Turner Classic Movies in December

Some of my favorite movies on Turner this month, some of which I may write more about later.

Fred Astaire. Balanchine said "He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times."  My particular favorite this month is Shall We Dance, with Ginger Rogers as his partner and wonderful songs by George and Ira Gershwin.  Visually "the ideal was perfection within a single shot," as Arlene Croce says in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (Galahad Books,1972), with no cutting away from the full frame of the dancers.

Raoul Walsh's White Heat.  Marilyn Ann Moss, in her 2011 biography of Walsh (The University Press of Kentucky) refers to this 1949 film as "a vortex for post-war American angst that proved anything but comforting."

Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent.  As Chris Fujiwara says in The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber and Faber 2008), this is a film "in constant and exciting movement" and is made in beautiful widescreen black-and-white.

Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running.  One of Minnelli's great dreamlike melodramas, with a powerful score by Elmer Bernstein.  Stephen Harvey, in Directed by Minnelli (Harper & Row, 1989) says (referring to the last scene) that it is "masterfully designed to exploit the horizontal proportions of the wide screen" and once again one can appreciate TCM's showing of the complete image.

Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind.  When I saw this film at MoMA some years ago the audience was so busy laughing at its soap opera plot they missed the irony and garish beauty of what Sirk, in his interview with Jon Halliday in Sirk on Sirk (The Viking Press,1972), said was "a piece of social criticism, of the rich and the spoiled and of the American Family, really."

John Ford's Wagonmaster.  In an art history seminar, in which I wrote a paper about Frederic Remington and John Ford, I was able to show a print of Wagonmaster which William K. Everson was kind enough to let me borrow.  I felt that showing this Western to my class would be more effective than any of Ford's films with the controversial John Wayne and I was right; several members of the class told me they had no idea that "a cowboy movie" could be so poetic.  Andrew Sarris wrote of Ford and Wagonmaster "He strokes boldly across the canvas of the American past as he concentrates on the evocative images of a folk tradition that no other American director has ever been able to render."(The John Ford Movie Mystery, University of Indian Press, 1975)

Robert Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar is my favorite of the Bresson films that TCM is showing in December.  It is based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, only the eponymous hero is a donkey who takes on the sins of a world where "simple love and laughter vanish with childhood but grace is never absent." (Roy Armes, French Cinema, A.S. Barnes & Co.,1966).

I also want to recommend Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night, script by Preston Sturges (and showing in a 35mm. print at Film Forum the last week in December) and Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, two "holiday" movies with healthy doses of cynicism.