wheels needed to be greased with the politicians in order to get anything  accomplished.  I even learned something about one of my former employers, the Equitable Life Assurance Society, in this one.

The Grandstander gives Three Stars to this one, which, I hope will put a smile on the author's face like the one below.

Matthew Algeo and his latest

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If you are a movie buff or a fan of the 1950 classic movie, "Sunset Boulevard", or both, then here is a book for you. As the sub-title suggests, this is an in-depth study of the "behind the scenes" stuff that went into the making of that terrific movie, which celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2025.

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you might, but most likely don't, remember that I wrote of a similar book way back in 2012.  This one was a lot better than that one.  My only quibble on this book is that it is written in an almost scholarly fashion, something like a doctoral thesis in film Studies.  However, it's not like there is anything wrong with that.  In fact, what I probably most liked about this one was the biographical details of all of the principals involved in this movie.  Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olsen, Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and even Cecil B. DeMille.  Some of this stuff I had already known, but I learned a lot about Gloria Swanson that I did not know and came away from this book with a real admiration for her.  Lupin carries it forward with a sort of "whatever became of" coda in the book for all of the featured players from this great film.

If you've never seen "Sunset Boulevard" make it a point to seek it out and watch it.  Then read this book.  Then watch the movie again. 

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

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And if you're looking for a novel for sheer entertainment purposes, some mental junk food, if you will, then I highly recommend "Parents Weekend" by Alex Finlay.

It's Parents Weekend at Santa Clara University, and four sets of parents of freshman students arrive on campus to spend a weekend with their children.  At the welcoming dinner on Friday  evening, the parents show up at the designated restaurant, but none of their children do.   What happened?  Is it a case of irresponsible college kids just being irresponsible college kids, or is there something more sinister at play here?

Well, of course there is, or else we wouldn't have a story here, would we?  The story is told from various points of view.  There is each of the kids' viewpoints, of course, but also the parents POV as well, and what a group they are:  a divorced mother who is a Very Important Person in the State Department who must travel with a team of security agents, a wealthy plastic surgeon to the rich and famous and his wife whose marriage is teetering on the rocks, a high profile judge and his wife who also are in a teetering marriage, but for a different reason, a single mother who works as a secretary in the University Dean's office so her son can go to college for free, and there is a fifth student involved, one whose parents are not in attendance, because his father is living in a halfway house after just getting out of prison after serving time as a convicted child sexual predator. Whew! Oh, and does the disappearance of these five students have anything to do with the magic death of another student earlier in the week?   The investigation into the crime, if, indeed, a crime has been committed, is led by a female FBI agent, who apparently is a recurring character in other Alex Finlay novels.

Like I said, this thriller novel is a pure entertainment piece.  Two weeks from now I probably won't be able to tell you much about it other than it was easy reading and fast paced.  I blew through it in three sittings, and I highly recommend it.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

To Absent Friends - John Cleary

John Cleary

1951-2025

This past Sunday's edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette included a news obituary for John Cleary, 74, a resident of the Pittsburgh area for the past fifty-plus years, Mr. Cleary was a native of Glenville, NY who was a student at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, the day that members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of students who had gathered in protest of the war in Viet Nam.  Four students were killed that day and nine others were wounded.  John Cleary was one of those wounded, and a picture of him taken in the immediate aftermath of the shooting appears on the cover of LIFE magazine the following week.

The obituary recounts how Cleary took a year off from college to recover from his wounds and then returned to Kent State to finish his studies.   He met his future wife at Kent State and they moved to Pittsburgh to start his architectural career and start a family, and there they stayed.  At first, Cleary didn't involve himself with commemorations of the May 4 events as he was starting his career and had family commitments.  In an interview in 2019 with the Post-Gazette, Cleary stated "Now that I'm older and have the luxury of time, I try to make more effort to come back more often." He developed  friendships with two others who were wounded that day, Thomas Grace and Alan Canfora, and the three of them would often attend Pirates games at Three Rivers Stadium.  Mr. Grace was quoted in the obit saying Cleary eventually "got more comfortable speaking in public about his experience" and that "while none of us were prepared to be thrust into the public eye, John was probably the least prepared."

I have told this story before, but I will tell it again.  What I most remember about that day was how upset my father was about the whole thing when he came home from work that night.  With anguish in his voice, I can still hear him say "They killed four kids."  The fact that he still had two kids living at home who were about the same age as the Kent State victims, no doubt played a role in his feelings that day.

It bothers me that every year when May 4 roles around, it is noted EVERYWHERE that it is "Star Wars Day".  I'm happy that the Star Wars folks have their fun that day, but what should really be talked about that day are the events that took place at a university in Ohio on that date in 1970.  I know that I mention it every single year on May 4.  It is a date that should never be forgotten, but, alas, the passage of time erases a lot.  (Incredibly, a friend once told me that on a college tour of Kent State with his high school senior son, he asked about the May 4 Memorial on the campus, and he, my friend, had to explain to the Kent State student conducting the tour what he was talking about!)  

John Cleary was an inadvertent participant and victim of one of the awful events of the era in which he lived, but he overcame the traumas of that day, had a good business career, had a fifty-plus year marriage, raised a family, and became a grandfather.   A good life well lived.

Also quoted in the obituary was Roseann Cleary, the sister of Alan Cleary:

"With each passing year at Kent State, and with every loss of a wounded survivor or eyewitness, we lose more than a storyteller. We lose a guardian of national memory - someone whose very experience challenges America to reckon with its past and resist the repetition of injustice."

RIP John Cleary

HERE is the obituary for John Cleary that appeared in the Post-Gazette on November 2.

"Ninotchka" (1939)

During our long drive to and from Massachusetts in September, Linda and I whiled away many hours listening to a podcast called "Talking Pictures".  This pod is hosted by TCM's Ben Mankiewicz and in each episode he interviews people connected with movies and the motion picture industry.  We listened to great interviews of people like Mel Brooks, Henry Winkler, Carol Burnett, Jane Lynch, Bill Hadar, Bill Murray, and even Charles Barkley (!!).  It's a great podcast, and if you like movies, I highly recommend it, but that's not why I'm here today.  During those interviews, Brooks, Burnett, Lynch, and Murray all referenced the movie "Ninotchka" as having a great and profound influence on them and their love of movies and in their careers in the movie business.

So, we resolved then that we had to see it, and last night, we watched it via Amazon Prime Video.

"Ninotchka" was made in 1939, directed by Ernst Lubitsch with a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and it starred, and this was the big deal at the time, Greta Garbo.   Garbo was a star of the silent screen, and was known for her dramatic roles and her enigmatic persona.  So her doing a comedy for MGM was a very big deal at the time.  So much so, that studio promoted the film with the tagline "Garbo laughs".

The story takes place in Paris in 1939 where three bumbling apparatchiks from Soviet Russia are there to sell crown jewels seized by the government during the Revolution, the proceeds of said sale are to be used to buy tractors for Russian farmers.  The problem is that these three guys have succumbed to the pleasures of Paris life and the capitalistic system, and have been living it up at a luxury Parisian hotel.  In order to bring them in line,  the Party sends a no-nonsense operative to Paris to finish the job. That person is Nina Invanova Yakushova, played by Garbo, and she plays the stone faced Communist Party official to the hilt.  According to some things I've read on line in research for this post, including some contemporary reviews, it was almost a self-parody of herself.  Example:

Garbo (as Ninotchka):  Must you flirt?

Melvyn Douglas:  Well, I don't have to, but I find it natural.

Garbo: Suppress it!

Of course, things get off track when Melvyn Douglas, who plays a Count who's attached himself to an exiled Russian noblewoman, who is the rightful owner of the jewels, falls hard for Garbo, whom he calls Ninotchka, she resists, then she falls for him.  Comic hijinks ensue.

The movie is filled with terrific comic lines and touches (the "Lubitsch Touch"), some great satirical pokes at both the Soviet Union and capitalism, and some sexuality that is understated just enough to get by the Hollywood's Production Code taboos in place at the time, as exemplified by the French maid cigarette girls at the hotel that make several appearances a few times in the film.  "Comrades, you must have been smoking a lot" says Nina when she sees them.

There are other great scenes:

• When Garbo finally laughs while lunching at a cafe
• Garbo drinking champagne for the first time
• When a drunk Garbo lines up for a make believe firing squad while Douglas pops a champagne bottle
• Just about all of Garbo's austere dialog and persona before she gives in to her feelings towards Douglas.

While this movie is now eighty-six years old, I found it to be not at all dated.  It could be made today with very little change in dialog and still be funny and sharply satirical.  Of course, today, who could possibly replace Garbo?

There is one joke in the movie that references Hitler and Germany that jarred you a bit because it made you realize what else was going on the world at the time.  The movie was released in 1939, and one year later, Paris and France was occupied by Nazi Germany.   By then, it was not the wonderful place depicted in the movie.

"Ninotchka" was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Picture, Actress for Garbo, and Screenplay for Wilder and Brackett, but it was steamrolled by "Gone With The Wind" for all awards that year.

We really liked the movie, and I give it  Four Grandstander Stars.

Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas

Before the"firing squad"

Garbo Laughs!

Some Random Thoughts

 The World Series

The Toronto Blue Jays bounced back from what had to have been a gut wrenching loss in that 18 inning Game Three by winning Games Four and Five in Los Angeles,  thus taking a 3-2 lead in the Series, which could end tonight in Toronto.  This Series has proven to be notable in a couple of regards.  One, is the remarkable performance of Shohei Ohtani.  Another is that remarkable eighteen inning game on Sunday night. And the third is the performance of 22 year old rookie Jays pitchers Trey Yesavage.

