THE GRADUATE, Charles Webb’s novel which was adapted for the screen by Buck Henry, will be one of the films featured at the TCM Film Festival on Saturday, April 24th at 6:30 pm PT. And what will make this more than just a repertory showing of Mike Nichols’ 1967 boxoffice smash will be the presence of Buck Henry, who will be interviewed by Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Kashner. In support of this, I conducted an interview by phone with Buck recently to discuss some of his film work and career sidebars. READ MORE

As I have noted recently, it seems these days that no week goes by without the appearance of some film that I thought I’d never see turning up on DVD.  Home video insiders have worried over the past few years that the medium of digital versatile discs has gone about as fer as it kin go, doomed by streaming video and torrent shares that allow fans of the obscure and the arcane to share files (legally or otherwise) over the Internet.  Nevertheless, the rare titles keep popping up, which is fun.  And yet.  And yet.  I find myself thinking of days gone by, in which most films, whether big ticket, classic or cult, were hard to come by… back when you had to rely on fate, the Furies, your local late night TV listings and the generosity of your closest repertory cinema, if you were even so lucky as to have a closest repertory cinema.  Thirty, thirty-five years ago, well before the advent of home video and the VHS boom, you counted yourself lucky if you could obtain any piece of a cherished or hotly anticipated film… a novelization of the screenplay, the published screenplay, a photo-novel, View-Master reels, a poster, the soundtrack or the holiest of holies (well, among my circle of idiots, anyway) the 8mm or Super 8 cutdown. READ MORE

Like many people, I first fell in love with Jean Paul Belmondo while watching BREATHLESS (1960). To this day I can remember the exact moment when he won my affection. It happened during a lengthy scene between Belmondo and his beautiful costar Jean Seberg that takes place in a hotel room. After turning a poster into a makeshift telescope Seberg looks through it to see Jean-Paul Belmondo starring back at her. He’s shirtless and a bit disheveled. A half-smoked cigarette rests between his fingers and his mouth appears to be on the verge of a smile. His eyes are penetrating and disarming. Seberg’s character doesn’t say a word but her silence seems telling. It’s easy to assume that she’s surprised by how his steady stare made her feel and so was I. At that moment Belmondo captured a little piece of my heart forever.

READ MORE

Now that Spring is here, I can look back on this event with amusement as I recall Daniel Webster’s comment that there “is nothing so powerful as truth—and often nothing so strange” Ain’t it the truth?:

The Real and the Imaginary Elisabeth of Bavaria (1837-1898)

The Scene: My Living Room

The Time: The Late Winter Doldrums

The Occasion: An Intervention

The Participants: My Loved Ones

What prompted this intervention by my family?  Shuffling into the living room, none of my near and dear ones seemed to want to meet my eye. As they gently explained, it was time to remember that I’m an American living in the 21st century. “Chuck this new-found interest in moldy royalty, and, well, get back to reality.” Sure, sure, I knew they were right, but still…

READ MORE

The inaugural TCM Classic Film Festival kicks off on April 22nd, and there’s going to be wall-to-wall coverage here once it begins. Jeff Stafford has already posted a wide-ranging, must-read interview with Norman Lloyd, who’ll be introducing Saboteur on the 25th. But like the Cannes Film Festival a few weeks later (May 12 – 23), I’ll be unable to attend, marooned as I am on the East Coast. But I’ll be checking back here at Movie Morlocks for reports on the TCM-fest, and there will be an endless array of outlets covering Cannes. But what about seeing the films, the vast majority of which won’t receive stateside distribution?

