Reviews - GEORGE VECSEY

Peter O’Toole the Actor – And Other Great Movie Lines

12/18/2013

He performed one of my favorite movie lines, but it did not apply to him. Peter O’Toole, who died the other day, got to play a dissolute guest on an early television program in the 1982 film “My Favorite Year.” Through the haze, Alan Swann divines that he is about to appear live, a prospect that thoroughly terrifies him. As he is nudged onto the set, he protests: “I’m not an actor – I’m a movie star!”

The line speaks to the inner truth most of us know about ourselves: sometimes we are in over our heads.

O’Toole recently was seen in the 1987 Bertolucci film, “The Last Emperor,” in that wonderful series that New York’s Channel 13 runs all too infrequently on Saturday nights. As an English tutor brought into the Forbidden City, O’Toole proved my point. He was an actor.

Among my other favorites:

In the 1963 film “The Balcony,” Shelley Winters plays a madame whose office assistant, Lee Grant, is lobbying to change positions within the establishment. Winters keeps trying to put her off, and the writer, Genet, plants the madame’s line in our heads before it is actually uttered:

“The world is full of whores; what it really needs is a good bookkeeper.”

How many times have I used that line to advise people to stick with their chosen profession?

Then there is the Clint Eastwood film, “The Unforgiven.” (I love Clint, even though he now speaks to empty chairs.)

The movie has many good lines, including when the young man kills somebody for the first time and starts babbling.

Will Munny (Clint): It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvet): Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.
Will Munny: We all got it coming, kid.

That’s pretty much the point of the movie. I love it when Clint calls somebody “kid.”

Then there’s the scene we all know is coming, when Clint doubles back to town to avenge the killing of his pal, Ned, played by Morgan Freeman.

Inside the bar, Clint asks: “Who’s the fellow owns this shithole?”

The poor dope named Skinny admits he does, and Clint commences to do what Clint does. I often revive that line when fate takes me to some miserable football stadium or over-priced restaurant where I emphatically do not want to be. Don’t we all have our inner Clint?

At the end, Clint rides off into the rainy night, his voice cutting through the empty street:

“You better bury Ned right!... Better not cut up, nor otherwise harm no whores... or I'll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches.” (I think he also mentions their children, even their dogs, but it’s just an echo by then.)

I know there’s a whole universe of favorite-movie-lines out there. What’s yours?

Roy Edelsack

12/18/2013 10:00:31 am

I've always appreciated William Hurt's response in "The Big Chill" when an old college buddy implies their friendship is "deep":

"Wrong. A long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time; you don't know anything about me. It was easy back then. No one had a cushier berth than we did. It's not surprising our friendship could survive that. It's only out there in the real world that it gets tough."

George Vecsey

12/18/2013 11:50:11 am

Roy, missed the movie...but love the line. GV

Alan Rubin link

12/19/2013 07:02:25 am

The orgasm scene from “When Harry Met Sally” starring Billy Crystal as Harry and Meg Ryan as Sally is a classic.

Sally is discussing faking an orgasm during a lunch conversation. Finally, to convince her skeptical friend, Meg proceeds to fake one.

An older woman (Estelle Reiner) at the next table comments to the waitress; “I’ll have what she is having”.

“My Cousin Vinnie” is a movie so loaded with memorable dialog, that a few links are necessary, hopefully with not too much duplication. I love movies where street smarts and logic win the day.

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0012597/quotes

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104952/quotes

Seeing the characters Vinnie Gambini (Joe Pesci), Mona Visa Vito (Marisa Tome), Judge Chamberlain Haller (Fred Gynne) and opposing lawyer John Gibbons(Austin Pendleton) interact is worth seeing the movie over and over.

I particularly enjoyed that the female lead, Marisa Tomei as an auto mechanic expert) saved the day.

John McDermott

12/19/2013 07:47:32 am

For funny, I like the movie, The Guard, with Don Cheadle as an FBI agent and Brendan Gleeson as police sergeant in rural Ireland. It is replete with great lines. The best one, for me, is when the Gleeson character, Sergeant Gerry Boyle, answers Cheadle's character's accusation of having made a racist comment, tells Cheadle, "I'm Irish. Racism is part of our culture." As the film goes on you realize that Sgt. Boyle is nobody's fool, and definitely not a racist.

Alan Rubin link

12/19/2013 08:21:16 am

John-thanks for the movie.

My wife and I are avid movie fans, but i never heard of The Guard.

I do not remember any specific lines, but two other Irish movies are worth watching.

"Raising Ned Devine" is about an elderly winner of the of the Irish lottery in a small remote village. He dies from shock and the residents cannot figure out who the winner was.

Two of his cronies decide to impersonate Ned to get the winnings, with the collusion of the entire town. If you have not seen it, I do not want to reveal too much.

A much earlier movie was "Tight Little Island" which about ship wreck off the coast with a cargo of whiskey, which is recused by the town.

Their zany, and very Irish, schemes to hide it from the authorities, probably British, are a pure delite.

I know that George requested good quotes, which always come in great movies.

George Vecsey

12/19/2013 09:44:03 am

no, man, it's free-form....
I never heard of The Guard....
as the holder of an Irish passport, I cannot comment on the remark itself.

GV

Jeff from Jersey, yes New Jersey

12/19/2013 03:31:10 pm

Another memorable quote from Clint Eastwood came from Magnum Force. His character, Inspector Harry Callahan, noted as his nemisis left the film with a bang," A man has to know his limitations." Good advice in the real world, too.

George Vecsey

12/20/2013 12:27:09 am

I only caught up with Clint in the last couple of decades -- Gran Torino, Unforgiven. Never heard that one. You are absolutely right. GV

John McDermott

12/20/2013 12:51:10 pm

"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse".

John McDermott

12/20/2013 12:52:48 pm

"That's not a knife. THIS is KNIFE".-Crocodile Dundee

Charlie Accetta

12/20/2013 03:07:09 pm

"Moonstruck" - near the ending. Robbie Cammareri (Nicolas Cage)has just proposed to Loretta Castorini (Cher) in a kitchen filled with Loretta's family. Loretta's mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis) asks a question.
Rose: Do you love him, Loretta?
Loretta: Ma, I love him awful.
Rose: That's too bad

Alan Rubin link

12/20/2013 03:12:59 pm

"Go ahead-make my day". Dirty Harry

Ed Martin

12/21/2013 03:54:01 am

"Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.". Blanche DuBois (character), "Streetcar Named Desire."

George Vecsey

12/21/2013 05:33:53 am

Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams (I am hoping it was in the movie; it is part of Tom's final soliloquy:)

"I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space..."

(Sam Waterston in the movie)

Brian Savin

12/21/2013 01:13:04 pm

Having just finished a holiday-time meal I think of Charles Laughton as Gracchus in Spartacus talking with a conspiring colleague about Crassius:

"You and I have a tendency towards corpulence. Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?"

The line was taken from Shakespeare, whose Julius Caesar says:

"Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous."

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Peter O’Toole the Actor – And Other Great Movie Lines

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