Centennial + 1 celebration

Delighted to update this year-old post. TCM celebrates Luise Rainer, 101 and still going strong, tonight.

Cineaste: Previewing History

Week by week through Dec. 13 I'll be writing Cineaste's first serial post, a review of each episode of TCM's Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood. Tonight at 8pm EST: Episode 1, "Peepshow Pioneers."

A tangled web

How the programming grid on my Time Warner box describes Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb (1955), which airs tomorrow afternoon on TCM: "Psychiatric clinic director (Richard Widmark) handles crisis over new curtains." Yeah, that'll put butts on couches.

On TCM: Heaven's Gate

It's a little late to celebrate, but TCM's "31 Days of Oscars" salute contained what I believe was its first telecast of Michael Cimino's reviled, now rehabilitated, Heaven's Gate. True, it came in the dead of the evening, and "Classic" is sometimes a bit of a stretch given what the channel airs, but there it was, proudly enshrined in a pantheon of sorts. Its Art Direction-Set Decoration nomination, incidentally, was awarded on the basis of the short version that was given a tiny release in 1981, a few months after Cimino's preferred version tanked. But TCM, and other channels, and the home video market, have long since embraced the long version--as has critical opinion. It's an uneven, indulgent, puzzling, but genuinely rewarding vision if you give it a chance, and TCM should give it many chances.

On TCM: Not a Dream adaptation

TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" unearthed the flat-footed 1966 version of Norman Mailer's high-strung An American Dream, a nominee for Best Song (Johnny Mandel's "A Time for Love"). I suspect the writer was singing the blues over how this one turned out, a film that needed the nervous urgency of a John Frankenheimer but instead got a director of TV shows (Robert Gist) to shepherd a cast of TV familiars, or soon-to-be TV familiars (Stuart Whitman, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Murray Hamilton, Warren Stevens, J.D. Cannon, Paul Mantee, and in smaller parts Harold Gould and George Takei), on TV production value sets--it's like a more posh 70s TV movie, or an impoverished Ross Hunter or Joseph E. Levine feature. Whitman is an anti-cop, anti-mob TV pundit who lets his shrewish heiress wife (the underrated Eleanor Parker, vivid as always) plunge to her death following a brawl on their penthouse balcony, with staging that reminded me of the final fight in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and, it must be said, a memorably awful, though bloodless, finish 30 floors down). This puts the cops and the mob on his tail, with Janet Leigh (with cropped platinum blonde hair) as a former flame who now flickers for the Cosa Nostra. The effect, with most of the actors leadenly intoning hard-boiled dialogue, is more like The Oscar than Mailer--but that has its own appeal, and if the beautiful letterboxed (1.85:1) print shown turns up in the Warner Archive (it was a WB release) I'd consider it. Trivia for Hammer fans: This was the first of the two films the lovely Susan Denberg appeared in, the other being Frankenstein Created Woman.

And what do you know...two days after posting this on the Mobius Home Video Forum it did turn up in the Warner Archive. Still considering it, but love the noir porn box art, under its original title, featuring Parker. Was it really exhibited somewhere as See You In Hell Darling? Was the retitling Mailer's idea?

2010: The year we make...manimals?

TCM is about to air 2010 (1984) in a few minutes. It's the 2001 sequel that imagines the birth of a second sun...but somehow couldn't foresee the end of the Cold War, which is in full chill as the movie opens but as we know pretty much came to a halt with the fall of the Berlin Wall five years later.

Once you've made that obvious stop this New Year's Day, maybe hit a few more flicks set this year. There's 1988's The New Gladiators, where armed gangs roam a post-nuke Los Angeles. Or 2004's District B13, where armed gangs skilled in the art of parkour crawl the walls and pop through walls in pursuit of a neutron bomb aimed at the slums on the outskirts of Paris. The armed--and legged, and furred, and toothed--gangs in 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau are made up of Marlon Brando's menagerie of manimals, which back when a man from Hope was in the Oval Office and everything seemed possible we all figured would be commonplace by now. Maybe Lady Gaga is one.

