With a festival theme of classic movies originating with literature, Turner Classic Movies’ 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood satiated, enticed and, on occasion, stirred in audiences the power and wonder that the original filmmakers intended decades ago.
Event planning in one of the city’s seediest neighborhoods is a challenge. In today’s cultural void, creating a sense of purpose, let alone eliciting an emotional response, around a particular idea is an impressive achievement. That Turner Classic Movies attempts, executes and sustains this festival every year, especially soon after losing its defining host and ambassador, Robert Osborne, and that brand TCM does this in Hollywood, which increasingly resembles a horror film set, astounds.
Senior programmer Charlie Tabesh, as Robert Osborne told me more than once while persuading me to attend the festival, has mastered the metrics of showcasing classic movies. TCM’s theme this year, films based upon a piece of writing, has renewed meaning and relevance. As I told them both, programmers Stephanie Thames and Scott McGee assembled an outstanding program.
New tours and venues, courtesy of the American Society of Cinematographers and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, were on the bill. Grand Prix (1966) screened in the ArcLight Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome. Interviews with movie makers James Ivory, Gilliam Armstrong and Robert Benton added value to the festival. So did the presentation of the first Robert Osborne Award, which went to Martin Scorsese at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Other welcome additions include a tear-out schedule in the program guide. Familiar guest speakers and moderators, such as Cari Beauchamp, Ben Burtt, Leonard Maltin, Wyatt McCrea and Donald Bogle returned for stimulating, thoughtful commentary, perspective and insights.
TCM does get in its own way. I watched A Woman Rebels (1936), a compelling movie starring Katharine Hepburn, on TCM after the festival and learned of its literary origins. This made me wonder what classic movie scholar and author Cari Beauchamp would have to say about it and wish the movie had also been featured. The event lacks wider and deeper philosophical perspectives (as I pointed out in my preview) and this year’s festival is no exception. In retrospect, TCM missed key literary-based pictures, though there are often good reasons, including rights, quality and recent festival screenings.
Other gripes or suggested steps in progress include better red carpet positioning — having movie stars, especially those in their nineties, posing in LA’s late afternoon sun is brutal — handling and presentation of talent. A stellar event such as this requires hands-on attention to detail. It was disappointing that few among the press pool knew that Sounder‘s Cicely Tyson, for instance, had portrayed both Marva Collins and Kunta Kinte’s mother on ABC’s epic Roots.
Speaking of Miss Tyson, whose tale of being tossed out by her mother as a kid for wanting to be an actress is wrenching, the interview with TCM’s host Ben Mankiewicz before Martin Ritt’s Sounder contained one question about the 1972 movie. Sounder co-starred the late Paul Winfield and introduced Kevin Hooks in his film debut. An actress of Miss Tyson’s caliber calls for delving deeper into the movie the audience is about to see.
Speaking of longtime host Ben Mankiewicz, he visibly makes every effort to be his best. Ben treats every festival gathering to his sense of humor. However, segments such as the “Growing Up Mankiewicz” feature, which packed a standing room only audience into Hollywood Roosevelt’s Club TCM, take time from festival programming for and about classic movies qua classic movies.
Indeed, TCM thrives on worshipping movies as movies, down to cinematography, storyboarding, lighting, casting, marketing and that which makes it all possible, the screenwriting. An emphasis on facts, analysis and context for classic movies ought to trump having a blood relation to those who made them. I enjoy witty and knowledgeable commentary by hosts such as Illeana Douglas, for instance, but it’s primarily because she demonstrates enthusiasm for the movies. Part of what makes Robert Osborne an enduring figure in TCM’s legacy is his experience and mastery of movies as a performer, columnist and, ultimately, as a television interviewer and host.
Robert Osborne’s proximity and connection to movie stars and filmmakers informed his insight, wisdom and passion for movies but knowing that he knew Lucille Ball and Olivia De Havilland was not fundamental to appreciating TCM’s brand; it was co-incidental, icing on the cake. What sealed his viewer relationship was his apparent and abundant love for classic movies and, crucially, his accessibility to the audience in sharing what he loved. He always sought to ground his experience in being the boy from Colfax, Washington, who’d immersed himself in the movies. That he later made a living from it was a happy fact which he cherished. He wanted you to cherish it, too.
Robert Osborne’s reverence for movies was the byproduct of, not an afterthought to, his experience and knowledge. He always sought to forge a connection with the audience rather than magnify any other connection he might have had. In every case, he always brought the focus back to classic movies.
