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10 YEARS OF THE TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL
The 10th
annual TCM Classic Film Festival is finally in the books, yet another fabulous,
frustrating and altogether delirium-inducing gathering in the heart of Hollywood to
designed to revel in the history of movies and encourage the continued
appreciation of the value of understanding where the movies have come from, how
they’ve come to the place they are, and even a moment or two to consider
possible futures, both for the path on which the movies find themselves and for the future of the festival
itself. As always, I have filed my report on this year's activities—movies
watched, schedules contemplated, favorite people visited—for Slant magazine’s blog The House Next Door—and if I come off in that report a little
crankier than usual, that dissatisfaction is borne from love for what TCMFF
does so well every year and concern for some of the more commerce-oriented
choices that seem to get in the way of the festival’s main thrust. Each year it
seems more and more like a good idea to keep in mind, as a fellow festivalgoer
and friend frequently reminds me, this festival is, more than ever, not for
“us,” the more all-consuming cinema addicts and historians, but more for the
general audience of film buffs and fans who don’t have as many opportunities to
indulge in the wealth of classic, independent, repertory and international
cinema that hose of us who live in urban centers like Los Angeles and New York
routinely do. And if one can keep that sentiment in mind, the TCM Classic Film
Festival will continue to be a place where fans, fanatics and more serious
denizens of film culture can co-exist and enjoy the chance to see the familiar
and the forgotten in the best possible venues.
As I said, this was the
festival’s tenth year, and I have been privileged, through the good graces of
TCMFF and my editor at Slant, Ed Gonzalez, to attend all ten. That adds up to a
lot of movies--141 so far, on average about 15 movies a festival—and a lot of
Vizine. You can read my annual coverage for Slant
by clicking here,
but for SLIFR I thought
it might be fun to take a look back and point out the highlights of my festival
experiences from each year, from the very beginning straight through last
weekend. So, let’s delay no longer. Take a trip back with me over ten years of
moviemaking and moviegoing magic, and while we cast a glance over our shoulder
we can also begin the process of looking forward to what TCMFF may have in
store as they begin their second decade of this unique film festival.
As
P.P. Arnold, Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart have been wont to remind us, the first
cut is the deepest, and so it was with the inaugural TCM Classic Film Festival
in 2010. And though during this festival I saw Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner
introduce Imitation of Life, as well as spectacular screenings of Playtime, Leave Her to Heaven, North by
Northwest, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the restored Metropolis,
the absolute highlight, and one of my favorite festival memories of all came
right out of the gate, poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel:
“As I trailed into the open poolside area, I observed there
must have been a couple hundred people buzzing around the edges of the pool,
many more than I thought could have fit comfortably. All the seats near the
screen were of course snapped up, and the only place I could find to settle in
was at the corner of the pool furthest from the screen, which was barely
visible to these weary eyes from that distance. But I was just glad to be
inside, and so I plopped down on the nicely padded chair and made fast pals
with my chaise mates, Roger and Joe, two very excited gentlemen from Atlanta who were staying
at the Roosevelt. (Talk about splurging for the full experience.) We traded
small talk about the festival, the places we lived, and of course our lousy position
re the evening’s events. But as the lights dimmed and the spotlight landed on
TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, who would introduce and interview the honored guests
of the evening, our attitude began to change. Mankiewicz was positioned about
10 feet from where we were sitting, and as he made his way through his genial
introductory repartee I turned to Roger and said, ‘I think we lucked out in a
big way’—the understatement of the evening, as it turned out. We heard
Mankiewicz say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Esther Williams and Betty Garrett!’ and
a few seconds later Betty Garrett, 89, with the help of a cane and a lovely
escort, and Esther Williams, 87, wheelchair-bound but lively as hell, made
their way right past Roger and Joe and I in our now not-so-crummy seats.”
(You can read more about Esther and Betty and me, and everything
else 2010 TCMFF-related, by clicking here.)
