TCM Schedule for Thursday, June 18 -- Great Directors -- Jules Dassin/François Truffaut

[Staph]

Today's great directors are American director (and victim of the HUAC) Jules Dassin, French director and occasional acting hunk (I had a serious crush on him after seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)), François Truffaut. Enjoy!


6:00am -- Phaedra (1962)
A tycoon's restless wife seduces her stepson.
Cast: Melina Mercouri, Anthony Perkins, Raf Vallone, Elizabeth Ercy
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-116 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White -- Theoni V. Aldredge

Based on the play Hippolytus by Euripides.


8:11am -- Short Film: From The Vaults: Jimmy Fund - At Home With Joan Crawford (1953)
Joan Crawford urging the audience to donate to the Jimmy Fund to end childhood cancer.
Cast: Joan Crawford
BW-4 mins

The Jimmy Fund was launched with the help of the Variety Club of New England (now the Variety Children's Charity of New England). The club organized a radio broadcast from the bedside of a young cancer patient dubbed Jimmy as he was visited by members of the Boston Braves baseball team. Contributions poured in to buy Jimmy a television set so he could watch the Braves play.


8:15am -- Reunion In France (1942)
A Frenchwoman tries to help a downed U.S. flyer escape the Nazis.
Cast: Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Philip Dorn, Reginald Owen
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-104 mins, TV-PG

Originally scheduled as a February 1943 release under the name "Reunion", the movie was moved up to a Christmas 1942 release with the final title because of the increased interest in the war in France. Most trade papers reviewed the film with the title "Reunion" due to early press previews, and the copyright registry bears that title also.


10:05am -- Short Film: One Reel Wonders: A Letter From A Soldier (1951)
In this excerpt from the feature film "It's A Big Country" (1951), a U.S. GI back stateside from Korea delivers a letter to the mother of a dead fellow soldier.
Cast: Keefe Brasselle, Marjorie Main
Dir: Don Weis
BW-9 mins

Marjorie Main is best remembered as Ma Kettle, from the series of eleven Ma and Pa Kettle movies in the 1940s and 1950s.


10:15am -- A Letter For Evie (1945)
A timid soldier sends his buddy's picture to a romantic pen pal.
Cast: Marsha Hunt, John Carroll, Hume Cronyn, Spring Byington
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-89 mins, TV-PG

Based on the story The Adventure of a Ready Letter Writer by Blanche Brace.


12:00pm -- The Canterville Ghost (1944)
A ghost who died a coward tries to inspire U.S. GIs to become heroes.
Cast: Charles Laughton, Robert Young, Margaret O'Brien, William Gargan
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-96 mins, TV-G

After 38 days of shooting, director Jules Dassin replaced Norman Z. McLeod. Although a news item stated it was due to a "difference of opinion," many believe it was done on the insistence of Charles Laughton. At the same time, William H. Daniels replaced Robert Planck as director of photography.


1:37pm -- Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Romance Of Radium (1937)
This Pete Smith Specialty tells the story of the discovery of radium and how it is used in medicine.
Cast: André Cheron, Eddie Hart, Emmett Vogan
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
BW-10 mins

At the time of filming, the entire world's supply of radium was 1-3/4 pounds.


2:00pm -- Naked City (1948)
A step-by-step look at a murder investigation on the streets of New York.
Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-96 mins, TV-14

Won Oscars for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- William H. Daniels, and Best Film Editing -- Paul Weatherwax

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story -- Malvin Wald

Most of the street scenes were shot on location in New York without the public's knowledge. Photographer William H. Daniels and his uncredited assistant Roy Tripp filmed people on the streets using a hidden camera from the back of an old moving van. A juggler was hired to distract the crowds.


3:42pm -- Short Film: From The Vaults: The Sky Divers (1969)
A behind the scenes, promotional short about the making of the feature film The Gypsy Moths (1969).
Narrator: Wink Martindale.
Dir: Dale Mackey
C-15 mins

The Gypsy Moths is one of John Frankenheimer's favorites of the films he has directed.


4:00pm -- Topkapi (1964)
An international band of thieves plots to steal a priceless treasure from a heavily guarded museum.
Cast: Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, Maximilian Schell, Robert Morley
Dir: Jules Dassin
C-119 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Peter Ustinov (Peter Ustinov was not present at the awards ceremony. Sophia Loren accepted the award on his behalf.)

Six weeks after the release of Topkapi, a similar, real-life heist took place at a New York City museum. Although 22 gems were stolen, they were recovered within 48 hours.


