News

We lost Kirk Douglas last week, and TCM today set a 24-hour marathon of programming featuring the legend of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The seminar actor’s life and career will be in the spotlight on March 5.

The “TCM Remembers Kirk Douglas” block will showcase 11 of his classic films — including Spartacus, Man with a Horn and Paths of Glory — along with the 2018 special

Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival: Michael Douglas, in which Ben Mankiewicz interviews the late star’s actor-producer son, Michael Douglas, at the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival. See the full program below.

Speaking of Spartacus and the TCM film fest, the event’s 2020 edition in April has set a 60th anniversary screening of the classic pic in a world-premiere 70mm print from a 4k restoration by Universal Pictures.

Peter Bart: Remembering Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas & ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’

Here’s the schedule for...

Awards season is long, and people are (already) tired, which is why it’s so refreshing when a contender breaks character along the way to show a little humanity. That’s exactly what happened at Friday night’s AFI Fest conversation with Martin Scorsese in Los Angeles, when “The Irishman” director, humbled by being so exalted across tribute clip-shows and heaping praise, soothed the room as the lights went down and told the audience, “Just try to relax and enjoy the movie.”

The Q&a began as American Film Institute president and CEO Bob Gazzale asked the audience to ponder a world where Scorsese never existed. “We would be less in touch with ourselves, and each other. Less human. We would be less,” he said. “It is, in short, unimaginable. Now wake up from this George Bailey nightmare, for he is risen: The young boy who aspired to become a priest,...

Lavi in "The Spy With the Cold Nose".

By Lee Pfeiffer

Israeli actress Daliah Lavi has passed away at age 74. Lavi was discovered by Kirk Douglas, who met her on a film shoot when she was ten years old. She went on to stardom in the 1960s, appearing with Douglas in "Two Weeks in Another Town" before often being cast as femme fatales in various thrillers including the Matt Helm film "The Silencers" and "Some Girls Do". She also was the female lead in "Lord Jim" and showed her talents for comedy in the spy spoofs "Casino Royale" and "The Spy with the Cold Nose", as well as the zany comedy "Those Fantastic Flying Fools" (aka "Blast-off"/ "Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon"). Lavi eventually left acting to concentrate on a singing career and became a major pop star in Germany. For more click here. ...

More than any other American director working today, Martin Scorsese retains perhaps the most encyclopedic set of knowledge when it comes to his cinematic forbearers. Two years ago, Fast Company distilled 85 references made throughout the course of a four hour interview on Hugo, and dubbed it “Martin Scorsese’s Film School.” Flavorpill went ahead and paired the majority of those titles with pre-existing commentary from the filmmaker’s documentaries, A Personal Journey Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy, to create a comprehensive video essay. Watch above for Scorsese’s insight into everything from Two Weeks in Another Town to Faces, Italian Neo-Realism (Rossellini) to pre-noir gangster films (Walsh), and much more.

More than any other American director working today, Martin Scorsese retains perhaps the most encyclopedic set of knowledge when it comes to his cinematic forbearers. Two years ago, Fast Company distilled 85 references made throughout the course of a four hour interview on Hugo, and dubbed it “Martin Scorsese’s Film School.” Flavorpill went ahead and paired the majority of those titles with pre-existing commentary from the filmmaker’s documentaries, A Personal Journey Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy, to create a comprehensive video essay. Watch above for Scorsese’s insight into everything from Two Weeks in Another Town to Faces, Italian Neo-Realism (Rossellini) to pre-noir gangster films...

Kirk Douglas movies: The Theater of Larger Than Life Performances Kirk Douglas, a three-time Best Actor Academy Award nominee and one of the top Hollywood stars of the ’50s, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" featured star today, August 30, 2013. Although an undeniably strong screen presence, no one could ever accuse Douglas of having been a subtle, believable actor. In fact, even if you were to place side by side all of the widescreen formats ever created, they couldn’t possibly be wide enough to contain his larger-than-life theatrical emoting. (Photo: Kirk Douglas ca. 1950.) Right now, TCM is showing Andrew V. McLaglen’s 1967 Western The Way West, a routine tale about settlers in the Old American Northwest that remains of interest solely due to its name cast. Besides Douglas, The Way West features Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, Lola Albright, and 21-year-old Sally Field in her The Flying Nun days.

