Category: Classic Movies

Classic Movie Journal: It’s Hard to Say “So Long” to TCM Star of the Month Jean Simmons

By Jennifer Baldwin. When featuring an intriguing star, TCM’s Star of the Month tribute is an overdose of straight-up, hardcore, pure pleasure. For one night each week, the month is turned over to a movie star and we witness, with relentless intensity, every curve and turn and height of the star’s career – until the month ends and we feel indecent over how much we’ve come to know this person.

We don’t really “know” them, of course. We only see their performances. But film is funny in its deceptive intimacy, and saying farewell to the Star of the Month is like saying farewell to a summer camp best friend or a wartime romance: “It was wonderful, darling. I’ll never forget the good times we had. We’ll always have that April on TCM!” The star is in your life, in your living room, for a whole month and then, suddenly, the star gets snatched away. The light goes out.

Of course, some months I’m just not interested in the chosen one. Singing Cowboys in July? Don’t fence me in, baby, I’d rather be out playing beach volleyball at the park. But just this past month of June, Jean Simmons had me glued. I hadn’t realized it until she passed away last year, but Jean Simmons was around a lot in my teenage years. I really identified with her, with the intelligence, strength, and vulnerability she brought to the screen. Young Bess at fifteen; Guys and Dolls at sixteen; Elmer Gantry at seventeen. I must have watched these movies on an endless loop when I was in high school.

When I finally got around to Angel Face in college, it bothered me for weeks. I told friends and family and random people on the street about this movie, about this character — Diane Treymayne — and how I just couldn’t shake her. She creeped me out, and I just couldn’t shake her. She was a murderer, a psychopath, but I just couldn’t let her go. I SYMPATHIZED with her. It was disturbing.

You’re not supposed to sympathize with the Spider Woman. Sure, you can understand her motivations, even get some perverse pleasure out of her power and wicked determination, but you’re not supposed to feel bad for her. But there I was — and here I am — feeling sorry for Simmons’ Diane Treymayne.

And that ending! That last, stomach-shocking scene, throwing all my emotions for a fireball crashing loop. Every time I watch the finale in Angel Face I go, “Oh my God! What the hell?!” Every time. Every single time. And I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. Continue reading Classic Movie Journal: It’s Hard to Say “So Long” to TCM Star of the Month Jean Simmons

Tarkovsky, Bach, and God

By David Ross. I first heard Bach’s choral prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (“I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ”) in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). It seems to me one of the world’s most beautiful compositions, and Tarkovsky’s scene, in which the piece harmonizes with the camera as it plays over Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), seems to me one of the most solemnly lovely scenes in cinema. The camera scrutinizes the details of Brueghel’s painting, at first coldly (as Kris must see it), but then with a certain wistful sorrow, as if in recognition of our hopeless estrangement from the natural life of the old village. The mournful precision of the piece by Bach (see here for Vladimir Horowitz’ transcendently lovely interpretation) underscores that there is only the beautiful sadness of our estrangement and longing. Kris stirs with new humility and humanity, and he and Hari begin to float, ostensibly in a state of zero gravitation, but actually in a state of grace.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Hunters in the Snow" (1565).

People often speak of Falconetti’s ecstatic expression in Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) as film’s most inspired synecdoche of the religious experience, but Tarkovsky, in my opinion, exceeds Dreyer artistically and spiritually. Tarkovsky seems engaged not in a pastiche of an archaic faith, but in the genuine struggle of modern faith, and his dense, intricately coded scene seems to compress everything integral to Western culture in its modern self-bewilderment and tentative hope.

In a 1986 interview, Laurence Cossé asked Tarkovsky whether he considered his films “acts of love towards the Creator.” Tarkovsky responded “I would like to think so. I’m working in it, in any case. The ideal for would be to make this constant gift, this gift that Bach alone, truly, was able to offer God.”

Posted on June 2nd, 2011 at 2:42pm.


A Classic Movie Lover’s Weekend at The 2011 TCM Film Festival

Watching "Gaslight" (1944) inside the Chinese Theatre during the TCM Classic Film Festival.

By Jennifer Baldwin. A funny thing happened on the opening night of the TCM Classic Film Festival: I fell in love with an old movie. That shouldn’t be so funny, really, since I fall in love with old movies all the time. It’s just what I do. It’s my thing. I watch a random old movie on TV one night and next thing you know I’m in love. No, what’s funny about that first night of the TCM film fest is that I fell in love with an old movie I already loved.