There's 364 days left and the last laugh may be on me, but I suspect that by 2011 we'll still have one sun and be bereft of manimals. (The nukes and neutron bombs I'm not so sure about.) And I'm OK with that, so long as the events prophesied in 2012 don't come to pass.

"TCM Remembers" too soon

TCM's annual remembrance short is much better and more thorough than the one at the Oscars, which always manages to overlook a few folks. This year's is no exception, and managed to fit in Richard Todd before it first aired--but we've lost one Oscar winner and other worthies since then, and my gut tells me there will be other losses through New Year's Eve (there always are this time of year.) Would it, err, kill TCM to put together the final assembly and broadcast it in January?

TCM in HD

Woo-hoo...almighty Time Warner Cable, which taketh away HDNet Movies a few months ago in a corporate snit, hath giveth Turner Classic Movies in hi-def, on channel 782 here in New York (that's exactly 700 up from its standard-def berth, so easy to remember). Terrific. Now if only I could get the HD set downstairs to watch it...

On TCM: The Case Against Brooklyn

TCM has put my DVR into overdrive these last couple of nights. There were a bunch of rarely shown Stewart Granger pictures on, mostly Westerns--not normally the kind of thing that gets me going, but I had a sudden jones for Stewart. (Richard Brooks' The Last Hunt, with Granger and Robert Taylor, really needs to be on DVD.) And there was also "undercover" night, which brought a cache of movies about undercover cops, like the entertaining B Bunco Squad, out of hiding.

Most enjoyable was 1958's The Case Against Brooklyn, which, as the trailer and poster italicize, is one of those torn-from-the-headlines melodramas, pitting young cop Darren McGavin against a laundry-based protection racket that uses crooked law enforcement officers as muscle. I doubt the filmmakers got much past the Columbia backlot for principal photography (a truck chase is very SoCal in location), but it was fun to hear "Atlantic Avenue" and "Prospect Heights" name-dropped for verisimilitude, and to see my neighborhood portrayed as it was in the bad old days, as a hotbed of vice and corruption. Making the case for Brooklyn was McGavin, a whip-smart actor (always to be remembered as Kolchak: The Night Stalker) in a typically colorful performance. He's Brooklyn, baby.

On TCM: Great Directors

Turner Classic Movies embraces the auteur theory in a big way this month, establishing the primacy of the director every day in June. Whether or not you agree that the director is the true author of a film, there's no arguing that this doesn't give TCM a chance to showcase some great movies this month--and some that I've always wanted to see, some of which are I think new to the lineup. These include Tony Richardson's take on Hamlet (1969), with Nicol Williamson as the great Dane and Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia, on June 17; Jules Dassin's Phaedra, with Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins, on June 18, and Blake Edwards' The Carey Treatment (1972), with James Coburn, on June 19. And a whole day of Jacques Tourneur pictures, from various genres, on June 12. I hope it rains.

On TCM: Barbarosa

It's a damn shame that Westerns are pretty much tumbleweed city anymore. I have last year's, Appaloosa, waiting to watch on DVD--I think that was the only one to come out of Hollywood last year, not-so-hot on the heels of 2007's 3:10 to Yuma remake. It took me awhile to come around to the uniquely American genre, and I wish a larger audience would, too--just enough of one to get a few good ones in the pipeline, to encourage a more natural flow.

According to the invaluable Overlook Film Encyclopedia on the Western, 1982 wasn't such a barnburner, either, with just seven in release. (1983 coughed up just one, the sci-fi-ish Time Rider). But the brand was good that year, and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, The Grey Fox, and The Man from Snowy River all merit a look. The best, however, was Barbarosa, the American debut of Australia's Fred Schepisi, who proved himself a landscape artist with the picture's incredible vistas of the high deserts of Big Bend National Park, shot by Ian Baker.

