Some really noteworthy Newly Featured stuff this week. TCM is finally playing The Story of Temple Drake (on Wednesday), which they had restored and premiered at last year’s TCM Film Festival. It was banned shortly after release in 1933 and is said to be one of the reasons the Production Code was finally enforced. They’ve also got The Prince and the Showgirl, the film that forms the background for the upcoming film My Week with Marilyn, so if you’re planning to check that out, why not see the original movie first? They’ve also got one of Billy Wilder’s most cynical and biting satires (and that’s saying something), Ace in the Hole, on Tuesday. And last but not least, TCM is doing a tribute to Merchant-Ivory this month; I find most Merchant-Ivory films a little dry for my taste, but the three I actually like are playing this Thursday, so if you like literary costume drama, these are cream of the crop.

Monday, September 12

6:00am – IFC – Waking Life
Richard Linklater’s first foray into overlaid animation is a philosophical dreamscape that’ll either leave you cold or inhabit your thoughts for weeks. It’s the latter for me. Like most of Linklater’s films, it’s largely made up of people talking, but with the added interest of the unique ever-shifting, never-solid animation style (which he’d reuse with a slightly more standard sci-fi story in A Scanner Darkly).
2001 USA. Director: Richard Linklater. Starring: Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy.
(repeats at 1:15pm)

9:20am – MGM – Witness for the Prosecution
This courtroom drama/thriller is among the last great films for all three of its stars, as Charles Laughton plays the crotchety judge overseeing the murder trial of Tyrone Power, with the major witness in the case being Power’s wife Marlene Dietrich. But not everyone is playing on the level here, and as the trial goes on, loyalties shift and double-crosses are revealed right and left.
1957 USA. Director: Billy Wilder. Starring: Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power.

11:15am – IFC – Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is likely my all-time favorite book or very close to it, and it’s a book that you’d never expect could be made into a good film. It depends an awful lot on stream of consciousness, internal monologue and memory, and a subjective experience of time – all stylistic and narrative elements that don’t translate well to film. However, this 1997 version of the novel with Vanessa Redgrave perfectly cast as the older Clarissa Dalloway and Natascha McElhone as flashback-Clarissa comes about as close as I think is cinematically possible. It doesn’t come close to matching the book for me, but it is a solid film and captures a lot of Woolf’s spirit.
1997 USA/UK. Director: Marleen Gorris. Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox, Sarah Badel, Lena Headey, John Standing.

12:15pm – 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.

5:25pm – MGM – Blow Out
Sound man John Travolta is recording sound samples one night, and may have accidentally recorded a murder occurring. As he tries to investigate, he’s drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. Inspired to some degree by Antonioni’s photography-based Blow-Up, but this is definitely DePalma’s film all the way.
1981 USA. Director: Brian DePalma. Starring: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz.
(repeats at 11:45am on the 17th)

9:30pm – TCM – 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.

11:30pm – TCM – The Prince and the Showgirl
Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier are an intriguing (and seemingly mis-matched) matchup in a story about a staid prince-regent and a chorus girl who catches his attention; the production of this film is also the setting of the upcoming Michelle Williams-as-Marilyn movie, My Week With Marilyn.
1957 USA. Director: Laurence Olivier. Starring: Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Wattis.
Newly Featured!

1:30am (13th) – TCM – The Misfits
John Huston directs and Arthur Miller writes this final film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Though the film is remembered for that tragic fact, it’s also a pretty solid film on its own, about a divorcee caught between two rough and ready men of the west (Gable and Montgomery Clift), then opposing them when she discovers their plans for the wild horses in the area. And of course, with Miller behind it, there’s far more going on than just that.
1961 USA. Director: John Huston. Starring: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach.

Tuesday, September 13

6:00am – Sundance – Visual Acoustics
As an architectural photographer covering modernist architecture during the mid-twentieth century, Julius Shulman captured some of the most iconic images ever of homes and other buildings, basically creating an entire generation’s perception of Los Angeles and Palm Springs especially. This well-designed documentary is a great primer on his life and work, and through his work, on modernist ideals and architecture itself. Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in photography, architecture, modernism, or Los Angeles.
2008 USA. Director: Eric Brickner. Starring: Julius Shulman, Dustin Hoffman.
(repeats at 3:05pm)

