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Here we go again. More trouble finding something to write about. I’ve brought this up before, so I’ll lay off here. I believe I’ll try a new tack anyway. I’ll write about nothing. That was the recipe that was so successful for 'Seinfeld '.
When anyone says he’ll write about nothing, he means he’ll lay off the heavy stuff for once and write about trivia. Trivia is all around, you see. Like June, it’s bustin’ out all over. You can use it as a subject and still not give up the customary pursuit of wrongs needing to be righted. It’s just that you lower your sights and deal with minor types of wrongs instead of big ones.
For instance my World Almanac has lots of lists in it, one of them a list of the Fifty Greatest Screen Legends as compiled by the American Film Institute. It’s bothered me for a while because, well, some of their picks don’t seem so legendary to me. To wit:
The usual names start the list, Gable, Wayne, Bogart, Grant, et. al. But where’s Bob Hope? No Bob Hope? What kind of list is this? What’s Orson Welles doing on it? He was a nonentity compared to Bob. What about Danny Kaye? Where’s he? Put him on. Put Tyrone Power on and Jack Lemmon. De-list Robert Mitchum and James Dean and Sidney Poitier.
My rejects aren’t un-persons, but they’re simply not in the category of my replacements. Tyrone Power was a sensation in his early years. Kaye and Lemmon had staying power. Dean didn’t; his career ended abruptly, as everyone knows. Mitchum and Poitier didn’t fill theater seats like my nominees.
Now who are the 25 women whose names will echo down the years? Their list differs from the men’s in that there are no obvious outsiders on it. But I question Sophia Loren’s right to be there. She was a star and sparkled all right, but not so much in America as in Europe. I have doubts about Lauren Bacall too. Was she really that big? Bigger than my candidates, Jean Arthur and Loretta Young? Maybe the solution is to expand the list to 27 ladies and stay out of trouble.
The talent scout for the Institute who picked the list of women seems to have been someone like myself, locked into the Forties and still under the spell. Unlike him, I have broken loose a bit and learned to admire Meryl Streep and Sissie Spacek, among others. That isn’t easy on a diet of one movie a year.
Drunk with power, the Institute went on to name the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. Again Orson Welles was a pet and got his whatsit, “Citizen Kane", a caricature of William Randolph Hearst, listed as the absolute g-r-r-r-eatest of all time. Orson was a rad of course, and politically correct and all that, but a legend? That’s going too far. Unless it was a reference to his appetite. That was legendary all right.
Funny, but if Citizen Kane is such a masterpiece, how come I’ve never had the opportunity to see it? Apparently it’s so precious it’s kept locked up in a vault like a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci and only released in leap years. That’s odd, because Gone With The Wind, also classified as a masterpiece by the Institute, is always showing somewhere. People want to see it, but seem able to get along without “Kane”.
The rest of the 100 Greatest is a mixed bag. Since I’m not writing a book I won’t dwell on them too long. I see four glaring omissions immediately: “Snow White”, “The Awful Truth”, “Boys Town”, “Going My Way”. Two of these were directed by Leo McCarey, who wasn’t politically correct, and one by Walt Disney, who wasn’t either.
The movies list runs from 1900 or so up to the present, with a lot of doubtful picks on it, but the only thing that can be done about it is to watch a few thousand pictures and then publish your own list of favorites. That would make me a cinch for the Dubious Achievement Award if it’s still being given. If not, it would probably be revived for me.
I’ve now dealt with the movies for once and for all. It’s time to move on to other sources of frustration. One is the television show “Cops”. Like the great majority of TV shows I see, I sample it instead of watching it right through. It usually concludes with some bedraggled junkie being dragged away from the stolen car he’s wrecked after a ten-mile chase, causing the cops to handcuff him, read him his rights for the TV cameras and inform him he’s under arrest for six different felonies. But all is not lost. At the top of the screen a message flashes telling one and all “The Suspect is Presumed Innocent”.
Innocent of what? The reckless driving we’ve just been watching for an extended time? The unlawful speeds he traveled at? The driver license he didn’t have? The battle he put up when the cops tried to pull him out of the car? Possession of the drugs found in the car? Use of the car without permission of the rightful owner? The damage to city property when he bounced off the hydrant and crashed into the lamppost?
We viewers have seen all these things and not being insane we aren’t presuming they didn’t happen. The cops were actually present on the scene when they did, so they can testify to them in court. When they reach the jail the warden will presume his guilt and accept him for custody. The district attorney will prepare charges accusing him of his crimes. The committing magistrate will remand him to jail to await trial or bail. If required, he will hold a hearing and listen to witnesses testify to their knowledge of the crimes. In all this sequence not one person will presume him innocent. If they did, they would have to release him instantly.
That’s the so-called “presumption of innocence”. It exists, but it’s confined to one group of people -- the trial jury beginning at the time they start to hear the case. I actually heard this explained by Warren Burger, the longest-serving Chief Justice of the United States, at Lincoln Center in New York in 1969. Any attempt to convince people it exists otherwise is simply a defense-lawyer swindle meant to bluff the public into distrusting its own perceptions when confronted with a crime. Well, as Dominick Dunne says “They’ll do anything -- anything to win an acquittal for a guilty person”. And TV will help them. | |