Remembering John Cazale, left, who was born on this day in 1935. The actor only appeared in five films, all nominated for Best Picture: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon (pictured here), and The Deer Hunter. pic.twitter.com/v3V0kqTT4L

— New Beverly Cinema (@newbeverly) August 12, 2018

Indeed, even a momentous event  like the death of Osama Bin Laden could just barely penetrate TCM’s  mix of Hollywood fantasy and scholarship. For me, the news first came as I overheard another filmgoer during an intermission of “West Side Story,” which I had popped in on just to see how good the 70mm print was, say to another. “No, he’s really dead.” I figured it was another classic film star gone forever. George Chakiris, who played Sharks leader Bernardo, had introduced the screening, but how were Jets Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn doing?

Walking away from the theater and heading toward the closing night party, I saw a lone car driving quickly down Hollywood Boulevard with its occupants yelling and waving American flags. Had the U.S.A. won an important soccer game or something? I eventually figured out what had happened, but it took hours for the news to sink in and, while people were mentioning it, most of the conversations I heard at the closing night party were about movies, understandably enough. The weird part was how several of the films I had seen dealt with the bloodier aspects of 20th century world history, which doesn’t seem to be letting up all that much here in the 21st.

Though you could see both “The Godfather” and “Taxi Driver” this year at the festival, in a funny way no film was more shockingly honest about violence than a film I’d managed to catch a second screening of just a few hours prior. “Went the Day Well,” a shockingly blunt and hugely effective piece of British wartime propaganda from 1942. Well regarded in England, the film, from the famed Ealing studios, was to some degree overtaken on its initial release by good news in the allied war effort and has become obscure even among the cinephile set. That may change as it is about to be re-released by Rialto Films. Directed by Brazilian expatriate Alberto Calvacanti and drawn from a short story by Graham Greene, “Went the Day Well” opens with a resident of a British town proudly telling us how several German names ended up in the town cemetery after it was the focal point of an abortive invasion.

From that opening, you’d have every right to expect to a tale of plucky Brits keeping a stiff upper lip as they bravely outwit the cruel Nazis. That’s what you get, more or less, but the surprise here is howviolent the film is by standards of the time and place it was released — enough to draw audible gasps from a modern day audience. The English have historically been much harsher on film violence than most other countries and it’s easy to imagine that the film might well have been effectively banned or severely cut if it wasn’t government sanctioned propaganda. It’s far from graphic, of course, but it’s bluntness is a real surprise to anyone familiar with films of the era.

More conventionally for a British propaganda film, it’s one with a collective protagonist, in this case an assortment of ordinary British people of various classes. The cast features numerous actors that looked vaguely familiar to this classic film fan, but few I could pick out of line-up. That doesn’t matter because most of them are doing very good work creating well-rounded charactes. I did recognize David Farrar from “Black Narcissus,” an actor with slightly odd rhythms,  and was wowed by a young Harry Fowler, a real treat as a borderline juvenile delinquent with heroic tendencies that I would have loved to see an entire film about. (Today, Fowler is probably best known for his uncredited bit in “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which Peter O’Toole teaches a disbelieving William Potter the not-so easy “trick” to putting out a match with your fingers.)

Perhaps surprisingly for a classic film festival, it’s possible that this year tales pitting the West against Soviet-style communism seemed to outnumber movies about World War II’s fight against fascism. 1934’s “British Agent,” made by a l0w-budget division of Warner Brothers, is the sort of curiosity only a real film geek can love and a real relic of pre-war confusion about where the Soviets fit it into a quickly realigning Europe.  Despite two very good leads in Leslie Howard and Kay Francis, who is assigned a next to impossible role, and first class production values overseen by director Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood”) the movie only works as a historical curiosity, though on that level it’s pretty darn interesting.

Technically an espionage tale, “British Agent” is really more of a romantic melodrama about a British diplomat (Howard) whose careless habit of decoding foreign cables in a loud voice leads to his new girlfriend (Francis) hearing some sensitive news. Since she’s not just his ladyfriend but Nikolai Lenin’s secretary, and he’s willing to foment a counter-revolution if it’ll keep Russia in World War I, it becomes a sticky wicket. The film is often criticized as jingoistic because of Howard’s ruthlessly Angl0centric behavior.