Classic movies this year were, as always and in general, superb. Sounder moved me to appreciate rational parenting from the perspective of a poor, black family during the Great Depression. Places in the Heart had a similar impact, though about a family made by choice, not simply by blood. Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound was something of a marvel in nitrate at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theater. I Take This Woman (1931) allowed me to experience the chemistry of young Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard. Kramer vs. Kramer, written and directed by Robert Benton, whom I had the pleasure to meet and interview during the festival, reminds me that life’s smallest moments, recreated with deliberation, can pack the most attuned emotional wallop.
The single movie that made the most searing impression is William Wellman’s A Star is Born (1937). This film, like 2016’s best movie, La La Land, revels in its screenwriting. The motion picture spins a tantalizing story of abiding romantic love, intoxicating glamour and the unspeakable agony of losing one’s highest value. Like that recent film, and like Hollywood and everything decent, honorable and larger than life about it, particularly as a microcosm for the best of America, this less jaded, more wholesome version of A Star is Born is cautionary, resplendent and redemptive.
The often remade movie ultimately depicts ambition. Wanting more of work one loves is not enough, this classic movie suggests, to fuel one’s life, let alone to let one live large. Whether this desire to create destroys or inspires the one wanting goes to whose sake for which one wants and whether the want is deserved. This makes all the difference.
As cinematic drama, so does A Star is Born, yesteryear, now and, with luck, always. The intelligent movie radiates a kind of glow born of combing through the details of hardship, strength and the relentless, not to be confused with ruthless, pursuit of one’s happiness. This makes the classic movie, the forerunner to another upcoming remake by two talented and luminous stars, a perfect ending for this year’s writing-themed classic film festival.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) co-starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck is a light psychological mystery. Seen by this writer for the first time in nitrate at a screening at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood during the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival, this 1945 movie is not director Hitchcock’s best work. Spellbound is nevertheless thoughtful and interesting. With Peck as the handsome but offbeat new head of a mental health center and cigarette holder-smoking Bergman as the lady doctor with whom he falls in love at first sight, Spellbound is, as TCM’s hostess properly introduced it, more than a tad preposterous.
Seeded into this psycho-drama, which also features Norman Lloyd and a capable cast as pseudo-sane, possibly malicious or predatory and mentally unstable doctors and patients, is “a lesson in how to accept reality”. As soon as Peck’s doctor appears on scene as the new chief and author of a scholarly work titled “The Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex”, with frigid Bergman coming undone at the sight of him, it’s clear that Spellbound aims to surprise while spinning into several subplots.
Is Spellbound spellbinding? Not completely, as Peck’s and Bergman’s doctors bond over a common interest in athletics and he subsequently goes bonkers over kidney-shaped designs on a napkin (or is it the stripes?) and she gets excited over the prospect of tending to the helpless male. Spellbound is more fun for picking up clues than it is binding, even as murder comes into play and Peck dashes off to the Empire Hotel.
Subplots come and go. Some converge, some do not, and some stagnate for no apparent plot point or purpose than amusement. There’s the matter of toying with the then-radical notion of a woman in public alone. Or is Hitchcock simply exploring the idea of being suspicious of an attractive woman alone? This is done as he dramatizes harassment of an attractive, professional woman who’s alone.
In any case, Bergman’s competent doctor is subdued in pursuing the handsome, possibly helpless, possibly unhinged, man in room 3033 and this alone raises thought-provoking, or at least entertaining, questions, especially in the context of the year 1945. When someone makes a declaration which begins with “I want…”, it earns the audience attention, even if it hardly amounts to an effective surprise.
Mixed with detectives on the trail, a glass of milk, a dubious claim that “the mind isn’t everything”, and a train to Rochester, all with Hitchcock’s usual visual flourish, Spellbound gets ahead of itself. Murder, of course, is solved in due course, though don’t expect a fully logical, let alone plausible, explanation. That it comes with the additional bit of wisdom that there’s “lots of happiness in working hard” makes Spellbound more enjoyable than bewitching.
Last week, I attended the world premiere restoration of a 1972 movie directed by Martin Ritt about a dog and a boy and the parents who guide and watch over them in the uplifting, family-themed Sounder. Introduced at the TCM Classic Film Festival in the grand, historic Grauman’s Chinese Theater, this is not a modern movie, so if your favorite movies have scenes that rarely last longer than a few seconds and are loaded with sound, action and special effects, Sounder is probably not for you.
However, for literate or literary movie-lovers (Sounder is based upon a short children’s novel) who welcome an opportunity to immerse in rich stories and plots with interesting characters, Sounder resonates.