2011 at TCMFF was the year that I got to see one of my favorite films,
Billy Wilder’s One Two Three (1961),
projected in front of an audience for the very first time. And with expert
context provided by film historian Michael Schlesinger, it was a home run
before a single frame of the film was shown:
“Schlesinger… delivered, with Wilderian brio and delightful
deadpan wit, several wonderful anecdotes centered on the director’s personal
style and personality related to the making of the movie. He explained to those
virgins in the audience who had little idea what they were in for a bit about
the pace of the movie, including the indications in Wilder and Diamond’s script
(based on an already brisk Ferenc Molnar play) that the movie be relentlessly,
breathlessly paced. (Kevin Lally’s biography of the director, Wilder Times,
quotes the screenplay as demanding a rapid-fire ‘molto furioso’
tempo—'Suggested speed: 100 miles an hour—on the curves—140 miles an hour on
the straightaway.’) And Schlesinger was at his best in piquing the audience’s
anticipation in relating a story in which James Cagney as C. R. MacNamara, head
of the Berlin branch of the Coca-Cola company, rattles off a manic swath of
dialogue during a scene in which he evaluates various pieces of wardrobe
central to the makeover of his boss’s new son-in-law, Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst
Bucholz), from youthfully zealous commie to a faux European count worthy of
marrying into decadent American capitalism. Cagney applied every ounce of a
dancer’s agility and energy to the scene (which, finished, is a marvel of
explosive, relentless speed, the essence of molto furioso) but was, not surprisingly, having
difficulty with some of the tongue-twisting verbiage. Fifty-two takes later,
one perfect run-through of which was ruined by a bit player’s miscue, and
Wilder had the scene the way he wanted it, but Cagney was spent, physically and
psychologically; his experience on One Two Three led to his 20-year retirement from the
movies.”
(Get the full story on Schlesinger and One Two Three, and the
entirety of the 2011 TCMFF, right here.)
My writing about TCMFF 2012 has
gone missing, but in lieu of verbiage, here’s a list of the films I saw, in the
order that I saw them: Cover Girl (Charles
Vidor; 1944), I’m No Angel (Wesley
Ruggles; 1933), Baby Peggy: The Elephant
in the Room (Vera Iwerebor; 2012), Son
of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee; 1939); Letter
from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls; 1948), Phase IV (Saul Bass; 1974), Who
Done It? (Erle C. Kenton; 1942), Dr.
No (Terence Young; 1962), The Black
Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer; 1934), Lonesome
(Paul Fejos; 1928), Call Her Savage
(John Francis Dillon; 1932), Black
Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; 1947), Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch; 1932), Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks; 1959), and Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer; 1977). The best of the lot,
seeing Black Narcissus and Rio Bravo in the presence of,
respectively, Thelma Schoonmaker and Angie Dickinson—but with a lineup like
that no complaints could be possibly be either credible or tolerated.
The Friday of 2013 TCMFF
was perhaps the most “movie” I’ve ever crammed into a single day, and probably
one of the most rewarding. My coverage came in four parts here at the blog that
year, and all four days were crammed with moments to last a lifetime, including
a reunion of the cast and director of Deliverance
before a grand screening of the film itself. But that came on Saturday. Let me
give you a taste of how that glorious Friday ended, and perhaps you’ll want to
read more after that.
“The coffee I gulped eight hours earlier was still working its magic, so Richard Harland Smith and I made our way into the TCM Underground-sponsored midnight show, a very rare 35mm presentation, in its proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio, of Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s Plan Nine from Outer Space (1958). Richard, in his own piece for TCM, rightly pointed out, with no small amount of ‘take that!’ satisfaction, that though this movie gained much of its notoriety from the Golden Turkey phenomenon spearheaded by Harry and Michael Medved, who dubbed it the worst movie ever made, it’s the Medved books that now languish in indifference while Ed Wood’s movie is screening at the TCM Film Festival! That ‘Worst Movie Ever’ moniker has stuck like a piece of used gum to Wood’s movie, but, as comedian-writer Dana Gould (The Simpsons) pointed out in his hilarious introduction to the film, it’s one that the movie doesn’t really deserve. No movie that’s as entertaining as this one, inept as it most assuredly is, could possibly be the worst ever made. (I offer the somnambulant Lily Tomlin-John Travolta romance Moment by Moment as one possible replacement for this dishonor.) The key to Wood’s ‘failure’ is, of course, the many well-documented ways in which the movie falls short of even the basest standards of production value and acting discipline, but lording it over such an obviously impaired picture on those grounds is really only part of the fun. As suggested by Tim Burton’s great Ed Wood, what’s fascinating about looking at Plan Nine from Outer Space, especially in a print that probably looks better than the movie has ever been seen by even its most snarkily ardent followers, is its sincerity. He may have been a terrible writer and an insufficient storyteller, but Wood was most definitely a believer. Even as it builds to its gloriously incoherent climax, I was hard-pressed to detect so much as a single frame of cynicism in his demented mise-en-scene. And seeing it at midnight, the capper to a day which saw six films before it, was the perfect, delirious way to end what I’d wager was the single greatest day of movie-watching I’ve ever experienced over my four-year history with the TCM Classic Film Festival, and maybe even of my entire movie-watching life.”