Labor Day weekend is here for 2013 and if you don't have any plans, there are plenty of great shows to check out over the weekend. You can catch up on "Continuum" Season 2 on Syfy, or watch the first three episodes of "The White Queen" on Starz. Sunday, Sept. 1 there's a killer Alfred Hitchcock movie marathon running all day on TCM.

Also, it's college football kick-off weekend, so settle in Saturday for the guys' returning to the gridiron.

Set your DVRs and check your local listings for times and channel numbers. All times Eastern below.

Friday, Aug. 30

A&E: "Shipping Wars" and "Storage Wars" marathon, 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.

The CW: New "America's Next Top Model" episode, 9 p.m.

Discovery: "Alaskan Steel Men" premiere, 10 p.m.

Espn: Cfb, Texas Tech at Southern Methodist, 8 p.m.

Espn 2: 2013 U.S. Open Tennis, men's second and women's third round, 1 p.m. to 7 p.

Titan Books has released a new edition of Dracula Cha Cha Cha, the third book in the Anno Dracula series. Derek recently had a chance to interview author Kim Newman and learned more about the novel’s Italian horror influences. We also have a status update on the long-awaited fourth book, Johnny Alucard.

Can you tell me a bit about the origin and perhaps any influences of this installment in the series?

After the gruesome, muddy, gloomy carnage of World War One in The Bloody Red Baron, the previous book in the series, I wanted to something more fun, but still serious. The summer of 1959 is personally important to me, since I was born then, and the world of la dolce vita in Rome – the real one and the Fellini film – struck me as an underexplored, interesting area. It also enabled me to play with Italian horror, bringing in giallo,...

Today we are talking to an iconic Tony Award-winning star who made her name as a teenager singing on TV variety shows - The Lawrence Welk Show and Sing Along With Mitch included - and then went on to a multimedia career in film and theatre, conquering Broadway with her Tony-winning turn in the Jule StyneArthur Laurents musical Hallelujah, Baby in 1967 and returning to the stage in the subsequent decades in a host of Broadway productions, such as Blues In The Night, Jerrys Girls, Anything Goes, August Wilsons King Hedley II and her celebrated Muzzy in Thoroughly Modern Millie - a role she reprises in the new Muny production of the Tony Award-winning Best Musical beginning this week - the one and only Leslie Uggams. Taking a thorough look back at her career thus far, Uggams opens up about her many successes and how she has endured for fifty years...

A Vincente Minnelli season opens at BFI Southbank in London today and it is no small thing. When The Complete Vincente Minnelli ran at the BAMcinématek in New York last September, I opened a roundup and spent a month updating it (and followed up in December with another roundup on 1944's Meet Me in St Louis). With the BFI's season on through May 31, this one may be another marathon runner.

For now, the spotlight's on The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which, as Michael Wood notes in his piece for the London Review of Books, will soon be playing in theaters throughout the UK:

The plot itself is too nifty by half, a sort of lesson in how to overdo the flashback. We see and hear three phone calls in the narrative present. A man called Jonathan Shields [Kirk Douglas] is trying to reach three Hollywood figures, a director (Barry Sullivan), an actress...

Vincente Minnelli's sugary 1950s confections are of another age, but as the re-released Meet Me In St Louis shows, they still sing

Released on Thanksgiving weekend in November 1944, only six months after the seismic morale-boost that was D-Day, Meet Me In St Louis offered a suddenly more optimistic wartime America the chance to wallow in the sugary comforts of hearth and home, to take refuge in innocence and nostalgia. With its sumptuous Technicolor tones, its American songbook classics, and its evocation of an idyllic, untroubled fin-de-siècle St Louis that surely never existed until Vincente Minnelli dreamed it up, Meet Me In St Louis is as midwestern Republican in its outlook as Minnelli himself (though, as a closeted gay midwestern Republican, he might well have seen the Gop as perfect camouflage). Yet, as with John Ford, you can forgive a lot politically when you get so well served aesthetically.

Minnelli...

