By John Seal
April 14-20, 2003
From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated, they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times PDT.
Monday 04/14/03
3pm Turner Classic Movies
The Girl and the General (1967 ITA-FRA): This rare Italian-French co-production stars Rod Steiger as an Austrian general during World War I who is kidnapped by Virna Lisi and Umberto Orsini, two ne'er-do-wells out to claim a 1,000 Lire reward from the Italian authorities. Director Pasquale Festa Campanile is best known for exploitation films such as When Women Played Ding Dong , Sex Machine , and the infamous David Hess vehicle Hitch Hike , but this is a fairly sedate, mainstream offering, featuring an Ennio Morricone soundtrack and cinematography by Ennio Guarnieri, who started his film career as assistant cameraman on Fellini's La Dolce Vita .
5pm Encore Mystery
The Sniper (1952 USA): Living in the Bay Area, you tend to see a lot of familiar landmarks in Hollywood movies, especially in the post-World War II era, when location shoots became the order of the day. Here's an excellent early example of the shot-in-San Francisco film, a movie about a mentally scarred veteran (Arthur Franz) who relives his wartime trauma by indiscriminately shooting the locals in between making laundry deliveries as part of his daytime job. Bad girl Marie Windsor plays against type as a woman who tries to get to know the introverted Franz but the real star is the city of San Francisco, not yet burdened with the ugly downtown developments of the 1960s and '70s.
6pm Sundance
Cunnamulla (2000 AUS): Thanks to Sundance Channel's Doc Days, we're getting to see some very obscure non-fiction films. This one sounds like a pretty good bet, detailing the lives of quiet desperation at the end of the railway line in Cunnamulla, Australia, a little town somewhere due west of back of beyond. Directed by Dennis O'Rourke (The Good Woman of Bangkok ), the film looks at the uneasy relationship between whites and Aborigines, all against the setting of a 100-degree Christmas. Sounds like fun! Also airs 4/19 at 12:30pm.
Tuesday 04/15/03
Midnight Showtime
Fyre (1979 USA): This obscure indie doesn't have much of a reputation, but you know I can't resist films like this, especially when they feature good-natured schlep Allen Garfield, here billed as Allen Goorwitz (I used to think Allen was related to the great John Garfield, but after seeing TCM's documentary on that actor a few months back, I think I was mistaken). Anyhoo, this oddity appeared shortly after Garfield/Goorwitz's Skateboard , about which I've waxed poetic in the past, but sounds like a decidedly grimmer affair. Lynn Theel plays the title character, a young woman who moves to Los Angeles after the death of her parents and soon becomes sucked into the world of prostitution. It's a grittier take on the memorable TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976 USA). Also airs at 3am.
10am Turner Classic Movies
Behave Yourself! (1951 USA): Once upon a time - a fairly long time ago, I might add - Shelley Winters was a bit of a sex symbol. This was one of her earliest starring roles, a lightweight comedy about a Welsh terrier who adopts a family (Winters and Farley Granger) but is being pursued by his original owners, gangsters who trained him to assist in their criminal activities. With help from a sterling supporting cast, including William Demarest, Lon Chaney, Jr., Elisha Cook, Jr., Hans Conried, and Allen Jenkins, and the always excellent camerawork of James Wong Howe, Behave Yourself! is an enjoyable piece of RKO fluff. You'll have to draw your own conclusions about Shelley's pinup possibilities. Look for Jerry Lewis regular Kathleen Freeman in a cameo role as the pet-shop owner's wife. It's followed at 11:30am by The Light Touch , an underappreciated Richard Brooks caper film. Stewart Granger plays a canny art thief who, with the help of an innocent Pier Angeli, tries to pawn off a reproduction to his client, Kurt Kaszner. The story is admittedly thin but there's some great repartee, especially amongst the troika of bad guys played by George Sanders, Norman Lloyd, and Mike Mazurki. And really, how can you go wrong with a threesome that sinister? Robert Surtees' cinematography is excellent and takes reasonable advantage of location work in Italy, Sicily, and Tunisia.
12:30pm Sundance
Hell House (2001 USA): This fascinating look at a fundamentalist Christian church's Halloween attraction raises some interesting questions about the participants. They each bring a particular set of "sins" to the table, things they did in their "pre-Christian" life that they are now ashamed of, and reproduce them for the delectation of the seething masses that pour through their doors on the run-up to All Hallows Eve. Whether it's drug abuse, drunkenness, abortion, or violence against women and children, the acting out of these scenes seems to provide a tremendous cathartic service for the parishioners. There's a certain amount of hypocrisy involved, and I'm not sure born-again Christians approve of therapy, but the film is riveting stuff about people who are convinced their little passion plays can save sinners from going to Hell. Also airs 4/16 at 1:30am.
