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The 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival

Without a doubt, this 2011 edition was the film festival experience of the year for me.

TCM Classic Film Festival
Photo: TCM Classic Film Festival

I suppose it’s inevitable that some of the bloom would have come off the rose that was last year’s first annual TCM Classic Film Festival. I am, after all, a year older, and the time spent in between the first festival and this year’s model has found life getting more complicated, with less room for the study of cinema, classic or not, than my selfish patterns would prefer. But just because I may be mired in a sophomore slump of sorts doesn’t mean that in 2011 the TCM Festival was equally bogged down. Familiarity hardly bred contempt this time around, or complacency. If anything, there was a certain comfort factor built into the festival for me this year, a feeling that, while not radiating the kind of freshman excitement generated by last year’s fun (and my own initiation into the rites of festival film-going), certainly resonated with the buzz of discovery, of learning, about films unfamiliar, and blessedly, seemingly genetically remembered, and even of the value of an adrenaline rush of straight-up nostalgia. Without a doubt, this 2011 edition was the film festival experience of the year for me.

Certainly the buzz surrounding the festival had anything but diminished. This may be wishful thinking, I suppose, but it struck me during the course of the year past that the first TCM Festival marked if not an awakening, exactly, then certainly a strengthening of the sense of value held by local cinephiles regarding the availability of classic cinema on big screens around Los Angeles. It remains a niche market as far as the general moviegoing public is concerned, and it’s hard not to look upon the advent of TCM moving out into the “real world” with this kind of concentrated theatrical presence as anything but a good thing, not only in the promotion of their own brand and positioning in the ever-broadening cable and satellite markets, but also for sowing the seeds of interest in what’s available in the cinema world after Turner leaves town. The 2011 Festival claimed a big upswing in sales of passes at all levels—TCMCFF 2012 is scheduled for this coming April—and the real beneficiaries of the sudden intense focus on classic films from all avenues and genres and nations will certainly be organizations like LACMA and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and cinemas like the New Beverly and the Cinefamily who depend on the adventurous and contagious spirit of the cinephile to remain vital and engaged on the film exhibition landscape. (They depend on something else too, the future of which is far less certain.)

The TCM Classic Film Festival remains a great place to make connections with people from all over the country, and from around the world as well, but I seemed to run into a lot more people from the greater Los Angeles area this year than I did last—a completely unscientific sampling, of course, but one that gave me reason to be cheerful about the notion of sowing seeds of classic film appreciation in this movie city, one which will set down roots that reach far deeper than the Casablanca/Gone with the Wind fan experience. (As part of the buildup to the festival, TCM took its show on the road this year to several cities in promotion of the festival and of classic film with its Road to Hollywood series which was, by all reports, very well received.)

As I began preparing for my own festival weekend in looking over the schedule, at first I was struck by a number of seemingly impossible choices. Unless I was remembering incorrectly (and believe me, such an occurrence is not out of the realm of possibility), I did not have this much difficulty mapping out what movies were essential to my experience during the first year. Some decisions get made automatically, of course, and this year, just like last, the hanging carrot of red carpet access and admittance to the festival’s opening night gala was snatched away almost as soon as it was dangled. So I could count on not having to worry about making it to Hollywood early to get in position for the long celebrity march into the Grauman’s Chinese Theater for the kickoff presentation, the 60th-anniversary digital restoration of An American in Paris.

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Of course I would gladly have participated in whatever cattle parade I would have been placed into should the opportunity have actually materialized, but much more so than last year I felt a distinct sense of relief at not being committed to being there and taking part. Every celebrity who would be appearing over the next four days would be heading into the theater to see the MGM musical, which announced with as much pomp and circumstance as possible this year’s festival theme, Music and the Movies. I won’t try to pretend that the prospect of seeing some of these luminaries, from movies both past and present, wasn’t tantalizing. But it was also easy to remember that the celebrities, though always exciting to see (especially when they participate in discussions and presentations preceding the movies themselves), never factor heavily into the construction of my plan of attack over the four-day schedule. (As concrete proof of this conviction, I planned to pass on all screenings that comprised the festival’s tribute to Hayley Mills, one of my great childhood crushes, because they conflicted with movies that were either more important or more obscure to me. Please believe that there was once a time when I would have killed to see Hayley Mills introduce The Parent Trap or Summer Magic or Whistle Down the Wind, and though the desire remains strong I could only muster a defeated shrug this weekend as opposed to a compulsion to wreak righteous vengeance on the programmer who scheduled her against Roy Rogers, Clint Eastwood, Clara Bow and Cary Grant.)

Night 1: Beauties, Suitors, Fools and Hangers-On

That highfalutin statement stated, I have to admit the alternative programming offered to those of us without the proper stature (or formal wear) to get into the Chinese on opening night just didn’t have the curious allure and the sincere evocation of old Hollywood that last year’s spectacular evening poolside with Esther Williams and the late Betty Garrett provided in spades. This is not to discount the fun that was surely had by those who opted to kick off the festivities in high style by the Hollywood Roosevelt pool this year. But I never seriously considered attending this year’s event, which was a (DVD) screening of Girl Happy (1964), Elvis Presley’s answer to the beach movie and, more importantly, Beatlemania, hosted by the movie’s costar Mary Ann Mobley and musician/actor Chris Isaak, whose wisecracking persona often consciously evokes that of the King. This is the one block of programming at the festival where I sensed a bit of the sophomore slump, and truly, the appearance of Williams and Garrett poolside, augmented by a performance by the Aqualillies, a water ballet troupe, was so thematically rich and resonant that it really was the essence of A Hard Act to Follow. So I opted to not challenge my memory of 2010 and what was probably as perfect an experience as I could have had and instead decided to wait and see if the folks putting together next year’s program can rediscover the inspiration of that poolside encounter with Neptune’s Daughter.

I had only two hard and fast rules for mapping my way through this year’s schedule. Number one: Try to avoid the familiar in favor of movies that were as yet unfamiliar to me. Number two: I must see at least one Roy Rogers movie. (Fans of old cowboy movies, like me, rejoiced when we found out that the 2011 TCM Festival would focus an entire series on the singing cowpoke’s movie career.) My sincere intent was that all my scrambling would be in service to these two streamlined tenets. So naturally I broke both of them right over my knee immediately upon my late arrival into Hollywood on Thursday night. Commitments at my office kept me busy enough that I realized there was no way to get to the nucleus of the festival, the swarming intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue (a.k.a. Los Angeles’s answer to Times Square), in time for any of the opening goodies, which started at 1:00 p.m. with an introductory panel hosted by the people behind the Turner Classic Movies channel, a 4:15 tribute to Hollywood photographer Jack Pashkovsky and a festival welcome party at Club TCM, the nightclub constructed exclusively for the festival inside the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel which would, as it did last year, serve as headquarters for the entire festival.

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As it turned out, I wouldn’t have been able to make it on time for Girl Happy even if I’d wanted to—I stumbled up the steps and out of the train station into Hollywood around 8:30 p.m., with just enough time to make my way over to the Roosevelt, snap a few photos and be on my way back to the Chinese complex which would, with no exceptions, be my home for the next three days. By arriving late I had already missed Girl Happy (1964), of course, but also a fascinating program of Walt Disney Laugh-o-Gram shorts dating from 1922, when Disney opened his Laugh-o-Gram Studio in Kansas City, as well as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), A Night at the Opera (1947) and the inaugural volley in the festival’s celebration of Roy Rogers, Under Western Skies (1938). I’d seen the Marx Brothers classic many times, and though I didn’t remember ever seeing Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s popular romantic drama (shown here as part of a tribute to Bernard Herrmann, who provided its memorable score), I knew that if I would have had the chance I would have kicked the festivities off with Roy and Dale and Trigger. Alas, it was not to be, and the evening’s second taste of the Rogers universe was actually not a Roy Rogers movie at all but instead a Republic Pictures musical called Casanova in Burlesque (1944), a zippy musical with Joe E. Brown and June Havoc in the lead and a sassy Dale Evans in a supporting role. This is the movie Evans made just before she first teamed with Rogers in The Cowboy and the Senorita, and though it was tempting, I was really jonesing for some wholesome horseback action, and Casanova just didn’t fill the bill.

So, my Roy Rogers intentions already dashed (at least for this truncated evening), I turned to considerations of what would be the one and only movie for my Thursday night TCM Festival opener. To hear Dorothy Herrmann speak before a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) would seem to be an obvious choice, at least for this sci-fi/movie music nerd. But I’d just seen the movie not long ago, and projected as well, so if I was going to be serious about my self-imposed rules, seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, even on that magnificent big screen inside the Chinese multiplex’s auditorium #1, just didn’t seem like the right choice. Unfortunately, for the integrity of those rules, the only other choice was also one I’d seen a couple of times, though not at all recently and never in 35mm. The last time I saw Josef Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) was in a shoebox-sized screening room on the University of Oregon campus some 30 or so years ago, and in 16mm, so it made sense that, through a process of elimination that would be far easier to endure than some of the choices that would follow, this was the movie to see.

I grabbed a spot in line along the edge of the corridor that serves as a breezeway into the main lobby of the Chinese multiplex, connecting the entrance of the theater on the Hollywood Boulevard side of the hall to the inner part of the structure where the parking lot can be easily accessed. This year’s line-up system seemed immediately less confusing to me than last year’s, or at least easier to get used to. Lines designated for auditorium #1 (the big one indoors which holds approximately 500 viewers) and auditoriums #3 and #4 (the tinier, screening room-sized cinemas, each with 177 seats) were easily determined and manned by a cadre of Turner Classic Film Festival volunteers who were, if anything, patient and helpful beyond the call of their undoubtedly meager pay. I was there early enough to get the third position in line, always a bonus for me—I am not allergic to standing in line under most circumstances, especially when I’m waiting to get something as special as this festival under way—and I came manned with my Trader Joe’s grocery bag, this evening filled with my note pad and my dog-eared copy of Robert Altman: An Oral Biography, which provided excellent literary sustenance throughout the weekend in situations just this like this one. (The only problem that cropped up from reading the book during my downtime here is that it inexorably stoked my desire to see an Altman movie, none of which were on display at this year’s festival. Perhaps an oversight that can be fixed next year…?)

As I waited, friends and fellow festival reporters Ariel Schudson and Bob Westal made it into the line behind me—I would save them a seat, despite the fact that saving seats was largely frowned upon by our friendly staffers (I’m such a rebel!)—and struck up a conversation with four women from San Francisco who were awfully excited about making the trip but showed little interest in me or my methods once I revealed to them that I would be skipping Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Now, Voyager (“There’s no skipping Bette, dude!” scolded the women, who I would somewhat sarcastically come to think of as the Bette Davis Appreciation Society—BDAS.) Relieved from further caustic examination of my proposed choices as the women turned away from me and toward a couple of their other friends, I returned to my book, its anecdotal structure perfect for simultaneous reading and people-watching, which is an essential part of the fun of attending a film festival which operates smack-dab in the middle of Hollywood.

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After a few moments I started to notice an increase in traffic through the breezeway leading to the parking lot, the obvious conclusion being that, it being close to 10:00 p.m., the big American in Paris gala must have just let out. My celebrity spidey-sense was well validated when mere seconds later I glanced up from my book and saw Ron Perlman, who was hosting midnight screenings of The Tingler and The Mummy at the Egyptian Theater on Friday and Saturday nights, glide through the crowd, followed in fairly quick and Hollywood-regal fashion by Rose McGowan, attending the festival to introduce A Place in the Sun, who couldn’t have been more lovely in a dress that suggested a cheongsam nightgown stitched by fairy godmothers for an all-girls weekend. At that point the population within the breezeway was getting pretty crowded, what with the line for Devil beginning to snake back around toward its head and the lucky festival-goers who just saw An American in Paris still filing through. And just as I was about to stick my nose back in for one last Altman anecdote before we were admitted to our auditorium, a woman and her party made their way past me in the hallway, quite close despite the fact that all we Marlene Dietrich devotees were separated from the crowd by a velvet rope. I looked up and realized that the person who had just brushed past me was Hayley Mills.

Breathlessly recounting the story in the bedazzled moments afterward, it was pointed out to me I apparently was so blinded by my encounter that I failed to notice that the woman accompanying her was none other than Juliet Mills, Hayley’s older sister and object of my intense Nanny and the Professor fixation of some 40 years past. I offer this story as irrefutable proof that not even living in Los Angeles for 24 years can completely shield one from an unexpected bout of star-struckery, and if attending this festival proves nothing else (and it proves plenty else), I’ll still thank TCM for that.

