Classic Movie Picks: February 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.)

It is awards season in Hollywood, which means that it is also time for TCM's 31 Days of Oscar festival featuring Academy Award-nominated films from February 1 through March 2. This year, as a play on the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, each film in the 31 Days schedule is linked to the next by a common actor; no actor is repeated and the last film is linked to the first. For my monthly movie picks, I've linked an actor from each classic film to a 2016 Oscar nominee. Each is linked in less than six degrees and no actor is repeated.  As an added bit of fun, or difficulty, the last link must include the current nominee's co-star in the movie from which he or she was nominated. Make sense? Let's get to the picks...

2/5, 8 PM - The Love Parade (1929)
The Love Parade is a light, airy musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch starring Maurice Chevalier as a raffish count who marries the queen of a small European country, played by Jeanette MacDonald, only to find that being the man behind the great lady isn't a role he's willing to play. The film has an interesting take on gender politics, but ends on an unfortunately conventional note. However, it's pretty fun along the way. The film is at its most crackling when Chevalier and MacDonald trade flirty dialogue and Lubitsch employs his talent for telling risqué jokes in a tasteful fashion. 
The film received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Lubitsch, and Best Actor for Chevalier. MacDonald is most associated with the string of wholesome operettas she starred in opposite Nelson Eddy. The Love Parade was MacDonald's first film and I was surprised to learn that it was Lubitsch who discovered her. As Queen Louise she shows off a talent for comedy and singing, as well as her legs. The rest of the cast includes colorful character actors like silent film comedian Lupino Lane, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette, and plucky Lillian Roth (whose thick New York accent is a bit of an anachronism, but who cares?).
To connect The Love Parade to this year's Oscar nominees, we'll go from Chevalier to Leslie Caron (Gigi) to Juliette Binoche (Chocolat) to Steve Carell (Dan in Real Life) to Christian Bale in The Big Short. I've been a fan of Bale for a long time (hello, Newsies!) and I'd love to see him try a romantic role again after his latest streak of intense dramatic and action roles. Has it really been 21 years since he stole hearts as Laurie in Little Women? I know Bale has it in him to channel his inner Chevalier in a light romance again.

2/10, 3:45 AM - This Land is Mine (1943)
Charles Laughton stars as a timid school teacher living in a World War II occupied town and suspected of being a Nazi collaborator. Though we're told the setting is "somewhere in Europe," it is likely meant to be France, the home country of director Jean Renoir. Renoir, who had made the great anti-war film Grand Illusion in 1937, aimed to show American audiences what the day-to-day life of an occupied country was like for its citizens. In addition to Laughton, the cast includes the very capable Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, and Walter Slezak.
The film won an Academy Award for Best Sound. It was the only competitive Academy Award ever received by a Renoir film, though the director did receive an honorary award in 1974. 
I'm going to connect This Land is Mine to a 2016 Oscar nominated film which also looks at paranoia and suspicion during wartime, Bridge of Spies: from star Maureen O'Hara to John Candy (Only the Lonely) to Tom Hanks (Volunteers) to Best Supporting Actor nominee Mark Rylance. Rylance's understated and unexpectedly wry performance as a convicted Russian spy during the Cold War is one of my favorites of the year.

2/26, 3:30 PM - Day for Night (1973)
Francois Truffaut directed, co-wrote, and stars in Day for Night as a film director struggling to complete his movie on-location in the French Riviera. Frequent collaborator Jean-Pierre Leaud plays the lead actor in the film-within-a-film and the glamorous Jacqueline Bissett is the leading lady. It's a movie about making movies - a favorite topic for the Academy Awards - and the title refers to the technique of filming a scene set at night during the daytime with the help of a camera filter. 
Day for Night received Oscar nominations for Truffaut in the categories of Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, as well as a Best Supporting Actress nomination for veteran Italian actress Valentina Cortese as an older actress who can't remember her lines. However, the only Academy Award it won was Best Foreign Language Film, as the entry for France, which isn't too shabby.
Day for Night is about creating an illusion, a fiction which we accept as reality; so, I'll connect it to current nominee which is also about constructing reality from illusion, but with a much more dramatic tone: Room. Jacqueline Bissett connects to Sean Connery (Murder on the Orient Express) to Kevin Costner (The Untouchables) to Joan Allen (The Upside of Anger) to the star of Room, Brie Larson. Larson's affecting performance as a young woman held captive in a single room, striving to create a loving and healthy reality for her son, has made her a front-runner for this year's Best Actress award.

