Turner Classic Movies

Coming Up on TV: Diabolique

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If you like suspense, you will want to check out Diabolique, to be broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on May 12.  The headmaster of a provincial boarding school is so cruel, even sadistic, that everyone wants him dead, especially his wife and his mistress.  When he goes missing, the police drain the murky pool where the killers dumped the body, and the killers get a big surprise.  Now the suspense from director Henri-Georges Clouzot really starts.

A master of the thriller, Clouzot was nicknamed the French Hitchcock.  In an achingly scary scene from Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, two truck drivers try to get a long truck around a cliff side hairpin curve  – and the truck is filled with nitroglycerin.  If you like Diabolique, you’ll probably also like another domestic murder – this time set in Paris – Quai des Orfevres.

Coming Up on TV: Pigskin Parade

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Football fans may be interested in the silly comedy Pigskin Parade because it shows how college football was played in 1936.  It airs on Turner Classic Movies on April 22.

Like many sports movies, Pigskin Parade ends with a climactic game – and there’s footage of real football being played in a snowstorm (in long shot) interspersed with the comic movie football (in medium shot).  You can see the formations, men in motion and punt formation.  I knew about the leather helmets for the players, but I didn’t know that the referees wore unstriped white Knickerbockers and baker boy caps or that the coaches sent in  substitutions by written note.

Jack Haley plays a dim football coach hired at the fictional Texas State.  His spark plug wife (the very funny Patsy Kelly) is the real football brain.  Out in the countryside, they find a hayseed QB who can throw the ball out of the stadium and outrun a deer when he is barefoot; he is played by Stuart Erwin (who garnered a Supporting Actor Oscar nod).

In the final game, Texas State, referred to as “Texas” by the radio broadcaster, is a big underdog to Yale.  Yale was indeed a power at the time.  Yale players won the Heisman in both 1936 and 1937.

Pigskin Parade was the first feature film for Judy Garland and the second acting credit of over 200 for Elisha Cook Jr.  Betty Grable appears before she became a star.  Judy, Betty and Elisha are all billed below the comic quartet The Yacht Club Boys.  (Creepiness alert:  all but one of The Yacht Club Boys were way too old to be hanging around a college campus acting zany and wearing varsity gear.)

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.