Wednesday 04/16/03
4am Black Starz!
Cooley High (1975 USA): Unfairly lumped into the blaxploitation category at the time of its release, Cooley High is actually a very well-acted and interesting drama of teenage growing pains in the 1960s. This film should have made Glynn Turman a star, but the spotlight was probably on Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who was then starring opposite John Travolta in television's Welcome Back, Kotter. Also airs at 11am.
2:05am Encore Mystery
Tight Spot (1955 USA): Another set-in-San Francisco crime movie, Tight Spot stars Edward G. Robinson as a DA trying to get a tough moll (Ginger Rogers) to spill the goods on the bad guys. Rogers doesn't really settle into the role, a part more comfortably essayed by actresses like Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor, but the supporting cast is fine and includes Brian Keith and Lorne Greene. Directed by genre specialist Phil Karlson, Tight Spot is a minor but watchable Columbia noir.
Thursday 4/17/03
5am IFC
The Empty Mirror (1996 USA): This week's speculative pick is a parallel-universe fantasy starring British actor Norman Rodway as a post-World War II Hitler musing upon his unfortunate life choices. Controversial and provocative, The Empty Mirror is by all accounts well made, but any depiction that casts the Fuhrer in anything but a monstrous light is bound to polarize audiences. I'll either love it or loathe it, but I'm not going to pass on the opportunity to see Joel Grey playing Josef Goebbels. Also airs at 11am.
5pm IFC
Black Caesar (1973 USA): This isn't the sort of film one usually associates with IFC, but it's tied in with a rebroadcast of the generally excellent blaxploitation documentary Baadasss Cinema , immediately following at 6:30pm. Black Caesar stars Fred Williamson as Tommy Gibbs, the handsome and immaculately accoutered Godfather of Harlem. The film isn't terribly original, but it has an outstanding supporting cast, including Gloria Hendry and D'Urville Martin; has a drop-dead terrific score by the OTHER Godfather, James Brown; and is intelligently written and well directed by the underrated genius of American cinema, Larry Cohen, whose screenwriting is currently on display in the recent release Phone Booth . Also airs at 9:45pm and 4/18 at 3am.
Friday 4/18/03
3:30am The Movie Channel
Hair (1979 USA): There are a lot of problems with Milos Forman's adaptation of the wildly popular stage musical - not least the fact that only three of the songs are any good - but it's a thin day in the TiVoPlex, and the film does have enough good points to deserve a tempered recommendation. John Savage is excellent as Claude, the Oklahoma farm boy thrust into the heart of hippiedom in New York City, and Treat Williams is fine as freak ringleader Berger. The film saunters along lackadaisically, confirming many of the Establishment's worst impressions of spoiled and selfish counterculture America, but hits its stride in the final half hour as Berger switches places with the newly inducted Claude and gets on a plane bound for 'Nam. The downbeat finale makes up for the previous 90 minutes of general silliness, and TMC's letterboxed print looks great, so you may want to make time for this. Also airs at 12:30pm.
11pm Turner Classic Movies
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964 FRA): Two musicals in one day? I feel like the world has stopped spinning on its axis, but that can't be true, or I'd be off on an expedition to the Earth's core to set things right. No, I'm not a big fan of the genre, but presumably TCM is airing the restored print utilized by Fox Lorber on their excellent DVD release. Gorgeous to look at, this is the film that introduced Catherine Deneuve to an international audience, and its Michel Legrand score earned it three Academy Award nominations.
6pm Sundance
Careful (1992 CAN): It's Guy Maddin night on Sundance. I'm not a huge fan of his black-and-white tone poems such as The Good Father and Tales From the Gimli Hospital , but his love for silent expressionism is a plus for cineastes, and by the time he made this film he was working in a - dare we say it - slightly more mainstream direction. Starring David Lynch regular Kyle MacCulloch, the film still relies on Maddin's beloved intertitles to tell much of the story about a village of Austrians living in the shadow of an avalanche-prone mountain, resulting in a community of whisperers who dare not raise their voices for fear of generating a snowy disaster. It's followed at 7:45pm by Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997 CAN) , starring the always popular duo Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin, and at 9:20pm by the 1997 documentary, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight , which will presumably reveal the secrets of this obsessive and talented filmmaker.
