TCM Look-Ahead October 9
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, October 9
02:45 p.m. PDT A Lion is in the Streets (1953) This rollicking vehicle for the charisma-machine Jimmy Cagney has been long forgotten, but packs a punch. Cagney plays a popular door to door salesman, selling essentials out of his jalopy to the locals in swampy burgs across the south. When he gets embroiled in political issues effecting his clients, who are mostly poor sharecroppers, he vengefully turns to politics and declares himself a Gubernatorial candidate against a firmly entrenched and utterly despicable incumbent. As his power grows, he becomes despicable himself. Directed with the gusto we associate with Raoul Walsh, this is, like All the King's Men, loosely based on the legend of Huey Long and a wonderful showcase for, arguably, America's greatest movie actor.
The movie offers, amid its hectic and rowdy melodrama, a constant and underlying vision of the crucial power of government to serve the public good-and the ease with which that power can, almost invisibly, be shifted...Richard Brody
08:00 p.m. PDT Boorman and the Devil (2025) Haven't seen this yet but I love Making Of Films, especially about Epic Fails, and I worship John Boorman. This is the story of Boorman, fresh off the heels of Deliverance and given carte blanch to choose his projects, decides to take on the Exorcist sequel as a corrective to the massive 1973 hit (he hated it and thought it was a portrayal of the torture of children. I mean, not wrong). The result was a film of such obstinate strangeness, resembling the original in name only, that pissed people off and bombed. Boorman, still with us at 93, appears in the film. I can't wait.
Real artists take the kind of risks that will ultimately lead to occasional failure, and the most daring filmmakers in history are the ones who truly make an impact. – Brian Tallerico
10:00 p.m. PDT Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) And voila, a chance to see the Epic Fail. It's been a few years for me, and I am not going to get your hopes up, but it does have its admirers (Martin Scorsese being one of them).
There’s enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what the picture lacks is judgment the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession. – Pauline Kael
Saturday, October 10
08:00 p.m. PDT Nights of Cabiria (1957) In many ways the prototypical Fellini, starring his wife and muse, Giulietta Mussini, as a waifish street retch for whom life becomes a series of degradations. Not always easy to watch, but to watch to masters at work it is essential. This is the film the musical Sweet Charity was based on (Bob Fosse worshiped Fellini).
Cabiria is the story of ascesis, of renunciation, and, (however you choose to interpret the term) of salvation. The beauty and the rigor of its construction proceed this time from the perfect economy of its constituent episodes. – Andre Bazin
Sunday, October 11
01:30 a.m. PDT S.O.B. (1981) It would seem Blake Edwards led an ideal life. A long, distinguished career as a Hollywood director with a ton of hits on his ledger, fame and fortune, and adoring, famous wife (Julie Andrews), all the things. So you may watch this acerbic early 80s satire and mutter "lighten up, Blake." While Edwards had many successes, he had a run of bombs that clearly had a greater effect on him, and it would appear, based on the proceedings of S.O.B., there was plenty to blame those on. An unhinged Robert Mulligan (remember his from Soap?) is the Edwards character, a suicidally depressed movie director whose repeated failures have him, in the film's first act, conjuring creative ways to end it all. He then hits on the idea of casting his wife, a massive, clean cut movie star (yet, you guessed it, Julie Andrews) in a soft core epic where she exposes her breasts, thus assuring box office gold. It is all a bit silly and over-the-top vitriolic, but it is often hilarious (Edwards had no equal as a modern master of slapstick) and there is no doubt it is an authentic portrayal of the business of Show, Hollywood style. Ironically, on the heels of the massive hit 10, S.O.B. was a bomb.
It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time. – Vincent Canby
01:45 p.m. PDT The Naked Kiss (1964) This would be the film to see if one were to only be able to handle one Samuel Fuller (which would make you a lily-livered coward). The statuesque and disarmingly erotic Constance Towers (who was largely wasted in films) plays an ex-prostitute trying to make it in the straight world as a teach who runs afoul of a bad man. It is possible you have seen the startling sequence of a bald Towers beating the hell out of client with a telephone. It is, in fact, the movie's first sequence, and sets the tone. Fuller at his most hysterical (complementary).
