Thursday, December 31, 2015

Classic Movie Picks: January 2016

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.)


Happy New Year! Here's to another year of classic movies full of old favorites and new discoveries!

1/1: American Remakes
8 PM - The Magnificent Seven (1960)
10:15 PM - M (1951)
The Magnificent Seven is a western about seven gunman hired to protect a town from ruthless bandits. Based on the Japanese film Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa, this is an example of a remake that lives up to the original. The change of setting to the American West works quite well and it has a great cast including Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn. A remake of the remake is scheduled to come out in fall of 2016 starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke. No idea if they've kept the setting and storyline, but let's hope the new version retains Elmer Bernstein's rousing score for the 1960 film.
M is based on a German film of the same name directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre. The German film is a suspenseful, noir-ish story about the manhunt for a murderer. I had no idea there was an American remake starring David Wayne, a Tony award-winning actor who I always enjoy when he shows up in supporting roles on film. I'm interested to see if this version matches the suspense of the original.


1/3, 9:45 PM - Broadcast News (1987)
Writer-director James L. Brooks created this examination of television news whose themes about entertainment vs. journalism are still relevant today. At the center of the story is a love triangle, as an ambitious and headstrong female producer (Holly Hunter) is drawn toward her network's handsome new anchor (William Hurt), while also being admired by a good-hearted, though neurotic, reporter (Albert Brooks). All the main characters are very well-drawn and well-acted. The first time I saw Broadcast News the thing that stood out to me was that the female protagonist was not wholly sympathetic; and for once, she wasn't being asked to choose between an obvious jerk and and obvious nice guy. Both the men are decent people; they are just different people. Mixed among the satire of the media are some truths about relationships: Sometimes you love the wrong person; you can't make someone love you, no matter how much you want them to; being a nice person is often underrated.


The Bigamist DVD


Directed by Ida Lupino
1/5, 12 AM - The Bigamist (1953)
1/12, 9:30 PM - Never Fear (1949)
Today, actress-turned-director Ida Lupino is regarded as a filmmaking pioneer. However, during the 1940s and 50s, when the number of women directing films in Hollywood could be counted on one hand, she was considered an oddity. Creating her own production company with her then-husband Collier Young, Lupino made films with a social conscience and storylines which focused on women. As the title suggests, The Bigamist is about a man secretly keeping two families in different cities. It stars Lupino, alongside Joan Fontaine and Edmond O'Brien as the three spouses. In real life, Lupino had at this point divorced Collier Young, who was also the film's screenwriter, but the two continued to produce together. Young had remarried with none other than Joan Fontaine. And so Ida found herself directing, and playing a rival to, her ex-husband's new wife, which seems...awkward. The film is part of a night featuring films restored with support from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group of journalists which hands out the Golden Globe Awards each January. Never Fear is the story of a young dancer who contracts polio and how the diagnosis affects her career and relationships. This film was restored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Film Archive.
The situation for women in Hollywood has changed shockingly little in the past 60 years. Though women have moved into all levels of the film business, they are by far the minority and the balance of power still weighs heavily towards men. (In fact it's even less equal than it was 17 years ago.) In addition, film studios are still wary of making films about women's lives, despite the fact that female-starring films have been among the most popular of all-time -- from the 1930s when Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin were the top stars of their respective studios, to recent hits like Frozen and Bridesmaids, not to mention films like Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and The Sound of Music which are routinely shown in theaters today, decades after their first release. All this is to say that I have a deep admiration for trailblazers like Lupino and hope that very soon her type of "women's pictures" no longer seem daring. 

1/22: The Divine Miss Emma
8 PM - Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
10 PM - Sense and Sensibility (1995)
12:30 AM - Impromptu (1991)
2:30 AM - The Remains of the Day (1993)
Speaking of talented women in film... Emma Thompson has appeared on film and TV steadily for the past 30 years, but she had quite a run of good films in the early 1990s. She won the Best Actress Oscar for Howard's End and followed that up with starring roles in the Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing and Remains of the Day, for which she received another Best Actress nomination. In 1995, she scored a major triumph adapting Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility for the screen and starring in the film. She thought she was too old to play Elinor Dashwood -- after all, in the book the character is 19 and Thompson was in her 30s -- but director Ang Lee thought she would be perfect for the part, aged up to 27 in the screenplay so that the idea of Elinor as an old maid would be more plausible to modern audiences. Thompson was nominated as Best Actress again; however, she won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay making her the first (and possibly only) person to follow up an acting award with one for writing. 
Thompson had a small part in Impromptu which centers on the romance between French author George Sand (Judy Davis) and composer Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant). I haven't seen this one, but the cast -- which includes not only Thompson, but Julian Sands, Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette Peters -- should be a treat to watch. The other three films on the schedule tonight are excellent and delightful in their own way -- from Much Ado's exuberance and wit, to the warm heart of Sense, to the melancholia of Remains.