Pictures of a father and son hunting raccoon in Louisiana in 1933 come over a title as they head home with the title’s loyal and expressive hound dog. Essentially, this slow, purposeful movie dramatizes proper parenting. The father, played by Paul Winfield in a physically demanding, exhaustive role, transforms over the course of the small-scale film. He hunts, he struggles and he worries. Providing for his poor, black family on a Depression-era farm that’s dependent upon a decent crop and his wife’s freelance laundry business is hard work. The farmer does what he thinks he needs to do to feed his family. He’s willing to pay the consequences and not a bit more.
When he’s arrested for stealing food for his family, he goes along with being handcuffed by the racist Southern sheriff but he won’t sanction watching a policeman execute his loyal dog Sounder. In this sense, Sounder sounds an alarm for his master to make radical change to liberate his children from poverty. Change is gradual in coming, which makes Sounder more rewarding.
Bringing continuity to the story in a role best understood as a subtle but pivotal part, Cicely Tyson plays Rebecca, the man’s wife and the boy’s (and other two children’s) mother. Rebecca’s depth of love for her husband and children is as natural as the Louisiana heat is sweltering. Rebecca’s dress may be tattered but it’s merely a contrast to her carefully stitched method of parenting, from her choreographed routine for feeding the kids to her efficient laundry business.
As their son in his motion picture debut, Kevin Hooks (who went on to appear as one of the Carver High basketball players on The White Shadow on CBS) is the film’s center. He walks to a schoolhouse, where he studies writing by Mark Twain. He’s clearly an intelligent boy. His parents see and acknowledge this; his dad in the complex way a father can notice a son’s potential and his mother in the simple way a mother can mirror a son’s best qualities.
Faced with poverty and the threat of imminent destitution, his mother must learn to compose herself for the sake of her child’s development. The father, facing a forced absence from his family and its aftermath, must learn to filter his thoughts and control the measure and tone of his actions. The bright boy is their beneficiary.
Parents aren’t the only ones to notice the child in the family. One of Sounder‘s most complex and endearing characters is Mrs. Boatwright, the family’s most loyal customer, a white woman who takes notice of the boy’s use of his mind. She bestows upon him The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. For most whites in the Depression-era American South, this act of kindness might be a bit too bold.
Not for this older woman, who is later accused without cause of harboring improper affection for the boy. The woman of the mind, 40 years ahead of her time, gives the book with the stern condition that she expects the boy not just to read it, but to think about it, which is to say she wants him to discuss what the novel means.
All of this attention to the first-born child in a struggling farm family accentuates the powerful if subtle role that family dog Sounder, wounded by the diverted gunshot, plays as he goes missing. Sounder, a happy and bounding hound dog that howls when his master is taken away, is the salve that’s kept the father in good spirits. But family toil is not without joy, as they gather to listen to a friend sing or to play baseball. Sounder may have run off. But the loyalty, laughter and joy he represents remains.
The family will need to draw from it, too, without a husband and father to hunt, gather and provide sustenance. Besides the chatter of small-minded townspeople, the sheriff refuses to contextualize rules and let Rebecca visit her husband in jail before he’s sent to the penitentiary. When the lawman asserts that he “must follow orders”, Rebecca sits with her anger in silence. But she departs with a judgment of her own, tying him to what she rightly pegs as his “low life job”, putting the sheriff and his ‘loyalty’ poster in context.
Doing without dad is Sounder‘s wider turning point. It’s the opening arc to see the boy, whose name is David, setting his own terms without his father to challenge, call and guide him. David starts to take charge when he looks for Sounder. Passing a Confederate war memorial, David brings a cake his mother’s baked to the jail. David works the farmland for sharecropping, cleans wounds, uses his mind with Mrs. Boatwright, if not as she’d intended, and David learns to get what he wants.
This is when Sounder goes around to become David’s journey. A sister and brother, mother and father and, of course, Sounder, serve the turn as it wanders and fans out to the world at large. Director Martin Ritt lets David’s odyssey linger among willow trees and singing insects as the boy looks for his dad. Amid rain, cattle, fog and a gleaming white plantation, David finds what he’s not looking for, which is what tends to happen in the most absorbing tales of the child roaming strange new lands, such as Earl Hamner’s The Homecoming and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.
David discovers a mulatto teacher named Camille Johnson, who teaches him about Harriet Tubman and a black American Revolutionary and other facts with no relation to stories by Mark Twain or, for that matter, Alexandre Dumas.
As if in payment for Miss Johnson’s lessons, and certainly as her properly earned reward, David speaks up. In particular, he does so on behalf of a poor, bewildered and brave boy named Clarence, who is singled out for taunting by his peers. This is Sounder‘s finer turning point. Again, it’s rendered on a quiet, natural scale as the black boy prepares for speaking up in the world at large. Tenderly, if no less sternly, Miss Johnson demonstrates to her visitor that his guilt is through no fault of the boy’s own.