An American in Paris may not be regarded as the best musical film of all time (most would say Singing in the Rain), but I’ve always had a soft spot for it in my heart. The Gershwin songs, the wild Technicolor, the audaciousness of that twenty-minute dance finale – it may not have the most riveting storyline in the world (few musicals do, really), but it more than makes up for it in terms of musical and visual pizzazz.

A special occasion for classic movie lovers.

I always end up watching the “I Got Rhythm” and “’S Wonderful” sequences with a huge grin on my face – and then there’s the “Our Love is Here to Stay” number, and the “American in Paris” ballet -and suddenly my heart is aching and I’m all swept up in the passion of the love story. It’s funny, and romantic, and colorful (boy, is it colorful!), and what more is there to ask of a musical? I’d seen the movie many times before, so why was the screening at the TCM festival such a revelation?

It’s an obvious answer, but nevertheless, it came as a shock to me: the movie was a revelation because I was watching it in a theater. Gorgeous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, to be exact. With a packed house. And all the energy and excitement of the night went crackling and sparkling through the theater as I sat there watching, falling in love. We applauded the credits; we applauded Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly; we applauded after the musical numbers. I’ve watched old movies on a big screen before, in an auditorium, for my film classes. Nobody in those classes ever applauded. Nobody ever cheered. There was no energy or magic.

But that opening night premiere of a new 60th anniversary digital print of An American in Paris was magical. It helped having Leslie Caron on hand to talk about the film and her days at MGM, in a lovely conversation with Robert Osborne before the start of the movie. It was like a mutual love fest: Ms. Caron, coming out to an adoring audience, proclaiming, “This is awesome!” (with a beautiful smile on her face, and a spring in her step), while we gave her a standing ovation. It wasn’t just a movie, it was an event, a communal celebration of classic film. Continue reading A Classic Movie Lover’s Weekend at The 2011 TCM Film Festival

Classic Blu-ray Review: The Towering Inferno, American Ambition & The Post 9/11 World

By Jason Apuzzo. The imagination sometimes wanders in unexpected directions. Govindini’s recent post on The Demise of bin Laden and The Cinematic Legacy of 9/11 put me in the frame of mind to revisit a favorite film of mine from years ago, a classic Hollywood action spectacle with eerie and unsettling echoes in the September 11th attacks: Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno, from 1974.

The Towering Inferno is, in my opinion, a genuinely great Hollywood adventure film – likely one of the best the industry has ever produced. It was certainly recognized as such in its day; the film was nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture (it won 3 Oscars – for Cinematography, Editing and Best Song). What’s more, the film was a gigantic hit at the domestic box office – taking in around $116 million. What this means is that adjusted for inflation, the film would’ve grossed around $482 million today. (By comparison, the top film at the domestic box office in 2010, Toy Story 3, made $415 million.) Today the film is largely remembered for being the greatest of the 1970s era ‘disaster’ epics, but that probably puts the film in too narrow a box. There really are very few action films of its scale, energy or dramatic impact. The film also has the distinction of being the last great action film made by either Steve McQueen or Paul Newman, who co-starred in the film – and so for that reason alone, The Towering Inferno has a special place in cinema history.

Around 1973, just after the smash success of producer Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure, a bidding war erupted between Fox and Warner Brothers for a forthcoming novel called The Tower, which told the harrowing tale of a fire that breaks out in the world’s tallest building just as celebrities and dignitaries gather for its opening. The Tower, which I’ve read, is basically a morality tale set in a spectacular setting – in which we get to see how different types of people behave in the midst of a terrifying crisis.

Allen wanted to adapt the novel for Fox, but Warner Brothers outbid him for the novel. As luck would have it, a similar novel called The Glass Inferno – telling almost the same story – would also soon be coming out on the market, so Allen acquired the rights to that one. Allen then pulled one of the great producing maneuvers in Hollywood history: he called a summit between Fox and Warner Brothers, and got both sides to co-operate on an expensive joint project marrying the two novels into one film: The Towering Inferno, with a screenplay – a superb one, by the way – to be written by Stirling Silliphant. Thus was born the first major joint studio project in history. (As an interesting aside, years later James Cameron’s similarly expensive disaster epic Titanic would be another such joint venture, this time between Fox and Paramount.)

Old-school cast photo for "The Towering Inferno."

The film that resulted from this collaboration between these two major studios lived up to expectations – and to some extent surpassed them. A project that could easily have flopped, or spun out of control in a maelstrom of budget overruns, dangerous stunts and FX work – or out-of-control star egos – was put together by Irwin Allen in an atmosphere of crisp, military precision and professionalism.