6:15pm -- Brute Force (1947)
Tough, disgruntled prisoners plan a daring, possibly bloody escape while on a drain pipe detail.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne De Carlo
Dir: Jules Dassin
BW-98 mins, TV-14

Former Warner Bros. producer Mark Hellinger, who had started his own independent production unit at Universal-International, wanted Wayne Morris to star in his first picture, The Killers (1946). Warners wouldn't loan Morris out, so Hellinger cast the unknown Burt Lancaster in his first movie. It made Lancaster a star.


What's On Tonight: GREAT DIRECTORS: FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT


8:00pm -- Jules And Jim (1962)
A tempestuous beauty comes between college friends.
Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre, Vanna Urbino
Dir: François Truffaut
BW-106 mins, TV-14

When Jim first visits Jules' home in Austria, Catherine shows him a picture of Jules costumed as Mozart. Oskar Werner, the actor who plays Jules, also portrayed Mozart in an earlier film.


10:00pm -- The 400 Blows (1959)
A 12-year-old boy turns to crime to escape family problems.
Cast: Guy Decomble, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy
Dir: François Truffaut
BW-100 mins, TV-14

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy

The title of the film comes from the French idiom "faire les quatre cents coups", meaning "to raise hell".


12:00am -- The Bride Wore Black (1968)
A woman seeks revenge on the five men who murdered her fiance.
Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Bouquet, Charles Denner
Dir: François Truffaut
C-108 mins, TV-14

Kill Bill (Volumes 1 and 2) have a very similar plot. I wonder if Quentin Tarantino is a Truffaut fan.


2:00am -- Small Change (1976)
Two children from different backgrounds share the pain and humor of growing up.
Cast: Geory Desmouceaux, Claudio Deluca, Philippe Goldmann, Franck Deluca
Dir: François Truffaut
C-105 mins, TV-MA

Director Cameo: Sitting in a cabriolet, wearing his standard blue shirt in the first minute of the film.


4:00am -- The Wild Child (1970)
A crusading doctor tries to civilize a child raised in the wilderness by wolves.
Cast: Jean-Pierre Cargol, François Truffaut, Jean Dasté, Françoise Seigner
Dir: François Truffaut
BW-85 mins, TV-14

The incidents based on true life, as reported by Dr. Itard and as shown by Truffaut, include the facts that:
(1) Victor was captured by hunters.
(2) Pinel did conclude and dismiss Victor as a helpless retarded child, "an incurable idiot."
(3) Crowds of Parisians really did come to see the "Wild Boy of Aveyron."
(4) Victor really did prefer the "O" sound, and accepted the name Victor, which in French has an accent on the "O" .
(5) Dr. Itard appears to have been truly kind to the boy, as were Mme. Guerin and the neighbors.
(6) Victor appears to have had great affection for Itard and Guerin, but was never interested in children of his own age.

[Staph]

1. Profiles of Jules Dassin and François Truffaut

Jules Dassin Profile

Gained experience in theater and radio in New York before going to work in Hollywood in 1940, first with RKO (as assistant director) and then with MGM. Dassin hit his stride in the late 1940s with such dynamic (and still well-regarded) film noir melodramas as Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948). After being blacklisted he moved to Europe, where he scored his greatest international successes with the French-produced Rififi (1955) and the then-scandalous Never on Sunday (1959), starring his second wife Melina Mercouri. For the most part, his later films--like Up Tight (1968), an ill-conceived black remake of John Ford's 1935 classic The Informer--have been disappointing and inconclusive.

Milestones:
1936: First role with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York City

Directed first stage play, The Medicine Show

1941: Directed first short film, The Tell-Tale Heart

1942: Feature directing debut, Nazi Agent/Salute to Courage

1947: Helmed the brutal film noir, Brute Force starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn

1948: Directed the black-and-white film noir The Naked City

1950: Filmed Night and the City in London to avoid being brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee

European producers were told that their films would not be allowed to be released in the United States if Dassin was involved in their production; did not direct another film for five years

1955: Returned to directing with the French language noir classic Rififi

1960: Directed (also scripted) future wife, Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday; earned Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay

1962: Once again directed Melina Mercouri in Phaedra

1964: Directed the heist film, Topkapi starring Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov

1967: Directed Illya Darling the Broadway musical adaptation of his film, Never on Sunday

1968: Wrote and directed Up Tight! starring Ruby Dee and Roscoe Lee Browne

1970: Directed (also wrote and produced) his wife, Melina Mercouri in Promise at Dawn

1974: Directed and co-starred with (also wrote) Olympia Dukakis, Arthur Miller and Melina Mercouri in The Rehearsal

1978: Wrote and directed Kravgi gynaikon; earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film

1980: Directed his final feature, Circle of Two starring Richard Burton as a 60-year old artist who falls in love with a fifteen-year-old (Tatum O'Neal)

Information supplied by TCMdb


Francois Truffaut Profile

Influential film critic, leading New Wave director and heir to the humanistic cinematic tradition of Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut made films that reflected his three professed passions: a love of cinema, an interest in male-female relationships and a fascination with children.

