2017 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival (#TCMFF) Recap: The Second Day

Hollywood, Friday April 7
Friday was the first full day of the festival. Screenings start as early as 9 a.m. and there are usually several good movies to choose from. My early morning choices were, Rafter Romance (1933), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Cry, The Beloved Country (1951), Beyond the Mouse the 1930s Cartoons of UB Iwerks, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). It wasn’t that long ago that I saw The Maltese Falcon on the big screen at a Fathom/TCM event. I didn’t want to commit to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a long, long, long, long movie, but I did want to keep with the comedy theme of the festival, so it was Rafter Romance over Cry, The Beloved Country.

Norman Foster, Ginger Rogers, George Sidney, and Laura Hope Crews

I never saw Rafter Romance before so I thought I’d give this pre-Code comedy a try. It starred Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster, who was married to Claudette Colbert (1928 –1935). The plot revolved around two people sharing the same apartment, but never actually meeting because one works during the day and one works during the evening. This improbable premise worked remarkably well and I was happy to go along for the ride. Rogers and Foster were very appealing as the leads and the supporting cast was terrific. Laura Hope Crews was hilarious as a rich patron who wanted to be Foster’s mistress. Foster, an artist, wants nothing to do with Crews. Crews, whose character is fond of alcohol, steals every scene she’s in. The cast also includes a young (ish) Robert Benchley as Rogers’s boss who is constantly asking her out on dates, only to have her refuse his advances. I found the movie absolutely delightful and was glad I choose it as my first movie of the day. Before the film, there was a brief discussion on how Rafter Romance was out of circulation for decades due to licensing and rights issues. TCM acquired the rights to the film in 2006 and “created restored prints with the help of the Library of Congress and Brigham Young University.”

Rafter Romance was screened in the Egyptian Theatre and so was my next choice, One Hour with You (1932). It was competing with Born Yesterday (1950), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Beat the Devil (1953). One Hour with You was another movie I had never seen before. This pre-Code musical starred Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, and Genevieve Tobin. The Ernst Lubitsch musical comedy centers around Chevalier and MacDonald as a happily married couple whose bliss is compromised when Chevalier is seduced by MacDonald’s best friend (Tobin). The film follows Chevalier as he struggles with his love for his wife and his attraction to Tobin. In the hands of Lubitsch and Chevalier, these struggles are incredibly comical. Chevalier breaks the fourth wall, as he constantly speaks (and sings) directly to the audience. Adding to the comedy mix are Roland Young and Charles Ruggles, but it’s Chevalier that makes this musical farce work. He’s charming, naive, sophisticated, and hysterical all at the same time. One Hour with You was another enjoyable movie experience for me. “But oh that Mitzie!”

Ben Mankiewicz and Peter Bogdanovich

After those two comedies, I took a break from the movies to go to Club TCM for “A Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich.” Like Martin Scorsese, Bogdanovich is a director and film historian in his own right. He’s interviewed some of the greatest directors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, including John Ford and Howard Hawks. He’s a terrific storyteller and does great impersonations of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Orson Welles. He was at his best when he was recounting stories of those Hollywood legends. He also discussed his film career and spoke about how he got started as a director. Bogdanovich wrote an article on film for Esquire magazine that caught the attention of producer/director Roger Corman. He ended up working with Corman on the film Targets (1968) starring Boris Karloff. He also spoke about his early directorial successes: The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973). I think I could listened to his stories for days on end; he was that entertaining.

Next up was a movie epic that I had never seen from beginning to end: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). It was shown at the Chinese Theatre in a restored digital presentation. The movie did not disappoint. The production was impressive, as were the performances of William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Alec Guinness who won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the by-the-book British colonel in a Japanese POW camp. This was director David Lean’s first big budget movie. It was a critical as well as an international box office success. I’m glad I finally got to see this film in its entirety. It more than lived up to its reputation. Alex Trebek introduced the film with some interesting trivia about the director and casts alleged womanizing!? Not sure how that added to the film’s enjoyment, but it was an interesting aside.

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Laura

I was back at the Egyptian for the nitrate screening of Laura (1944). Laura is one of my favorite movies and Dana Andrews is my favorite movie star, so I was excited to see this classic on the big screen. After all the hype surrounding the nitrate screenings, I found this print lacking. It was dirty in spots, the focus was in and out, and worst of all, the film skipped and important dialogue was missed. If you’ve seen Laura, you know that the film is filled with great, witty dialogue. You don’t want to miss any of it. Parts of the film looked good, but overall, I was disappointed. Still, it was great to see Andrews, Gene Tierney (another favorite), Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, and Judith Anderson on the big screen. I wish we had been prepared for what to expect from this screening. If we were given a heads up as to its deficiencies and if they had pointed out the scenes that were sharp and worth noticing, I would have felt better about the overall experience. When you have a theatre like the Egyptian packed with films noir fans, you can expect some snipping—and there was quite a bit of it—about what we saw on the screen.

Even though I ended the evening on a bit of a sour note with Laura, I would have to declare the entire day a successful one. I got to see all the films I wanted to see and had a great time experiencing them with a live audience in true movie palaces.

Saturday brought more tough choices. Decisions, decisions!

2017 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival (#TCMFF) Recap

I can’t believe the 2017 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival is over. All winter long, I looked forward to the festival to get me through the days, the weeks, the months until those magical four days of classic movie bliss. Now, this third TCMFF is history.

