TCM
TiVo ALERT
For
January
15–January 22
DAVID’S
BEST BETS:
THE
GOODBYE GIRL (January
16, 8:00 pm): Before Richard Dreyfuss thought he was
God's gift to acting, he was an excellent actor. This 1977 film, in
which he won an Oscar for Best Actor (becoming, at the time, the
youngest to win the award), is a perfect example of that. The
screenplay, written by Neil Simon, is good, but the acting and
interaction between Dreyfuss, Marsha Mason and Quinn Cummings
(the latter two were nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting
Actress, respectively) are outstanding. Cummings, who was 10 when the
film was released (and flaming out as an actress a couple of
years later), is marvelous as Mason's precocious daughter.
It's a very charming and entertaining romantic comedy.
EDGE
OF THE CITY (January 19, 4:15 am): An impressive film
starring John Cassavetes as a drifter, later revealed to be
an Army deserter, who befriends Sidney Poitier when he gets
a job as a longshoreman. The interaction between the two is
excellent, but Jack Warden as Malik, a vicious racist who hates
blacks and is blackmailing Cassavetes, is the best part of this
1957 film. The two fight scenes he has, first with Poitier and
then with Cassavetes are powerful. The racial themes of the
film, including having Cassavetes' character having a
relationship with a black woman, were groundbreaking for its time.
ED’S
BEST BETS:
SAHARA (January
17, 2:15 pm): In 1943, Humphrey Bogart was loaned out
to Columbia to star in this war picture about a British-American tank
crew stranded in North Africa just ahead of a horde of German
soldiers. Bogart is accompanied by his surviving crewmen (Bruce
Bennett and Dan Duryea), a Sudanese soldier (Rex Ingram),
his Italian prisoner (J. Carroll Naish), and a downed German
pilot (Kurt Krueger) as they search for water in the desert. This
little multi-cultural cast makes for some fine drama as they must
find and defend their source of water before the Germans arrive.
Based on a Soviet film Trinadtstat (1937), the
screenplay was penned by Communist Party stalwart John Howard Lawson,
along with the director, Zoltan Korda. Thanks to Korda,
much of the propaganda was toned down in favor of the grim tension
that makes this film one worth catching. It was shot in Brawley,
California, in the Borego Desert just north of Mexico.
There’s little actual fighting in the film. Bogart and wife
Mayo Methot provided most of the fighting during the
off-hours in the aptly named Brawley. The battling couple went
at it almost every night after getting liquored up. This s a
film that will please both fans of war films and fans of Bogart
alike.
A
FACE IN THE CROWD (January 20, 3:00 pm): Budd
Schulberg wrote and Elia Kazan directed this prescient
look at celebrity and media-made pundits in the story of Larry
“Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a drifter discovered in jail
by the hostess (Patricia Neal) of a morning radio show in Pickett,
Arkansas, and who, through the sheer force of his “down home”
personality eventually makes his way to New York, where he becomes
not only an entertainment superstar, but a respected wielder of
opinion; powerful enough to make a nondescript senator into a
formidable presidential candidate. Rhodes, however, is rotten to the
core, and as his fame and power increase, the monster within him
begins to break out. It’s up to Neal, as a latter-day
Frankenstein, to destroy the monster she created before he destroys
us, and she does it in a quite unique way. Neal, of course, is her
usual superb, and Griffith gave the best performance of his career,
playing against type and should have gotten the Oscar. But
he wasn’t even nominated, in due to the less than stellar
box office of the movie and the Liberal backlash against
director Kazan for supposedly “naming names” before
Congress. (In reality, he didn’t name anyone
that wasn’t already named again and again.) What
eventually brought critics around to giving this film another look
was Francois Truffaut, who championed the film as a
modern-day classic and a warning.
