The Mummy, playing on TCM on Friday. I freaking love this pulp poster style.

There is a bunch of new stuff this week to go along with a good mix of previously featured films. Don’t miss Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night on Wednesday, one of his more delightful and accessible films, then Thursday TCM has a bunch of what I’ll call second-tier Hitchcock films, but second-tier Hitchcock is still pretty damn good. Also on Thursday, check out The Claim on IFC – I talk a lot about bad Milla Jovovich films (because I enjoy even the bad ones), but this one is actually good. TCM continues their series of Hammer horror films on Friday with four Mummy films, then carries us through Saturday and Sunday with early Dietrich-von Sternberg collaboration The Blue Angel, the 1960 version of The Time Machine, the silent version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and caps it off with Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong film remade in 2006 as The Departed. Lots of variety, and of course lots of repeats that are well worth watching or rewatching.

Monday, October 11

6:00am – IFC – Before Sunrise
Before Sunrise may be little more than an extended conversation between two people (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) who meet on a train in Europe and decide to spend all night talking and walking the streets of Vienna, I fell in love with it at first sight. Linklater has a way of making movies where nothing happens seem vibrant and fascinating, and call me a romantic if you wish, but this is my favorite of everything he’s done.
1995 USA. Director: Richard Linklater. Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy.
Must See
(repeats at 11:25am)

8:00pm – TCM – The Big Sleep
One of the greatest detective/mysteries/films noir ever made. Humphrey Bogart is the definite hard-boiled detective, Lauren Bacall is the potential love interest/femme fatale. Don’t try to follow the story; whodunit is far less important than crackling dialogue and dry humor. Watch out for future Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone (Written on the Wind) in the small but extremely memorable part of the bookshop girl.
1946 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, Elisha Cook Jr., Dorothy Malone.
Must See

10:00pm – TCM – His Girl Friday
This is a remake of the 1931 film The Front Page about newspaper buddies who go after a major story – Howard Hawks takes it to a whole new level by turning one of the men into a woman, and setting reporters Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant as a former couple, now divorced who can’t seem to stay apart, either personally or professionally. The dialogue is a stroke of genius, as well, overlapping in a maelstrom of words that’s overwhelming and delightful all at the same time. I call this one of the greatest American films ever made.
1940 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy.
Must See

12:00M – IFC – Shadow of the Vampire
What if actor Max Schreck, who played the vampire in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, actually WAS a vampire and kept eating various members of the cast and crew? That’s the premise set forth by this slight but entertaining film, with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as the eccentric Schreck.
2000 USA. Director: E. Elias Merhige. Starring: John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack.

2:00am (12th) – TCM – Hail the Conquering Hero
After being discharged from the Army as 4F, Eddie Bracken is pressured into pretending to be a war hero by a group of marines when he returns to his small home town; as things escalate in his honor, he tries to set things straight, but can’t get anyone to listen. This is one of Preston Sturges’ best-known absurd comedies, and he has quite an impressive string of absurd comedies, so that’s saying a lot.
1944 USA. Director: Preston Sturges. Starring Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Raymond Walburn.

4:00am (12th) – TCM – The Palm Beach Story
Similar in tone but less consistent than The Lady Eve, this Preston Sturges film follows bickering couple Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert as she leaves him to gold dig for a richer man. He follows her, pretending to be her brother, and they get all entangled with a wealthy brother and sister. The ending is a weak bit of trickery, but there are enough moments of hilarity to make it worth watching.
1942 USA. Director: Preston Sturges. Starring: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Rudy Vallee, Mary Astor.

Tuesday, October 12

6:00am – IFC – Picnic at Hanging Rock
I have a love-hate relationship with Aussie director Peter Weir. His films are almost always slow and methodical, which works for me sometimes and not others. It works in Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of his earlier films, in which a group of schoolgirls goes into the wilderness for a picnic and mysteriously disappear.
1975 Australia. Director: Peter Weir. Starring: Anne-Louise Lambert, Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Karen Robson.
(repeats at 11:35am)

7:00pm – Sundance – Marie Antoinette
Though Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is unconventional, it is a solid and riveting re-interpretation of the giddy but not untroubled courts of Louis XVI and Louis XVII. The use of actors like Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, who are not known as period actors, as well as anachronistic music, sounds like an ill-conceived attempt to make the story feel contemporary, but it actually works. Coppola took some serious risks with this film, but they paid off beyond all expectation.
2006 USA. Director: Sofia Coppola. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne.
(repeats at 1:50am on the 13th)

8:00pm – TCM – A Star is Born (1937)
This is not the better-known Judy Garland version, but the non-musical version featuring Janet Gaynor in one of her last roles. Gaynor’s not well remembered now, but she won the very first Academy Award for Best Actress back in 1928, and she holds this story of a hopeful ingenue married to a has-been actor together. I still love Judy’s version better (because I can’t get enough of her singing “The Man That Got Away”), but this one is well worth watching as well.
1937 USA. Director: William A. Wellman. Starring: Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou, May Robson.

