The Screengrab : turner classic movies

Set Your DVR!: March 13 - 20, 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

After a demoralizing post-New Year's stretch where Turner Classic Movies' late-Friday-night "TCM Underground" slot seemed to have been turned into a dumping ground for toothless crap fit only for drive-ins catering to viewers who are still using training wheels--The Amityville Horror!? TCM, please!--things have started hopping there again, and I don't mean Night of the Lepus. Last week saw the channel's premiere of Willie Dynamite, a 1974 blaxsploitation movie about a flamboyantly dressed pimp played by Gordon from Sesame Street, and this week, March 14 at 1:00 am central/2:00 am eastern, TCM unearths a Cold War artifact beyond Rorshach's more feverish nightmares: Shack Out on 101 (1956), one of the strangest and most seldom-seen movies of its day. A poverty row production, it's set in a greasy spoon restaurant, with Keenan Wynn as the proprietor, Terry Moore (once the love object of both Howard Hughes and Mighty Joe Young) as the waitress, and Frank Lovejoy as a nuclear scientist--"a big, big man" in Moore's words--who regularly stops by to get into different kinds of trouble with Moore and with Lee Marvin, who plays the cook, known as Slob, who's moonlighting as a Commie agent. If the intense mixture of steaminess and paranoia and the energy that the cast gives off trying to keep the claustrophobic picture alive aren't enough to hold your interest in a vise, you can kill time during the dead spots by trying to figure out whether it's more implausible that Marvin would have been approved by the KGB recruiting office or the Board of Health.

Then, a week later, March 20 at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern, TCM Underground has the greatest counterculture roap trip of them all, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). James Taylor yes-that-James-Taylor, with a hawkish profile and great greasy-looking dark locks, is the nameless driver who tools around the country with his mechanic sidekick (the late Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys), getting into races for money; the magnificent Warren Oates is the middle-aged fantasist who finds their very existence so objectionable that he goads them into a race to Washington, winner take the other's wheels. Neither Taylor (who in an interview included in a 2007 Criterion Collection DVD release says that he's never seen the picture) nor Wilson ever acted again, and if Oates had never acted in anything else, his work here would be enough to secure him a position in Character Actor Heaven. When it was first released, Esquire ran a picture of its leading lady, Laurie Bird, on its cover and proclaimed it the movie of the year, a boast that the magazine later sheepishly retracted after it flopped in theaters. It would have to settle for being one for the ages.

TCM has so many hours of programming to fill up that it can hardly restrict the weird stuff to the witching hour, so Friday morning, March 13, 8:45 am central/9:45 am eastern, the network premieres Zotz!, a 1962 comedy directed by the scary-movie gimmickmeister William Castle. Little seen (and, like Shack Out on 101), not available on DVD), the film has acquired a cult reputation over the years based largely on its far-out title and the change of pace it marked for Castle, who soon moved back to plastic skeletons. It stars Tom Poston, the thinking man's Jim Nabors, who plays a professor who, Wikipedia says, "obtains powers to cause pain or slow movement, and even kill. He immediately suffers the consequences of his discovery: Jones realizes that when he points at another living creature, it causes a great pain. This prevents any intimate encounters with a woman. It is a metaphor of the age of nuclear weapons." Sounds hilarious!

LazyVision: Week Ending Feb. 14th

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We know that fans of the Screengrab want the dish on what's happening now in Hollywood (hence the Weekend Box Office Report) and what's yet to come (hence the Morning Deal Report). We know you want to be aware of what's coming to home video, hence DVD Digest. And we know that sometimes, you just want to park yourselves in front of the tube to catch a good flick, hence Set Your DVRs!.

We also know that some of you are deeply, deeply lazy individuals. And, beyond that, you're cheap, and you can't figure out anything more technologically complicated than a light switch. (We say this in the most loving way possible, for we count ourselves in your number.) You want to be able to turn on the TV -- not the computer -- and watch a good movie, anytime you want, without having to program anything -- for free. After all, wasn't that the promise of the new modern era? Wasn't that the allure of the digital age -- any movie you want, any time you want, no waiting, no fees?

Well, assuming you have digital cable, Video On Demand was made for lazy gasbags like you. Most of the stuff shown on VOD is either pay-per-view or, to put it mildly, dire, but occasionally, a gem will pop up on the "Free Movies" feature as a reward for infinitely patient cheapskates like yours truly. So, once a week, we'll bring you a handful of not-completely terrible movies you can watch whenever you want, for zero dollars and change. (Check your local provider for channel details.)

- FEARnet this week is featuring Night of the Creeps as one of its free movies on demand. This underrated 1986 camp-horror classic from cult director Fred Dekker is a real winner -- it never takes its zombies-from-out-space-plot too seriously, and plays around with the conventions of the genre years before the Scream franchise got the idea. The characters are all named after cult directors (Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, etc.), and best of all, it's held together by a swell performance from beloved tough-guy character actor Tom Atkins.