2/27, 12 AM - Apollo 13 (1995)
Apollo 13 tells the true story of the 1970 mission to the moon in which three astronauts were left stranded en route after an explosion crippled their spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon play the astronauts who, with the help of Mission Control in Houston, must draw upon all their training to devise solutions which will bring them home. Director Ron Howard has made many good films and I think this is one of his very best; surprisingly though, Howard was not even nominated by the Academy for Best Director (the award that year ultimately went to Mel Gibson for Braveheart). Howard would win an Oscar six years later for A Beautiful Mind, but I think Apollo 13 is a better film and a better testament to his skill. (And it isn't even my favorite film of 1995; that would be fellow Best Picture nominee Sense and Sensibility whose director, Ang Lee, was also not nominated...it was a strange year.)
The film received eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor and Actress nominations for Ed Harris as the Mission Control flight director and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn, the wife of astronaut Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks). However, it won only two awards, for sound and editing.
I have a hard time thinking of any film about space exploration that doesn't involve some sort of accident which jeopardizes the entire mission. Maybe A Trip to the Moon from 1899? Of course, in that adventure from film's early days, the voyage was all a dream; but since mankind actually started taking trips to the moon, filmmakers have devised all manner of calamities to befall such missions - some based on fact, but mostly fiction. One such story is current Best Picture nominee The Martian. Like Apollo 13, the veteran director of The Martian, Ridley Scott, was not nominated by the Academy. I really liked The Martian and I'm disappointed that it isn't more of a front-runner this awards season; though star Matt Damon has a long-shot chance for Best Actor. For this last connection from Oscar nominees past to present, I have to start with Mr. Six Degrees himself, Kevin Bacon: from Bacon to John Lithgow (Footloose) to Jessica Chastain (Interstellar) to the titular "martian" Matt Damon. 

The 2016 Oscars, honoring films from 2015, will be given out on February 28. I'll be watching to see if any of my favorite films win, hope you'll join me!

Classic Movie Picks: February 2015

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.)

This month marks the beginning of TCM's annual "31 Days of Oscar" tribute to Academy Award winning and nominated films. Each day's programming focuses on a particular genre, while the primetime schedule features a chronological history of nominated films beginning with the first ceremony in 1927 and ending with films from 2006-2011. As the month goes on, and the films get more current, we'll see many TCM premieres; however, the daytime schedule is still packed with favorites from the classic era. As is tradition, I've connected by picks for the month to this year's Best Picture nominees. Even if you don't put a lot of stock into which films win awards, it's interesting to see what themes show up in acclaimed films past and present.

Boyhood
2/6, 12 PM - The 400 Blows (1959)

Writer-director Richard Linklater's film Boyhood is a lovely portrait of growing up in America, but what makes it truly remarkable is that the actors age over the course of real time -- in this case 12 years -- and by the end of the film you feel as though the main character of Mason is a boy that you've known his whole life and seen grow up before your eyes. Other filmmakers have achieved a similar effect through a series of films following a person or character over the course of many years; for example, Michael Apted's eight Up documentaries have chronicled a group of Londoners since age seven through the latest installment at age 56. In his Before trilogy, Linklater himself checks in with characters Jesse and Celine as they meet, reunite, and settle into a life together. However, French director Francois Truffaut's series of semi-autobiographical films starring Jean-Pierre Leaud feels like the closest cinematic ancestor to Boyhood. The first of Truffaut's films about Antoine Doinel, The 400 Blows, stars Leaud at age 12. It is a portrait of an adolescent in a world of adults, struggling through the confusion that we all experience at that age. This very personal story earned Truffaut and co-writer Marcel Moussy an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

American Sniper
2/9, 8 PM - The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
American Sniper, based on the story of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, reminds us that support for the troops doesn't end at "mission accomplished" and the scars of war are mental as well as physical. I think that no film has portrayed this issue more beautifully than The Best Years of Our Lives, which follows three veterans returning to small town life after the end of WWII. The film won seven Academy Awards -- Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Music, Best Actor (Fredric March), and Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell). While Best Years ends happily, the film doesn't gloss over the very real mental and physical challenges faced by the soldiers and is not overly sentimental. Harold Russell, a real-life vet who had lost both hands, gives a memorable performance as Homer, a former football star who fears his high school sweetheart can't cope with the reality of his injuries. However, all the performers --including March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, and Hoagy Carmichael -- bring subtlety and warmth to the film. The Best Years of Our Lives is a film I can watch again and again and never ceases to effect me.

The Grand Budapest Hotel
2/21, 5:45 AM - Cabaret (1972)

A young man befriends a charismatic libertine against the backdrop of the rise of European fascism -- it could describe the plot of both Wes Anderson's melancholy comedy Grand Budapest Hotel and Bob Fosse's musical drama Cabaret. Anderson's film contains the remembrances of Zero, a lobby boy and protege to the magnetic concierge M. Gustave (played by an excellent Ralph Fiennes). M. Gustave and the grandiose hotel he oversees represent a dying era of opulence and gentility, subsumed by the harsh violence of a fascist regime in the fictional eastern European Republic of Zubrowka. The decadent Kit Kat Club at the center of Cabaret becomes a metaphor for 1930s Germany, from the point of view of a young writer who bonds with the club's over-the-top singer, Sally Bowles. As directors, Fosse and Anderson are exact -- the former's precision with the flick of a wrist matched by the latter's attention to the bow on a Mendl's pastry box. Cabaret won eight Academy Awards, though not Best Picture, which went to The Godfather: Best Director, Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey), Cinematography, Editing, Score, Set Direction, and Sound.