A triumphant closeup the audience may not realize they’ve been waiting for comes on screen at last and Sounder serves an emotional, bookended moral to the story, which, in the end, beckons with a joyful and easy call for true, rational parenting.
Hollywood’s first Technicolor movie starts with words on a screen play and goes to a great American story of a self-made soul from there. Janet Gaynor stars as a waif from North Dakota named Esther Blodgett. Wispy Esther loves the movies, I mean she really worships pictures as a means of envisioning a better life. For this, Esther is ridiculed by her spinster aunt and others in her family.
“Leave me alone”, she wearily pleads. Her grandmother, played by May Robson in one of her best performances, consoles young Esther, offering wisdom about being a pioneer in the West, forging a new way of life and loving her life and her husband no matter what the cost, even if it means breaking her heart, telling the story of her murdered husband who was downed by savage Indians to “make a new country”.
With that, A Star is Born unspools a wondrous, dangerous and glorious tale. Esther, aided by her granny’s savings, makes way for Hollywood to become a movie star. In lush pictures of the then-new American West, Los Angeles, land of motion pictures, co-writer and director William Wellman shows the Hollywood Bowl, the bright lights and boulevards and the shiny locomotives and airplanes made of hard, cold steel to transport America’s bravest pioneers to the world’s newest arts and industrial center.
As Esther Blodgett, who’ll change her name, Miss Gaynor (who co-starred in Mr. Wellman’s excellent Wings) fits the part for the time. Plucky and pert, the petite actress combines qualities of the ingenue with the womanly characteristics with which one associates a would-be rising actress. “No cowboys”, a sign says at the boarding house where she meets an aspiring filmmaker (Andy Devine, Stagecoach), indicating that the road to stardom is harsh and competitive and that it puts the artist under a kind of constant scrutiny for favor in a city built on sharp, if often snap, judgment.
The spunky young actress wants what she wants and she dares to think she might be the exception to the rule, which she dares to say out loud in a telling, foreshadowing scene which is easy to miss and dismiss in crediting Janet Gaynor’s performance. Having sighted the hand and footprints of movie stars such as Shirley Temple and Jean Harlow in the forecourt of the world-famous Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, she’s determined to go after what she wants. She even steps into the shoe prints of one of her heroes, matinee idol Norman Maine.
But Norman Maine, played with nuance, bite and melancholy by the great, handsome Frederic March (Inherit the Wind), who will meet the struggling actress a few scenes later at a movie producer’s party, is filling up on scotch and soda to the extreme. Maine’s story within a story, and that’s what it is, is a superficially humorous, cautionary depiction that’s often been proven true since this 1937 classic was made.
Whether Marilyn, Elvis or Whitney, the potential for great tragedy in the artist whose greatness lies in his or her sensitivity, authenticity and powers of keen insight and observation looms large in A Star is Born. This same tender and intelligent quality puts the artist supremely at risk, too. This is a theme which Wellman, a World War One veteran and fighter pilot, understands well as he applies his grasp to this masterpiece. And it’s best encapsulated in the simple plea “just one more look,” which, if you think about it, shows and tells the audience all it needs to know about this emotional movie and its memorable characters.
Among them are Oliver, played with empathy and precision by Adolphe Menjou (Man on a Tightrope), a producer with dollar signs in mind for movies and affection for humanity in his every action. Andy Devine’s and May Robson’s characters, too, are pivotal, especially Robson’s, to the stunning outcome of the climax that comes in a gentle scene on the beach. Each character accentuates the loving, passionate, sexually demonstrative coupling of Miss Gaynor and Mr. March. When Menjou’s motion picture businessman instructs his studio’s biggest star “you have to work it out for yourself”, he’s speaking with clarity and urgency and in the highest sense of the last two words.
Lionel Stander and a cast of extras are best described as the mob or the herd in Hollywood’s star machine, a mixture of wannabes and sycophants, representing the villainy of what makes and unmakes the movie star.
A Star is Born ends as it begins, with words written on the page, following a road trip, a wedding and a fast track toward some certain sense of loss, finally cut loose by what happens after the sound of a doorbell. It is followed, in a scene more chilling than anything in a horror movie, by a scream. Wonderfully, and achingly, if not overdoing the agony, A Star is Born fittingly caps the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival, where I saw this film for the first time in nitrate at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theater.
It is a serious warning about what murders the best in man. It is framed, like this year’s festival theme, by the written word. And it emerges with an embittered, resurgent sense of man the unconquerable which is what this movie means.
