TCM Look-Ahead - April 3
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, 04/03
TCM featuring the films directed by Roger Corman today, including...
09:00 p.m. PST Bucket of Blood. Kooky, way out beatnik-centered comic horror about a sculptor who finds surrounding dead bodies with plaster to be lucrative and a come on with the chicks. Very similar in tone and theme to Little Shop of Horrors, which Corman would make a year later. Dig, Daddy-o.
Saturday, 04/04
10:00 p.m. PST The Great Race. Incredibly informative movie for me, probably the one that made me fall in love with the cinema first, having seen it as many times as I could get away with at the Admiral theater in Bremerton upon release. Blake Edwards cooking with gas, with one tremendous slapstick set piece after another. Concerns a New York to Paris car race that pits good (a somewhat debauched-looking Tony Curtis) and Evil (Jack Lemmon stealing the movie in a dual role). And, speaking of informative, Natalie Wood in a bustier covered in pie filling.
Sunday, 04/05
01:15 a.m. AND 10:00 a.m. PST T-Men. A never-less-than-dazzling collaboration with Director Anthony Mann and Cinematographer John Alton etching their artistry in glimmering black and white. There are some documentary elements to it, which were starting to become de rigueur in crime films of that time, but aesthetically it is noir all the way. Two treasury cops go after a counterfeiting ring. Essential.
Monday, 04/06
02:30 a.m. PST Blow Up It's a hard to understand the impact this, Michelangelo Antonioni's English language debut, had on the industry and on current and budding directors (it is a deep influence on, for instance, Coppola's The Conversation and De Palma's Blow Out). It's breakthrough at the box office made Hollywood sit up and take notice that art could be commerce. It holds up well, too, if anything has the added fascination of being a Time Capsule for swinging London in the late 60s. Patience with the artsier elements will result in an appreciation for what is, essentially, a cracking murder mystery. But the artsier elements is what makes it an Antonioni.
Wednesday, 04/08
A bunch of underrated noirs start today and go through tomorrow. A heavy dose of Scotland Yard set films, including...
12:15 p.m. PST Tension. Directed by the soon-to-be-blacklisted John Berry (He Ran all the Way), this is one of those noirs that is centered around a mild-mannered protagonist (Richard Basehart, in wire specs) who is pushed too far, all the way to committing murder. Or did he?
Thursday, 04/09
06:15 a.m. PST In the Money. When was the last time you saw a Bowery Boys picture? I am not sure I ever have, at least all the way through. This is the last one in the Series before Allied Artists shut it down. The Beverly Cinema in L.A. (aka Quentin's theater) is doing a retrospective of the director of this one, William Beaudine, and they generally program with solid auteurist taste, so this is as good a place as any to start (you can work backwards from here!).
03:00 p.m. PST The Verdict. The directorial debut of Don Siegel as he removed himself from the editor's chair once and for all. Sydney Greenstreet, in the rare starring role, and Peter Lorre, the oft-paired duo, have wonderful chemistry as two Scotland Yard investigating a locked-door murder. Rather uncharacteristic for the soon-to-be hard case director Siegel would become, but highly enjoyable.
06:15 p.m. PST Lured. Douglas Sirk made a handful of noirs before settling into the florid melodramas of the American middle class he became known for. This was a long lost picture that got a recent restoration and looks amazing, as one might expect from Sirk. Lucille Ball, cast once again as a borderline-floozy dancer, is used as bait by Scotland Yard to catch a serial killer.
