“You know you can watch that at home, right?” Such was the advice directed my way by a wisecracking passerby while queued up for a screening at the 2024 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Hollywood, California. They were clearly not a festival passholder, but the indifference heard right there on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was another instance of the trampling of history that both the festival and its parent channel aim to counter.
Probably the most even-handed response to that trampling would be a reminder—to flip a well-known phrase—that a home is not a house (not a movie house anyway). The folks who flock to Los Angeles every year from all over the world to attend this festival, probably all subscribers or rabid devotees of the channel that bears its name, cough up a prodigious amount of money to do so. It’s clear that for them, for us, the chance to see these films somewhere other than home, close to the geographical heart of where many of them were produced, in (usually) pristine condition on giant screens, in the company of experts and other believers, is a temptation far too difficult to resist. This year’s TCMFF was no exception.
The festival’s theme for its 15th edition, “Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film,” was a juicy framework through which to examine, as TCMFF itself put it on its official website, “the inherent conflict between criminal endeavors and the pursuit of justice.” But the festival’s mission statement also acknowledges that such a pursuit isn’t often as clear cut as many of the programmed films themselves would often seem to have it:
“Movies also remind us that…(j)ustice can be defined very differently when it comes to those wrongfully accused and pursued, to men and women of color, or when it’s corrupt authorities themselves who have violated the very law they are sworn to uphold. In those stories, what is most wanted is justice that has been denied.”
Among the many films on the TCMFF 2024 slate addressing those expressed concerns were titles as varied as John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island, in which the slave-owning Southerner Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter) is wrongfully accused of participating in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln; Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, in which a by-the-numbers police detective (Glenn Ford) subtracts some of those numbers to avenge the murder of his wife; Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story, a hard-boiled depiction of true-life corruption and racial violence shot on location in Phenix City, Alabama, while the killers involved in the actual crimes were still on trial; and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (the festival’s opening-night gala presentation), in which robbers and criminals of just about every other stripe shimmy, bop, and otherwise enjoy the virtual absence of the authority of cops.
Of course, there was more to do at TCMFF 2024 than just debating Dirty Harry Callahan, whose exploits populate what Pauline Kael once described as “a right-wing fantasy,” and his liberal use of a .44 Magnum in pursuit of a really bad guy. Festival attendees could visit Club TCM inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (a.k.a. TCMFF Headquarters) and take part in the world’s most difficult movie trivia contest, “So You Think You Know Movies,” hosted by Bruce Goldstein, programmer of NYC’s Film Forum and founder of Rialto Pictures. (I’ve tried Goldstein’s contest more than once, and the results reveal that I don’t know movies.)
They could then hit the pavement and see Jodie Foster get her hands and feet imprinted in cement outside of the famous Grauman’s (now TCL) Chinese Theater and then, four hours later, indulge in an interview with Foster before a screening of The Silence of the Lambs, which might at least be enough time for the Oscar-winning actress to get cleaned up.
Passholders might have also grabbed a drink at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (a.k.a. TCMFF Headquarters) and ogled Billy Dee Williams in an on-stage conversation before heading off to see him introduce two films in which he starred: Lady Sings the Blues (presumably a reunion with Diana Ross couldn’t be coordinated) and the underrated baseball comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. Or they could have gotten dolled up to celebrate the work of makeup artist Lois Burwell, an Oscar winner for Braveheart who was on hand all weekend to discuss her craft and introduce such showcases for it as Almost Famous and Lincoln.
There were also, as always, excellent specialty programs to appeal to every niche interest of the TCMFF cognoscenti. Animation fanatics found their pot of gold with “Back from the Ink: Restored Animated Shorts,” a program of 10 restored rarities from the likes of Dave Fleischer, Mannie Davis, and George Pal. “That’s Vitaphone: The Return of Sound on Disc” featured six early Vitaphone sound vaudeville shorts, including a 1926 “Introduction to Vitaphone” from code-master Will Hays himself, projected in 35mm, with sound played back from their original 16-inch discs on a turntable designed and engineered by Steve Levy and Bob Weitz, two members of the Warner Bros. post-production engineering department. (Bruce Goldstein was on hand to moderate the discussion between these techie geniuses.)
TCMFF 2024 also highlighted the 100th anniversaries of MGM and Columbia Pictures. The studios’ histories were well represented by films released under their respective banners, but they also got some extra attention. Matt Severson, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Margaret Herrick Library, hosted a lively program of previews entitled “Columbia’s Centennial Trailer Caravan.” And the fascinating “100 Years of MGM History: Celebrating the UCLA Hearst Newsreel Collection” was illuminated by contributions from UCLA Film & Television Archive curator Todd Wiener; Jeffrey Bickel, senior newsreel preservationist at UCLA FTVA; and Patrick Loughney, director of the Packard Humanities Institute.