Seeing Hayley was a thrill, but don’t let me give the impression that Marlene in any way disappointed. Ariel, Bob and I settled into our seats with about 10 minutes to spare, long enough for me to realize that, as much fun as I had bopping around the festival pretty much on my own last year, it’s a much richer, exciting experience seeing these great films in the company of friends whom you know share your fundamental wavelength and openness to the experience. Of course, everyone who waits in line at 10:00 p.m. on a Thursday night to see The Devil is a Woman is likely to share that wavelength, and it’s a great relief to know going in that you’re not likely to be in for one of those devastating theatrical viewings of a classic film ambushed by the irony-drenched cackling of what my friend Richard Harland Smith recently termed “the porkpie hat set,” those of minimal acquaintance with film history who are in attendance primarily to prove how much smarter they are than the museum pieces trotting around on screen. And the film we saw on Thursday night, despite its 76-year age, played like anything but a dusty relic. Katie Trainor, Film Collections Manager at the Film Preservation Center of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, provided a fascinating introduction to the von Sternberg film. (Trainor introduced last year’s screening of the rare pre-code drama The Story of Temple Drake.) The film was, in 1935, the least well-received of all the von Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations, not least of all by the Spanish government, who cottoned not to the movie’s portrayal of the country’s police guard as a buffoonish contingent led by their soft brains, corrupt souls and, of course, blind lust. Under Spaniard threat to act against further Paramount releases in their market, Paramount chose the reactionary path, releasing von Sternberg from his contract and spearheading an effort to destroy all negatives of this box-office flop, which was clearly not worth all the international trouble it was causing.

Fortunately, the movie was Dietrich’s favorite of all the movies she made with the German director; she loved it so much that she socked away a print of her own before Paramount could destroy the master negative. Many years later Dietrich donated that print to MoMA, who restored the film quite some time ago. But the print we saw at TCM was in fact yet another restoration, this time to a durable polyester stock that Trainor assured us would be viable for projection and further prints for at least another 300 years. It’s easy to see why a self-serious government might take exception to their portrayal in such a fashion, but less easy to square that they would have such influence over Paramount’s behavior toward its own film. Surely the movie’s low box-office take was also important in shaping the studio’s indifference, but it’s more difficult to understand why they would have such little faith in the movie’s aesthetic accord with more beloved von Sternberg jewels like Shanghai Express.

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The Devil is a Woman vigorously epitomizes the luminously amoral, sexually voracious Dietrich persona, and it is merciless in its portrayal of the shameless attachments and milquetoast motivations of the men who cross her path. Perhaps the studio didn’t appreciate such reverse-shot emasculation, but nearly 80 years later the movie remains an erotic vision of a diva that thrills to toying with men who derive pleasure from willing sublimation to her designs. (Lionel Atwill’s Captain Costelar, in recounting of his own obsession with Dietrich to Cesar Romero’s Antonio, plays less like a warning siren than a fly wrapped in a spider’s silk which on some level enjoys the process of seeing another man taken in by the web.) The movie’s atmosphere of perverse carnality is amply echoed in its carnival trappings. Beauties, suitors, fools and hangers-on float through von Sternberg’s delirious fantasy of decorous (and claustrophobic) Spanish cityscapes trapped in a web of the director’s most feverish design; the images radiate through level upon level of streamers, scrims, lace netting, patterns of ornate lattice and ironworks until one can’t imagine the world any other way except as a vast garden of fleeting earthly delights and endless deception.

On the train ride home I already felt sated after one film, exhausted, and with three full days to go my energy and endurance would be taxed and invigorated by the movies yet to come, and I didn’t feel like my schedule had really even yet been set in stone. But The Devil is a Woman, so insinuating even within the imposed standards of the recently inaugurated Production Code, couldn’t have been a better start, and a stronger hint, of the early gems of the pre-Code era, and some fascinating visions of newer films that found their way to the screen through the cracks of the Hollywood system, which were only a few tantalizing hours away. Literally. It was just after midnight as I hopped one of the last trains out of the station and back toward the Valley. I’d have to be back out of bed by 5:00 a.m. if I expected to be seated for tomorrow morning’s first movie, which had a scheduled start time of 8:15.

Day 2: “All I Ever Did Was Change Clothes”

The great glory of navigating the 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival was that the wealth of the unknown and the rarely seen, especially gems from the pre-Code era, were so plentiful that it made mincemeat of what I had initially assumed would be some very tough decisions regarding my own schedule. I had also decided that, unlike last year, I would try to actively minimize high-speed jaunts out of the immediate vicinity of the Chinese complex, which meant that offerings at the Egyptian would automatically become lower priority for me. Friday provided the first real challenge to those expressed resolves to make the festival more about discovery than reassurance, more about geographical efficiency than opportunities for desperate foot races from cinema to cinema. In order to remain true to my plan, the morning’s first slot featured two high-profile temptations that I had to scuttle quickly. Peter O’Toole presenting Becket at the Egyptian was a serious temptation, but the movie itself was less the attraction than the star, and that star, no matter how gregarious, couldn’t compete with the movie’s lengthy running time.

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I also tossed out a chance to see a digitally restored A Streetcar Named Desire at the big Chinese on grounds of sheer familiarity. Of course the movie has long been a favorite, but despite the fact that I had never seen it theatrically—and remembering that discovering the breadth of director Elia Kazan’s work was one of last year’s real highlights for me, peaking with the TCM Festival screening of Wild River—I said no. Which left an opportunity to be entranced by Busby Berkeley (Gold Diggers of 1933) or line up a little later in the morning for one of the festival’s big attractions, the rarely seen The Constant Nymph (1943; Edmund Goulding). The movie, long a fan favorite and one of the TCM network’s most requested titles, turned out to be a big hit at the festival too, making for one of the longest and earliest-forming lines on the schedule.

But I didn’t see it for myself, because at 7:15 a.m. I arrived to get in line for a pre-Code double feature that would be better than the strongest cup of coffee in jolting me awake for the long day ahead. In the time it would take to see Becket and enjoy Peter O’Toole’s surely engaging discussion with Robert Osborne, I would see two vivid, nasty pulp pieces from the early days of Warner Brother and Vitaphone pictures, and that was a deal I couldn’t pass up.

Both Taxi! (1932; Roy Del Ruth) and Two Seconds (1932; Mervyn LeRoy) were introduced by Mike Mashon, film historian and curator at the motion picture division of the Library of Congress, who expressed his contagious enthusiasm for these films, and for all the films of the pre-Code era, and got a Starbucks-fueled audience (about half the capacity of the 144-seat auditorium #3) up to speed on their historical context. Taxi! was James Cagney’s follow-up to The Public Enemy (1931), and Warners really wanted to capitalize on his man-of-the-people appeal. He stars as Matt Nolan, an independent driver around whom other cabbies gravitate in the fight against the corrupt influence of a big cab company, and the movie is electrified by Cagney’s energy. The picture is famous for its scene of Cagney speaking Yiddish, but it should be even more famous for the kind of gritty, bull-headed force personified by Cagney and reflected in Roy Del Ruth’s bare-knuckle style, which propels the movie itself like a cab running behind schedule and careening between stops. George Raft, still then a couple of pictures away from Scarface, has an uncredited cameo as a dance contestant, and the movie gets a terrific foundation from reliable pros like Warners stock players Guy Kibbee, George E. Stone and Dorothy Burgess.

But the most astonishing surprise to these eyes offered by Taxi! came via the vibrant Loretta Young, who has never been an actress who held much appeal for me. Young starred in the kind of romantic programmers, titles like Wife Husband and Friend and, yes, The Bishop’s Wife that were completely outside my field of interest, and her persona (as I perceived it growing up) was far too stuffy and matronly to stir my interest in the way of, say, Rita Hayworth or Gene Tierney. She didn’t seem to have that dark undertow that made me want to come back for more after what little taste that I did get. But Mashon warned us that Young was never more beautiful than in Taxi!, and I have to think he’s right. I certainly had no idea that she was so devastatingly lovely as she is here. The kicker in her pairing with Cagney is that she has the necessary astringency as well to survive on screen with him and make her own scorched impression. As Matt’s ill-fated lover, Young spins her own vortex of plain-Jane erotic allure around that level-headed center of comely assurance and wisdom, resulting in a combination that encourages Cagney’s vitality, all elbows and fists, and gives him, and the audience, occasional respite from the movie’s intense, almost documentary-like atmosphere. (Not long after seeing Taxi! I caught up with Young paired with Ray Milland in one of those romantic comedies I’d always avoided, The Doctor Takes a Wife, and found her comic timing delightful. It seems I have further investigation to do on the subject of Loretta Young.)

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Two Seconds is primarily a showcase for Edward G. Robinson and, like Cagney’s shift from The Public Enemy, it’s a change of pace. Robinson starred in three features in 1931 and 1932 in between his star-making triumph as Rico in Little Caesar and his tour de force performance in this pain-drenched morality piece, and what it lacks in Taxi!’s straight-ahead momentum it makes up for in the gravity of Robinson’s doomed presence. The movie’s conceit is that we’re seeing the life of humble (and humbled) construction worker John Allen as fate puts the pieces in place that will lead to a murder conviction and his last dramatic moments in the electric chair. (The movie’s title is taken from Nolan’s reflection on his situation, all of which takes place in the final two seconds of his life before the executioner flips the switch.)

The picture is based on a Broadway play by Elliot Lester, and its roots on the stage are never fully severed by director Mervyn LeRoy. But again, that nasty, pre-Code Warners (or Vitaphone) style plays directly into the movie’s strength, providing plenty of scurrilous attitude to counterbalance the wobbly surety of Allen’s worldview. Seems he’s far too trustworthy when it comes to the female of the species, and damned if dance hall floozy Shirley (Vivienne Osborne) doesn’t take advantage of his every generous impulse, fooling him (and us) at first with her feigned sincerity. Allen’s cynical pal and co-worker Clark (Preston Foster) suspects the worst, and he gets dealt the worst too, when Allen falls into alcohol-fueled disillusionment and begins to believe that Clark and Shirley are betraying him. The setup and (pardon me) execution of Two Seconds are, I think, a bit more routine than that of Taxi!, but the movie still has a scrappy vitality. And it also has the invaluable depth of Robinson himself. A great character actor who was able to carry movies that would have scuttled the ambitions of more conventionally handsome lead players, he invests Two Seconds with exactly the kind of melodramatic pathos that seems earned by the character, not bestowed upon by the actor. The wild card he and LeRoy have up their sleeve is an extended, expressionistic monologue delivered by Robinson in the courtroom after the delivery of his death sentence that may be every actor’s dream but is specifically Robinson’s claim to true movie-acting glory. San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle once wrote of the actor’s glorious emotional upheaval in Two Seconds:

“(Robinson) endows the speech with the shape and size of melodrama, but maintains the precision of a ballet dancer. Remaining true to his core, and so in control, he goes to a deep place, without fear, hesitation or bluffing, using himself unflinchingly.

Though it has been revealed that the murder for which he will be executed was an accident, Allen recognizes his friend’s good intentions as well as the dark undercurrent of rage and jealousy in himself and when he pleads to the judge (while looking straight at the camera, and us) for the harshest possible treatment it’s an intensely chilling moment of self-condemnation. “It ain’t right to kill a man and let a rat live,” he reasons, and of course we already know which creature is the next to die.

This rare encounter with a double feature the likes of Taxi! and Two Seconds threw into vivid relief Mashon’s argument that there is a solid pre-Code case to be made for the studio as auteur, Warner Brothers/Vitaphone’s sort of industrial-era sociological approach being but one excellent example. But it also presaged my festival experience as one that would lean heavily, and happily, on movies of the pre-Code era and whetted my appetite for more encounters with the movies from this giddy and relatively untamed window of movie history. Citing another of LaSalle’s observations, when the critic wrote of an upcoming festival of pre-Code films, “the kick of the pre-Codes is the opposite of nostalgia. Watching them, we don’t search for the past in the present. Rather, we discover the present in the past.” This could be a telling truism for the entirety of the TCM Classic Film Festival, or at least a noble aspiration. But in watching Taxi!, Two Seconds and the other delights that were yet to come, LaSalle’s notion dawned on me as a sweet revelation, an invitation to explore a rich chapter in film history which hints at the entirely different reality we might be celebrating, had not the forces of censorship insisted on the fork in the road that made it necessary for filmmakers to learn to disguise the more specifically adult aspects of their stories, the fork that has led us to where we are.