10:00pm – TCM – The Best Years of Our Lives
One of the first films to deal with the aftermath of WWII, as servicemen return home to find both themselves and their homes changed by the long years of war. Director William Wyler and a solid ensemble cast do a great job of balancing drama and realism without delving too much into sentimentality.
1946 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Herbert Russell, Cathy O’Donnell.

12:00M – IFC – Evil Dead 2
The sequel/remake to Sam Raimi’s wonderfully over-the-top demon book film, set in the same creepy wood-bound cabin, with even more copious amounts of blood and a lot more intentional humor. I’m still not sure which I like best, but either one will do when you need some good schlock.
1987 USA. Director: Sam Raimi. Starring: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks.

Wednesday, October 13

9:50am – Sundance – Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog has made the savage beauty of nature one of his themes throughout most of his fiction films, so perhaps it’s only natural that he has moved onto explicitly non-fiction explorations of some of nature’s most remote locales, in this case, Antarctica.2007 USA. Director: Werner Herzog.
(repeats at 3:15pm)

6:45pm – Sundance – Little Children
Todd Field’s perfectly written (and acted) story of intersecting unhappy suburbanites reminds us why melodrama shouldn’t be a bad word – this is melodrama at its very best, and its very best is stunning. Kate Winslet turns in a should’ve-been-Oscar-winning performance as the frustrated wife and mother grasping for an emotional connection with another neighborhood dad (Patrick Wilson), while Jackie Earle Haley registered a comeback as a sex offender.
2006 USA. Director: Todd Field. Starring: Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Gregg Edelman, Jackie Earle Haley.
(repeats at 2:00am on the 14th)

8:00pm – TCM – The General
One of the greatest silent comedies of all time; no, scratch that, one of the greatest any kind of comedies of all time. Buster Keaton is at the top of his game as a Civil War era engineer whose train (with his girl on it) gets captured by the Union army, and he’s got to get them both back, with many an amazing stunt along the way. No one did stunt-based comedy better than Keaton, and he’s never been better than this.
1926 USA. Director: Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman. Starring: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack.
Must See

9:30pm – TCM – Smiles of a Summer Night
One of Ingmar Bergman’s lightest and most accessible films, a romp through the love lives of a group of upper-class Europeans culminating in a weekend party at a manor house where all the entanglements may or may not get straightened out. Really delightful piece of filmmaking, but not wholly without Bergman’s trademark existential thoughtfulness.
1955 Sweden. Director: Ingmar Bergman. Starring: Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, Jarl Kulle, Bjorn Bjelfvenstam.
Must See
Newly Featured!

Thursday, October 14

6:30am – TCM – Broken Blossoms
A few years after D.W. Griffith’s controversial Birth of a Nation and epic Intolerance, he made this much smaller, much quieter film about a Chinese man (the non-Chinese Richard Barthelmess – and yes, there is some inherent racism is the plot, though you get the feeling that Griffith is trying in his somewhat hamfisted way to apologize for the way people took Birth of a Nation) who becomes enamored with a young girl (Lillian Gish) whose father abuses her. At its core, though, it’s a really simple yet beautiful story, and shows Griffith at his sentimental best.
1919 USA. Director: D.W. Griffith. Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp.

7:35am – IFC – Paranoid Park
I go back and forth on whether I think Gus Van Sant is brilliant or a pretentious bore – maybe some of both. But I really quite liked the slow, oblique approach in this film about a wanna-be skateboarder kid who relishes hanging out with the bigger skateboarders at the titular skate park – but there’s a death not far from there, and it takes the rest of the movie to slowly reveal what exactly happened that one night near Paranoid Park. Gets by on mood and cinematography.
2007 USA Director: Gus Van Sant. Starring: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Lu, Jake Miller, Taylor Momsen, Lauren McKinney.
(repeats at 12:05pm)

8:00am – TCM – Orphans of the Storm
D.W. Griffith takes on the French Revolution with the help of silent screen superstars Lillian and Dorothy Gish in one of his best-remembered films. Griffith can always be counted on to bring the spectacle and find the pathos in it, and even though I haven’t seen this one yet, I’m sure it’s just the same.
1921 USA. Director: D.W. Griffith. Starring: Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Joseph Schildkraut, Frank Losee.

