Monday being Labor Day, it's the end of the Telluride Film Festival, which also brings TCM's annual programming salute to the festival. One of the past honorees at the festival was German director Werner Herzog, so TCM is noting that with two documentaries about Herzog. The first, Burden of Dreams at 5:45 PM, is about the making of Herzog's movie Fitzcarraldo, which was a rather eventful shoot to say the least. The second has a more interesting title: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, at 7:30 PM. In the late 1970s, Errol Morris was a struggling documentary maker, who was trying to get footage for a concept he had on pet cemeteries. So Herzog made a bet: if you can get the movie made, I'll eat my shoe. Morris eventually finished Gates of Heaven, and sure enough Herzog went through his part of the bargain. The short documentary is the result, showing Herzog cooking and eating the shoe, while talking about the state of moviemaking..
Another fun short is Happy Anniversary, which is honoring Pierre Étaix at 2:15 PM. Étaix was a clown by training who used the comic timing he learned in the circus to make a series of comedies in the 1960s. This one has Étaix as an average man in Paris trying to get a gift for his wife and some other things on his anniversary. Unfortunately, things always keep happening, especially trouble finding parking spaces (there's a running joke throughout involving the man whose space he borrowed at a barbershop), while his wife, waiting at home for him with a special anniversary dinner laid out for him, decides to have a glass of wine while she waits. Nowadays, they'd just call each other on their cell phones and explain the delay, but 50 years ago, they couldn't do that, and the result is a really fun comic short that transcends language barriers.
TCM is running a special series called The Story of Film on Mondays and Tuesdays starting this week. There's a 15-part documentary, with each part premiering at 10:00 PM Monday, and getting a repeat sometime in the overnight hours between Tuesday and Wednesday. (Specifically, this week the repeat is going to be at 4:00 AM Wednesday, but the time for the repeat will change from week to week.) Since this week sees part one of the series, it means we're going to get a bunch of the early silents. This starts with a set of shorts packaged as "An Edison Album" at 8:00 PM, followed by another set packaged as "LumiÈre's First Picture Show" at 9:30 PM; I'm not certain exactly which shorts are going to appear in these sets. After the 10:00 showing of the documentary, there's a couple of shorts by pioneering woman director Alice Guy-BlachÉ at 11:30, including Falling Leaves. What's interesting about this one is that it's one of the earliest movies to face banning by the censors. The reason for this is that the main character is a young woman with tuberculosis, and her kid sister, who hears the doctor say the older girl will die "when the last leaf falls". The kid sister tries to keep the leaves on the trees (there's a similar O. Henry short story), but also interacts with her sister in a way that the public health officials of 100 years ago would have blanched over.
There are also several movies in this first week of the Story of Film series that were directed by DE Griffith. The first two are on the first night:
Bith of a Nation at 2:00 AM Tuesday; this is Griffith's epic tale of how the Civil War divided old friends from the North and South, and the racist stereotypes of the second half about how blacks who gained power in Reconstruction were a thing to be feared.
In Orphans of the Storm at 5:15 AM Tuesday, Lillian and Dorothy Gish play a pair of sisters in 1780s France who travel to Paris to get an operation when one of them goes blind; the two get split and then carried along by the turbulent events of the French Revolution
Tuesday night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Intolerance, interweaving four stories of intolerance through the ages, with the two big ones being the contemporary story, and one set in ancient Babylon (complete with fabulous for 1916 sets);
Finally, at 11:30 PM Tuesday, is Way Down East. Lillian Gish is a country girl who moves in with her rich city aunt, gets seduced and dumped by playboy Lowell Sherman, and then gets saved by Richard Barthelmess, in a famous scene that has Gish lying on a piece of drifting ice in a raging river.
Over on the Fox Movie Channel, you can catch Sniper's Ridge. In fact, you can catch it multiple times: at 4:55 AM Tuesday and Thursday, as well as 6:00 AM Wednesday. Jack Ging plays Cpl. Sharack, who is on a hill on the front lines of the Korean War. The good news is, the armistice is nearly agreed and it's only a couple of days until the cease-fire. The bad news is, Sharack is about the only competent member of the worst outfit in Korea, and he's had it with the war. It doesn't help that Sharack's immediate superior in the trenches is suffering from something like shell shock. When one last attack is ordered, Sharack tries everything he can think of, including going AWOL, to get out of it. The premise is pretty good, but the movie plays out more like an episode of one of those TV war dramas like Combat. FMC has also been running a panned-and-scanned print.
