I awoke Saturday morning to a singular purpose – to stalk, er, follow the Huston family through three screenings from 10am to 6pm. As part of this weekend’s festival, TCM is honoring the legendary cinematic family with three films: 1948′s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which won Oscars for both John Huston (writing and directing) and Walter Huston (Best Supporting Actor); 1989′s Crimes and Misdemeanors, the first of two Woody Allen films featuring Anjelica Huston (the second was Manhattan Murder Mystery); and 2005′s The Proposition, a bloody, and as I’ll learn, fairly relentless Aussie Outback quasi-Western starring Danny Huston in one of his most iconic villain roles. Anjelica and Danny will be in attendance at all screenings, talking both together and separately about the films. It’s a good thing both are amazingly personable, funny and generous with their film knowledge and anecdotes, because all three of the movies screening explore some of the darkest parts of the human soul. As Danny says later in the day, the films share the trait of being about men of confidence broken down by the story that envelops them. Oy.

Sierra Madre is screening at 10am at Grauman’s Chinese; tourists have already gathered outside to gawk and take pictures with the celebrity impersonators, but inside the famed theater it’s quiet, red and soothing, filled with fans very excited to see the Hustons and experience a brand-new print of the film. Robert Osborne, whom Eva Marie Saint has referred to as the “rock star” of the weekend festival, introduces a succinct short film tracing the careers of Hustons Walter, John, Anjelica and Danny, heavy on clips and admiration. The adaptability of all four is deftly showcased, showing Walter as both matinee idol and grizzled character actor, Anjelica as both Morticia in The Addams Family and the struggling femme fatale of The Grifters, Danny as characters both sympathetic and threatening (mostly the latter), and John both behind the camera and in front of it, most notably his chilling turn in Chinatown. Afterwards, Osborne brings the siblings out to a standing ovation — my stalking instincts are finely honed, as I’ve inadvertently picked a seat about 20ft away from their offstage position. The two talk warmly about their father and the film, which Anjelica says she’s seen about 50-70 times and Danny remembers as being shown at home on a “deliciously noisy little projector.” Danny also gives props to some of his father’s lesser-known films: Fat City, Wise Blood and The Misfits, among others. Fortunately, this print is deliciously crisp and the projector isn’t noisy in the slightest; the images jump off the screen and Huston’s framing and cutting still feels amazingly contemporary. Though Humphrey Bogart is phenomenal as a man undone by greed, Walter Huston’s performance is less grizzled than I remember and much more nuanced; a nearly wordless sequence in which he revives a young Mexican boy comatose from drowning is breathtaking and favors awe and fascination over sentimentality.

After a lunch break, it’s time for a 3:30pm screening of Crimes and Misdemeanors, and for the second day in a row, I’m discovering that the mid-afternoon screenings provoke  the longest lines, as earlier screenings run over due to Q&A discussions and the TCM staff wrangle all the appropriate people into the right lines. I manage to score a seat high up in the auditorium at Mann’s Chinese for maximum celeb sighting, but no one shows and my mind wanders until the girls behind me give a tiny squeal when a spectacled Alec Baldwin quietly slinks in, his nose in the TCM program and guided by either an assistant or handler (he gets one of the reserved seats). The Huston troupe arrives just in time for Ben Mankiewicz (who appears to have honed his hosting duties at weddings and bar mitzvahs) to introduce the Huston short film; later he’ll also refer to Anjelica as John Huston’s “son”, a point she classily and breezily corrects him on. Anjelica and Ben chat a bit before the screening, and she refers to her family as a “lovely band of gypsies” and recalls how for Crimes and Misdemeanors the first scene she had to shoot was the first in which she appears in the film, where she has to hit the ground running in high neurotic and paranoid style. C & M still remains one of the later great Allen films, and despite some of the ham-handed symbolism (most notably the blind rabbi), the cast finds the heart amidst the philosophy. After 30+ years of Allen films, it’s now easy to spot the actors who can handle Allen’s sometimes stilted dialogue: Martin Landau, in an Oscar-nominated turn, does well, as does the scene-stealing Alan Alda as an egomaniacal TV writer. In retrospect, the film is something of an elegy for the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow relationship, as they seem both utterly relaxed and entranced by each other as actors, in comparison to the brittle edges of Husbands and Wives three years later after… well, you know.

Post-screening, Mankiewicz brings up Anjelica and Martin Landau, and the two embrace warmly as if they haven’t seen each other in forever; he remarks affectionately that she smells like an “Oreo cookie”. With the house lights up and safely ensconced in the back, I’m able to Twitter a few of the most notable observations of the conversation, which you can read here. Anjelica tackles head-on the question that popped up in my mind watching the film again: are her clothes and hair really supposed to be that terrible? Apparently, yes – she was “horrified” when she went to her first costume fittings. She and Landau also chronicle her attempts to meet with Allen before filming; she tried to meet him for coffee in New York weeks before shooting started, but Allen was down with the flu. Then, Huston and Landau trailed him across the set until Landau officially engineered an introduction that culminated with a succinct, “Hi.” Anjelica warmly recalls the incident and notes how carefully Allen cast his actors, that he didn’t need to meet or rehearse with them before filming began, and Landau concurs, noting the lack of rehearsal time and minimal takes Allen required. One anecdote that didn’t make sense: apparently Allen’s character, at the end of the film, was meant to be caught in a clinch with… Sean Young?! Sound a little too 80s for me; wisely, it was scrapped.