Whiplash
2/25, 2:45 AM - Fame (1980)
Both Whiplash and Fame are about students striving for excellence in their art form -- in Whiplash it's a jazz drummer at an elite music academy persecuted by an overbearing teacher, while Fame focuses on the experiences of several students at New York City's High School for the Performing Arts. In both cases, the musical sections are where each film shines. Fame received Academy Award nominations for its screenplay and editing and won awards for its score and title song sung by Irene Cara. Fame was made at the beginning of the MTV era and it's musical numbers feel like music videos, full of quick cuts and dynamic angles. While the melodrama of the students lives can feel predictable, those moments when they are able to show off their talents for dancing and singing bring the film to life.

Selma
2/27, 10:15 PM - Gandhi (1982)
Selma and Gandhi are both about famous activists who used non-violent means to spread their message. However, while Gandhi is a sweeping epic that follows its main character over decades, Selma focuses on one event in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the civil rights march through Alabama, from Selma to Birmingham. Gandhi received Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Editing, Screenplay, Art Direction, and Costume Design, as well as several more nominations. Unfortunately, Selma won't have a chance to match that achievement since it is only nominated in the categories of Best Picture and Best Song.

The Imitation Game 
3/2, 8 PM - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Dark forces threaten from afar and the world's best hope is a motley team of unlikely heroes, led by the least likely of all. When you start to think about it, the parallels between The Imitation Game, which follows Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park colleagues as they struggle to break the Enigma code and stop the Germans' advance in WWII, and the Fellowship are numerous. Mark Strong plays a Gandalf-like authority figure, watching the team's progress and interfering only when necessary; there's even a Boromir-esque traitor among group. At the center is Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who like Frodo displays weakness, determination, hopelessness, and triumph along his journey; alongside Turing is his own "Samwise" (Frodo's trusted companion) in the form of Keira Knightley's Joan. Fellowship was nominated for 13 Oscars and won four for visual effects, makeup, cinematography, and score. TCM is showing the full Lord of the Rings trilogy tonight, so if you want to see how Frodo's story ends, get comfortable and enjoy all 558 minutes of it!

The Theory of Everything
3/3, 1 PM - Dodsworth (1936)

The Theory of Everything is the story of world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane, from their courtship as university students through the difficult years of their marriage. As time goes by, Stephen's health deteriorates drastically, making him dependent upon Jane, while his work as a scientist becomes more and more celebrated. I think a message one can take away from this film is that even when love exists, relationships are constantly evolving as the needs of each person change. I think this is a lesson at the center of Dodsworth as well. Fran Dodsworth (played by Ruth Chatterton) has spent her whole adult life supporting her husband Sam (Walter Huston) as the perfect wife and mother to their daughter, allowing Sam to achieve professional success. Now, upon reaching 40 and becoming a grandmother, Fran yearns for the adventure that her life has lacked. While Sam is the hero of the film and we are glad that he finds love with Mary Astor's Edith, Fran is not without our sympathy, too. Dodsworth received seven Oscar nominations, but won only for Art Direction; with five nominations, Theory's best chances for a win might be lead actor Eddie Redmayne or the original score.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
3/3, 8 PM - The Artist (2011)
You can probably imagine that at first it was a bit difficult to find a "classic" parallel to Birdman, a surreal fantasy about an actor (portrayed by Michael Keaton) known for a superhero role who desires to be taken seriously as a Broadway stage actor and is simultaneously suffering an existential crisis -- the surreal part is that he hears the voice of Birdman (his iconic character) goading him on and occasionally flies around New York City and makes things move with his mind. The parts of Birdman that I enjoyed the most were the more realistic scenes about putting on the play. Then it was obvious, the Academy loves show business stories that reveal the drama that goes on backstage, and Birdman was another entry in this genre. At its core, Birdman reminds me of a recent Oscar Best Picture winner: The Artist. In this film set in 1920s Hollywood, Jean Dujardin plays a successful silent film actor whose career declines with the advent of sound. Since he defines his personal worth by his fame and stardom, his professional troubles lead to depression. Dujardin won best actor for this role which is almost completely silent and the film also received awards for direction, score, costume design, and of course Best Picture. With nine Oscar nominations, Birdman is also a front-runner in the best picture and actor categories.

I'll be watching the Oscars on Sunday, February 22 to see which film gets the top prize! Hope you'll join me!

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.