Turner Classic Movies in July

There are several John Ford movies this month, of which my favorites are How Green Was My Valley and Three Godfathers.  Joseph McBride, in his book Searching for John Ford, said that Three Godfathers was "perhaps the most ravishingly beautiful film he ever made"; it was also an unusual Western in that it was not shot in Monument Valley.  And about How Green Was My Valley McBride wrote "Like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) Ford's 1941 classic retains a deep hold on the public's emotions despite (and perhaps because of) the fact that it tells an essentially bleak story of the futility of an ordinary man's existence."

Speaking of Frank Capra, Turner is also showing one of his loveliest pre-populist/fascist films, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), described accurately by Victoria Wilson in her recent biography of Barbara Stanwyck as "dreamy, exotic, other-worldly."

No one directed comedies as funny and elegant as Ernst Lubitsch.  Turner in July is showing the understated, sophisticated and beautiful Trouble in Paradise (1932) and To Be or Not To Be (1942) which, as Andrew Sarris says, was "widely critiqued as an inappropriately farcical treatment of Nazi terror, it bridges the abyss between laughter and horror."

Leo McCarey, who Jean Renoir said understood people better than any other director, directed Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a bittersweet film about growing old.

Nicholas Ray is represented on TCM in July by The Lusty Men (1952), a film Ray biographer Patrick McGilligan referred to (correctly) as "an ambitious overlap of genres, with a dreamlike quality  and a brooding fatalistic view of life."

Other films I look forward to in July include:

Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1955), a film Truffaut called "the first modern film."

Chaplin's A King in New York (1957);  America of the 50's from the point of view of an outcast.

The Big Parade (1925):  King Vidor's powerful and moving WWI story, starring John Gilbert.

Capt. Horatio Hornblower (1955):  Raoul Walsh's film about adventure and loss.

Out of the Past (1947):  Jacques Tourneur's intense film noir.

The Mortal Storm (1940):  Frank Borzage's film is one of the earliest Hollywood films about Nazis, with a doomed love affair at the center.