The 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival

As far as matters of its own history goes, Los Angeles has a reputation for having one eye set to the rear-view mirror, the other eye focused more intently on what’s happening in the trendy, modern now. Districts like Bunker Hill and neighborhoods like Chavez Ravine remain sobering monuments to aggressive urban development (and residential displacement), though groups like the Los Angeles Conservancy and other organizations dedicated to social responsiveness and representation of the citizenry have been aggressively and successfully raising funds, awareness, and levels of appreciation for Los Angeles history and the city’s landmarks for several decades now. But in the city that once almost exclusively signified the heart of movie production in less globally focused times, while some original studio sites are still in use or at least recognizable, many others have been lost: The historic Pickfair Studios in West Hollywood, where Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks first formed United Artists, the first artist-run movie studio, during the silent era, fell victim to “progress” just three years ago.

Even in the heart of Hollywood, where costumed hustlers and tourists daily trample over sidewalk stars dedicated to the memory of entertainment legends, few are likely to pause over names like Lloyd Bacon, Ralph Bellamy, Stanley Kramer, Gregory La Cava, or Una Merkel. Except, perhaps, during one long weekend near the end of March, when classic-film historians, scholars, and everyday movie buffs gather, as they have since 2010, for the TCM Classic Film Festival, where this year the work of each of these less-well-known actors and directors was greeted with wild enthusiasm. To crib the title of one of the fêted films at this year’s gathering, it may be true, especially in Los Angeles, that nothing lasts forever, but TCMFF seems dedicated to the perception that some things, some people, some films just might be able to buck the inevitable disappearing act into the mists of history.

Speaking of which, the theme of this year’s festival, “History According to Hollywood,” is one that covers a lot of ground in the realm of classic and contemporary film, suggesting the difference between Hollywood’s inevitably fictionalized version of our collective past and that of a work of historical scholarship, or a textbook. And as Selma recently proved, there’s perhaps more tension than ever in the perpetual tug of war between a filmmaker’s fealty to historical accuracy and to the requirements of drama, of personal perspective, of art. The TCMFF atmosphere probably doesn’t inspire a lot of deep-dish contemplation on this sort of tension, as festival pass holders shuttle through the Chinese Theater complex, quickly exiting a screening of the restored 1972 film version of the musical 1776 on their way to securing a place in line to see The Diary of Anne Frank. But it’s in the air anyway, and it’s part of the valuable experience of being able to see movies like Malcolm X and Young Mr. Lincoln projected in very close proximity, measuring the ways that directors as disparate as Spike Lee and John Ford craft their own personal perspective to fit the history and the mythology surrounding their central characters.

Ford’s Lincoln may be a less immediate subject than the continuing significance of the man once known as Malcolm Little, or that of Martin Luther King Jr., and it’s doubtful anyone will accuse Ford of hewing too closely to the historical record on the early life of the great American president. However, both Malcolm X and Young Mr. Lincoln make grabs at the sort of truth that reverberates in the heart as well as the head, a sort which may be more elusive and even more rewarding than what might be yielded by a plain regurgitation of facts.

Hardly a seminar on cinematic historical representation, TCMFF’s overriding focus this year proved to be interesting as much for its subdivisions as for its main idea. In addition to the aforementioned epics and biopics, the umbrella of “History According to Hollywood” covered enough ground to include films of varying historical accuracy such as Apollo 13 (with the movie’s real-life hero, Captain James Lovell, in attendance), Lenny, Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, Calamity Jane, Madame Curie, The Miracle Worker, Queen Christina, Viva Zapata!, A Man for All Seasons, Breaker Morant, Inherit the Wind, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (featuring a beautiful restoration and a brand-new score written and conducted by Carl Davis), Judgment at Nuremberg, and even (points for irreverence, TCM programmers) Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part 1.

