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The 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival

Signs of the push-pull of commerce and art that have always been present within TCMFF were more apparent this year.

The 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival
Photo: TCM Classic Film Festival

I emerged out of the train station and onto the roiling snake pit of Hollywood Boulevard this past Thursday afternoon with a singularity of purpose that has served well those who have learned to safely navigate this peril-ridden stretch of tourism and other desperate forms of humanity. Among the mass of logy sidewalk gawkers, shaggily costumed superheroes, and barkers hawking coupons for bus tours and free drinks at comedy clubs, the guy in the Creamsicle-colored tuxedo and matching top hat didn’t even cause me to balk as he moved toward me on the sidewalk. He certainly didn’t seem out of place, even as his lanky, six-and-a-half-foot frame towered above the stumpier heights of most everyone else bobbling down the Walk of Fame. But as we passed each other, this orangey giant suddenly offered up a loud, impassioned plea to the crowd, for no readily apparent reason, which put me at attention: “Remember Bob Hope!” Wondering if a declaration of fond tribute for, say, Mickey Rooney would have been timelier, I moved right along. No matter. There could be no doubt, if there ever was any, that the 2014 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival, headquartered as always in the very heart of the mythological realm of Hollywood, was now officially under way, a gathering of film buffs vacationing from the real world among the icons and memories of movie-studio glory, where there would be no lack of warm remembrance for Hope or Rooney or any of a hundred other stars whose images and talents would be ceaselessly evoked and reminisced upon over the next four days.

This spring, the festival took the opportunity to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Turner Classic Movies itself, the cable channel that has risen from relatively humble beginnings to become a cultural force for marketing nostalgia, to be sure, but also for film preservation and restoration, as well as for fostering an appreciation for this prevalently black-and-white world in younger, newer generations of filmgoers for whom even vibrantly colored films of the classic Hollywood era often seem too arch and distant from The Way Things Are Now to be of much interest. Despite the many ways in which narrative movies from around the world have remained recognizably the same over decades of film history, a weekend within the cultural confines of the festival, now in its fifth year, goes a long way toward underlining just why the past generations of films seem like such irresistible catnip to some, impenetrable to others. The often more emphatic, stylized acting, the more patient approach to mise-en-scène and narrative structure, the frequent playfulness and coded layering of language, and sometimes the boiled-down, no-nonsense, information-packed momentum of the classic era’s B movies—these are all signals indicating the viewer’s emergence into a strange world, a foreign country where things really are done differently.

Of course, nostalgia is hard-wired into the very idea of a festival devoted to classic films, and the fact that TCMFF has become such a solid draw as a vacation destination for thousands of folks from all around the country and the world, young and old alike, speaks volumes about the success it’s enjoyed in translating the reverence of an older generation of film appreciation into more market-friendly terms. But the festival has never been exclusively about rose-colored glances backward, whether rendered in Technicolor or in luminous shades of silver and gray and deep, rich black. The official theme of this year’s festival was “Family in the Movies: The Ties That Bind,” an umbrella which covered a subdivision of films concerned with single motherhood, with the relationship between fathers and daughters and between sisters, with aging parents and with the dysfunction that often hobbles and even destroys the stability of the family, however it’s defined—all concerns that touch modern audiences as deeply now as they ever did.

Of course, in the cool shade of the family tree as constructed by the festival’s programmers, plenty of familiar themes and situations were inevitably and expectedly explored over a wide range of movies like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Bachelor Mother (1939), Best Boy (1979), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Eraserhead (1977), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Her Sister’s Secret (1946), I Remember Mama (1948), The Innocents (1961), Stella Dallas (1937), and even What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). But within the group of films I chose to see, using no guiding principle other than favoring the rare or unknown, or even just the opportunity to see old favorites in the best possible restored light, strange juxtapositions and connections often sparked and made the festival come alive for me in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated.

