It’s been a while since I noted a great film playing on IFC for the first time, but this Saturday they debut Gone Baby Gone, a film I think surprised most people when it came out, suggesting that Ben Affleck’s real talents may in fact lie behind the camera rather than in front of it. TCM continues their series of Civil War films on Monday and Wednesday evening, plus note Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People on IFC on Thursday, a set of Gershwin musicals on TCM on Saturday, and a number of must-see repeats spread throughout the week.

Monday, April 25

6:45am – TCM – Morocco
My knowledge of the Josef von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich cycle of films is woefully slight, but the one I have seen (The Blue Angel) was pretty impressive, so it’s an oversight I intend to fix at some point. Dietrich here takes a leap of androgyny with her tuxedo-clad cabaret numbers, while an extremely young Gary Cooper is along for the ride as a Legionnaire.
1930 USA. Director: Josef von Sternberg. Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou.

9:45am – TCM – The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arguably the best of the extensive series of Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, from one of Doyle’s best-known novellas about the great detective. A moody piece with Holmes investigating a series of deaths on the northern moors that many are attributing to a local legend of a supernatural hound.
1939 USA. Director: Sidney Lanfield. Starring: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Richard Greene, Wendy Barrie, Lionel Atwill, John Carradine.
Newly Featured!

11:45am – IFC – Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Lawrence Sterne’s 1769 proto-postmodern novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy has long been considered unfilmable. So what does director Michael Winterbottom do? He makes a film about the difficulty of filming Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom’s film is something of an experiment, but it’s a delightful one, showing the behind-the-scenes antics of production as well as highlighting the circularity and self-defeating narrative of Sterne’s novel in the film-within-the-film.
2005 UK. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Jeremy Northam.

2:45pm – TCM – Love Me Tonight
MacDonald and Chevalier were a quite successful pairing in early sound-era operettas, and this is one of their best – a pretty excellent musical comedy of noblemen and peasants and mistaken identity directed by Rouben Mamoulian doing his best Ernst Lubitsch impersonation (Lubitsch actually did do a couple of films teaming MacDonald and Chevalier, but none as good as this one).
1932 USA. Director: Rouben Mamoulian. Starring: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Myrna Loy.

7:00pm – TCM – Glory
An Edward Zwick film that doesn’t feel quite so burdened by being an Edward Zwick film as some his later ones would, about an all-black volunteer unit in the Civil War, fighting prejudice both from the opposing Confederate army and their own Union brothers-in-arms. Denzel Washington won a Supporting Oscar in one of his earliest roles.
1989 USA. Director: Edward Zwick. Starring: Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes.

9:15pm – TCM – Gettysburg
An epic depiction of one of the Civil War’s most devastating and decisive battles, at Gettsyburg, Pennsylvania. Based on Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels.
1993 USA. Director: Ronald F. Maxwell. Starring: Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen, Stephen Lang.
Newly Featured!

Tuesday, April 26

9:00am – TCM – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
There have been a lot of versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and this one isn’t considered one of the better ones. It’s interesting to me, though, because Spencer Tracy expresses the transformation between meek doctor and monstrous alter-ego almost solely through his facial expressions and physical bearing – no change in makeup – and his intensity makes it work.
1941 USA. Director: Victor Fleming. Starring: Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp, Ian Hunter.

7:00pm – TCM – The Lost Weekend
A classic addition story, with Ray Milland as the alcoholic on a bender over a weekend, while he flashes back to earlier points in his “relationship” with alcohol, complete with DTs and over-the-top hallucinations and the whole bit. But if anyone can make a hard-hitting story about addiction entertaining, it’s Billy Wilder, and he does so here.
1945 USA. Director: Billy Wilder. Starring: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry.

Wednesday, April 27

12:00N – TCM – The Private Life of Henry VIII
The first of several times Charles Laughton played England’s King Henry VIII, and he won an Oscar for it – it was a role that “fit” him very well, if you get my drift.
1933 USA. Director: Alexander Korda. Starring: Charles Laughton, Robert Donat, Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester, Wendy Barrie, Binnie Barnes.

