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The Screen with Ross Freedman, 5900 park heights, Washington D.C., DC (2025)

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/19, Monday, 9:30pm: Clarence Brown's FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1926) volunteers such cautionary titles as "When the Devil can't get to us in the spirit - he often sends the flesh in the form of a beautiful woman." With Garbo fixing her lips in church while a pastor storms about Bathsheba and then adulterously tempting inamorato John Gilbert into duels with two separate husbands, the message hardly had to be spelled out. Garbo, an icon at the height of incandescent charisma, photogeneity, and narcissism, was enjoying her highest role of elegantly playful vampdom and not incidentally plying the occasion for a fat new MGM contract. She can be subtle, as in the velvet vise applied by arms and lips in some of the screen's most simmeringly long kisses, but she also obviously relishes the scenes of rapacious sexuality. The introduction of the illicit lovers, in which she literally waltzes Gilbert from ballroom to bedroom, is still breathtaking. Perhaps to make the truly scandalous more palatable, MGM surrounded the temptress with big, warm family scenes and scads of moralizing titles. But audiences were reading between the lines. The wandering wife flourishes in infidelity and shockingly perishes only in her one brief moment of contrition.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/18, Sunday, 8pm: Frank Capra's STATE OF THE UNION (1948) takes the liberally amiable, marital-political comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse and turns at least its final sequence into another one of Capra's crucifixion of innocents. The other big change, beginning with an oddly disorienting deathbed wish, was the expansion of the female Henry Luce role (Angela Lansbury), a power-hungry magazine tycoon committing to electing the next president. Spencer Tracy, as an industrialist lion susceptible to White House taming, and Katherine Hepburn, as his lamb-keeper of the hearth, perform with a familiar expertise, especially as the most convincing grown-up bedroom duo of the 1940s and '50s, but the rest of the comedy is too broad. The film is serviceable for what it does, but it ends being not quite enough Lindsay and Crouse and not quite enough Capra, which is to say it is the essence of a Metro package deal during the enlightened but not necessarily inspired Dore Schary era. Van Johnson is uncommonly weak as the comic devil's advocate, whereas Adolph Menjou adds all his posture of authority to the role of the political boss.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/18, Sunday, 2am: Jerry Lewis's CRACKING UP (SMORGASBORD, 1983) is the great comedian's directorial swan song. The film, which not surprisingly sat on the shelf for two years, has the ascetic, abstract quality one associates with auteurs in the moody twilight of their obsessions. Told in the form of an extended psychoanalytic session, the film has the free-form inventiveness of Lewis’s 1960s classics, yet the gags are tinged with morbidity and despair.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/17, Saturday, 12am: Howard Hughes's THE OUTLAW (1943) Is a major curio rather than a classic. It will forever deserve a sociological footnote for sponsoring the breast-fetish craze that swept the world in the wake of Jane Russell's sullen bustiness. Strangely, her role is only a bit part in what amounts to a buddy-buddy love triangle among three western men becalmed in a way station. For once, screenwriter Jules Furthman got to celebrate male camaraderie at 100-proof intensity without the diluting stylization of Josef von Sternberg or the deflecting humor of Howard Hawks. (Hawks actually did direct early portions of the film.) Beyond the film's blunderbuss assault on 1940s mammary mores by the cold, callous, cynical Hughes, its main historical contribution was to anticipate the postwar flood of Freudian westerns and their spectacles of sexual violence.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/16, Friday, 1215am: Richard Lester's PETULIA (1968) is the 1960's greatest, most underrated love story. Lester deftly maneuvers a dangerously eccentric cast into an expressive ensemble. The stylistic convolutions of his mini-montage prove necessary to release the romantic energies of his characters in an alienating world. There are many unearthly elements to the movie, making it a kind of science-fiction film, but of inner space, not outer space. Julie Christie clearly belongs to the miniskirts of the 60s and not the long skirts of the 30s , yet in her hippy kookiness she maintains a sentimental affinity to Depression-era screwballs in one of the great feminine performances of the decade. George C. Scott also has never been more charming or more complex, and the two of them are ultimately luminous as the thwarted lovers.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/16, Friday, 12:15am: Alfred Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) is a masterful vision of 1940s small-town America instilled with feelings of fear, guilt, and paranoia. People who keep saying that this or that filmmaker has gone beyond Hitchcock should look more closely at a film like SHADOW OF A DOUBT which becomes deeper and more tantalizing with every viewing. Hitchcock supervised a story concocted by Thornton (OUR TOWN) Wilder, Sally (MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS) Benson, and Alma Reville, his wife and screenwriter alter ego. The inspired, eerily controlled camera work, treating the visiting Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) and the niece (Teresa Wright) as doppelgangers of one spirit, even though he represents cosmopolitan vice and she Santa Rosa innocence, helps make their relationship one of the most profound in all of cinema. Wright gives her finest performance and Cotten, as the suspected Merry Widow Murderer, puffs smoke rings around his role. Henry Travers and Hume Cronyn as amateur connoisseurs of grisly whodunits provide extraordinary comic support.