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And this year, after so many great successes in spotlighting a world of cinema that seems hopelessly quaint to some, but can still speak to modern audiences with surprising relevance and acuity, signs of the push-pull of commerce and art that have always been present within TCMFF were more apparent than ever. Among 2014 celebrations of the careers and enduring legacies of Quincy Jones, Alan Arkin, Maureen O’Hara, and Jerry Lewis, all of whom were present throughout the festival, and that of Charlton Heston, a two-film tribute to Richard Dreyfusss stood out maybe not like a sore thumb, but surely a problematic pinkie. The featured live interview with the star is precisely the sort of appealing attraction the festival has come to specialize in. However, and not that it’s necessarily relevant, the selected films, The Goodbye Girl, for which he won an Oscar for Best Actor in 1977, and Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), for which he was again nominated for the same award, aren’t this man’s ideas of the sort of “classics” that make for especially rewarding festival programming. For really interesting Q&A possibilities, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Inserts, The Big Fix, or even Whose Life Is It Anyway? would all have been fascinating (and attendance-challenging) choices, as perhaps another run at Close Encounters of the Third Kind would have as well. But lines for both The Goodbye Girl and Mr. Holland’s Opus seemed to confirm that there was definitely interest among the festival pass holders in honoring Dreyfuss with these movies.

Apart from the movies, though, Dreyfuss’s appearance signals what might be a big question on the horizon for this actor/filmmaker/celebrity-oriented festival: Who are the actors and filmmakers of the more recent generations (say, the ’70s and ’80s) who can be fêted, who may deserve to be fêted, and who will make appearances to discuss their work 10, 20 years from now? (Several decades ago, the idea of honoring Bob Hope might have seemed just as premature, if not downright silly, but now, well, just go talk to the Creamsicle Giant.) It’s a tangled question that encompasses whether or not Hollywood has among its current crop of stars anyone who’s likely to be able to stand with, and not be pointedly diminished by the ghosts of icons like Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Sturges, and Howard Hawks at this unique festival, one which goes to the heart, as these questions usually do, of the newer generation of movies themselves.

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.

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It was a strange coincidence that so many of the movies I chose from TCMFF’s eternally bounteous and vexing schedule—so many intriguing choices often competing in the same blocks of time—dovetailed so neatly with O’Hara’s brave and clear-headed take on her own mortality. Leo McCarey’s powerful Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) lays out its empathy with dramatic sensitivity and without apology, as an aged couple (played by Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore), who’ve stumbled financially in the shadow of the Great Depression, lose their house and are passed around among their children, who squabble about and dodge responsibility for their suddenly inconvenient parents. These folks may have come to terms with the inevitably of their own passing, and their own irrelevance to their children’s lives, but the pain with which they’re so unceremoniously left to deal with in the time they have left is what hits the gut most squarely.

A luminous digital restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), introduced by Powell’s widow, Oscar-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, showcased the film’s genuinely awesome melding of unerring romantic instinct with a clear-eyed, unsentimental acceptance of death. An ostensibly doomed RAF fighter pilot (David Niven) falls in love with an American officer (Kim Hunter) who comforts him in his last moments before his plane goes down in the foggy night. But when the angel assigned to sweep the pilot up to heaven fails to find him, he returns to Earth, meets the woman behind that comforting voice, and then must construct a legal case before a heavenly tribunal to keep the unintentional extension granted to his life. The film’s much-celebrated visual riches, courtesy of cinematographer Jack Cardiff, have never been as rapturously evident as they are in this new restoration, supervised by Sony Pictures Classics’ Grover Crisp. The dissolves back and forth between Cardiff’s stunning black-and-white heaven and the vibrant hues he bestows upon earthly existence (“One is starved for Technicolor up there,” opines one heavenly emissary upon his arrival on terra firma) are the perfect context for contemplating Powell’s and Pressburger’s fearless examination of the conviction of love, one which easily transcends the government-commissioned theme of U.S.-British relations near the end of World War II. Here, death, beyond the awful violation of its physical reality, has no sting; reunion with friends, family and loved ones is virtually guaranteed. It’s the idea of separation itself, the knowledge of a continued existence without true fulfillment, which is intolerably painful.

And finally, anyone could be forgiven for a failure to imagine that the 1954 Japanese version of Ishirō Honda’s seminal monster classic Godzilla and Yasujirō Ozu’s understated drama of familial conflict, the magnificent Tokyo Story (1953), both movies devastating in specific but seemingly unrelated ways, could ever be so illuminating when seen in such close proximity. They were made and released within a year of each other, approximately eight years after the end of World War II, and both are informed by the inexorable, inescapable agony and sadness of rebuilding life in the shadow of the bomb. In form and content, of course, they couldn’t be more different, yet that shared history is nonetheless revealing.

