Archive for category TCM Classic Film Festival

On Sunday night, the coolest guy in Los Angeles was unoffical rock star Robert Osborne, who capped off the four-day TCM Classic Film Festival with a breathtaking screening of Metropolis. Introduced for the last time, Osborne was greeted at Grauman’s Chinese with a thunderous standing ovation, complete with whistles and cheers. Adroitly managing all the adoration, Osborne went on to thank all the TCM folks who made the festival possible, and recounted being approached by fans who told him that the channel got them through dark times, including unemployment and cancer. Osborne deflected any maudlin feelings by quipping, “I hadn’t expected we’d be anyone’s nurse!” and then told the crowd, almost conspiritorially, that it would be announced tomorrow that, yes, there would indeed be a second TCM Classic Film Festival. (If that doesn’t prove true, I’m going to have to eat my hat — and this blog.) More cheers. After those subsided, Osborne got down to the business at hand: briefing the audience on the screening to commence in mere minutes.

The last day of the festival was focused on the epic: things kicked off at 9am with a screening of 1963′s Cleopatra, featuring co-star Martin Landau, who had sardonically stated yesterday, “I’m going to have to bring a boxed lunch to that thing!” The 100-year-old Luise Rainer, the first actor to win back-to-back Oscars, did indeed make it to the screening of The Good Earth (Jerry Lewis, however, did not make it to The King of Comedy). And Eli Wallach was on hand for a pre-screening discussion of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But the crowning achievement of the day — if not the festival — was the North American premiere of a new restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Though the film has gone through copious restorations since the 80s, in 2008 a complete print of the film was discovered at a museum in Buenos Aires, and this new restoration, minus one scene near the end that was damaged beyond repair, is now just beginning to circle the globe.

To be honest, I did not cotton to the idea of sitting through 2 1/2 hours of silent film at the tail end of an already exhausting film festival. I’m glad I didn’t trust my instincts — the print that unspooled onscreen was pristine beyond belief, and seeing it on a huge screen literally took my breath away. Lang’s iconic images are just as potent today as they were over 90 years ago, and leave most any of today’s quote-unquote epic filmmakers in the dust; anyone who has helmed most any summer blockbuster of the past ten years should see this film and then hang their head in shame at Lang’s mix of action, suspense and drama. Osborne told the audience beforehand that, because the found print was 16mm, the newly restored scenes would be grainy from their age as well as being enlarged to accommodate the restoration. The difference is immediately apparent; the “new” scenes are scarred with lines, sometimes blurry, sometimes grainy. That said, after about 30 minutes (while you’re playing a game of could-this-scene-have-been-cut?) you forget the disparity and just become enveloped in the film. The acting does indeed tend toward silent-film histrionics, but in a movie dominated by men, it’s the female lead, Brigitte Helm, as the saintly Maria and her evil doppelganger robot impersonator, who captivates through and through. Helm has the unenviable task of playing both madonna and whore, but wow! As the “machine-man” version of Maria, Helm seems like a punk-rock queen, and a raised eyebrow from her conveys more than most recent Academy Award-winning performances altogether. If you get a chance to see this restoration, you must.

And, if you can, see it with live music accompaniment. The Alloy Orchestra provided live music for the Grauman’s screening, and live pulsating rhythms for the first time made me understand the magic that silent films must have conveyed when first unveiled to the public, seeing images you could never conceive in your own mind set to the musical version of a live heartbeat. It’s truly magical.

And, that magic was what was celebrated throughout the four days of the fest in various forms — the visceral experience of true moviegoing. Loath to attend movies at my local cineplex, I found myself completely enjoying the communal experience — hearing laughs where I may not have expected, smiling ruefully as audience members clapped at various names through the opening credits, feeling the tension that pulls people together; it was a great reminder of the power that movies still hold in the era of ultra-modern technology that can isolate us from audiences. Hopefully, this kind of classic moviegoing will never go out of style.

Thanks for reading and coming along with us (virtually) to this unique, celebratory festival:  check out photos here, our Twitter feed here for highlights from the event, and our special section on the festival here.

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.

After yesterday’s overcast chilliness, regular southern California sunshine came back to Hollywood, and with it, gaggles of tourists. The four festival venues — Grauman’s Chinese, Mann’s Chinese (two screens there), and the Egyptian Theater — are all within a stone’s throw from the Hollywood Roosevelt HQ, so getting to a film means running two gauntlets: the traffic and the tourists. The crosswalks, while a bit of a long wait, are the easy part. The tourists, however… With everyone looking down at their feet to see whose star they’re trampling upon, it requires savvy navigation and radar skills to figure out who may suddenly stop short, or who’s creating their own new photo op. The biggest hub is around Michael Jackson’s star, which is (in)conveniently located in front of the Grauman’s gift shop, adjacent to the theater.