However, “British Agent” been better written, I think it would be read today as more as a realistic depiction of real politik from a frankly British point of view. It certainly makes no clear attempt to demonize the Soviets, who were still a year or two away from launching the infamous “great purges” of the 1930s, which killed millions. In fact, it’s oddly soft on the already not-so-swell human rights record of the early Soviet Union and even portrays a Stalin-like character as a not entirely bad bloke.

A very different kind of outsider’s take on the Russian revolution is offered in “Reds,” but here the movie itself was somewhat eclipsed by a very rare post screening appearance by the film’s director, co-writer and star, Warren Beatty, being interviewed by Alec Baldwin. It was high comedy as fans of Beatty were treated to the actor-producer-director’s apparently inborn inability to answer a simple question with a straight answer. He did, however, promise a return to filmmaking now that his children were old enough to be tired of him.

The movie itself is a romantic melodrama-cum-biopic, starring Beatty as radical American writer John Reed, who wrote the acclaimed history, 10 Days That Shook the World — which I actually managed to wade through after seeing “Reds” the first time — and wound up being the only American buried in the Kremlin. Co-starring Diane Keaton as his sometimes estranged life partner and fellow writer-activist, Louise Bryant, “Reds” is fairly straightforward in its depiction of both the ups and downs of radicalism and relatively blunt about the state-sponsored terror that arose early on in the Soviet Union. It won’t surprise Beatty’s many conservative detractors that it’s also pretty blunt about the lack of real civil liberties in Woodrow Wilson’s America.

As an ambitious Hollywood entertainment, the first half is thoroughly engaging and high on witty dialog. The second half is a bit more of a slog as the story takes us to more chilly emotional and geographic climes, but the entire effort is peppered with strong supporting performances. Chief among them is a restrained Jack Nicholson, before he’d developed some of his more recent bad acting habits, as playwright Eugene O’Neil, Maureen Stapleton as legendary anarachist earth-mother Emma Goldman, and the ever-great Gene Hackman in a two-scene cameo as a not-at-all-radical newspaper editor. Keaton and Beatty don’t make any attempt to veer away from their usual star personas and are not afraid to play up the comedic aspects of the story, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

If Warren Beatty was reasonably honest about the inhumanity of Soviet-style communism, Billy Wilder waged a hilarious iced Cold War against it in his semi-forgotten classic, “One, Two, Three.” As the very entertaining Michael Schlesinger pointed out in a funny live intro, it’s the kind of late-career summing up film for Wilder that “North by Northwest” and “Rio Bravo” were for Wilder’s peers, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. True, it’s a lot less well known than those two classics and perhaps just a hair or two lower on the rung of absolute cinematic greatness — except I don’t quite believe that. Like Schlesinger, I love this movie beyond all reason, even it’s too-silly, reality-breaking jokes.

Drawn from a one-act play by Hungarian author Ferenc Molnár, which I’d love to read or see in translation, “One, Two, Three” stars James Cagney as a manic Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who is not about to let his bosses’s teen daughter (Pamela Tiffin) and her sudden marriage to an ardent East German commie (Horst Buchholz) drag down his corporate ambitions. Aside from what it bought from Molnar, it features borrowed and refurbished characters and plot elements from such past Wilder classics as “Ninotchka,” which Wilder co-wrote in 1939, as well as “Some Like It Hot,” which was only a few years old in 1961.

Like “Hot,” it’s one of the very few true film farces — a very specific type of comedy — that actually works. (“A Fish Called Wanda” might have been the last really effective movie farce.”) Central to its genius is an absolutely brilliant performance by Cagney that fuel’s the film’s breakneck pace, which is vastly more caffeinated than a case full of Coke. It’s exhililirating to watch but apparently the filmmaking process — made more difficult by the reported obnoxiousness of co-star Horst Bucholz and the fact that the film was actually made as the Berlin Wall was being constructed, setting the stage for an actual Cold War crisis — was so exhausting that when Cagney heard a friend talk about taking a relaxing boat trip, he was so envious he decided to retire for the next twenty years.