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Friday afternoon’s schedule provided more scheduling challenges. In preparation for the festival, I wrote to a friend, “As much as I’d like to take in the panel on ‘The Best Trailers Ever Made’ at 2:00 p.m., there’s no way I can miss Bigger than Life, screening in the presence of one of my great movie crushes, Barbara Rush… The 4:00 block is another gnarly thicket. You have Girl Crazy—Mickey and Judy with that great Busby Berkeley finish; British Agent, an early Michael Curtiz thriller starring Kay Francis and Cesar Romero; and To Kill a Mockingbird which, like Streetcar earlier, gets bounced simply because I’ve seen it too many times. So naturally I drifted toward the voyage led by Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad…

But the sad realities of life have their way of imposing themselves even within the rarified bubble of a film festival. Earlier in the week one of my wife’s uncles came to the end of his long life, and his funeral happened to be scheduled a considerable distance away, in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley, for mid-afternoon on this very Friday. I had considered opting for festival-justified funeral exemption status, but I just couldn’t do it. As a result, I would have to miss my date with Barbara Rush, not exactly a world-crushing proposition (and I had seen Bigger than Life courtesy of the lovely Criterion Blu-ray very recently). It was a disappointment, but not one to compare with the one I would have felt in myself if I had allowed my love of the movies to overshadow, in this particular moment, my love and respect for my extended family.

Incredibly, Los Angeles traffic on an early Friday afternoon cooperated completely, both to and from the Rose Hills Funeral Home and Mortuary, and by 3:15 I was out of my mourning togs and back inside the Chinese multiplex lobby, where I met up with Ariel and filed into the tiny auditorium for my first 35mm encounter with Ray Harryhausen’s seminal and influential Dynamation epic. The pre-show context was provided by film historian Bruce Crawford, who informed the crowd that Harryhausen and Schneer were looking for a simple way to distinguish this new, more lavish and expensive picture from the cheaper films—The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth among them—they had produced before. One way was to use color for the first time; the other was in the approach to the musical score. Harryhausen reportedly wanted to hire Miklos Rosza or Max Steiner, but it was Schneer who insisted upon Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann’s score, which some consider to be among the greatest and most influential of all time, would mark the first of four collaborations with the Harryhausen/Schneer team, and according to Raymond it was Herrmann’s personal favorite of the four. (The movie screened at TCM as part of a 100th-birthday tribute to Bernard Herrmann; other films in the series included Citizen Kane, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Trouble with Harry, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Taxi Driver.) From its first triumphant fanfare over the movie’s credits, Herrmann’s score soars and enlivens the drama, elevating the spectacle to a more allusive and sensually ripe plane, even though I have to admit a personal preference for Herrmann’s even more thematically adventurous music for Island and Jason. But whether or not they are adorned by Herrmann’s grace and grandeur, seeing Harryhausen films projected provides such a distinct experience from the way most movie/fantasy geeks of my generation, myself included, of course, initially took them in—as either Saturday-afternoon matinees perforated by commercials and cuts on TV, or through the magic of super-8mm condensations that could be shown at home anytime we needed a fix. (Remember, youngsters, the days of the very first Betamaxes were still seven or eight years away when I first started recognizing Harryhausen’s as a recurring name whose movies could not be missed.)

Seen in a theater, the grandeur and mystery of a movie like Sinbad are largely restored, though my senses were also heightened to the gap between modern technology and more routine achievements of computer-generated imagery. Part of the reason Harryhausen’s films had and still have magic in them is due to the fact that they are quite literally hand-made; Harryhausen didn’t supervise a battleship-sized effects squadron; he was a crew of one, and he laid down on the miniature sets and moved each creature himself, incrementally, creating the illusion of movement one frame at a time. But those groundbreaking fantasy films are special too because they stood apart on the landscape of the year’s release schedule. Though apprentice animators like David Allen and Jim Danforth were eventually part of projects that eventually tried to recapture the allure of their mentor’s movies, there was quite simply nothing else like a Harryhausen/Schneer joint at the time. They weren’t just one more example of a Hollywood slate overloaded on images aspiring to the awesome, stretched extra-wide to compete for the rapidly deteriorating attention-spans of an audience sated and bored by repeated exposure to the impossible, the fantastic, the absurdly overscaled. Movies like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Mysterious Island and Jason and the Argonauts were the fountains of imagination from whence sprang the inspiration of an entire generation of filmmakers, for better and most certainly for worse. As I was watching the exploits of Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews), the tiny Princess Parisa (the exquisite Kathryn Grant) and the villainous Sokurah (Torin Thatcher) I fell under the spell of that handmade quality just like always, and seeing the movie writ so large for the very first time I also luxuriated in imagining what it must have been like to be among the first to have ever seen such a marvel unspool on the big screen back in 1957.

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But I also felt myself becoming a little protective of the movie’s relative innocence. I’ve heard enough pseudo-sophisticated complaining about the quaint artificiality of Harryhausen’s animation, and always in comparison to the supposedly superior marvels of today’s technologically pristine achievement in visual effects, that I begin to shift into defensive mode even when no one is audibly complaining. Today’s visual effects largely aim to completely obliterate the need for a suspension of disbelief; and when the subject is a one-eyed Cyclops fighting Sinbad and his scurrying soldiers on a beach, that’s a tall order to fill. Harryhausen’s movies argue eloquently for the audience’s role in filling that gap between what they see and what they understand to be possible. This is admittedly a strange role for a fantasy film to fulfill, and I doubt this was heavy on the minds of Harryhausen and company when 7th Voyage was released. But now, when movies like Sinbad exist as historical artifacts afloat on a sea crowded with increasingly irrelevant big-budget effects extravaganzas, there is, as I see it, increased value in the films of this earlier generation that provided their own miracles but do not insist, as so many modern movies do, on doing all the work, when they deign to do any work at all. The audience must allow itself to be transported in a Harryhausen film, not only to the fantastical world that the film inhabits, but also to a world of the past where audiences sat in rapt anticipation of being swept away instead of in a state of bemused indifference at the prospect of having seen it all, daring the movie to blow them away. And transported we were on that Friday afternoon, back to a Saturday-matinee sensibility that proved that the thrill was far from gone, and that the essence of those thrills was still accessible in the imprecise, soulful fantasy evocations of an effects master whose last work was done 30 years ago but whose ability to transfix willing audiences remains as potent as ever.

Eats at this year’s TCM Festival were economically dictated. Each day I packed a cooler bag full of sandwiches and a couple of waters in an attempt to eschew the siren call of the street dog, always a Hollywood temptation, the tempting aroma wafting from the Johnny Rockets burger franchise just around the corner from the Chinese’s lobby, and the endless availability of popcorn and Diet Pepsi in the theater itself. The sandwiches worked their space-occupying magic, and they were much cheaper than hitting Johnny Rockets for breakfast, lunch and dinner too. I did allow myself one bag of popcorn and one Diet Pepsi per day, though, and since I only left the friendly confines of the Chinese multiplex once during the entire run of the festival the true value of the refillable large popcorn and soda sizes soon became evident. If part of the subtext of this year’s festival was, for me anyway, reducing expenditures, then I had indeed done a pretty good job of making a 15-movie run on my own culinary ingenuity and the fumes emanating from my wallet. A quick bite to eat in between movies, or just as often gobbled during the movie thanks to the bottomless indulgence of my friends and everyone else seated around me (at least I left the egg salad at home!), and I was in good shape. And so it was as I stumbled out of the #3, gobbled my own pre-packed delights and got back in line to go right back in to the same auditorium for dessert in the form of the evening’s early indulgence, Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933).

While waiting, those of us who were near the front of the queue were treated to the embarrassing spectacle of a festivalgoer taking the low road of smug entitlement and berating one of the festival’s exceedingly friendly staffers over a perceived slight involving his placement in line and the fact that a few people had (accidentally) been admitted ahead of him. The rumpled punk kept loudly insisting, over repeated attempts by the patient staffer to get a word in edgewise and explain what had happened, that the staffer stop treating him as if he were a moron, to which those of us within earshot of his snotty tirade could only think, “Then stop giving her reason to, moron!” It wasn’t as if his admittance into the auditorium hung in the balance; he still had the pick of the 140-or-so seats that would be waiting when he finally got inside. No, it was just another exercise in ugly behavior leveled for no reason other than the fact that the opportunity arose and the porkpie-topped bulldog seized it. I had a grand time shaking my head in disbelief and embarrassment over this display along with a couple of exceptionally friendly gentlemen from Illinois who were standing in line with me, Vince Golik and Jim Brooks. It turned out that I would run into these guys a few more times before the weekend was over, and each time we had a grand time talking about the gems of the festival so far, including our discussion before Design for Living in anticipation of yet another Lubitsch classic that none of us had ever seen in such a splendid situation before.

In fact, the commiseration we enjoyed before the movie shines a light on yet another plus regarding the TCM Festival that at first seemed like a muffed opportunity but which in retrospect plays like a calculated gamble that paid off nicely. By now all the festival-goers had become well acquainted with the short rotation of TCM bumpers playing on screen before each feature, my favorite of which laid down a keen pop-up-book visual theme, accompanied aurally by a pleasing and altogether catchy drum-and-bass line which was thrown into relief by the slightest hint of glockenspiel added on top like a dollop of musical cherries. At first I thought that TCM might have put the empty screen time to better use with short films and information much like that which punctuates the airtime in between screenings on the network. But if the audience was all staring up at the screen for a bunch of what would amount to pre-movie commercials, we would be less likely to be spending that time in interaction with each other, trading stories, comparing notes, discovering mutual loves and hates, or otherwise getting to know fellow film fans in the fashion that has quickly become the hallmark of this film festival. I would much rather spend time enjoying the experience of this unique festival with people I’ve never met, even if it’s just to buzz about the bad behavior of other audience members, than by killing time absorbing on-screen factoids that I could access any-ol’-where. The fact is, the enthusiasm of people like Vince and Jim is what makes the TCM Film Festival special to me, and I’d be a fool to let anything distract me from accessing that enthusiasm. It’s an essential part of why I wanted to come back for my second year in the first place.

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The screening of Design for Living not only continued the theme of pre-Code Hollywood treasures that seemed to be coalescing around the festival, it also gave occasion to add another chapter in my continuing love affair with Miriam Hopkins, which was well stoked last year with the rare presentation of her triumphant turn in The Story of Temple Drake. Hopkins started off her show business career as a dancer, but a broken ankle sidelined an early opportunity to travel with a ballet troupe. So she threw her efforts behind getting an acting career started, leaning on her Georgia lineage to lend her credence and power to Broadway roles such as the original production of Jezebel in 1933. But it was the movies whose call she answered, debuting in 1930’s Fast and Loose with Carole Lombard and Frank Morgan (and mouthing Preston Sturges’ dialogue). Her very next movie, The Smiling Lieutenant, found her in the employ of Ernst Lubitsch, a writer and director who had a lot to do with the fact that within a couple of years Hopkins was one of the premiere stars at Paramount Studios. (She would also work with Rouben Mamoulian—twice, memorably—William Wyler, King Vidor and Howard Hawks, among many others, before the end of her life in 1972.) Hopkins’ star may not shine as brightly today, largely because many of the pre-Code films which made her a star are either unavailable or have only recently emerged in digital form—classics like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), 24 Hours (1931) and The Story of Temple Drake (1933) being prime examples. But her movies with Lubitsch alone would be ample evidence to support a case for her status as one of the premiere actresses of any age, and Design for Living, though less well-regarded overall than Trouble in Paradise, is still a crown jewel in their three-film collaboration.

Many have commented on Noël Coward’s original play being tamed for Hollywood, but as an example of the insouciance of pre-Code Hollywood this adaptation of Design for Living still packs a punch, even if it is wrapped in the gossamer accoutrements of the “Lubitsch touch.” Hard to believe Hollywood in any era could ever be so casual about a ménage-a-trois, explicitly laid out or subtly coded and implied, as Lubitsch was in presenting the romantic intertwining of two bohemian artists, an apprentice playwright and a fledging painter (Fredric March and Gary Cooper, respectively, and both cast quite against type) who meet up with a spunky commercial artist (Hopkins) on a train bound for Paris. The attraction of both men to Hopkins is mutual and obvious from the start, and the actress has a high old time telegraphing both the mutual attraction and the kick of being the object of doubled affection. Having all three fallen in love, they eschew convention and the rather more pressing necessity of money and make the logical/illogical and utterly romantic decision to live together, albeit celibately (there’s Will Hays’s contribution, thank you) in a futile effort to forestall jealousy and the inevitable fractions of emotion and loyalty.