But once you find your way inside, things get much calmer — especially before 9am. Decreeing it far too early for the psychedelic fantasia of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I decide to go old-school Hollywood with an early screening of 1952′s The Bad and the Beautiful, a behind-the-scenes Hollywood melodrama starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell and Gloria Grahame (who won a supporting actress Oscar), and directed by Vincente Minnelli. There’s a surprisingly robust crowd for the early hour, and turns out even Robert Osborne is up this early too, and introduces Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who was about 8 years old when filming commenced. They chat for about 10 minutes or so, and the conversation turns toward Lana’s sense of humor, a tangent that seems jarring — until you see the movie. This is probably Turner’s best performance ever, and as an alcoholic actress with daddy issues and an inferiority complex, she’s more relaxed than you’ll probably ever see her on screen, and handles Minnelli’s shifts from melodrama to cynical wit with amazing ease. Her tour-de-force is the quintessential nervous-breakdown-while-driving-a-speeding-car-in-the-pouring-rain scene, which she still probably owns to this day. The film itself is not perfect — it feels like a Hollywood knockoff of All About Eve, with Kirk Douglas as the schemer everyone’s entranced by — but Minnelli, who still remains an underdog in the auteur-appreciaton sweepstakes, knows how to handle a camera with balletic skill, and takes unparalleled care with his actors. There isn’t a false note in the cast, and Grahame, who’s in only a handful of scenes, waltzes off with the film as a steely, ambitious, yet loving and naive southern belle, a prototype steel magnoila.

As it turns out, directors will emerge as the theme of the day, as I next make my way to “Club TCM” for a conversation between Leonard Maltin and director Peter Bogdanovich. As the two enter, Maltin looks even more gee-whiz in person than he does on TV, and Bogdanovich is wearing what I now take to be his trademark cravat. The two get comfy in easy chairs among an audience of 100 or more, and begin talking about Bogdanovich’s early career. Things start off with The Last Picture Show, and Bogdanovich proves to be an easygoing yet compelling raconteur, talking about the casting process of the film (he let Ellen Burstyn choose her own role) and Orson Welles’ initial disapproval of the script (it was “dirty”). Being only an hour, the conversation doesn’t progress further past Paper Moon in Bogdanovich’s filmography, but does include a variety of tales about famous directors, from John Ford to Orson Welles to Alfred Hitchcock and even Fritz Lang. Two observations of Bogdanovich’s stand out: his matter-of-factness when talking about how Tatum O’Neal was “old beyond her years” even at age 8 thanks to the life-experience crammed into such a short time, and the director’s response to an audience members question about the industry: “The industry today? There is no industry… It’s gone to hell… The B picture is now the A picture,” he responded, with the caveat, “There’s always hope, I think.”

Two other directors — Douglas Sirk and Richard Rush — dominated my second half of the day, as I waited in a surprisingly long line for Imitation of Life; apparently, everyone waiting had also seen Valley of the Dolls copious times. The print itself was a tad disappointing, but the Sirk strings, after all these years, were effectively played and pulled. The audience laughed outright at Lana Turner’s oblivious racism (and numerous costume and hair changes), but when the melodrama kicked into high gear, snuffles were loudly apparent throughout the theater. Later, the film’s two Oscar-nominated stars, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner (mother of director Chris Weitz), chatted with Robert Osborne about the movie. Dashing from there, I somehow managed to breeze into the screening of The Stunt Man at the festival’s smallest venue, the less-than-200 seat auditorium at Mann’s Chinese. Ben Mankiewicz introduced Oscar-nominated director Richard Rush before the film, which was being presented on a brand-new print just struck last week. The film, from 1980, still holds up amazingly well — Peter O’Toole is arguably at his career-best as an egomaniacal director toying with a Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback, almost crazier than O’Toole) on the run from the law. If its mix of comedy, action, drama and meta-Hollywood still strikes you as fresh now, imagine what audiences back in 1980, when Ordinary People was the year’s Oscar winner, made of this unique, one-of-a-kind, behind-the-scenes tall tale. While obviously and lovingly choreographed down to the nth degree, the movie still retains a kind of 70s/early 80s spontaneity most usually associated with Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph. And there are echoes of Fellini as well, with the driven auteur-director and the occasional bursts of circus-style music; this would make a fantastic double bill with 8 1/2. Afterwards, Railsback and co-star Barbara Hershey joined Mankiewicz and Rush for a 15 minute discussion of the movie. What was most notable weren’t bon-mots but the effortless camaraderie the three still shared after 30 years. It felt like absolutely no time had passed between what was seen on the screen and the present day.

