Picture is unrelated, but we all love ASPHALT JUNGLE-era Marilyn Monroe, right?
Check your local listings, etc. Yeah, I'm a little late this week; it was …. quite a weekend.
Tuesday, March 30
4:10AM-6:05AM, Indie: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, 113m.
It's strange how this movie … well, it rarely pops up at all in conversations, but I was going to say that it's strange that it rarely pops up in discussions of artistically successful film adaptations of novels. There's really nothing you could add or subtract from it to improve it, is there? The sets are the right kind of squalid futurism, the script doesn't whitewash the more horrifying ideas in Orwell's book and the casting couldn't be better -- John Hurt was the perfect choice for Winston Smith; Richard Burton made an ideal O'Brien and Suzanna Hamilton's Julia is the right mix of heartless and sensual. Michael Radford, we salute you. [Reairs at 3:20PM.]
6AM-7:15AM, TCM: BLUEBEARD, 70m.
An Edgar G. Ulmer period-piece oddball about a puppeteer who just can't keep [from killing] a female assistant. John Carradine, Jean Parker and Nils Asther star.
6:40AM-8:30AM, Sun: THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, 100m.
Guy Maddin's best. Mark McKinney is a great leading man. [Reairs at 2:15PM.]
8:30AM-11:15AM, FMC: THE BLUE MAX, 156m.
World War I aviation epic. It's very very long, but good watching on a slow Sunday morning.
4PM-6PM, FMC: THE CRAZY WORLD OF JULIUS VROODER, 98m.
6PM-8PM, FMC: TRIBES, 90m.
Potentially interesting double-feature of '70s Vietnam non-war movies.
VROODER stars Timothy Bottoms as a vet who "fakes insanity to escape the world." Costars Barbara Hershey, George Marshall and Richard Dysart under Arthur Hiller's direction in a Hugh Hefner [!?] production. TRIBES sounds awesome: despite it being a TV movie, a prime Darren McGavin plays a tough drill sergeant faced with breaking down a rebellious hippie draftee in a young Jan-Michael Vincent. AIRWOLF! Joseph Sargent directs.
8PM-10:30PM, TCM: DERSU UZALA, 141m.
10:30PM-1:30AM, TCM: KAGEMUSHA, 180m.
I've complained about Turner's habit of airing the lesser-known, more challenging Akira Kurosawa films in the early hours of the morning [usually after my crappy Time Warner Cable service has once again futzed out, rebooted and turned itself off, leaving nice black silence on my DVDr] but I take all of it back for them airing these two in prime time! Even for Kurosawa, UZALA [his first movie following a suicide attempt and a separation from his longtime studio Toho] is an Everest of a movie to tackle just after dinner. Maksim Munzuk, Yuri Solomin and Svetlana Danilchenko star. KAGEMUSHA is a much more conventional 1980 samurai epic, starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsutomu Yamazaki and Kenichi Hagiwara.
Wednesday, March 31
1:45AM-4:30AM, TCM: RAN, 163m.
And Kurosawa's 100th birthday celebration concludes with his last period epic, his version of KING LEAR. Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao and Jinpachi Nezu star.
4:30AM-7AM, TCM: KING LEAR, 138m.
Very clever -- follow up Kurosawa's take on Shakespeare's foolish patriarch with an English version of the play. Paul Scofield, Irene Worth and Ian Hogg star under Peter Brook's direction.
6AM-8AM, FMC: DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, 104m.
John Ford's first color film, and his most gorgeous. Henry Fonda! Claudette Colbert! The Revolutionary War in Glorious Technicolor!
7:30AM-10:15AM, Sun: THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING, 165m.
A recent Egyptian metaphorical epic about the inhabitants of a run-down Cairo apartment building. [Reairs at 2PM.]
8AM-10AM, H: NAZI AMERICA: A SECRET HISTORY
Gotta love any time the History Channel gets back to its Nazi-documenting roots. [Reairs at 2PM.]
8AM-9:35AM, FMC: FIXED BAYONETS, 92m.
One of Samuel Fuller's lesser-known war movies, this Korean War cheapie [made during the war] stars Richard Basehart, Michael O'Shea and Gene Evans as [not that] Sgt. Rock.