It was one very well-earned retirement. Watch “One, Two, Three” and you’ll see why. True, he already had some competition from a certain James Brown, but every moment Cagney is on screen he’s the hardest working man in show business.

Breakfast came with an introduction from and a short Q&A with Jose Andres, host of “Made in Spain,” a show which I now feel like I need to watch just because he was so darned charming. After that, we got an update from PBS Kids which was surprisingly unexciting, but I stuck it out because I didn’t want to feel guilty about strolling out with the “Dinosaur Train” and “Super Why” toys that were on table. (My daughter’s going to love them…) From there, we shifted into the big ballroom and spent some time with Jeff Bridges as he talked about his upcoming “American Masters” special, then back to the small ballroom for the “Masterpiece” presentations on “Upstairs Downstairs” and “Zen.”

Back to the big ballroom again for “Bears of the Last Frontier,” but although I was fascinated, I had to slip out early in order to do a one-on-one with Rufus Sewell about his work on “Zen.” Thankfully, I made it back in time for the long but wonderful panel for “The Best of Laugh-In,” featuring Gary Owens, Jo Anne Worley, Ruth Buzzi, Lily Tomlin, and creator George Schlatter. Sadly, I missed most of the next two panels, “Forgiveness: A Time to Love & A Time to Hate” and “Independent Lens: Artists Profiles,” but on the other hand, it’s because I was able to help my buddy Brian Sebastian on interviews with Owens and Tomlin, even getting a few questions in myself.

The evening event was a performance by Harry Connick Jr. in conjunction with his “Great Performances” special, and I thought it was fantastic, if unabashedly jazzy. But, really, if you were expecting anything else, then you clearly haven’t been listening to the man’s music very much. All I know is that he tore the roof off the joint, and I loved every minute of it.

Okay, time for your top 10 quotes of the day. You’ll note more repetition of shows this go-round, but all I can tell you is that there were fewer panels and less instantly memorable moments in some of them. I think you’ll still get a few good laughs from this bunch, anyway, though. See you tomorrow!

1. “I got a little bit nervous when they told me that I had to be speaking in front of TV critics. I knew I was coming here to share time at PBS, but all of a sudden it’s, like, ‘The room is going to be full of TV critics.’ Great: all my life dealing with food critics one by one, and now I’m going to have to be dealing with an entire room of TV critics…?” – Jose Andres, “Made in Spain”

2. “There’s an element in making movies, the collage, that you give all your stuff and then the director cuts it up and makes a different piece out of it. Seeing myself as this young guy (in ‘Tron: Legacy’), it rubbed my fur a little bit the wrong way. You know, it was a bit like…remember the first time you heard your voice on a tape recorder, how weird it sounded to you? Early on in my career…I don’t know if we have time for kind of a long story. You feel like a story or not?

“My first film was called ‘Halls of Anger.’ The movie was about busing white kids into a black school, and I was the white kid who was supposed to be, you know, trying to integrate into the sports and all these things. And the black kids keep beating me up. So now this is the scene here; what I’m going to describe is the climax of the film. And Calvin Lockhart, wonderful actor, is playing the boys’ vice principal. And the scene is; I’ve been beaten up, and now I’m there, and I say, ‘I’m quitting.’ And I’m in tears and everything. He says, ‘No, you got to stick.’ I say, ‘I’ve had it. I’ve had enough,’ you know. So we started shooting the scene, and we did Calvin’s side first. And all my emotion came, and I was thinking, ‘God, I hope I have it when we come back to my side.’ Then they shot all the coverage of all the people’s reaction, and I was there. And then they came to my side, and I kicked ass, man. I was so…it was like fresh, and I got applause from the crew. And I was, like, ‘Oh, man, maybe I should do this acting thing. I’m pretty good!’ Now we cut to Watts, and it’s the premiere of the show, and I’m sitting there with my brother on one side and my father on one side. And I’m saying, ‘Wait till you guys see my…’ Well, you know, not saying it to them, but I’m saying it inside. And here comes the scene. And here it comes. And now they’re on Calvin. Yeah, Calvin, the boys’ vice principal. Yeah. Cut to me. Cut to me. Why aren’t you cutting to me? And now they cut to me…and my face is something like (a grimace). And the entire audience laughs…and I just about had a bowel movement. And if you listened, it was the perfect opposite reaction that I wanted from the audience.