Part of the resistance to the film at the time was anchored in the recasting of the leads as Americans—the lovers were played by Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontaine and Coward himself on stage. But the movie also serves as a superb example of the kind of artful camouflage that would become standard operating procedure for writers and directors in response to the impositions of the newly formed Hays Office. The censoring board found Coward’s play far too risqué and issued commands to Hecht and Lubitsch to tone down the sexual innuendo and downplay the nature of the characters’ relationship. It’s difficult to say just how much of the tone and intent of Coward was masked from appreciative audiences in 1933, but in 2011 it’s a real tonic that the movie’s leisurely depiction of a romantic threesome makes it to the screen and to us unmitigated by prudery or judgment—one critic who penned an appreciation of the movie for the New York Writers Institute, aptly described “Lubitsch’s cosmopolitan air” as one that “makes a film about a ménage-a-trois seem about as regular as a nickel streetcar ride.”

Design for Living retains enough of Coward in spirit, combined with the unexpectedly fizzy results from the chemistry of its stars, that it can stand alone as a comedy classic, certainly one that fits in well within Lubitsch’s luminous oeuvre. And the movie’s unconventional casting, trading in the blasé upper-class cynicism of the Lunt-Fontaine-Coward combo for the chipper fish-out-of-water exuberance of Americans on the road, is a key to its lasting quality. The relatively straight-laced March and Cooper find unexpectedly fertile footing in sophisticated romantic comedy, so much so that they are not entirely upstaged even by the likes of Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn. One has to believe that their unconventional casting here provided illumination onto aspects of their capabilities that would change the way they were perceived by audiences and casting directors alike for the remainder of their long careers. As for Miriam Hopkins, the bright light generated by her magical flightiness and air of perpetual longing in Design for Living helped to ensure that she would encapsulate the distilled naughtiness and nonchalant spark of the pre-Code era even if her post-’30s career never fully lived up to it.

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I filed out of the screening thinking the screen never seemed so silver as when Lubitsch threw light on it. In contrast, the lobby of the Chinese multiplex, packed with people as it had been all day, felt far more tarnished, dense with the battling aromas of body odor, cheap cologne (the halfhearted attempt to counter the inevitable B.O. of a days’ worth of cinema sitting) and freshly popped popcorn, the buttery lusciousness of which almost had the strength to deck the forces of those other olfactory offenses. But all was okay, because I was perched high on the Lubitsch cloud, where the real world seemed distant and removed at such an elevation. Which meant that I was in no mood to follow through on my original plan to end Friday’s programming with Shirley Clarke’s experimental, free-jazz adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play The Connection (1961), a critique of the documentary form centering around a group of junkies and their relationship with the documentary crew (including Roscoe Lee Browne in his first film) who are filming them. I opted instead to let the artifice continue and closed the night out with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), a screening that would be graced by surprises both welcome and disconcerting.

Before the screening, I was delighted to make another new friend and bump into an old one as well. I sat down next to a woman whose name I would soon discover was Carrie Specht. Carrie turned out to be, among many other things, an assistant director and a writer who was also covering the festival for her Web site Classic Film School, a self-described “Online Resource for The Classic Movie Fan” which has plenty of links to satisfy precisely the kind of audience packing the house for a grand old MGM musical. Carrie was accompanied by her mother, a delightful lady who seemed to be enjoying herself in the company of so much Hollywood history, as well as that of her attentive and enthusiastic daughter. And joining us before the lights dimmed an old pal, Michael Schlesinger, independent producer and consultant for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Michael is a great friend to the interests of the classic film lover and to the promotion of film history, not to mention a raconteur of the first order, which he will amply prove if you’re ever lucky enough to spend time talking film with him. It was he who prompted the inclusion of one of the big highlights of last year’s festival, the riotously funny Fred MacMurray/Marjorie Main comedy Murder, He Says, which he was quick to point out was yet another terrific comedy from the pen of the reliable classic Hollywood journeyman Lou Breslow, one of the many names that Michael has clued me into since I’ve gotten to know him. Michael Schlesinger would introduce, in his inimitable and fascinatingly informed way, a highlight yet to come in this year’s festival too, but tonight he was here to soak up the majestic romantic comedy of Stanley Donen’s musical, enlivened as it is by Michael Kidd’s groundbreaking choreography, which fills and sometimes threatens to burst the boundaries of an already bounteous wide-screen frame.

But before the lights went down, the audience was in for yet another treat, the kind for which the TCM Classic Film Festival has quickly become known—film critic and historian Leonard Maltin took a seat in front of the giant empty screen and promptly introduced one of the stars of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the vivacious and quick-humored Jane Powell. The anecdotal tenor of the TCM Festival Q&As do much to reinforce the sense of intimate connection the viewer, the fan, has with any certain beloved title, and it was clear from the start that we lucky 800 or 900 audience members felt more like we were in Powell’s living room listening to old friends revisit favored memories rather than in a cavernous stadium-type auditorium. Powell recounted how she moved with her family from Portland, Oregon, where she had been singing on the radio since age seven, to Los Angeles, where her singing career gained even more traction on a program called Hollywood Showcase.

The name of the show was a prescient one, and as a result of her appearance there singing an aria from Carmen she ended up on the radio show hosted by Charlie McCarthy, which quickly led to signing an MGM contract. Despite the fact that her movement at a very young age from radio celebrity to possible film stardom seemed almost predestined, Powell was never a performer who radiated pretense—she very much was the essence of the girl next door that her early movies indicated, and her warm demeanor in front of the TCM crowd (at age 82) did nothing to dispel that down-to-earth appeal. The young-at-heart star of Royal Wedding (1951), Hit the Deck (1955) and of course Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, would have us believe that there was little to her blithe and engaging film persona that was the result of anything she specifically brought to the table. “All I ever did was change clothes!” she remarked to Maltin of her many roles, a comment that practically brought the house down with its misplaced (though apparently sincere) modesty. The movie we saw immediately following that claim served as the most profound refutation possible.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers remains one of the great explosions of energy in the MGM musical canon, and Powell’s spunky conviction and sharp timing is right at its core, amplified by the movie’s mixture of the intimate and the grandiose and its thrilling expansion of the parameters of dance in the movies. (It’s hard to believe a standard 1.85 aspect ratio was ever considered for this movie, but the evidence is right there on the movie’s 2004 DVD release—one was shot and then, thankfully, abandoned for CinemaScope.) The movie has a robust conviction and lightness of spirit that completely neutralizes any complaints that one might possibly mount regarding the aesthetic choice of staging this musical, which has at its heart a celebration of the possibilities of freedom and change as exemplified by its great Pacific Northwest setting, in such a set-bound manner. Hollywood was still a few years away from the relative realism lent by location shooting for musicals like South Pacific and West Side Story ushered in, and for Donen and Kidd any serious thought of making Seven Brides outdoors was quashed by the status of Brides as a kind of B-picture during production. (MGM was far more interested in the concurrent production of Brigadoon, another musical tied to specific locations that would be forced indoors for its shoot.) But one of the glories of Seven Brides is how it turns that artifice into an advantage—the audience’s awareness of the entirety of the movie as a creation heightened by its swooning, sweeping stylization is, I think, central to its success, and it certainly helps the audience leap over some of the occasional benignly boorish behavior of those brothers.

Unfortunately, the print made available for the TCM Film Festival highlighted a more pressing concern, that of film preservation. According to a press release from the Museum of Modern Art trumpeting a 1996 restored print commissioned for Turner Entertainment, MGM, which had not expected the movie to be a major success at the box-office, found itself in the position of having mass-produced release prints from the original camera negative rather than the more customary practice of copying the duplicate negative. Seven Brides was shot (as was Brigadoon) in Ansco Color, and in addition to damage to the original negative, the inferior (and by 1996 obsolete) Ansco Color process resulted in color temperatures that varied wildly and did not match the newer color film stock. Robert Osborne reported in his column of September 12, 1996, that only 40% of the original negative was usable for the restoration and that “the remaining 60% was created by combining elements from duplicate negatives and other sources.” The print shown at the TCM Festival that Friday night, however, was in such disarray in terms of its color timing that it’s disconcerting to believe that this could have been one of the best available prints for such a high-profile screening. (The tint of Howard Keel’s flame-red beard seems to go through multiple gradations in the first few minutes alone, sometimes varying from shot to shot.) We discussed the print problem with Michael afterward, who was also surprised that this would be the print chosen to show, but not at all surprised that a film processed in Ansco Color would, 56 years down the line, end up looking so shoddy. For all the great efforts in film preservation already logged, it’s clear that we, meaning the preservationists who do the work as well as the audience who benefits from it and must continue to support it, have a lot of work left to do.

Day 3: Went the Day Well!

I hopped off the train at the Hollywood and Highland stop on Saturday morning fully revved up. This would be the day that I would finally keep my date with Roy and Dale and Trigger too, and it would make for an amusing and illuminating Saturday matinee double bill at this year’s festival built around the humble origins of one cowboy myth and the agonized legacy of yet another.

My first stop was the by-now well-familiar Chinese #3, where inside I would see Cheryl Rogers-Barnett, Roy and Dale’s daughter, introduce the movie Rogers always considered his favorite, My Pal Trigger (1946), the picture that purports to tell the origin story of Roy’s best four-legged pal. (I don’t recall seeing a title card that said anything like “Based on True Events,” so I decided it was best to assume the story had been somewhat fictionalized…) Rogers-Barnett regaled the receptive, smallish crowd with tales of her famous movie parents and growing up in Hollywood, tales which were punctuated by a screening before the feature of Harriet Parsons’ Republic Pictures short subject Meet Roy Rogers—Rogers-Barnett can be seen in a couple of shots of these promotional piece on her mom’s shoulder, in diapers.

My Pal Trigger is, of course, a romanticized and typically silly picture, but also completely charming in its unabashed embrace of its own modest mythology. Roy Rogers plays a traveling horse trader by the name of Roy Rogers (he was essentially the same character and persona in every movie) who wants to mate his mare with Golden Sovereign, a superb stallion owned by a crusty and cranky rancher named Gabby Kendrick (Gabby Hayes, in his patented, full-on grizzled old fart glory). But Gabby doesn’t think Roy’s mare is a worthy match and blows him off, which of course doesn’t do much to discourage Roy. He hangs around the ranch in the hopes of changing Gabby’s mind, unaware that at the same time nefarious gambler Brett Scoville (essayed with oily surety by veteran nasty Jack Holt) has orchestrated the theft of Golden Sovereign. The stallion manages to escape Scoville’s clutches long enough to hook up with Roy’s mare, at which point Scoville accidentally shoots Golden Sovereign while aiming at Roy, who, naturally, is accused of the killing. Roy goes on the run, aided by his pals, played by the Sons of the Pioneers, but soon returns, accompanied by his mare’s new colt (played by Trigger) who he offers as a peace gesture to Gabby. But Gabby is more concerned with the gambling debt he’s run up with Scoville, and while his feisty daughter (Evans) watches, he sets up a climactic high-stakes horse race that will have implications for not only his ranch but for the future legacy of a cowboy legend and his faithful steed!

This one turns out to be easily one of the best of the Roy Rogers pictures—I showed it to my daughter a couple of months after I saw it at the festival, and she had no trouble accessing the cheerful heart of what many might assume would be looked at by most attention span-challenged modern kids as merely a musty museum piece. As genially innocent as it seems to be, My Pal Trigger is considerably more than the accurately billed “heartwarming story of a man and his horse.” It’s also a glimpse into a moment of Hollywood’s past when the movie cowboy really was king. Remembering that the rural expanses of Los Angeles had yet to be consumed by urban sprawl in 1946, it was kind of thrilling to contemplate a movie universe in which cowboys and their gals, despite the presence of cars and other modern conveniences, operated in a fashion in which those elements of modernity are integrated with a Republic-style representation of a horse opera movie past. (This was certainly the kind of life I was familiar with growing up on a farm in my early childhood.) According to the Republic Roy Rogers movies, and many other B-westerns of the time, the worlds of modernity and simpler, Western (movie)-based values seem fully functional in a completely non-anachronistic way, a notion that a stroll around the neighborhoods surrounding the Burbank Equestrian Center in 2011 does little to dispel.

