The Screengrab : diabolique

Set Your DVR!: November 10 - 17, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Mon, Nov 10:

2:45/3:45 pm: Becket on TCM. As I wrote last week, decent Oscar bait from 1964.

3/4 pm: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years on IFC. Awwright! Hello, Cleveland.

Tues, Nov 11:

6:55/7:55 am: Solaris on IFC (repeat at 2:40/3:40 pm). As I mentioned in our utopia/dystopia list from last week, Tarkovsky's Solaris is a stunning, somber look at alienation. This is a slow one, but it pays off in spades.

11 pm/12 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC (repeat on 11/12 at 4/5 am). Also a little slow. Also pays off in spades. Terrence Malick's take on the war movie falls somewhere between nature film and meditation on the soul.

Wed, Nov 12:

8/9 pm: Wild at Heart on IFC (repeat on 11/13 at 12:30/1:30 am). My least favorite Lynch. I don't even know why I'm recommending this.

Thurs, Nov 13:

12:30/1:30 am: Blow-Up on TCM. Antonioni's meditation the lens and the horror of other people, all in Swinging London. Not my favorite of his movies, but it's essential for movie geeks.

1/2 am: Vanishing Point on FMC. Cool cars & existential crises!

2:30/3:30 am: Quartet on TCM. Four stories by W. Somerset Maugham, as introduced by the man himself.

5/6 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER (repeat on 11/14 at 2/3 am). I'm tired of recommending Val Lewton-produced horror flicks. But this is a good one.

8:45/9:45 am: Amarcord on IFC (repeat at 2:20/3:20 pm and on 11/14 at 4:50/5:50 am). Fellini making the most Felliniesque movie of his career.

11:45 am/12:45 pm: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM. Date movies don't get better than this. True, the execrable You've Got Mail is based on this, but Lubitsch's movie has a wildly beating heart, which neither Meg Ryan nor AOL can claim.

Fri, Nov 14:

3/4 pm: Rear Window on TCM. Everybody loves Hitchcock. I've been avoiding recommending his movies, because a) there's always a Hitchcock movie playing on TV somewhere and b) even the bad ones are good, so why bother recommending them? But Rear Window is so great that I just wanted to mention that it's going to be on.

5/6 pm: The Thomas Crown Affair on TCM. Q: Would I enjoy watching Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway doing mostly nothing for 2 hours? A: The Thomas Crown Affair.

Sat, Nov 15:

1/2 am: Suspiria on TCM. Dario Argento's greatest movie.

2:45/3:45 am: The Haunting on TCM. As always, the Robert Wise movie, not the terrible remake.

7/8 am: Three Outlaw Samurai on IFC. Pretty good samurai movie.

7/8 pm: Paths of Glory on TCM. Kubrick's classic anti-war movie, starring Kirk Douglas as a man who is OUTRAGED that the military might be run by incompetent boobs. The actors who aren't chewing scenery might just tear your heart out.

Sun, Nov 16:

7/8 am: The Seventh Seal on IFC. The source of the famous Swedish aphorism "Never play chess with Death unless you are Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA."

10:15/11:15 am: Bright Young Things on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and on 11/17 at 3:55/4:55 am). Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies." Funny AND bitter!

Mon, Nov 17:

1/2 am: Diabolique on TCM. One of my favorite suspense movies. The dread that permeates it never lets up until the heart-stopping finale.

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC. Honestly, I can barely remember this movie, but I seem to recall that Robert Downey, Jr. killed in it.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. The Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am). Just recently wrote about this one, too. Over-wrote, you might even say. Still, this is one of the best films of the last decade.

That Guy!: Dan Hedaya

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

You know, folks, it's really not my intention for this feature to just go through a list of everyone who's ever worked with the Coen Brothers or appeared in Buckaroo Banzai, but that's the way it seems to be shaking down. Some people just share my appreciation of freaky-looking middle-aged guys who behave eccentrically, I suppose. Anyway, Dan Hedaya's first movie role was in Myra Breckenridge, but don't hold that against him: not only did he go one to have a beloved television career, most prominently as the dull-witted Nick Tortelli on Cheers, but he's also appeared in nearly a hundred movies, usually as some variety of dolt or sleazebag. 1999 saw him combine the two, playing doltish sleazebag Richard M. Nixon in Dick and fulfilling a sort of physical destiny: with his weighty jowls, shifty eyes, and perpetual five-o'-clock shadow, he's a near spitting image of the Tricky One. Born to a family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Hedaya taught junior high school science for a number of years before his acting career took off; his shuffling demeanor and absent-minded craziness is certainly reminiscient of more than a few science teachers we can remember from our own school years. Outside of television, the role which Hedaya made the biggest impact was that of Alicia Silverstone's wealthy father in Clueless; he also stole the show in the overblown, overpriced movie version of The Addams Family as Gomez's crooked, shiftless attorney, Tully Alford. Recently, as he closes out his sixties, he's specialized in playing the fathers of characters as eccentric as he is: he was Amy Sedaris' dad in the big-screen adaptation of Strangers with Candy, the patriarch of the Butabi Brothers in the dismal SNL spin-off A Night at the the Roxbury, and the father of the obsessive-compulsive detective played by Tony Shalhoub in Monk. His recent appearance in the controversial TV series The Book of Daniel shows that he won't stop shuffling into strange roles anytime soon.

