The February 2013 TCM Schedule

[MikeBSG]

I have heard wonderful things about "The Organizer," and "Saraband for Dead Lovers" has always sounded intriguing.

[Lzcutter]

Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, Feb. 2nd) at 4:00 pm PST, TCM premieres the documentary, Warner Brothers: Tales From the Lot which seems like it might be a salute to 90 years of films from the studio but it might include some behind the scenes tidbits.

I'll be watching! How about you?

[charliechaplinfan]

Hold Back the Dawn is a wonderful film, everyone record it, it's a keeper.

[JackFavell]

HOLD BACK THE DAWN????!!! Oh lordy, get your recorders ready. This one is impossible to find and so worth seeing. C'est formidable! And The Garden of Allah is also going to be shown this month, which is another tough find.

There's a nice string of Ealing comedies on right after Saraband for Dead Lovers. I'd also like to see Vogues of 1938, I have no idea how good it is, but I've never seen it before, so what the heck? It's got Joan Bennett and Warner Baxter.

I saw I Compagni on the schedule but I don't know a thing about it, so I immediately marked it for viewing! It's shown with 5 or so other foreign films, including Bitter Rice, Big Deal on Madonna Street (good because I missed this recently), Virgin Spring and Wild Strawberries.

Imitation of Life - the original 1934 version is going to be on February 6th at 10:30 PM ET. I don't know if TCM has ever shown this, but I have never seen it. Can't wait! Seems like I've been waiting forever for this one. And it's on right after All Quiet on the Western Front.

The Racket is showing on the 20th, it has a knockout performance by my favorite silent star, Marie Prevost and also stars silent heartthrob Thomas Meighan and Louis Wolheim.

I'm also looking forward to The Long Voyage Home, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit toward the end of the month. Captain Fury is a great favorite of mine with Brian Aherne and Victor MacLaglen, who are enormously good together, and Captain Caution, an early Victor Mature film is on right after, starring Louise Platt as a captain's daughter who takes command of his ship when he dies... Alan Ladd has a small role in this one, and for me it's a must see, for curiosity's sake.

[charliechaplinfan]

I love all of those foreign movies, all very different and all brilliant. Big Deal is a real slow burn comedy. Ingmar Bergman's films are always interesting.

[JackFavell]

I'm embarrassed to say I haven't seen one of them, except Bitter Rice. I have a reaction against Bergman after seeing Fanny and Alexander at a too impressionable and fragile time in my life and I never got over it. I think it's time to try him again. These two films of his they are showing seem more like something I might appreciate.

[moira finnie]

Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, Feb. 2nd) at 4:00 pm PST, TCM premieres the documentary, Warner Brothers: Tales From the Lot which seems like it might be a salute to 90 years of films from the studio but it might include some behind the scenes tidbits.

I'll be watching! How about you?

I am recording it and it appears to be repeated on Sun. Feb. 3 at 9am (ET) too. Hope it is as good as The Brothers Warner (2007) about the family business.

[Rita Hayworth]

Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, Feb. 2nd) at 4:00 pm PST, TCM premieres the documentary, Warner Brothers: Tales From the Lot which seems like it might be a salute to 90 years of films from the studio but it might include some behind the scenes tidbits.

I'll be watching! How about you?

I am recording it and it appears to be repeated on Sun. Feb. 3 at 9am (ET) too. Hope it is as good as The Brothers Warner (2007) about the family business.

Lzcutter/Moira ...

It is packed, really packed with history of Warner Bros so well in 55 minutes of so much information and so much in-depth ... I was literally blown away watching it ... I wanted it to be a 2 hours ... 3 hours filled with information about Warner Bros. It is highly recommended to watch it ... I loved every second of it and it was so incredibly educational. I enjoyed it to the fullest.

Thanks Lzcutter for bringing it to my attention.

Fantastic Show!

[charliechaplinfan]

What I'd say about Bergman is no two films are the same, I haven't liked them all but I have liked most of them, I haven't understood them all but somehow that didn't matter. I haven't watched Fanny and Alexander yet. He's a challenging director to watch but I always feel like I've gained something by watching his movies.