"Madame Bovary (1949) offers what is arguably the greatest of all of Minnelli’s parties, the musical and melodramatic set piece (over eight minutes long) of the ball at Vaubyessard. The entire sequence is built upon a set of escalating visual and musical motifs: the play with fabric (with Emma’s ornate gown at the center of this), the contrasting rhythms and movements of the social dances (culminating with the eroticism of the waltz) and, most important, glass — the chandeliers, the glasses of alcohol, the mirror, and the windows. In a moment of supreme delirium, these windows are eventually shattered by chair-wielding butlers in response to Emma’s anxiety about fainting due to the heat while she is waltzing. In the midst of all this, Minnelli also establishes a contrast between the world of the visible (Emma as the center of attention, being looked at and admired by all, including herself...

Following its presentation in August, when the Ferroni Brigade was so taken with The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963) they awarded it their Grey Donkey, Locarno's retrospective arrives in New York at BAMcinématek as The Complete Vincente Minnelli, opening today and running through November 2.

"Filmmakers as diverse as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Spike Lee, Terence Davies, Amos Gitai, Quentin Tarantino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have expressed admiration for his work," writes Joe McElhaney in Alt Screen. "Richard Linklater has repeatedly stated that Minnelli's small-town melodrama, Some Came Running (1958), is his favorite film. A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), a four-hour documentary tour of Scorsese's favorite American films, is filled with extended Minnelli excerpts, as is Jean-Luc Godard's far more ambitious project Histoire(s) du cinéma (ongoing since 1989), a complex video meditation on the very nature of the moving image." Overall, this series "is not really about being a completist,...

"At least you can see they're really trying to make a good festival," commented, with typical dry wit, one of the (very) few international colleagues the Brigade considers at least something of a crypto-Ferronian. Hard to argue with that, as Locarno's program still shows the signs of having to battle back and forth with the two heaviest lifters on the festival calendar, Cannes and Venice—yet mostly, the Ferroni Brigade had a grand time this year.

Of course, more often then not, when dispirited acquaintances met a merry Brigadier in between screenings, the answer to their inevitable question would be: "Coming from (and returning to) a retrospective, of course!"—but also among new films, we ended up with more truly interesting stuff than in the previous year. Not all of it true donkey material, for different reasons. Nevertheless, there were quite a few Ferronian pleasures out there, some of them more touching than others,...

We hit 600 trailers and we put up a lot of stuff on the blog. Did you miss anything? Read on to find out!

Trailers

We started the countdown to 600 trailers on Monday, June 20, with Allan Arkush as he spent Two Weeks in Another Town.

Then on Wednesday, June 22, Josh Olson told us to never put Three on a Match, but to definitely see the film of that name.

And, finally, on Friday, June 24, we hit the big 600 and we did it with the biggest trailer ever: Larry Cohen’s ten-minute impromptu treatise on The Ten Commandments.

Residuals

Elsewhere on the site, we kicked the week off exactly how I wished we’d kick off every week: Joe Dante pointing out some fascinating knowledge about an obscure film talent. In this case, he’s talking William Cameron Menzies.

Then Joe introduced us to another week of TCM’s drive-in double features.

Allan Arkush speaks the minds of every frustrated creative in Hollywood before deciding to spend Two Weeks In Another Town:

Director Vincente Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas reunited for this operatic non-sequel followup to their caustic 1952 Hollywood saga The Bad and the Beautiful, now set ten years later in the La Dolce Vita movie world of Rome and based on a novel by Irwin Shaw. Some claim its protagonists are thinly veiled representations of Tyrone Power, Linda Christian and Darryl Zanuck. Extensively recut by the studio, it’s still a delirious fantasy about Eternal City filmmaking with some memorable sequences and a terrific cast.

Click here to watch the trailer, and then follow on for a little bonus content.

I don’t even know where to start with Vincente Minelli. Understatement: he made some beautiful movies. These guys (and gals) know it:

And here’s a more personal take...

2 and 3 plus 10 add up to a Tfh Milestone: our 600th Trailer!

Find out what these numbers mean in this week’s preview!

On Monday, June 20th, Allan Arkush rushes back after spending Two Weeks in Another Town

Director Vincente Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas reunited for this operatic non-sequel followup to their caustic 1952 Hollywood saga The Bad and the Beautiful, now set ten years later in the La Dolce Vita movie world of Rome and based on a novel by Irwin Shaw. Some claim its protagonists are thinly veiled representations of Tyrone Power, Linda Christian and Darryl Zanuck. Extensively recut by the studio, it’s still a deliriousfantasy about Eternal City filmmaking with some memorable sequences and a terrific cast.

