"The Darkest Secret" by Alex Marwood

I admit that I have gotten away from writing about novels, i.e. works of fiction, that I read because (a) I read a lot of the things, (b) for the most part, such books that I do read fall under the classification of escapism and entertainment, or, as an old co-worker of mine called, it, "mental junk food", and (c) many of them become instantly forgotten after I've read them.  But not this one.  I stumbled across "The Darkest Secret" in one of those Kindle Bargains emails that flood the inbox all the time, and it looked interesting, so I sprung for the $4.99 deal.

At a weekend house party in 2004 celebrating the 50th birthday of British millionaire real estate mogul Sean Jackson, Coco Jackson one of his three year old twin daughters (to his second wife) disappears.  Because of Jackson's wealth and connections (a member of Parliament, high end attorney and publicist husband and wife team, and a celebrity doctor), a nationwide search that soon becomes an almost world wide search begins for the little moppet, but she is never found.

Twelve years later, Jackson, now on his fourth marriage, dies under somewhat shady circumstances, and the family and the so-called "Jackson Associates" gather again for the funeral.  It falls upon the now 27 year old semi-wastrel Camilla Jackson, a daughter from the first marriage, to identify the body, collect her 15 year old half-sister Ruby, Coco's twin, and deliver a eulogy for the father from whom she has been estranged for almost all of her life.  The novel is told through Camilla's eyes, as she struggles with the emotional scars left upon her by her father, gets to know Ruby, whom she hasn't seen in years, and tries to make sense of what happened those twelve years before.  However, in alternating chapters, we learn in flashbacks everything that happened during that fateful four day Bank Holiday Weekend twelve years before.

Along the way, we are exposed to themes of the privileges that the wealthy take as their birthright and the arrogance that that brings about, the emotional damages that can result from multiple divorces, affairs, and how having so many step-parents and step-siblings can just wreak emotional and physical havoc upon families.  There are some hints about back stories that never get told or explained that I would like to have known more of, but maybe by NOT telling them, author Alex Marwood (whose other novels now become books to look for and read) just makes the story all the more compelling.

This seems like it  would be a perfect "book club book" to discuss over all of those book club lunches and/or bottles of wine.  Without putting too much effort into it, I could probably come up with at least a half dozen or so discussion questions.  I am anxious for Mrs. Grandstander to read it so that she and I can dig into a meaty discussion about it.

The Grandstander gives it a sold Three and One-Half Stars, and please be aware that "The Darkest Secret" is still out there on Amazon for $4.99 for your Kindle.

Old Movie Time - "Mean Streets" (1973)

In his ranking of Gangster Movies, Washington DC film critic Jason Fraley listed Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" at Number 16 on his list.  This prompted me to seek out this now forty-seven year old movie, which, surprisingly given my affinity for mob movies, I had never seen.   

The storyline of this one follows a couple of young trying-to-be-up-and-coming-wiseguys in New York City's Little Italy.  Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, whose uncle is a capo of sorts in the neighborhood, and Robert De Niro plays Johnny, a punk wannabe who can't keep up with his payments to the neighborhood sharks and who's constantly flying off the handle and getting into fights with the other punks in the neighborhood.  Charlie spends most of his time trying to cover for his buddy Johnny Boy at the possible expense of his own standing in the neighborhood hierarchy.  It all comes to a predictable conclusion on the "mean streets" of Little Italy.  

In and of itself, "Mean Streets" is a somewhat predictable gangster story.  If it was the only such movie that Scorsese made, it probably would not be as highly remembered or regarded today, but what makes it an important movie is what it foreshadowed.  In 1973, the 31 year old Scorsese had a few directing credits to his name, mostly shorts and documentaries, and the 30 year old De Niro had only one significant role to his name ("Bang The Drum Slowly").  "Mean Streets" was the first time that these two collaborated on a motion picture, and it was the beginning of one of more significant director/actor combos ever.  The two of them would go on to make nine other  feature films together over the next forty-three years, and they're probably not done yet.  This movie had everything that we came to know as trade marks of a Scorsese flick.....a freeze frame shot where the character's name gets  superimposed on the screen to identify him to the audience....a scene consisting of an extended  single take tracking shot (this one was a fight among the various hoods in a bar's  back room that circled a pool table)....extended swatches of dialog with De Niro going back and forth one-on-one with other characters in his NYC/Italian/Wiseguy dialect....and, most significantly, a sound track of period rock-n-roll music (Motown, Rolling Stones, etc) that blared almost constantly throughout the movie.  All of the things that Scorsese did, and did better, in movies like "Casino", "Goodfellas", and "The Irishman", were seen for the first time in "Mean Streets", and THAT makes this a movie worth watching.

