Critic Stephen Farber’s TCM Fest 2016 movie round-up 1

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The fun of the TCM Classic Film Festival [arts•meme has covered since 2010] is the sheer range of offerings, from obscure rarities to Oscar-anointed hits. Three of my favorite events from this year’s festival featured memorable guest appearances. The Yearling was shown in a magnificent 35mm print from The George Eastman House. Not all studio ...

TCM Fest: Angela Lansbury brings wit, hauteur, menace to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’

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In 1961 Angela Lansbury was playing the mother of rising star Warren Beatty in All Fall Down, an intense family drama adapted by playwright William Inge from the novel by James Leo Herlihy. In that film she seemed thoroughly convincing as the overbearing mother to Beatty, even though she was only 11 years older than ...

TCM Fest: Stacy Keach recalls his fighting form for ‘Fat City’ 1

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“I was a hero that day,” Stacy Keach told a TCM festival crowd Sunday afternoon. He was talking about the time, on the movie set of “Doc” in Almeria, Spain, when the legendary filmmaker John Huston paid him a visit, hoping he would star in his next feature, Fat City. There may be no conventional ...

Gina! The great Lollobrigida appears @ TCM Fest 2

Film
So much fun, at Friday’s TCM Fest 2016, to view director Carol Reed’s marvelous Cinemascope circus movie, “Trapeze,” a color-drenched treatment of a world gone-by; the setting, a circus smack in the middle of Paris. Cast as a foxy and ambitious she-acrobat, Gina Lollobrigida brings her earthy presence to the film, as she jockeys her ...

Dark doings under SoCal sun in “Private Property” at TCM Fest

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The Big Sleep and Horse Feathers are among the treasured favorites unspooling in spiffed-up restorations at the TCM Classic Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night in Hollywood. But it’s not all starry A-listers on this year’s lineup. The vintage-film faithful will have a chance to discover an obscure and deeply weird independent film from ...

arts·meme’s TCM Fest coverage announced 1

Film
The dream team debuted last year — and hit a home run. So… three strong film writers are set to do it again! The strategy remains the same: Divide and conquer the densely programmed, movie-studded long weekend of the seventh annual TCM Classic Film Festival. Pounding the (once-glittering, still star-studded) sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard and ...

How now, Shirley MacLaine @ TCM Fest 2015

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Shirley MacLaine made a few appearances at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, and she enthralled audiences with her candor. She revealed that when she first received the script for the Oscar-winning film, The Apartment, it was only 29 pages long. Director Billy Wilder and his longtime writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, continued writing as filming ...

Ann Miller, in KISS ME KATE 3-D, too darn hot! 1

Dance · Film
It was awfully fun, during TCM Fest 2015, to run into Jon Olivan who heads up the TCM Classic Movie Fan Club in Los Angeles. We mixed and mingled in Club TCM, sipping (complementary) Humphrey Bogart gin surrounded by Mike Kaplan’s great dance-movie posters exhibited in that lounge. Olivan shared a special memory of “Kiss ...

Stephen Farber’s TCM Fest 2015 movie round-up

Film
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I interviewed Ann-Margret at an Academy screening of Bye Bye Birdie three years ago, so it was great to see her again at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, where she introduced a screening of The Cincinnati Kid. The film’s original director, Sam Peckinpah, cast her in the movie, though Peckinpah was replaced by Norman ...

Lost and found: Houdini has ‘Game’

Film · Reviews
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Among the many mysteries surrounding Harry Houdini is the question of whether he might have parlayed his charismatic stage persona into sound-era movie stardom. The peerless illusionist and escape artist died almost precisely a year before the release of the first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer. His filmography consists of five silent films, the second ...