Classic Movie Picks: July 2014

by Lani

Each month, I scour the Turner Classic Movies schedule for upcoming films that I can't miss. The highlights are posted here for your reading and viewing pleasure! (All listed times are Eastern Standard, check your local listings or TCM.com for actual air times in your area. Each day's schedule begins at 6:00 a.m.; if a film airs between midnight and 6 a.m. it is listed on the previous day's programming schedule.)

7/6: Good help is hard to find...
2 AM - The Housemaid (1960)
4 AM - Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
I'm intrigued by this late night double feature of foreign films featuring maids who disrupt the lives of their employers. Korean director Kim Ki-yong's psychological drama The Housemaid was unreleased in America until 2013, with assistance from Martin Scorcese's World Cinema Project. Diary of a Chambermaid was made in French by Spanish director Luis Buñuel, here downplaying his usual surrealism, and stars Jean Moreau. 

7/7: Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
8 PM - Show Boat (1951)
10 PM - Carousel (1956)
Tonight's line-up honors lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II with film adaptations of his stage musicals. Show Boat was a collaboration with composer Jerome Kern and depicts the personal dramas among entertainers aboard a riverboat. Carousel is perhaps the darkest work produced by Hammerstein and composer Richard Rodgers, his most successful and sustained collaboration. It tells the story of an ill-fated romance between an innocent mill-worker and a rough, self-centered carousel barker. Though they may seem old-fashioned now, both shows represented an evolution in musical theatre from revue-style shows to ones in which the songs and dances arose from and furthered the plot. It seems that with Broadway's current slew of "jukebox" musicals, we may be moving backwards, but that's a discussion for another blog...

7/10: Great American Docs
8 PM - Salesman (1969)
9:45 PM - The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
11:30 PM - Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)
These three documentaries offer authentic and revealing portraits of American life. Salesman, directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, focuses on four door-to-door Bible salesman on the East Coast. While selling door-to-door is mostly a thing a of the past, the struggles of the salesmen still resonate today. 
Director Robert Epstein began filming a short film in 1978 about San Francisco politician Harvey Milk's campaign against the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California public schools. Three weeks after the initiative was defeated, Milk was assassinated, and Epstein chose to re-focus his film on the life of Milk and his message of inclusiveness for the LGBT community. The Times of Harvey Milk won the Best Documentary Academy Award in 1984.
Barbara Kopple also won the Best Documentary Oscar for her film Harlan County U.S.A. It chronicles a contentious miners strike in Kentucky as the miners push to unionize and are met with frequently violent resistance from the mine owners, Duke Power.

7/27, 12:15 AM - Pandora's Box (1928)

In this silent film by German director G.W. Pabst, Louise Brooks is Lulu, a hedonistic dancer whose sexual magnetism causes the weak men around her to self-destruct. She isn't a traditional femme fatale; she suffers along with the men and as a result of their recklessness. (And she doesn't just beguile men -- the film contains what may be cinema's first lesbian in the character of the Countess, who shares a dance with Lulu.) Even if you've never seen this film, you'll probably recognize Brooks's hairdo. Her severe, squared-off bob became an iconic look of the 20s and it pops up often in later films which want to reference the era, from Cyd Charisse in 1952's Singin' in the Rain to the title character in 2012's Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.