[JackFavell]

I should have watched one of his others first, but I saw F & A at the video store and it had gotten good reviews. I just couldn't deal with the death of innocence in it, it went to a place I really couldn't go emotionally and I wasn't expecting it. I really need to man up and go back and try something else now, the two playing are the two that intrigue me the most, along with Persona.

[movieman1957]

I watched the "90 Years of Warner Brothers" and wasn't as thrilled with it as others may be. A little too much time of 1970's executives and really disappointed with the two minutes they spent on the film vault. Found the history of the sets and costumes and props interesting. My guess is they assumed a certain amount of viewer knowledge coming in to the film.

[moira finnie]

I should have watched one of his others first, but I saw F & A at the video store and it had gotten good reviews. I just couldn't deal with the death of innocence in it, it went to a place I really couldn't go emotionally and I wasn't expecting it. I really need to man up and go back and try something else now, the two playing are the two that intrigue me the most, along with Persona.

I think you might find Wild Strawberries is one of the best intros to Bergman at his most accessible. Maybe I am just an oddball, but It is one of those evergreen films for me, like The Searchers, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Nights of Cabiria, and The Best Years of Our Lives, that mean more to me each time I see them.

[JackFavell]

Well, if you are including it in that lineup, what can I do but watch? I've run from watching Bergman for too long now, fearful of another shattering experience, but this one really seems to be calling me. I love Victor Sjostrom, so it can't be too hard to watch.

[Robert Regan]

I agree with Moira about Wild Strawberries. It is an excellent entry into Ingmar Bergman's world. And yes, Wendy, even if there were nothing else to recommend it, the great Victor Sjostrom was still a brilliant artist.

I've been revisiting a lot of Bergman during the past few years, and generally I no longer revere his films as I did in my teens and twenties. The one that I truly love is Fanny and Alexander. Yes, there are parts that are painful to watch, but the opening section with its lovingly detailed depiction of a turn-of-the-century Christmas celebration with a large and colorful Upsaala theatrical family is for me cinematic ecstasy. For city dwellers, the enormous and elegant apartment makes Mia Farrow's digs in Hannah and Her Sisters look cramped for space. One of my greatest joys in movies, and I think it is something that has been more successful during the past fifty years or so, is what I call the time machine aspect of film. This is when a movie convincingly takes me back to another time and place. Fanny and Alexander does this for me, as also do The Age of Innocence, Barry Lyndon, Master and Commander, and The Leopard among many others.

Okay, since I've started on this, here's something I wrote on the subject for Mubi:

CINEMA IS A TIME MACHINE
By: Robert Regan

This time machine does three extraordinary things.

1) It shows us people and places in motion as far back as the 1890s: the streets of New York, Paris, or Cairo; men and women waiting for a train, feeding a baby, or playing cards. The Lumieres and the other pioneers brought a new dimension to the amazing still photography of the nineteenth century.
2) It has made it possible for us to see a person at all stages throughout a long, productive life. The most notable example of this is Lillian Gish. We can see her as a teenager in her first film, Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912). Over a hundred movies later, we can see her last picture, with Bette Davis, Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August (1987). What an opportunity! Now, here I have to tell a story. It may not be true, but it is in character, and didn’t John Ford urge us to Print the Legend? It is said that, after shooting a close-up of Miss Gish, Anderson said, “That was Perfect!”, upon which Davis who was watching offered, “Of course it’s perfect! The b**** invented close-ups!”
3) What this list is about is the ability of a fiction film to transport us to another place, another time. Historical subjects have always been popular in movies, but I think there were some giant steps forward in the realistic, or let’s say credible, presentation of the past on film from the sixties on. Lighting, costumes, sets, and changing attitudes towards the past have helped filmmakers bring a greater verisimilitude to historical fiction on the screen. Thus, though I love the cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, there will be few films on the list from that era. Similarly, there are few European films here, because the stylization common to the classic European art direction, much as I have often loved it, tends to take me into a beautiful imaginary world (not unlike Sternberg’s Russia), rather than a place that feels real to me.

It may appear that I've gotten pretty far from Wild Strawberries, but that film has flashbacks to the main character's youth that really take us back with him. And to close here, let me add that the next time there's a fifty per cent sale on Criterion and I have a few buck in the bank, I will buy the Fanny and Alexander set that includes both the long theatrical version and the even longer television cut.