On Wednesday, June 22nd, Josh Olson puts 3 On a Match.

The largely forgotten Ann Dvorak sizzles in this snappy 63 minute pre-code Warner Bros. melange of booze, drugs and gambling. Scarface...

Tuesday, DVD roundup day, is a fine day for taking a look at the new Summer 2011 issue of Cineaste, particularly since, among the online samplings this time around, DVD reviews outnumber all other types of articles combined.

To begin, Darragh O'Donoghue on Harun Farocki's Still Life (1997): "Five aphoristic essays on 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, of about three minutes each, bracket four documentary sequences of photographers creating modern still lifes for magazine advertisements. These two levels, though defined by opposites — stasis/motion, tell/show — are linked by visual motifs and rhymes, just as the modern products echo the subjects of the paintings. The documentary sequences have no commentary, mostly last ten to fifteen minutes, and take their cue from Farocki's earlier An Image (Ein bild, 1983). In that short, he recorded the shooting of a German Playboy centerfold spread, from the building of sets and the arrangement of props (including...

If you long for the days when actors routinely slapped pipes out of their co-stars' faces and cups out of each other's hands, for dialogue where the last word gets wildly accentuated (e.g., "I don't need your Charity!" or "He gives me nothing, and nothing is what he Gets!"), then it's time to ferociously stub out your cigarette, throw a shot glass against the wall, and snap up Warner Archive's new DVD of Two Weeks in Another Town.

Everyone has a breaking point and for actor Jack Andrus, that point was when his wife, Carlotta, had an affair with his best friend, filmmaker Maurice Kruger. The affair landed Jack in a mental institution and ended his bright Hollywood career. When his old friend, director Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) offers him a role in his latest production, Jack, played by Kirk Douglas, leaves the institution and travels to Rome to spend Two Weeks In Another Town, working, living and trying to find his feet in the industry once again.

When he arrives on set, Jack learns that there isn’t a role for him in the film, as Kruger had promised him. The director simply wanted to get him out of the institution and back into the real world, and knew that a potential job was the only way to lure him out. To make matters worse, he discovers that his ex-wife Carlotta,...

Part of a film dynasty, he's unforgettable on screen, but has never had an acting lesson. Is it all in the genes for John's late-flowering son, asks John Patterson

If you don't already know whose son Danny Huston is, the fastest way to figure it out is to close your eyes and listen to him speak. The words waft towards you on a breathy cloud, lent colour and character by a ­detectable lifelong smoking habit (no emphysema like the Old Man had, though, not yet). In a faded American accent that sounds as if it's been ­acquired or borrowed or even half-forgotten in ­exile. All inflected with an Irishman's love of words-as-song and a bullshitter's ­devotion to the art of speech. Every so often a story – and they're all well-told, like dad's were – will resolve itself into a generous, wheezy burst of laughter that's like an ­invitation to intimacy and friendship.

Many retro movie lovers (including us) didn't realize that sultry Italian actress Rosanna Schiaffino had passed away in October at age 69 after a long battle with cancer . Schiaffino provided plenty of sex appeal for both European films and major Hollywood productions before she retired from the industry in the 1970s. Her tempestuous personal life rivaled any of the melodrama and scandal found in Italian films of the period. Her English-language films include Two Weeks in Another Town, El Greco, The Man Called Noon and Arrivederci, Baby!  Click here to read more about her life and career.

Italian model and film actor, she left the cinema and joined the jet set

Rosanna Schiaffino, who has died aged 69, was one of those Italian beauty queens who began a promising acting career in the post-neorealist cinema of the 1950s. She gave up the cinema in the 1970s and married the handsome playboy and steel industry heir Giorgio Falck. Their marriage and, a decade later, their break-up and divorce, had overtones of melodrama more piquant than the content of any of the 45 films in which Schiaffino had starred.

She was born in Genoa, in north Italy, into a well-off family and, although her father wanted her to pursue studies as a surveyor, her mother encouraged her showbusiness ambitions, helping her to study privately at a drama school and then to take part in beauty contests, which she usually won. These led to modelling jobs, with photographs in important magazines, including Life.