The great beyond seemed to loom large at TCMFF 2014, as a
recurring theme in the programming I gravitated toward, and also in the spirit
of the festival itself, as exemplified by a chance to see Maureen O’Hara
interviewed just a few months before her passing, at a screening of How Green Was My Valley:
“In the shadow of the recent death of Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney, who passed away just four days before the festival opened, the actors who could be glimpsed at various TCMFF functions and on stage before the films they starred in were especially appreciative of the attention lavished on them. But one legendary Hollywood actress interviewed by TCM’s own iconic headmaster, Robert Osborne, seemed to be looking as much forward as back toward the past, openly acknowledging and even embracing her own slow approach to the end of the line. Maureen O’Hara, wheelchair-bound at 93, joined Osborne on stage before the screening of How Green Was My Valley (1941), and she, too, was somewhat awed by all the reverence and love directed her way. The Queen of Technicolor, a sobriquet bestowed upon her for her many appearances in splashy, intensely hued swashbucklers like Flame of Araby (1951), At Sword’s Point (1952), and Against All Flags (1952), was feisty right out of the gate too. When Osborne began with a question about John Ford, she played the audience like a well-tuned fiddle by responding with mock indignation: “I thought this was supposed to be about me!”
“In the shadow of the recent death of Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney, who passed away just four days before the festival opened, the actors who could be glimpsed at various TCMFF functions and on stage before the films they starred in were especially appreciative of the attention lavished on them. But one legendary Hollywood actress interviewed by TCM’s own iconic headmaster, Robert Osborne, seemed to be looking as much forward as back toward the past, openly acknowledging and even embracing her own slow approach to the end of the line. Maureen O’Hara, wheelchair-bound at 93, joined Osborne on stage before the screening of How Green Was My Valley (1941), and she, too, was somewhat awed by all the reverence and love directed her way. The Queen of Technicolor, a sobriquet bestowed upon her for her many appearances in splashy, intensely hued swashbucklers like Flame of Araby (1951), At Sword’s Point (1952), and Against All Flags (1952), was feisty right out of the gate too. When Osborne began with a question about John Ford, she played the audience like a well-tuned fiddle by responding with mock indignation: “I thought this was supposed to be about me!”
But
further sincere inquiry from the host was more often politely sidelined by the
actress, who seemed far more interested in conveying to the audience her deep
satisfaction with a life well-lived and also, more importantly, her acceptance
of its close and inevitable end. She frequently implored the audience to take
stock of their own paths and assured us that this known life was not the last
stop, even singling out one woman whose cough O’Hara, a good Irish Catholic
with a lovely brogue to match, insisted with seriousness and delight was a
happy noise that was floating directly up to God. In such a pristine, digitally
restored state as we would witness, How
Green Was My Valley
itself would even add a bit of convincing evidence to O’Hara’s conviction. As
O’Hara’s unspeakably lovely Angharad, daughter of the Morgan clan, leaves the
chapel after her wedding to a man she does not love, the wind picks up the
train of her veil, causing it to dance and reach skyward with such gorgeous,
fortuitous choreography that one could be forgiven for imagining its movement
providential, as if God himself was laying the groundwork for the actress’s own
heavenly assurance with an invitation that would only be accepted some 50 or so
years later.”
(The entirety of my
coverage of TCMFF 2014 is available here.)
All great films aside, the best thing about
TCMFF 2015 was attending it with my best pal, and TCMFF served up another great
poolside screening (and a surprise after the fest was over) which seemed
pitched just for the two of us:
And that surprise I mentioned? A TCM
photographer caught a great image of the silhouettes of myself and my pal
relaxing by the water while Douglas and Roundtree gabbed on in the background,
surely the best TCMFF souvenir I or anyone could have asked for. (Read all
about the rest of the best of the fest right here.)