3:15pm – TCM – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Charles Laughton plays the put-upon hunchback Quasimodo, a young Maureen O’Hara the lovely Esmerelda in one of the best film versions of Victor Hugo’s classic of gothic romanticism.
1939 USA. Director: William Dieterle. Starring: Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, Edmond O’Brien.

7:00pm – TCM – Abraham Lincoln
One of legendary director D.W. Griffith’s final films (and few sound films) returns to the Civil War era that he depicted so memorably and controversially in Birth of a Nation. I haven’t seen it, but have heard that though it doesn’t come close to his silent films in terms of innovation and mastery, it’s still worth watching and much better than its nearly-forgotten reputation would indicate.
1930 USA. Director: D.W. Griffith. Starring: Walter Huston, Una Merkel, William L. Thorne.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – IFC – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
I need to give another look to this Peter Weir film about a British commander pursuing a French vessel through dangerous waters during the Napoleonic Wars; it didn’t impress me a whole lot when I watched it, but it’s pretty highly regarded in the Third Row. I’m kind of back and forth on Weir in general, but I’d be plenty to happy to add this one back to the “pro” column.
2003 USA. Director: Peter Weir. Starring: Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd.

10:00pm – Sundance – A Town Called Panic
One of the most delightful films I saw in 2009, a whacked out stop-motion film from Belgium that follows Horse, Cowboy, and Indian throughout a series of adventures, mostly focused on trying to rebuild their house which keeps getting stolen every night. This is mile-a-minute absurdity with more inventiveness in 75 minutes than I usually see all year.
2009 Belium. Directors: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar. Starring: Stéphane Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Bruce Ellison, Vincent Pater.

Thursday, April 28

1:30pm – TCM – On the Beach
After nuclear war, most of humanity is destroyed; a small outpost in Australia survives, but not for long. See David’s longer take here.
1959 USA. Director: Stanley Kramer. Starring: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire.

6:40pm – Sundance – L’auberge espagnole
A French student moves into an apartment with six other people in Barcelona. The interactions of these roommates with diverse cultural backgrounds and personalities forms the basis of the film as a whole, which may be short on plot but is great on the interpersonal relations and conversations that the French are so good at putting on film.
2002 France. Director: Cédric Klapisch. Starring: Romain Duris, Judith Godrèche, Kelly Reilly.

8:05pm – IFC – The Usual Suspects
One of the earliest in the late 90s wave of “twist” films, and still one of the few that did it best. Spoiler warnings may not have been invented for The Usual Suspects, but it was certainly one of the films that popularized anti-spoiler sentiment (and the converse glee for spoiling, I suppose). Thanks to Christopher McQuarrie’s tight script and great acting turns, though, the film is about more than the twist, which is what makes it continue to be worthwhile over a decade and multiple viewings later.
1995 USA. Director: Bryan Singer. Starring: Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Bryne, Benicio Del Toro, Kevin Pollack, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri, Pete Postlethwaite.
(repeats at 2:45am on the 29th)

9:00pm – 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.

10:00pm – Sundance – 24 Hour Party People
An idiosyncratic look at the creation and heyday of Factory Records, the home of Manchester punk bands Joy Division/New Order, James and the Happy Mondays, and others, under the direction of Tony Wilson. But this is not documentary, nor standard biography, but a stylistically bold and funny film as only Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan can put together.
2002 UK. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Steve Coogan, Lennie James, Paddy Considine, Shirley Henderson, Andy Serkis, John Simm.
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 3:00am on the 29th)

11:00pm – TCM – North by Northwest
Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) gets mistaken for George Kaplan and pulled into an elaborate web of espionage in one of Hitchcock’s most enjoyable and funniest thrillers. So many great scenes it’s impossible to list them all.
1959 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau.
Must See

1:30am (29th) – TCM – The Magnificent Ambersons
Welles followed up Citizen Kane with this film about a wealthy but decaying American family, but wasn’t given nearly as much creative freedom. But even with studio interference, it’s well worth seeing.
1942 USA. Director: Orson Welles. Starring: Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead.

