TCM Look-Ahead - June 5
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.
With the release of Spielberg's newest film, Disclosure Day, TCM pays tribute to the master. You don't need me to recommend any of this films, but here are a few others that are worth your attention
Saturday, June 6
01:30 a.m. PST (1981) The Long Good Friday. The first film I ever saw on the Z Channel after moving to L.A. for college. Anyone remember the Z Channel? It was a heavily curated cable channel for artistic-leaning cinema, the only thing of its kind in the states. It was soon to be doomed by its expensive subscription costs and the rise of monster competitors like Showtime and HBO (and some tragic circumstances around its founder and major domo Jerry Harvey), but oh my gosh it was great for a young cinephile. Anyhoo, more importantly to the World Cinema, The Long Good Friday was the film that put the great Bob Hoskins on the map. Hoskins plays a Cockney crime lord who tries to move his way up the chain, leaving a blood soaked trail. It is justly famous for the last shot of Hopkins in the back of a car as he realizes that the end is nigh.
03:30 a.m. PST (1986) Mona Lisa. A spiritual remake of The Long Good Friday has Hopkins, this time playing a much more sympathetic and smaller time crook who falls for a call girl for whom he has been hired as a Minder. Moving, gritty cinema from Neil Jordan, who seemed like he could do it all around this time. I wonder what happened.
10:00 p.m. PST (1949) The Set Up. Robert Ryan was seemingly born to play a down-on-his-luck palooka at the end of his tether, and here he is, in Robert Wise's searing boxing movie. Ryan brings tremendous credibility to the boxing sequences – he was a four-time heavyweight champion at Dartmouth. Attributed as the first film to tell its story in real time (pre-dating High Noon by three years). Canon noir.
Sunday, June 7
02:15 p.m. PST (1945) I Know Where I am Going. If, for some reason, you have not taken the plunge on the films of Powell/Pressburger (The Archers), this is as good a place as any to start. Set in Powell's beloved Scottish Hebrides, the great Wendy Hiller stars as a headstrong girl intent on marrying for money because it is the prudent thing to do. When she goes to the Island to track down her millionaire betrothed, she becomes trapped on said island due to a storm. She gets to the know the locals, including the insanely sexy Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesy). While never pandering to the lead's superficial ambitions (she is never presented as a silly girl), The Archers present a wind-swept paean to the inevitability, the almost spiritual necessity, of romantic love.
Monday, June 8
04:00 a.m. PST (1983) Sans Soleil. Chris Marker's (La Jetée) masterpiece, not so much a documentary as a meditation on travel and memory. Hitchcock fans will revel in the San Francisco sequence, as Marker revisits the themes and locations of Vertigo.
04:30 p.m. PST (1939) Love Affair. Two strangers (Charles Boyer, Irene Dunne), each with numerous but not satisfying complications on their plate, meet aboard a ship and fall hard for each other. They make a pact to meet at a later date to see if what happened was really real. Love Affair is the first go-round for that irresistible scenario. Director Leo McCarey himself remade this as An Affair to Remember about 20 years later, and of course Sleepless in Seattle traffics heavily in these waters, but no one topped this version.
08:00 p.m. PST (1952) Clash by Night. Star of the month Marilyn Monroe (who would have turned 100 this year) in one of her lesser-known roles, despite it being directed by the legendary Fritz Lang. Pre-stardom, she takes a backset on the marquis to Robert Ryan (there he is again, this time indulging in his specialty – the self-loathing jerk), Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Douglas, but she is one to watch here. Based on the play by Clifford Odets, it has all the purple, pulpy dialogue one would expect from the writer of Sweet Smell of Success. Set in Monterey, which Lang makes the most of.
Friday, June 12
Back to back films from the 80s that featured up and coming director wunderkinds making their debuts.
01:45 a.m. PST (1986) River's Edge. Tim Hunter is a bit of an enigma in Hollywood. This undeniably powerful film debut concerning a group of listless teens who willingly do not divulge the murder of a classmate was supposed to be his entree into directorial superstardom. It never really happened for him (though he has done mostly great work in television), but this is an absolutely critical piece of social commentary, based on a true incident, and introduced the world to several young actors, including Keanu Reeves and, in an insane, unhinged performance, Crispin Glover.
03:30 a.m. PST (1984) Reckless. James Foley's debut, and another one that showed promise that was never entirely fulfilled. Foley has a more distinguished filmography than Hunter (Glengarry Glen Ross, After Dark, My Sweet, for instance), but would up helming two of the disreputable "Fifty Shades" films, nice work if you can get it, but hardly indicative of a talent that was clearly there from the start. This is a horny, high-school set romance of a wrong-tracks boy (Aiden Quinn, game but entirely too old) and popular girl (Daryl Hannah, in a genuinely effective performance as the Good Girl looking to escape). The third critical character is the town itself, not named, but very much like Pittsburgh, which offers very little in the way of a variety of choices for kids on the brink of adulthood. The film's high point is a prom dance between Quinn and Hannah to Romeo Void's "Never say Never," pure, raw energy and a reminder that American movies used to fuck.