In a vacuum, The Grandstander would give "Mean Streets" Two and One-Half Stars, but because it represents and presages what was to come from the Director and the Actor, it gets Three Stars.

A couple of more words on the casting.  Keitel was 34 years old when he did this movie, and he, too, would appear in many other Scorsese films, most recently, "The Irishman."  About the only Scorsese touch missing from this movie was Joe Pesci!  Another character in this one was actor David Proval as Tony.  Many years later, Proval would go on to additional screen Mob fame as Richie Aprile in "The Sopranos."  

De Niro and Keitel

A much younger De Niro and Scorsese

To Absent Friends - Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland

1916-2020

As you will read in every obituary of Olivia de Havilland that will be published over these next few days, she is perhaps the very last survivor of "Hollywood's Golden Age" or of "Hollywood's Studio System."  de Havilland was 104 years old when she died today, and surely there can't be anybody else still around who predates her in either of those categories.

A two time Oscar winner, de Havilland is most remembered for her "Gone With The Wind" role of the Goody-Two-Shoes Melanie Hamilton, the cousin of Scarlett O'Hara, whom Scarlett hated because she ended up marrying prissy Ashley Wilkes, played by Leslie Howard.  (AN ASIDE: Scarlett had Rhett Butler/Clark Gable, and she pinned for Wilkes/Howard?  I never could get that.)  In a touch of irony, de Havilland, who was the only lead character in GWTW to die, was the last surviving cast member of that epic production.

With Howard as Ashley

As the perfect Melanie

Perhaps her next most famous role was that of Maid Marion alongside Errol Flynn in "The Adventures of Robin Hood."  She was undeniably beautiful in both roles, and the on screen chemistry with Flynn led to them appearing in many movies together.  Although Flynn was one of Hollywood' most notorious womanizers, de Havilland maintained that the on screen chemistry never extended to anything other than platonic off-screen.

As Maid Marion with Flynn

"The Adventures of Robin Hood"

For all of her distinguished career, I have to say that in 1978, at the age of 62, she appeared in a cast-of-thousands disaster movie that were so popular during that era called "The Swarm" that may well have been one of the worst movies ever made.  Hey, so she was working for a paycheck.  Nothing wrong with that.  

There are two aspects of Miss de Havilland's career that are noteworthy.

The first is that she is the older sister of Oscar winning actress Joan Fontaine.  I believe that they are the only siblings ever to receive Leading Role Oscars, but more to the point, the two of them had legendary Hollywood feud that dated back to the 1930's.   They rarely spoke or even acknowledged each other's existence from then until Miss Fontaine's death in 2013 at the age of 94.  I am sure that Olivia took great delight in outliving her sister by seven years.

The other interesting thing was de Havilland's challenge to the Hollywood "studio system", when the studios kept actors under contract and left them with little choice in what they could or could not do.  To make a long story short, in 1943, de Havilland took Warner Bros. to court for the right to get out of her contract.  In a decision that to this day is known as "de Havilland's Law", the California Courts ruled that no studio could extend a performer's contract without the consent of the performer.  So, in a sense, she was the Curt Flood of Hollywood, or maybe Flood was the Olivia de Havilland of baseball.

RIP Olivia de Havilland.

Old Movie Time - "Atlantic City" (1980)

Jason Fraley is a Movie and Entertainment reporter for Radio and TV station WTOP in Washington DC, and I have become familiar with his work via both podcasts and Facebook.  Throughout the month of July, he has been offering Top 30 lists in thirty different genres....Comedy, Drama, Crime, Musicals, Romantic Comedies...you get the idea. It's been fun to read them and say things like "How could he put THIS ahead of THAT?" or "How could he possibly not include 'The Music Man' in his top thirty musicals?" (ahem!).  Anyway, I read his list of Gangster Movies (Godfather and Godfather Part II were an entry at Number One), and I earmarked three movies from the list that I had never seen and vowed to make it a point to watch as soon as possible. 

Last night I watched the first of these.  From 1980 and director Louis Malle, "Atlantic City."