Where to see Dan Hedaya at his best:

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

In their motion picture debut, Joel and Ethan Coen were already showing their deft touch with character actors, casting Dan Hedaya as Julian Marty, the possessive, sleazy strip club owner who stands between John Getz and Frances McDormand. Hedaya gets a rare opportunity to show off his capacity to express rage during his final confontation with Getz, and goes on to become the most persistent murder victim since Paul Meurisse in Diabolique. But all told, it's just one of the earliest examples of his long line of questionable scumbags, a man so dodgy that even ethics-deprived private dick M. Emmet Walsh finds him "disgustin'".

JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

John Patrick Shanley was one of Hollywood's hottest properties, coming off of a big hit with Moonstruck, when he made this rather strange little number, a suicidal romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan looking as uncomfortable as ever. But Dan Hedaya almost single-handedly salvages the movie with a brief but mercilessly hilarious cameo near the start of the film as the hapless, hopeless Hanks' boss. He vanishes from the movie early on and never has much impact on the plot, but he gets some of the greatest comic dialogue of any film of the year: "I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you!"

MUHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

We have it on good authority that when David Lynch approached Dan Hedaya about appearing as enigmatic movie producer Vincenzo Castigliane in Mulholland Drive, he asked him: "Dan, we know you can do eccentric. We know you can do sleazy. We know you can even do creepy. But can you do completely bugshit insane?" (He can get the job, but can he do the job?) It turns out he can, and we were all rewarded with another small but scene-stealing performance in this perplexing surrealist masterpiece from a guy who knows good character actors almost as well as the Coens.

Take Five: Revolution!

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Monday was Guy Fawkes Day. What the hell is Guy Fawkes Day, you may be asking if you are not British, or the product of an inferior educational system? The Fifth of November is what it is, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by one Mr. Fawkes to blow up Parliament. Americans, comic book fans, and people who were hung over in their Survey of European History classes may remember it best from V for Vendetta, where the eponymous terrorist V decides Guy Fawkes Day is the perfect time to throw his own fireworks display at the Houses of Parliament, touching off a popular revolt against the tyrannical government of a future England (not entirely without similarity to modern America). Hollywood films have always had a bit of a, shall we say, delicate constitution about films that portray violent revolution, which, despite the circumstances of our own founding, seems to smack a bit of pink. Other countries haven’t been so squeamish; here’s some good films to watch when you’re ready to stick it to the Man.

BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN [THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN] (1925)

A classic in every sense of the word, Sergei Eisenstein’s phenomenal silent movie about an uprising of sailors against the czarist regime virtually invented the modern art of montage, gave us the endlessly influential “Odessa Steps” sequence, and stood as a towering achievement of Soviet cinema, even outlasting its censors and detractors in Russia itself. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that it was made less than eight years after the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important upheaval of the 20th century. The notion that such gorgeous and powerful art could be put the service of the purest propaganda would haunt writers and critics for decades – and would be put to the test again when Leni Riefenstahl began work on her Triumph of the Will.

METROPOLIS (1927)

Science fiction, with its potential for infinite variety, would seem to be a natural for political storytelling, but much popular sci-fi is either painfully apolitical or downright reactionary. Writers such as Samuel Delany and Ursula LeGuin, who approach issues of revolution and anarchy, are still few and far between in the genre. In the 1920s, though, when Fritz Lang made his silent sci-fi masterpiece, everyone in the audience knew exactly what he was talking about. The highly charged atmosphere of Germany between the wars featured socialists, communists and nationalists constantly at each other’s throats, and Metropolis’ depiction of a mistreated underclass of despised laborers working for the enrichment of a wealth, privileged industrial elite made it quite clear where the director’s sympathy lay. Only a few years later, the Nazis would come to power, and Lang fled the country, deciding that it wasn’t his kind of revolution.

ZÉRO DE CONDUITE [ZERO FOR CONDUCT] (1933)

French boarding schools have contained an element of seediness and menace in more than one great film (see also Clouzot’s Diabolique), but nowhere do they seem as oppressive and intolerable as they do in Jean Vigo’s masterful, anarchic Zero for Conduct. Surreal, creepy, innovate, funny, touching and occasionally terrifying, the film also does more than anything before or since to convey the pure, joyous spirit of youthful rebellion that life eventually beats out of you. Less than an hour long but filled with unforgettable moments, Zero for Conduct is a masterpiece about the giddy charge of revolution.

WEEK END (1967)

It takes so little to transform that word into something threatening: simply split it, as do the French, and place a heavy emphasis on “end”, and you have the implication, carried in every frame of this astonishing film, that it’s not just the work week that’s coming to an end, but cinema and perhaps civilization itself. It’s hard to appreciate today exactly how great an impact Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary consciousness had on French society of its day; he wasn’t the most successful director in the country, but he was a major figure in the arts, and his stars were famous television actors with huge amounts of mainstream credibility. When his characters turned to the camera and discussed, in plain terms, the high and low of Marxist revolution, it wasn’t satire or the dabbling of a dilettante: it was someone who was dead serious, and whose final stab for some time at narrative filmmaking would eerily presage the eruption of Paris less than a year later.

IF… (1968)

Nowadays, young people know Malcolm McDowell as that kindly old man from Heroes who wants to blow up New York to prove a point about something or other. But forty years ago, between appearing as Alex in A Clockwork Orange and starring in this Lindsay Anderson classic about a rebellious youth who graduates from sassing back and carrying on with girls to turning a machinegun on the headmasters at his school, he must have seemed like the film industry’s own Antichrist. 1968 was a tumultuous year, and students in France, Italy, Japan and Germany, among other places, were only a hair away from actually lining up their teachers in front of a firing squad; the film seems a bit heavy-handed and dated these days (especially given the spectacular flameout of its director), but at the time, it was a savage and sobering piece of filmmaking.

— Leonard Pierce