TCM Look-Ahead - May 22
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.
Memorial Day weekend offers a plethora of war-themed films, some famous, some fairly obscure, but of auteur interest. Shoulder Arms!
Saturday, May 23
03:00 a.m. PST The Purple Plain. (1954) I stand corrected (see last week)! TCM is coming through with Gregory Peck's best film in Gregory Peck month. A can't miss concerning the survival of two plane crash victims in the desert, ostensibly enemies, who have to forge a partnership to withstand impossible odds. Peck goes against his usual stoic and stolid man of virtue (he is basically a psychotic) and gives his best performance.
10:45 a.m. PST The Red Badge of Courage. (1951) John Huston's adaptation of Stephen Crane's novel about cowardice in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds on the battlefield. Real-life war hero Audie Murphy is audaciously cast as the lead, the coward. The studio cut massive chunks out of the film for running time purposes, causing Huston to essentially disown it. Incidentally, the making of this film is the subject of one of the best books ever written about film, "Picture," by Lillian Ross. If you can find it, snap it up.
2:00 p.m. PST The Steel Helmet. (1951) Sam Fuller at home, as usual, on the battleground. Don't expect political subtlety or pacifist leanings. Commies are the enemy and get what's coming to them. Do expect the full-on Fuller wild style, which is singular and breathtaking.
03:45 p.m. PST Darby's Rangers. (1958) Little-discussed late William Wellman war film which, I admit, I know nothing about, set in Scotland (training) and then North Africa and Italy (battle). Wellman was always home in a war-setting, and I would expect his usual sensitive treatment of our fighting boys.
Sunday, May 24
04:00 p.m. PST The Story of G.I. Joe. (1945) Previously recommended, so another chance if you ignored me the first time around, which is unconscionable. Wellman on the battlefield again, probably my favorite war film.
Monday, May 25
01:45 a.m. PST The Big Parade. (1925) King Vidor's astonishing work of poetry, concerning a rich boy who foolishly enlists in the army thinking it will be a romantic and rollicking good time. Which are not words used to describe WWI. At any rate, this is one of the films one might hold up to the theory that sound ruined what cinema was becoming in its late silent stages.
04:30 a.m. PST Westfront 1918. (1930) Long thought lost, G.W. Pabst's masterpiece, his first talkie, was digitally restored from camera negative elements in 2014 to astonishing effect. Pabst was a complicated figure, a pacifist and nominal anti-Nazi who nevertheless did not follow the past of his countrymen Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau and flee the country as Hitler puts his hooks in. This has contributed to a diminishing of his overall reputation, but it is clear in watching Westfront this was an immensely talented and sensitive director. Released almost simultaneously with the much more ballyhooed, Oscar-anointed All Quiet on the Western Front, I find this the superior, less pretentious and ultimately more pacifist work.
01:30 p.m. PST Merrill's Marauders. (1962) Sam Fuller in the trenches again. Embittered, uncompromising infantry saga, more about exhaustion in the face of following orders, than the politics.
Tuesday, May 26
01:45 a.m. PST A Walk in the Sun. (1945) The final must-see of The Memorial Day weekend extravaganza. Lewis Milestone's classic Italian-front-set WWII infantry film, a major influence on Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan.
08:00 p.m. PST Floating Weeds (1959) Kicking off a series of Ozu films on this day, each one a must see. This is Ozu's own remake of his 30s film The Story of Floating Weeds, and the later film is more intense, showing Ozu, moving away from his typically family-set dramas, to the Kabuki theater and some of the most unsympathetic characters in Ozu's oeuvre. However, as one might expect, redemption is around the corner. Gorgeously shot in color and unmistakably Ozu. This is followed by Late Autumn, An Autumn Afternoon, Equinox Flower, Good Morning, and The End of Summer. So no need to touch that dial.
09:30 a.m. PST Fort Apache. (1948) The first in John Ford's Calvary trilogy (followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande) starring John Wayne and, against type, Henry Fonda, playing an arrogant, glory-seeking, by-the-book Commander who spars with Wayne. Ultimately they work together to battle Apaches and their leader, Cochise. As always, Ford's depiction of the Indians is sympathetic in comparison to other films of the time. The unnecessary and unconvincing love story between the Shirley Temple and John Agar characters (they were a real-life couple) mars the proceedings, but this is one of Ford's greatest, pictorially spectacular, and thematically intriguing (some have written about the Calvary trilogy as a metaphor for the Cold War, which was just encroaching as the films were made).