The movie starred Burt Lancaster as Lou,  an aging, two-bit, yet self-aggrandizing hustler/gangster and Susan Sarandon as Sally, a woman from a broken marriage in Canada who comes to Atlantic City to learn to become a casino dealer with dreams of working her way to a big time casino in Monaco.  The movie takes place as Atlantic City tries to transition itself from a seedy beach resort into a glitzy and glamorous gambling mecca resort destination.  Trust me, Malle captures "seedy" perfectly.  Lou and Sally live in the same dumpy apartment building that is soon scheduled for demolition, and old Lou has made it a habit of observing Sally through the window as she performs her ritualistic ablutions every night at the kitchen sink.  Lemons never were more sexy!

Breezing into their lives comes Sally's no account husband, her sister who is now about eight months pregnant with hubby's baby, and a kilo or so of cocaine that hubby has stolen from the Philly Mob.  Lou somehow falls into teaming up with the kid to peddle the dope and get a score the likes of which he has never seen, the Philly mobsters show up in AC looking for their coke, their money, and their revenge, not necessarily in that order, and Sarandon's life and dreams are thrown into complete disarray.

Sounds like a hokey potboiler, but it's not, not by a long shot.  The movie was nominated for five Academy Awards back when it was released: Best Picture, Actor (Lancaster), Actress (Sarandon), Director (Malle), and Screenplay.  It didn't win any of them, but that takes nothing away from what is a terrific movie.  Lancaster is absolutely fantastic as he talks about the old days ("You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then.").  He is mesmerizing in every scene that he is in.  Susan Sarandon was 34 years old when she made this movie, and she is beautiful, sexy, naive, frightened, and bewildered throughout the movie.  Both fully deserved those Oscar nominations.

Some scenes from the movie....

Seedy Atlantic City

Sexy Susan as Sally

 Susan and Burt 

as 

Sally and Lou

I found "Atlantic City" to be just a fabulous movie.  Great performances by the two stars and the supporting cast, and a gritty and realistic portrayal of a decaying - both physically and morally - city.  Not sure how I missed it back in 1980, but, then again, I was in a whole different place in my life forty (!!!!) years ago.

The Grandstander gives it Three and One-half Stars.

Oh, and the other two movies from Fraley's list I plan on watching?  Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs."  Stay tuned.

To Absent Friends - John Lewis

John Lewis

1940 - 2020

At the Pettus Bridge  

Selma, Alabama

It is not often that we can recognize a genuine American Hero in our midst, and we lost one them this past week when U.S. Representative John Lewis of Georgia died.

A veteran of the American civil rights movement of the twentieth century, Lewis marched along side Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham and Selma and other places throughout the country through those turbulent days.  He was the youngest person to speak at the 1963 March on Washington.  He was 23 years old at the time.  Upon his election to the Presidency in 2008, Barack Obama said that he got there on the "shoulders of John Lewis."

We may never see his like again.

RIP John Lewis.

Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Looks Like We're Going To Have Baseball

A month ago I didn't think that it was going to happen, but Opening Day for an abbreviated Major League Baseball season is set for one week from today; one week from tomorrow for your Pittsburgh Pirates.  Whether MLB will be able to complete the sixty game season and play through to  a World Series still remains a question, but let's hope.

I have to say that despite low expectations of the Pirates. I am excited at the prospect of watching a live played-in-2020 baseball game as soon as tomorrow night when the Pirates play an exhibition game with Cleveland at PNC Park.  (An ASIDE:  I noticed that one night earlier this week, AT&T Sports had scheduled one of those "Pirates Classics" reruns.  The game to be shown was a 2019 game between the Pirates and the Marlins.  Now I ask you, in what stretch of anyone's imagination, could a game between the 2019 versions of the Pirates and Marlins be considered a "classic"?)  And I especially am looking forward to watching games that count in the standings, however bastardized this season will be.  Despite a horrendous 2019 season and a pre-shutdown offseason of bitching and moaning about the state of the team, I am, like I am every season, glad to have them back.

So, how will the team that lost 93 games last year do in 2020?  Well, they traded their second best player (Starling Marte), have lost a key starting pitcher for the season (Chris Archer), their slated closing reliever, Keone Kela, is on the ten day IR, and Gregory Polanco has been confirmed to have COVID19.  So, if you take last year's winning percentage of .426 and apply it to a 60 game season, you come up with  a record of 26-34.  Sounds about right.

Also, the Pirates first twelve games of the season are against the Cardinals, Brewers, Cubs, and Twins.  It's going to be a tough stretch.

Still, I'm excited for new manager Derek Shelton.  He's waited forever for this chance, only to be dealt the blow of a pandemic that has....well, you know what it has caused.  I've listened to him many times on his weekly radio interview with Ron Cook and Joe Starkey on 93.7 The Fan, and he seems to be a pretty good guy.  I'm hoping for good things for him and the Pirates, but probably not until at least 2021 or -22.  In any event, I shall be cheering them on, as I have every year since 1959 (that's seasons in eight different decades!!!).

