By David in TN
Friday, January 10, 2020 at 5:15:00 PM EST
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 a.m. ET is Joseph Losey’s The Big Night (1951), with John Drew Barrymore, Preston Foster, Howard St. John, Philip Bourneuf and Joan Lorring.
Film Noir Guide: “Barrymore (a.k.a. John Drew Barrymore, Drew’s dad) plays an awkward 17-year old high school student who’s teased by his peers because he’s different. His macho father (Foster) is the owner of a bar where the boy hangs out after school. Shortly after a disappointed Foster witnesses his son taking a ‘birthday beating’ from other students, he submits himself to a vicious caning by a crippled sportswriter (St. John) in front of his customers and son. Barrymore, humiliated by his father’s behavior and hell-bent on vengeance, steal’s Foster’s gun and goes hunting for St. John. During the course of a mystifying evening, he hooks up with a happy-go-lucky drunk (Borneuf), commits an unconscious but hurtful racial gaffe and romances a sensitive older woman (Lorring) who hides his gun and tries to talk him out of his plan. At the end of the evening, the disturbed boy learns the reason for his father's beating. Painfully slow at times but interesting.”
Early Monday Morning, January 13, TCM shows two circa 1959 foreign films.
First at 2 a.m. ET is Kapo. Susan Strasberg plays a young Jewish woman who collaborates with her captors out of survival but redeems herself.
At 4 a.m. ET, showing on TCM for the first time is the German film, The Bridge, or Die Brücke, directed by Bernard Wicki. A few days before the fall of the Third Reich, a group of young Germans guard a bridge, placed there to keep them out of the way. A chain of events causes a battle with disastrous results. Wicki intended this as an antiwar film showing the callousness of a brutal regime sacrificing lives to no purpose.
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2 comments:
"Die Brücke" is worth seeing.
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 am ET and 10 am ET is The Captive City (1952), directed by Robert Wise, and featuring John Forsythe, Joan Camden, Harold J. Kennedy, Ray Teal, Hal K. Dawson.
Film Noir Guide: "John Forsythe (of TV's Bachelor Father and Dynasty) plays a crusading newspaper editor battling the Mafia in his small town. When a terrified private eye (Dawson) contacts Forsythe and tells him he's being harassed by the police and followed by a car with out-of-state plates, Forsythe doesn't pay much attention...until the man turns up dead, a hit-and-run victim. Forsythe finally decides to investigate but finds the townsfolk strangely uncooperative. He's resisted at every turn by the police chief (Teal), the town's business and religious leaders and even his partner (Kennedy) at the newspaper. It isn't long before Forsythe and his wife (Camden) notice a car with out-of-state plates following them, too. Forsythe gives an enjoyable, low-key performance, but the film is slow moving and lacks suspense. Senator Estes Kefauver (see Mad at the World), the chairman of the Senate Crime investigating Committee, makes an appearance to warn the American public of the dangers of ignoring seemingly victimless crimes such as gambling. United Artist was careful to point out that Kegauver's salary for his part in the film went to charity."
Estes Kefauver was our Tennessee Senator from his 1948 election to his death in 1963. Kefauver ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. He beat incumbent Harry Truman in the New Hampshire primary and Truman announced he would not run for reelection. At the 1952 Convention, Truman came to Chicago and told the delegates to nominate Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, which they did after several ballots.
Today, gambling has been pretty much legalized. The public never has cared that much (post-World War II especially) about organized crime, as they don't usually carry out murderous home invasions, kidnap-murders of innocent civilians, rape-murders of young women, etc. But politicians have long made reputations on "fighting organized crime."
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