TCM

Coming up on TV: The Stunt Man

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On March 11, Turner Classic Movies is showing The Stunt Man (1980).  It’s on a list of Overlooked Masterworks that I’m working on.

Steve Railsback plays a fugitive chased on to a movie location shoot.  The director (Peter O’Toole) hides him out on the set as long as he works as a stunt double in increasingly hazardous stunts.  The man on the run is attracted to the leading lady (Barbara Hershey).  It doesn’t take long for him to doubt the director’s good will and to learn that not everything is as it seems.  Shot on location at San Diego’s famed Hotel Del Coronado. Listen to Director Robert Rush describe his movie in this clip.

Coming up on TV: TCM’s History of Hollywood

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On Labor Day, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting all seven parts of its series Moguls And Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood.  Most histories of cinema emphasize the technical and creative evolutions of film.  Instead, Moguls traces the business story – how mostly Jewish immigrants started with the early peep shows in old Eastern cities and wound up building monopolistic empires in the sun and glamor of Hollywood.  It’s a great story, and this series tells it very well.

TCM originally broadcast the series in fall 2009.  The DVD set is now available for purchase for about $28.  Here’s the original TCM promo.

Coming Up on TV and DVD: The Battle of Algiers

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On July 28, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast The Battle of Algiers, the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters.  Although it looks like a documentary, it is not.  Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching strategy councils of each side.  Urban insurgency and counter-insurgency are nasty, brutal and not very short – and we see some horrifically inhumane butchering by both sides.

Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency.  In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.

In addition, Criterion is about to release The Battle of Algiers in one of its magnificent DVDs.

Coming up on TV: Strangers on a Train

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On June 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1951 Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller – one of his very best. A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.

Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history.  The tennis match and carousel finale are great set pieces.

Coming up on TV: Twentieth Century

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On June 18, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1934 screwball comedy, which holds up as well today as it did 77 years ago. A flamboyantly narcissistic Broadway producer (John Barrymore) has fallen on hard times and hops a transcontinental train to persuade his former star (Carole Lombard), now an A-list movie star, to headline his new venture. Barrymore’s shameless self-entitlement and hyper dramatic neediness makes for one of the funniest performances in the movies.

Coming up on TV: Lawrence of Arabia

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Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia

It’s time to revisit a spectacle.  On May 9, Turner Classic movies is broadcasting Lawrence of Arabia.  For decades, many of us watched this epic squeezed into tinny-sounding TVs.   In 1989, I was fortunate enough to see the director’s cut in an old movie palace.   Now technology has caught up, and modern large screen HD televisions  can do this wide screen classic justice.  Similarly, modern home sound systems can work with the great Maurice Jarre soundtrack.

Nobody has ever created better epics than director David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago).  Peter O’Toole stars at the moment of his greatest physical beauty.  The rest of the cast is unsurpassed: Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, thousands of extras and entire herds of camels.  The vast and severe Arabian desert is a character unto itself.

Settle in and watch the whole thing – and remember what “epic” really means.

DVD of the Week: Moguls And Movie Stars

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Moguls And Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood is a 7-part series from Turner Classic Movies , which originally broadcast the series last fall.  Most histories of cinema emphasize the technical and creative evolutions of film.  Instead, Moguls traces the business story – how mostly Jewish immigrants started with the early peep shows in old Eastern cities and wound up building monopolistic empires in the sun and glamor of Hollywood.  It’s a great story, and this series tells it very well.

The DVD set is now available for purchase for about $28.  Here’s the original TCM promo.

Coming up on TV: The great Erroll Morris and Gates of Heaven

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On May 1, Turner Classic Movies is showing Gates of Heaven (1978), the first masterpiece by documentarian Erroll Morris.  It’s overtly about a Bay Area pet cemetery, but as Morris interviews the cemetery owners and the pet owners (as well as the guy at the rendering plant), the subjects expose their passions, aspirations and vulnerabilities.  And it’s hilarious.

This is an excellent introduction to America’s best documentarian, whose other films include The Thin Blue Line (which freed a wrongly convicted man from Texas’ Death Row) and Standard Operating Procedure (which exposed what was behind the abuses at Abu Ghraib).

Morris’ newest film, Tabloid, will be released on July 15.

Coming Up on TV: The two best Civil War films

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Jeff Daniels (center) in Gettysburg

The Civil War began 150 years ago this month, and TCM is broadcasting the two best Civil War movies on April 25.

Ron Maxwell’s 1994 Gettysburg is the gold standard of Civil War films.  It follows Michael Shaara’s superb historical novel The Killer Angels and depicts the decisive three day battle.  It was filmed on the actual battlefield with re-enactors.  Maxwell took great care in maintaining historical accuracy.  Civil War buffs will recognize many lines of dialogue as historical, as well as shots that recall famous photographs.  In addition, Gettysburg is especially well-acted, especially by Jeff Daniels, Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Sam Elliott and Brian Mallon.

The other very best Civil War movie is the 1989 Glory, which tells the real-life story of an all-black unit in the Union Army.  Glory has tremendous performances by Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher, Morgan Freeman and Jihmi Kennedy.