BCB After Dark: Rookie of the year? (2024)

Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Everyone is welcome tonight, new friends and old. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. There are still a few good tables available. Bring your own beverage.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

The Cubs beat the Diamondbacks 3-2 in 11 innings tonight. The story of this game early was Ben Brown and Michael Busch. Brown went a career-high six innings and allowed just one run on one hit. Busch homered in his fifth-straight game. But late, the story of the game was Nico ho*rner. ho*rner scored from second in the top of the ninth on a wild pitch to send the game to extra innings and then had the game-winning RBI single in the top of the eleventh.

Oh, and a tip of the hat to a strong pitching performance by Keegan Thompson in extras.

Last week I asked you to give your current opinion of the Michael Busch trade. That was before he homered in each of the last four games. (The fifth home in the series in San Diego did come before the vote.) In any case, 84 percent of you gave it a “Yay!,” which is a lot higher than the 49 percent of you who gave it a “Yay!” on the day of the deal. Only three percent of you said “Nay!” and 13 percent of you were still “meh.”

Here’s the part of the show where we talk about jazz and movies. You can skip these parts if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.

I’ve always felt that one thing that limits people from enjoying jazz is a basic unfamiliarity with the material. Yes, there are lots and lots of original tunes written for jazz groups, but a lot of the material comes from the “Great American Songbook,” which just means songs that were popular from the 1920s into the 1950s. These songs would be instantly recognizable to anyone from that time, but the next time I hear “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” on the radio will be the first time I hear it. Unless you’re talking about a jazz version of it. But sometimes it’s hard to understand what the musicians are trying to do if you’re aren’t familiar with the song in the first place.

So that’s just a long way of introducing this piece by French-Israeli pianist Yaron Herman. It’s Radiohead’s “No Surprises.”

Stage Fright (1950) is never mentioned among the top works of director Alfred Hitchco*ck. And truth be told, it really isn’t up to the high standards that Hitchco*ck set. But bad Hitchco*ck is usually better than ninety percent of what’s out there, and taken on its own, Stage Fright is a decent picture. It does have some unique qualities to it, however, that would recommend it to anyone wanting more Hitchco*ck beyond the obvious classics. It’s also a must-watch for Marlene Dietrich fans.

The year 1950 was a weird time in Hitchco*ck’s career. He was famous as a bankable director, but he wasn’t Hitchco*ck yet. He hadn’t yet become an adjective. That wouldn’t come until after his series of hit films in the fifties and especially after the success of the television program Alfred Hitchco*ck Presents. The director came to America in 1939 and immediately had a huge hit with Rebecca. He followed that up with a series of big hit films in the early forties. But by the late forties, Hitchco*ck had a series of disappointing films under his own production company, Transatlantic Pictures. Rope may be considered a classic today, but it received mixed reviews at the time and was a commercial failure. His next film, Under Capricorn, did even worse. Stage Fright was his third attempt with Transatlantic Pictures and he went back to London to shoot it. He used a mostly English cast, but he brought Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich over from Hollywood to star in it. Hitchco*ck felt he needed their star power to sell the film to American audiences.

The plot of Stage Fright is a variant of the Hitchco*ck staple of the innocent bystander getting swept up in a plot they don’t understand. In this case, the innocent is Eve Gill (Wyman), an aspiring actress who has an unreciprocated crush on fellow aspiring actor Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd). Jonathan, however, has been carrying on an affair with famous actress and cabaret singer Charlotte Inwood, who is basically a fictionalized version of Dietrich herself.

Jonathan comes to Eve in a panic, explaining that Charlotte had killed her husband and then set him up to take the fall for her. Jonathan begs Eve to hide him from the police until they can prove his innocence. Eve, out of her affection for Jonathan, agrees to hide him at her father’s house on the English coast.

The rest of the plot is Eve and her father (Alastair Sim) trying to keep Jonathan hidden while gathering evidence against Charlotte. Eve runs into a police inspector Wilfred “Ordinary” Smith (Michael Wilding) who is looking for Jonathan to arrest him. Eve plays a dangerous game of hiding Jonathan from Smith while at the same time, trying to get him to investigate Charlotte instead. Smith, on the other hand, is convinced that Eve knows where Jonathan is and tries to convince her to give him up. Also, he’s a bit smitten with the cute-as-a-button Eve and wishes she would return his affections. After a while, even Eve realizes that “Ordinary” Smith is a better romantic partner for her than Jonathan, but she still can’t betray her friendship with him.