6:00am – IFC – A Prairie Home Companion
One of Robert Altman’s final films, and one I’ve not yet gotten up to in my attempts to rectify my Altman blind spot. As much as I’ve been enjoying his films during the New Hollywood marathon, though, I’m definitely putting his entire filmography higher on my to-watch list.
2006 USA. Director: Robert Altman. Starring: Woody Harrelson, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Lily Tomlin.
(repeats at 1:45pm)

7:30am – Sundance – Wendy and Lucy
This is a favorite among Row Three writers, following a young woman on the verge of financial collapse as she’s about to lose a major job opportunity as well as her beloved dog.
2008 USA. Director: Kelly Reichardt. Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Oldham, Michell Worthey, John Robinson.
(repeats at 4:35pm, and 4:20am on the 14th)

12:00N – TCM – The Man Who Came to Dinner
A rare comedic film for Bette Davis, though the film mainly focuses on Monty Woolley as an acerbic newspaper critic forced to take up residence with a midwestern family when he breaks his hip outside their house. Woolley was a great character actor here given the spotlight, and he takes it and runs with it. A great script by Julius and Philip Epstein (of Casablanca) doesn’t hurt, either.
1942 USA. Director: William Keighley. Starring: Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Monty Woolley, Jimmy Durante, Billie Burke.

2:00pm – TCM – You Can’t Take It With You
Capra won his third directing Oscar for this film (the others were for It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), but to me it’s not one of his more interesting pieces. Young couple James Stewart and Jean Arthur invite chaos when his staid, wealthy family meets her wacky, irreverent one.
1938 USA. Director: Frank Capra. Starring: Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Spring Byington.

10:00pm – TCM – Ace in the Hole
Billy Wilder is known for his cynical streak, and this is pretty much Exhibit A. Kirk Douglas is a reporter, sent to middle-of-nowhere New Mexico after disgracing his paper, who gets wind of a cave-in trapping a lone miner. He pounces on the story, but manipulates everything to create the biggest media circus he can, with little thought of the trapped man’s safety. It’s an indictment both of media self-focus and of those who like to watch it, and aside from the safe ending, it’s lost none of its biting power.
1951 USA. Director: Billy Wilder. Starring: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur.
Newly Featured!

12:00M – TCM – The Bad and the Beautiful
Vincente Minnelli directs Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, and Gloria Grahame in one of the best dark-side-of-Hollywood noirish films this side of Sunset Boulevard.
1952 USA. Director: Vincente Minnelli. Starring: Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Gloria Grahame.

Wednesday, September 14

6:00am – Fox Movie – The Snake Pit
One of the earlier films to deal with the realities of mental illness seriously, with Olivia de Havilland as a woman in an insane asylum, brilliantly moving back and forth between lucidity and falling back in the fog of illness. She got an Oscar nom for her role, based on a true story.
1948 USA. Director: Anatole Litvak. Starring: Olivia de Havilland, Mark Stevens, Leo Genn, Celeste Holm.

8:00am – Fox Movie – Anna and the King of Siam
The earlier/non-musical version of The King and I stars Irene Dunne in one of her last films and Rex Harrison in one of his earliest American ones. Both do a fine job.
1946 USA. Director: John Cromwell. Starring: Irene Dunne, Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Gale Sondergaard.

4:00pm – Fox Movie – Unfaithfully Yours
Preston Sturges’s last great film is a pitch-black comedy with Rex Harrison as a jealous conductor who fantasizes ways to deal with his wife’s supposed infidelity as he conducts a symphony. The combination of bombastic music and his by turns morbid and farcical fantasies makes for one of the more unusual memorable films of the 1940s.
1948 USA. Director: Preston Sturges. Starring: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee.
(repeats at 4:15am on the 15th)

7:00pm – 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.
(repeats at 1:30am on the 15th)

8:00pm – TCM – The Story of Temple Drake
Finally, one of the major finds of the 2010 TCM Film Festival makes its way onto the channel. Temple Drake is one of the last films of the pre-Code era; in fact, it’s credited as one of the final straws that caused the Code to be upheld. Strong performances from Miriam Hopkins and Jack La Rue complement the Southern Gothic story based on a Faulkner novel. See it while you have the chance; they may not play it often (it’s been almost a year and a half since it played at the Festival).
1933 USA. Director: Stephen Roberts. Starring: Miriam Hopkins, William Gargan, Jack La Rue.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – Fox Movie – All That Jazz
Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographial film plays something like his musical take on 8 1/2, as stage director Joe Gideon works through his creative difficulties and womanizing before illness takes him. Extremely powerful, and with some of the greatest choreography in any film ever.
1979 USA. Director: Bob Fosse. Starring: Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Ben Vereen.
Must See