#letsgobucs

It's "- 30 -" for Brian O'Neill

In today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette general columnist Brian O'Neill announced in what will be his final column that he was accepting a buyout from his employer and retiring.  O'Neill came to Pittsburgh in 1988 as a columnist for the Pittsburgh Press, survived the demise of that paper in the early 1990's and has been at the PG ever since.  His three-times-a-week column covered the gamut from the scoundrels and scalawags in Harrisburg ("America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature") to the chronicling the travails of the Pirates to stories of just plain regular people that populate his North Side neighborhood and all throughout the greater Pittsburgh and southwest Pennsylvania region, the "Paris of Appalachia", as he dubbed it.  My favorites were stories of his family....his mother who could "wisecrack like Barbara Stanwyck", his cheapskate brother, "The Incredible Dullboy", his own tendency for cheapskatedness, and best of all, his stories about sneaking into Shea Stadium during his youth, even sneaking in during the 1973 World Series. These stories were special favorites of my Dad, who knew a thing  or two about sneaking into sports venues.

I have had the pleasure of getting to know Brian personally over the years.   He helped me out on two occasions in the past by agreeing to serve as a guest speaker at both my Highmark Retiree Club and for the  Pittsburgh Chapter of SABR.  On a more personal level, he has also joined our infamous Saturday morning breakfast gatherings at the Allegheny Sandwich Shoppe on several occasions.  With more time on his hands now, perhaps that can become a more regular thing.

It wasn't too long ago that I made the statement that "Brian O'Neill was one of the few remaining reasons that I remain a subscriber to the Post-Gazette."   The philosophical turn of the PG's editorial direction has been a turn off, to be sure, as has the paper's strong armed union busting tactics.  In his final column, Brian appealed to the readers to remain with the paper.  "If you think government is bad with us watching them," he said "wait until you see what they will do with no one watching them."  True words to be sure.   If you missed it, here is Brian's final column:

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/brian-oneill/2020/07/12/Last-dispatch-Pittsburgh-Paris-Appalachia-stories-journalism/stories/202007120029?fbclid=IwAR2l1PKZr2ISExtwy6Mv76wNKN-__B3gcZ97eaLdPHcvexdgtEcNxOEhjNU

If you are on The Facebook, I strongly recommend that you seek out Brian's fellow PG columnist Tony Norman's comments about him today.   Unlike me, Norman is a real writer, and his words are a terrific tribute to O'Neill.  

There is now a big void in the Pittsburgh scene.  Enjoy your retirement, Brian, and see you at the Sandwich Shoppe.

No Minor League Baseball

Yesterday, Major League Baseball released its 60 game schedule for 2020, as teams go through their Summer Camps in hope of being ready for an Opening Day in two and one-half weeks.  At the same time, MLB has been shown to be spotty with providing timely COVID19 testing results for their players and associated personnel, leaving some executives, Washington Nationals GM Mike Rizzo being the most prominent, to ask if if it is going to be possible at all to stage any kind of season.

Less noted and commented upon was the announcement made last week that all of Minor League Baseball has been canceled for 2020.  This will have a devastating impact in several areas.

First, from a baseball standpoint, what happens to the hundreds of players who are (barely, in most cases, as we have learned) making a living in the bushes? What happens to the development and learning curve of those players who are legitimate big league prospects?  How is their development going to be set back by missing a full year of innings pitched, at bats, and professional coaching?   How about those six players the Pirates drafted in the entry draft last month?  What happens to them between now and next year's Spring Training (if it happens)?  

The "can't miss" guys will probably be okay, although a guy like Pirate first round pick Nick Gonzales may be set back a year or so in his career advancement, but how about those marginal guys, players who may somehow break through, earn a spot on a roster and hang around long enough to make a decent living, earn an MLB pension, and then maybe go into coaching and managing down the road?  I'm thinking of guys like current Pirate Jacob Stallings, and former and current Pirates managers Jim Leyland and Derek Shelton?  How many guys like that, maybe seeing the end of the trail and with young families to support, may just decide to hang it up and begin a career selling insurance or real estate?

The ripple effect of a shut down minor league season may not be seen for several more years, but it's going to happen.

