TCM Look-Ahead - April 24
A weekly feature here on Big Heads that looks forward to the week ahead on the mighty Turner Classic Movies, for your viewing and recording pleasure.
Friday, April 24
06:15 a.m. PST A Damsel in Distress. George Stevens and Fred Astaire made a nice pair. I know almost nothing about this rarity, but it looks like fluffy, tap-dancing fun.
Saturday, April 25
03:45 a.m. PST Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger. An absolutely essential doc about England's greatest film makers.
02:00 p.m. PST Berlin Express. A difficult to find gem from beloved auteur Jacques Tourneur. Set amidst the ruins of WWII, and handful of passengers on a train become involved in an assassination plot. God I love train movies, with characters wobbling back and forth in tight quarters. And I love Robert Ryan, who reminds me of my grandpa, John Queen.
Sunday, April 26
10:15 p.m. PST The Loved One. Tony Richardson is the director of this, but the real auteur is screenwriter Terry Southern, whose jaundiced misanthropy permeates this adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel. Waugh, a jaundiced, misanthropic Englishman, set out to skewer Capitalism American-style with this satire of the funeral industry. The film is hurt by the miscasting of Robert Morse in the lead, but the rest the cast is having a ball, especially Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy, the chief embalmer at Whispering Glades funeral home, beginning a series of remarkable performances in the mid and late 60s (The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Sargeant).
Tuesday, April 28
12:45 a.m. PST The Breaking Point. A second movie adaptation of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and, to my mind, pretty superior to the Hawks film. No one is arguing Curtiz over Hawks in the director pantheon, but but this is major Curtiz and To Have and Have Not is minor Hawks. It is just a more arresting adaptation, and John Garfield adds a gravity to this story about a boat captain who is forced by circumstances to lend his services to gangsters that Bogart just didn't seem interested in pulling off.
Thursday, April 29
12:15 a.m. PST The Rain People. Francis Ford Coppola was an accidental maker of blockbusters. He didn't want to make The Godfather, which made him famous and rich, but finally gave in because of personal money problems. The Rain People is much more an ideal film for him, a road movie about a lost woman, shot on location with hand held cameras and improvised acting, some of it quite powerful from Shirley Knight, James Caan and Robert Duvall. Its artiness can at times be distracting, but it is a fascinating glimpse at what Francis might have become had he avoided the allure of filthy lucre.
