Classic Movie Picks: August 2013

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.)

TCM's Summer Under the Stars is back! Because each day in August is devoted to the films of a single actor or actress, this is the perfect time to discover new films featuring your favorite stars. This year's line-up includes S.U.t.S. perennials like Doris Day, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, as well as never-before-spotlighted actors like Maggie Smith, Wallace Beery, and Mickey Rooney. I've picked out eight stars whose films I'm especially looking forward to watching, including three Oscar-winners. Most of the films I've picked here are new to me, but when one of my favorites, like After the Fox or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, shows up I can't pass up the opportunity to watch it again.

8/4: Mary Boland
Boland was a popular character actress in the 30s and 40s, usually cast as a society matron or zany matriarch. In the western comedy Ruggles of Red Gap (8 PM), Boland and her real-life husband Charlie Ruggles play wealthy ranchers who win an English butler in a card game. (But Boland's husband isn't the Ruggles of the title, that's Charles Laughton as the butler.) The silly screwball He Married His Wife (9 AM) stars Joel McCrea and Valerie Randall as a married couple  pulled apart by horse racing and brought closer by divorce; however, Boland reportedly steals the show as a giddy socialite whose home serves as the film's main location.

8/8: Ramon Navarro
After the death of Rudolph Valentino, Mexican-born Ramon Navarro became Hollywood's top Latin lover; however, Navarro's greatest success was as Judah Ben-Hur in 1925's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (8 PM). Navarro's stardom didn't transition to talkies for some reason; it wasn't the fault of his voice - Navarro was a trained tenor. And he's in full voice in the operetta The Cat and the Fiddle (6:15 PM) opposite Jeannette MacDonald. (The New York Times review from 1934 notes that Navarro appeared in person at one of the 2 NYC theaters showing the film, performing several songs on a program which included "dancers, Ruth Harrison and Alex Fisher; George Campo, pantomimist; the Chester Hale dancing girls, and Little Jack Little and his Radio Orchestra." I'd like to request that this sort of personal appearance become standard again. Just think, after a screening of The Wolverine, Hugh Jackman could do his cabaret show!)

8/12: Catherine Deneuve
French beauty Catherine Deneuve is an actress who I enjoy more with each role I see her in. She stars in one of my all-time favorites, the gorgeous and haunting musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (8 PM). She's said that one of her personal favorites is Tristana (10 PM), directed by Luis Bunuel, about an older man's obsession with his young ward. However, critical opinion points to 1993's My Favorite Season (12 AM) as Deneuve' finest performance to date, as a middle-aged woman caring for her aging mother and reconnecting with an estranged brother.

 8/19: Randolph Scott
Last May I really enjoyed discovering Ride the High Country (9:30 PM), Randolph Scott's final film after over a decade of appearing exclusively in westerns. So I'm really interested to see some of his westerns from the 50s directed by Budd Boetticher, which Scott also co-produced with Harry Joe Brown. Though regarded as popular B-movies at the time, these collaborations have gained critical attention in recent years. Ride Lonesome (5 PM) casts Scott as a cowboy seeking revenge and along the way he becomes entangled with a couple of outlaws and a beautiful widow. In The Tall T (8 PM), Scott plays a down-on-his-luck rancher who falls for a woman being held for ransom.

8/20: Hattie McDaniel
It's unfortunate that the immensely talented Hattie McDaniel spent most of her career playing maids. But no matter how small the role, McDaniel brings a wonderful spark to each of her films and she's the only Oscar-winning actress on my list this month. Her award-winning role came in 1939's Gone with the Wind (8 PM); anyone watching that film cannot deny that McDaniel's performance is a highlight. Where that film is epic and heavy, Janie (8:15 AM) is breezy and light; however, both films depict a nation at war and in both McDaniel plays the family maid. This comedy in the vein of the Hardy Family pictures centers around an innocent teen who falls for a soldier when her hometown becomes the site of an army base.