After C&M& it’s straight into the screening of The Proposition, and again both Anjelica and Danny are in tow, with their nephew Jack, son of Tony Huston. Looking him up on IMDb, I find that Jack is slated to appear in the next Twilight film, Eclipse — good thing Ben Mankiewicz didn’t mention that, or else there might have been a mob scene on hand. In the smaller auditorium at Mann’s Chinese, this screening feels much more intimate (you can hear Danny’s signature laugh throughout the film) and the conversation between Danny and Mankiewicz is appropriately loose. Being closer to Danny in this smaller space makes you realize how downright uncanny his voice resembles his dad’s, and you can hear intimations of Chinatown‘s Noah Cross in his inflections. Danny is very obviously grateful and excited to give this little-seen film exposure at the festival (he even talked about it on the red carpet Thursday night) and gives props to director John Hillcoat and especially co-star Ray Winstone. Mankiewicz quizzes Danny on his roaming accent — which Danny wryly refers to as a “tax haven accent” given the various locations in which he grew up — and which directors asked him to do what accent. Danny’s most notable point for that question is on his experience working with Sofia Coppola on Marie Antoinette, where when he asker her what kind of accent she’d like, she told him, “Be yourself.” Huston’s reaction: “I was totally perplexed.” The Proposition itself is a visceral little film set in the late 19th century Outback, where an outlaw brother (Guy Pearce) is given the titular proposition to kill his brother (Huston) in order to recevie a pardon and save the life of his younger brother. It’s filled with very good performances (including Emily Watson as Winstone’s porcelain-china wife), but also filled with bloody violence, lots of sweat and flies and dirt, and many actors with very, very bad teeth (which I assume are prosthetics). It’s more than a little nihilistic, and after death three times over this day, I’m in need of a little palate cleanser.

So after a quick stop at the Roosevelt, I bolt over to Grauman’s Chinese again for the 10pm screening of Saturday Night Fever and if anything, there are more tourists at night than during the day. The auditorium is maybe 2/3rds full, and I sit back waiting for the film to start up promptly, as there’d been no mention of Q&A in the festival program. To my surprise, a spotlight finds its way to “rock star” Robert Osborne, who introduces the director of the film, John Badham. Aside from the fact that they refer to the film as a “musical” (which I guess, in a way, it is), they chat about the genesis of the movie and how Badham became involved. Based on an infamous New York nonfiction magazine article “Tribal Rituals of the New Saturday Night” (which later was revealed to be entirely fabricated), Saturday Night Fever was initially to be directed by Rocky helmer John G. Avildsen; however, after Avildsen protested just a bit too much at the script, he was promptly replaced with Badham, who had only star John Travolta and five songs by the Bee Gees on hand before he went to New York to start filming. Badham recounted how he cast the film entirely with New York actors, had the set decorators put up aluminum foil and Christmas lights to give the infamous Oddysey (that’s how it’s spelled in the movie) disco a “glamorous” feel, and how everyone at Paramount expected the movie to close within a week; apparently, when then-studio head Barry Diller got the first weekend grosses, he exclaimed, “There’s a mistake! There are too many zeroes!” The rest is cultural history.

For those who remember only the white disco suit, the multi-million selling soundtrack, and Travolta’s smile and gold chains, Saturday Night Fever still remains something of a revelation. It’s a scrappy, low-budget movie low on glamour and high on lower-middle-class angst, as Tony Manero, still acting like an overgrown boy, struggles to find the man inside himself, and a purpose in life (not for nothing do the lyrics of “Staying Alive” feature the refrain, “Life going nowhere/Somebody help me/Somebody help me, yeah”). It’s truly a star-making performance for Travolta, who effortlessly holds the screen and can go from cocky to insecure in a heartbeat — and oh yes, the dancing is still pretty amazing, especially Travolta’s solo to “You Should Be Dancing”, which prompted spontaneous applause from the audience. It still remains a coarse, rough movie to this day — the profanity would not be out of place in a Tarantino film, and the sexual politics are not something 21st century political correctness would ever tolerate — but echoes the course of its protagonist: unsure, occaisonally confident, coasting on charisma when needed, sweating when it has to, and reaching for something greater than its origins.

Sunday: As the weekend winds down, the festival is given over mostly to re-screenings of previous movies and a handful of new screenings, so the highlight will be the closing night showing of Metropolis, in a North American premiere of a new restoration, with accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra. As always, check out photos here, our Twitter feed here, and our special section on the festival here.