A movie I've mentioned before, but that fails so spectacularly that it deserves to be seen again, is Storm Center, airing at 10:15 AM Wednesday on TCM. Bette Davis plays a spinster librarian in a middle-class town who feels very strongly about freedom of information. This includes keeping a book called "The Communist Dream" on the shelves. Needless to say, some of the library's trustees don't like this, and want the book removed. One of the local townsfolk (Brian Keith) discovers that Davis had dalliances with socialism during World War II, which is reason enough to get her fired. Meanwhile, Kevin Coughlin is a kid who idolizes Davis and reads as much as he can -- too much, if you believe his father. But when little Kevin finds out that the woman he looked up to might have been a communist dupe in her past, oh boy does he do a 180. The movie is incredibly heavy-handed, to the point that it's unintentionally funny.
TCM's Star of the Month is Kim Novak, who will grace your TV screen every Thursday night in September if you don't want to watch Thursday Night Football. The salute kicks off with the interview Novak did at the TCM Film Festival this past April; it's airing at 8:00 PM, with an encore presentation at 11:15 PM and then several times again the rest of the month. The first of Novak's features to show up is the overrated Vertigo at 9:00 PM, which will also be showing up later in the month for the Alfred Hitchcock salute. The one of Novak's movies airing this week that I haven't recommended before is Five Against the House, at 4:15 AM Friday. Novak plays the girlfriend of Guy Madison, playing a Korean War veteran. The two of them are on their way to Reno for a quickie wedding, with three of Madison's best friends in tow. What they don't know is that one of the friends (Kerwin Matthews) came up with a plan to rob a casino in Reno. Well, Matthews isn't really serious; even if they did get the money he'd return it. But another of the buddies (Brian Keith) is a Korean War veteran too, suffering from PTSD, and taking seriously Matthews' idea to rob the casino.
This month's Friday Night Spotlight is dystopic visions of the future. It's always fun to see how wrong Hollywood gets the future, or, in the case of Metropolis (8:00 PM) or Things to Come (10:45 PM), how wrong European cinema gets it. Hollywood gets it wrong in Escape From New York, which is airing at 12:30 AM Saturday. It's hard to believe that this film is almost a third of a century old, having been released in the summer of 1981, but it is getting on in years, showing New York as it wasn't to be in 1997. In this movie, Manhattan is now a maximum security prison, as opposed to the soft tyranny of nannyism it is today. The US President (Donald Pleasance) is on his way to a summit when Air Force One crashes, stranding the President in Manhattan. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is a newly-convicted prisoner who is given a deal by the warden (Lee Van Cleef): get the President out of Manhattan safely, and you can have your freedom. Oh, but there's a catch: we're putting some time-release poison in your body. If you don't get the President out in 23 hours, the poison capsule will dissolve and kill you. There's quite a few well-known names in the cast: Harry Dean Stanton as the Brain, Snake's former partner in crime; Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain's girlfriend; and Ernest Borgnine as the cabbie.
If you've seen Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, you'll know Gary Cooper had a good sense of humor, but wasn't your typical comic actor. If you've seen High Noon, you'll know he was good at westerns. The two are combined in the 1945 film Along Came Jones, which is on TCM at 3:30 PM Saturday. Cooper plays Melody Jones, a ranch hand along with William Demarest who rides into one of those isolated towns that populate western movies. Jones' initials are the same as those of Monte Jarrad (Dan Duryea), a criminal the townsfolk couldn't recognize on sight. So when they see Jones' initials, they mistake him and his companion for Jarrad and his partner. Needless to say, complications ensue as everybody in town tries to take the man they mistake for Jarrad dead or alive. Loretta Young is the female lead, playing the owner of the local house of ill repute.
Alfred Hitchcock gets another Sunday of films, although it of course conflicts with the first Sunday of the NFL season. This is a shame, since one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, Saboteur, is on at 6:00, during the second half of the Packers' epic beatdown of Jim Harbaugh and his San Francisco 49ers. Reminiscent of The 39 Steps or North By Northwest (the latter will be airing at 10:15 PM Sunday), it stars Robert Cummings as the man wrongly accused of Sabotage who has to travel across the country to find the real guilty party. In between the Saboteur and North By Northwest is Foreign Correspondent at 8:00 PM; this one stars Joel McCrea as a jouralist who sees a prominent Dutch politician killed, and then finds out the guy really wasn't killed. It's another of my favorites.
If you for some reason aren't a fan of Alfred Hitchcock, you might be the sort of person who will like Peter Sellers instead. If that's the case, you could watch The Party, at 8:00 AM Sunday. In this one, Sellers plays an Indian actor in Hollywood to make "Son of Gunga Din". But in a scene gone wrong, he accidentally destroys one of the sets. The producer wants to put him on the blacklist, but the producer has an accident too: somebody signs the Indian actor's name not to the blacklist, but to the list of invites for a big Hollywood party. Sellers shows up and finds that he doesn't really care for most of the Hollywood types at this bizarre party (which includes an elephant and a Russian ballerina), while everybody at the party naturally assumes that Sellers belongs there -- after all, he was on the invite list, wasn't he?