3:15am (29th) – TCM – On Dangerous Ground
A tough cop gets too tough once too often and gets sent away from the city to upstate New York to cool off for a bit and investigate a murder up there; in the process, he meets and is captivated by a blind woman whose simple brother is a prime suspect in the case. A quieter than usual take on film noir (and unusually set in the country), but worth watching, as is most anything from director Nicholas Ray.
1952 USA. Director: Nicholas Ray. Starring: Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bond.

Friday, April 29

7:00am – TCM – Them!
I love a good classic sci-fi film and this one hits all the high points. Radioactive material? Check. Mutant insects? Check. Scientists? Check. Nuclear paranoia? Check. Giant mutant ants (created by radioactivity left by atomic bomb tests in Arizona) start attacking people, first in Arizona, then to Texas and Mexico, and finally in the middle of Los Angeles. A team of scientists works with the police to take the monsters down. One of the better examples of the “atomic mutant” sci-fi films, of which there were many; it builds intensity perfectly (in fact, it’s at least half an hour in before you come close to finding out what’s happening, adding in a very welcome mystery element) and doesn’t spend to long on its obligatory romantic subplot.
1954 USA. Director: Gordon Douglas. Starring: James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness.

7:00pm – TCM – Royal Wedding
This isn’t one of the all-time great Fred Astaire musicals, but it’s quite charming in its small way, and has the distinction of including the Fred’s “dancing on the ceiling” extravaganza, as well as a few surprisingly competent dance numbers from Fred and not-dancer Jane Powell. Oh, and Fred’s love interest is Sarah Churchill, Winston Churchill’s daughter, which is interesting (Powell plays his sister).
1951 USA. Director: Stanley Donen. Starring: Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, Sarah Churchill, Peter Lawford.

9:00pm – TCM – Roman Holiday
Audrey Hepburn’s first lead role, and the one that immediately catapulted her into stardom. She’s a princess who runs away to try out being normal, and spends an adventurous day exploring Rome with incognito journalist Gregory Peck. Pretty much delightful right the way through.
1953 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert.

11:30pm – IFC – 28 Days Later
Danny Boyle brought the zombie film into the new millennium, with a fast-spreading virus infecting the population at record speed (the “zombies” also move at record speed), leaving only a few survivors to try to escape London before it’s too late. I’m not a particular fan of the ending, but up until then, it’s a mile-a-minute thrill ride that’s hard to beat.
2002 UK. Director: Danny Boyle. Starring: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston.

3:00am (30th) – TCM – The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
There’s a musical version of this story from the 1950s, with powerful vocals from tenor Mario Lanza, but this silent version is much stronger and more evocative – likely because of director Ernst Lubitsch. Latin heartthrob Ramon Novarro plays the prince trying to ignore his royal duties when he falls in love with barmaid Norma Shearer.
1927 USA. Director: Ernst Lubitsch. Starring: Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer, Jean Hersholt.

Saturday, April 30

8:00am – TCM – Scarface (1932)
Howard Hawks’ early take on the gangster genre, with small-time hood Tony making his way up in the ranks of the mob. For me, this one really shines in its treatment of Tony’s sister and the conflict between his professional life and his care for his family.
1932 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, George Raft.

1:30pm – IFC – Cache
Very deliberate but intensely thought-provoking film from director Michael Haneke, delving into issues from privacy and surveillance to war guilt and revenge. It’s a difficult film, and one that stretches the limits of the suspense thriller, but if you’re willing to go along with it, it’s well worthwhile.
2005 France. Director: Michael Haneke. Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou.

