September Highlights on TCM
In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.
GREGORY LA CAVA (September 18, 8pm)-- Gregory La Cava studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before he began his career in animation with Raoul Barré (on the Animated Grouch Chasers series). In 1915, he was hired by William Randolph Hearst to run his new animation studio (one of his youngest employees was Walter Lantz, the man who later invented Woody Woodpecker). After the studio folded, La Cava worked for a couple of other animation companies before he went to Hollywood, where he got his start in live action with two-reel comedies. Although he made a few melodramas, he was known primarily as a comedy director and rightly so. It's interesting that he began in the visual arts and animation (and that he apparently had his animators study Chaplin films), because his pictures have a remarkable visual precision and fluidity: you can close your eyes and remember the movements and gestures of the characters in certain La Cava films. TCM is showing seven of his pictures in September. Unfortunately, My Man Godfrey--La Cava's best film and one of the great movies of the '30s--is not included, but they are showing the great anomaly of his career and one of the craziest pictures ever made, Gabriel Over the White House. La Cava made this hairraising political melodrama for Hearst, and it has to be seen to be believed (Warren Beatty took the basic plotline, but nothing else, for Bulworth). If you don't know La Cava's work, this selection is a good way to get acquainted. And if you've never seen My Man Godfrey, don't miss it next time it airs.
TONI (September 3, 11:30pm)--Speaking of the great pictures of the '30s, Jean Renoir's Toni is also showing this month. Renoir made this story of Spanish and Italian immigrants working in the mines in the south of France for Marcel Pagnol's production company and he based it on a true story, a crime of passion that had occurred ten years earlier. Toni was shot on real locations with direct sound, and it has long been considered a forerunner of neorealism. To a certain extent, this is just-- Luchino Visconti actually worked as Renoir's assistant during this period. Renoir himself disagreed: "The Italian films are magnificent dramatic productions," he wrote in his autobiography, "whereas in Toni I was at pains to avoid the dramatic" (it's an interesting point, maybe truer of Visconti and De Sica's films than Rossellini's). Toni is, really, a film about the rhythms and textures, the music of life among these particular people. It's funny, surprising, heartbreaking and amazingly alive.
BYE BYE BRAVERMAN (September 24, 4:30am)-- Sidney Lumet's Bye Bye Braverman was quite difficult to see for a while, and I'm glad that it's in circulation now (Warner Archive just re-issued it as a burn-on-demand DVD). It's based on a comic novel by Wallace Markfield called To an Early Grave (one of his later novels was called Multiple Orgasms) about four Jewish intellectuals (George Segal, Jack Warden, Sorrell Brooke and Joseph Wiseman) who get lost on their way to their friend's funeral in Brooklyn (the character of Braverman was based on the writer Isaac Rosenfeld, a close friend of Saul Bellow's and Manny Farber's). The picture is frequently hilarious, and it reaches a comic high point with the scene featuring Alan King as a rabbi. In addition, it's now a precious visual record of New York in the late '60s.
by Martin Scorsese
GREGORY LA CAVA (September 18, 8pm)-- Gregory La Cava studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before he began his career in animation with Raoul Barré (on the Animated Grouch Chasers series). In 1915, he was hired by William Randolph Hearst to run his new animation studio (one of his youngest employees was Walter Lantz, the man who later invented Woody Woodpecker). After the studio folded, La Cava worked for a couple of other animation companies before he went to Hollywood, where he got his start in live action with two-reel comedies. Although he made a few melodramas, he was known primarily as a comedy director and rightly so. It's interesting that he began in the visual arts and animation (and that he apparently had his animators study Chaplin films), because his pictures have a remarkable visual precision and fluidity: you can close your eyes and remember the movements and gestures of the characters in certain La Cava films. TCM is showing seven of his pictures in September. Unfortunately, My Man Godfrey--La Cava's best film and one of the great movies of the '30s--is not included, but they are showing the great anomaly of his career and one of the craziest pictures ever made, Gabriel Over the White House. La Cava made this hairraising political melodrama for Hearst, and it has to be seen to be believed (Warren Beatty took the basic plotline, but nothing else, for Bulworth). If you don't know La Cava's work, this selection is a good way to get acquainted. And if you've never seen My Man Godfrey, don't miss it next time it airs.
TONI (September 3, 11:30pm)--Speaking of the great pictures of the '30s, Jean Renoir's Toni is also showing this month. Renoir made this story of Spanish and Italian immigrants working in the mines in the south of France for Marcel Pagnol's production company and he based it on a true story, a crime of passion that had occurred ten years earlier. Toni was shot on real locations with direct sound, and it has long been considered a forerunner of neorealism. To a certain extent, this is just-- Luchino Visconti actually worked as Renoir's assistant during this period. Renoir himself disagreed: "The Italian films are magnificent dramatic productions," he wrote in his autobiography, "whereas in Toni I was at pains to avoid the dramatic" (it's an interesting point, maybe truer of Visconti and De Sica's films than Rossellini's). Toni is, really, a film about the rhythms and textures, the music of life among these particular people. It's funny, surprising, heartbreaking and amazingly alive.
BYE BYE BRAVERMAN (September 24, 4:30am)-- Sidney Lumet's Bye Bye Braverman was quite difficult to see for a while, and I'm glad that it's in circulation now (Warner Archive just re-issued it as a burn-on-demand DVD). It's based on a comic novel by Wallace Markfield called To an Early Grave (one of his later novels was called Multiple Orgasms) about four Jewish intellectuals (George Segal, Jack Warden, Sorrell Brooke and Joseph Wiseman) who get lost on their way to their friend's funeral in Brooklyn (the character of Braverman was based on the writer Isaac Rosenfeld, a close friend of Saul Bellow's and Manny Farber's). The picture is frequently hilarious, and it reaches a comic high point with the scene featuring Alan King as a rabbi. In addition, it's now a precious visual record of New York in the late '60s.
by Martin Scorsese
TCM Shopping
