TCM Look-Ahead - August 21
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.
TCM gets the ball rolling, to their credit, on their Summer Under the Stars with a marvelously idiosyncratic choice of star, the singular Marie Windsor!
Friday, August 21
Noon PDT The Unholy Wife (1957) Underrated auteur alert! John Farrow does it again with a lurid, lust-filled potboiler about marriage and murder. Features the American screen debut of the redoubtable Diana Dors.
In The Unholy Wife, Dors sure looks like a woman who could get away with murder. She slinks through the picture in a series of fitted suits and dresses that are technically very proper, though they not-so-secretly accentuate her va-va-voom proportions. – Stephanie Zacharek
01:45 p.m. PDT The Bounty Hunter (1954) More underrated auteur action, this time from oft-recommended Andre De Toth. Randolph Scott was better-known for his collaborations with Budd Boetticher, but this is solid genre stuff that makes use of Scott's just-slightly-off heroic ambiguity.
In The Bounty Hunter, Scott's portrayal of a single-minded, cold yet heroic killer hunting down three outlaws particularly looks ahead to the Boetticher pictures, especially Ride Lonesome (1959). As one character tells him here, "You'd turn your grandmother in on her birthday if there was a reward for her." And Scott agrees. – Jeremy Arnold
08:00 p.m. PDT The Narrow Margin (1952) Previously recommended but cannot be recommended enough. Underrated auteur, you say? Richard Fleischer tops them all. Bring me more train-set movies!!
The Narrow Margin... is charged with very moral nitroglycerine but confers a grace that any sweaty driver of a heavy, slow-moving vehicle might envy. – Francois Truffaut
Saturday, August 22
02:15 a.m. PDT The Outfit (1973) The only acceptable Richard Stark Parker adaptation other than Point Blank. Bob Duvall and the great Joe Don Baker are partners who take on the mob, with explosive circumstances. A cast filled with "that guys and gals" not the least of which is the sadly underutilized (by Hollywood) Sheree North.
An outline of the plot would make it sound pretty routine, but what makes the picture superior is its richness of detail. – Roger Ebert
06:00 p.m. PDT She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) A highlight of John Wayne day. Arguably, with The Searchers, his best performance, tremendously sympathetic as a soon to retire Calvary captain on one last mission that is beset with difficulties. An unnecessary romance is wedged in, and expect the usual, um, ambiguity as regards the portrait of Native Americans, but this is John Ford at his picturesque best (it is one of his "Calvary Trilogy") and it is likely the performance that you will most admire even if you don't admire the Duke.
Wayne embodied the brutal, implacable order of the West less with personal flair than with archetypal endurance. – Andrew Sarris
Sunday, August 23
12:45 a.m. PDT Jet Pilot (1957) An unlikely pairing of Wayne with Joseph Von Sternberg. A batshit anti-commie artifact that has a young and entirely comely Janet Leigh playing a Russian pilot who wants to defect (just go with it). Love ensures between the ancient Wayne and very young Leigh. It's a bit uncomfortable, but somehow, thanks to Sternberg's non-pareil visuals, it works.
To be sure, the film's intention is stupid propaganda, but Sternberg constantly turns it aside so that tears come to our eyes in the face of such beauty. – Francois Truffaut
Katherine Hepburn takes the stage after the Duke and, apropos of my overall problem with Summer under the stars, TCM is featuring no-brainer classics mixed with a soupcon of outright bad movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Rooster Cogburn. Avoid everything but the ones you know you are going to love (Woman of the Year, Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story).
Monday, August 24
08:00 a.m. PDT A Walk in the Sun (1945) Dana Andrews, next up after Katie, was distinguished by his remarkable proclivity to work with pantheon auteurs. There was something about his stoicism and bitter edge that appealed to the likes of Wyler, Preminger (5 films!), Tourneur (4 films!), etc. In this case, Lewis Milestone in a highly-regarded WWII film (but I wouldn't put Milestone in that pantheon).
Milestone's predilection for camera movements made All Quiet on the Western Front among the most stylistically advanced films of the early sound era, and there is also ample dynamism in A Walk in the Sun. – James Steffen
Tuesday, August 25
Bonita Granville, a child actress, sort of a Shirley Temple with gravitas, whom upon entering tweendom starred in a series of Nancy Drew films, is featured next. I am curious about a bunch of the films, but the one I can recommend without hesitation is...
08:00 p.m. PDT These Three (1936) William Wyler's production-code-compromised but still effective adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Children Hour, with all but the most innuendo of the lesbian affair at its center all but removed. It is still an effective work about gossip and professional jealousy and, while sublimated, longing. Granville is great as an almost entirely hateful child (she would receive a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination, a very rare thing for a child actor). Would be remade by Wyler himself in the 60s with its original title and lesbian sub-text becoming more textual but, oddly, it isn't as good as These Three (which I attribute mostly to Wyler entering the Grand Old Man, multi-Oscared phase of his career).
I have seldom been so moved by any fictional film....After ten minutes or so of the usual screen sentiment, quaintness and exaggeration, one began to watch the incredulous pleasure of nothing less than life – Graham Greene
Wednesday, August 26
Jimmy Stewart day.
Noon PDT The Shop Around the Corner (1940) I feel like this is a still-underrated masterpiece. Lubitsch plus Stewart plus Margaret Sullivan plus (scenarists) Raphaelson and Hecht about a Hungarian gift shop and the couple at the two young employees who begin hating each other and end up you know what. That rarest of films from the era that is actually about working people.
The actors are all as right as right can be and lightest of all is the quiet charm with which Lubitsch has taken a frivolous little Molnaresque story and turned it into a silken and witty ninety minutes of delectable froth – Herman G. Weinberg
Close to perfection – one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made in this country – Pauline Kael
The week concludes with a welcome tribute to the incredibly reliable character actor Brock Peters.
12:15 p.m. PDT Framed (1975) Hey, here's that Joe Don Baker guy again. Possibly his most quintessential role, playing a gambling whale (complimentary) who makes a killing at a casino but then gets shafted by the mob. Nobody shafts Joe Don Baker. Underrated auteur (again!) Phil Karlson found himself some box office gold hooking up with Baker late in a career of commendable service. “First time I ever saw a tub of shit in a suit."
In films as diverse as 99 River Street and The Phenix City Story, Phil Karlson has shown a striking aptitude for the dynamics of seedy crime melodramas — particularly those which deal, in Andrew Sarris’s phrase, “with the phenomenon of violence in a world controlled by organized evil” – Jonathan Rosenbaum