10:45am – TCM – Rich and Strange
Alfred Hitchcock made very few films that weren’t suspense thrillers, but this is one of them – an early sound comedy of a couple inheriting a sum of money and finding it not all it’s cracked up to be.
1931 UK. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Percy Marmont.
Newly Featured!

12:15pm – TCM – I Confess
The most obvious example of Hitchcock’s usually subdued theme of Catholic guilt has priest Montgomery Clift refusing to reveal a murderer’s confession due to the sanctity of the the confessional. 1953 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne.
Newly Featured!

2:00pm – TCM – Stage Fright
An actress helps a friend try to defend his innocence when he’s accused of murder – but is she doing the right thing? This is one of the earliest examples I know of in film of an unreliable cinematic rendering of events; doesn’t follow through on it quite as well as Rashomon does (which was released the same year), but very interesting nonetheless.
1950 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Jane Wyman, Michael Wilding, Marlene Dietrich.
Newly Featured!

4:00pm – TCM – The Wrong Man
Alfred Hitchcock made many films based on the idea of the wrong man being accused for some crime, but this is the most on-the-nose one. Innocent Henry Fonda is mistaken for a suspect in a crime, and undergoes a vast extended ordeal at the hands of the police and witnesses who constantly identify him as the criminal even though he is not. The effects on him and his family are devastating. Not one of Hitchcock’s very best, but worth watching for Fonda’s performance and the distillation of one of Hitchcock’s most prominent themes.
1956 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle, Harold J. Stone.

8:00pm – TCM – Dial M for Murder
Glossy Hitchcock film with Ray Milland hiring a hitman to off his wife Grace Kelly after discovered she’d been unfaithful to him, but when she turns the tables on the would-be killer, Milland is forced to ever more devious cover-ups and plots. Really solid suspenser, if not quite top-level Hitchcock for me. Still a must-see if you’re a Hitchcock fan.
1954 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Cummings, John Williams, Anthony Dawson.

8:00pm – IFC – The Claim
A typically complex film from Michael Winterbottom, with Peter Mullan anchoring the ensemble cast as the rich leader of an old West mining town faced with pressure from the railroad and echoes from his past. The rest of the cast, including Sarah Polley and Milla Jovovich (in one of her rare actually good movies), are superb as well and make this well worth seeking out.
2000 UK/Canada. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Peter Mullan, Milla Jovovich, Wes Bentley, Sarah Polley, Nastassja Kinski, Shirley Henderson.
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 3:15am on the 15th)

1:30am (15th) – TCM – The Band Wagon
There are many reasons to consider The Band Wagon among the best movie musicals ever made. The satirical plot involving a Shakespearean director who tries to turn a lighthearted musical into a doom-and-gloom version of Faust, the bright yet sardonic script and score by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who basically appear in the film as the characters played by Nanette Fabrey and Oscar Levant), the last really great role for Fred Astaire (maybe Funny Face is a contender, but barely), and of course, the never-surpassed beauty of dance numbers like “Dancing in the Dark” with Fred and Cyd Charisse. But even if it didn’t have all that, I’d still rank it among my favorites for the epic “Girl Hunt Ballet” number spoofing hard-boiled detective fiction.
1953 USA. Director: Vincente Minnelli. Starring: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Jack Buchanan, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabrey.
Must See

Friday, October 15

5:45pm – TCM – Mister Roberts
Henry Fonda is the title character, an XO on a cargo ship who often butts heads with the captain (James Cagney), who runs the ship with an iron fist. The tone is a satisfying combination of comedy and drama, and with a cast that also includes William Powell in his last role and Jack Lemmon in one of his first, you can hardly go wrong. Though John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy share credit for the film, it’s mostly Ford – LeRoy was brought in to finish it when Ford had to undergo emergency surgery, but he tried to emulate Ford’s style as much as possible.
1955 USA. Director: John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy. Starring: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Jack Lemmon, Betsy Palmer, Ward Bond.

