TCM Look-Ahead - July 31
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.
Fritz Lang (with 2 films!) nudges ahead of Nicolas Ray in the most rec'd competition here on the Look-Ahead.
Friday, July 21
08:00 p.m. PDT Sweet Smell of Success (1957) In the list of the "ten movies to get to know me" (along with the next one, below). There isn't a particular reason. I have no personal connection to the world of publicity or gossip journalism. But I simply cannot resist the endlessly quotable dialogue supplied by Clifford Odets, the shimmering b & w photography by the great James Wong Howe, the love/hate glimpse of New York city at its rattiest glory, the Chico Hamilton score and, most especially, the break out bravura performance by my favorite actor, Tony Curtis, as Sydney Falco. "You are a cookie filled with arsenic. I'd hate to take a bit out of you."
The main incentive to see this movie is its witty, pungent and idiomatic dialogue, such as you never hear on the screen anymore in this age of special-effects illiteracy. – Andrew Sarris
Saturday, August 1
01:45 a.m. PDT Point Blank (1967) A pop art masterpiece built on the bedrock of the protagonist's intransigence ("I want my 40 thousand dollars"). John Boorman's never-to-be-topped adaptation of one of the early Richard Stark Parker novels in many movies in one. An exercise in editing, dancing with the inscrutable nature of time. A meditation on death, re-birth and betrayal. An L.A. movie par excellence. A Primal Scream. The movie that has probably influenced more tough-guy-wanna-be directors than any other, but they will never be as tough as that gentle brit and his unlikely best friend/collaborator, the greatest movie star of them all, Lee Marvin.
The movie is really about a strangely unhealthy tactility. All physical matter seems to be coated: buildings are encased in grids and glass, rooms are lined with marble and drapes, girls are sculpted by body stockings, metallic or velour-like materials...Manny Farber
03:30 a.m. PDT Mike's Murder (1984) Intriguing follow up to Urban Cowboy by director James Bridges, starring Debra Winger, has been long hard to find. It has had a bit of a second life as a cult item, though the cut intended by Bridges is largely lost forever. Apparently the original soundtrack, by Joe Jackson, has been similarly relegated. It is a grotty portrait of early 80s L.A., making it a fit as a double bill with Point Blank. Winger, who is great as a bank teller that takes the investigation of the titular boyfriend's demise into her own hands. Winger is another interesting case. Poised to be a major star at around this time, she drifted into semi-retirement, apparently self-imposed. Call it the Curse of Mike's Murder.
Mike's Murder is probably the most original and daring effort by the writer-director James Bridges, and it has two superb performances – a full-scale starring one by Winger, and a brief intense one by Paul Winfield. – Pauline Kael
10:00 p.m. PDT Midnight Lace (1960) Birthday girl Doris Day is terrorized and gaslit in London. Is there anything creepier than the voice of the obscene phone caller/terrorizer? Maybe that "Auntie My Helen" kid on the phone in the t.v. movie When Michael Calls. But it's close.
It's always nice to have a mystery melodrama, no matter how implausible it may be, that takes place amid elegant surroundings and involves people who are beautiful and rich. It makes one feel so luxurious to be there with the diamonds and champagne...– Bosley Crowther
Tuesday, August 4
08:00 p.m. PDT The Big Heat (1953) Our boy Fritz gave birthday boy Glenn Ford one of his better roles (the normally stodgy and self-righteous Ford has some real bite here), but it is Gloria Graham and Lee Marvin as crook and moll trading pots of boiling hot Joe to the face that you will remember.
Above all, it is directed with a dramatic incisiveness, a sharp-edged observation that keeps the pitch of interest and excitement continuously high. – Lindsay Anderson
Wednesday, August 5
01:30 p.m. PDT The Woman on the Beach (1947) I have struggled with the American films of the great French director Jean Renoir. A few weeks back I hesitantly recommended his film This Land is Mine, and upon revisit that week found it to be kind of bad, with a career-worst performance by Chuck Laughton. This one has frequent Big Heads habitues Robert Ryan and Joan Bennett and I can scarcely recall anything about it from a long-ago viewing. Let's give it, and Monsieur Renoir, another try, shall we?
The filmmaker, living in California in self-imposed exile from France, cuts loose with vicious moods and creative rages that feel like the destruction of an old world and the violent birth of new possibilities. – Richard Brody
08:00 p.m. PDT Man Hunt (1941) Taut, politically-charged and 100% Fritz. A prize-winning hunter (Walter Pigeon) is engaged to assassinate Hitler at his vacation home. Being a 1941 film there is an utterly unnecessary romance wedged in. Unlike Hollywood films of 1941 there is no ambiguity about what Lang feels America's role in the war should be (the powers that be in Hollywood were largely anti-interventionist. Fritz, who spent more than a little bit of time contemplating first-hand the inevitability of the Third Reich, would have none of that).
Astonishingly this bold landmark in political cinema was released six months before America entered the second world war. – Philip French
Thursday, August 6
Midnight PDT Suspiria (1977) This film could hardly get arrested for several years after its arrival. But like its spiritual twin, Zuwlaski's Possession, it has become an enormous cult artifact, and even inspired a (unnecessary) remake by no less a hipster than Luca Guadagnino. Director Dario Argento is divisive, of course, but if one is Argento-curious, this is the film to start with, the first of his "Three Mothers" trilogy, that accumulates all the things we associate with his "art." A young American dance student (the always fragile Jessica Harper) goes to Germany to audition for a prestigious dance academy. There she finds all sorts of evil doings. It won't take you three minutes to shout at the screen "girl, turn around and get the hell out of there," but plot and plausibility matter little. Stay for the remarkable set pieces and iconic score by the band Goblin. (Oh, there is a (unnecessary) remake of Possession coming, too).
Anyone but the most hopeless addict to linear neatness and plausibility should be tastily beguiled and tantalized by Suspiria's cavalier disregard for making rational sense. – Richard T. Jameson