If you've followed the Series, you know the story.  He pitched for four different teams in the Blue Jays minor league system this season (Rookie, A, AA, and AAA), arrived in Toronto late in the season and has now started more post-season games than regular season games.  In Game Five, he went seven innings, gave up one run, no walks, and struck out 12 batters.

What I came to learn from my niece, Jill, is that Yesavage graduated from Boyertown High School in 2022 with her daughter, Cale, and played on the same Boyertown American Legion and high school teams with her son, Gavin.

The Boyertown Bears, circa 2019:

Top row, fifth from left, wearing number 6, is a 16 year old Trey Yesavage, now a genuine World Series hero.  If you watched Trey pitch in this post-season, you can see that he has experienced a significant growth spurt  since 2019. (My great-nephew Gavin is also in this photo, but without having the permission of either he or his mother, I am not going to identify him here.)

Baseball Royalty and the Other Kind of Royalty

On Pardon the Interuption last night, both Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon expressed how thrilling and awe-full it was to see Sandy Koufax - SANDY KOUFAX!!!! - sitting in the stands at Dodger Stadium watching the World Series games this week, and I couldn't agree more.  Koufax will turn 90 in December, and he looks at least fifteen years younger than that.  It is also true that it has been fifty-nine years since he last pitched in a major league game, so most people watching have never seen him play, and cannot possibly have any idea just how Capital G Great he was.  Much has been made that Dodger pitcher Clayton Kershaw, a sure fire first ballot Hall of Famer is retiring this year (and didn't he go out on a great note by retiring one batter with the bases loaded in that extra inning game on Sunday?).  Kershaw was a great pitcher, no doubt, but, and trust me on this, kids, he couldn't hold Sandy Koufax's spikes when it came to greatness on the mound.  So, yes, when you see a shot like this on your TV screen, it really is thrilling to old guys like The Grandstander.

And while Sandy Koufax represents baseball royalty, we were also treated to a screen shot of these two during Game Four:

Yep, that is Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, taking in the ol' ball game.  I have seen several posts on social media in the days since then of people, mostly Dodgers fans and hide-bound traditionalists expressing their outrage of Sandy Koufax being forced to sit in the second row behind a second string British Royal.  To those folks I say this:  If your life is such that THIS is what gets you "outraged", then you have a lousy sense of what is important in life.

Steelers Lose Second in a Row

The Steelers laid a colossal egg this past Sunday night in losing their second game in a row, this time to the Green Bay Packers.  In these last two losses, the Steelers defense, which is the highest paid such unit in the NFL, has surrendered sixty-eight (68) points.  They are now 4-3, still in first place in the AFC North, and improbably, still have a legit shot at winning that division, only because that division has shown itself to be incredibly mediocre this season.

This week they face the surprisingly good Indianapolis Colts, who are 7-1 and have the highest scoring offense in the League thus far.  The possibility of the Steelers getting boat-raced on their home field on Sunday is a very real one.

Let's just say that things aren't looking good for the Steelers at this point in this season.

"Only Murders In The Building"

Last night Linda and I finished watching Season 5 of "Only Murders In The Building", a series that we have enjoyed throughout its five season run, but I have to be honest in saying that perhaps they pushed the envelope a bit too far in producing this fifth season.  Has the show jumped the shark?  Maybe not, but we didn't find ourselves compelled to watch the show this season as we have in the past.  A couple of weeks went by between our watching some of the episodes.  This tends to take some of the excitement out of watching as you, or at least me, tend to forget just what happened last episode, and just what is the crime that the crew is investigating right now?

Still, the show did have its moments, and the chemistry among the three stars remains kind of charming, so, yes, we will be watching when Season 6, which will be set in London, debuts next year.

Only Two and One-Half Grandstander Stars for Season 5 of OMITB.

That Epic Game 3, and Some Thoughts on Baseball Broadcasting

At some point late Monday night, or perhaps it was early Tuesday morning, I made the following post on Facebook:

Were you like me? did you stay up until three o'clock in the morning to watch all 18 innings of that 6-5 Dodgers win over the Blue Jays?  It was truly an epic game, and I couldn't tear myself away from it, no matter how tired I was.  (Thank God for being retired!)

I always love looking at box scores of marathon games like this.  Ernie Clement and Tommy Edman were both 1-for-8.  Edman had at least two chances in extras to end the game for the Dodgers, which would have been fitting, because he had earlier made two tremendous defensive plays in the game that prevented Toronto from scoring and winning the game.  Teoscar Hernandez was 4-for-8 with a home run and an RBI.  There were nineteen pitchers used.

