TCM Look-Ahead - July 17
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, July 17
10:00 p.m. PDT In a Lonely Place (1950) Nick Ray's swooningly romantic, liquor-soaked murder story that puts us in the unlikely position of suspecting our hero, Humphrey Bogart, might actually be the murderer. Once Upon a Time in Beverly Hills. "I was born when I met you. I lived while I loved you. I died when you left me..."
"Few other directors had such a sense of the effect of locations and interiors on people’s lives, or the visual or emotional relationship between indoors and outdoors, upstairs and downstairs. Ray’s characters contract or expand according to the emotional tone of the place in which they find themselves.” – David Thomson
Saturday, July 18
04:00 a.m. PDT Klute (1971) Jane Fonda, playing the no-nonsense and fully-in-control call girl Bree, left no doubt for the world that she was an actress of the first order. The film itself, part of Alan Pakula's "Paranoia Trilogy" (along with Parallax View and All the President's Men) holds up remarkably well. Co-starring Donald Sutherland as the rather clueless title character, a detective looking for a serial killer in seedy early 70s New York. Pakula's European influences are obvious, elliptical editing and expressionistic lighting, lend an air of dread. One is never on sure footing, and even as it reaches its inevitable conclusion, one remains in a state of disequilibrium.
“Jane Fonda’s motor runs a little fast. As an actress, she has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she’s always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat – this quicker responsiveness – makes her more exciting to watch. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she’s Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us.” – Pauline Kael
03:45 p.m. PDT The Lusty Men (1952) Nick Ray again. And again demonstrating his ability to take what could have been a series of genre tropes and transforming it into a deeply moving mediation on Honor and Home. Bob Mitchum (a frequent habitue in the TCM Look-Ahead column) plays Jeff McLeod, who returns to his home town after a long time away, and is convinced to get back in the rodeo game by his best friend (Arthur Kennedy) against the wishes of the best friend's wife Louise (Susan Hayward), who fears for their safety. Eventually we begin to see there is something more between Jeff and the wife that initially meets the eye. A subtle triangle develops and we eventually see Louise's concerns justified. Beautiful black and white and Ray's distinctive angular compositions and deep sympathy for flawed but decent people.
"Mitchum is the most convincing cowboy I've seen in horse opry, meeting every situation with the lonely, distant calm of a master cliché-dodger." – Manny Farber
Sunday, July 19
06:15 p.m. PDT The Lady from Shanghai (1948) Orson Welles does himself no favors by casting himself in the lead and insisting on a ridiculous Irish brogue. But no one else could have played the role, you see, because at the time he was married to Rita Hayworth, who plays the Femme Fatales of all Femme Fatales, and the frisson between the two is palpable. Just an astonishing work of visual art, highlighted by the concluding scene in the Hall of Mirrors, arguably the most virtuoso sequence ever filmed. "But killing you is killing me. No difference. Come to think of it, I am pretty tired of the both of us."
"...looms as the pivotal work of Welles's career, one of the greatest glories of the American cinema, and undoubtedly the trashiest masterpiece in motion picture history." – Richard T. Jameson
Monday, July 20
01:30 a.m. PDT The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978) A beautiful, if patience-testing, masterpiece from Ermanno Olmi. Concerning four families and the day to day grind of farm life and the efforts of the child of one of the families to get a formal education and rise about the peasantry, was kind of a big deal at the time (it won the palme d'or at Cannes and was nominated for Best Foreign Film Oscar). It has, like Olmi, been largely forgotten. Time for a revisit.
"What I'm suggesting is that this movie should be viewed for its actual visual content, rather than for its noble pretensions." – Roger Ebert
Tuesday, July 21
02:45 a.m. PDT Truck Turner (1974) From the talented Jonathan Kaplan's blacksploitation phase before carving out a respectable career as a mid-level Hollywood craftsman (Heart Like a Wheel, The Accused, Unlawful Entry). This features the movie debut of Isaac Hayes and the great Yaphet Kotto, playing a pair of bounty hunters who look to mess up the trade of a nasty pimp named Gator. Hide your mamas.
"Easily one of the most violent and politically incorrect movies ever made, it is also one of the best of the blaxploitation genre." – Cool Ass Movies
08:00 p.m. PDT A Woman Under the Influence (1974) Gena Rowlands' performance here is something of legend, and it continues to be name-checked by our best actresses as a major influence (most recently by Rose Byrne, who channels Rowlands in her great performance in If I Had Legs I Would Kick You). Rowlands plays the damaged wife of construction foreman Peter Falk who is just barely holding the family, which includes three sympathetically portrayed but challenging kids, together. Eventually, something has to give. The film itself can be a grind in that Cassavetes way, but ultimately pays off in emotionally devastating ways. You want to talk about personal cinema? Not only is Rowlands, of course, married to Cassavetes, but they shot the film in their own house.
"Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen." - Dave Kehr
Wednesday, July 22
12:15 a.m. PDT Killer of Sheep (1978) Charles Burnett's debut was long lost (or at least forgotten) but has now returned forever into the Pantheon amongst the greatest films ever made. The Watts-set drama concerns the emotionally fragile life of a slaughterhouse worker who, like Gena Rowlands, is just trying to keep it all together. The exemplar of the L.A. Film Rebellion, a movement sprung from UCLA film school in the 60s that resulted in several distinctive African-American works.
"A milestone of eloquent understatement that captures the daily life of have-nots as few American movies have." – Wesley Morris
01:45 a.m. PDT Daughters of the Dust (1991) Julie Dash, the director of Daughters of Dust, was part of the L.A. Rebellion, along with Burnett. Dust is the first theatrical film released in the U.S. directed by an African-American woman. Though the plot, concerning three sisters who prepare to leave their home in South Carolina to seek opportunity up North, can meander, a not uncommon trait for a first-time director, the deeply felt understanding of the characters and the milieu is undeniable. Dash, clearly talented, has had a difficult time carving out a career in feature films, which is not surprising in the least. Shameful, in fact.
"It's a true original and, as such, of considerable value both as a film and as a sad yet hopeful summation of history as memory and experience." – Derek Malcolm
Thursday, July 23
01:00 p.m. PDT Freaks (1932) One cannot really watch Todd Browning's Freaks without at least a little bit of guilt. It is an exploitation film in every sense of the word. But its power is undeniable, and the denouement, where the tables are turned on the exploiters, is deeply satisfying, even if the viewer is implicated.
"Browning's sympathies are clear; if there are "freaks" on display here, they are not the versatile performers to whom the title seems to allude." – Mark Kermode
11:15 p.m. PDT The Curse of the Demon (1957) Creepy yet subtle, in other words, a Jacque Tourneur film. Dana Andrews as a professor investigating a satanic cult led by Peggy Cummings (from Gun Crazy!). Genuinely unsettling, and when the creature finally appears, it slaps.
"Intelligent, delicate, and actually frightening." – Dave Kehr
Friday, July 24
04:30 p.m. PDT Badlands (1973) Terence Malick's astonishing debut. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are young (in Spacek's case, disturbingly young) lovers on the run after Sheen guns down Spacek's disapproving father (Warren Oates). Based on the Charles Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate real-life murder spree story, it is, in Malick's hands, much more than an exploitation film about a couple of nuts. It is an elegiac ode to a weird, lost America.
"Compositions, actors, and lines interlock and click into place with irreducible economy and unerring precision, carrying us along before we have time to catch our breaths." – Jonathan Rosenbaum