- The Sundance Channel's on-demand service is offering a look at John Huston's The Dead, gratis. The final film Huston ever made, it's also one of his finest and most personal; adapted from a very fine James Joyce short story, it features some astonishing performances (including by his daughter, Anjelica) in a story involving a woman's memories of her long-dead first love, and how it stirs emotions in her husband during an Epiphany gathering. Best of all, The Dead isn't currently available in a U.S. DVD release, so this opportunity is even more special.

- Turner Classic Movies also has an on-demand service, and free this week is the classic 1948 noir flick Naked City. Somewhere between solid post-war noir, hardboiled police procedural, and ripe pre-war crime drama, Naked City is a tightly wound look at every step of a brutal murder investigation in New York. Directed by legendary noir specialist Jules Dassin, Naked City features a terrific villain in Ted DeCorsia, a gritty semi-documentary filming style, and an absolutely gripping extended chase scene through the city. It was later made into a popular TV crime show in the 1950s .

- FEARnet's on-demand service coughs up another great free offering this week in Escape from New York. Made during the period when a new John Carpenter movie was cause for excitment, this cult classic takes place in a near-future dystopia where New York City is a maximum-security prison. When President Donald Pleasance's plane crashes there with the nuclear football on board, it's up to Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, one of the all-time great screen bad-asses, to bail him out. Russell gamely waltzes with a swell cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton -- and good ol' Tom Atkins.

- Finally, TNT's on-demand service this week offers the chance to see John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood. The 1991 film set off a wave of west coast gangsta dramas, but Boyz was the first and is still one of the best, as Singleton (whose filmmaking skills are raw and exciting here) takes a look at a group of childhood friends who struggle in different ways against the rough life of gang-ridden south central Los Angeles. Larry Fishburne's performance is a standout, and this was one of the first movies in which evidence was presented that Ice Cube was a good actor -- evidence which has been sorely lacking in recent years.

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Rose McGowan: TCM's Latest Essential

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

The Osborne-McGowan team has also torn through The Music Box and The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie that McGowan should probably remake, just so we can see her name on the posters next to that title. Of the selections coming up, McGowan is especially high on Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a hallucinatory masterpiece starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher. “It’s heavy-handed, sure, I get it. It’s just so smart. It’s very much a classic metaphor for the big person to proclaim for all to hear how Christian he is, and then there’s Lillian Gish, who probably only weighs about 90 pounds. … And she’s the quiet Christian, and it’s her behavior that speaks for her about her Christian belief.” Of the TCM gig itself, McGowan says, “I had no idea that they were even going to pay me. Seriously, a job where I get to sit and discuss these movies? Are you kidding me? I’ve been boring my friends for years!” One can't help but wonder how any lost soul could become so miserably jaded as to ever be bored by the sight of Rose McGowan rhapsodizing about Laurel and Hardy, but perhaps she has better tastes in movies than in friends. Rose, call us! We'll introduce you to some really cool new people at Trivia Night.

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.

DVD Digest for March 4, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

After last week's release of the mammoth Criterion four-disc set of The Last Emperor, it was sort of inevitable that this week would be something of a letdown. Still, this week has a number of worthy releases it can call its own.

DVD of the Week: One of the most thought-provoking documentaries of 2007, Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That (Sony) tells the story of little Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old girl whose paintings won her acclaim as a modern-art prodigy until a segment on 60 Minutes II cast doubt on her authorship of the works. What began as a human-interest story about a little girl who enjoyed painting and turned out to be surprisingly good at it becomes a hornet's nest of issues — everything from how much of the value of art comes from the story behind it to the concept of modern art itself. Most relevantly, Bar-Lev takes the role of the media in building people up only to tear them down again, even addressing his own complicity in this process. Most impressively, the film does all this — and more besides — all in the course of eighty-three minutes. Also included on the DVD are an audio commentary with the director as well as several documentaries, one about the film, and the other featuring an interview with New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. A must-see for anyone interested in art or documentary filmmaking.

Other new releases coming to DVD this week include: Sean Penn's Oscar-snubbed Into the Wild (Paramount); Zack Helm's Roald Dahl ripoff homage Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Fox); Susanne Bier's melodrama Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamworks), which boasts a fine Benicio Del Toro lead performance; and of course Steven Seagal's latest direct-to-DVD release, Pistol Whipped (Sony). Keep your eyes peeled to Vern's site for his no doubt imminent review. Also, for anime fans, this week brings the R1 release of the Japanese animated series Blood+ Part 1 (Sony), comprising the first twenty-five episodes of the series, as well as Blood+ Volume 1 (Sony), which only includes the first five episodes.

On the classics front, the most notable release is TCM Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2, a three-disc set that includes five pre-Code classics — The Divorcee (1929), A Free Soul (1931), Three on a Match (1932), Female (1933), and Night Nurse (1931) — accompanied by a new TCM documentary about pre-Code Hollywood. This week also sees the release of new editions of 101 Dalmatians (Disney), 12 Angry Men (MGM), and Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox), as well as Magnum P.I. Season 8 (Universal), and Blu-Ray-only releases of Ice Age (Fox) and 2002's The Rookie (Disney).