You wouldn't know it, though, from indifferent TV and home video prints, which carelessly crop the image. Tonight at 10:15pm, however, Turner Classic Movies corrects this with what should be an eye-filling letterboxed image. I'll be watching for the background. What really counts, though, is what's in the foreground, an engaging and beautiful story about the importance of myth and the catastrophe of its absence--in the form of an ambitious, exciting, and amusing Western, teaming Willie Nelson (at his most iconic) and Gary Busey, with a lovely final role for veteran Gilbert Roland to boot. The film is being aired as part of a cult movies tribute--and you will want to saddle up with fellow Barbarosa mavens once you've seen it.

On TCM: Disney in the flesh

Everyone loves Disney's animated classics. Its live-action features, starting with 1954's magnificent 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, had their ups and downs, but there's a lot of nostalgia for them, which a new Turner Classic Movies documentary, Age of Believing: The Disney Live Action Classics, milks for all its worth. Angela Lansbury narrates, which gets the cozy vibe going, and check out the guest interviewee list: Kurt Russell, Hayley Mills, Dean Jones, Tommy Kirk, Dick Van Dyke, Glynis Johns, Kim Richards, etc., plus lots of footage of Uncle Walt in (live) action.

The documentary, which premiered last weekend, caps a day of Disney programming tomorrow, as TCM showcases some of the A- (and B-, and C-list) live actioners on Sundays this month. The show ends with 1982's Tron, and pretty much skips over the flailing studio's bid for Star Wars coin with 1979's The Black Hole, which kicks off a day of sci-fi and supernatural-themed outings. Included are the two Witch Mountain pictures (the second had no less than Christopher Lee and Bette Davis as the bad guys), Lansbury in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Jodie Foster (pictured) and Barbara Harris terrific in Freaky Friday. Foster really was something: From the start you can see the formidable actress she would become, and she harmonizes with David Niven and Helen Hayes in Candleshoe, which is also being broadcast. (1984's Splash, from the Eisner era, got the live-action market back on its feet, as Disney sprouted different branches and moved into PG, PG-13, and R-rated movies, big boxoffice achieved at the price of homogenization.)

It all takes me back to the K-Cinema in Randolph, NJ, which had Disney double features in the mid-70s. 1965's That Darn Cat!!, with Mills and Jones supported by a typically delightful supporting cast including Dorothy Provine, Elsa Lanchester, Roddy McDowall, Neville Brand, William Demarest, Grayson Hall, Frank Gorshin, and the inevitable Richard Deacon, was a favorite. I hate how Disney has looted its heritage by remaking these pictures, with better special effects but duller actors and charmless scripts. (If your kids prefer Robin Williams in Flubber over Fred MacMurray in The Absent-Minded Professor, show them the door.) But nothing lasts forever. The K-Cinema switched from Cat to pussy after the Disney run ended, and became a porn theater.

On TCM: Van Heflin

Few actors played underappreciated better than Heflin, which may be why the actor himself is slighted these days. Turner Classic Movies shows a little love for the star tonight with a showcase of his roles, beginning at 8pm EST with the original 3:10 to Yuma (pictured, with Glenn Ford), his Oscar-winning turn as a clinging gangster in 1942's Johnny Eager, the Barbara Stanwyck noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), and the excellent, Rod Serling-penned office drama Patterns (1956).

On TCM: Newman tribute today

Turner Classic Movies' all-day salute to the late actor is in full swing. Exodus, on right now, is a slog outside of Sal Mineo's scenes (neither Newman nor co-star Eva Marie Saint got along with director Otto Preminger, and it shows in their disinterested performances), but things pick up sharply with Sweet Bird of Youth, the outstanding Hud (pictured), and the rest, except for the curious closer, The Outrage, where Newman plays Toshiro Mifune's Rashomon part, this time as a brown-skinned Mexican. Of note is his acclaimed directorial debut, Rachel, Rachel (2:15 am EST), with one of Joanne Woodward's best roles.