The first big thing Allen did was assemble the film’s extraordinary cast, beginning with the improbable, blockbuster pairing of Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. More on that pairing below. Take a look at the rest of the cast, though, for Towering Inferno: Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner … and, of course, O.J. Simpson (he’s actually pretty good in his few scenes). Can you imagine a cast of this caliber appearing in a special effects picture today? It’s unimaginable. Continue reading Classic Blu-ray Review: The Towering Inferno, American Ambition & The Post 9/11 World

ANNOUNCEMENT: LFM Covers The TCM Classic Movie Festival! + How TCM Changed My Life

By Jennifer Baldwin. From my earliest days as an old movie obsessive (circa, age fourteen), I’ve been obsessed with finding out how young people fall in love with old movies.

For my grandma’s generation, the love is easy to explain: These aren’t “old movies,” these are just THE movies, the ones they spent their lives seeing in the theaters.

For my mom’s generation, these old movies weren’t exactly contemporaries, but they weren’t so old and distant either. When my mom was a kid in the 1960s, the old movie stars were still around and the old movies must have still felt familiar, if a bit musty. It’s a lot like my own generation’s relationship to the movies of the 1980s. My Saturdays were filled with a never-ending supply of popular ‘80s movies on cable TV, just as my mom’s youth was filled with Rita Bell and “Bill Kennedy at the Movies.”

But how do people born in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s become old movie buffs? How do Generations X, Y, and Z get into watching movies made in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s?

I know how my own old-movie odyssey went, all of the influences and the inspirations. I know I owe a lot to the years 1988 to 1992, when it seemed like every summer another movie came out that was set in a 1940s Never Land – whether it was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or The Rocketeer or A League of Their Own – and each of these new movies whetted my imagination for the old ones.

I know I owe a lot to my grandparents and their love of jazz, and how that love was transferred to me, so that for three solid years I spent my summers at the Elkhart jazz festival and never at a New Kids on the Block concert. Being a fan of swing jazz and Dixieland made it easier to love other old things, like movies.

I know I owe a lot to my grandmother and my mom, who invited me to watch these strange old movies with them, folding laundry on the couch and falling in love with Cary Grant and Clark Gable, thus beginning my own long, intoxicating affair with old Hollywood.

But how do other people of my age and generation get into the old stuff? What are their paths to classic cinema ecstasy?

I have a feeling that no matter our divergent and differing paths, we have one thing in common: Turner Classic Movies. Continue reading ANNOUNCEMENT: LFM Covers The TCM Classic Movie Festival! + How TCM Changed My Life

HBO’s Mildred Pierce: Faithful, If a Little Cold

By Jennifer Baldwin. “About her face there was no distinction whatever. She was what is described as ‘nice-looking,’ rather than pretty; her own appraisal she sometimes gave in the phrase, ‘pass in a crowd.’ But this didn’t quite do her justice. Into her eyes, if she were provoked, or made fun of, or puzzled, there came a squint that was anything but alluring, that betrayed a rather appalling literal-mindedness, or matter-of-factness, or whatever it might be called, but that hinted, nevertheless, at something more than complete vacuity inside. It was the squint, Bert confessed afterwards, that first caught his fancy, and convinced him there was ‘something to her.’” – James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941).

The squint in her eye is Mildred’s defining detail in James M. Cain’s novel, but in Todd Haynes’s (dir. Far From Heaven) beautifully detailed new adaptation, it’s the one detail that’s been left out. Meticulously rendered, obsessively detailed, HBO’s new five-part miniseries Mildred Pierce is a gorgeous and intoxicating recreation of Depression-era southern California. And Kate Winslet throws herself full-throttle into the part of Mildred, a recently divorced housewife and mother who does what she must in order to provide for her children, especially her snobbish, cruel elder daughter, Veda (Morgan Turner, Evan Rachel Wood). Winslet gives a naturalistic performance and her sobs and flashes of anger are neither histrionic nor mechanical, but instead subtle and filled with an inner intensity. She puts as much life into Mildred as she can and you can see Winslet’s skill at work in every frame (and she’s in almost every frame of the show). Unfortunately, seeing is not feeling, and I was left strangely cold by Winslet’s performance, despite being hypnotically sucked in by the luridness of the story and the sumptuousness of the set design. Continue reading HBO’s Mildred Pierce: Faithful, If a Little Cold