The presence of Rogers and My Pal Trigger at the festival, part of its salute to the popular singing cowboy, turned out to be not only a celebration of the innocent movie-going pleasures of the past, but also, of all things, a testament to the ever-expanding purview of film preservation. Mike Mashon was on hand again to explain that My Pal Trigger, like many B-westerns and other “marginal” entertainments of its kind, has had a kind of checkered history in terms of the conditions under which it has been traditionally seen (mostly on TV), over the years. Originally running a brisk 79 minutes, the movie languished for years in the public domain and was frequently seen in a considerably choppier 54-minute version designed to fit into hour-long weekend TV programming blocks. Fortunately, film preservationists tend not to need the blessings of highfalutin film culture in order to proceed where they are needed, and so it is that the TCM Festival premiered a brand-new restoration of My Pal Trigger with this screening, beautifully cobbled together from the remnants of that mangled TV print and a recently discovered French archival print. (Mashon invited the audience to try to guess what sections of the film might have come from that French print, and the answer was revealed midway through the picture in the form of a sign on the door of a lawyer’s office translated into French.) The movie looked more glorious than ever, which is probably needless to say, but more thrilling than the quality of the print is the thought that even a movie like My Pal Trigger is considered, by some who are in a position to make a difference, to be a piece of entertainment and a historical artifact valuable enough to save for future generations. That’s the kind of populist impulse that Hollywood should be proud of, one that will hopefully remind others that continued 35mm preservation and distribution is important for reasons beyond profit, or the lack thereof.

After spending 79-plus minutes in a darkened theater awash in the mythos of Roy and Trigger, emerging out into the bright Hollywood sun to make my way through the crowds of tourists and festival-goers over to the Big Chinese was even more disorienting than usual. (I admit that a part of me was hoping that I’d emerge out onto a very different looking Hollywood Boulevard, one where an occasional golden palomino and his rhinestone-speckled rider might come sauntering by.) The front façade of the Chinese was still inaccessible to the general public, the famous cement foot-printed courtyard having been cordoned off for Thursday night’s premiere gala and never reopened. All that meant was that I’d have to cross the busy street on the crosswalk that bisects the block just down from the El Capitan Theater, make my way around toward the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel and back around to the far side of the Big Chinese, where the line for the 12:00 screening of The Outlaw Josey Wales was already making its way around the side of the building. (This was a minor inconvenience, to be sure, but up to this point I had spent the entirety of the festival inside the walls of the upstairs Cineplex, so I suppose a little cinemagoraphobia is understandable.) Once in line I once again ran into a passel of friends and newly minted acquaintances including Ariel Schudson, Richard Harland Smith, Carrie Specht and film student John Damer, whom I first met when he introduced himself last year inside the very auditorium we were about to enter, before the screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d seen a movie with such a relatively large gathering of like-minded people. I don’t know what it says about my creeping tendency toward hermit status (if it says anything at all), but I found myself exceedingly glad to be in their company to share what was promising to be a spectacular presentation.

And spectacular it was. Divorced from the more gloomy portends of what the conversion to all-digital exhibition will mean for the future of revival cinema and small-town movie houses, a big, splashy digital restoration, unveiled in an atmosphere like the main auditorium of the Grauman’s Chinese, can be an impressive thing to behold. Certainly, the premiere of this spiffed-up digital version of Clint Eastwood’s first solid directorial statement, in commemoration of its 35th anniversary, amplified the movie’s strong sense of its antihero’s inescapable connection to his past by rendering, in an almost tactile, three-dimensional fashion, the landscapes that envelop him inside the expanses of the Panavision frame. The restoration was also notably and relatively free of digital’s tendency toward chilliness in its reinterpretation of analog imagery. Whether or not it was entirely due to the scale and technological quality of the screening, those landscapes across which play Wales’ fortunes, and those of the men and women he encounters on his journey, remained as rich and full of faint voices as I remember them, and sometimes richer in emotion and depth than those in my memory.

It was less obvious in 1976 than it is now that Josey Wales would earmark the commencement of Eastwood’s backward-gazing analysis of his own on-screen persona and the mythology surrounding not only that persona but the tropes and sentiments of the western itself. Sometimes that examination would yield great rewards (Unforgiven), other times it would seem self-indulgent and misjudged (Pale Rider). But if it weren’t clear before (and it certainly was to some, including Orson Welles, who ranked Eastwood’s work here as belonging beside the best of Ford and Hawks as early as 1982), The Outlaw Josey Wales speaks directly to our experience of the westerns, great and small, that make up our collective moviegoing past and addresses them while casting new and brilliant shadows of its own. The temptation certainly exists to ruminate on what kind of film would have emerged had Eastwood not eventually replaced the film’s original director, Philip Kaufman. The laconic sensibility of Kaufman’s previous foray into the genre, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, probably played a big part in getting him the job in the first place, and that movie doesn’t seem radically out of line with the temperament and style of what Eastwood came up with. But Eastwood’s film has treasures enough to relegate such imaginings to the status of movie buff trivia.

Josey Wales is notable for the weight of its soul, that of a man haunted by sorrow and anger and propelled by divided loyalties and an attempt to orchestrate, for himself and for the group of settlers he falls in with, a kind of new society, one based in the sort of freedoms the United States had, since its inception, promised but only partially delivered. It’s a gloomy, violent vision, no doubt, but it has always been an exhilarating one as well, full of (and perhaps unexpected at the time) what François Truffaut called the joy of making movies, an audience picture engorged in the sheer pleasures of the western that also recognizes and revels in the expanse and historical richness of its iconography. To say that it resonated with the audience at the TCM Classic Film Festival that Saturday afternoon would be an understatement. This is, after all, the same screen where, a year earlier, I saw The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, in the presence of Eli Wallach. After seeing The Outlaw Josey Wales in this pristine new presentation, it was hard to think that anyone could come away from it not believing that it deserves consideration amongst the great pictures of Hawks, Ford, Boetticher and, of course, Leone. But even more tellingly, a look at it a couple of months later, in an environment far less overwhelming than that of the Chinese, confirmed to these eyes its status as a true masterpiece of the genre.

Upon exiting the big Chinese, Ariel and I bid a fond farewell to the rest of our group and made our way back upstairs to the main Chinese multiplex, where we would spend the next three movies in each other’s company, amusing ourselves with tales of favorite movies, our thoughts on what we’d seen so far and the special kind of anticipation for what was still in store. Ariel, who is currently back in school in pursuit of a career in film preservation and restoration, was especially excited for our next destination, which many in the press had well ahead of today earmarked as one of the festival’s potential high points. Considering the length of The Outlaw Josey Wales, the start time (3:45 p.m.) of the next feature and the small size of the auditorium (we were in the 177-seat #4, where it happened we would spend the rest of the day), we still managed good position in the wait line and were soon settling in for Rialto Pictures’ 35mm restoration of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942).

The screening was introduced by Academy-Award winning filmmaker, historian and force for film preservation Kevin Brownlow, so you might say the anticipation level was indeed high. (I had to physically restrain Ariel from bouncing in her seat like a Beatlemaniac on a couple of occasions.) Brownlow, who was the honored guest for a programmed conversation at the Hollywood Roosevelt which unfortunately coincided with the Josey Wales screening, turned out to be a quiet, unassuming, dryly-humored gentleman, and he provided plenty of historical context for the appearance of the movie on the landscape of British cinema, as well as a quote or two from one of the prominent film critics of the day, C.A. Lejeune, who was dismissive in the extreme toward the movie when it was first released. Brownlow commented that had he seen Went the Day Well? first, he probably would never have made his own most notable feature as a director, It Happened Here (1966), a drama which posits a dire alternate reality in which the Germans win World War II and invade England.

The premise of Cavalcanti’s movie, from a script by John Dighton, Angus MacPhail, Diana Morgan and Graham Greene (based on Greene’s short story, “The Lieutenant Died Last”), is only slightly less historically outlandish. On first appearance the little hamlet of Bramley End, England, seems a placid and happy place; there’s a certain mournfulness that is apparent only upon closer inspection and introduction to a memorial plaque and a small graveyard in the middle of town. The town verger turns and speaks directly to the camera, a nod to the homespun worldview of Thornton Wilder, and begins to relate the tale of the Battle of Bramley End. Immediately the apparent tone of the picture, an early entry from the very same Ealing Studios which would eventually define its own spirit of British whimsy with comedies like Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, seems set. The verger leads us to a small graveyard whose occupants he reveals as a division of German soldiers who were defeated here in the Battle of Bramley End, the same way, as it turns out, those invading Nazi forces at large were defeated by British and Allied forces.

But wait—the movie’s framing device is set in 1942, the year of the movie’s actual release, when the real-life outcome of the war with the Germans was still very much in question. What gives Went the Day Well? a very real power is its embodiment of the sheer force of will that could allow for its existence in the first place. Its potency as propaganda is completely embedded in the fact that, at the time the movie was produced, that triumphant outcome over the German invaders was not yet historical fact but merely the projection of the very plucky British optimism and spirit of togetherness in which the movie appears to be grounded. And what gives the movie its ferocious power as cinema is its subtle subversion of that surety of British fighting spirit, even as it functions as pulse-pounding propaganda, to reveal a portrait of a besieged citizenry both entirely vulnerable to enemy infiltration and, more shockingly, one with a capacity for violence barely hinted at on its whimsical surface, a violence more readily associated with the savagery of the enemy.

Directed with documentary immediacy, Went the Day Well? posits a world of quaint charm into which the enemy finds his way with frightening ease. The convoy of soldiers which makes its way down the well-trodden paths leading to the village look for all the world like British troops. When their commander reveals to the townspeople the purpose to set up and review defenses in the area, and consequently presents a request that housing for 60 men be provided, the villagers, doing their duty for God and country, accommodate them with little question. It is soon revealed to the audience, and eventually more deliberately to the villagers, that the soldiers are in fact Germans who intend to use Bramley End as a gateway for an invasion of the whole of England. The rate at which the suspicions begin to trickle into the general populace provide the movie with its incredible suspense, as the familiar archetypes of domestic British comedy and drama—among them, the gossipy postmistress, the gracious, though condescending lady of the manor, the timid spinster, the ever-present, mild-mannered vicar, and the nosey Cockney—find the structure of their quiet rural life being undermined and overtaken by the forces of a very real evil.

Soon one of them discovers a suspicious chocolate bar embossed “Chockolade-Wien” on the personage of a parachutist on maneuvers, and the veil hiding the true peril is lifted. For as easily as the German soldiers are assimilated into British country society, the very welcoming citizenry of that society, who pride themselves on their inclusiveness and upstanding tradition, will access a level of justifiable savagery in defense of that society that most would deny in pleasant company.

Went the Day Well? is that rarity in English-speaking war films, the thriller that seems rooted in the sweet-tempered satiric tradition which would emerge from the Ealing Studios, but whose roots extend terrible tendrils that wend their way through the history of English-speaking cinema. The films touched by its influence range from the magically placid, besmirched pastorals of Powell and Pressburger (A Canterbury Tale, 49th Parallel) to the acrid and vicious assessment of the (British) capacity for violence found in works as disparate as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned, Mike Leigh’s Naked, the whole of the postwar British film noir movement, the delirious fantasias of British life coursing through the work of Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell, and even forward to the Quentin Tarantino of Inglorious Basterds, in its gamesmanship with European identity and its wild projections of a victory that was hardly secured at the time the film was made. The vision at the heart of Cavalcanti’s film is potent and unyielding enough to be shocking even to an audience well heeled in the range of potential viciousness, incivility and even transcendence ripe within all of those films. (The TCM crowd gasped and screamed at one act of violence as if they were watching a horror movie).

Went the Day Well? is, amazingly, completely of its time and simultaneously capable of reaching out and appearing frighteningly modern some 60 years after it was released, a vision of cheerful patriotism and absurd humor in which the conservative forces of good reveal an uncomfortable affinity with the blood-red force of vengeance.