On the other side of this equation is what will be lost in small cities and towns all across America like Altoona, Erie, Morgantown, Akron, and Mahoning County (just to name five towns within a two hour or so drive of Pittsburgh) when the people who live there will now have one less way to spend a pleasant summer evening or afternoon.  You go to a minor league game, you definitely know that it's not a major league baseball you are watching, but you are guaranteed to have a fun night in a terrific atmosphere, and you never know who you might be watching.  Back in the early 1950's, Whitey Ford pitched in Butler, PA, and in the early 1990's, I saw future Hall of Famer Jim Thome playing in a  Double-A game in Canton, Ohio.  And then there is the effect of the loss of jobs that these teams provide to people.  One of our nieces spent two summers scooping ice cream at the Bulls ball park in Durham, NC.  Pretty cool job for a high school kid.

There has been a movement afoot among some in MLB to drastically reduce the size of the minor leagues, eliminating as much as a quarter to a third of all teams.  Not only is this a shortsighted view from a baseball standpoint, but it will rip away huge part of the fabric of social and sporting life in smaller towns and cities across America.  The complete cancellation of the 2020 minor league season may be just the excuse to implement this reduction plan come 2021.  Another pyrrhic victory for the bean counting Suits in MLB front offices like (cough, cough) Bob Nutting.

We won't be seeing this sight in Altoona in 2020.

Will we still be able to see it in 2021 and beyond?

To Absent Friends - Nick Cordero

Nick Cordero

1978 - 2020

Broadway actor Nick Cordero died yesterday at the age of 41.  He was a victim of COVID19, brought on by the coronavirus.  His death is neither more nor less tragic than any of the other over 120,000 American deaths brought on by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, but it is a more public one, and, as such, it serves as a reminder of how deadly and sad this disease is.

I never saw Cordero perform, and, in all honesty, I'm not sure if had ever even heard of him prior to the news breaking in March that he had contracted COVID19.  He performed most notably in three Broadway shows of some renown - "Waitress", "A Bronx Tale", and "Bullets Over Broadway", for which he received a Tony nomination.

He leaves a wife of two years and a one year old daughter.

RIP Nick Cordero

Here is Cordero singing  "One Of The Great Ones", perhaps the signature song from "A Bronx Tale."

Movie Review - "Hamilton"

I have written of the musical "Hamilton" many times in this space and have had the good fortune to see it twice on stage, so it was with great excitement that I looked forward to seeing the movie version of "Hamilton" that began streaming on the Disney+ platform today.

If you don't know the background, the original plan was for Disney to release this movie in theaters in the Fall of 2021.  With the COVID19 pandemic upon us, and with there being no telling when movie theaters will reopen, Disney and creators Lin-Manuel Miranda and director Thomas Kail decided to release it now, on the July 4, 2020 weekend.  No doubt financial considerations played into this for all concerned.  We won't be naive about it, but the anticipated release of this movie generated an enormous amount of excitement among fans of the show, and fans of the music who have not been able to see it performed on stage.  One of the big criticisms of the show has been the enormous prices that the demand for tickets has generated.  Now, for a mere $6.99 a month, anyone can have access to unlimited number of viewings of the "Hamilton" movie.  That is a real bargain, trust me on that.

But this is not a movie version of "Hamilton" like the filmed adaptations of Broadway plays that we are used to seeing.  This version was made from two filmed performances of the play as it was performed in New York in 2016, with the original cast still intact.  Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr, Chris Jackson, Daveed Diggs, Anthony Ramos, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Phillipa Soo, Jonathon Groff....all those voices that you know from that original cast recording are here.  What you are seeing is not  really a movie, but a theatrical performance.  It is like being in a theater and sitting in the audience.  Even better, the cameras and the close-ups allow you to see the facial expressions and nuances of the actors that you would never see when sitting in a theater.  We can even hear the reactions and the applause of the audiences that were in attendance during this performance.  You even get the traditional Curtain Call, too!  It was an amazing performance.

I am not going to go into plot summaries and music reviews here.  I've done that before in The Grandstander so no need to be redundant.  All I will say is that if you are a fan of the show and the music, this movie is a must see.  And if you have never seen the show, are not all that familiar with the music, but you enjoy a great show with rousing performances, it is a MUST see.

I am not sure how the Motion Picture Academy will deem this movie.  My understanding is that they are considering rethinking their stance on films that go straight to streaming.  If so, and considering the dearth of movies that have been released in 2020, with no end of that trend in sight due to the pandemic,  I would think that "Hamilton" would be a strong contender for Academy Award nominations and wins come awards season.

It gets the full Four Star treatment from The Grandstander.

The Curtain Call as seen from my TV screen