On TCM: Monday with Jack Palance

I just posted on tomorrow's "Summer Under the Stars" salute at the Mobius Home Video Forum, with an entry on the actor's third and final collaboration with director Robert Aldrich, the Hammer Films production Ten Seconds to Hell (1959). I then realized I was stepping on my own schtick, so I'm bringing it back to base camp. Ten Seconds, which I've never seen, proved a trying experience, but their two, much more essential pictures, Attack! and The Big Knife, a movie-about-moviemaking that drips real venom, are also on. So is the fine, last hurrah for the Old West drama Monte Walsh (1970), with he and Lee Marvin giving warm and sympathetic performances as aging cowboys heading out to pasture. (They're on opposing sides in the all-star The Professionals, also airing.) And, revisiting another topic, Palance and Alain Delon (and Ann-Margret) co-star in 1965's Once a Thief, which is either a French crime drama gone Hollywood style, or vice versa. However you look at it, Delon never caught fire here. But Palance, whose facility from part to part wasn't truly appreciated till his Oscar-winning comic trail boss in 1991's City Slickers, walked tall whatever company he was keeping.

On TCM: Wednesday with Peter Lorre

As "Kim Novak Day" continues on Turner Classic Movies (there's still time to catch the little-seen and very good Paddy Chayefsky adaptation Middle of the Night at 6pm, followed by the fine Fred MacMurray noir Pushover at 8pm), Peter Lorre waits in the wings for his closeup tomorrow. Lorre was one of the great all-time character actors, a Michael Phelps of the form, effortlessly stealing scene after scene. Here he is, at his most diabolical, in 1935's Mad Love, positioned for prime time at 8pm Wednesday. Right after that (9:15pm) he adds to the expressionist style (including a memorably off-the-wall dream sequence) of 1940's noir-ish Stranger on the Third Floor, co-written by Day of the Locust scribe Nathanael West. Two of his pairings with "the fat man," Sydney Greenstreet, air beginning at 10:30pm, the legendary Maltese Falcon and the twisty Mask of Dimitrios. A day of lauding Lorre nears its close with one of my favorites, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, airs at 2pm, with Lorre a fine foil for a chipper Kirk Douglas and Esmerelda the seal.

I really should read Stephen D. Youngkin's acclaimed biography of the actor, but tomorrow is a good time to experience some of his facets.

On TCM: Monday with Richard Widmark

He never won an Oscar, but Turner Classic Movies is giving the late actor his own day tomorrow as its "Summer Under the Stars" series continues this month. You can get an early start at 2:30am, when TCM winds down its "Doris Day" with one of his few comedies, 1960's The Tunnel of Love. Then rise and shine at 6am with the Vikings and Moors epic The Long Ships (1964)--a false start, as it was the least of his pictures with co-star Sidney Poitier, and a credit he disliked. "Don't do me any favors," I can hear him snarling, through clenched teeth.

But things pick up at 8:30am, with one of his best grinning bastard roles, opposite the aged-in-wood Robert Taylor in 1958's The Law and Jake Wade. 1955's The Cobweb, a glossy asylum melodrama co-starring Lauren Bacall and directed by Vincente Minnelli, follows at 10am. Worth recording is 1956's Run for the Sun, a Most Dangerous Game remake with he and future Against All Odds co-star Jane Greer pursued by Trevor Howard in the Mexican jungle. It's the 4:30pm movie. 1978's Coma, which closes out the day at 4am, takes the grinning bastard out of the Old West and plunks him down in a modern hospital, a little smoother and more civilized this time.

The highlight is Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, at 8pm. His pickpocketing pas de deux with Jean Peters in a New York subway is one of the great erotically charged moments in strait-laced Fifties cinema. And he and Oscar nominee Thelma Ritter are equally combustible together. I love this exchange, as her stoolpigeon gives him grief for consorting with Red spies who are after microfilm in his possession:

Ritter: What's the matter with you? Playing footsie with the Commies!
Widmark: You waving the flag, too?
Ritter: Listen, I knew you since you was a little kid. You was always a regular kind of crook. I never figured you for a louse.
Widmark: Stop, you're breaking my heart.
Ritter: Even in our crummy line of business you gotta draw the line somewhere.