The movie, not well known before this summer even in its country of origin, is being rediscovered as one of the great classics of the movies, thanks largely to the kind of exposure it engendered here at the TCM Classic Film Festival (where it was so popular it was scheduled for a repeat performance on Sunday) and other festivals and venues over the past year. That reputation is both refreshingly free of hyperbole and richly deserved. Headed by a cast of great British character actors such as Leslie Banks, Elizabeth Allan, Basil Sydney, Mervyn Johns, David Farrar, Frank Lawton, Valerie Taylor and Thora Hird, Went the Day Well? is a thrilling and vital piece of film history, a great, uncompromising classic of suspense. The movie goes far toward proving that no one inspired the masses toward a noble cause of defense in World War II quite like the British, even so far as exposing with vigor and acuity the ruthlessness behind common civility that might be called up when stiff upper lips come face to face with the enemy.

On the way out of the auditorium I think it’s fair to say that Ariel and I were still reeling, but we managed to compose ourselves long enough to say hi to New Beverly Cinema owner/operator Michael Torgan, who slipped into the screening along with a representative from Rialto Pictures, time enough only to implore Michael to run the movie at his little corner of heaven before we scuttled back to the velvet rope zone to get in line for the next feature. (The New Beverly did run Went the Day Well? for a week this past fall, paired with several Graham Greene-inspired Brit noirs, including Brighton Rock, The Fallen Idol and, of course, The Third Man.) Thinking again about all the awful choices foisted upon us by the TCM scheduling staff this year as we made our way down the stairs and back toward the dark corridor off the lobby where all the line-waiting for the festival is endured, I reiterated to Ariel how glad I was that we’d seen the previous two movies. She sacrificed seeing the Kevin Brownlow panel discussion and I, in a weaker moment, might have been tempted to scamper over to the Egyptian to see Hayley Mills introduce The Parent Trap. (Once again, thank heaven for chance encounters.)

No such dilemmas, however, existed for the remainder of the evening’s programming. Back over at the big Chinese, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was just the kind of big ticket, fan base-friendly attraction I was determined to avoid. I’d already passed up much better movies there, like A Streetcar Named Desire, The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird, Spartacus and even that “shallow masterpiece” Citizen Kane, so Blake Edwards’ inexplicably popular trifle (with that prominent cultural pimple of a performance by Mickey Rooney) didn’t offer even a hint of temptation. Niagara seemed marginally more fascinating, but its allure has never been particularly powerful for me either. My only real quandary came in considering a run down the block to the Egyptian to see Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), accompanied as it was by a reportedly “period-authentic” score written by Vince Giordano and performed by his renowned Nighthawks Orchestra. Unfortunately the scheduled 7:00 start time of that screening meant that I would have to hustle back through an undoubtedly dense Saturday night street crowd to make it back inside the Chinese in time to get in line for the unmissable 9:30 p.m. presentation of—But I’m getting ahead of myself. (More on that 9:30 event in a moment.)

Around that same time phones all over the general area of Hollywood and Highland started buzzing with reports coming in from festival headquarters as to the nature of what would fill the as-yet-empty slots on the Sunday afternoon schedule. As it was for the previous year, when the programming slate was initially announced there was a block of times, slated for the smaller #3 and #4 auditoriums, which remained under the heading “To Be Announced.” These slots were reserved for programming repeat performances of unexpected festival favorites, some of the more unusual, less-sexy-to-the-general-TCM-fan-contingent titles which drew bigger crowds than were obviously anticipated. Last year, when Murder, He Says was one of the pictures that grabbed one of these spots on the final day of the festival, I was occupied with Sergio Leone at the Big Chinese, John Carpenter and company in a panel discussion, and the restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to close things out, and the titles that got repeated were ones I’d already managed to see. But this year the lineup for Sunday in the Big Chinese was less tempting—That’s Entertainment! (an amusing diversion that just leaves me hungry for a slew of other movies, a real movie), plus digital restorations of Goldfinger and Taxi Driver, and the festival’s big send-off, Fantasia were all movies with which I was more than familiar. And some of the other selections that closed up the festival on the Music and the Movies theme in other venues were even less attractive—I’ve seen Manhattan far too many times, and if I never see West Side Story again (even in the presence of George Chakiris within the hallowed walls of the Egyptian Theater) I won’t worry too much about it. I was really hoping that Sunday’s TBA block, which included a mystery movie scheduled for the big #1 auditorium of the Chinese multiplex, wouldn’t be packed up with titles I’d already encountered during the previous couple of days.

As the e-mails and text messages that revealed what was in store on Sunday began flowing, some grumbles of indifference could be heard mixed into the enthusiastic drone of chatter in the main lobby. The women from San Francisco who so disapproved of my earlier decision to eschew Bette Davis, and who were on their way over to spend more time with Holly Golightly, stopped briefly to say hello and complain about the announcement of the Sunday lineup, all of which seemed negligible to them excepting the last-minute scheduling of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to be introduced by Leonard Maltin and the movie’s cinematographer, Haskell Wexler. I agreed that this was a great choice, especially as counterprogramming for those of us not particularly interested in any of the other big-ticket musical items being offered in the prime-time closing slot. (I had actually considered bailing out early, but with the announcement of Virginia Woolf? hanging around suddenly seemed well worthwhile.)

The rest of the fill-ins held much less interest for the Bette Davis Appreciation Society, and as they left to make their way back over to the big Chinese Ariel and I commiserated with much greater enthusiasm on what was shaping up to be a wonderful Sunday afternoon—repeat performances of Frank Tuttle’s This Is the Night (which Ariel had seen, loved, and instantly committed to seeing again with me), the Clara Bow vehicle Hoop-la, the triumphant return of Went the Day Well?, which proved to be one of the festival’s hottest lower-profile tickets, and the best news of all for me—one more time around for Bigger than Life, with Barbara Rush having been talked into coming back for another interview appearance in the company of TCM icon Robert Osborne. The Nicholas Ray picture would start my final day off a little later than the previous two (no complaints!), and as Ariel had seen it already on Friday she was either going to sleep in or catch another program. Either way, we’d meet up midday and beat the crowds to get started on the final three pictures after Bigger than Life together.

We didn’t exactly have to knock anyone over, however, in order to get great seats to see Saturday evening’s first selection, Pennies from Heaven (1981), director Herbert Ross’s beautiful and bleak distillation of Dennis Potter’s landmark BBC miniseries (from Potter’s own screenplay). Even the prospect of an introduction by TCM favorite Illeana Douglas didn’t do much to spark attendance for this undervalued movie—out of the 177 available seats in the auditorium, probably only 40, maybe 50 were filled. Mis-marketed (or at the very least indifferently marketed) by MGM from the very beginning, Pennies has never been an audience favorite, nor will it likely ever be, which is why I jumped at the chance to see it in these relatively splashy environs. My history with the movie is comprised of a couple of screenings at a cracker-box Cineplex in Southern Oregon during the Christmas season of 1981, before the movie made its hasty and ignominious exit from American movie theaters, and endless repeat showings courtesy of a copy taped off of HBO on my trusty new companion, my first Sony Betamax. Even though I’d never really experienced the full immersive effect of seeing the movie look and sound as it should, Pennies from Heaven was, from that first encounter, a marvelously empathetic and emotional movie for me, and it would cast the same spell this time around.

For the majority of festival attendees, however, there was simply no getting over the movie’s reputation as an unpleasant experience—I overheard a few people going over their schedules who emphatically rejected the option of seeing it. Those who might be transported by an Astaire and Rogers dance sequence or a splashy, surreal Busby Berkeley production number are not necessarily the best audience for Pennies from Heaven, even though impressions of both those movie musical touchstones (and many more) are directly accessed by the film. Even some who aren’t necessarily put off by the movie’s despairing worldview can’t find their way past its central conceit—people trapped in dead-end lives find emotional and psychological transport through the popular music of the 1930s and express the cheery resolve of the tunes, aural antidotes to the suffocating despair of real life, by bursting into lip-synched performances of the original recordings.

But for me, whether it’s the more visually modest, more thematically ambitious BBC series (starring Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell) or this big-screen version starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters (who at the time probably surprised some audiences with their musical and theatrical capabilities), that conceit has always worked as a way to access the beating heart of Potter’s cruel subject. It’s distancing in a strictly “realistic” sense, yes, but in terms of reaching into the expressive hearts of people who may not be comfortable articulating their pain, their hope, or even acknowledging that they have much hope, there are not too many moments in movie history that can match the eerie emotional directness of Martin lip-synching “Did You ever See a Dream Walking?” when he first glimpses Peters in a sheet music store, or Vernel Bagneris’ spectacular dance to Arthur Tracy’s mournful version of the title song.

It’s hard to say whether it was these “jarring” moments in Pennies for Heaven, which amplify the usual disconnect from reality that accompanies that musical moment of transition in a scene from naturalistic dialogue to the stylized impulse to suddenly burst into song (with full orchestral accompaniment), or the movie’s suffocating fatalism, or the casting of two stars more renowned for comedy that proved too much for audiences to handle back in 1981. But the real and lasting distress of the initial response to Pennies from Heaven is that there seems to be little interest in taking another look at it. Those few who loved it 30 years ago likely still love it now, but there doesn’t seem to be a palpable curiosity about the film, in either the film buff community or the general public, to warrant much serious reconsideration. (While there is no Blu-ray of the movie available, the 2004 DVD release is of good quality and features a terrific audio commentary by film critic Peter Rainer, who articulately examines the movie and clearly understands its status as an underappreciated gem.) That’s a shame, because thematic, structural and stylistic ambition of the sort that flows through Pennies from Heaven, already rare enough when the movie was initially released, is even rarer today; the hostile reception of movies that go out on artistic limbs like this one does isn’t much of an encouragement to young filmmakers who might be interested in taking real chances, and the thought of a movie like this one being green-lit in today’s creatively conservative Hollywood, where a studio is only as good as its last $200 million comic book franchise, seems a fantastical flight far more unlikely than opening your mouth and hearing a Bing Crosby recording come out.

Our look back at Depression-era America through the delusory prism of MGM musicals at an end, we filed out of the tiny #4 and got straight back in line to re-enter the auditorium for another bit of social and political history courtesy of yet another movie that was a box office failure upon its release. Time, it turns out, has been far kinder to the reputation of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s One Two Three (1961). Over the years this caustic farce has enjoyed a strange sort of popularity and continued its growing status within its writer-director’s career and on the landscape of film history, despite the film being rooted in political upheavals and uncertainties very specific to the time in which it was released, a context that likely might be lost on younger audiences. When I discovered it would be playing at this year’s festival, the screening became the one true must-see, alongside Went the Day Well?—despite it being one of my all-time favorite movies, I only saw it in wide-screen for the first time upon the release of MGM’s Billy Wilder DVD box set from a few years ago. (My first repeated exposure to it came from a panned-and-scanned version that I cobbled together from an afternoon showing on a Portland TV station, one of the first movies I recorded with my magical Betamax back in 1982.) And this would be my first time ever seeing it projected, as part of a presumably receptive theatrical audience—quite a step up in the showcasing of a movie that many consider one of the funniest ever made.

One of those for whom the movie holds such golden status is Michael Schlesinger, whose encouragement to the right people at the TCM Classic Film Festival was directly responsible for the movie been offered to us on this Saturday night. As I said earlier, Michael’s instincts and taste in introducing audiences to great, less widely known classic comedies was proven beyond a shadow cast through silver nitrate last year when he brought George Marshall and Lou Breslow’s hilarious treat Murder, He Says out for an unexpectedly popular festival appearance. But beyond that, Schlesinger is himself a very funny guy, the perfect gentleman to be introducing audiences to a great comedy. (He’s like the comedian who comes out to grease the giggles in a studio audience before the taping of a sitcom, the only difference being that he’s actually funny instead of just grimly aggressive, and the thing he’s preparing you for is even funnier.)

One Two Three is a Cold War comedy that was extremely topical in 1961—many of its jokes and even the meaning of its central situation is dependent upon one’s familiarity with the particular pall cast on the playing field of U.S.-Russian relations in the early ’60s. Schlesinger proved, as he had been the previous year, expert in providing the context that would set the stage for Wilder and Diamond’s breakneck political satire. The movie, which takes place in Berlin in the days just prior to the construction of the wall which would for decades separate communist-controlled East Berlin from its capitalism-friendly Western half, was shot on location by Wilder and his cast, but when the Berlin Wall went up before the movie had been completed Wilder and company had to restructure some of the topical references, to say nothing of the trajectory of the script, which now seemed even dicier and more dangerous than before. Schlesinger explained how Wilder realized that the footage that had been shot at the actual Brandenburg Gate, when passage from one side of the city to the other was, while sometimes time-consuming still easily managed, had achieved a certain documentary-style verisimilitude; it was now not just footage shot for a Billy Wilder movie, but also an ethnographic record of a German city whose future was far from stable, whose face and tenor had been perhaps forever altered.