John Ford, an artist so important to the way in which many people have crafted perceptions and even refigured actual memories of an America receding into an ever more distant past, even rated his own category in the TCMFF program this year: “History According to John Ford.” Over the course of the weekend festival, his World War II drama They Were Expendable played alongside Young Mr. Lincoln and two other significant Ford considerations of the crossroads between history and mythology, My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

I managed to squeeze into a packed screening of the other Ford of the bunch, the rarely seen 1932 adventure picture Air Mail, starring Ralph Bellamy and Pat O’Brien as hotshot pilots with a contentious past who deliver the U.S. mail under treacherous conditions from a lonely desert-airport outpost. Undersold by Leonard Maltin in his pre-film introduction as merely a “bread-and-butter” picture, the film combines familiar themes of honor and trust with juicy pre-code romantic entanglements (courtesy of Gloria Stuart and, especially, the sultry Lilian Bond) and spectacular aerial photography and stunt work; this is the one where you’ll see stunt pilot Paul Mantz fly a plane in and out the open doors of a hangar, the first time this stunt was ever performed for a film. Air Mail was co-written by U.S. navy aviator Frank “Spig” Wead, who was himself the subject of a later biography directed by Ford and starring John Wayne, 1957’s The Wings of Eagles, and it reaps major rewards in the authenticity department from his participation. An early highlight during a festival packed with peak points, Air Mail is yet another strong exhibit in the case for eschewing the familiar at TCMFF in favor of the rare, the unknown or the never before seen. (Of the 14 movies I saw over the weekend, eight of them were new to me.)

Even more impressive was Anthony Mann’s 1949 film Reign of Terror, which casts new, chiaroscuro light not only onto the fictionalized circumstances of the French Revolution, but also onto its atmosphere and the lush visual language typically used by the makers of American and European historical epics. One of the major strokes of genius employed by Mann and cinematographer John Alton, who had both just come off of the low-budget one-two punch of T-Men and Raw Deal (both of which helped strongly codify the film noir style of the late ’40s and early ’50s), was to reject sweeping vistas and crowd scenes and bring the action down onto the cobbled streets and darkened alleyways of revolution-period Paris. Alton’s eerie shadows, twisted angles and shocking close-ups heighten every moment of Mann’s tightly woven storytelling strategy, building the film’s many great suspense sequences upon a solid foundation of immediacy and unexpected stylization.

Mann also manages a magic trick I would have previously thought impossible: For the first time as a leading man, Bob Cummings doesn’t seem in hopelessly over his head. His D’Aubigny is a secret republic operative who infiltrates the inner circle of Robespierre (an ever-seething Richard Basehart) and is charged with finding the black book that contains the names of the enemies the dictator-in-waiting has marked for investigation and possible execution. (Though advertised as Reign of Terror in the festival programming guide, the print shown featured the film’s alternate title, The Black Book, and I swear there was an audible murmur coming from some of those around me who thought they’d been baited and switched. Calling Paul Verhoeven!)

Cummings goes beyond the usual perturbed indifference that marks most of his work as a leading man. He’s harder, more intent, and he seizes the role with a surprising gusto that plays well off the showier performances, particularly Basehart’s frightening Robespierre and especially Arnold Moss as Fouché, head of the French secret police who vacillates deliciously between evil self-interest and sympathy for the citizenry. He oozes through his scenes as if anticipating installation as F. Murray Abraham’s villainous patron saint, a bad guy who really rises, or descends, to the occasion of the moment.

Also on hand are Arlene Dahl, who was never more lovely than here, seen through Alton’s lens as Madelon, D’Aubigny’s partner in romance and rebellion, and Beulah Bondi as a matriarch who must hide Madelon and D’Aubigny, and the book in question, from Robespierre’s minions in a scene of agonizing suspense which finds echoes in Night of the Hunter and Inglourious Basterds. The antithesis of the stuffy formula most readily associated with historical dramas, Reign of Terror crosses up the French Revolution with the feverish intensity of a hard-boiled crime film. It’s the movie that was probably my favorite of the festival.

But, of course, within their consideration of history according to Hollywood, TCMFF proved just as interested, as it should be, in the history of Hollywood, with several films on the schedule that celebrated significant anniversaries this year. There would be no escaping the constant reminders during the weekend that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the festival’s opening-night attraction, The Sound of Music. In addition to Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer walking the red carpet on Thursday night on their way into the VIP screening of the film, Plummer would receive a star on that Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday, and eerie, green-tinted images of Maria welcoming Robert Wise’s iconic helicopter shot with open arms played incessantly, on an apparently endless loop, before each new screening. Those of us grateful not to have been Von Trapped in the Chinese Theater on Thursday night remained haunted all weekend long nonetheless.

Other 50th-anniversary celebrations were reserved for David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago and Tony Richardson’s The Loved One, with Robert Morse on hand to speak to TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, who found himself saddled with extra interviewing duties in the absence of Robert Osborne, out this year due to health problems. Rialto Pictures did up a beauty of a restoration on Rififi, which screened in honor of its 60th birthday, and Rebel Without a Cause celebrated 60 years of tearing sensitive adolescents apart at this year’s festival as well.

Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid held a 50th birthday party at TCMFF too, featuring special party guest Ann-Margret, but I missed both the actress’s interview at TCM headquarters in the Hotel Roosevelt and her appearance before the screening of the movie itself because all that was scheduled opposite a beautiful restoration of Orson Welles’s rarely seen—and certainly never before seen with this sort of clarity and grandeur—Chimes at Midnight , which also turns 50 years old this year. I’d never seen it before, and what an introduction. Welles’s grand, gratefully imperfect, marvelously skillful and emotionally resonant distillation of Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V serves as perhaps the best introduction one could ask for to the three plays, and a potent realization, with visual poetry to approach that of Shakespeare’s words and a force-of-nature performance from Welles himself as Falstaff, the knight befriended and eventually betrayed by Prince Hal. Even with knowledge of Charles Foster Kane, Falstaff seems the role Welles was born to play; no other actor I’ve seen in the role could match him. And it’s not a stretch to imagining Welles, looking back over his own bit of Hollywood history (“Jesus, the things we have seen!”) as he inhabited this great, cowardly, exuberantly self-aggrandizing knight, seeing himself reflected in Falstaff’s generous, worn countenance.

The movie itself moves with stateliness, but it’s the furthest thing from static. It crackles with life, and it might be the best of all the films made of Shakespeare’s work. Many film fans have seen Chimes at Midnight only on degraded DVDs, 16mm prints, or even muddy VHS, so we happy few who were in the audience Friday afternoon were especially privileged. But there’s talk of an imminent Blu-ray release of the film, and it will be making its premiere on Turner Classic Movies in May, so those who treasure Welles’s movie, the one the director himself claimed to have loved most, have reason to take heart.

Finally, what happens when films take on the history of Hollywood and the movies themselves as a subject? TCMFF was able to provide a few offhanded answers to this question as well. In the sweet-spirited Australian drama The Picture Show Man, from 1977, John Meillon stars as a traveling film exhibitor near the end of the silent era, with fellow Aussie Rod Taylor playing Meillon’s rival in the picture show business. Woody Allen’s whimsical but decidedly downbeat The Purple Rose of Cairo, from 1985, asks questions about the magic of the movies as a meaningful escape from Depression-era reality and finds the medium coming up short. And the manic slapstick of Blake Edwards’s 1968 film The Party, which features Peter Sellers as an Indian actor trying to make inroads into the excess of the late ’60s movie industry, was well suited as one of three separate attractions which played out at the Hotel Roosevelt’s outdoor poolside screenings over the weekend. (More about another one of those in a moment.)

“The Dawn of Technicolor” was a special presentation of stills and original 35mm archival clips (based on the book written by David Pierce and James Layton) illustrating the development of three-strip Technicolor from 1915 to 1934, through the boom period of Hollywood’s great early sound musicals. This was one of the more buzzed-about events, and unfortunately I couldn’t get to Hollywood early enough on Friday morning; missing this resulted in the biggest regret I carried away from the festival this year. I also whiffed on attending “Return of the Dream Machine: Hand-cranked Films from 1902-1913,” an exhibition presented by Randy Haberkamp of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which featured silent films such as George Méliès’s 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon and Lois Weber’s 1913 split-screen thriller Suspense, shown on a 1909 hand-powered cameragraph motion-picture machine and accompanied by a live musical performance.

I did have an excuse for missing the hand-cranked exhibition, though it’s not one that is likely to score me a lot of points in more esoteric film-buff circles. Yes, while others were off proving their cineaste credentials watching flickering images created from the earliest sparks of movie magic, I settled in poolside for a different sort of example of Hollywood wrangling with its own history. Released just three and a half years after the devastation of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California, Earthquake capitalized upon and emulated the all-star disaster epic formula that had already reaped such huge financial success for rival studios with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

You might initially wonder, as many undoubtedly did (myself included), what the hell a trashy epic like Earthquake was doing among the finery of TCMFF presentations. After all, even those of us who savor it would be hard-pressed to consider it a classic. My favorite comment about the movie came from Pauline Kael’s review, in which she compared it to the studio’s other disaster picture, Airport 1975, which was released only a month earlier: “The picture is swill, but at least it’s not cut-rate swill.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Years later, Kael’s comment was used as a pull quote on the DVD, and a single misplaced vowel turned her wisecracking condemnation into a rave: “The picture is swell!”