11AM-1PM, TCM: TWO RODE TOGETHER, 109m.
Even for a very late-model John Ford, the combination of James Stewart and Richard Widmark in a Western must be interesting. Shirley Jones co-stars.
Noon-2PM, Sun: LET'S GET LOST, 120m.
Everyone should see Bruce Weber's iconic profile of cool-jazz trumpeter/singer Chet Baker at least once; Sundance has scheduled it to air often enough this month that everyone will.
8PM-9:30PM, Sun: THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, 81m.
It's wonderful to have Noah Baumbach back and making movies again, although I'm not wild about the stylistic tics he's apparently picked up from working with Wes Anderson; I never thought I'd come to dislike hearing Blossom Dearie but here I am. Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney star. [Reairs at 2:30AM.]
Thursday, April 1
4:15PM-5:45PM, TCM: THREE WISE FOOLS, 90m.
5:46PM-5:57PM, TCM Short: LITTLE WHITE LIE, 11m.
I'm a sucker for a little Margaret O'Brien vehicle, especially one that promises a "crusty" performance from Lionel Barrymore. Edward Buzzell directs.
7AM-9AM, FMC: THE SHERIFF OF FRACTURED JAW, 103m.
A late model, uncharacteristic Raoul Walsh Western, starring Kenneth More, Jayne Mansfield and Connie Francis as Mansfield's singing voice for one of those insipid but undeniably memorable theme songs that you normally have to hire Rod McKuen to write.
2:30PM-4PM, FMC: SILENT MOVIE, 87m.
Mel Brooks assembles his crew -- Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise, Sid Caesar, Ron Carey and Bernadette Peters this time -- and gives silent cinema the business.
7:49PM-8PM, TCM Short: THE CAMERA CAUGHT IT, 9m.
8PM-10PM, TCM: ADAM'S RIB, 101m.
10PM-12:15AM, TCM: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, 130m.
One of Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn's best movies as a team. Judy Holliday, Tom Ewell and Jean Hagen costar and George Cukor directs from a script by married couple Ruth Gordon & Garson Kanin. Then Frank Capra's still-trenchant critique of the media and politics disguised as another Capra-corn yokel-in-the-big-city comedy. James Stewart, Jean Arthur and Claude Rains star.
Friday, April 2
4:15 AM-6AM, TCM: THE MEN WHO MADE THE MOVIES, THE: HOWARD HAWKS, 55m.
Richard Schickel's 1973 portrait of the Hollywood professional's professional.
6AM-7:45AM, TCM: BROADWAY MELODY OF 1936, 101m.
I'm always interested to see more of Jack Benny's movies -- he made a lot more of them than any of us probably assume -- and why he just couldn't translate his radio style to film. With a title like this, you can pretty accurately guess what it's about. Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell co-star with direction by Roy Del Ruth.
8AM-10AM, FMC: HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON, 108m.
John Huston and Robert Mitchum team up for a WWII yarn about a Marine and a Roman Catholic nun [Deborah Kerr] being marooned on an island in the South Pacific. John Boorman later remade this elliptical romance as HELL IN THE PACIFIC with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, which I'm going to keep claiming until either someone calls me on it or it gets added to both films' Wikipedia entries.
8:30AM-10:15AM, Sun: DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID
Jeanne Moreau and Luis Bunuel's take on the original Jean Renoir film. [Reairs at 1:45PM.]
10PM-Midnight, H: WASHINGTON THE WARRIOR
Washington, Washing-ton, Six-foot-five, weighed a fucking ton, etc. Military history of General Washington. [Reairs at 2:01AM.]
Saturday, April 3
6AM-7:15AM, TCM: THE SECRET LAND, 71m.
A 1948 documentary recounting Admiral Richard Byrd's adventures in the Antarctic and its pole. Narrated by Van Heflin, Robert Montgomery and Robert Taylor. [One of these things is not like the other ….]
6:15AM-8:15AM, Sun: NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, 118m.
It's startling and enchanting how late-period Chaplinesque this this early Fellini film is; the film even looks like a sound-era Chaplin in its grain. Giulietta Masina stars, with Amadeo Nazzari. [Reairs at 3PM.]