“That was like a real crossroads for me with the acting, because I thought, ‘God, how do you protect yourself?’ And you don’t. You just have to be willing to lay it out there and put yourself in some director’s hands.” – Jeff Bridges, “American Masters: Jeff Bridges – The Dude Abides”

3. “(My performance tonight) was really weak. You know what it is, man? Like, I resorted a little bit of trickery. I haven’t sung a song in four months. I haven’t sat at a piano in four months because I was doing this dolphin movie. I’ve been a veterinarian for the last four months. So it’s unfair in a sense. But you guys didn’t pay to get in here, so I don’t feel that bad about it.” – Harry Connick, Jr., “Great Performances: Harry Connick, Jr. in Concert on Broadway”

4. “Lady Bellamy (on ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’) was played by Rachel Gurney in the first series. The truth of the story is she came into a great deal of money. Her mother died and left her a lot of money. So she went to John Hawkesworth and the other producers and said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go, I don’t want to do this anymore.’ So she went down on the Titanic, as you’ll remember, Lady Bellamy did. And either (Rachel) ran through the money, or she got bored, and she wanted to come back, so she went to John Hawkesworth and said, ‘Could you please write me back in, darling?’ And he said, ‘Rachel, the only person who could write you back in is Jacques Cousteau.’” – Jean Marsh, “Masterpiece: Upstairs, Downstairs”

5. “’Upstairs Downstairs’ premiered in England in 1971, it went on for five years, there were probably 68 episodes, and about 15 years ago, Jean Marsh and I were at a reception with Princess Margaret, in England. Princess Margaret was notorious as a party girl, as you all know, and there were great gaps in her own personal history. So Jean…I probably shouldn’t be telling the story, but it’s too late now…Jean was introduced presented to Princess Margaret, who was there in the dress, with the handbag. And the equery sort of whispered in Princess Margaret’s ear and said, ‘Jean Marsh, the creator of the very popular television series ‘Upstairs Downstairs.’’ Blank, nothing. Shakes hand with Jean, and the equery says, ‘You remember, the one about the Bellamy family at Eaton Place.’ And Princess Margaret said, ‘Oh, yes. The one about all the classes.’ Now, Jean’s a very feisty piece of work, and it doesn’t go down well, things like that, with Jean. So Jean is shaking her hand, curtsies, whatever you do, whatever you people do over there, curtsy. And she said, ‘How do you do, ma’am.’ Jean said, ‘Did you see it?’ And Princess Margaret said, ‘No, I was away.’ And Jean said, ‘For five years?’ That’s our Jean.” – Rebecca Eaton, “Masterpiece”

6. Ed Stoppard: Rufus has been Tom (Stoppard’s) surrogate son for about the last 20 years. I’m working through a lot of issues, actually, about this at the moment.
Rufus Sewell: This is a breakthrough.
Ed Stoppard: Yeah, and you’re all here. It’s like an intervention. Rufus, as I’m sure you’re aware, starred in ‘Arcadia’ in 1993. So I would have been 19. I remember going to see it — 18, 19 — and I remember going to see it and sort of slightly having a crush on him, really, truth be told. Have I not told you this before?
Rufus Sewell: No.

Ed Stoppard: Okay. Don’t print that. But basically thinking, “This is…” That was certainly one of those moments in my adolescence where I thought, ‘This is something I’d like to do.’ So I kind of knew Rufus from afar, and we’d sort of bumped into each other once or twice over the years. But, you know, Caterina was quoted in an interview I noted where she was asked, ‘What first attracted you to this project?’ And she said, ‘Rufus Sewell.’ And I kind of felt…I mean, that was also sort of pertinent to me. The idea of working with Rufus was…I was about to say very attractive. That’s not what I want to say at all, but…you know what I mean.
Rufus Sewell: More of a breakthrough than we need.

