Tubi clearance sale

Three movies that I’d bookmarked for future viewing on Tubi were about to depart the channel, so I had to move them up in my queue and watch them quickly.  

I’m not sure why Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) begins and ends with “Hooray for Hollywood” – it folds into the "L.A. Noir" category, but much of it takes place in Malibu and Mexico, with no mention of films or filmmaking. 

Elliot Gould plays the venerable private detective Philip Marlowe with an insouciant charm, a hipster anti-hero and the only character in the film who wears a business suit, even on the beach, smokes (constantly, striking wooden matches on any flat surface within reach), or has zero interest in a sorority of potheads who practice topless yoga on the balcony across from his apartment.

If you're looking for Altman’s sometimes leftfield casting, The Long Goodbye includes Jim Bouton, with a pivotal role (but thankfully few lines), and Nina van Pallandt, a 1970 headline maker thanks to her role in the silly 1970 Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes “scandal.”

Toss in the excellent Gould, Sterling Hayden playing to type as a blocked Hemingwayesque writer and Henry Gibson, going against the grain as a tough-guy, and you have the best of the post-Bogart Philip Marlowe movies.

The social order within the Rat Pack is never more apparent than in Salt and Pepper (1968). Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin share top billing in a drama like Some Came Running; Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis get stuck with this comedy (which they co-produced) about nightclub owners in “Swinging London” who find themselves involved in stopping a military coup of the U.K.

Sammy isn’t just the co-owner of the club, he’s also the nightly entertainment, and gets a big song and dance number, frugging and whipping off a “solo” on an electric guitar that isn’t plugged in. He only needed to wait a year for his real shot for a big number in a big movie, The Rhythm of Life in Sweet Charity.

A fascinating subtext throughout, knowing how Lawford and Davis died, is watching them forever lighting up, smoking or having a cigarette smoldering between their fingers. There’s no oxygen tank assistant listed in the credits, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.

One year after Dirty Harry comes Hickey and Boggs (1972), with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby menacingly pointing big guns. This is one dark and brutal movie. Culp (who directed) and Cosby play private detectives financially and emotionally at the end of the line. As a disillusioned Cosby says, “There’s nothing left of this profession. It’s not about anything.”

But even as both are prone to confusion about their identity, purpose and meaning in life, they also buoy each other.

The plot is somewhat convoluted, but a missing person case leads to a string of deaths (a lot of deaths) and shootouts (including a firefight in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium and on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum).

Professional hitmen, Black Power nationalists, dark bars at midday, Mexican immigrants, sunbaked urban settings – as a noir movie about the “seamy underbelly” of Los Angeles in the 1970s, Hickey and Boggs is an underrated gem.

Stuck a feather in his hat

Friedrich Wilhelm Steuben (AKA Baron von Steuben) was born into a Prussian military family in 1730. He enlisted in the Prussian Army as a teenager and put in 17 years of military service, rising to the rank of captain. He was abruptly discharged in 1763, then spent 11 years as a private citizen.

But Steuben yearned for military life and when Benjamin Franklin made overtures to have him join the Revolutionary War and help lead an inexperienced army of farmers on its heels battling far superior British troops, he jumped at the chance.

Working without compensation, Steuben arrived in the colonies to find a ragged and undisciplined Continental Army. He established military drills, paid attention to housekeeping details like placing latrines and mess halls on opposite ends of encampments, and taught battle tactics unknown to the colonials, like how to use a bayonet in close-quarter combat. 

Now prepared and battle-ready, the war shifted in the favor of the colonials. Steuben won over George Washington, becoming a trusted advisor.

Baron von Steuben was also apparently openly gay at a time when the term “homosexual” had yet to be invented and “gay” meant something else entirely.

Steuben remained unmarried his entire life and there is no mention of female companions in any of his correspondence. He took on several long-time companions, younger men who served as aides-de-camp and translators (Steuben spoke no English, only profanities). At Valley Forge he met two officers in their twenties, William North and Benjamin Walker, and legally adopted them as his “sons,” able to inherit his estate, a common practice before gay marriage was legal.

There is also a story that at Valley Forge Steuben organized, at his own cost, a dinner party for the troops, demanding everyone who attend be nude or in their underwear. Maybe it was his way of saying that rank didn’t matter, we’re all the same underneath. Maybe not.

Steuben may have been openly gay, but the specter of sodomy laws were always present, with a maximum penalty of death in Virginia. (Thomas Jefferson tried to reduce it to "simply" castration).

With the war over, Steuben was discharged with honor, became a U.S. citizen and a thankful New Jersey presented him with the use of an estate, known as Steuben House, located in New Bridge Landing (today River Edge). The home had been confiscated from a Brit loyalist and it served briefly as George Washington’s military headquarters. Steuben and William North lived together there for several years before Steuben moved to New York State, where he died in 1794.

You can become blasé growing up so close to history – Google Maps says it’s a 23-minute walk from where I grew up to Steuben House – but thanks to many school trips, Baron von Steuben was as familiar a name to us as George Washington or Alexander Hamilton. The place always had a ghostly presence, sitting as it did among busy roadways and faceless garden apartments (named The Steuben Arms).

Ironically, it’s also just a half mile away from another New Jersey landmark. Club Feathers opened in 1978, making it the state’s oldest gay nightclub and currently the only one in North Jersey. Its a place where, according to one online review, people can feel safe, welcome and accepted. 

Sounds like the kind of place Baron von Steuben might have liked hanging out in.

Much of the historical information about Steuben is taken from “Washington’s Gay General,” a graphic novel written by Josh Trujillo and illustrated by Levi Hastings.