Finally, back by popular demand is this week's Huddleston Corner, in which we spotlight films being released in the soon-to-be-defunct HD-DVD format. This week's new HD releases:
Into the Wild (Paramount)
No Reservations (Warner)
Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamworks)

Condolences!

The Rep Report (January 2-17)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: From January 2 through the 17th, Film Forum hosts a retrospective of the films of the once-ever-present, still-controversial Otto Preminger. Things kick off, fittingly, with the classic noir Laura (double -billed with the Joan Crawford vehicle Daisy Kenyan), followed by a new restored print of the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder and a matched double bill of thrillers capturing Preminger at his seamiest: Angel Face, with the aristocratic Jean Simmons eager to sully herself with a bemused Robert Mitchum, and Fallen Angel, with Dana Andrews itching for Linda Darnell. (The theater will not be following Preminger into the depths of the last fifteen years of his career, but anyone curious to see just how unmoored he had become by 1968 might want to supplement the program with some homework in the form of a rare TV screening of the hippie head trip Skidoo, airing at 2 AM (EST) Friday night/a> as part of Turner Classic Movies' "Underground" series.)

Film Society at Lincoln Center's Dance on Camera Festival (January 2–6, 11 and 18–19) includes a wide range of dance films from around the world, including works by Pina Bausch and Jacques Tati.

Those who've just gotten their first taste of the world as seen through the eyes of maverick filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson via There Will Be Blood can find out where he's been all their lives with the Museum of the Moving Image's weekend screening of Anderson's first four films, from Hard Eight (or Sydney, as he'd much rather you'd call it) to Punch Drunk Love. We can't guarantee that they'll emerge feeling certain that you know just what he's been doing all their lives, but we hope they'll enjoy the ride anyway.

LOS ANGELES: "The Films of Lee Chang-dong" (January 3 - 5) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art gives local audiences a chance to get acquainted with a South Korean director whose four films have, with the exception of 2002's Oasis, received no real distribution in the U.S. (However, his most recent film, Secret Sunshine, is South Korea's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture and recently came in first in IndieWIRE's critics' poll devoted to undistributed films.) Lee will be in attendance at the screenings.

CHICAGO: The Gene Siskel Film Center devotes two months, from January 5 to March 4, to the taboo-busting Japanese director Shohei Imamura, showing eighteen of his features, "many in specially imported prints from Japan." The schedule includes such classics as Vengeance Is Mine, Black Rain, The Ballad of Narayama and The Insect Woman, but it is especially notable for being crammed with many titles that remain seldom screened and little known in the U.S.

Forgotten Films: "Remember the Night" (1940)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Of all the movies that might have become perennial stocking-stuffers over the years, none has been more undeservedly forgotten than the 1940 Remember the Night. The first few times I came across the title, I thought that I'd seen it already, and that it was about the Titanic. Instead, it's a romance starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, four years before their more acidic teaming in Double Indemnity, and directed by Mitchell Leisen, from an original screenplay by Preston Sturges. Three years earlier, Leisen had directed Easy Living, one of the funniest Sturges scripts from before Sturges started directing them himself. This film, though, is less a screwball farce than a gentle comedy than turns more and more into a swooning love story. Luckily, Stanwyck's just-barely meltable hard edge and Stanwyck's way with a wisecrack keep it just this side of mushiness. (The terrific movie blogger the Self-Styled Siren has observed that it was "written soon after Sturges's marriage (his second of four, but a honeymoon's a honeymoon)."

MacMurray plays a hard-nosed assistant D.A. whose last job before Christmas break is to prosecute Stanwyck, a shoplifter. (Explaining why she couldn't just plead to being a kleptomaniac, she sweetly explains, ""You can't try to sell the stuff afterward, or you lose your amateur status.") Recognizing that he's on the verge of losing the jury, MacMurray gets a continuance, figuring that they'll be in a less forgiving mood after the holidays. Then, nagged at by guilt over the thought of the new glittering babe in his life spending Christmas in jail, he bails her out, just so he won't feel like a grinch, yeah, right. He winds up giving her a lift home to see mom for Christmas, planning to drop her off before continuing on his way to his own family get-together, which is presided over by Beulah Bondi. The all-embracing, loving warmth of the MacMurray homestead sometimes threatens to be a bit much, but it's counterbalanced against the cold-eyed cheerlessness of the frost-covered shack from whence Stanwyck's character sprang; the thought of having grown up there is so godawful that the scenes with Ma Bondi couldn't entirely erase the chill if her house was set in front of a butterscotch waterfall with pet unicorns romping on the lawn. Unavailable on video, Remember the Night made its belated debut on Turner Classic Movies last year, and it doesn't seem to have returned this year. But this fine tribute by the aforementioned Siren does much to convey its sweet, distinctive flavor.