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Friday 5/21/10

6:30 AM Turner Classic Movies
Private Lives (1931 USA): Based on a Noel Coward play, Private Lives is a comedy of errors about a couple that have as much trouble living with each other as without. The couple are Amanda Prynne (Norma Shearer) and Elyot Chase (Robert Montgomery), and they’ve both recently remarried—she to Victor (Reginald Denny), he to Sibyl (Una Merkel). Amanda and Elyot immediately come down with cases of buyer’s remorse (hey, you would too if your spouse were Denny or Merkel) and everyone ends up trying to drown their sorrows in a Swiss ski chalet. It’s arrant nonsense, but Shearer is radiant as ever, and reason enough to watch the film. It’s followed at 8:00 AM by Faithless (1932), a less elegant but similarly themed MGM melodrama starring Montgomery and Tallulah Bankhead.

12:35 PM Encore Love Stories
Siren of Atlantis (1948 USA): A real oddity by any standards (and certainly by the standards of Encore Love Stories!), Siren of Atlantis is an uneven blend of noir and exotica that still manages to work. Lovely Maria Montez stars as Antinea, Queen of an isolated desert city ‘discovered’ by two French Legionaires (Dennis O’Keefe and Jean-Pierre Aumont). Aumont (then married to Montez in real life) falls hard for the dishy dame, but courtier Blades (Henry Daniell, particularly ripe in this outing) has other ideas, and murder raises the temperature even higher. Shot in atmospheric, beautifully lit black and white by Oscar-winner Karl Struss, Siren of Atlantis was directed by Greek expatriate Gregg Tallas, who would helm the terrific James Bond rip-off Marc Mato, agente S. 077 in 1965.


1:35 PM IFC
Vera Drake (2004 GB): The feel-bad movie of 2004 makes its American widescreen television debut this evening. Vera Drake (the amazing Imelda Staunton) is a 1950s British working-class mum with a secret: she's an abortionist on the side, helping girls get out of trouble and accepting very little in return. When one of her wealthier customers confesses her sins to her own mother, the police are compelled to take action, and this desperately sad, modern Greek tragedy takes its inevitable course, with the weepy and confused Vera forced to take the stand and ultimately serve time. Directed by Mike Leigh, Vera Drake is an astonishing period piece, vividly recapturing life in the London backstreets circa 1955, and features some truly great performances: besides Staunton's tour de force, keep your eyes on Richard Graham, stalwart yet ashamed as Vera's husband, and Eddie Marsan, whose subtle performance as her young son-in-law may well be the film's unsung high point.

Saturday 5/22/10

7:30 AM Turner Classic Movies
Trouble Makers (1948 USA): Seems like I’ve been writing about the Bowery Boys for years now, but we’re not even close to the half way mark yet: here’s the series’ twelfth entry. This one’s enlivened by the presence of just-about-to-be-blacklisted Lionel Stander, here playing goombah Hatchet Moran, whose latest dastardly crime, wouldn’t you know it, has been witnessed by Slip and Sach. Will the police believe their story? I don’t think so.

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