Godzilla, seen at TCMFF in a spectacular 60th-anniversary digital restoration, has always been recognized as a metaphor for the nuclear-powered decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But those most familiar with the re-edited American version, which inserts Raymond Burr into the action as a reporter commenting on the creature’s path of destruction and deletes all overt references to uncomfortable reality, may be surprised to realize that the bomb isn’t coded subtext in the Japanese version—it’s openly acknowledged. There’s even a blackly comic conversation between three commuters, one of whom complains about how annoying it is to have survived Nagasaki only to have to face the possibility of being eaten by Godzilla. But Honda’s movie is striking in how seriously those memories of nuclear death reverberate throughout the movie. Those who primarily remember the myriad subsequent adventures of Godzilla and other Toho-created monsters like Rodan and Ghidorah will recognize the distinctly somber tone of the action here as a quality unique to the original film. Even the ominous themes of Akira Ifukube’s famous musical score, heard while Godzilla stomps through the city and reduces Tokyo to fiery wreckage, sound like a dirge, a less-than-faint, resonating reminder of an all-too-real black rain.

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At almost the same point along the timeline of cinema history, Ozu’s Tokyo Story plays out with quiet assurance, contrasting the simplicity of unassuming lives lived out in modern rural Japan with the busy citizenry of postwar Tokyo, where the cityscape is constantly interrupted by easily visible (but never commented upon) indications of reconstruction. Seen alongside Godzilla, Ozu’s movie, a meditation on the uneasy, shifting relationships between parents and children (it was partially inspired by Make Way for Tomorrow), might be thought of as one of the hundreds of thousands of stories taking place among the tiny buildings under Godzilla’s giant foot. This resonant, imperfect humanity is what’s lost when the mushroom cloud rises. In Tokyo Story, there’s as much emotional impact in a lowering of a glance, or in the raising a cup of sake in the comfort of close, familiar quarters, as in the rampage of a radioactive sea monster. Each of the characters in Tokyo Story are affected by the lingering nightmare of the war in ways they may not even be aware of, as well as ways—missing sons and husbands—they couldn’t possibly forget. In its own absorbing, beautifully modulated way, Ozu’s film acknowledges the horrors of the past and how they’ve been woven into the fabric of everyday life, somehow, miraculously, giving equal weight to both quiet despair and to hope, as well as for mourning on a grand and a very personal scale.

Movies like Tokyo Story, A Matter of Life and Death, Make Way for Tomorrow, and, yes, even Godzilla deeply engage in echoes and forebodings and the realities of facing death, which also means that they are just as richly engaged with its opposite. For if these classic movies understanding anything, it’s that if the depiction of the cessation of life is to have any meaning, that depiction must first pulsate with its own imagined evocation of joy, sorrow, wonder, frustration, love—in other words, all that which bestows upon the prospect of death its dire weight of anxiety, fear and loss.

And despite all that, attending the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival was hardly a funereal experience. How could it be when it afforded me, in addition to the glories already described, my first experience with On Approval (1944), Clive Brook’s hilarious, marvelously nasty adaptation of Frederick Lonsdale’s 1926 play of the same name? There were also, in addition to the ones already described, magnificent DCP restorations of Double Indemnity (1944) and, most spectacular of all, the eye-popping Johnny Guitar (1954). (Republic Pictures may have dubbed their process Tru-Color, but the supersaturated hues of that desert landscape and Joan Crawford’s primary-colored western wardrobe are true only to the greater glory of Hollywood imagination.) And maybe the most pure fun of all, TCMFF made one of my dreams come to glorious life: to see Mel Brooks introduce Blazing Saddles (1974) in front of a packed house at the big Chinese Theater in Hollywood, the very palace where Brooks’s movie concludes its meta-maniacal devolution into comic insanity. Well, raise my rent!

Well, rather, let me raise a glass to the memory of Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney, and also to the memory of another bounteous showcase of cinematic riches courtesy of the TCM Classic Film Festival. However it continues to evolve and approach the questions that its continued healthy existence will surely raise, as long as it encourages a new generation to embrace the past, where they really did do things differently, I’m fine with all of its nostalgic indulgences. That any festival could cause so many connections for me over such a span of time and over such a breadth of cinematic languages is truly cause for celebration. The spring of 2015 can’t come soon enough.

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The TCM Classic Film Festival ran from April 10—13.

Dennis Cozzalio

Dennis Cozzalio is the blogger behind Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

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