Surprisingly few patriotic movies on the TV for the 4th (at least on the channels I monitor), but Yankee Doodle Dandy is a great one on TCM tonight. The rest of the week has a lot of repeats, but do check out a couple of classic silents on TCM on Tuesday night, with Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad and Valentino in The Sheik. There are a few other newly featured ones scattered out, including Neil Marshall’s The Descent on Friday and charming Scottish film Dear Frankie on Saturday. Then check out Cold War paranoia classic Fail Safe on Saturday night, a favorite among Sidney Lumet fans.

Monday, July 4

8:00pm – TCM – Yankee Doodle Dandy
James Cagney won an Oscar putting on his dancing shoes to play song-and-dance man and Broadway composer George M. Cohan in this biopic. Though it seems strange to think of gangster picture regular Cagney in a musical, he actually got his start in show business as a hoofer, and returned to musicals many times throughout his career, though this remains the most notable example.
1942 USA. Director: Michael Curtiz. Starring: James Cagney, Joan Leslie.

8:00pm – IFC – thirteen
As disinterested as I am in Twilight and Red Riding Hood, I keep giving Catherine Hardwicke the benefit of the doubt based on this film, a pretty solid exploration of a young teenager’s troubled relationship with her mother as she acts out with a wild-living friend.
2003 USA. Director: Catherine Hardwicke. Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed.
(repeats at 12:00M)

12:15am (5th) – TCM – Network
Newscaster Peter Finch is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. To see why, watch this incendiary unmasking of the ruthless world of network television. Finch, Dunaway, and Straight all won Oscars for their roles.
1976 USA. Director: Sidney Lumet. Starring: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight.

2:00am (5th) – Fox Movie – Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Not the TV show, but the much more comedic film version that inspired it (Joss Whedon is said to have wanted to make the TV show after being disappointed with what the movie based on his script turned into) – it’s certainly nowhere near as good as the series, but it’s decent fun and plays into the Buffy mythology more than you might expect, especially leading into Season One of the show.
1992 USA. Director: Fran Rubel Kuzui. Starring: Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens.

2:15am (5th) – TCM – Duck Soup
Leo McCarey directs the Marx Brothers in what many think is their best and zaniest film. This is the one with Groucho becoming the dictator of Freedonia and declaring war on nearby Sylvania. Frequent Marx Brothers foil Margaret Dumont is on board as the wealthy woman who causes the rivalry that leads to the war. Personally, I prefer A Night at the Opera to Duck Soup, but this may be your best bet if the idea of musical interludes from Allan Jones (of which Opera has several) turns you off.
1933 USA. Director: Leo McCarey. Starring: The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern.
Must See
(then Monkey Business and Animal Crackers)

2:15am (5th) – IFC – Carrie
There aren’t that many movies that you can say are equally loved by horror fans and feminist academics, but Carrie is one of them – Carrie’s physical coming-of-age sparks telekinetic abilities, allowing her to take bloody revenge on the schoolkids who mistreated her. And who can’t relate to that, really?
1976 USA. Director: Brian DePalma. Starring: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving.

Tuesday, July 5

9:30am – 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.
(repeats at 4:00pm)

12:15pm – MGM – The Purple Rose of Cairo
A love letter to cinema, The Purple Rose of Cairo has Woody Allen at his most romantic. Unhappy housewife Cecilia (Mia Farrow) escapes to the cinema to see The Purple Rose of Cairo again and again, where she fantasizes over hunky character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels). Much to her surprise (and the other characters’ consternation), Baxter steps off the screen to join her. It makes it even more complicated when Gil, the actor who played Baxter, turns up as well.
1985 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello.
(repeats at 10:15am on the 9th)

2:45pm – TCM – Summertime
[Mike Rot] David Lean is best known for his epic films such as Doctor Zhivago, and Lawrence of Arabia, but for me one of his greatest works remains one of his lesser known ones, his 1955 love letter to Venice, Summertime. The film is a refreshingly honest depiction of Anglophone abroad storytelling that consecrates onscreen the multifaceted nature of traveling with its strange mix of the mundane and the glorious. Where a lesser film would editorialize the experience and keep only salient moments to document, this journey into Venice takes in the complete panorama including the quiet moments like leisurely walking to the hotel, or basking in the first morning before all the possibilities.
1955 USA. Director: David Lean. Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Rosanno Brazzi.

4:30pm – TCM – Doctor Zhivago
Idealistic Zhivago experiences the Bolshevik Revolution while also dealing with his conflicting feelings for his wife Tonya and young nurse Lara. There are a few things about the romance side of the story that bother me, mostly the fact that I liked Tonya way more than Lara, but I have to admit Lean knows how to make epic films, and Maurice Jarre’s score is unforgettable.
1965 UK/USA. Director: David Lean. Starring: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness.

6:50pm – Sundance – Wendy & Lucy
This is a favorite among Row Three writers, and I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t managed to catch up with it, despite it being ever-available to me on Netflix Instant Watch. One of these days I will rectify that, I promise.
2008 USA. Director: Kelly Reichardt. Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Oldham, Michell Worthey, John Robinson.

8:00pm – IFC – American Psycho
A virtuoso performance from Christian Bale leads this controversial thriller about an affluent Wall Street investment banker leading a double life as a psychopath carrying out his amoral and misanthropic fantasies through sex and murder.
2000 USA. Director: Mary Herron. Starring: Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas, Chloe Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon.

10:30pm – TCM – The Thief of Bagdad
One of Douglas Fairbanks’ most iconic and fantastical films, as a poor thief in love with the Caliph’s daughter – if he succeeds in the Caliph’s contest to bring back the rarest treasure in the land, he could win her, but he’s not the only one in the race.
1924 USA. Director: Raoul Walsh. Starring: Douglas Fairbanks, Julanne Johnston, Snitz Edwards.
Newly Featured!

10:30pm – Fox Movie – The Name of the Rose
A fine adaptation of Umberto Eco’s novel of medieval mystery and religion, with two monks tasked with finding a murderer in their midst. Not as esoteric as the novel, which is probably just as well for a film, but more thoughtful and deep than many mystery films.
1986 France/Italy. Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud. Starring: Sean Connery, Christian Slater, Helmut Qualtinger.
Newly Featured!

1:00am (6th) – TCM – The Sheik
Rudolph Valentino proves his magnetism as an Arabian sheik who falls in love with an English woman traveling through Arabia and kidnaps her to his camp. It’s far from politically correct, but it’s worth a watch, especially for Valentino in his prime. And to set you up for The Son of the Sheik, which is probably the better film.
1921 USA. Director: George Melford. Starring: Rudolph Valentino, Agnes Ayres, Ruth Miller.
Newly Featured!

Wednesday, July 6

9:45am – TCM – Words and Music
MGM liked to do largely fictionalized composer biopics in the 1940s and ’50s, mostly because it gave them an opportunity to show off their stable of singing and dancing stars. Words and Music is their retelling of the career of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and it’s pretty routine. What isn’t routine is Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen’s dazzling rendition of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” a ten-minute dance number that is 100% worth the price of the film.
1948 USA. Director: Norman Taurog. Starring: Tom Drake, Mickey Rooney, Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, Cyd Charisse, June Allyson, Gene Kelly, Vera-Ellen, James Mitchell, Lena Horne, Kathryn Grayson, Judy Garland.

10:05am – MGM – Interiors
In case anyone doubted Woody Allen’s admiration for Ingmar Bergman, he made this film to prove it. Interiors is about the best imitation of a Bergman chamber drama you could ask for, down to the spare set design, strained family relations, and a climax involving an angry sea. Still, it is also very much Allen’s film–his first straight drama–focusing on deeply neurotic, introspective characters unable to get outside their own heads for long enough to form really true relationships.
1978 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Geraldine Page.

10:15am – IFC – Che
Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious two-part epic about South American revolutionary Che Guevara. IFC is playing both parts back to back.
2008 USA. Director: Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Julia Ormond, Rodrigo Santoro.

12:30pm – Fox Movie – I Wake Up Screaming
Better known for bright and sunny musicals, Betty Grable took a turn for the noir in this crime film, playing the sister of a recently-murdered model with a rising career. It’s a slight noir, but fun nonetheless, especially for the chance to see Grable in a role unusual for her.
1942 USA. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone. Starring: Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis.

2:00pm – Fox Movie – Call Northside 777
One of Jimmy Stewart’s first films after spending the war as a fighter pilot; he plays a reporter compelled to reopen an eleven-year-old murder case, coming to believe the wrong man was sentenced to life in prison. A good combo of film noir and mystery.
1948 USA. Director: Henry Hathaway. Starring: James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb.
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 8:00am on the 7th)

5:45pm – TCM – Scaramouche
Stewart Granger was sort of a poor man’s Errol Flynn in his 1950s swashbucklers – never quite had Flynn’s panache, but hey, he tried. Scaramouche (from the novel by Rafael Sabatini, who also wrote Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, which became Flynn vehicles) is one of his better films, and does boast the longest sword fight in cinema history. So there’s that.
1952 USA. Director: George Sidney. Starring: Stewart Granger, Janet Leigh, Eleanor Parker, Mel Ferrer.

