TCM Look-Ahead: August 14
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.
It saddens me to announce that TCM is continuing its Summer Under the Stars feature which, while not as egregious as a thousand days of Oscar, has a similarly deleterious effect on the programming. Why, you ask? Well, TCM tends to favor very, very big stars in these tributes, and big stars tend to be in stone-cold classics that don't need some basement-dwelling weirdo like me to recommend them (coming up on Brando day, A Streetcar Named Desire!). And big stars also make a LOT of very meh, middle of the road and sometimes just plain terrible films. Probably something to do with a tendency to play it safe with one's stardom.
Since I believe my primary service here is to burrow around the margins, it makes this column less fun and likely less valuable. However, I will soldier on.
Saturday, August 15
02:00 a.m. PDT It Should Happen to You (1954) Jack Lemmon festival continues with his first-ever film and while the delightful Judy Holiday is front and center as a gal who achieves fame by plastering her picture on billboards across New York, it becomes clear very quickly that Lemmon was going to be an irresistible force. It is bittersweet to see the ascension of one star just getting started on a 50-year career and the galling reminder that Holiday would only make a few more films and pass away at the stupidly young age of 43.
An instant fan of Judy Holliday's, I shall continue to honor her memory by repurposing Gladys Glover's unimpeachable exit line whenever I need to beat a hasty retreat: "I think I'd better be going because I'm not having a good time." – Melissa Anderson
03:45 p.m. PDT Splendor in the Grass (1961) The movie that made the world realize what a great actress Natalie Wood was. While never really given this kind of opportunity before, here she is gut-wrenching playing Deanie, so repressed from her sexual desire for Warren Beatty (in his film debut) that she goes insane. Another reminder that Elia Kazan was the supreme director of acting for the cinema. Neither Wood or Beatty would ever be better.
...a sometimes-devastating portrait of youth culture on the brink – Walter Chaw
Sunday, August 16
The day is given over to Cary Grant, and while I find the selection kind of bleh (and includes some absolute dreck like Every Girl Should be Married and Dream Wife), and you scarcely need me to recommend North by Northwest or His Girl Friday, it is Cary Grant, for gosh sakes. So go get your candy. (Crisis, a film I have not seen, might be worth a look as it is largely forgotten and has Grant in a seemingly very serious role as a surgeon tasked with operating on a nefarious South American dictator played b y Jose Ferrer with a fantastic beard). 12:45 a.m. PDT.
Monday, August 17
11:00 a.m. PDT Night Must Fall (1937) Robert Montgomery was a light and likable leading man who lobbied hard to play the serial killer in the movie adaptation of Emlyn Williams' play (the one with the head in the hat box). His performance is pretty astonishing, but I think it might have scared him and his audience. He returned to light and likable, never to stray, shortly thereafter.
...Montgomery was determined to prove a villain. And we should all be grateful that he was, because he gave us one of the most frightening murderers ever to menace the silver screen—possibly the scariest before Psycho—a devilish blend of charisma and repulsiveness. – The Nitrate Diva
Tuesday, August 18
07:30 a.m. PDT The Chase (1966) A ride or die movie for me, chastised in its day for wasting all the talent on hand (Director Arthur Penn, writer Lillian Hellman, Brando and that incredible cast). Time has proven it to be a uniquely pungent take down of the decadent, despicable American south (something Ms. Hellman knew a thing or two about). Fortunately, the south no longer suffers from the mendacity, racism and debauchery depicted here. Oh wait.
Ironically, this is part of Robert Redford day on Under the Stars (not Brando's, which will come later) and it is the only film I can recall where he is severely miscast, playing Bubber, an escaped convict, whose manhunt is the focus of the plot. He is no more of a desperate southern convict than I am (we are, however, both blonde). The rest of the cast is amazing, though, including a young and scorching hot Jane Fonda and Robert Duvall, counter-intuitively cast as a cuck.
This movie’s so ambitious and powerful I don’t know where to start. It’s a hidden highlight of the careers of the film’s actors like Brando, Fonda and Redford. It’s also one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, but then again I change my mind about that a lot. – Robin Wood
10:00 a.m. PDT The Candidate (1972) Unlike The Chase, it is hard to imagine better casting that Redford as a fledgling and over-his-head senatorial candidate trying to take down a deeply entrenched incumbent using marketing and looks as his primary (only?) weapons. Still probably the greatest political film, directed by the great Michael Ritchie in his prime, with a typical looseness of style, and spot on verisimilitude. No one understood America like Ritchie.
One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made. – Vincent Canby
Noon PDT Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969) Redford, on the brink of superstardom with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, here selflessly hands over the film to Robert Blake as the title character, a Chemehuevi–Paiute Native American, on the run for killing his father-in-law in self-defense. Redford leads the posse that hunts him, and begins to gain respect for Willie Boy as things proceed. Unfortunate that Blake, who is absolutely believable, needed to be cast as a Native-American, but still a pretty uniquely sympathetic film for the time. The film marks the return to feature directing for the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky.
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here is another one of the best American movies, and in its own way, equally idiomatic, evocative, and resourceful [as Force of Evil]. – Roger Greesnpun
Friday, August 21
12:30 a.m. PDT The Men (1950) Imagine stumbling into the local bijou in 1950 to check out a well-meaning film about disabled war veterans and being gob-smacked by this newcomer, this Marlon Brando. Brando day is pretty drab, with some outright crap (The Ugly American, the racist Teahouse of the August Moon) mixed in with some classics. I include his debut as a reminder that Brando was not a method actor (he bristled at the label), but a supreme technician, making the most of what god gave him, caring little about his "motivation."
Stern in its intimations of the terrible consequences of war, this film is a haunting and affecting, as well as a rewarding, drama to have at this time. – Bosley Crowther
