Turner Classic Movies Vintage Movies Top Picks for Old Movies July 11-12 2009 Review

Classic and Old Films on Cable Station TCM  Highlights for July 11 and 12 included several interesting films and a couple of classics too.

July 11th  TCM  focuses on films starring or featuring Jean Seberg .   Who? 

You might know Jean Seberg from Godard's classic  Breathless in 1959  or as the sexy schizophrenic in Robert Rossen's 1964 film Lilith.  Her private life was very interesting and sad.  She became famous when director Otto Preminger chose her over 18,000 hopefuls to be the star of his Saint Joan in 1957.  The movie wasn't well received, however. 

She was the center of controversial when she supported the Black Panthers in the late 60s.  In fact while married to Romain Gary the gossip in the press was that the baby she miscarried actually belonged to a Black Panther leader. (It did not).  The vicious rumor was meant to discredit her and destroy her career was actually started by the FBI  who years later admitted authoring the lie.  Seberg was emotionally unstable all her life, but beginning in 1971 she tried to commit suicide every year on the anniversary of her miscarriage.  She died of a drug overdose in Paris on September 8, 1979.  

The films on TCM featuring the blond actress are:

1959's The Mouse That Roared; the clever  satiric comedy in which a small bankrupt nation declares war on the U.S. in order to lose the war and collect foreign aid money to rebuild itself.  It stars Peter Sellers. It airs at 5:00 p.m. on the West Coast.

1963's In the French Style; Seberg plays a beautiful art student from Chicago studying art history in Paris.  She falls in love with a French engineering student who turns out to be only 16 years old!  On the rebound she has several affairs but falls for a playboy journalist.  He father flies in from Chicago to try and convince her to move back to the States. Look for the actor who plays Dr. John Haislip, James Leo Herlihy  who is better known as a novelist and playwright of  Blue Denim, All Fall Down and Midnight Cowboy -which were made into films . It begins at 6:30 p.m. pst.

1958's Bonjour Tristesse was director Otto Preminger's second attempt to make a star of Seberg.  It tells the story of a French Teenager purposefully manipulating her father's love life which results in the accidental death of a female rival.  The French story was changed with the casting of the Iowa born, Seberg, David Niven and Deborah Kerr.  Kerr was upset with how Preminger bullied Seberg while making the film.  It screens at 8:30 p.m. P.S.T.

Producer/Director Robert Rossen's last film was 1964's Lilith starring Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, Peter Fonda, Kim Hunger, Jessica  Walker and Gene Hackman.  Psychologically disturbed asylum inmate Lilith (Seberg) quietly manipulates some of the inmates and staff of the asylum.  It's a flawed film attempting to update the myth of the she-demon who uses sexuality to ensnare men.  Seberg considered it her best.  It airs at 10:15 p.m. PST.

And

1969's Paint Your Wagon was a chaotic big budgeted flop of a movie.  It's fun though and stars Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg,  Ray Walston and others.  Everyone tries to sing too... Yikes. It airs at 12:15 a.m. on the West Coast

On Sunday, July 12  TCM plays two films written by James Agee back to back and they are keepers:

1951's  The African Queen  is the classic featuring Humphrey Bogart as the ornery skipper who takes dedicated missionary Katherine Hepburn on a boat ride that leads to them fighting the Germans in Africa during World War 1.  It's directed by John Huston.  It airs at 5 p.m.

This is followed by the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton... the suspenseful classic

1955's Night of the Hunter in which a phony preacher marries an outlaw's widow to find the dead man's hidden money.   It stars Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish,and  Shelley Winters.  It's a harrowing film in which the brutal ex-con stalks the widow and her children.   Cinematographer great Stanley Cortez said his best experiences in film were working with Orson Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons and Charles Laughton.  He felt they were the only directors that understood and appreciated light and its relation to film. When the film was a box-office failure, Laughton gave up trying to direct any more movies.   It airs at 7 p.m.  PST.   Don't miss it.