10:00pm – Sundance – Notes on a Scandal
If you want to see a be-all-end-all actress-on-actress battle of the wills, this is the film to watch. Aging teacher Judi Dench finds out her younger colleague Cate Blanchett is carrying on with one of her students, and Dench sets out to psychologically blackmail Blanchett, with whom she is secretly infatuated. There are a ton of levels to these characters, and both actresses shine in their roles, playing off each other with an intensity rarely seen on-screen.
2006 UK. Director: Richard Eyre. Starring: Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, Andrew Simpson.
(repeats at 8:25pm on the 17th)

11:00pm – TCM – Thank Your Lucky Stars
One of several musicals put out in the early 1940s that basically served as showcases for each studio’s major stars, revues in service of the war. Warners had this one plus Hollywood Canteen; that one is better as these things go, but this one has Bette Davis doing a musical number. So there’s that.
1943 USA. Director: David Butler. Starring: Eddie Cantor, Dennis Morgan, Humphrey Bogart, many others.
Newly Featured!

11:15pm – 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.

Thursday, September 15

7:25am – IFC – Maria Full of Grace
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 1:45pm)

9:15am – TCM – You’ll Never Get Rich
Fred Astaire steps out with Rita Hayworth after finishing a near-decade long run with Ginger Rogers as almost his only partner, and she keeps up with him pretty well. This war-time musical comedy has Fred trying to get out of a pickle by joining the army.
1941 USA. Director: Sidney Lanfield. Starring: Fred Astaire, Rita Haywoth, Robert Benchley.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – TCM – The Remains of the Day
One of the best novels about the class system in England is this one by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Merchant-Ivory made a very fine film adaptation of it here, with Anthony Hopkins as the by-the-rules butler of a post-war Britain whose whole highly-structured world is torn apart by the possibility of love and by his employer’s Nazi ties.
1993 UK. Director: James Ivory. Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, John Haycraft.
Newly Featured!

10:30pm – TCM – Howards End
Merchant-Ivory takes on one of E.M. Forster’s best novels, tracking the societal upheavals the Edwardian age brought to Britain by interweaving an uppercrust business-oriented family, an artistic family, and a family on the verge of poverty. It’s an amazing novel, and quite a decent film as well.
1992 UK. Director: James Ivory. Starring: Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham-Carter.
Newly Featured!

12:00M – Fox Movie – The Verdict
Powerhouse filmmaker Sidney Lumet returns to his 12 Angry Men courtroom milieu for The Verdict, starring Paul Newman as an on-the-rocks lawyer who takes a medical malpractice suit to trial in a somewhat desperate attempt to salvage his career.
1982 USA. Director: Sidney Lumet. Starring: Paul Newman, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden.
(repeats at 8:00pm on the 16th)

1:00am (16th) – TCM – A Room with a View
One of Merchant-Ivory’s best films out of their many classy adaptations of period literary classics – and less, uh, stuffy than they often tend to be. For me, it vies only with >Howards End (another E.M. Forster adaptation) in their repertoire. A young Helena Bonham Carter, a veteran Maggie Smith, and Daniel Day-Lewis in one of his earliest film roles, don’t hurt at all.
1985 UK. Director: James Ivory. Starring: Helen Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Julian Sands, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Daniel Day-Lewis.

1:30am (16th) – Sundance – Red Riding: 1983
The third entry in the Red Riding trilogy picks up the story from the first one, finishing it off satisfactorily. I wasn’t particularly invested in it on its own, though, since pretty much the only characters left are ones I disliked in 1974, plus a lot of it seemed redundant, rehashing the first film a bit too much.
2009 UK. Director: Anand Tucker. Starring: David Morrissey, Lisa Howard, Chris Walker.

Friday, September 16

6:45am – TCM – Dark Passage
Okay, so this is the least memorable of the four films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together. It’s still Bogart and Bacall, and it’s a perfectly respectable and enjoyable film noir.
1947 USA. Director: Delmer Daves. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorehead, Bruce Bennett.