8:00pm – TCM – Springtime in the Rockies
A bright and frothy musical in 20th Century Fox’s all-but-patented candy-color Technicolor, and probably Betty Grable’s most memorable vehicle. It’s insubstantial, but fun.
1942 USA. Director: Irving Cummings. Starring: Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, John Payne.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – 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.
(repeats at 12:30am on the 7th)

10:00pm – Sundance – The Piano
I often find Jane Campion films overly pretentious, but this one strikes the right chord, with Holly Hunter as a mute woman in an arranged marriage who finds love with one of her husbands’ hired hands – but stealing the show is her young daughter, an Oscar-winning performance by Anna Paquin.
1993 New Zealand. Director: Jane Campion. Starring: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin.

1:30am (7th) – TCM – Gaslight (1940)
Not the more famous 1944 Victorian suspenser that won Ingrid Bergman an Oscar, but the 1940 British film that it was based on. This film was almost suppressed completely by MGM as they tried to focus attention solely on their remake and eliminate any potential competition from the earlier film; thankfully, the original survived, and it’s quite compelling in its own right.
1940 UK. Director: Thorold Dickinson. Starring: Anton Walbrook, Diana Wynyard, Frank Pettingell.
Newly Featured!

Thursday, July 7

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 weighty ethical matters taking 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
(repeats at 8:00pm, and 8:00pm and 10:30pm on the 9th)

9:15am – MGM – The Bride Wore Black
That Truffaut admired Hitchcock is no secret – he even wrote a book of interviews with him shortly before making this film, his most overt homage to Hitchcockian suspense. After a failed suicide, Jeanne Moreau heads out to track down the five men who are responsible for her husband’s death on their wedding day.
1968 France. Director: François Truffaut. Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy.

10:00pm – Sundance – Marie Antoinette
Once in a while a film comes out of nowhere and floors me – this quiet little film about a group of South American women who agree to smuggle drugs into the United States by swallowing packets of cocaine did just that. Everything in the film is perfectly balanced, no element overwhelms anything else, and it all comes together with great empathy, but without sentimentality.
2004 USA. Director: Joshua Marston. Starring: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Virginia Ariza, Yenny Paola Vega.
(repeats at 3:30am on the 8th)

Friday, July 8

10:00am – Fox Movie – Carmen Jones
Oscar Hammerstein takes on Bizet’s Carmen, transposing it into a contemporary setting at a Korean War army base and writing new lyrics to go with Bizet’s operatic melodies. It’s interesting not only for the adaptation of opera to musical, but also its use of an all-African American cast – giving Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and many others lead roles in an era when they were still all-too-often relegated to roles as servants or one-off entertainers.
1954 USA. Director: Otto Preminger. Starring: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey.

10:15am – TCM – The Petrified Forest
Bette Davis and Leslie Howard are top billed in this 1936 crime drama, but the thing you’ll remember is Humphrey Bogart in his first major film role as criminal-on-the-run Duke Mantee. They’re all holed up in a remote gas station while Mantee figures out his scheme to escape the manhunt for him. He fairly sizzles on screen.
1936 USA. Director: Archie Mayo. Starring: Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran.

10:00pm – Sundance – Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Sadly this turned out to be Sidney Lumet’s final film before his death. But from what I hear, this is a fine one to have as a swan song, an intense and well-constructed heist thriller – something Lumet was certainly skilled at directing. I have got to get around to checking it out myself soon.
1997 USA. Director: Sidney Lumet. Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney.
(repeats at 3:30am on the 9th)

11:00pm – IFC – The Descent
I have yet to catch up with director Neil Marshall’s horror film about a spelunking expedition gone wrong, but after really appreciating his approach to genre filmmaking in Centurion, I really want to. Sounds like a claustrophobic good time.
2005 UK. Director: Neil Marshall. Starring: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Jackson Mendoza, Alex Reid.
Newly Featured!

Saturday, July 9

6:00am – IFC – Dear Frankie
Emily Mortimer is a young mother who writes responses to her son’s letters to his father; when her elaborate ruse to convince him his father is just away at sea starts to fall apart, she hires a handsome stranger to pretend to be his father. A charming and unassuming tale, and the Glaswegian accents don’t hurt either, at least for me.
2004 UK. Director: Shona Auerbach. Starring: Emily Mortimer, Gerard Butler, Jack McElhone.
Newly Featured!
(repeats at 1:00pm)

8:15am – 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.