8:00pm – TCM – The Mummy (1959)
TCM is bringing out the Hammer horror every Friday night this month, and tonight is a bunch of Hammer movies featuring the Mummy, starting with 1959′s The Mummy and continuing with The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Shroud, and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. I haven’t seen any of these, but after foolishly missing the Dracula-themed night last week, I’m going to be for sure setting my DVR this time.
1959 UK. Director: Terence Fisher. Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Yvonne Furneaux, Eddie Byrne.
Newly Featured!

8:30pm – IFC – Office Space
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office will identify with Office Space immediately – with the paper-jamming printers, the piles of beaurocratic paperwork, and the difficulty of keeping up with staplers if not the plot to make off with boatloads of money due to an accounting loophole. In fact, if you do or have worked an office job, I’m gonna call this required viewing.
1999 USA. Director: Mike Judge. Starring: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston.

Saturday, October 16

12:00N – TCM – High Sierra
Bogart’s breakout role as an on-the-run con man who gets involved with the lame Joan Leslie. (No, I mean actually crippled.) He’d been bumming around for a few years as a Warner second lead or villain, but with 1941’s double punch of High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, he unequivocally arrived.
1941 USA. Director: Raoul Walsh. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Joan Leslie, Ida Lupino.

6:00pm – IFC – Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Easily one of the most absurd, random, hilarious, and quotable comedies of all time. A more hapless bunch of Round Table knights couldn’t be found, and Monty Python has never been better than they are here.
1975 UK. Directors: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Starring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones.
Must See

10:00pm – IFC – The Crying Game
British soldier Forest Whitaker is captured by an IRA cell, and one of the IRA members (Stephen Rea), against his better judgement, befriends him. Later, Rea leaves the cell and makes his way to London to find Whitaker’s lover and ends up getting involved with her under an assumed identity. There’s an additional twist that you likely know if you play any film trivia at all, but the rest of the film is a solid exploration of terrorist guilt with director Neil Jordan’s characteristic angst.
1992 UK. Director: Neil Jordan. Starring: Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson.
(repeats at 3:45am on the 17th)

3:45am (17th) – TCM – The Blue Angel
One of Marlene Dietrich’s early films, paired with her oft-director Josef von Sternberg – but even though she steals every scene she’s in and is the reason the film remains known at all, it’s really more about Emil Jannings’ tragic professor character, who is dragged from his respected life and social position by his infatuation with Dietrich’s showgirl. It’s a bit on the moralistic side, but with such a humanist touch that it’s tough not to be drawn into it at least a little bit.
1930 Germany. Director: Josef von Sterberg. Starring: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti.
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Sunday, October 17

11:00am – TCM – Poor Little Rich Girl
One of Shirley Temple’s better films has her as a spoiled rich child who gets lost in the city and is cared for by a couple of entertainers. It doesn’t hurt that one of the entertainers is Alice Faye, who provides much better support than Temple usually has in her films.
1936 USA. Director: Irving Cummings. Starring: Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, Jack Haley, Gloria Stuart, Michael Whalen.

2:00pm – TCM – The Time Machine (1960)
George Pal’s 1960 version of H.G. Wells’ classic time travel novel mixes Victorian/Edwardian costume picture, steampunk-esque devices, and futuristic worlds with awesome stop-motion and practical effects with utterly charming results. I love sci-fi like this, and I think watching this film last year is really the thing that got me on the current B-movie sci-fi/horror kick that I’m happily indulging whenever I have time.
1960 USA. Director: George Pal. Starring: Rod Taylor, Alan Young, Yvette Mimieux, Sebastian Cabot.
Newly Featured!

12:00M – TCM – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
There have been a bunch of adaptations of Victor Hugo’s novel about the outcast Parisian hunchback, but this is one of the earliest and continues to be highly regarded, thanks in no small part to Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney’s portrayal of Quasimodo.
1923 USA. Director: Wallace Worsley. Starring: Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller, Norman Kerry, Nigel De Bruller.
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2:00am (18th) – TCM – Infernal Affairs
The original Hong Kong version that Martin Scorsese remade as The Departed, and which many critics prefer to Scorsese’s excellent version. I’ve been wanting to see this for a long time and never got around to it – trust TCM to help me out, even though this is a bit outside their normal programming sphere.
2002 Hong Kong. Director: Wai-keung Lau. Starring: Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang.
Newly Featured!