– Ed Stoppard and Rufus Sewell, “Masterpiece Mystery: Zen”

7. George Schlatter: I must admit, (getting Richard Nixon to appear on ‘Laugh-In’) was my biggest mistake, and I’ve had to live with that ever since he announced that that may have gotten him elected, but Paul Keyes was his closest friend, and I said, ‘Let’s do something. What about Nixon?’ He said, ‘We’ll go talk to him.’ So we went over to CBS, and Paul said, ‘Mr. Nixon, we want you to say, ‘Sock it to me.’ He said, “What is ‘sock it to me’?’ I said, ‘Just say that.’ He did say that. So we got a camera. Now, his guys are still, ‘He can’t do it,’ and we’re in there, and we say, ‘Just say, ‘Sock it to me.'” “Sock it to me.” “No, no, Mr. Nixon. If you could say, like, ‘Sock it to me.” ‘Yes, I’ve got it. This comedy is new for me, you know. Sock it to me.’ So we took six takes to try to get the one you saw, and we were out of there like a porch climber and put it on before anybody really knew what we were doing or knew the effect that it would have. Then we chased Hubert Humphrey all over the country trying to get him to rebut it…and he said that cost him the election.

Gary Owens: Well, you know, I was with Humphrey that particular day. He was doing “Meet the Press” that same day that Nixon came on “Laugh In,” but not together. So I knew Humphrey from my days in the Midwest, so I said, “Let’s go down and talk to him.” Well, he can’t do anything except say, “No,” and at this point, he says, “Well, I’m just starting to do ‘Meet the Press.’ Can you guys come back in maybe an hour and a half, and I’ll ask my advisors what I should do.” Well, of course, we’re waiting around thinking he would do it, and his advisors told him that he’d have his pants sprayed with seltzer and fall through a trap door…
George Schlatter: Not a bad idea…
Gary Owens: …which, of course, you wouldn’t have done. But, so, anyway, his advisors told him not to do “Laugh In.”
George Schlatter: They passed a special bill in Congress that would…they had an equal time provision, a special bill that allowed a political candidate, if it was a nonpolitical statement, under five seconds to appear on a variety show so that Nixon could appear. And I’ve had to live with that.

– George Schlatter and Gary Owens, “The Best of ‘Laugh-In'”

8. “I tried to resist…creating a strong persona because of my father, you know, with ‘Sea Hunt’ and Mike Nelson and all that. I saw how frustrated he was, because he was a very versatile actor, and because he was so successful as Mike Nelson. He got offered a lot of skin diving scripts. That’s about it for quite a while. So I went about not developing a strong persona, and now The Dude has sort of materialized as that. And I’m not so I’m not so stuck on not developing a persona. I figure now my persona is going to be whatever it is, and I’ve got enough material around The Dude that the filmmakers know I can do other things, so I’m not as worried as I once was about that, and I love ‘The Big Lebowski.’ It’s one of my favorite movies. I’m partial. I’m in it. That’s one reason. Even if I wasn’t in it, it would still be one of my favorite movies. It always hooks me. You know, I’m one of the guys who clicks on the TV, and if ‘The Godfather’ comes on, I’ll watch that. I get hooked. I say, ‘I’ll just watch a couple of scenes,’ and I get hooked. And ‘Lebowski’ is like that with me too. I’ll watch a couple scenes, and I’m a goner.” – Jeff Bridges, “American Masters: Jeff Bridges – The Dude Abides”

9. “I remember asking Brian May, the guitar player with Queen, ‘How much did Freddie (Mercury) know…like, really know…about music?” And he said he had a third grade piano education, which is fascinating to me because, when you think about the stuff he did like on any song, like ‘Death on Two Legs,’ whatever song you want to pick, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would be the obvious choice, and there’s a lot of stuff going on there. You know, what I dug about him so much is he was completely uninhibited as a performer. He just didn’t care. Like, he would just go out and wear what he wanted, even with his sexuality and with the way every nothing mattered. I mean, he wasn’t afraid of anything. As a young performer, that’s what you aspire to: to be able to not care. And the more you sort of restrict yourself with the confines of established art form like jazz and when you start to become successful at it, it becomes more and more difficult to be uninhibited because you like the success, you like what’s happening to you. So you would destroy it by doing anything contrary to that.

