TCM this week – July 25, 2023

Huh. TCM seems to be celebrating Christmas in July–very Australian of them. They’re showing the 1938 A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen—my second favorite Christmas Carol, non-Muppet category, after the 1951 Scrooge version with Alastair Sim —at 2 am. Record it and hang onto it for 5 months?

And it’s not just A Christmas Carol. Right after it, they’re showing In the Good Old Summertime (1949), which is a musical remake—starring Judy Garland—of another Christmas staple, at least in my house, The Shop Around the Corner, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring James Stewart. It’s the movie that was remade most recently as You’ve Got Mail, but the original, set in Christmas-time Budapest, is—despite not having Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks—the better version, as well as being the Christmas-y one. I haven’t seen this musical remake, though the title suggests it is not a Christmas movie in this version.

Actually… that’s it for Christmas stuff. So not much of a Christmas in July. Curious that they’d even program A Christmas Carol now, even at 2 am…

Anyway, Wednesday has a number of good films, including Fury (1936), directed by Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and starring Spenser Tracy. That’s followed by To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heat of the Night—so a good night of movies.

Thursday, July 27, is all about the Bard, with some very good Shakespeare on screen:

• Kiss Me Kate (1953) at 8:30 am
• Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier at 10 am
• Romeo and Juliet (1937), directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer at 12:30 pm
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) at 2:45 pm, and
• Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) at 5:15 pm

I haven’t seen that “Romeo and Juliet” so it’s the must see for me. The Olivier Hamlet and Henry are justly famous. They’re interesting to watch alongside the more recent versions by Kenneth Branaugh—the earlier ones very much filmed versions of plays, the later ones trying to see how much more can be done cinematically, both by people steeped in, deeply engaged with Shakespeare. I love Kiss Me Kate, but I always want to see it in the 3-D version, ideally in the Castro Theatre of old, where the song “I Hate Men” tends to be a laugh riot. My favorite number in it, though, is “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”:

Continuing…

Friday is Blonde Ambition day. Or something. I like it when programmers do stuff like this—it’s a bunch of movies with “blond(e)” in the title, well four anyway, beginning with the best of the lot at 1 am, Blondie (1938), based on the comic strip.

Saturday, July 29, looks awesome—one of those days when, in the past, when so many movies you could only catch on TV, I would stay in all day watching stuff. It begins with one of the better San Francisco-based movies, Freebie and the Bean, which I’ve written about previously and which is a prime contender for the movie that started the whole “buddy cop” genre. It’s followed by a really stellar selection of stuff:

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) at 4:30 am – directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and with a soundtrack featuring Leonard Cohen
• Key Largo (1948) at 2 pm – directed by John Huston, starring Bogie and Bacall, with Edward G. Robinson as the bad guy. Not as talked about or often seen as the other Bogie and Bacall films, but excellent.
• Foreign Correspondent (1940) – early (well, before all the famous ones anyway), excellent, interesting Hitchcock
• The Omega Man (1971) at 6:15 pm – fairly cheesy post-apocalypse sci fi film with Charleton Heston. Not as good as that other post-apocalypse film with Heston and some damn dirty apes, but an interesting piece for reflecting on trends in cinema, and in anxiety, as we moved out of the classic Hollywood era.
• Double Indemnity (1944) at 8 pm – one of the most famous and most important of classic film noir. Not my favorite – which might be Out of the Past – but a must see for anyone serious about film and film genres.
• Body Heat (1981) at 10 pm. A modern (when it came out forty years ago) reboot of the whole film noir genre, with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Excellent.

If you haven’t already seen it, the obvious “must see” film of this week is… McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which Roger Ebert hailed as “a perfect film.” (I mean, it’s not Howard Hawks, but it is pretty perfect otherwise.)

For more…

• Metropolis – Kanopy
• Blondie (1938) – Wikipedia
• Key Largo – Amazon
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Wikipedia
• Roger Ebert’s review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller – spoiler: he liked it. A lot.
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Amazon
• Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West
• Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling
• Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction
• Film Noir Reader
• Henry V (Kenneth Branaugh) – Amazon
• Hamlet (Kenneth Branaugh) – Amazon
• Romeo & Juliet (Zeffirelli, 1968) – Kanopy
• Shakespeare to stream on Kanopy

Filed under: Music, Classic Films, Film, TCM