7:00pm – TCM – An American in Paris
Expat artist Gene Kelly in Paris, meets Leslie Caron, woos her away from rival Georges Guetarey, all set to Gershwin music and directed with panache by Vincente Minnelli. All that plus Kelly’s ground-breaking fifteen-plus-minute ballet to the title piece.
1951 USA. Director: Vincente Minnelli. Starring: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetarey.
Must See

8:00pm – IFC – Gone Baby Gone
Ben Affleck proved his directing chops beyond all doubt with his debut behind the camera, a meditative detective film ostensibly about a kidnapping, but with a surprising level of thoughtfulness as weighty ethical matters take the foreground. In a year of great films, Gone Baby Gone more than held its own.
1997 USA. Director: Ben Affleck. Starring: Casey Affleck, Morgan Freeman, Michelle Monaghan, Amy Ryan, Ed Harris.
Must See
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 3:30am on the 1st)

8:00pm – Sundance – The Royal Tenenbaums
My favorite of all of Wes Anderson’s films (and indeed, one of my favorites of the whole decade), a web of fine characterizations surrounding Royal Tenenbaum, an eccentric old man whose imminent mortality forces a reunion with his family. But its morbidity is tempered by absurd humor and quirk.
2001 USA. Director: Wes Anderson. Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Bill Murray.
Must See
(repeats at 2:00am on the 1st)

9:15pm – TCM – Girl Crazy
Mickey Rooney is a city boy sent out west when his hard-partying ways get him in trouble. Seems like he’s in for a tough, boring time – until he meets the local postmistress, Judy Garland. A slightly more grown-up romance for the formerly teen couple plus a boatload of Gershwin classics (including “Embraceable You,” “I’ve Got Rhythm,” and “But Not For Me”) make this arguably the best of the ten Rooney-Garland collaborations.
1943 USA. Director: Norman Taurog, Busby Berkeley. Starring: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Rags Ragland, Gil Stratton, June Allyson.
Newly Featured!

1:30am (1st) – TCM – Shall We Dance
Shall We Danceis not as good as most other Astaire-Rogers films, but I still love it to death every time I see it, due in no small part to a great Gershwin score. Here Fred’s a ballet dancer who wants to do tap, and is obsessed with meeting his idol, Ginger. When he does, somehow it all snowballs into rumors of a secret wedding and all sorts of things that just kind of get in the way of the dancing.
1937 USA. Director: Mark Sandrich. Starring: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore.

5:00am (1st) – TCM – Gold Diggers of 1935
This movie is not even as good as Gold Diggers of 1933 (to which it is unrelated in plot), but it does have one thing that makes it eminently worth watching – the epic “Lullaby of Broadway” number that closes the show, with a full story-within-a-dance playing out through three verses of the song. It is possibly the most definitive number of 1930s backstage musicals.
1935 USA. Director: Busby Berkeley. Starring: Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Gloria Stuart, Alice Brady.

Sunday, May 1

7:00am – TCM – Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)
No relation to the 2005 Pitt-Jolie vehicle, this Mr. and Mrs. Smith is one of Hitchcock’s only straight comedies, no suspense or mystery plot in sight. It’s a serviceable screwball comedy, with Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard as the title couple who discover their marriage may not be legally binding. It’s worth watching once, but overall it’s a relatively minor entry in both Hitchcock’s career and the annals of screwball comedy.
1941 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Robert Montgomery, Carole Lombard, Gene Raymond, Jack Carson.

12:30pm – TCM – All About Eve
One of the very best show business movies ever made, with Bette Davis in one of her many signature roles as Margo Channing, a Broadway actress just about to fade from the top of her game, with Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, the kid waiting to take her place. The supporting cast are all wonderful as well, and the script? One of the greatest Hollywood has ever seen. It just crackles.
1950 USA. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter.
Must See

5:15pm – TCM – Key Largo
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall team up for the final time on this great noirish melodrama of a group of people, including a wheelchair-bound hotel owner, his recently widowed daughter-in-law (Bacall), a war veteran (Bogart), and a ruthless gangster and his girl, forced to take refuge against a fierce hurricane. Among the best films for all involved, and that’s saying something considering who all is involved.
1948 USA. Director: John Huston. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor.
Must See

5:30pm – IFC – The Ladykillers
This film, usually considered one of the Coen Bros’ few misfires, is also one of the few Coen films I haven’t seen. I’m a pretty big fan of the original Ealing film about a group of would-be bank robbers stymied by an old lady, and I’m willing to check out the Coens’ version…just not particularly eager.
2004 USA. Director: Joel & Ethan Coen. Starring: Tom Hanks, Marlon Wayans, Irma P. Hall.