What of TCMFF 2016, you ask? A chance
to see Anna Karina talk before a screening of Band of Outsiders was most definitely a highlight, one that sparked
an unexpected train of thought about the nature of nostalgia:
“Early
on (in Band of Outsiders), our heroes
sit for an English class in which their teacher, readying them for a lesson in Romeo
and Juliet, emphasizes T.S. Eliot’s
observation that “Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional”
as a way of softening her students’ resistance to material that might seem
musty or forbidding in any language. The quote suggests not only the teacher’s
belief that new texts can reorganize tradition, but also ways in which classic
texts can achieve modernity, not just through themselves, but through constant
recontextualization over time. Always one to recognize a movie convention,
Godard uses the classroom scene to establish his modus operandi in much the
same way as hundreds of films before and since have done. The teacher even
spells it out on the chalkboard: to be classic is to be modern.
As Band of Outsiders washed over me, I thought about
the apparent swelling of interest in TCMFF among young people, who were
noticeably out in droves at this year’s festival and coming close to matching
in numbers the relatively elderly population of movie fans who might be
expected to most ardently embrace the festival’s riches. If Nora Fiore, a.k.a.
Nitrate Diva, a 25-year-old blogger and TCMFF enthusiast is to be believed,
it’s possible that classic movie fare of the ‘30s and ‘40s may resonate with
millennials more than anyone may have previously understood. ‘I think my
generation responds to the subversive sides of old Hollywood, especially
pre-Code films and film noir,’ Fiore said in a recent L.A. Weekly piece, ‘Why
Young People Go Nuts for the TCM Classic Film Festival,’
adding that ‘studio-era films were often thrilling, shocking and, in some ways,
ahead of where Hollywood is now.’
Even if young fans like Fiore are more niche than norm (most young
people I know still have an allergic aversion to black-and-white film stock and
anything that predates the Marvel Cinematic Universe), it’s hard not to take
some degree of encouragement from seeing so many millennials wallowing in so
much cinematic history, even if it’s primarily Hollywood-oriented. In fact,
what ended up being most exciting for me at TCMFF 2016 was the realization of
just how much modernity there was in that wallow, even if some of the more
fascinating films in that light had to fight to be noticed over some of the
more ostentatious attractions.”
And speaking of unexpected modernity, there was a nearly
forgotten pre-Code western that sparked the biggest flame for me at the
festival that year:
“Another presumably musty
relic, this one from the pre-Code vaults of Universal Pictures and producer
Carl Laemmle Jr., was Edward L. Cahn’s excellent, surprisingly moving 1932
western Law and Order, which belies the
dominantly jaunty disposable tone that characterized most pre-Stagecoach B-movie
westerns and makes unexpected moves forward toward a depth of feeling and
technique which links it, however improbably, to The Wild Bunch. The
film, essentially the Gunfight at the OK Corral with the names changed (to
protect the mythological?), stars Walter Huston as notorious
gunslinger-turned-marshal Frame “Saint” Johnson, née Wyatt Earp, and Cahn, who
would eventually become a prolific but often mediocre director of agreeable
schlock (Dragstrip
Girl) and the occasionally noteworthy genre effort (It! The Terror From Beyond
Space), lends Law and Order a somber, elegiac attitude toward death.
The numerous killings here have a gravitas absent from the average horse opera
of the day, and the film’s final shootout set piece has been choreographed and
edited with a surprising degree of poetry that made me think of Sam Peckinpah
more than once.”
(More on TCMFF 2016 here.)
At TCMFF 2017, I was thinking a lot about the
spirits of the dead:
“Almost by definition, any festival dedicated exclusively to the
treasures, glories, and the occasional folly of the past is likely to be
visited by ghosts, and the spirits of the dead are practically a staple at the
TCM Classic Film Festival, which held its eighth gathering in the heart of
Hollywood this past weekend. The memory of the late Debbie Reynolds, who had
made several in-person appearances at TCMFF over the past eight years, was
invoked through yet another screening (the festival’s third) of the
indisputable classic Singin’ in the Rain, in which Reynolds made her first
big Hollywood splash back in 1952, and at a screening of Postcards
from the Edge (classic status somewhat more disputable), before
which Reynolds and her daughter, Carrie Fisher, were remembered fondly by Todd
Fisher, Reynolds’s son.