07/20/2024

TCM, 03/01, Wednesday, 6am: Orson Welles's THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942) is the cinema's quintessential mutilated masterpiece. RKO's recutting resulted in a truncated third act with scenes shortened and reshuffled into a portentous series of climaxes, and in reducing a 132-minute feature into an 88-minute one, much of Welles's complex social history was lost. The most tragic loss to film history, however, was the discarding of the entire last reel with Joseph Cotten visiting Agnes Moorehead in a decrepit boarding house. Despite all this, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS remains, fragment by fragment, one of the most emotionally and intellectually articulate films ever made, as well as one of the most beautiful and haunting meditations on the mystical process of time the cinema has given us. Agnes Moorehead as Aunt F***y, the poignantly frenzied spinster, takes top acting honors without shredding the delicately woven tapestry of family drama and trauma. AMBERSONS's abiding unpopularity with the Hollywood mass audience is, however, proof of its transcendent importance in the coming of age of America. Even in KANE, but especially in AMBERSONS, the young, brash Orson Welles had imparted to American movies a long overdue intimation of the mortal limits and disillusioning shortcomings of the American Dream. He dared to suggest that even Americans become old and embittered as the inexorable forces of family, capitalism, and 'progress' trampled them. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is ultimately two films, one commercially misguided, the other artistically sublime. As in CITIZEN KANE, Welles transformed and transfigured someone else's story into a covert autobiography of his own. In AMBERSONS, he did not disguise his deepest feelings with satiric gibes at the possessors of great wealth and power. What shines through in AMBERSONS, more than a hundred snow-covered sleds named "Rosebud," is Welles's abiding love and respect for his wondrous characters in all their precious pastness.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/15, Thursday, 4pm: Orson Welles's CITIZEN KANE (1941) is the most revered of foundational American sound films and has proven powerful enough to survive any kind of overexposure. Even though almost everyone interested in movies knows Rosebud is the sled, this does not detract from the film's red-herring catalyst with its poetic intimations of "les neiges d'antan" as the object passes from the snows of childhood to the fire and ashes of death. The magical fusion of Welles, co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, cinematographer Gregg Toland, composer Bernard Herrmann, and the Mercury Players parading mystically across the shadow screen produced so many classic thematic and stylistic sequences that the film has been analyzed and psychoanalyzed ever since. As Andrew Sarris observed, this corrosive fable of a William Randolph Hearst-like newspaper tycoon is at once derisive and romantic, pessimistic and exuberant, self-mocking and self-glorifying. The use of deep-focus photography, eccentric camera angles, and expressionistic lighting marked a break with Hollywood's classical editing and populist reaction shots. Though many ghosts continue to haunt this mock-epic biography, the film is preeminently dominated by the Marlovian presumption of Orson Welles.

07/20/2024

TCM, 8/15, Thursday, 12am: Alan Johnson's TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1983). Mel Brooks's remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 classic is inferior to the original in every sequence and every character. Brooks is not even in particularly bad taste on this occasion. He is simply not funny enough as a performer, and the rest of the cast is unable to escape the ghostly cloaks of the original to provide any fun of their own.

07/16/2024

TCM, 8/14, Wednesday, 9:30am: John Ford's 7 WOMEN (1966) was a commercial disaster when it came out, generally ridiculed by critics and relegated to the lower half of double bills - yet Ford's last feature is surely one of his greatest, as well as his most savage and despairing. It's an unusually modern work, not merely for its unsentimental distillation of Fordian themes, but for the telegraphic urgency and passion of its style, which is aided rather than handicapped by the stripped-down studio sets. Set in 1935, the film effectively transposes the gender and settings of many of his classic westerns to the apocalyptic last days of a female missionary outpost in China, which is about to be invaded by Mongolian warriors (including Mike Mazurki and Woody Strode). The movie was at once too profound for the art-film circuit and too personal for the big, brassy Broadway houses. Ford's greatest crime was taking his material seriously at a time when the seriousness of an entire medium was being threatened by the tyranny of trivia. The most startling thing about 7 WOMEN is its resolution. With Anne Bancroft starring as an atheistic but humanist doctor who turns up at the mission, Ford investigates the struggle between religion and science, treating religion in an almost Bunuelian manner.

07/16/2024

TCM, 8/13, Tuesday, 9:45pm: Jean-Luc Godard's PIERROT LE FOU (1965) is the epitome of New Wave Pop Art romanticism. The movie is as evocative of its epoch as a Warhol “Marilyn” or Beatles VI. PIERROT was partially inspired by the script for BONNIE AND CLYDE, which had been sent to Godard in '65, and is almost linear—at least for JLG. Made in the middle of Godard’s greatest period, it’s a grand summation of everything he’d achieved since BREATHLESS—collage structure, autonomous sound, interpolated set pieces—as well as his version of a location thriller. Shot in wide-screen and saturated primary colors, mainly in the south of France, PIERROT looks sensational—as does Godard’s then-wife Anna Karina who, even as she captivates and abandons co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo, is herself the movie’s documentary subject. Karina’s insouciant grace and spontaneous outbursts parallel that of the film: Culturally, PIERROT LE FOU is all over the map, juxtaposing Sam Fuller (in his celebrated party scene) with Federico Garcia Lorca, the war in Vietnam, and Auguste Renoir. Few films have ever been more hostile to Americans and more devoted to their cars. PIERROT is hardly devoid of Godardian misogyny, but whatever personal bitterness infuses the filmmaker’s representation of Karina, the movie itself radiates joy of cinema.

07/16/2024

TCM, 8/13, Tuesday, 8pm: Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (1960) is the first masterstroke in his critical vision of the cinema as a mixed form. He slashes the material of a killer on the run, reassembles the fragments in between expressively winding scenes of character and camera movements, punctuates Raoul Coutard's impromptu street shooting with D.W. Griffith's iris dissolves, pivots from comedy to tragedy, from documentary to melodrama, from Murnau to Mickey Mouse, and ends with an enigmatic image of Jean Seberg suggesting that a pretty girl is like a metaphor. In a film variously described as a Saganesque soap bubble and the last of the American gangster movies, the interplay of masks, gestures, grimaces, and collages created a cinema for which no critical theory existed outside of Godard's mind. His style was personal and original while excluding the then conventional middlebrow distinctions between Art and Kitsch.

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