Elsewhere today: Mel Brooks finally got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (where not a few TCM head honchos developed sunburn), and hosted a screening of the original 1968 The Producers; Jean-Paul Belmondo appeared at the screening of Breathless; Tony Curtis cameoed at Sweet Smell of Success, and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull of 2001 fame hosted his own panel at Club TCM. TCM is discouraging massive photo-taking at screenings and events (the lighting sure doesn’t help either), but is providing official photos, which we’ll be publishing throughout the weekend in our special section on the festival. And make sure to check out our Twitter feed @ IMDbLive as well.

Saturday: I’ll be following the Hustons around all day, as the festival celebrates the cinematic family with three films: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Proposition. If energy allows, I’ll try to pick up the 10pm screening of Saturday Night Fever, which is already garnering retro-buzz among festival-going 20-somethings who have never seen John Travolta’s disco moves on the big screen — if ever.

Walking into the Hollywood Roosevelt isn’t exactly like walking back in time, but the place is positively swathed in glamour — and the TCM Film Festival. The main lobby – not to be confused with the mezzanine or the ground floor, where you actually check in – is dominated by a lush lounge in its center, and the “TCM Club” off to the side, where under colored lights, passholders can mix, mingle, drink, eat, and be entertained by strangely ambient music alongside vintage film clips. It’s not 1930s chic, but it holds a certain charm and quality, a 21st century riff on the early century lounges where silent film stars may have reclined to see and be seen. Granted, we’re all festival-goers here, not movie stars, but it’s fun to pretend.

There was no pretend glamour at the red carpet for the opening night of the festival (a screening of a restored edition of A Star Is Born, with two of Judy Garland’s children — Lorna and Joey Luft — on hand), held across the street at the legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Over the classic handprints and footprints of stars past and present walked a number of stars both past and present, ranging from TV ingenues to Oscar winners. Some reporters and photographers couldn’t place all the names to the faces, but that didn’t stop them from flagging down whoever they could — Tony Curtis, Eva Marie Saint, Ernest Borgnine, Eli Wallach, Tippi Hedrin… Everyone wanted a piece of Martin Landau, who managed the gauntlet adroitly. Alec Baldwin, half-scowling and half-amused, went about halfway before forsaking the rest of the press line for the company of film critic Leonard Maltin. Some stars just sauntered by, or hung out with friends: the lovely Diane Baker (you may remember her as the senator in The Silence of the Lambs) chatted up everyone with such ease many took her to be a press agent. You could turn around suddenly and there would be Jacqueline Bisset, lovely as ever and just as charming; ditto Illeana Douglas, who seemed to materialize out of thin air only to disappear just as quickly.

The stars skewed definitely old-school, but they were anything but snooty — Tab Hunter greeted everyone with a handshake and the declamatory, “Hi, I’m Tab.” (Like you wouldn’t know…) Eva Marie Saint leaned over the velvet rope to confide favorite stars and scenes. Margaret O’Brien pranced about in a little electric-blue outfit, complete with feathers she was happy to show off to anyone. There were a handful of the recently-minted famous, most notably Andrea Bowen of “Desperate Housewives” and Kate Flannery of “The Office,” but the past reigned supreme: heck, even Hugh Hefner showed up!

The Mr. Congeniality award definitely goes to Danny Huston, who talked charmingly about his family, his movies, and what he was looking forward to over the weekend; he went out of his way to thank reporters who mentioned The Proposition (screening this weekend), and projected ease, charm, and classic good looks — you wouldn’t recognize him as the evil villains of some of his blockbuster films. And director Peter Bogdanovich, rocking a cravat, was the last man standing, making sure everyone who wanted an interview got one.

Once the red carpet was rolled up and the velvet ropes down, it was over to the pool at the Roosevelt for a photo-op featuring Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, the stars of Neptune’s Daughter, which was slated to screen that evening by said pool. The two stars posed with some modern-day bathing beauties known as the “Aqualillies” and later chatted briefly with host Ben Mankiewicz before the film rolled. As the sun gradually set, one couldn’t help but feel concern for the performing Aqualillies, who did a water ballet in honor of Williams in what could not have been very warm water. Considering there were only six of them, it was a fun performance, the highlight being when one swimmer/dancer sprang out of the water as if she were part-dolphin. The large crowed around the pool gave Williams and Garrett warm standing ovations, especially when both crooned lines from the film’s Oscar-winning song, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

And that it was. An overcast LA day gave way to chilly night on the first evening of the fest, but judging from both the stars and the attendees, warmth was going to be on hand for the rest of the weekend. More people are passionate about classic film than you might think, and it gave the opening night a definite sense of fun, camaraderie, and excitement for things to come.

Check out our photo gallery for more pics, and our TCM Classic Film Festival section for more.