The 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival - Slant Magazine (2024)

Now with 14 years under its belt, the TCM Classic Film Festival has been around long enough that it can be said to have its own little history and set of traditions to look back on fondly, with a mixed feeling thrown in here and there for good, honest measure. But even with such an illustrious backlog of well-regarded and certainly well-attended editions, there’s a long way to go to match the 100-year history of Warner Bros., the studio that TCMFF 2023 celebrated this past weekend with a four-day lineup of films drawn largely, but not exclusively, from that history under the umbrella theme “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

Those words are a slight rewording of Al Jolson’s enthusiastic proclamation from the landmark 1928 talkie The Jazz Singer, one Warner Bros. film that wasn’t on hand for viewing during the festival this year. One can certainly draw one’s own conclusions as to possible reasons for its absence, though if cultural sensitivity, or lack thereof, is one of them, a similar consideration certainly didn’t prevent this year’s return to TCMFF of Stanley Donen’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a rousing musical favorite which I imagine plays to audiences much differently in 2023 than it did even when I saw it as recently as 2011 at this same festival.

Wisely avoiding the strategy of devoting their entire schedule to Warner Bros., as TCM itself has through the month of April, the festival still seemed top-loaded with enough Warner product to provide a decent overview of the sorts of films that made the studio’s reputation as a creator and marketer of crisp, tangy, provocative entertainments over its century of dominion in Hollywood.

The Warner Bros. celebration kicked off on opening night with the world premiere of a gorgeous restoration of Howard Hawks’s 1959 western Rio Bravo, a collaboration between the studio and the Film Foundation, two esteemed members of which—Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson—were on hand to present the film and talk about the foundation’s preservation efforts. The film’s lone surviving star, Angie Dickinson, was there too.

In addition to other memorable Warner Bros. pictures shown on the big screen, such as 50th-anniversary showings of 1973’s Enter the Dragon and The Exorcist (with director William Friedkin appearing in high-contrarian style for a testy Q&A), a 70mm screening of The Wild Bunch and, of course, a passel of classic-circuit stalwarts like Casablanca and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, TCMFF also brought some lesser–seen treats out of the Burbank vaults.

Some of those treats included 1942’s Larceny Inc., the hilarious Edward G. Robinson comedy of cross-wired capitalism; the third of Warner Bros.’s delirious collaborations with Busby Berkeley, 1933’s Footlight Parade; Tay Garnett’s zesty pre-Code romantic adventure One Way Passage, featuring the final pairing of William Powell and Kay Francis; and a gorgeous 70th-anniversary showcase for Vincent Price’s orchestration of the monstrous, molten delights of House of Wax, one of the biggest hits of the initial wave of 3D pictures of the ’50s.

There was even a presentation entitled “Warner Night at the Movies,” featuring pre-movie cartoons, short subjects, and trailers as they might have been experienced by audiences heading out to theaters in 1941, all followed by the main feature: Jimmy Cagney, Rita Hayworth, and Jack Carson in Raoul Walsh’s delightful 1941 romantic comedy The Strawberry Blonde.

There were also several Warner Bros.-oriented presentations that more than justified multiple visits to Club TCM, the festival’s ballroom party hub located in the heart of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. “Warner Bros.: Hollywood’s Ultimate Backlot,” hosted by former Warner Bros. archivist Steven Bingen, featured a lively multimedia tour through the soundstages and exterior sets from the studio’s heyday. And “Looney Tunes at the Oscars,” celebrating the award history of animators Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, among others, and anchored by AMPAS exec Randy Haberkamp and animation historian Jerry Beck, made for the sort of break between features that’s always welcome at the festival. Both presentations were catnip for the Hollywood history-addicted attendees who filled the hall for each program with the eagerness of would-be time travelers hoping to reconnect with ancient worlds that had long ago ceased to exit.

As often happens at TCMFF, certainly through no conscious design, my film choices over the weekend seemed to coalesce unexpectedly into a theme. This year, that theme emerged as one centered upon reflections of worlds ending, worlds forever changed, which couldn’t be a more perfectly tuned concern for a festival so profoundly anchored in the past, yet one which increasingly wrestles with how to keep an audience while constantly assessing the qualifications that define a classic. Much as in recent years past at TCMFF, one could definitely feel worlds changing, if not exactly ending, as programmers continued to intensify focus on a younger audiences that might find as much space in their hearts for the Farrelly brothers (represented this year with a screening of 1998’s There’s Something About Mary) as the older TCM fan has for, say, the Marx Brothers, who weren’t represented at the festival this year.