8/24: Charles Coburn
Whenever Charles Coburn shows up in a film, I smile just a bit more. I'm usually already smiling because Coburn's films tend to have really silly plots. For example, in Together Again (1 PM), Irene Dunne stars as the mayor of a small town, an office inherited from her late husband. When a statue of Dunne's husband is accidentally beheaded (!), Dunne's father-in-law, played by Coburn, encourages her to find new love, which comes in the form of sculptor Charles Boyer. The More the Merrier (10 PM) is a cute comedy set during a wartime housing shortage in Washington, DC. A hilarious Coburn plays cupid for his two reluctant roommates Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, and the performance won him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar of 1943.

8/27: Martin Balsam
Prolific character actor Martin Balsam is the other Oscar winner on this list (Best Supporting Actor for 1965's A Thousand Clowns). Balsam is a supporting player to stars Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May (8 PM), a tense drama about a military coup. Apparently Balsam was made even more tense by director John Frankenheimer's habit of firing off guns during his scenes. In the kooky caper film After the Fox (4 PM), Peter Sellers stars as an Italian thief who uses a "new wave" film production as a cover for a gold heist. Balsam plays the manager of the washed-up Hollywood actor who stars in the fake film.

8/29: Glenda Farrell
Glenda Farrell seems to have found a niche playing tough newspaper reporters. She first tried on that role in 1933's The Mystery of the Wax Museum (9:15 PM), as the sharp-tongued comic relief in a horror film about, well, a mysterious wax museum. Farrell then went on to star in the successful Torchy Blane series, starting with Smart Blonde (8 PM) in which the ambitious reporter investigates a murder alongside her policeman boyfriend. As hardboiled Torchy, "the Lady Bloodhound with the Nose for News," Farrell was even the inspiration for Superman's love interest Lois Lane.

Get the full line-up at http://summer.tcm.com/ - and enjoy the rest of summer!

Review: Twixt

by A.J.

If you look at his career as a whole, it appears that Francis Ford Coppola is an indie director that has also just happened to have made some of the most groundbreaking and noteworthy movies of all time. The film he directed prior to The Godfather, was a small scale road movie about a housewife who runs away from her home and husband called The Rain People. Along the way she picks up a brain damaged football player. It’s a movie very much in line with the times (the late 60’s), and also in line some of the smaller movies spread throughout Coppola’s filmography. Some of those films are good, some not so good. The Rain People moves at about the same slow-but-steady pace as The Godfather, but unfortunately has far less interesting subject matter and characters.

Francis Ford Coppola’s success with his vineyard has afforded him the luxury of making the films he wants to make, when he wants to make them, with little or no outside interference. He has made only 3 movies since beginning of this century. Despite the big name behind the camera, each of those films easily qualifies as an “indie film.” The most recent of those is Twixt, his first horror movie since 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Twixt played at film festivals with some sequences in 3-D; outside of those festivals it fell way under the radar. However, Twixt should not be entirely dismissed.

Twixt tells the tale of third rate horror novelist Hall Baltimore, played by Val Kilmer, who, while on a book tour, stops in a small town with a dark past and a recent mysterious murder. The local sheriff, played by Bruce Dern, thinks that the young murder victim (Elle Fanning) is tied into the town’s past, the band of Goth teens that live across the lake, and vampires. He also thinks it’d be a great idea for a book. Hall reluctantly agrees to co-write the book with the sheriff.

I’m a big fan of Coppola’s version of Dracula which was heavy on mood and practical visual effects. Twixt is also heavy on eerie mood and the visual effects, which are no doubt digital, but are used in just the right way at just the right time. The big highlight is the series of dreams Hall has in which he and Edgar Allen Poe discuss the art of crafting a story and Poe reveals to Hall the town’s past. Another highlight is Val Kilmer running through a series of impressions while trying to come up with a first line for his new novel.

Coppola came up with the idea for this movie after he had a dream not unlike the one Kilmer’s character has; and this movie does feel like something someone dreamed up and then threw together over a weekend or two. There is obvious skill and style from the first shot to the last, but unfortunately the story is only as thin as a dream and doesn’t quite live up to the craft put into the film. Nevertheless, Twixt still has enough interesting elements and stunning visuals to make it worth watching late one night.