The on-line cinematheque The Auteurs has come through for me on at least one title on my list, with an assist by Stella Artois. They’re streaming nine former Cannes selections for free thanks to that mediocre Belgian beer sponsor. These include Our Beloved Month of August (2008), a Portuguese experiment highly regarded by  Cinema Scope’s Mark Peranson and Robert Koehler, Jonathan Romney of Sight & Sound, and filmmaker C.W. Winter (The Anchorage, which I wrote about recently), who placed it on his best-of-the-decade list. It was never picked up for the U.S., and I was ecstatic to find it offered along with a group of higher-profile past Cannes selections including L’aaventura, Mon Oncle, and Amarcord.  The kind of curatorial adventurousness that led to August being included among this canonical group is sorely needed in programming these days, and The Auteurs should be praised (once again), for loosing this strange beast upon American eyes.

READ MORE

I share a birthday with Donna Reed, the girl next door in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) who matured into everyone’s favorite TV mother in The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966). Though never one of my favorite movie stars, her appealing persona was likable enough for me to pipe up about our shared birthdays whenever someone asked me when I was born. Recently, I have been researching Reed’s career, and I discovered some information about her that makes me appreciate the actress for reasons other than her specific movie and television roles. In many ways, Reed’s star image, which evolved from the wholesome Midwestern girl into that of the perfect mother, was more important than the actual films she made, save for It’s a Wonderful Life and From Here to Eternity (1953).

READ MORE

In a few hours we will screen a 35mm English print of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God. I imported it from Europe with the help of Lucki Stipetić, the younger half-brother of Herzog (and head of Werner Herzog Filmproduktion), who emailed me a week ago to say: “The print we have is the only English print we have and we have to be very careful with it.” I first tried to get Aguirre from the newly reconstituted New Yorker Films, the original distributor of the film who, in a fitting tribute to Easter, rose back up from the dead this month. But they have a lot of sand stuck to their tunic and they’re waiting for the coffee to kick in, which put into question whether I’d be able to secure a print from them in time for today. I didn’t have the luxury of time as Roger Ebert is in town this week for The Conference on World Affairs – a yearly event founded in 1948 – and he’s selected Aguirre for a week-long dissection that begins tomorrow. So last week I contacted Herzog’s office in Germany where Lucki tried to sell me on screening Aguirre in a digital format. For me that was out of the question. Ebert’s week-long dissection goes on this Monday through Friday and allows anyone in the 2,000+ seat Macky Auditorium Concert Hall to raise their hand to pause the action with a question or comment, with Herzog there the first two days and Ebert there the whole week. These aptly titled Cinema Interruptus screenings are by necessity screened digitally. As far as I’m concerned it would be a sacrilege not to give people a chance to see Aguirre before that, uninterrupted, on the big screen, and with the full warmth and density that 35mm celluloid provides. The only time I could sneak in that screening was today: Easter Sunday. Which is just fine by me; the film theater is one of my preferred churches anyway.  READ MORE

In conjunction with TCM’s first ever film festival in Los Angeles, I wanted to interview some of the people who will be presenting movies at the event. At the top of my list was actor/producer/director Norman Lloyd who will be introducing Alfred Hitchcock’s SABOTEUR at Mann’s Chinese Theatre on April 25^th. The subject of a recent documentary, WHO IS NORMAN LLOYD?,  the 94-year-old raconteur has known and worked with some of the biggest names in the world of theatre, radio, film and television including Orson Welles, John Houseman, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Bernard Herrmann, Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock and John Garfield to name just a few.  The following interview was recorded on March 2^nd, 2010 . READ MORE

I see that 1967′s Bonnie and Clyde is tomorrow night’s selection for TCM’s “The Essentials” movie slot, and I couldn’t agree more.  B&C is one of those select few movies about which I can honestly say it changed my life and the way I think about everything.  I have such clear memories of watching this movie in the theater when it first came out — I was thirteen — and of the way it blew me away and captured my intellect and my imagination.  It’s remained one of my favorite movies, frequently revisted and never forgotten, and I’ll be watching tomorrow night if I’m home.  We all know that movies seen when you’re younger often take hold in mysterious ways, and boy, did Bonnie and Clyde have that effect on me.

READ MORE