What's good about his films is lovable; the daring, uninhibited use of semi-documentary techniques that save the movie from Fuller's mind, an unthinking morass at best. – Manny Farber
Monday, October 12
04:00 a.m. PDT Camera Buff (1979) Most folks know Kristoff Kieslowski for his Trois Colours trilogy, but of course he was a tireless filmmaker with a huge filmography in his native Poland before hitting it big in the more Western world of the art film. In many ways, this is best film, a culmination of the themes and style which distinguished him. Filip Mosz is an ordinary schmo of a factory worker who, when acquiring an 8mm movie camera, begins to obsessively film the life around him, including the corruption and suffering of every day Warsaw. This leads him into trouble with his losing-her-patience wife and we-are-not-amused state authorities. A film that will resonate profoundly with any camera obsessive who cannot filming life while not necessarily living it (guilty, as charged).
Suffused with Kieslowski's dry wit and intelligence, this early feature provides an excellent introduction to his work. – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Starting at 08:00 p.m. PDT The Thin Man and many of its sequels. You don't need a rec on these from me. They are all delightful.
Tuesday, October 13
08:30 a.m. PDT Foreign Correspondent (1940) Easily one of Hitch's most underrated films, this taut picture has unusual political resonance for the typically a-political master. The stolid yet always reliable Joel McCrae plays a crime reporter who, when in Europe to cover the increasingly escalating war, gets embroiled in an assassination conspiracy. Not a wasted frame, a pure master class. Yes, this is the one with the windmills (you'll see).
Into it Director Alfred Hitchcock, whose unmistakable stamp the picture bears, has packed about as much romantic action, melodramatic hullabaloo, comical diversion and illusion of momentous consequence as the liveliest imagination could conceive. – Bosley Crowther
08:00 p.m. PDT All that Heaven Allows (1955) The ongoing theme this week seems to be "if you must see one film by this master, it may as well be this one." In many ways, the movie we think of when we think of Douglas Sirk (the sweeping, mirror-reflective mise en scene, the eye-popping technicolor, the sincere, never kitschy melodrama, the woman character at its center, with full agency, but longing for a better life). Jane Wyman plays a millionaire returning home who falls for her impossibly hunky yet poor Thoreau-esque Gardner (the inevitable Rock Hudson). A rare Hollywood romance about class disconnect. This may as well be the film in the time capsule that denotes "the 1950s."
A masterpiece (1955) by one of the most inventive and recondite directors ever to work in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk. – Dave Kehr
Wednesday, October 14
05:45 p.m. PDT The 49th Parallel (1942) Powell and Pressburger were, at heart, aesthetes, but they did not shy away from borderline propagandistic political films during WW II. This is one of their crackers, and the extremely rare case where Germans (let's just say it, Nazis) are portrayed somewhat sympathetically. 6 German U-Boat inhabitants are stranded in the Canadian wilderness and try to survive against an awesome cast of actors (including Laurence Olivier, complete with sketchy Canadian accent). The men are not demonized (though some are worse than others), but they are clearly villains, and we watch as they are slowly dispatched with a mixture excitement but also a rare relatability. What emerges is a plea for understanding but an unshakable belief in the eradication of evil.
Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey, Laurence Olivier and Anton Walbrook are the stars in a cast flashing with talent; and Michael Powell directs with his usual flair for the handling of action against a natural background. – Dilys Powell
Friday, October 16
And on Friday, a morning and afternoon of non-stop Hammer Horror! I will list these in the order of my recommendation, but record them all of them, Monster Kids!
7:45am PDT
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
4:15am PDT
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)
9:15am PDT
Horror of Dracula (1958)
2:30am PDT
Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
6:00am PDT
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) (previously recommended!)
12:45am PDT
The Brides of Dracula (1960)
10:45am PDT
The Mummy (1959)