1:00pm – Fox Movie – Niagara
Marilyn Monroe got a chance to play against type a bit as a calculating newlywed planning to off her husband during their honeymoon. Also unusual for what is basically a noirish crime film, it’s shot in color.
1953 USA. Director: Henry Hathaway. Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters.
(repeats at 6:00am on the 10th)

3:15pm – IFC – Volver
Pedro Almodóvar deftly straddles the line between drama and comedy in one of his more accessible films. Two sisters return to their home at the death of their aunt, only to find their mother’s ghost – or is it a ghost? And as always in Almodóvar’s films, there are related subplots aplenty. Penélope Cruz is incredible as the younger, fierier sister – she’s never been more moving than in her passionate rendition of the title song, nor funnier than when calmly cleaning up a murder scene.
2006 Spain. Director: Pedro Almodóvar. Starring: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanco Portillo, Yohana Cobo
Must See

5:30pm – TCM – Red River
Howard Hawks’ brilliant transposition of Mutiny on the Bounty into the Old West has John Wayne as a tyrannical cattle drive leader and Montgomery Clift (in one of his earliest roles) as his adopted son who soon defies him.
1948 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru.
Must See

6:55pm – Sundance – Metropolitan
If Jane Austen made a movie in 1990 and set it among entitled Manhattan socialites, this would be it. The film follows a group of such entitled teens from party to party, focusing especially on the one outsider, a boy from the blue-collar class who has to rent a tux and pretend he likes to walk to avoid letting his new friends know he has to take the bus home. Though they find out soon enough, they keep him around because his intellectual nattering amuses them. In fact, it’s quite amazing that this film is interesting at all, given the amount of pseudo-intellectual nattering that goes on, from all the characters. But from start to finish, it’s both entertaining and an incisive look at the American class structure.
1990 USA. Director: Whit Stillman. Starring: Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman, Carolyn Farina, Taylor Nichols, Dylan Hundley.
(repeats at 5:15am on the 10th)

8:00pm – TCM – Fail Safe
A Cold War paranoia thriller, with Henry Fonda as the president trying to avert disaster when American planes are accidentally sent toward Moscow with a nuclear payload. Based on the same source material as Dr. Strangelove (and released the same year), but with an utterly different tone, as Sidney Lumet plays it straight and plays up the suspense.
1964 USA. Director: Sidney Lumet. Starring: Henry Fonda, Walter Matthaw, Fritz Weaver.
Newly Featured!

Sunday, July 10

7:45am – IFC – Curse of the Golden Flower
One of the weaker entries in Zhang Yimou’s series of historical martial-arts-on-wires films, but it still has its moments – and the production design, as usual, is flawlessly beautiful. Definitely worth a watch if you’re a fan of the style.
2006 China. Director: Zhang Yimou. Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Ye Liu.
(repeats at 4:00pm)

12:00N – TCM – BUtterfield 8
Elizabeth Taylor’s first Oscar came for this role as a high-priced call girl, but I was honestly far more impressed with the supporting turn from Susan Oliver as the woman who fears she’s losing her boyfriend Eddie Fisher to Taylor (life imitates art, Fisher and Taylor married in real life). Not top-shelf melodrama, but some snappy dialogue here and there helps.
1960 USA. Director: Daniel Mann. Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey, Eddie Fisher, Susan Oliver.

1:30pm – Sundance – Man on Wire
One of the most highly-acclaimed documentaries of recent years tells the story of high-wire walker Philippe Petit as he embarks on perhaps his most dangerous stunt yet.
2008 UK/USA. Director: James Marsh. Starring: Philippe Petit, Jean François Heckel, Jean-Louis Blondeau.

3:45pm – MGM – Capote
Phillip Seymour Hoffman inhabits the role of author Truman Capote, capturing the period of time while Capote researches the senseless murder of a Kansas family for the book that would become In Cold Blood, in the meantime getting rather too involved with one of the killers as he interviews him extensively.
2005 USA. Director: Bennett Miller. Starring: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins Jr., Catherine Keener.

6:00pm – TCM – Casablanca
Against all odds, one of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, focusing on Bogart’s sad-eyed and world-weary expatriot Rick Blaine, his former lover Ingrid Bergman, and her current husband Paul Henreid, who needs safe passage to America to escape the Nazis and continue his work with the Resistance. It’s the crackling script that carries the day here, and the wealth of memorable characters that fill WWII Casablanca with life and energy.
1943 USA. Director: Michael Curtiz. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains.
Must See

8:00pm – TCM – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Frank Capra puts on his idealist hat to tell the story of Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an inexperienced young man appointed as a junior senator because the corrupt senior senator thinks he’ll be easy to control. But Smith doesn’t toe the party line, instead launching a filibuster for what he believes in. Wonderful comedienne Jean Arthur is the journalist who initially encourages Smith so she can get a great story from his seemingly inevitable downfall, but soon joins his cause.
1939 USA. Director: Frank Capra. Starring: James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Thomas Mitchell.
Must See

10:00pm – Sundance – Moulin Rouge!
Baz Lurhmann admittedly has a love-it-or-hate-it flamboyantly trippy aesthetic, especially in the informal Red Curtain trilogy which Moulin Rogue! closes. And sure, it’s over the top; sure, the story is fairly routine; sure, the acting is so-so. I love it to pieces anyway.
2001 USA. Director: Baz Lurhmann. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, John Leguizamo.