This Week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the French coming-of-age drama Bonjour Tristesse and a tribute to the groundbreaking French comedy La Cage au Folles, coming up on TCM. Plus a preview of the upcoming Frameline film festival and a fond reflection on La cage aux folles.
REMEMBRANCES
60s pinup queen Mara Corday starred in a series of monster movies: The Giant Claw, The Black Scorpion (both among my Least Convincing Movie Monsters) and Tarantula. Corday concluded her career in several Clint Eastwood movies, most memorably in Sudden Impact as the waitress hostage rescued by Clint with “Go ahead, make my day.”
Frederick Forsyth’s early days as a spy and a journalist gave him fodder for his potboiler novels, many of which were adapted into movies like The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and, perhaps my favorite thriller, The Day of the Jackal.
CURRENT MOVIES
- Pee-Wee Herman as Himself: a man hidden in his own invention. HBO Max.
- Bonjour Tristesse: not the life lesson she was expecting. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- The Count of Monte-Cristo: you think you’ve seen a revenge movie? kanopy (free), Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger: locking gazes. kanopy.
- The Friend: grieving with an enormous dog. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Friendship: the loser isn’t lovable. In theaters.
ON TV
Tonight, Turner Classic Movies resurrects the great, great comedic performance by George C. Scott as the con man Mordecai Jones in The Flim-Flam Man (1967). Mark Twain would have loved this movie.
And set your VCRs for TCM’s June 20 airing of the rarely-broadcast Argentine neo-noir Nine Queens. Nine Queens has a great con artist plot, kind of midway between House of Games and The Sting. And it stars one of my favorite actors, Ricardo Darin, the Argentine Joe Mantegna. Sadly, the writer-director Fabián Bielinsky died at 47, right after his masterpiece The Aura, ending a very promising career.
