Ask Mick LaSalle:
When Gable was snubbed.
Dear Mick LaSalle: When Clark Gable didn’t win the Oscar for “Gone With the Wind,” he took it as a personal snub. Which he should have. Right? Robin Ellison, Napa
Dear Robin Ellison: Not really. It’s best not to take anything as a personal snub, most especially personal snubs. But Gable was always brooding. The truth is, strong, silent-type actors have much more in common with other actors than they do with real-life strong, silent types. They’re worried, insecure people who just happen to look a certain way.
Dear Mick LaSalle: I walked out of “Fury” about 70 minutes in. I didn’t care about the main characters or what happened to them. It didn’t seem like there was a plot. A few others walked out. The excess gore didn’t bother me, and I got the fact that it was realism. John Reid, Menlo Park
Dear John Reid: Actually, you’re describing the movie accurately, but you’re characterizing as bad everything that’s good about it. Yes, it feels plotless. The characters aren’t lovable; the violence is brutal, and the whole aura is one of senselessness and horror. I never saw a movie that better depicted the feeling of being at war endlessly, and that showed the spiritual damage it does to people. These things make it an almost great movie — and a unique depiction of World War II. What prevents it from being a flat-out masterpiece is the last half hour, which reverts to a more conventional and heroic pattern. As soon as the war starts making sense, the movie loses something.
Dear Mick LaSalle: Please tell me how Jimmy Stewart plays a creep in “Vertigo” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much”? A creep in my vocabulary is repulsive, slimy and offensive, very often a sexual predator. The father in “Man” and the detective in “Vertigo” are creeps? You and I have a different dictionary. Walt Giachini, Novato
Dear Walt Giachini: We do have a different dictionary, in that my dictio- nary is an actual dictionary. Funny thing, but deciding what a word means in your own vocabulary doesn’t actually change the word’s definition in everybody else’s, because other people are using that word, too. If I say he’s a creep in “Vertigo,” it’s because he acts like a creep throughout the second half of the picture. In “The Man Who Knew Too Much” the creepiness is more subtle, but just as interesting. Because he is played by James Stewart, the audience barely registers that this is a very harsh guy, that his marriage to his wife is almost entirely burnt out, and that he really isn’t nice to her at all — even though she’s played by Doris Day, which should have made it easy. The scene in which he tricks her into taking sleeping pills is among the great unsettling scenes in the Hitchcock canon.
Hi Mick: Your review of “Wild” was oddly bloodless. There was a disconnect there, almost as if you were thinking “I don’t really understand why someone would do something like this, and frankly, the thought of all those blisters and dust is kind of icky.” Berkeley Choate, Berkeley
Hi Berkeley: I see movies all the time about people who do things I wouldn’t do. The majority of movies that get made are about people who do odd or extreme things. What you’re really responding to is my honest lack of enthusiasm for a movie that has many good things in it, but that just barely succeeds, mostly thanks to the direction. It’s a movie about a hike — and watching it is almost like going on a hike, but without the exercise. The holiday season is a big time for grade inflation, because critics are looking to fill their top 10 lists and are searching for candidates in the various categories. I try not to succumb to that temptation but rather love movies in December as I would in May.