There’s a major twist to Stage Fright that I can’t really describe in any sense without giving away the plot. It’s a twist that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a film before. However, that may be because it doesn’t really work. It’s not well set-up and it seems to come out of nowhere. In fact, the screenplay, credited to Whitfield Cook, Alma Reville (Hitchco*ck’s wife) and James Bridie is the weakest part of Stage Fright.

Wyman was coming off an Academy Award for Best Actress for Johnny Belinda (and a divorce from Ronald Reagan) as was a hot property when she made Stage Fright. She’s fine here as an innocent trapped in a murder plot, but the script doesn’t do her many favors. Wyman also lacks much on-screen chemistry here with anyone other than Sim, who plays her father. (The father-daughter relationship here is the only one that’s pretty good.) Dietrich and Wyman reportedly didn’t get along during the shoot, which is OK because their characters don’t particularly like each other anyway.

Hitchco*ck also made the decision to have Eve go with Wyman’s American accent, despite both of her on-screen parents having heavy English accents. There’s a throwaway line about her attending school in America, but the real reason is so that when Eve goes undercover trying to gather evidence, Wyman adopts an English accent, meaning the audience knows when Eve is being Eve and when she’s pretending to be someone else. Which is a choice, I guess.

As noted earlier, Dietrich is just playing a fictionalized version of herself. Hitchco*ck pretty much let Dietrich direct herself, figuring that the grand diva knew more about how to make herself look good than he did. That also meant fewer battles that Hitchco*ck had to fight on the set, but it also was a source of friction between Dietrich and Wyman, who thought that Dietrich arranged the scenes with the two of them to make Dietrich look better than her. She probably did. Wyman reportedly cried at how frumpy she looked in parts of Stage Fright and Hitchco*ck was as responsible for that as Dietrich was.

Dietrich has two big musical numbers in Stage Fright that look like they came out of a different movie. Not that they’re not both great. Cole Porter wrote an original song for Stage Fright, “The Laziest Gal in Town” for one number and Dietrich performed Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en rose” for the other one. Both would become staples of her stage act for years thereafter.

Also, Dietrich was fabulously attired by Christian Dior in this film. (And Wyman wasn’t—not that the character of Eve would ever wear Dior.) One of the dresses even plays a plot point. Fans of fashion history would find Stage Fright worth watching just for one of the most celebrated designers of all time at the height of his career making clothes for Marlene Dietrich.

Overall, Stage Fright isn’t a bad film, but it’s one mostly of interest to Hitchco*ck and Dietrich fans. There’s certainly the sense that Hitchco*ck is trying to recapture the magic of Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt with Stage Fright and he just misses. But then he lets Marlene Dietrich do her thing, which elevates it in the end.

Here’s the trailer for Stage Fright. You can see they really lean into the star power of Wyman to sell the film. The first 45 seconds are all about Wyman and Johnny Belinda.

Welcome back to everyone who skips the jazz and cinema.

Tonight I have a simple question that isn’t so simple. Who will be the Cubs’ Rookie of the Year?

The Cubs have been propelled so far this year by two rookies: left-handed pitcher Shōta Imanaga and first baseman Michael Busch. Coming into tonight, Imanaga had made three starts and posted a record of 2-0 with a 0.00 ERA over 15.1 innings. He has struck out 16 batters and walked just two. Those home runs that we were told would be an issue for Imanaga? They haven’t been an issue so far as he hasn’t allowed one.

Tonight, Busch tied a Cubs franchise record with a home run in his fifth straight game. As I write this the game is still going on, but Busch is batting .327 with a .400 OBP and six home runs, which ties him for second in the National League. Busch’s slugging percentage is .731.

Imanaga has allowed one unearned run, but that was the fault of an error by Busch.

Coming into tonight, Imanaga has a WAR of 0.9 according to Baseball Reference. Busch’s WAR was 0.5, but I’m sure that increased after tonight.

I’m sure that Imanaga is going to allow an earned run sometime this year and there is going to be a game when Busch doesn’t hit a home run. But both of them could continue to be among the best players on the team.

But which one will end up being better? That’s the nasty question that I’m asking tonight. Tell me which one of your new favorite ballplayers will be the best rookie on the Cubs by season’s end.

I’ll even let you vote for “other” if you want. But I don’t know why you’d want to. I guess you could be a Ben Brown fan. That would make sense.

Thank you so much for stopping in this evening. You’re the reason that we do this. Please check to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything. Recycle any cans and bottles. Get home safely. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.