7:45am – IFC – From Dusk Till Dawn
An early collaboration between Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (Rodriguez directing, Tarantino writing and acting) mixes crime action with vampire horror. Intriguingly, the film is split almost equally between the two, half an almost Coen-esque crime spree gone wrong, half an over-the-top claustrophobic gorefest. I rather like the first half better, but the second part has its moments, many of them thanks to Keitel.
1996 USA. Director: Robert Rodriguez. Starring: Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, Juliette Lewis.
(repeats at 3:05am on the 17th)

8:45am – 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

11:50pm – MGM – Hannah and Her Sisters
Though I love Manhattan and Annie Hall to bits, I throw my vote for best Woody Allen movie ever to Hannah and Her Sisters. It has all the elements Allen is known for – neurotic characters, infidelity, a tendency to philosophize randomly, New York City, dysfunctional family dynamics, acerbic wit – and blends them together much more cogently and evenly than most of his films do.
1986 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Barbara Hershey, Mia Farrow, Carrie Fisher, Michael Caine, Dianne Wiest, Woody Allen.
Must See

Saturday, September 17

6:15pm – TCM – The Major and the Minor
A rather slight and sometimes shrill comedy that still has its moments, notable for being Billy Wilder’s first Hollywood film as a director (he also wrote it, of course, with Charles Brackett). Ginger Rogers plays a young woman who pretends to be a twelve-year-old child to get half-fare on a train; in so doing, she catches the attention of a soldier who takes her under his wing, thinking she’s actually twelve. Events snowball from there. I have a soft spot for this film, personally, and especially for Diana Lynn as the sarcastic and much-wiser-than-her-years kid who becomes Rogers’ confidant.
1942 USA. Director: Billy Wilder. Starring: Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley, Diana Lynn.

8:15am – 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.

8:00pm – TCM – Mildred Pierce
In quite probably Joan Crawford’s best role (only perhaps excepting her catty “other woman” in The Women), she plays a woman trying to work her way up in the world from lowly waitress to entrepreneur, all the while dealing with her shrew of a daughter. Melodrama isn’t a particularly prized genre these days, but films like Mildred Pierce show how good melodramas can be with the right confluence of studio style, director, and star.
1945 USA. Director: Michael Curtiz. Starring: Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Ann Blyth, Eve Arden.
Must See

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 2:30am on the 18th)

Sunday, September 18

8:00am – IFC – The Station Agent
One of the most pleasant surprises (for me, anyway) of 2003. Peter Dinklage moves into a train depot to indulge his love for trains and stay away from people, only to find himself befriended by a loquacious Cuban hot-dog stand keeper and an emotionally delicate Patricia Clarkson. A quiet but richly rewarding film.
2003 USA. Director: Thomas McCarthy. Starring: Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Williams.

2:15pm – TCM – Suspicion
The first of four films Hitchcock made with Cary Grant, and probably the weakest, but it’s still well worth watching. Hitchcock’s second American film has Joan Fontaine (his star from Rebecca) becoming paranoid that her husband Grant is trying to poison her.
1941 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty.

4:00pm – TCM – Wait Until Dark
Audrey Hepburn is a blind woman set upon by a trio of home invaders in search of some smuggled heroin they think ended up hidden at her house – an all-around good little thriller, with a fantastic climactic set-piece.
1967 USA. Director: Terence Young. Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

8:00pm – TCM – Citizen Kane
Widely considered the greatest American film ever made, I’d be very surprised if anyone reading this hasn’t seen it. The quest for what makes publisher/politician Charles Foster Kane tick takes a journalist through a fractured narrative that never seems to give any definitive answers. Personally, I respect and recommend Kane for its innovations in narrative, cinematography, and cinema language, but I find it a difficult film to love (yet even that is fitting, as the difficulty of loving or being loved by Kane himself is a central theme).
1941 USA. Director: Orson Welles. Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead.
Must See

12:00M – TCM – Metropolis
I’m not sure if TCM is showing the new Complete Metropolis print (I’d wager they are not), but even the previous restoration is still good. The new one is better though. But TCM is playing a documentary directly after the film called Metropolis Refound, which I assume is about the discovery and restoration of the footage in the most Complete version, which would be pretty fascinating to watch.
1927 Germany. Director: Fritz Lang. Starring: Brigitte Helm, Gustav Frohlich, Alfred Abel.
Must See
(followed by Metropolis Refound)

3:00am (19th) – Fox Movie – Naked Lunch
This is a wacked out movie, more of an exploration of beat author William S. Burrough’s life and writing process than an adaptation of his novel of the same name, with addictive bug powder, murders, hallucinogenic trips, typewriters that turn into cockroaches, and espionage plots. I saw it ages ago when I probably wasn’t ready for it; ought to try it again sometime.
1991 Canada. Director: David Cronenberg. Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm.