I won’t be getting any sleep this weekend
As Mark Evanier and Bill Sherman have been writing about and otherwise billboarding, Turner Classic Movies is running a month-long tribute to comedy movies and comedians. I’ve been watching a good many of them, comedy and otherwise. So far I’ve seen:
North By Northwest, another couple of times. For all that the famous action sequences get praised, I’m in love (or at least wildly infatuated) with Ernest Lehman’s dialogue, which is sheer pleasure.
Oklahoma! Still one of the good movie musicals.
Arabesque. A flawed but very sexy (seven words: Sophia Loren in a shower in 1966) spy thriller that I first saw (on video) the summer before I turned 16, as I remember.
There’s also been a good and very interesting original documentary on Errol Flynn and a one-hour intervew with James Garner from a few years ago. As well as a couple of little-known films called Casablanca and To Have and Have Not.
Today they’re doing Marx Brothers movies all day, and early tomorrow morning a couple of films starring Harold Peary as “The Great Gildersleeve,” the character he played on the radio series of the same name. Radio exploitation films like this are not reckoned to have been any good in any history of the medium, but curiosity bids me.
You can check the rest of the schedule here. To all my friends on the Pacific shores, please take note that all listed times are Eastern.
And then early Sunday morning, A&E is running a program about the recent all-Star Stephen Sondheim tribute in New York, incorporating rehearsal footage and excerpts from the concert, including…sigh…my light, my angel, my only reason for getting up in the morning, Anne Hathaway.
So. No sleep till Monday…