The music swells up, A Star is Born tells us at The End. So, too, does the human spirit, in a powerfully poetic, cinematic deliverance for a hundred years and a lifetime, particularly when you feel like what glitters is gone for good.
This rarely seen pre-Production Code gem has its charms. Don’t expect a marvelous, grand or lush motion picture. If the abundance of riches presented by the prospect of watching Carole Lombard and Gary Cooper together in a love story entices you and the opportunity comes up, make the effort to see I Take This Woman (1931; not the 1940 version of the same name).
Miss Lombard portrays a lively, modern society woman. She parties and plays, including with the affections of a suitor who knows he’s ordinary and seeks to marry this liberated heiress, whose father disapproves of her lifestyle, yet something about her is straight, upright and wants to be moored. Enter Gary Cooper as cowboy ranch hand Tom McNair, a lanky, loose-limbed and loose-lipped man who works at the ranch her family owns out west in Wyoming. This is where Daddy sends the young temptress, under threat of disinheritance, to cool her jets after a scandal.
Imagine what happens next.
Despite direction that fails to capitalize on the magnetism these two movie stars generate, I Take This Woman takes off. Not everyone agrees with me, as evidenced after I saw the film at the TCM Classic Film Festival (after TCM’s hostess introduced the wrong version). But there’s enough, much and even more to appreciate in the performances and chemistry of its stars alone.
Amid scenes of running water, a smoldering kiss by a departing train and the sexual tension and conflict between the blue jean-wearing cowboy and the satin-skinned heiress, Cooper and Lombard shine. This makes it easier to forgive I Take This Woman its mistakes, gaps and flat transitions. And, ultimately, there’s something in this tale of hard labor, mixed thoughts and feelings and contrasting lifestyles (watch to see which one triumphs in the end) to win you over and make it all worthwhile.
Whether it’s the way Carole Lombard looks directly into the camera or storms up, not down, the stairs, or the way Gary Cooper puts his woman in her place, or the way she reclaims him in a softer, sweetened mea culpa, I Take This Woman highlights the shine in its stars. It flattens at the end, when it should have swept up for a finish with an epilogue in romantic Western pictures. Yet when Mr. Cooper and Miss Lombard wake in the dead of winter, in the worst of times, to wish another ‘Merry Christmas’ and discreetly exchange presents, the movie, based on the novel Lost Ecstasy, earns its emboldened title.
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Event planning in one of the city’s seediest neighborhoods is a challenge. In today’s cultural void, creating a sense of purpose, let alone eliciting an emotional response, around a particular idea is an impressive achievement. That Turner Classic Movies attempts, executes and sustains this festival every year, especially soon after losing its defining host and ambassador, Robert Osborne, and that brand TCM does this in Hollywood, which increasingly resembles a horror film set, astounds.
Spellbound is nevertheless thoughtful and interesting. With Peck as the handsome but offbeat new head of a mental health center and cigarette holder-smoking Bergman as the lady doctor with whom he falls in love at first sight, Spellbound is, as TCM’s hostess properly introduced it, more than a tad preposterous.
Parents aren’t the only ones to notice the child in the family. One of Sounder‘s most complex and endearing characters is Mrs. Boatwright, the family’s most loyal customer, a white woman who takes notice of the boy’s use of his mind. She bestows upon him The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. For most whites in the Depression-era American South, this act of kindness might be a bit too bold.
As if in payment for Miss Johnson’s lessons, and certainly as her properly earned reward, David speaks up. In particular, he does so on behalf of a poor, bewildered and brave boy named Clarence, who is singled out for taunting by his peers. This is Sounder‘s finer turning point. Again, it’s rendered on a quiet, natural scale as the black boy prepares for speaking up in the world at large. Tenderly, if no less sternly, Miss Johnson demonstrates to her visitor that his guilt is through no fault of the boy’s own.
With that, A Star is Born unspools a wondrous, dangerous and glorious tale. Esther, aided by her granny’s savings, makes way for Hollywood to become a movie star. In lush pictures of the then-new American West, Los Angeles, land of motion pictures, co-writer and director William Wellman shows the Hollywood Bowl, the bright lights and boulevards and the shiny locomotives and airplanes made of hard, cold steel to transport America’s bravest pioneers to the world’s newest arts and industrial center.
This rarely seen pre-Production Code gem has its charms. Don’t expect a marvelous, grand or lush motion picture. If the abundance of riches presented by the prospect of watching Carole Lombard and Gary Cooper together in a love story entices you and the opportunity comes up, make the effort to see I Take This Woman (1931; not the 1940 version of the same name).