The 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival

Like several of its previous incarnations, year seven of the TCM Classic Film Festival, which concluded this past Sunday in the grimy, glittery heart of Hollywood, was organized around an overriding theme. But unlike such past umbrella constructs as “Family in the Movies: The Ties That Bind,” “Hollywood Style,” and “History According to Hollywood,” this year’s official theme, “Moving Pictures,” was one that was perhaps less precisely defined.

According to the official press release, TCMFF 2016 would be dedicated to exploring films “that bring us to tears, rouse us to action, inspire us, even project us to a higher plane…the big-time emotions of big screen stories, from coming-of-age pictures to terminal tearjerkers, from powerful sports dramas we feel in our bones to religious epics that elevate our spirits.” By the time the final schedule had been announced, there was even a sentimental subdivision of films centered on animals—Lassie, Come Home, Bambi, and Old Yeller among them. Of course, almost every film, whether we respond to it with warm feelings or revulsion, “moves” us in some way, emotionally or intellectually, sometimes even physically, so it seems a forgivable response if, going in, TCMFF’s announced theme seemed too broad to inspire much in the way of great expectations for an above-and-beyond level of curation.

Even so, with my festival experience well under way, the kernel of a richer TCMFF 2016 theme crystallized for me from a selection which could be classified as movie nostalgia of a different wrinkle. Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders, from 1964, played in a prime-time slot on Saturday night, prefaced by an interview with the film’s still-radiant star, Anna Karina, conducted by the clearly infatuated (and somewhat ill-prepared) TCM host Ben Mankiewicz. The beautiful Rialto Pictures restoration we saw quickly illuminated Mankiewicz’s infatuation, and ours, and Godard’s—revealing this buoyant, defiant, vividly sexy film in a big, bright, most undeniable fashion. Band of Outsiders looked smashing, coursing as it does with movie love, music love, and, of course, Paris love; it’s as much a starry-eyed promotional travelogue for the City of Lights as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is for Monument Valley.

Early on, our heroes sit for an English class in which their teacher, readying them for a lesson in Romeo and Juliet, emphasizes T.S. Eliot’s observation that “Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional” as a way of softening her students’ resistance to material that might seem musty or forbidding in any language. The quote suggests not only the teacher’s belief that new texts can reorganize tradition, but also ways in which classic texts can achieve modernity, not just through themselves, but through constant recontextualization over time. Always one to recognize a movie convention, Godard uses the classroom scene to establish his modus operandi in much the same way as hundreds of films before and since have done. The teacher even spells it out on the chalkboard: to be classic is to be modern.

As Band of Outsiders washed over me, I thought about the apparent swelling of interest in TCMFF among young people, who were noticeably out in droves at this year’s festival and coming close to matching in numbers the relatively elderly population of movie fans who might be expected to most ardently embrace the festival’s riches. If Nora Fiore, a.k.a. Nitrate Diva, a 25-year-old blogger and TCMFF enthusiast is to be believed, it’s possible that classic movie fare of the ’30s and ’40s may resonate with millennials more than anyone may have previously understood. “I think my generation responds to the subversive sides of old Hollywood, especially pre-Code films and film noir,” Fiore said in a recent L.A. Weekly piece, “Why Young People Go Nuts for the TCM Classic Film Festival,” adding that “studio-era films were often thrilling, shocking and, in some ways, ahead of where Hollywood is now.”

Even if young fans like Fiore are more niche than norm (most young people I know still have an allergic aversion to black-and-white film stock and anything that predates the Marvel Cinematic Universe), it’s hard not to take some degree of encouragement from seeing so many millennials wallowing in so much cinematic history, even if it’s primarily Hollywood-oriented. In fact, what ended up being most exciting for me at TCMFF 2016 was the realization of just how much modernity there was in that wallow, even if some of the more fascinating films in that light had to fight to be noticed over some of the more ostentatious attractions.

It’s hard to miss how movies like The Conversation (surveillance-inspired paranoia), All the President’s Men (surveillance-inspired political corruption), Ace in the Hole, and Network (prescient projections of infotainment journalism and reality TV), The Manchurian Candidate (the specter of political assassination), and A Face in the Crowd (election-year megalomania) might resonate for young and old, even if grumblings about the downbeat nature of many of the featured films could be heard in just about every queue I occupied. Yet despite those grumblings, the biggest spontaneous draw of the festival turned out to be Friday night’s screening of The Manchurian Candidate, which was attended by the film’s most memorable embodiment of evil, Angela Lansbury; twice the number that could be held by the gigantic Chinese Theater auditorium tried to get tickets and over 900 eager fans were turned away. (The effect of The Manchurian Candidate’s popularity was felt in every other auditorium Friday night; the frothy, second-tier 1955 musical My Sister Eileen, featuring Bob Fosse’s fleet, insinuating choreography and the chance to see Janet Leigh singing and dancing right into the TCM wheelhouse, played in front of only about 100 pairs of eyes, mine included.)