“I experienced that when I did these funk records. People you know, they come to my shows to hear me singing ‘It Had to Be You,’ and then we’re playing really weird New Orleans R&B, and so it’s difficult. But Freddie Mercury was one of those guys who didn’t care. That’s extremely rare, I think, to be able to do that, and you couple that with his musical abilities, I wouldn’t say he was the greatest piano player in the world, but he’s certainly intensely musical, and his vocals…like, there’s a guy I wouldn’t want to have a cutting contest with as a singer. Like, I mean, he just…that’s just…it’s, like, silly ability. That’s unbelievable to be able to do that, and even when you listen to his vibrato, it’s erratic. You know what I mean? That’s just talent, straight up talent and creativity. That’s ridiculous. Imagine what he would have been able to do had he been trained. Like, it wouldn’t have affected his spontaneity or creativity at all, I don’t think. I think that’s a big myth when you you know, when you become educated, it takes away from the soulful part. Imagine. I mean, that’s just, like, once a century talent, I think.”

10. “You know, some of (the talk show hosts) are great eaters. Charlie Rose is. Conan O’Brien is. But this is entertainment at 1:00 a.m. If you have anyone at 1:00 a.m. awake, don’t talk to them about the future of humankind through food, you know? When I go to these shows, I know I make a clown of myself. They never sit me in the sofa. I’m, like, ‘What the heck?’ Because I’m an immigrant? They make you cook. You know, they don’t invite Frank Gehry and they put him to make little buildings in the middle of the room. But with chefs, they still make us cook. Like, ‘All right, give me a break.'” – Jose Andres, “Made in Spain”

This other trailer tells you almost nothing about the actual plot of the movie in question, though it tells you something. The movie did okay.

For one thing, there’s the announcement that Kurt Ellis, the screenwriter behind HBO’s “John Adams,” is setting his sights on Warren Harding and developing the miniseries “Black Gold: The Teapot Dome Scandal.” Then, of course, there’s the fact that we’ve been chomping at the bit for Season 4 of “Mad Men” ever since the dissolution of Sterling-Cooper back in November, which means that we’ll pretty much forgive the network anything when the series returns later this year. Joel Stillerman, AMC’s Senior Vice President of Original Programming, Production, and Digital Content, gave us this one-liner: “Betty is off to Reno, Don is shacked up in the village, Sterling Cooper is held up in a hotel room, but maybe most importantly, Joan is back, and it should be another great season of one of the best shows ever.” Sounds good to me. More details are also emerging about the latest addition to AMC’s slate of original series, “Rubicon,” which Stillerman describes as “an incredibly compelling mystery that pays homage to the great conspiracy thrillers of the ’70s like ‘The Parallax View’ and ‘Three Days of the Condor,’” adding, “We thought, if we could find a way to take that style of storytelling that has stood the test of time so well and spin it off into a serialized drama, we would have something really great.” Let’s hope they do.

But enough about the new kid on the block. Let’s talk about the network’s other high-profile series: “Breaking Bad,” which will kick off its third season on March 21st.

It will, I’m sure, not surprise you that there will be little in the way of revelations in this piece, what with the season premiere still more than two months away as of this writing, but I can tell you that, within the first five minutes of the panel, the discussion had already veered between a religion called Santa Muerte and a teddy bear’s eyeball, so, y’know, make of that what you will.

Like many dramas on TV, the cast members of “Breaking Bad” have almost as little idea what’s going to happen next as the viewers do, rarely knowing how things are going to unfold until they get the script for the next episode.

“That’s what makes it exciting,” explained Bryan Cranston, who plays the show’s cancer-ridden meth dealer, Walter White. “Just like you watching it, we are reading it, and the feeling has the same impact, as much surprise as you have. We often comment to each other, ‘Did you read it yet? Did you read it?’ ‘Yeah, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.’ ‘I’m only halfway through it.’ ‘Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. You are not going to believe it. You are not going to believe it.’ So you have that kind of anxiety and anticipation of what’s about to happen, so it’s never boring and always a surprise and a turn here and there.”