WE
DISAGREE ON . . . LOGAN'S RUN (January 17, 4:00 am)
ED: C. As
with most movies set in the future, Logan’s Run is
a child of its times. Made in 1976, we see that the year 2274 pretty
much resembles 1976, except everyone lives in a shopping mall and
dresses as if going to the disco. Survivors of some sort of holocaust
live in a domed city. To control the population the computers that
run the city have mandated that anyone over 30 is to be liquidated.
The policy is enforced by policemen called “Sandmen.” Of course,
Michael York, one of the “Sandmen,” begins to question the policy
and becomes a rebel himself. Please, this is a hackneyed plot to
begin with, and the “special affects” do nothing to enhance the
goings-on. For one, the domed city looks as if it were made for a bad
Japanese monster movie - note the miniatures. On the other hand, the
cheesy fire-guns used by the sandmen look like something out of a bad
Italian sci-fi movie. Speaking of, the special effects in
this film are, to put it mildly, atrocious. You can see the strings,
for God’s sake. And check out Box the robot. Does it get any
worse - or sillier? Truly cringe inducing. As for the acting, Michael
York, normally a good actor, is difficult to differentiate from the
tress he walks among. Jenny Agutter looks great in those
short-short negligees, but she seems to be reading her lines from cue
cards. Peter Ustinov has nothing better to do than ham it up and
mumble his way through. And Farrah Fawcett-Majors? Well, the
less said the better. The duel to the death between York and fellow
Sandman Richard Jordan only serves to remind Darth and
Obi-Wan that they had nothing to worry about as per competition. And
speaking of, can you believe that Star Wars was only
a year away? It seems as if it were light years away.
I think that in giving this mess a “C” I was being far too
generous.
DAVID:
B+. After reading Ed's review of Logan's Run,
I was stunned by how much he dislikes it. Did we watch the same
movie? I'm a huge fan of early and
mid-1970s futuristic dystopian films such as
this, Soylent Green, Omega
Man and Rollerball. As an aside, the three films
I named were subjects of previous We Disagrees with me liking them
and Ed not being much of a fan of any. In Logan's Run,
it's the year 2274 and some sort of apocalypse has
occurred leaving people to live in a domed society with everything
they do handled by a super-computer. That leaves them a lot of time
for wine, women (or men, though futuristic sex is a little strange)
and song. Most everyone is very happy leading a hedonistic life.
Among those not thrilled are people approaching and then reaching the
age of 30. That's because there's one catch to this society: once you
get to be 30, you go through a ritualistic death in a place called
"Carousel." It is there where the birthday boys and girls
are incinerated and supposedly renewed elsewhere while spectators
cheer with each death. Logan 5 (Michael York) is a "Sandman,"
a cop who hunts down "Runners," those who want to live past
30 and attempt to run for their lives. After killing a Runner, Logan
discovers a curious-looking pendant worn by him. Logan takes it to
society's computer, which tells him what it is and that he must find
a supposed "Sanctuary," where the successful Runners are
and destroy it. To make sure Logan does what he's told, the computer
adds four years to his life, thus making him 30 and someone with a
vested interest in keeping society in order because he's now a
Runner. Unlike Ed, I find the plot compelling, and while some of the
special effects look straight out of 1976, they were good enough to
receive a "Special Achievement" Academy Award for visual
effects. It was also nominated for two Oscars – Best
Cinematography and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, and six Saturn
Awards (given by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and
Horror films – you know, people who love sci-fi),
including one for Best Science Fiction Film. The prior winner
was Rollerball and the year after Logan's
Run, Star Wars received that honor. Gravity won
last year. The acting is fine though far from great. However,
Peter Ustinov is exceptional as an old man living outside the dome.
He is the first person anyone from inside the dome sees who is old.
The scene in which the dome is destroyed by the computer, after it essentially self-destructs, and those who escape that society see,
touch and marvel at Ustinov's character as he is old with wrinkles
has a beauty to it. There's a morality tale in this film, but I'm not
going to argue it's a classic or even a highly-sophisticated film.
What is it? It's an enjoyable and fun science-fiction film with a lot
of action and women in very mini miniskirts.
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