TiVoPlex
By John Seal
December 13, 2010
Thursday 12/16/10
3:30 AM Flix
Great Expectations (1974 GB): It can’t hold a candle to David Lean’s classic 1946 version, but this made-for-television adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel is quite good in its own right. Produced by Lew Grade’s ITC, the film features Michael York as Pip, the young man in a hurry rescued from perdition by convict Magwitch (James Mason) and dotty old Miss Havisham (Margaret Leighton). It’s a wonderful story told more than adequately by director Joseph Hardy, and features an impressive supporting cast, including Rachel Roberts, Robert Morley, Sarah Miles, Anthony Quayle, and Peter Bull. Also airs 12/18 at 3:00 AM.
3:35 AM Showtime Extreme
March or Die (1977 GB): Gene Hackman is none too convincing as a Foreign Legionnaire in this old-fashioned action flick written and directed by Dick Richards. Hackman is Major William Foster, a World War I veteran hoping to forget past troubles in the deserts of colonial French Africa, where he’s assigned the task of assisting archaeologist Francois Marneau (Max von Sydow) in his scientific endeavors. This was the film of which Hackman famously said that “the audience marched out of the theater and died”, but it’s not quite that bad: even at his worst, Gene is an interesting actor to watch, and any film in which Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) plays a Berber Arab can’t be all bad, right?
5:00 PM IFC
Bullet (1997 USA): Mickey Rourke and Tupac Shakur play gangsters competing over drug turf in this never boring character study from director Julien Temple (The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury). Rourke (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Bruce Rubenstein) is the title character, a hardened con who returns home to his middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood after serving time for a crime he didn’t commit. Back on the streets with younger bro Ruby (Adrien Brody), Bullet gets back in the swing of things and immediately starts messing with heroin and hustlas, including Tank (Shakur), an old pal turned rival. Released direct-to-video back in the day, Bullet is another showcase for Rourke, who completely overshadows Tupac, whilst the film provides early evidence of Brody’s considerable potential. Also airs 12/17 at 12:45 AM.
Friday 12/17/10
4:30 AM Fox Movie Channel
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947 USA): I’m currently reading Frederica Sagor Maas’ autobiography — also entitled The Shocking Miss Pilgrim — so though I’ve never seen this film, I feel I would be remiss were I not to mention it. Sagor Maas’ story is a remarkable one: born in New York City of Russian immigrant parents in 1900, she dropped out of Columbia University in the early 1920s and became story editor for Universal Studios. Maas later moved west, where she began a career writing screenplays at MGM before hitting the glass ceiling and falling foul of studio politics and the blacklist. The Shocking Miss Pilgrim was her final screen credit (she shared it with husband Ernest), but the story wasn’t over...40 years later, she met film historian Kevin Brownlow, who convinced her to put pen to paper and tell her tale. She began writing in 1988 and her book was published 11 years later, when she was 99 years of age. And the best part? Amazingly, she is still alive today at the age of 110! I have no idea if The Shocking Miss Pilgrim is much of a film, but the book is one of the best kiss and tells you’ll ever read, and an invaluable first-person account of the early days of Tinsel Town.
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