8:15AM-10:15AM, Sun: JUMP TOMORROW, 97m.
I'm a sucker for multi-national, indie romantic comedies set in upstate New York, especially when they are occasionally funny and have a leading lady like Natalia Verbeke with support from character actors like Hippolyte Girardot and the old man who plays the deaf grandfather. [Reairs at 4PM.]
2PM-3:30PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1985: Livingstone Bramble vs. Ray Mancini"
3:30PM-4:30PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1994 & 1997: Lennox Lewis vs. Oliver McCall I & II"
4:30PM-6PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1993: Riddick Bowe vs. Evander Holyfield II"
6PM-7PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1983: Alexis Arguello vs. Aaron Pryor"
7PM-8PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1991: Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman"
8PM-8:30PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "2007: Rafael Marquez vs. Israel Vazquez I"
8:30PM-9:30PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1990: Mike Tyson vs. James “Buster” Douglas
9:30PM-11PM, ESPNC: CLASSIC BOXING "1975: Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier"
A massive block of mostly classic fights. Too lazy to look up which Arguello-Pryor fight this one is, but both were exciting. Plus, they're showing "The Thrilla In Manilla" instead of "The Rumble In the Jungle" for a change, which is nice. The Rumble is a classic, but it doesn't need to be aired a few times a week for months.
8PM-10PM, TCM: BONNIE AND CLYDE, 111m.
10PM-11:45PM, TCM: POINT BLANK, 92m.
11:45PM-1:30AM, TCM: THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, 102m.
I've never seen BONNIE; something about it has offended me for whatever deranged reason, but I like this triple-feature and Roger Ebert told me it's a movie I should watch and I'm not one to argue with him these days. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway star, duh, and Arthur Penn directs. Lee Marvin & John Boorman's BLANK is one of my favorite movies; I still hold that you can gauge a film's quality to the atomic level based entirely by the fight scenes with Angie Dickinson it contains. COYLE is a wonderful, low-key and genuinely gritty drama from Peter Yates and a startling showcase of how truly great an actor Robert Mitchum could be when he gave a damn. Peter Boyle and Richard Jordan co-star.
Sunday, April 4
6:35AM-8:30AM, IFC: THE FLORENTINE, 104m.
I'm oddly nostalgic for this kind of '90s B+ list cast indie movies, but loathe the entire subgenre of indie gangster movies. This one subverts the formula just enough to make me want to watch all of it -- yes, it features Luke Perry, Jim Belushi, Burt Young and the late Chris Penn in support roles, but what I've seen of the movie was more about accepting that you've grown up [Tom Sizemore's character returns to town to find out his ex-girlfriend Virginia Madsen is getting married] than any gangster shit. Also, how often do we get a chance to realize that the character actor in Hollywood is not entirely dead? [Reairs at 3:15PM.]
11AM-12:15PM, Sun: GUMBY DHARMA, 72m.
Short profile of stop-motion animator Art Clokey, who's not the kind of man you would guess he is based on his Gumby and Davey & Goliath cartoons. It was a terrible idea to have Gumby narrate, especially in the more sordid middle half of Clokey's life. Imagine Charlie Brown narrating the chapters of that Charles Schulz bio that openly discuss how Schulz started to bird dog as his first marriage fell apart. Ew?
Noon-2:30PM, TCM: BARABBAS, 138m.
This is probably one of the less-heralded widescreen Biblical epics for good reason, but I just have to see how Richard Fleischer [of both THE NARROW MARGIN and FANTASTIC VOYAGE] handles the genre and its demands. Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance and Ernest Borgnine star.
2PM-3:45PM FMC: THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT, 99m.
Frank Tashlin brings his animated-cartoon chops to live-action film. Lurid full-color in Cinemascope, and performances from Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps and The Platters. Also, Jayne Mansfield's tits. There's an entire universe of a life lived in Tashlin's comment, "There's nothing in the world to me that's funnier than big breasts." Tom Ewell and Edmond O'Brien co-star.
1PM-3PM, H: BANNED FROM THE BIBLE
3PM-5PM, H: BANNED FROM THE BIBLE II
In general, the History Channel's flirtations with Christianity make me nauseous because so much of it is conjecture and end-of-times scaremongering -- they might as well make teasers like the 11 O'Clock News "The Gospel of John -- what you DON'T KNOW just might KILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!!! Tonight, at 8PM." -- but these two programs sound promising. A look at the Books dropped from the Bible over the years -- Enoch, Mary, Jubilees, Judas, etc. -- though I trust the producers won't actually make explicit that these revisions to God's Literal, Unquestionable Word show that the Bible is just a book. A poorly edited, incredibly uneven anthology best shelved in the "fantasy" section, if you want to be specific. Happy Easter, by the way.
2:30PM-5PM, TCM: THE SILVER CHALICE, 135m.
Another widescreen Bible extravaganza, but this one has the unearthly Pier Angeli. Sold! Also: Paul Newman, Virginia Mayo and direction from Victor Saville.
5PM-8PM, TCM: THE KING OF KINGS, 171m.
Holy Fucking Shit, it's Nick Fucking Ray's "The Life of Christ" starring Jeffrey Hunter [!!!] as Jesus, the very Oy-rish Siobhan McKenna as his mom Mary, Robert Ryan as John The Baptist and a young Rip Torn as Judas [!!!], with narration written by Ray Bradbury [!] and delivered by Orson Welles. And Nick Ray pulls it off. Really, WTF FTW people.
10:30PM-1:45AM, TCM: THE NUN'S STORY, 152m.
Considering how adorable she was, it's easy to overlook how good an actress Audrey Hepburn was. Nun movies were a staple of the Hollywood studio era, yet only a handful of them remain with us as vividly as when they were released. I don't know if this is a great movie, or even a good one, but it stays with you for a while. Peter Finch and Edith Evans co-star under Fred Zinnemann's direction.
Monday, April 5
1:45AM-3:15AM, TCM: THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, 82m.
3:15AM-5:40AM, TCM: JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, 137m.
TCM closes out Easter Sunday with a top Silent Sunday and TCM Import. ARC is a startling, haunting Carl Theodor Dreyer film about the iconic femme flammable, starring Renee Falconetti, Eugene Silvain and Antonin Artaud. SPIRITS is an iconoclastic view of life and spirituality from Federico Fellini. Giulietta Masina, Sandra Milo and Valentina Coretese star.
7:20AM-9:15, IFC: THE FIELD, 113m.
I'm pretty sure a movie can't get more Irish than this unless someone in Craft Services dies from a potato famine. Richard Harris faces off against Tom Berenger over ownership of a gawd-forsaken patch of rocky farmland. John Hurt provides support as the village idiot.
12:15PM-1:50PM, TCM: FURY, 93m.
I believe this was Fritz Lang's first film in America, and it's a brutal meditation on mob rule, the rule of law and revenge. Also, don't piss Spencer Tracy off.
12:15PM-2PM, IFC: SOLARIS, 99m.
Steven Soderbergh delights and awes again, remaking Stanislaw Lem's thoughtful science-fiction novel and/or Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 mindfuck into a soulful little $60,000,000 movie about memory and regret. If Jeremy Davies' jittery style has ever been better deployed, I'd love to know where. [Reairs at 5:15PM.]
4PM-6PM, TCM: NOBODY LIVES FOREVER, 100m.
A nice post-war thriller from workhorse Jean Negulesco; John Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald should have made more movies together.
6PM-7:30PM, TCM: BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, 82m.
What I said here. Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan and Anne Francis star, John Sturges directs.
8PM-11:30PM, TCM: GIANT, 201m.
11:30PM-1:30AM, TCM: GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER'S JOURNEY, 112m.
George Stevens' "modern" epic about one Texas ranching family is best known as one of James Dean's only films. I've seen the movie twice and for the life of me I barely remember him and co-star Elizabeth Taylor at all -- all I take away from my viewings is the scene where Rock Hudson fights an assholic roadside-diner cook for calling his grandson [I think?] a "beaner." I don't know if that reflects badly on the movie or me. STEVENS is a lengthy mid-'80s profile of the filmmaker, leading into a mini-marathon of his films in the wee small hours of the morning.
And there's another week.
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