Earthquake’s status as a classic is completely arguable, but as rich opportunities for indulging in all manner of Hollywood decadence go, this event was a doozy. My very first experience with TCMFF in 2010 was taken in beside this same pool, listening to Esther Williams being interviewed, then watching her take in a special presentation of aquatic choreography performed right there in the water, all leading up to a screening of her delightful Neptune’s Daughter from 1947. But I think seeing Earthquake last Saturday night may have eclipsed even that wonderful bit of Hollywood happiness. There was nothing on the four-day schedule to match the welcome relaxation of kicking back in a chaise lounge under palm trees at the edge of a pool in the center of a history-soaked hotel, sipping complimentary gin and tonics like they were soda pop (and they weren’t, as the bartender was in a very generous mood) and tempting fate in the most casually ironic manner. There was a definite sense that any temblor coinciding with the screening would have drawn screams, and then applause even louder than that which greeted star Richard Roundtree, who was interviewed before the show by TCM stalwart and actress Illeana Douglas, granddaughter of actor Melvyn Douglas.

As it turned out, watching Earthquake in this situation was a good way to actually see the movie as well. The outdoor projection of the DCP was startlingly vivid, a real improvement over the cheap DVD projection used to screen Esther Williams’s musical, and TCM technicians even did a marvelous job of providing a super-subwoofered facsimile of the movie’s patented Sensurround rumbles. The deep bass thrumming even extended to Charlton Heston’s state-of-the-early-’70s-art Chevy Blazer, which signaled an earthquake all its own every time Chuck fired it up, and the movie’s sound level in general covered much of the MST3K-style chatter that must have been going on in some of the most relaxed corners of the venue. I’ve seen the movie multiple times since 1974, including a couple of recent screenings at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, but I don’t know that it has ever looked as good as it did last Saturday night at the Roosevelt.

Earthquake acknowledges the essential insanity of building skyscrapers on a major fault line, or houses on stilts along unstable hillsides, and there’s a lot of movie industry self-flagellation going on in the charmingly analog depiction of a crumbling Los Angeles, but the film hardly qualifies as social critique. Even so, it doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in its rickety body, and the performers, in it for the paycheck to be sure, are still pretty game. Marjoe Gortner’s presence remains mystifying, as most of his film appearances do, but he’s weirdly enjoyable, as is George Kennedy, whose bull-in-a-china-shop bluster gets more free rein here than any of his appearances as stalwart aviation honcho Joe Patroni in the Airport films. (Early on, he leads the audience on a geographically coherent car chase that skirts the very area where we were watching the movie.)

Ava Gardner has little to do but rant; her hilariously bitter “Goddamn it!” is the film’s first volley of dialogue. But she’s as close as we’ll ever get to seeing Edward Albee’s Martha stumbling through the wreckage of a disaster movie, and I maintain there’s value in that. Overseeing it all is the rock that is Charlton Heston, here on the downside of peak dystopian visions like the first two Planet of the Apes films, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green, and well settled into the mold of the self-sacrificing hero in whom 1974 audiences had already stopped believing.

In Earthquake, Heston dies for the sins of L.A., sins that aren’t shown so much as assumed, and it’s strange to think that Universal was so eager and relatively quick to capitalize on the fears of a city which was still reeling from the aftershocks of a real-life disaster which may have itself had an air (however misplaced) of inevitability about it, coming so close on the heels of the random terror generated by the likes of the Manson Family. Maybe in the remake we’ll get to see more of the bad behavior that justifies such an Old Testament-style cataclysm, and the effects will surely be much more “believable.”

But Earthquake doesn’t really play in the real world, and I bet any spiffy CGI-enhanced update won’t be nearly as much fun as seeing a cardboard miniature of the Capitol Records building crumble to the ground, or a low-tech matte painting of the Cinerama Dome in smoking ruins. I felt lucky to have survived the Earthquake screening, knowing that a vengeful God chose to leave us alone for those three hours or so instead of jumping on the opportunity to pull off the ultimate Hollywood joke. And I have to admit that it was a relief to drive by both of those iconic structures the next day and see them still standing, holding court in a Hollywood that will be more than ready for the return of the TCM Classic Movie Festival in the spring of 2016.

The TCM Classic Film Festival ran from March 26—29.