This year I saw 14 movies (the same number as last year), but all the movies I attended were in either the Egyptian Theatre or the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX! All the movies I wanted to see I got to see. Last year I was shut out of Midnight and Double Harness (twice!). Since so many films were shown at the Egyptian (618 seats), it was less stressful than last year. Last year it seemed like the time between movies was so tight that I was constantly running to the next screening for fear of not getting in. Thankfully, this was not the case this year.

Part of the crowd at the Egyptian Theatre

The festival was dedicated to the memory of Robert Osborne, which was only right. His knowledge and love of classic movies will be sorely missed. I think he would have enjoyed this year’s movie lineup that included some of the funniest screwball comedies from the 1930s and 1940s. Plus his favorite movie star, Gene Tierney was showcased in the classic film noir, Laura.

My goal this year was to try and see movies I hadn’t seen before. Of all the movies I saw, six were new to me. At this year’s festival, they promoted several nitrate films. Thanks in part to TCM, the Egyptian remodeled its projection booth so that it could screen nitrate films safely. I ended up seeing all the nitrate screenings. I had seen all of these films before, but Lady in the Dark hasn’t been seen anywhere for years. It’s been at least 30 years since I last saw it—and I didn’t remember a thing—so in many ways it was new to me.

Besides movies, I attended the “So You Think You Know Movies” event at ClubTCM (tough, tough questions!), enjoyed “conversations” with Peter Bogdanovitch and Lee Grant. Good stuff!

Films were shown in the following formats: 35mm, digital, and nitrate (35mm). Below is the breakdown of film formats I saw this year:

35mm – 9 films
Digital – 5 films
Nitrate – 4 films (nitrate films were all 35mm)

Check back for daily recaps and recollections from my four days at the festival.

Hitchcock/Truffaut at the Music Box

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a new documentary, directed by Kent Jones, playing at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., Chicago, IL, through December 31, 2015.

In 1962, Francois Truffaut persuaded Alfred Hitchcock to sit with him for a week long interview in which the great British auteur would share with his young admirer the secrets of his cinema.

Based on the original recordings of this meeting—used to produce the seminal book “Hitchcock/Truffaut”—this film illustrates the greatest cinema lesson of all time and plunges us into the world of the creator of Psycho, The Birds and Vertigo. Hitchcock’s singular vision is elucidated and brought vividly to life by today’s leading filmmakers: Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wes Anderson, James Gray, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, Peter Bogdanovich, and Paul Schrader.

For more information, including show times, click here.

“What’s Up Doc?” final film screened in screwball comedy series April 12, 2014

When: Saturday, April 12, 2014 4:00 p.m.
Where: The Venue 1550 at the Daystar Center, 1550 S. State Street

I can’t think of a better film to end our screwball comedy series than with What’s Up Doc? This modern comedy classic directed by Peter Bogdanovitch is a homage to the screwball comedies from the 1930s and 40s. It owes much of its plot and structure to Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, but it more than stands on its own merits.

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, in their first screen pairing, play Judy Maxwell and Howard Bannister respectively. Judy is a free spirit and college dropout who seems to create trouble wherever she goes. Howard is a Ph.D. and musicologist from the Iowa Conservatory of Music, engaged to Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn) who is a bit controlling, to put it mildly. The trouble all begins in San Francisco when four identical overnight bags get mixed up. Of course Judy and Howard’s bags are part of the mix up and their lives become entangled from there on in.

Streisand and O’Neal were at the top of their box office appeal in 1972, and Bogdanovitch exploits this. Like screwball comedies past, there are inside jokes, and allusions to other films, all with great good humor. Apart from the stars, Bogdanovitch assembled some of the best character actors available, including Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Sorrell Brooks, John Hillerman, Graham Jarvis, and Mabel Alberston to name a few. Kahn, in her movie debut, all but steals the picture. As the constantly unhinged Eunice Burns, Kahn is pitch-perfect. Annoying to both O’Neal and Streisand’s characters, she is never annoying to the audience. When I first saw the film in theaters, audiences howled with laughter every time Kahn was on the screen.

As a screwball comedy, What’s Up Doc? is so good that if released in the late 1930s or early 40s, audiences would have responded to it the way they did My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, and The Lady Eve.

Backstory: This was Peter Bogdanovich’s homage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s, as well as a tribute to directors Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, and Preston Sturges.

Trivia: Madeline Kahn was nominated as Most Promising Newcomer, female by the Foreign Press Association (Golden Globes). The Writers Guild of American (WGA), USA awarded What’s Up Doc? Best Comedy Written for the Screen (Buck Henry, David Newman, Robert Benton). The film’s first 2 weekends broke the Radio City Music Hall house record that had stood since 1933.

Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand talk under the table.

Have some Joe and Enjoy the Show!
Before the movie, grab a cup of coffee from Overflow Coffee Bar, located within the Daystar Center. You can bring food and beverages into the auditorium; we even have small tables set up next to some of the seats.

Join the Chicago Film club, join the discussion
The Chicago Film Club is for classic movie fans. Once a month we screen a classic film and have a brief discussion afterward. For more information, including how to join (it’s free), click here.To purchase your ticket in advance, click here. The Venue 1550 is easily accessible by the CTA. Please visit Transit Chicago for more information on transportation options.