Review: Welcome to the Punch

by A.J.

Welcome to the Punch opens with detective Lewinsky, played by James McAvoy, in hot pursuit of elite criminal Jacob Sternwood, played by Mark Strong. Sternwood escapes, Lewinsky is wounded in the knee and spends the next 3 years falling down the ladder of the London police department. When Sternwood’s son is caught up in a heist gone wrong, he comes out of hiding to try to save his son giving Lewinsky another chance to capture his nemesis.

Better movies have been made with simpler premises, so I’m hesitant to blame the material. It seems that just not enough was done to keep the story energetic and moving. There is more behind that heist gone wrong, but the build up to that reveal is a slow one. Characters at many different levels of the London police department, as well as criminal underworld are introduced. You might guess that they all intersect; eventually they do. In the meantime we have a cool blue-tinged London and a police department that only employs people under 35.

Whether from the 1960s or the 21^st century, I really enjoy gritty British crime movies. There is enough interesting camerawork and good performances to keep the first two thirds of this movie from being unbearably dull. Things finally pick up in time for the final shootout; which is a good one, very intense and action packed. Welcome to the Punch is gritty in tone more than visuals and in its better moments reminded me of The French Connection and L.A. Confidential, but ultimately falls short of being a notable entry in the gritty British crime genre. 
 

A Few Highlights of 2013, So Far...

by A.J.

The year 2013 is slightly more than half way done. Though I haven’t been to the movies as much as I would have liked, there have been some highlights and here are three.

If I had to distinguish one movie as “best of the year, so far” it would be:

The Place Beyond the Pines

This is an excellent multi-character, generational family drama of the kind that you might have seen on a semi-regular basis 20 or maybe even 10 years ago. It’s becoming a cliché to say that good character based dramas are rare these days, but it is true; and The Place Beyond the Pines is this year’s rarity. Spanning 15 years and 4 central characters this movie feels bigger in scale than I’m sure it’s budget could allow. This movie is essentially 3 different stories about fathers and sons and criminals and cops with overlapping characters. Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling are great, as you might expect, but seeing them work with material that is truly worthy of their talents is especially satisfying.
The Place Beyond the Pines comes out on DVD/Blu-Ray on August 6th.

Trance

Danny Boyle’s Trance is an excellent example of a “Neo-Noir” film. Film Noir is the distinction applied to crime dramas from the 1940’s and 50’s that were dark in subject matter and style. They usually concerned criminals or detectives and unsavory schemes. The definition of a film noir is as detailed as it is changeable, depending on who you ask. If you ask me, the noir style goes beyond the classic noir period of the 40’s and 50’s. Plenty of films made since qualify as noirs since the central elements of a film noir are timeless. Trance is about a group of art thieves trying to recover their recent theft from their inside man, an art auctioneer played by James McAvoy, who is unfortunately suffering from amnesia after double crossing them. The leader of the thieves, Vincent Cassel, goes along with a plan to have a hypnotherapist, Rosario Dawson, help him recover his lost memories. The plot twists and turns as memories are recovered and we learn more about the characters and just exactly why McAvoy’s character decided to double cross his gang in the first place. There are maybe one too many twists and turns, but this is still an entertaining noir fueled by the energetic style of director Danny Boyle.

Danny Boyle's Trance comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray July 23rd.

The Heat

So we’ve seen plenty of mismatched buddy cop comedies, more than a few of them have been good, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen one about female buddy cops. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Sandra Bullock in a decent comedy, too. Luckily, The Heat is a hilarious movie. Bullock plays a straight-laced FBI agent in pursuit of a drug kingpin who crosses paths with Melissa McCarthy, playing a wild card Boston cop in pursuit of the same drug kingpin. They partner up despite their differences and hilarity ensues. I know, it’s a formula, but all the correct variables were put in the right places: comedic director Paul Feig, funny actresses Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, and a script by Katie Dippold that is more concerned with making sure the characters are funny people than bashing us over the head with “Hey, look! Women can be funny!” A quote from Paul Feig, who also directed Bridesmaids, has been circulating around the internet: “[I want] men to come away from it going, like, ‘I’m not afraid of two women being funny’… These are just two very funny people and you’re just going to laugh for almost two hours.” It’s true. You’ll laugh for about two hours if you watch The Heat.

