I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I’m a sucker for certain of the Astaire/Rogers films (primarily Swing Time, and probably mostly because I think there’s something interesting about the fact that Fred is essentially a gambling cad who spends the entire movie flirting with Ginger but won’t seal the deal because he has a frumpy fiancee at home), but I’m really more into Gene Kelly.

Among the films screening on Sunday that I’d recommend: the Best Picture winning An American in Paris, directed by Vincente Minnelli and scored to Gershwin; It’s Always Fair Weather, which is essentially the Mad Men of mid-century musicals; and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the last film Busby Berkeley directed without choreographing. Ball Game is more of a curiosity than anything else; rumor has it, Berkeley was too far in the bottle at that point in his career to really take control, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s credits for choreography.

The numbers aren’t “good”, exactly, but intriguingly off. Like the one above, where Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing a song where they tell a number of increasingly unlikely brags about making out with girls on the road and then never calling them. The chorus: thanks to Sinatra leading leading her on and leaving the next day, they sing triumphantly, “the sweetest gal at Vassar’s in the cold, cold ground.” Later, Kelly sings about how he “had to go” when he learned that one paramour was “just 11.” Of course, the cads eventually get their comeupance when they meet Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, but the movie’s a little more interesting in these WTF? moments.

Two quotes just popped out of my feed reader and clubbed me over the head; when I came to, I recalled a couple of other soundbites from my week in LAFF that sort of seem related. First, from David Poland’s eye-roll at “Tom & Jerry On Crack cartoon” Wanted:

Wanted is more like the last of big budget porn, throwing around endless style along with massive fake boobs and enough smoke to choke a Scott. Guys still get off on it - guys can get off on anything that tells them it wants to get them off - but one simply has to wonder, “Doesn’t anyone just f*** anymore?”

We’ll get back to that. First, a digression…

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• Turner Classic Movies has hired Elvis Mitchell to host a new interview series called TCM: Under the Influence. Lou Lumenick reports, via Movie City News.
• In an interview with Stream, Wholphin’s Brent Hoff gives props to the programmers of some of our favorite film festivals: SXSW, Cinevegas and True/False. Of the latter’s Paul Sturtz and David Wilson, he says, “Their selections are incredible. They are people with such heart, and they look at everything through the prism of who they are as people and what moves them. And I think that’s why they put on such beautiful films. And believe me, everyone says it, everyone that goes universally agrees that these guys nail it like nobody else, and few people know about it. I guarantee it will become a much bigger deal. I’m outing them. I’m sure I’ve just ruined the town.” Via BigScreenLittleScreen.
• Above: a talk at Drexel University, wherein Arin Crumley talks about rethinking cinematic content for web episode distribution.

One of the hardest things about being a young film critic is that it’s impossible to catch up to the older guys in terms of how many films I’ve seen. To think Roger Ebert was already reviewing films at the Sun-Times for ten years before I was born. And gee whiz, Andrew Sarris has been doing this forever. I mean, it’s hard enough seeing every significant film released in a year, let alone every significant film released in the 8 decades before my lifetime. But while it’s certainly in my best interest to see all those Ingmar Berman films I’ve avoided, and see everything else on all those “all time best” lists, and maybe watch Turner Classic Movies 24-7 for the rest of my life, there’s just no way I’ll ever be complete in the eyes of some of my peers or, more importantly, of my readers.

Last Sunday, SF Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle confessed to having never previously seen some “classics”, including 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he had finally just watched them and proceeded to review them. Some bloggers have responded, including Kevin Lee, who is disappointed in LaSalle’s low-level insight, and Jeff Wells, who admitted to his own unseen, none of which seemed too embarrassing. But then LaSalle ponied up a response to the responses:

“Of course, since I’ve written that article I’ve heard from people telling me that I’m an illiterate for not seeing the movies they’ve seen (although I’ve seen them NOW). Needless to say, I could name hundreds of worthy and significant films that probably none of them have seen. But hey, people need something to make them feel good about themselves, and they’ll find any excuse.