After a troubled childhood, Truffaut joined the French army, deserted and was sentenced to a prison term. Critic Andre Bazin helped secure his release and encouraged his interest in film. In Bazin's influential journal, CAHIER DU CINEMA, Truffaut published Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Francais (A Certain Tendency in French Cinema) in 1954, proposing what came to be known as the auteur theory. A reaction against the bloated "Tradition of Quality" cinema in France, the article was a plea for a more personal cinema and an informal manifesto for the New Wave, which had not yet broken on the shores of French film.

As a filmmaker, Truffaut began by making shorts (Une Visite 1954, Les Mistons 1957) and working as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini. In 1959 he completed his first feature-length film, the semi-autobiographical childhood story The 400 Blows, about a troubled adolescent, Antoine Doinel. Truffaut went on to chronicle Doinel's youth and young adulthood in the Antoine and Colette episode of Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979), all films featuring the same actor, Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Antoine.

Two diverging strains characterize most of Truffaut's work from the early 1960s on. On the one hand, the director celebrated life in the humanistic tradition of Jean Renoir. These films include that masterwork of 60s cinema, Jules and Jim (1961), which defined the modern romantic triangle for a generation--it is the bittersweet story, not of Jules and Jim, the two men, but of Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the woman who dominates their lives and is free, at least, to choose; The Wild Child (1970), an essay in signs and meaning in which Truffaut himself starred as the historical Dr. Jean Itard, obsessed with understanding how to establish human communication with a boy raised outside of society; the ebullient Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1972); Day For Night (1973), an exuberant celebration of the joy of filmmaking, the ultimate communal art; the joyous depiction of childhood, Small Change (1975); the celebration of women and love in The Man Who Loved Women (1977); and the gentle thriller Confidentially Yours (1982).

On the other hand, many of Truffaut's films are fatalistic or even cynical, displaying a Hitchcockian fascination with life's darker side. This group includes The Bride Wore Black (1967), his most explicit homage to Hitchcock, scored by the master's regular composer, Bernard Herrmann; Two English Girls (1971), about a writer (Leaud) and his affairs with two sisters; The Story of Adele H. (1975), one of the most harrowing examinations of unrequited love ever filmed; The Green Room (1978), about the love of death; and The Woman Next Door (1981).

Yet another group of films reflect an uneasy balance of these two divergent tendencies, as in his anatomy of adultery, The Soft Skin (1964); the romantic but brooding Mississippi Mermaid (1968), which Truffaut described as being about "degradation, by love"; and The Last Metro (1980).

"I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the anguish of making cinema," Truffaut once said. "I am not interested in all the films that don't vibrate." In 1976, Truffaut accepted the invitation of the wildly successful young American director Steven Spielberg to star in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the scientist in search of communication with extra-terrestrials. His stoic portrait in that film is an emblem of Truffaut's . . .pain; the arduous difficulty a born outsider encounters in communicating. This pain suffuses his lesser films, and cramps them, but it also lurks never far from the heart of his great films. It's what makes them "vibrate."

Always concerned with the process as well as the product of his profession, Truffaut maintained his role as critic and commentator throughout his filmmaking career, as proud of his books as he was of his films. Among his publications is a book-length interview with Hitchcock, Hitchcock-Truffaut (1967), a perennial critical classic which he revised in 1983, shortly before his death. His critical essays were collected in Les Films de ma Vie (1975) and his letters--posthumously--in Francois Truffaut Correspondance (1990), with a foreword by Jean-Luc Godard.

Truffaut died--dramatically, arbitrarily--of a brain tumor in the American Hospital in Neuilly in 1984. He is the father of Laura Truffaut (born 1959) and Eva Truffaut (born 1961), both of whom appeared in their father's film L'Argent de Poche (1975) and whose mother is his first wife, Madeleine Morgenstern; and of Josephine (born 1983), whose mother is Fanny Ardant.

Information supplied by TCMdb

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