The apparently indefatigable Mel Brooks, going on 98 years young, made his seventh TCMFF appearance before a screening of Spaceballs, the comedy he made for MGM. But rather than designate that picture for celebration under the MGM banner, Spaceballs was officially and rather perplexingly categorized by TCMFF programmers as an “Essential,” as arguable a claim as could be found here this year, positioning this lesser (but apparently popular) Brooks effort under the same umbrella alongside Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and La Strada, as well as other arguable “essentials” like Se7en and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Truly essential, though, were some of my own personal favorite festival experiences of the weekend. Starting on opening night, producers Nick Varley and Matthew Wells, along with Randy Haberkamp of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, introduced their documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a mostly comprehensive deep dive into the histories and oeuvre of British filmmaking legends Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a.k.a. the Archers, who made some of the most memorable and indelible and impassioned movies not only in the history of British cinema but of cinema itself.
Any collaboration that can claim 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffmann among its achievements probably should be more readily known among more casual devotees of classic film. It’s to the purpose of raising awareness of Powell and Pressburger’s oeuvre that the documentary’s makers, aided and abetted by the film’s on-screen host, Powell-Pressburger super-fan Martin Scorsese, apply themselves. The result is an excellent introduction for those who have yet to become intimately familiar with their output, as well as an exhilarating examination of what made the Archers such great filmmakers. (Immediately following was a screening of one of Powell and Pressburger’s less-heralded but no less piercing films, The Small Back Room, reuniting two of the stars of Black Narcissus, David Farrar and Kathleen Byron, both left to play out their personal and romantic struggles while bombs dropped on WWII London lay dormant and ready to explode.)
Oscar-winning sound designers Ben Burtt and Craig Barron, whose previous TCMFF appearances included energetic and hilarious expansions upon When Worlds Collide (retrofitted with a vast improvement on the Universal Pictures rumbling sound gimmick retitled “Bensurround”) and Tarzan and his Mate, returned this year to visit their magic upon Them! In the classic and inimitable Burtt-Barron multimedia fashion, the duo examined the sci-fi monster masterpiece’s history and historical context before bringing on stage, previously unannounced, former actress Sandy Descher, who played the little girl found memorably wandering through the desert at the beginning of the film, the one survivor of Them!’s initial giant-ant attack.
Descher brought along meticulously preserved home movies, shot by her parents on the set of Them!, which showed the then-nine-year-old petting her eight-foot insect enemy and hugging the film’s ostensibly much less threatening leading man, James Whitmore. Now a business owner in Palm Springs, California, Descher ended the pre-show fun by sipping from a glass of supposedly ant-secreted formic acid (or something less toxic) and recreating for the audience the scream she so chillingly committed to film 70 years ago.
One of the highlights of my festival weekend was experiencing the giddy high of the absolutely batshit musical variety revue International House, featuring W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen, and a host of other talents and no-talents you may never have heard of, all primed by another great Bruce Goldstein preamble—exactly the kind of entertaining audience warm-up and scholarship needed to really enrich the film’s very particular sort of madness. (This riot of a movie makes Never Give a Sucker an Even Break look like a Merchant-Ivory joint.)
I also delighted in hearing actor Andy Robinson, who played the mad killer Scorpio in Dirty Harry, shout from out of the darkness just as the film was about to begin (after being interviewed by TCM film noir czar Eddie Muller), “If you’ve never seen this movie on the big screen, you’ve never seen it!” Dirty Harry was the first R-rated movie I ever saw (at age 12), and as a veteran of many theatrical screenings of director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood’s quintessential collaboration I can confirm that Robinson is right. Center-seated four rows from the giant screen, the movie looked spectacular and it has lost none of its power, as it remains a brutal, troubling, brilliant American policier and, yes, essential.
Probably no movie at TCMFF 2024 was more inessential, less deserving of the moniker “classic,” than Saturday night’s midnight movie, Heavenly Bodies, a 1984 Canadian-produced relic that suggests a gene splice of Flashdance, The 20-Minute Workout, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The result is a murkily photographed paean to aerobic tights, leg warmers, and kids in bad ’80s hairdos who just gotta do it for themselves, which in this case means those kids opening a “dance-ercize” studio and going up against the unprincipled owner of a rival club in a you-don’t-really-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it dance marathon to determine which studio has the right to continue sweating to the oldies (and the insufferable newies).
I made it through the opening credits of Heavenly Bodies before leaving, but I wasn’t there for Lawrence Dane’s film anyway. I was there to welcome back to TCMFF the host of that Heavenly Bodies screening, author and former TCM Underground programmer Millie De Chirico, one of many true TCM essentials who were shown the door in 2022 as part of the David Zaslav-era shakeup at Warner Bros. Discovery, TCM’s parent company.
The return of De Chirico, alongside the presence of myriad other lively and knowledgeable and inexhaustible hosts and special guests seen every year—many of whom, because of this festival’s particular historical focus, are being winnowed away by time—are the best counter to the “it’s just content” indifference voiced by that Hollywood Boulevard wisenheimer I overheard while awaiting a screening. Those hosts and guests perennially provide the motivation anyone might need to seek out a happening like the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival.
But they’re also an important reminder, to the wisenheimers and the ivory tower money-grabbers like Zaslav alike, that it’s the people, as much as the films at an enduring festival like TCMFF, who make the magic happen, who bring the knowledge, who are well and truly essential. As TCM continues, on its 30th anniversary, to pursue the preservation—and now contextualization—of Hollywood film history, may that truth also not be forgotten.
The TCM Classic Film Festival ran from April 18—21.
