The TCM Festival does a great job screening pristine new copies of beloved films like West Side Story or The Godfather, but I value it most for its work in championing the obscure and almost forgotten, for those movies can turn out to be something more special than simply rare. Such is the case with Clara Bow’s final screen appearance, Hoop-la (1933). The original negative destroyed by fire, it existed in one sole print, gifted by Fox to the Museum of Modern Art as part of a huge collection. Once the whole lot had been basically preserved (35mm neg, 16mm print), the head of MOMA’s collection Katie Trainor explained, the sheer volume of titles required that inquiries about specific films were of great help in prioritizing the restoration work list. Enter David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, whose repeated bothering the museum about Hoop-la resulted eventually in the the world premiere of a brand new 35mm print this weekend Its value turned out to be somewhat greater than mere rarity.

Continue Reading

The high point of the TCM Festival for me this year was the restored print of Ealing ‘s WWII propaganda piece Went the Day Well? It’s an unjustly obscure title by an unjustly obscure director (Alberto Cavalcanti, who would have run the MOI’s film unit had he not been a gay Brazilian) that far transcends its duty as a lesson on vigilance. In fact, it bears comparison with the Archers’ A Canterbury Tale for its evocation of something intangibly, inherently English in the countryside. But much more exciting.

Continue Reading

It was with some alarm that I heard Ben Mankiewicz declare of Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) that “there’s no better Western than this” at Saturday’s TCM Festival screening. He proceeded to read some amusingly negative contemporaneous reviews, which were closer to my own distant memory of the film, and related the bizarre story of the right-wing nutjob, Asa Earl Carter, who had written the source novel under a pseudonym. Eastwood was entirely unaware of the author’s racist past and a certain tension between his own curious politics, Carter’s past life as a staunch segregationalist, and the latter’s new emphasis on his fractional Native American roots, may perhaps have contributed to the unfocused nature of the film’s fundamental themes.

Continue Reading

Films are sometimes forgotten for a reason. One of the great things about TCM – and their festival – is that whilst they while happily vaunt the famous and already well-regarded titles, they display no discrimination in championing old movies in general, rescuing titles from obscurity whether they are apparently worth it are not; Hollywood’s more oddball outings preserved for those with an interest, helping fill in the whole great tapestry of American movie-making and by extension, twentieth-century history. Thus we were treated to this somewhat bizarre 1933 offering from Warner Brothers/First National, British Agent, based with cavalier abandon on the memoirs of R.H. Bruce Lockhart, British Consul in Russia at the time of the Revolution,. It is a film which I could never recommend to anyone without a specific interest in the period, but which was nevertheless a perfectly enjoyable show.

Continue Reading

The Turner Classic Movie Festival has rolled into Hollywood for its second year, a finely staged event in celebration of great movies and the theatre experience. As such it is a festival of indulgence, perhaps discovering something new but mostly rewatching  old favourites in their optimum setting. So where better to start than with the Emperor of Indulgence himself, Josef von Sternberg and his dreamy1935 picture The Devil Is A Woman. Continue Reading

For over half a century there’s been debate over the best way to watch silent films – Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française insisted on no accompaniment at all in the 50s – but one can be certain that the Turner Classic Movie Festival will come up with something a little more special. And so Saturday night’s presentation of Eric von Stroheim’s 1925 comedy The Merry Widow, was introduced by the incomparable Kevin Brownlow and a wealth of anecdotes, and played to a brand new score, a North American premiere no less, by Maud Nelissen, conducting the Von Stroheim Virtuosi, a small and largely competent ensemble of strings, woodwind, percussion and a very useful accordion. Continue Reading

The Turner Classic Movie Festival laid on yet another special occasion for Saturday night, inviting Vince Giordano and his Nighthawks Orchestra to perform their tailored accompaniment to Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), and getting Leonard Maltin onstage to give a typically first-rate introduction. As he pointed out, a drummer without cocoanut shells is not worth your trouble; the Orchestra a spiffy outfit blowing 20s tunes in dead-on style and the cocoanuts were great.

Continue Reading

The First Annual TCM Film Festival took place over the weekend and it was a complete success. If you’re an old movie buff who thinks that Robert Osborne is a rockstar you were probably in attendance along with hundreds of other fans who stood in line to see some of Hollywood’s most revered classics on the big screen. Not only did the event give people the opportunity to see these old movies in a theatrical setting but it gave them the chance to watch a restored print. The Festival also included special guest stars like Anjelica Huston, Martin Landau, Eva Marie Saint, Tony Curtis and more.

Here’s our recap of the sights and sounds of the event…

Continue Reading

The number one draw at the First Annual TCM Classic Film Festival was the North American premiere of the brand new almost-complete restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and it was a truly spectacular experience. The film is renowned for many things: at the time it was the most expensive feature ever made and it was the first science-fiction blockbuster, unprecedented in the scope of its design both physically and in terms of cinematic technique. The film’s influence is felt everywhere, most prominently in the cityscapes of Blade Runner and second-hand thereafter, and the futuristic steam-powered machinery is an explicit forerunner of cyberpunk.

Continue Reading