But that’s neither important nor interesting. However, the larger point this brings up, though, does interest me. Movies have been around now for about a century. Fifty years ago, we might have reasonably assumed (it wouldn’t have been true, but it would have been a reasonable assumption) that every film critic of significance had seen all the major movies.

But after a hundred years, do we really want our film critics to be generalists, all familiar with the same batch of pre-digested movies that everyone agrees are good? By now, you really can’t see everything, so do we want critics all to have seen the same narrow basic repertory?”

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AdLand points to this print ad, purchased by Turner Classic Movies, which backhandedly “supports” the striking writers. A mock-up of a crumpled screenplay cover page, the ad encourages striking screenwriters to “keep it up” because, “After all, the greatest movies have already been written.”

It’s only surprising that TCM, a brand built on heavy fetishism of the old studio system, would so blatantly taunt the WGA, in that it’s a surprise to see ANYONE express an AMPTP-sympathetic position these days. But the ad has sparked an interesting conversation over at LAist. Of course, the ad is condescending. But is it actually more sinister than that?

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My ever-present addiction to Turner Classic Movies always hits a problem point come August, when the channel runs its Summer Under the Stars series. Today they’re running 24 hours worth of Jane Russell, and with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes mysteriously absent from the schedule, the real gem of the line-up is Josef Von Sternberg’s Macao, from which I’ve embedded a clip above.

Despite the fact that I’m both something of a Sternberg devotee AND mildly obsessed with Russell, I hadn’t seen Macao until fairly recently. I Netflixed it a month or so ago and fell in love. On the surface, it’s the story of a group of Americans who may or may not be criminals, who get mixed up in one another’s business whilst hiding out in the Chinese port city. But as with any Sternberg film, it’s really an isolation fantasy, in which two outsiders (Russell and Robert Mitchum) meet in an exotic, alternate universe and bond over their mutual loneliness.

I’d love to be able to show you the scene where a spat between Russell and Mitchum escalates into an unexpectedly violent pillow fight; or maybe the chase scene, which Sternberg shoots through so many layers of netting that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who’s winning (Sternberg loved to obfuscate action scenes, as if to say, “You might as well not even watch this part — this isn’t what the film is about.”)

Unfortunately, the clip above was the only embeddable portion I could find online from Macao (although there’s also a trailer on TCM’s site). I love Russell’s self-conscious “It’s a living” eye roll at the end, but this is not even my favorite musical number from the film — that would be Russell’s devastatingly depressive take on “One For My Baby.” As a singer, she was never going to steal any work from a Judy Garland, but dear god, could she hold a close-up.

Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Barbara Stanwyck. Perhaps the greatest tough-cookie of an era in which tough-cookies were in no short supply, Stanwyck worked steadily from the 30s through the 60s. She had a rare gift for adopting the expected conventions of any given genre, while maintaining her signature blend of wise-cracking sensuality and drowsy hostility.

Some of Ms. Stanwyck’s must-see performances are screening on Turner Classic Movies today and tonight; though I’d prefer to watch Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, the gem of the program is probably Baby Face, which airs tonight at 8pm EST. Baby Face was the ultimate pre-Code picture, and one of the least morally defensible products of Warner Brother’s early-30s stab at social relevancy. Stanwyck plays Lily, a saloon maid who, perhaps too-loosely interpreting the advice of her Nietzschean mentor, “accidentally” kills her father and, with her handservant/only friend in tow, hightails it to the big city to commence sleeping her way to the top.

The film was so racy in its original incarnation that when it was initially released in the relatively-wild pre-Code era, significant cuts had to be made to appease the censors. The original cut was found and screened at Film Forum in New York last year; as the New York Times‘ Dave Kehr put it at the time, “with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed.”

For more on our girl Babs, check out these tributes from around the web:

“[I'd] rank Stanwyck\’s abilities above that entire Picturegoer list, even above Garbo, who was an instinctual actress and not the superb technician that Stanwyck was.” — Self-Styled Siren

“She was a great star, and also happened to be a rock-ribbed right-winger and anti-communist