Saturday 4/19/03
Noon Encore Mystery
Theater of Blood (1973 GB): Vincent Price and Diana Rigg in the same film: how can you go wrong? Of course you can't. Theater of Blood is a delightfully gruesome horror comedy based on the works of Shakespeare, and features a virtual who's who of great British character actors: Jack Hawkins, Harry Andrews, Arthur Lowe, Eric Sykes, Ian Hendry, Dennis Price, and the unforgettable Robert Morley. Price plays a down-at-heel actor whose Shakespearean turns have roundly and repeatedly been ostracized by the London critics. He and his daughter (Rigg) concoct a delightfully bizarre revenge scheme against them, and one by one the writers meet an end only the Bard of Avon could approve of. If you enjoyed Price's early revenge film, The Abominable Dr. Phibes , you'll love this one.
11:20pm Encore
The Island (1980 USA) : A guilty pleasure if ever there was one, The Island is a ridiculous and logic-free Peter Benchley story about an island full of pirates who have survived (and presumably propagated) for the last few centuries. Michael Caine stars as a journalist who stumbles across the island whilst investigating the disappearance of numerous ships and pleasure cruises in the Caribbean. It's easy to imagine this being a hit at a time when tales of the Bermuda Triangle were vying for tabloid consumers everywhere, but it actually bombed, grossing only $10 million against Universal's $22 million investment. The pirates are being nurtured by a conniving jack-of-all-trades, played by an oily Frank Middlemass (Barry Lyndon ), and are led by David Warner, who for once avoids ingesting the lush tropic scenery. Don't ask how the almost exclusively male pirates have bred, or why they haven't succumbed to infectious disease over the centuries. This is a film where you must suspend entirely all common sense and give yourself up to the absurd story. If you can do so, you'll have fun. Also airs 4/20 at 2:20am.
Sunday 4/20/03
2am Flix
The Apple (1980 USA-BRD): I try not to subscribe to the so-bad-it's good camp, but I've already recommended The Island this week, so I may as well go the whole hog. The Apple is truly one of the most bizarre movies you will ever see, an ineptly-made musical with unlikable stars and positively dreadful songs, set design, and costuming. A cross between Fame and The Rocky Horror Picture Show , it's Showgirls -bad, and just as entertaining.
4:30am Turner Classic Movies
Lost Horizon (1937 USA): Hopefully this will be a rebroadcast of TCM's partially restored version of this classic tale of a mountain utopia, utilizing stills to replace the scenes cut from the film by director Frank Capra on its initial release. TCM has also done similar work with Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (1924 USA) and Tod Browning's London After Midnight , and while we can still dream about somehow finding the lost footage in a vault somewhere, the skilful introduction of film stills and intertitles give the viewer a better conception of the filmmakers' intentions than is otherwise available. Lost Horizon is based on a James Hilton novel and stars Robert Colman as a plane crash-survivor who happens upon the lost kingdom of Shangri-La, a happy land cut off from the evils and exigencies of the outside world for centuries (Luckily, they don't have any pirates in their midst; only llamas and farmers.) Later disastrously remade as a musical in 1973, this is a memorable epic featuring a marvelous score by Dmitri Tiomkin.
5pm Turner Classic Movies
Safety Last (1923 USA): This week's segment of TCM's Harold Lloyd festival starts out with the film many consider his greatest, Safety Last , another film about a meek character (Lloyd) beating the odds and winning the girl, in this case by performing as a human fly and ending up clinging to the hands of a large (and extremely elevated!) clock. It's followed at 7pm by Why Worry? (1923 USA), in which a hypochondriac (Lloyd) goes on a cruise for his health and ends up embroiled in a South American revolution. Girl Shy (1924 USA) airs at 8:15pm, and it's my personal favorite of the films on show tonight, with shy Harold engaged in writing a book entitled The Secret of Making Love. 9:45pm brings us 1924's Hot Water , about a young bachelor who swears never to fall in love, and then immediately does. There are some two-reelers on display tonight in between the features, with 1921's Never Weaken appearing at 6:30pm and the Hal Roach-directed Now or Never at 11pm. You may as well just plan on spending Sunday night in front of the goggle box with a nice Salisbury steak on your TV tray and a diet Mr. Pibb in your recliner's cup holder.