We all know, though, what the true highlight of that box score was:  Shohei Ohtani with a 4-for-4 night and five walks, four of them intentional, two home runs and 3 RBI. He was on base an almost incomprehensible nine times.

And to have it end with a walk-off home run by one of my favorite players, Freddie Freeman.

It was indeed a game for the ages.

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And now please allow me to vent a bit on the subject of baseball broadcasting in general.

Like you, I have slogged through these past several weeks watching MLB post-season games on various different networks - Fox, TNT, ESPN - and I have found that the announcers broadcasting these games, both the play by play guys and the analysts, are generally terrible to the point of being almost unlistenable.  I have the volume turned way low on the TV while watching and listening.

What is the problem?  Well, the game itself has gotten so bogged down with analytics and statistics and data that it has become mind-numbing.  John Smoltz, who I had always liked on these games, has gotten to the point where it seems that all he talks about are things like release angles and whether or not this or that pitcher is throwing too high a percentage of splitters.  Oh, and let's not forget how we are constantly reminded about things like exist velo and JUST HOW HARD so-snd-so is hitting the ball, never mind that he is in a 2-for-15 slump.  Honest to God, I think that my ears started to bleed while listening to him last night in Game 4.

And all of this comes after listening to Greg Brown, Joe Block, and all of the ex-jock Pirates in the booth over the course of a 162 game season.  As we all know, no one loves talking about launch angles, exit velocities and how HARD Oneil Cruz hits the ball as he compiles his .200 batting average more than Brownie and Blockie.

Back in August, the Pirates honored their former broadcaster Lanny Frattare upon his being placed on the Media Wall of Fame in the Press Room at PNC Park.  At that time, I heard Lanny being interviewed on The Fan, and in commenting upon the state of announcing today, he said two interesting things.  One was that he would prefer doing a broadcast of a game alone, with no analyst.  You know, like Vin Scully always did.  That would be nice, I think.  Secondly, he said that broadcasts today are too cluttered with word salads involving launch angles, exit velocities, and other advanced metrics mumbo-jumbo. He may not have meant it that way, but that was one serious shot across the bow that Lanny took at the current Bucco announcers.

Thanks for listening, folks.

The World Series Begins Tonight!

 

You all have no doubt been asking the question "Grandstander, why haven't you been writing about some of the great moments of the 2025 MLB Post Season?"

Well, that's because I've been very busy watching  the 2025 MLB Post Season.  And the NFL.  And the WNBA Playoffs.  And the Penguins season started.  And the NBA.  Oh, and there was that trip to Nashville over the weekend.

You get the idea.

Before getting into the World Series, let me just comment on a couple of things from this MLB Post Season.

First, a comment on a simply amazing Game 5 of the National League Division Series, won by the Dodgers 2-1 in an epic eleven inning game.  It was scoreless through six innings, the Phillies scored in the top of the seventh, and the Dodgers tied it in the bottom of the seventh.  It then went into extra innings, and the Dodgers won when Phillies pitcher Orion Kerkering inexplicably fielded a ground ball with two outs and the bases loaded and, rather than throwing to first base to end the inning, he threw to the plate. The throw was high and to the left, the run scored, the Dodgers won, and the series was over.  As I heard one commentator, I think it was Tim Kurkjian, say that it was a case of the game moving too fast for the young pitcher Kerkering, he got caught in the moment, and just made the wrong play.  I hope that the kid doesn't let it affect him mentally as he moves forward in his career.

Me, my mind flashed back to Bob Moose's wild pitch that ended the 1972 NLCS.  If you know, you know.

Then there was Game Four, the final game of the NLCS, a game that will forever be know as The Shohei Ohtani Game.

You all know what happened.  Ohtani started the game pitching, went six scoreless innings, gave up 3 hits and struck out ten batters.  TEN STRIKE OUTS!  And he hit three home runs.  THREE HOME RUNS!.  It has been called the greatest single game that any baseball player has ever had.

Me, I have no other words for it.

In contrast the Dodgers sweep of the Phillies, the Mariners-Blue Jays series went the full seven games, and it was a Game 7 well worth its name.  Seattle held a 3-1 lead, thanks to solo home runs by Julio Rodriguez and Cal "The Big Dumper" Raleigh until George Springer hit a three run dinger that put the Jays up 4-3.  The bullpen held the lead, and Toronto secured its first trip to the World Series since 1992.

I have no strong rooting interest one way or the other in this Series.  I suppose that as the games progress I may develop such an interest, but until then, I will hope only for a competitive and exciting Series.  I'll also say that I hope that we get to see something historic from Shohei Ohtani, although I don't know how he can top that show he put on in Game 4 of the LCS.  As for a prediction, most of the "experts" out there are telling you that should the Dodgers starting pitchers continue to perform as they have thus far in the post season, they will win in the end.

I'll follow that party line and say the Dodgers win it in six games.