Schlesinger also 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.

Sufficiently primed, the TCM Festival crowd roared through One Two Three with sustained, appreciative and helpless laughter. (My friend Bob Westal kindly noted afterward that I was a pretty good person to sit next to while watching a comedy, which I took to be high praise indeed.) Wilder’s movie is a genuine marvel to behold, a comedy in which the venomous political satire, while pointed in a certain direction, is applied with glorious equanimity. The absurdity inherent in every point of view amidst the pressure and uncertainty of early ’60s Berlin is fresh meat for Wilder here, from the Three Stooges of Russian diplomacy, who drive one surprisingly hard, materialist-inspired bargain with MacNamara after another, to MacNamara’s very American arrogance and fierce determination to impose Western values (in the form of Coca-Cola capitalism) upon the world, to the humorless and strident surety of Otto’s party line declarations. The movie, seen big and wide and colored by an audience’s raucous response, remains a relentless, exhausting and exhilarating triumph, incisive in the way that few comedies have been, could ever have afforded to be.

We tumbled out of the screening spent, like Cagney must have been after 52 takes, but also giddy and feeling awfully lucky to be part of any festival that offered One Two Three, and introduced by Michael Schlesinger to boot, as a Saturday night showcase. However, a bit of festival fatigue had definitely set in for me, and after 11 movies, with a full day left to go on Sunday, I was ready to call it a night. My sleepy eyes, even after the caffeinated jolt provided by Billy Wilder and James Cagney, couldn’t possibly remain propped open for the last movie of the night, a screening of the Boris Karloff Universal horror classic The Mummy commencing at the Egyptian theater (of all places) at midnight, as much as my movie-saturated intellect kept prompting me to go. So as the hour crept closer to 12:00 I said good-bye to Bob and Ariel and headed for the train station. The first movie tomorrow, Bigger than Life, started at 9:00 a.m., which meant I’d have to be in line by 8:00 if I wanted to guarantee myself a seat. I sat very quietly for the short ride home, thinking of cowboys, dancers and warriors (hot and cold), and of the time (coming soon!) when my movie dreams would get a chance to feed the ones that would come when I finally closed my eyes.
Day 4: Waking Up From (and To) Love and War

It turns out that Barbara Rush, an actress I’ve always had a bit of a crush on, is apparently every bit as delightful a person as I could have hoped. Or so it seemed from her conversation with Robert Osborne which introduced the Sunday morning screening of Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life (1956). Seeing Rush before the screening was well worth getting up early, after a short night’s rest. The movie grabbed one of the Sunday “Back By Popular Demand” slots due to a high level of interest in the career of director Nicholas Ray, undoubtedly, and also perhaps because of its heightened profile, having been released mere weeks earlier in a deluxe Criterion DVD/Blu-ray package. But clearly the fact that Rush was there and would be generous enough to return for a second pre-screening go-round with Osborne, an old friend with whom she obviously feels a great deal of comfort, was also a major draw for festival attendees. Like Jane Powell before her, Barbara Rush was never a top-tier Hollywood star, but like Powell she also had the advantage of seeming genuine, her motivations often transparent, that patented girl-next-door appeal warm and translucent. The danger with someone like Rush is the tendency to come off slightly bland, or at least to be used by filmmakers in ways that might accentuate her everyday quality at the expense of whatever starry luminosity she might offer. It was this tendency that characterized her TV work—she was the face of upper middle class satisfaction and niceness in her many television guest appearances, and even in working with actors like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Paul Newman in movies like The Young Lions, Hombre and The Young Philadelphians her presence wasn’t exploited for much more than youthful pleasantry or the middle-class stability imparted by her natural poise and grace.

“Working with great actors evolves you,” she told Osborne on stage, and while that’s certainly true it was hard to come away from seeing her recount the highlights and realities of her career and not wish she’d had the opportunity to work and evolve with a similar cadre of great directors. By the time she arrived on Nicholas Ray’s set she was a veteran of a couple of low-budget science fiction classics (It Came from Outer Space and When Worlds Collide) and an experience with Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession), and watching the movie you can sense that she was hungry to register more seriously in Hollywood than she was ever really given the opportunity to do. When he saw how well she complemented the piece, Ray brought in Clifford Odets to, among other things, punch up Rush’s character, that of Lou, wife to the increasingly ill schoolteacher Ed Avery played by James Mason. Ray wanted more than what was written in the script by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum that would indicate Lou’s resolve, the inner strength that could coexist with the fear surrounding her husband’s mysterious behavior. Rush responded to Odets’ additions with a fierce performance that, while perhaps not matching the volatility of Mason, is certainly a match for him in terms of her ability to ground the melodramatic trappings of the story in recognizable, empathetic human behavior and render her character respectfully, without stridency or self-righteousness. And being in the presence of Barbara Rush, a remarkably vibrant and youthful-looking 84 years of age, I happily renewed my 40-year-old crush on this most charming and unpretentious of actresses.

Don’t get me wrong, however—seeing Bigger than Life on the big screen was a thrill too. The movie’s “atmosphere of petty domesticity,” as Mason’s Avery falls victim to a rare disease and then teeters on the brink of insanity when he becomes addicted to the drug—cortisone—prescribed to cure him, does indeed seem at once lifelike and amplified under Ray’s magnificent observational eye. Ray’s wide-screen compositions, created in collaboration with cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, is frequently broken down into frames within frames (Mason looking at himself in a shattered mirror, or staring out from a doorway underneath a suddenly twisted-looking staircase), sorting a bigger-than-life vision of social malaise into visual fragments that underscore Avery’s mental fragility, as well as the unreliability of the iconography of middle-class stability upon which an entire generation’s values were based. Certainly a director like David Lynch, who made a cottage industry out of plumbing the dark terrain underneath the façade of everyday Americana, owes much to this movie’s shadowy rendering of suburban bliss and the rot underlying it—even David Raksin’s lush, tense music for Bigger than Life features themes that would flower and mutate in Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. And Bigger than Life surely owes much to Mason’s haunted visage and his commitment to the character’s grimmest delusions as well—it’s inconceivable without him, even though at first he seems an unlikely choice to play Avery. But ultimately this movie stands as one tied intimately to its director. This is perhaps Nicholas Ray’s grandest, yet most intricate work as a creator of powerful, cogent, emotionally engorged images, and even having already seen the beautiful new Criterion DVD, seeing Bigger than Life actually bigger than life, on a Cinemascope-worthy screen where its most potent visual metaphors could live and breathe and rage, was an overwhelming experience.

Probably one of the worst traps of any film festival where you end up largely confined to one theater or location is diet, especially when there’s not even much time between features to head outside and hit up nearby fast-food establishments. And it’s even worse when you’re operating on a half a shoestring budget—one of my express goals for this festival was to avoid using my car (thus avoiding a daily $10 parking charge) by taking the train in from Universal City, and otherwise finding every way I could to minimize any and all expenditures. Back on line down in the lobby, I tried to distract myself from the prospect of splurging for a third day of popcorn by tearing into my meager lunchbox turkey sandwich with a degree of decorum that wouldn’t clue those around me into just how hungry I was. Since I didn’t bother to pack a drink, I would have to (have to!) indulge in another XXXXL Diet Pepsi to get me through the afternoon, a vice I considered far less nutritionally harmful, though if I had allowed any thought of the economic absurdity of paying $5.00 for a 44-ounce soft drink, on this or any other day, I’d probably have gone cold turkey on that vice as well a long time ago.

Now fully sated and carbonated, I met up with Ariel again. She was coming out of a screening of The Sid Sagas, having caught up with Barbara Rush and Bigger than Life on Friday, and assured me that our next feature, This Is the Night (1932), which she’d also already seen, was so funny that, based on my reaction to One Two Three, she felt it was necessary to see it again and feed off the guffaws that I would surely produce. And she was not wrong. This Is the Night, despite some advance word to the contrary floating about the festival, turned out to be a vibrant and very funny screwball lark, directed with unexpected verve by Frank Tuttle, a journeyman director who made his name in silents and would, after Night, go on to direct the first version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (1935) and solid film noirs like This Gun for Hire (1942) and Hell On Frisco Bay (1955). Night was also yet another entry in the festival’s unofficial celebration of pre-Code Hollywood, a snappy farce soaked in the sexual innuendo of the first order and a very appealing sense of the absurd to countermand its straight-up, generously moneyed surfaces. The film’s plot involves Roland Young (deadpan to the point of narcolepsy, but still capable with the script’s steady supply of dry one-liners) and his dalliance with Thelma Todd, whose husband, an Olympic javelin tosser, is away on an international meet. But when the husband (who turns out to be Cary Grant, in his first feature role) comes back early from his travels and catches the couple almost in flagrante delicto, Young’s pal Charlie Ruggles arranges to hire an aspiring actress (Lili Damita) to impersonate Young’s nonexistent wife and join them on the trip to Venice that Young and Todd had hoped would include only themselves. Damita’s charms end up disarming the stuffy Young, the suspicious Grant and the presumably asexual Ruggles as the farce builds up to a typically fevered pitch.

Tuttle infuses a sense of playfulness right from the start by structuring the movie’s sexual roundelays, deceptions and shifting partnerships as a playful symphony come to life—an orchestra is seen beginning a performance of a piece entitled “This Is the Night,” and the musical cues and accompaniment of this orchestra follows the characters throughout the film, sometimes dictating the tempo, rhythm and even the sound of the dialogue. One early exchange between two minor characters is overlaid with blatting trumpets and clashing cymbals, and much comic mileage is plumbed from an early musical sequence featuring Todd emerging from a limousine, only to get her gown caught in the door and torn asunder by an overzealous chauffeur. (“Madam has lost her dress! Oh, look! Oh, look! Madam has lost her dress!”). Tuttle also employs the strange but nicely modulated device of tinting the image a deep, rich blue to render more mysterious and bewitching the movie’s outdoor nighttime sequences. This technique, first visible over the Paramount logo that opens the picture, alternates essentially blue-and-silver images with the conventional black-and-white of the interiors and creates a kind of magical alternate reality that complements the movie’s musical stylization quite nicely.

The cast goes a long way toward selling the essential silliness. Young is his familiar meek, nonplussed self here, refining the persona that would flower so brilliantly in comedy classics like Ruggles of Red Gap, Topper and The Philadelphia Story, while Todd gets the benefit of a very slow burn over both that lost-dress chorus and her eventual sexual supplanting by Damita. And nobody stammered and hemmed and hawed in ’30s screwball comedy like Ruggles. Damita herself has an intriguing screen presence—she’s not at all comfortable with English, which is perfectly acceptable for the character of a French actress, and while her phonetic line readings hamper her a bit on the level of simple grace, she has charm and allure aplenty. It’s no stretch to see how she might cast a spell on both men and women, and the movie left me with a desire to find out more about Damita who, as it turned out, was the first wife of Errol Flynn. Their relationship was one apparently based primarily on sexual attraction and when Damita’s career, one that had survived the silent era but never flowered into stardom in the talkies, found itself in Flynn’s estimable shadow, the relationship foundered. (After divorcing Flynn in 1942, Damita spent the remainder of her days living in Palm Beach, Florida in relative obscurity. Scott Eyman wrote about Damita’s tempestuous life for The Palm Beach Post some years after her death in 1994.)

But the main fascination of This Is the Night, beyond its status as a solid romantic comedy with less of a reputation than it deserves, is the emergence of Cary Grant, whose urbane wit and charming sexual piquancy seems close to fully formed in this, his very first feature role. He’s far more recognizably “Cary Grant” here than in his more famous encounters with Marlene Dietrich and Mae West in Blonde Venus (1932) and She Done Him Wrong (1933), separated a full five years from Topper (1937), which would not only reunite him with Young but also initiate a popular run that has arguably never been matched by any other star. Grant elevates This Is the Night from likable fluff to perhaps the greatest coming attraction preview in the history of American movies.