As expected, Cranston wouldn’t offer specifics about what Walt would be going through in Season 3, but he was willing to speak in general terms, at least. “There are actually a couple turns that happen emotionally, some physically,” he said. “I’m starting to completely accept the metamorphosis of my character. I’m breaking out of the cocoon and ready to become a different person, and that transition over time is one of the things that was the most compelling for me about wanting to do this show is that (creator) Vince Gilligan said he wanted to do something that he’s never seen before, and that’s, as he famously puts it, turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. And it hasn’t been done on television before unless someone can cite an occasion where you actually see a person completely change who he is by the end of the series or near the end of the series. I will be a completely different person from the milquetoast person you saw in the pilot.”

(You may recall that Cranston spoke to this issue when he chatted with Bullz-Eye in conjunction with the most recent TV Power Rankings.)

Those who enjoyed his introduction in Season 2 will be pleased to learn that sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman will be back on the attack in Season 3. Saul was never intended to play such a substantial part in the show, but as Gilligan freely acknowledged, the part got beefed up because Bob Odenkirk was just so damned good in the role.

“I think the idea started the impetus was just watching ‘The Godfather’ over and over again, which I’m wont to do pretty much every other weekend,” said Gilligan. “We’re just ripping it off shamelessly at every turn. We figured Michael Corleone has a consigliere, so Walter White needs one too, but perhaps Saul Goodman is the type of consigliere that Walt and Jesse would get.”

“It’s a blast to play this character,” said Odenkirk. “People tell me it’s funny, and it’s certainly there’s a lot of funny lines, and he’s a funny guy, funny, slippery character to play. But I think, too, in a show where so many of the characters are they have such high stakes all the time, and my character is a little bit removed. It’s a little bit of a game to him to move these pieces around and see if he can make some money off them.”

“You’re sort of like the hooker with the heart of gold, though,” said Gilligan.

“Does he have a heart of gold?” asked Odenkirk.

Gilligan hesitated. “Well…”

“He had it removed,” decided Odenkirk. “So he can sell it and see how much he can get for it.”

Probably the most telling responses during the course of the panel came when the group was asked en masse if they could nail down a theme for Season 3 of “Breaking Bad.” Gilligan immediately passed the buck, claiming, “I can’t see the forest for the trees.”

“Well, its very different this year in the sense that, in Season 2, we were all leading toward that final midair collision, and everything led up to that,” said Cranston. “This changed all that. I know, Anna, you were talking to me about the whole conceit of Walter feeling like he had to keep this secret to himself.”

“Yeah,” agreed Anna Gunn, who plays Walter’s long-suffering wife, Skyler. “At the end of last season, he had to balance that he decided to go down this road, but the whole time it was essential, obviously, to not let Skyler find out. And then what we’re left with is that she knows something. She doesn’t want to know what it is, but she knows something. And he knows therefore that he doesn’t know exactly you don’t know exactly what I know at the end of last season.”

“I know what you think you know,” said Cranston, smirking, “but I don’t know what you really know.”

Gunn laughed, but she pressed on, explaining, “I think that the actions that he took are starting to have consequences. That’s what it seems to me. The chickens are coming home to roost.”

“That’s well put,” agreed Gilligan. “Perhaps this season is, ‘The best laid plans of mice and men…’ I don’t want to get too much into detail, because it would ruin a lot of fun things that are coming up, but I see Walt this season a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein, in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein, with good intentions, creates a monster. And maybe we’ll see a little of that with Jesse.”

“I think this season is really a season of change for all the characters involved in this show,” said Aaron Paul, who plays the aforementioned monster in Gilligan’s comparison. “With Jesse, it ends off with him feeling completely 100 percent guilty for the death of Jane, his first real, true love. I mean, maybe it was just like a chemical romance, but he lost her, and he completely blames himself. So he is thrown into rehab, and this first season starts with him kind of trying to make an executive decision on staying focused. he kind of accepts who he is…and it’s kind of a sad reality.”