Even though he wasn’t represented at the festival on screen, Don
Rickles, who passed away on April 6, the festival’s opening day, couldn’t be
ignored. Rickles’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located on Hollywood
Boulevard across the street from the Chinese Theater complex, and as I made my
way through the usual crush of tourists, desperadoes, and TCMFF pass holders
toward my first screening on Thursday afternoon I wasn’t surprised to see the
little square of sidewalk devoted to Rickles surrounded by flowers, curious
bystanders, and entertainment reporters trolling for soundbites, and even
adorned by one fan’s thoughtful memorial: a brand-new hockey puck.
The ghost that made its presence felt at almost every turn of this
year’s festival belonged, of course, to TCM’s beloved host Robert Osborne, who
died one month to the day before the launch of this year’s festival.”
(More on TCMFF 2017 can be found here.)
TCMFF 2018 was all about the power of words, which made a
certain film loom large, perhaps larger than all the others:
“TCMFF 2018 did offer various opportunities to celebrate talented,
perhaps less zingy writer-directors such as Gillian Armstrong (My
Brilliant Career); James Ivory (Maurice); Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer); Melvin van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a salute which makes me happy even though my mind remains
boggled that it ever managed to happen); and Ron Shelton (Bull
Durham), whose gem-laden career bears an inordinate degree
of dedication to making sports movies the way Hollywood doesn’t like to make
’em—raunchy, unpredictable, often melancholy—and then proving that audiences
would come to see them anyway.
One
filmmaker who couldn’t be in attendance was highlighted with a feature so
strong and bracing you could practically feel the one-two punches smashing
against your torso and smell the cigar smoke from his ever-present stogie
wafting down the back of your neck. Sam Fuller, who died in 1997, would have
been thrilled with the festival showcase afforded his favorite film, 1952’s Park Row. Fuller’s urgency isn’t an empty exercise designed to get an
audience’s collective pulse racing. His own experiences as a newspaper copy
boy, coupled with his passion for the primacy and importance of the fourth
estate, inform this gloriously claustrophobic, booze-soaked, relentlessly forceful
tale of how one (fictional) editor, played by Gene Evans, a veteran of Fuller’s
The Steel
Helmet,
flies in the face of corruption and illegal influence, and against the baser
instincts of a rival publisher once his boss (Mary Welch), in the pursuit of
journalistic standards to honor the statues of Horace Greeley and Benjamin
Franklin which anchor Park Row itself.
Another
writer-director who was himself, like Fuller, at the forefront of a
particularly important moment in the history of American independent film, John
Sayles, used his time introducing Park
Row to eloquently characterize the film, in one of the overall best,
most informed, beautifully delivered speaker presentations I’ve ever seen at
TCMFF, as ‘Citizen Kane printed on butcher paper.’ You could almost
hear Fuller chuckle with approval.”
(Extra! Extra! Read all about the
rest of TCMFF 2018 right here.)
And then
there’s 2019, year 10 of TCMFF, when I complained perhaps more openly
than ever before, about the festival’s turn toward those audience pictures that
haven’t got as much classics credibility:
Of
course, the flip side of that coin is an opening-night gala devoted to the celebration
of …When Harry Met Sally, which isn’t the first film I would think
of to announce to the world that TCMFF is celebrating a milestone. It’s been 10
years since the festival launched, and its mother channel is celebrating 25
years on the air this year—and, okay, the Rob Reiner-helmed, Nora
Ephron-scripted comedy is now 30 years young. But I really wonder, beyond …When Harry Met Sally’s most famous scene, which is all but
stolen by the director’s mother and her delivery of the memorable zinger ‘I’ll
have what she’s having,’ if this dated rom-com really means enough to audiences
to be included among a TCMFF schedule of films ostensibly more qualified to be
considered as classics.”
(The rest of my TCMFF 2019
experience is right here. See you in 2020!)
(My favorite photo from TCMFF 2019: me and my best pal Bruce, who attended with me again this year, in the company of TCM programmer Millie De Chirico and film critic Michael Sragow.)
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