Hot on the heels of This Is the Night, Hoop-la (1933) was notable in my experience for being my first real exposure, outside the occasional clip, to Clara Bow, Hollywood’s “It” girl, so named for the saucy 1927 silent hit It, which launched a nation’s love affair with the actress and came to define her career. Bow had struggled publicly with the transition to talkies, but Hoop-la offers plenty of evidence that she was on her way toward conquering them. She’s compelling, almost shockingly seductive (to hapless Richard Cromwell, and to us), and terrifically effective as an actress, quite separate from her obvious sexual allure, in this movie, which unfortunately turned out to be her last. Bow left the movies after Hoop-la turned out to be another in a string of box-office failures that convinced the actress maintaining a movie career constituted a battle she was no longer interested in fighting.

Another pre-Code dalliance with the kind of frank material that would either disappear or become sublimated in creative Hollywood screenwriting and direction in the wake of the ascension of the Hays Office, Hoop-la centers on a predatory carnival dancer (Bow) who sets her sights on the son of the show’s manager (Cromwell, who starred opposite Janet Gaynor in a festival highlight from last year, David Butler’s charming musical Sunnyside Up). Despite her commitment to the character and her natural openness and humor, Bow remained suspicious of the movie as being little more than an excuse to get her into various stages of undress. But even considered simply as a vehicle about (and certainly for) sexual exploitation, Hoop-la and Bow fascinate because even at the time she didn’t precisely conform to the curves and lines of the standard Hollywood beauty—compared to stars like Carole Lombard and Loretta Young, Bow comported her sexual confidence in a voluptuous body that still hinted at the weight problems which would plague her both during her career and much later in life. (She is quoted in the TCM Festival press materials as having said “A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.”)

However unlikely a seductress (by today’s standards anyway), seduce us she does in a surprisingly poignant, completely committed and beautifully nuanced performance. Hoop-la bears witness to the possibilities inherent in sexual representation in movies that have largely gone unexplored in Hollywood to this day, in the industry so resistant to allowing much variation in the pursuit of a certain slender interpretation of the standards of glamor and beauty. The screening was introduced, as it was on its initial Saturday afternoon run, by film historian David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, and Museum of Modern Art film collection manager Katie Trainor, a recurring hero of the two festivals I’ve attended so far. The two took obvious pride in presenting MOMA’s new restoration of Hoop-la, accentuating the rarity of seeing Hoop-la at all, one of those near-forgotten movies that has never been seen on either TV or DVD and will most benefit from the efforts of concerned preservationists like these two.

Our experience at the 2011 Turner Classic Film Festival nearing its end, Ariel and I made our way to the main auditorium of the Chinese multiplex and settled in for what would be our final screening, Mike Nichols’ film version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). By this point I was close to exhausted—15 movies over the span of three days and four nights had to be some kind of personal record, one that I think bested even last year’s voluminous TCM Festival intake. Ariel, however, was raring to go—ah, youth!—and couldn’t wait to be exposed to Nichols’ movie for the first time. (I’d seen it many times, but never in 35mm.) The movie seemed a strange choice to end a festival that had largely been devoted to delving into stylized, sometimes surreal, almost always pointedly artificial fantasies spun from the fine gold thread that stitched together even the silliest of Hollywood dreams. But taken as an alternative to spending time with well-worn selections like West Side Story (never a favorite), Fantasia or even Manhattan, spending time in the company of the vitriolic George and Martha was, for me, the only real option, especially when offered the opportunity to listen to the observation’s of the evening’s special guest.

Sitting upon the same stage where he spoke with Jane Powell just two nights earlier, Leonard Maltin introduced the film and framed its social context and its importance as a benchmark of an emerging adult sensibility in the waning days of both the ’60s and the studio system. And then he brought out Haskell Wexler who, after shooting feature films for some 13 years, really made a mark, on his career and on the trajectory of personal Hollywood filmmaking, by undertaking this project, which would win him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Black and White). Wexler explained how both Nichols and the studio were surprised by the insistent intimacy of his handheld, rather unforgiving shooting style, to the point that the cinematographer expected at one point that he might lose his job. But cooler heads prevailed and Wexler was allowed to bring his collaborative sensibility in line with that of Albee’s, presumably guiding the fledging director Nichols, whose first film this was, in the process. (It’s telling that none of Nichols’s subsequent features displayed anything like the serrated visual edge of Woolf?, or much of its caustic, relentless confidence either.)

And Wexler reserved nothing but praise in speaking of the recently deceased Elizabeth Taylor, praising her indelicate, boundary-pushing performance (which even the actress suspected might have been beyond her range) and her raucous sense of humor, which Wexler was quick to note gave her entry to Martha’s personality but was never wielded with anything like the viciousness that characterized Martha’s poisonous barbs. It’s not unusual when a public figure as beloved as Elizabeth Taylor is frequently remembered as being something of a saint, whatever well-publicized foibles conveniently set aside in the rush to offer up the most presentable, whitewashed image in her memory. And certainly in the days after her death Taylor was as subjected to such treatment as any major star. But Wexler’s comments, coming from someone who was probably more associated with her professionally than as a friend, had an unusual quality of sincerity about them—not surprising, since Wexler has something of a reputation himself for being one quite hesitant to suffer the misbehavior of fools and not at all hesitant to speak up in defense of his ideas. His impassioned remembrance of Taylor as a warm person and a talented actress was a heartfelt and appreciated warm-up to the acerbic, wounded woman with whom we would spend the next two hours.

Though it can’t help but betray its stage-bound roots, the movie Nichols, Albee, Wexler Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal made of Albee’s searing play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? revealed itself to the TCM audience as having barely been diluted by the passage of 44 years. After all, the shock and discomfort of Virginia Woolf? lies not in its flaunting of any specific movie taboos beyond the occasional “Suggested for Mature Audiences” level of coarse language, adapted freely from the stage as well, so much as its headlong march into the scorched-earth landscape of a befouled, fear-laden marriage. George and Martha, essayed in what still registers as a shocking level of flayed emotional flesh by real-life marrieds Burton and Taylor (whose own romantic history, and our knowledge of it, makes the drama even more potent), are engaged in a spectacularly self-destructive co-dependency. The movie stages marriage as a microcosmic act of love and war, probingly reflective of the kind of self-flagellation Middle America was already engaged in as the social upheavals of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, raged on. George and Martha, already drunk after a late-night faculty party at the college where George toils (and where Martha’s father runs the history department, perpetually holding the promise of promotion and the specter of disapproval over George’s head), bully a young couple (Segal, Dennis) new to the school into an all-night drinking “party” inside their modest house, where they proceed to strip the couple of their pretensions and expose themselves in the process, wreaking havoc on the crumbling pillars of their own relationship.

Albee’s vision of the fierce, destructive George and Martha dynamic was given smashing expression in this movie, even during those few moments when the material threatens, because of its horrific immediacy, to topple over into ghastly parody. The author posits marriage as a death dance of mutual mistrust, disgust, psychological manipulation and character assassination, with acrid and mocking literary allusion (the foul repetition of the titular limerick forming an icy knife that pierces the older couple’s most malignant delusions) making for a fetid cherry on top. It’s fairly incredible, then, given the pitch-black nature of the play, that it is also as bleakly funny as it is. Taylor and Burton both access the sheer, blunt delight buried within these stunted performers, who on some level actually enjoy the application of the torturous, bitter barbs they sling at each other with the drunken facility of wounded comics, gulping abuse and spewing retribution like shots of the cheapest, most foul rye. Even through its occasional moments of artifice, when Wexler’s gaze gets too close, too insistent, or when Nichols momentarily loses control of the mounting horror, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, sometimes wobbly, never flies off the tracks. It remains a cogent, penetratingly histrionic portrait of the sort of hysteria and disillusionment that lies dormant (if we’re honest) in most relationships, in times of prosperity and uncertainty, the terror of which is given potent free reign in this tiny, war-torn living room situated at the heart of our continuing national, and personal, nightmares.

It seemed fitting to consider, as we made our way out of the theater, that four of the festival’s most powerful, viscerally effective, tonally divergent movies—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Went the Day Well?, The Outlaw Josey Wales and even One Two Three—had as their subjects how different characters respond to the demands of one kind of war or another. (Haskell Wexler even made a direct connection to the idea of Virginia Woolf? as a war movie when he suggested to Maltin that seemingly simple concepts like “peace” and “love” were loaded words in the social context in which his movie was made.) These kinds of ruminations, connections between seemingly disparate material, are among the joys of a well-organized film festival, which can take on unexpected life down unplanned avenues as the process of reflection begins, and it was a special joy to find out that a festival like the Turner Classic Film Festival, devoted to the glories of past films, can be as open to this kind of application as showcases for contemporary works like Sundance, Toronto and Cannes.

As the crowd began to dissipate Ariel was on her phone making plans to head over to the Hollywood Roosevelt, grab a drink or two and listen to some post-fest party music, unwilling to let the experience of the weekend go just yet. But if I was flirting with exhaustion before the lights dimmed for Virginia Woolf?, I was undeniably spent now, extremely grateful for the fact that Metrolink would be taking me out of Hollywood and sparing me a bleary-eyed drive home. I headed across the lobby for one last visit to the men’s room with which I had become so familiar, and on my way there I once again ran into my Bay Area acquaintances, the Bette Davis Appreciation Society. I was about to say hello when one of them walked up to me, a shocked look on her face, and said with strange detachment and no explanation, “They got him.” I must have clearly looked confused, because she didn’t hesitate for much longer than a second before she reiterated, “They got him,” this time adding, “They killed Bin Laden.” Shocked, I asked her for details, but she claimed to have none, passing along an initial report she must have received, like a film festival update, on her iPhone. She said it to me again—”They got him”—as if she was trying to persuade herself to believe the disorienting news, and then walked away to join the rest of the BDASes without so much as a “see you later” tossed my way.

When I finished my business, I returned to Ariel, who was standing near the exit and who had already heard the news, by way of a text message that announced half-price drinks at Club TCM in the Hollywood Roosevelt in celebration of whatever closure the death of such a heinous bastard represented. Strange thing though: The repercussions vibrating through the lobby, where conversations about this recent development could be overheard everywhere, didn’t have the cathartic effect of watching vicious Union raiders get their comeuppance, or scheming, duplicitous Nazis get axed and slaughtered by unassuming rural Britons. No, it turns out that, just as we all probably suspected, real life and the emotions that get churned up in the wake of even a morally justified act of retaliation tend to be a little messier than, or at least resistant to the instant gratification and certitude so available in the movies. Ariel and I parted ways, vowing to compare notes on movies and madmen in the days following the festival, when life would ostensibly return to normal. As I made my way to the entrance of the train station, the aromatic lure of the street dog, so seductive to my palate last year, barely registered on my radar, even though I was surrounded by carts and their vendors, sautéing onions and making bacon-wrapped wonders of the most questionable of street meats, even though I was operating on a single turkey sandwich consumed nearly nine hours earlier. Undeniable reality had met the powerful cumulative effect of four days and 15 wonderful films, and for the moment anyway the harsh world had asserted itself, made no concession to fantasy, to notions of film criticism, appreciation and assessment in the stirring of emotions that would bring me to tears on the northbound train I was about to board. Reality had won out, more abruptly than the usual slow lap dissolve back out of the dream. All I wanted to do was go home and sleep for real.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go out, as they did last year, to Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine and Keith Uhlich, editor extraordinaire at The House Next Door, for their insight and encouragement and for making possible a second helping of the delights of the TCM Classic Film Festival for me. I owe them both my gratitude for their patience this year as well, in light of the peculiar distractions and responsibilities that made publication of this piece closer to the event itself difficult, to say the least. My most sincere thanks and love go out to my wife, Patty Yokoe Cozzalio, who displayed an altogether different sort of patience during my four-day absence to attend the festival, and who did such a fine and dedicated job of proofing and editing this very long article for me. I would also like to acknowledge the movie-going companionship and conversation of Ariel Schudson and Bob Westal, whose schedules and festival selections often overlapped with mine, thus making an exciting time even more rich and rewarding, and also the continued influence and passion of Farran Smith Nehme, whose singular wit, good humor, and genuine love and respect for the film classics of a bygone era provide me and so many others with the inspiration to truly appreciate and attempt to preserve, each in our own way, the treasures of our collective movie past.

The TCM Classic Film Festival ran from April 28—May 1.

Dennis Cozzalio

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

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