The Heat is currently in theaters.

Classic Movie Picks: July 2013

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.)

7/12, 8 PM - The Bride Wore Black (1968)
This month, TCM is spotlighting the films of French director Francois Truffaut on Friday nights. The Bride Wore Black stars Jeanne Moreau as a woman on a mission of revenge. The film was conceived as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut had recently published his now-classic book of interviews with Hitchcock) and was an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. So, if you like any of those three directors, this film may be worth a look.
BONUS PICK: 7/26, 8 PM - Day for Night (1973) - Truffaut's Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film is about the making of movies, lovingly depicting the contrast between the actual tedious labor of filmmaking and the captivating magic of a finished film.

7/22: Big Band Music on Screen
All day long, 6 AM to 8 PM, enjoy musical movies and shorts featuring Big Band stars of the 30s and 40s. For an added level of fun, try to pick out future A-listers like Ronald Reagan, Ava Gardner, and Dale Evans in blink-and-you'll-miss-em roles.
In Ship Ahoy (1942), airing at 12:30 PM, dancing dynamo Eleanor Powell and Red Skelton get mixed up in a spy plot to smuggle a magnetic mine on a cruise ship to Puerto Rico. It's got the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, including a young Frank Sinatra, plus Eleanor tapping out messages in Morse code - what more do you need on a summer afternoon?

7/22: Fred and Ginger
9 PM - The Gay Divorcee (1934)
11 PM - Top Hat (1935)
1 AM - Follow the Fleet (1936)
3 AM - Swing Time (1936)
5 AM - The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)
After a day of Big Band musicals, what's better than more musicals? Tonight's mini-marathon includes some of the best films featuring Hollywood's quintessential dance team: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

7/25: Controversial Teachers
8 PM - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
This film kicks of a night of stories about students and teachers; however, it is not the usual story of an unconventional teacher who is championed by her students and ultimately vindicated (see Stand and Deliver, Mr. Holland's Opus, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, etc.). Anchored by an Oscar-winning performance by Maggie Smith as the arrogant, manipulative Miss Brodie, the film also contains strong performances by Celia Johnson as the school principal and Pamela Franklin as one of Brodie's favored students.
10 PM - Dead Poet's Society (1989) - If you haven't seen this "new classic" then seize the day - carpe diem! - or night, as it were.
12:15 AM - These Three (1936) - Lillian Hellman adapted her controversial play The Children's Hour into this film about the power of a lie.

7/24: Tribute to Mel Brooks 
8 PM - AFI Lifetime Achievement Award: A Tribute to Mel Brooks
9:30 PM - The Twelve Chairs (1970)
11:15 PM - Carson on TCM: Mel Brooks (9/21/83)
11:30 PM - Excavating the 2000 Year Old Man (2012)
2 AM - Young Frankenstein (1974)
4 AM - The Producers (1968)
5:30 AM - The Dick Cavett Show: Mel Brooks
Tonight we celebrate the work of Mel Brooks with a tribute show, three comedies, two talk show clips, and a documentary; take your pick or enjoy them all! I'm looking forward to The Twelve Chairs, which seems to be the Mel Brooks film no one remembers. Set in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, it follows a once-wealthy aristocrat, a con man, and a priest in a race to find a fortune of jewels hidden in one of twelve chairs.

7/28, 8 PM: Great Expectations (1946)
John Mills, Jean Simmons, and Alec Guinness star in this Essentials, Jr. installment about poor orphan Pip who is raised up into society by a mysterious benefactor. Though the original story has been greatly pared down to focus on Pip's journey, this film version directed by David Lean remains the definitive screen adaptation of Dickens' novel.