Otherwise, the inclusion of films like Rocky and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest helped fill the official “Moving Pictures” thematic bill, I suppose, as well as the criteria for what makes a “classic,” and they helped ensure full houses and enthusiastic photo ops for obviously happy audiences too. More selections like Cinema Paradiso, The Way We Were, and Children of a Lesser God, however, seemed to be pushing that “classic” definition in a less-defensible direction, an observation confirmed by some of those ’30s-obsessed youngsters who were the focus of the L.A. Weekly article. At least Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, whether or not it’s a true classic, deals exclusively in the iconography of classic ’40s film noir, so it was hard to begrudge Carl Reiner’s hilarious, genuinely odd comedy a place at the table.

As in years past, for me the true glory of TCMFF 2016 was to be found in the margins, away from heavy-rotation stalwarts like It’s a Wonderful Life or The King and I and down the rabbit hole where a multitude of unfamiliar treasures lay waiting to be discovered, to reveal a set of surprisingly modern sensibilities beneath their vintage veneer. Festival programmer and all-around good-luck charm Millie De Chirico, who introduced many of the films I attended, such as Ida Lupino’s 1949 directorial debut, Never Fear, and William Dieterle’s delirious political chamber drama/romance/post-Frankenstein sci-fi oddity Six Hours to Live from 1932, even began referring to those of us who repeatedly frequent the tiny auditorium where these lower-wattage screenings often take place as members of the Theater Four Club, and there may be no higher TCMFF honor.

It was in Theater Four where the threads of my own “classique = moderne” theme began to come into focus, made clear by the ways in which the crop of classic films I chose seemed so integrated, in style, form, and content, to current social and political issues, as well as aesthetic ones. There were moments when these films, which might seem to the casual observer museum pieces closed down by history, seemed to reach out and connect up with works they preceded on the timeline sometimes by decades, and without warning. And those sometimes startling connections began revealing themselves with my very first festival choice.

Larry Peerce’s 1964 film, One Potato, Two Potato, won its star, Barbara Barrie, the Best Actress award at Cannes, yet it’s dismayingly unknown to contemporary audiences, a heartfelt and ultimately devastating drama detailing the effects of an interracial marriage made at a time when such a heinous transgression was still punishable by prison time in several states. The societal resistance to such relationships may have since been largely eroded, but the racial tensions underlying such resistance have not, which makes this film’s relative obscurity an even greater shame. TCMFF made it easy to compare the rawness of One Potato, Two Potato to the easy-to-swallow liberal pieties of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? by positioning Stanley Kramer’s far more well-known film from 1967 in another auditorium directly afterward. (Festival programmers pulled off similar curating magic on Saturday by creating a de facto double bill at the Egyptian Theater which juxtaposed Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’s 1946 film The Big Sleep with Elliot Gould in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye from 1973, banking on audiences’ memory of the critical debate over Altman’s irreverent but impassioned take on Raymond Chandler’s detective icon, Philip Marlowe.)

Back in Theater Four, pre-Code rarities were multitudinous and ripe for the picking. John Cromwell’s 1932 romantic dramedy Double Harness got busy subverting the presumptions of its time, appealing to modern audiences ready to accept and understand its terms as something beyond mere titillation. William Powell and Ann Harding star as a couple out to test Harding’s theory that a marriage need not be based on emotion or even love, but instead only the passionless practicalities of a professional transaction, and the movie recasts the crossroads of sex and business in dramatic terms that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Steven Soderbergh film. The movie is an interesting artifact and fun to watch, but it lacks the snap of the period’s juicier efforts, which might have been provided if Barbara Stanwyck or Marion Davies had been cast instead of the relatively drab Harding.

Another presumably musty relic, this one from the pre-Code vaults of Universal Pictures and producer Carl Laemmle Jr., was Edward L. Cahn’s excellent, surprisingly moving 1932 western Law and Order, which belies the dominantly jaunty disposable tone that characterized most pre-Stagecoach B-movie westerns and makes unexpected moves forward toward a depth of feeling and technique which links it, however improbably, to The Wild Bunch. The film, essentially the Gunfight at the OK Corral with the names changed (to protect the mythological?), stars Walter Huston as notorious gunslinger-turned-marshal Frame “Saint” Johnson, née Wyatt Earp, and Cahn, who would eventually become a prolific but often mediocre director of agreeable schlock (Dragstrip Girl) and the occasionally noteworthy genre effort (It! The Terror From Beyond Space), lends Law and Order a somber, elegiac attitude toward death. The numerous killings here have a gravitas absent from the average horse opera of the day, and the film’s final shootout set piece has been choreographed and edited with a surprising degree of poetry that made me think of Sam Peckinpah more than once.

With his appearance in Law and Order and another Theater Four exclusive, William Wyler’s second talkie, A House Divided, Walter Huston ended up securing my vote for Patron Saint of TCMFF 2016. The 1931 film, yet another early Universal Pictures release, was so innovative in its use of sound and camera movement, and so absorbing in its drama, revolving around a violent widower (Huston) whose ineffectual son falls in love with the mail order bride (Helen Chandler) meant to replace his mother, that it was easy to forget it was made when the movies themselves were still such a young medium. Huston is a grim force of nature in this film, and it’s interesting to speculate, as film historian Eddie Muller did in the pre-screening talk with Wyler’s son, David, about the film’s links to horror and the possibility that Huston’s role might have been once considered by producer Laemmle Jr. for Lon Chaney.

Roy Del Ruth’s Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, enthusiastically and accurately hyped in an introduction by archivist Michael Schlesinger as “the best movie you’ve never seen!,” was perhaps the festival’s happiest surprise. The 1934 film is fresher than most comedies rolling out of studios today, predating the larky anarchy of comic mysteries and parodies like Murder by Death and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery by 40 or 50 years and besting them easily in the laughs department. The film brings back Ronald Coleman as the titular ex-British Army colonel and amateur detective and surrounds him with a top-notch cast including Warner Oland, Charles Butterworth, Una Merkel, C. Aubrey Smith, Mischa Auer, and Loretta Young, whom DP J. Peverell Marley lights as if she were a gauzily gorgeous Maria Falconetti, all in service to a brisk and hilarious script by Nunnally Johnson, who only went on to write the screenplays for The Grapes of Wrath, The World of Henry Orient, and The Dirty Dozen. If any film deserves to be rescued from movie purgatory and given the full Criterion treatment, it’s this one.

TCMFF 2016 held other surprises which felt comfortably, if not chronologically modern, including Melvin Frank’s seductively sharp farce Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell from 1968, which confirmed star Gina Lollobrigida’s credentials as a top-notch comedienne in zesty fashion. Lollobrigida, 88, was in attendance, and those in the packed house who didn’t already know were soon educated about her post-acting success as a photographer and a sculptor, a quintessentially independent modern woman without doubt. For sheer fun, only the world premiere of the restoration of the Marx Brothers classic Horse Feathers topped the Saturday-afternoon one-two punch of Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, which counted as the 99th and 100th movies I’ve seen during my seven-year run with TCMFF.

Finally, Noel Marshall’s 1981 film Roar, in which Marshall and his real-life family, including Tippi Hedren and Melanie Griffith, act out a very thin story of peril among a menagerie of untrained and unpredictable lions, tigers, and panthers, was without doubt king of this urban festival jungle in the realm of unbridled disbelief. I’m pretty sure I’ve never watched an entire film with my mouth hanging open in shock before this one. Roar isn’t exactly a Disney True-Life Adventure snuff film (nobody dies), but the absolute knowledge that people could have been killed, and at the very least will be seriously mauled on screen, lends it a sort of tension that’s hopefully unique in movie history.

The message the film desperately wants to send—regarding the preservation and the majesty of wildlife, particularly African cats of all shapes and sizes—keeps getting blurred by the insanity of the situations into which dedicated animal preservationists Marshall and Hedren put themselves and their family. The gore in this movie is real, the disregard for human safety is lunatic and irresponsible, and its motivations are strangely muddled, but I’ve never seen anything like it. A classic? No. But I was riveted. As noted film historian Richard Harland Smith suggests in his excellent article in the TCMFF program, the best comment on the well-intentioned, if bizarre hubris behind Roar would be to program it on a double bill with Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.

Even with oddities like Roar to distract from the festival’s most intriguing threads, I came away from TCMFF 2016 hoping that Eliot and Godard were right. In the afterglow of such a lineup, the idea that classic movies can become accessibly modern for younger audiences who might not otherwise be culturally inclined or conditioned to embrace them didn’t seem so improbable. And the spirit coursing through the best, if not exactly the highest-profile, offerings at this year’s fest has kept me cautiously hopeful that an attitude of “classique = moderne” fostered by TCM’s enraptured evangelism might continue to fuel and guide a new generation’s appreciation of the glories, the missteps, and even the follies of movie history.

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