TCM Look-Ahead - May 15
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.
Not quite the Treasure Trove last week was, but still a few gems to be plucked.
Friday, May 15
Gregory Peck day on TCM but they don't have his best film, The Purple Plan. They are screening, however...
08:00 p.m. PST Mirage. A movie I was obsessed with when I saw it on t.v. at 9 years of age, so much so it inspired my first screenplay. It was basically a shot for shot remake and was never picked up by any studios, oddly enough. At any rate, Mirage is about Peck with amnesia and finding himself pursued by all manner of hostiles. Walter Matthau shows up and steals every scene. I am going to watch this again after all the years and cringe my way through it as one often does when revisiting their favorites at the age of nine.
Saturday, May 16
10:00 p.m. PST A Piece of the Action. Largely forgotten heist film with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier showing mad chemistry in front of the lens, and Poitier showing a breezy, unfussy style behind it. The plot concerns our two leads being brought unwillingly into an inner city employment agency to train under prividged kids their particular brand of skills. The third and final installment of Poitier's popular Uptown Saturday Night trilogy and the one with the most on its mind as regards poverty and race. It has both the fortune of a great soundtrack by Curtis Mayfied and the misfortune of showing Cosby macking inappropriately with the ladies.
Sunday, May 17
10:15 a.m. PST Strangers on a Train. You probably don't need me to recommend one of Hitchcock's most famous and oft-imitated classics. Bruno and Guy meet on a train. Bruno is certain Guy has agreed to his scheme to "exchange" murders, Bruno's dad for Guy's wife, who won't give him a divorce so he can pursue more a more socially accommodating matrimonial situation. But Guy only agrees in the Freudian sense of the word. Robert Walker's all-time great performance as Bruno steals the show, but it is the man behind the camera who is the real star, throwing a hundred miles an hour here.
Monday, May 18
02:00 a.m. PST Fires on the Plain. For a time Kon Ichikawa was as famous and feted a director as Kurosawa, but for some reason fell out of fashion. This just-post-WWII film is unrelentingly bleak, concerning, as it does, an abandon soldier's existential wandering through the plains. But if you are looking for entree into Kurosawa, this is a good place to start.
Tuesday, May 19
A bunch of corny musicals today on TCM, but there is one surrealist classic hiding amongst the bunch...
03:30 a.m. PST Gold Diggers of 1935. Busby Berkeley's first accredited film as a director is a dizzying blend camera tricks, insane choreography and Adolph Menjou leading a dance troupe wielding a machete. Apparently a strong influence for on Greta Gerwig for Barbie.
Wednesday, May 20
01:00 a.m. PST Early Spring. Ozu's devastating masterpiece about a tenuous marriage trying to survive an act of adultery. As always with Ozu, it is the small details, spread out over the film's two and a half hours, that result in a portrait of warts-and-all humanity.
And then we are off to Nicolas Ray day on TCM. They are all worth a look, but especially...
06:00 a.m. PST They Live by Night. Deeply felt love story between two innocents. Farley Granger (from Strangers on a Train) and Cathy O'Donnell play to pair with an aching sincerity. Granger plays part of a gang who is injured in a failed robbery. O'Connell nurses him back to health and they fall in love and flea the laws together. Arguably Ray's masterpiece, his debut. Remade in the 70s by Robert Altman under the original title of the novel source material, Thieves Like Us.
Friday, May 22
06:00 a.m. PST Body and Soul. If you have ever been curious about the eccentric Afro-American directed Oscar Micheaux, and you should be, TCM has what is probably his best-known but still-hard-to-find fil Friday. The great Paul Robeson does his best with Micheaux's melodramatic leanings, playing an escaped convict who poses as a man of the cloth to con a town and seduce a girl.