For me, the rich vein of melancholy running through the films I saw this year—which, in one way or another, addressed the death of old ways and the looming presence of unknown worlds—was as compelling as it was unplanned. Alfred Hitchco*ck’s Shadow of a Doubt, showing in a new restoration struck for its 80th anniversary, is at the very least a consideration of innocence teased and then torn away, as young Charlie (Teresa Wright) learns of the horrors of a world she yet barely knows from her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), a serial murderer of rich widows.

And in 1969’s The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah simultaneously explodes and redefines the western in profoundly emotional, radically formalist terms, leaving only the smoking husk of the well-worn genre, as it follows a group of desperadoes facing extinction in a world whose nihilism and cruelty has run rampant over the boundaries of their violent codes of conduct. TCM’s Eddie Muller, in introducing what he deemed “the best western ever made,” described its infamously brutal conclusion as “the apocalypse,” and his assessment seems uncomfortably correct.

Of course, Rudolph Maté’s 1951 sci-fi disaster film When Worlds Collide, produced by George Pal from the 1933 novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, takes as its primary subject the destruction of the world we know and the desperate escape to one that’s completely unknown. That direct address may have enhanced its effectiveness when surrounded by other films that subtly reinforce its impending sense of doom, even as When Worlds Collide is eventually diluted by the storybook sense of optimism that undergirds its not-entirely-convincing finish.

When Worlds Collide was surely one of the festival highlights, introduced as it was by sound designer par excellence Ben Burtt (Star Wars, WALL-E) and visual effects artist Craig Barron (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Zodiac). The two hosts opened with a multimedia presentation on the movie’s history, production and cultural impact. They then surprised the audience by revealing that, in honor of the technological intentions that Pal’s production never quite realized, they had retrofitted the film’s soundtrack with the ultimate upgrading of Sensurround (here dubbed, of course, Bensurround). Their version of the spectacularly loud audio gimmick surpassed in effectiveness anything Universal Pictures ever concocted for its disaster epic Earthquake and quite literally seemed to threaten the structure of the decades-old Hollywood Legion Hall theater where the movie screened. (Each time the film’s rocket ship version of Noah’s Ark roared its engines, the side doors of the auditorium rattled and flew open.)

That melancholy undercurrent of worlds coming to their conclusions even ran through a couple of ostensibly lightweight comedies that are better known for their evocative nostalgia than for their assessment of the darker side of the human condition. For one, it’s hard to ignore the underpinning of loss, of a familiar environment slipping away, that courses through George Lucas’s American Graffiti, or the fear instilled into several of the main characters, if not always deftly articulated by them, regarding what life might hold in store once that world does disappear. As high school graduates in 1962, they would soon find out in one way or another.

And even a breezy British comedy like Genevieve, about a ritualistic road trip from London to Brighton in antique cars whose return leg turns into the slowest, most malfunction-plagued grudge road race in cinema history, pines for the impracticality of pioneering technology that’s by no means up to the demands of the modern world. Anyone in the audience certainly could be forgiven if they themselves longed for a world where the pace and paucity of traffic could accommodate such puttering through the countryside as Henry Cornelius’s 1953 film celebrates. The disastrously malfunctioning soundtrack on the print provided to TCMFF by the British Film Institute, on which the dialogue was 70% barely audible, was its own cause for anguish.

Even so, Genevieve’s charms managed to shine through. Worlds collide, fade away, rage at their transformation, or are sometimes just clumsily reconstructed, but these movies, seen in such proximity, made a convincing case for an art form’s ability to sneak up on unsuspecting sensibilities and bring profound subtext, if not resolution, to their sincere concerns.

As for TCMFF itself, the festival shows no signs of going away, perhaps only of simply catering to its inevitably shifting audience. That’s an understandable development, if not an entirely pleasing one, but it’s hardly reason for despair. Some purists, like myself, might have a stricter concept of what makes a classic, but it’s silly to think that over the course of 12 festivals some change would not eventually dawn. If it’s the end of the world as TCMFF has known it, or as we have known TCMFF, the 2023 edition proves that there’s still no reason not to feel fine.

The TCM Classic Film Festival ran from April 13—16.