Dear Phillip,
And as Gotham sinks slowly into the twilight shadows, this brief but bracing correspondence draws to a close. Oscar night will be positively anticlimactic after this extended warm-up. But isn’t that often the case? And don’t know we usually end up bleary-eyed, muttering “Another musical number? When are they gonna get to Best Picture?”
I’ll probably be more than a little bleary-eyed since I’ll be watching the show with out-of-date eyeglasses: Yesterday evening, in an awesome demonstration of nature’s unleashed power, my bifocals were ripped from my head by a cyclonic gust of wind and sent flying into the road, where they were promptly run over by a limo, in a bit of timing worthy of Mack Sennett. Well, a little fuzziness probably won’t hurt the proceedings too much.
Re Hanssen, Ames, et al.: There haven’t been enough good spy movies for a long time. I’m especially fond of Mankiewicz’s Five Fingers (especially for James Mason’s elegant performance–talk about the nobility of failure–and the subtlety of the notion that he’s selling information to the Nazis knowing that they’ll never act on it, thereby absolving him of excessive guilt) and those intricate BBC adaptations of le Carré’s Smiley novels, which ought to be due for some kind of reissue. Spy movies are one of the few places where you’re not only allowed but are virtually compelled to be complicated, which is probably why they don’t make them anymore. And these latter-day American spies are such forbiddingly unlikable characters. Even Edward Fox as the Jackal had more charisma. So, wonderful as the subject is, it probably won’t happen.
Good luck with the speech. I’ll be keeping the champagne cold until the 25th.
Best,
Geoffrey
