DIRECTORS OF THE MONTH
The French "New Wave" 20 Movies; Fridays
France’s New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) was a movement in filmmaking, beginning in the late 1950s and peaking in the ’60s, that offered refreshing breakthroughs in technique and storytelling styles. The movement, whose impact is still vividly felt today, was largely the result of critics who wrote for the film journal "Cahiers du Cinema" and proceeded to create their own revolutionary movies. Outstanding among these critic/directors were Jean-Luc Godard, whose Breathless (1959), a study of a French gangster and his American girlfriend, became the key film of the New Wave; and Francois Truffaut, whose autobiographical The Four Hundred Blows (1959) stylishly spins the story of a Parisian youngster who turns to small-time crime. Alain Resnais’ complex and powerful Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) employs unconventional editing in its story of a pair of lovers in postwar Hiroshima. Having its world television premiere on TCM is Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), one of the films with which Claude Chabrol established himself as perhaps the most technically proficient of all New Wave directors. Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), among the most charming of the New Wave collection, tells of two men and a woman involved in a menage a trois. Eric Rohmer, editor-in-chief of "Cahiers du Cinema" for six years, emerged as one the most stimulating directors of the late ’60s with such works as La Collectioneuse (1967). Other New Wave masterworks in TCM’s festival include Renais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Truffaut’s The Soft Skin (1964) and Godard’s Alphaville (1965).

SOULS FOR SALE
5 Movies; Sept. 28
The Sept. 29 release of Lost Souls, a thriller in which Winona Ryder deals with the Devil in human form, inspires TCM to review past movies about unholy alliances. One of the most famous is The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), with Hurd Hatfield as the Oscar Wilde hero who never ages – though his portrait does! In Angel on My Shoulder (1946) it’s Paul Muni who struggles with Satan, playing a murdered convict who returns to earth as a respected judge. The Seventh Victim (1943) offers Kim Hunter as an innocent in a den of Satan-worshippers, while Eye of the Devil (1966) has David Niven as a vineyard owner threatened by a pagan ceremony that demands death in exchange for good crops. Probably the scariest of all Satan stories is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), with Mia Farrow in a brilliant performance as a young wife who may have been impregnated by the Devil himself.

SET DESIGN, 44 Movies; Tuesdays
For artistic inspiration and sheer technical brilliance, few craftspeople can match the Hollywood set designers – those wizards who routinely transport audiences to other worlds and times. TCM’s tribute to these extraordinary artisans begins with Biblical Spectacles (September 5), including two shot on location in Rome. For Quo Vadis (1951), William A. Horning, Cedric Gibbons and Edward Carfagno designed the Oscar-nominated sets – some of which were torched to represent the burning of ancient Rome.
The Oscar-winning designs for Ben-Hur (1959) by Horning and Carfagno were even more elaborate, with some 600 sets constructed. The largest of these, the Circus Maximus where the celebrated chariot race was so excitingly filmed, occupied no less than 18 acres. The History of Western Civilization (September 12), features a look at the streets and homes of Renaissance Italy as imagined by Gibbons and his associates for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1936), starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer. Juliet’s garden, where the crucial balcony scene was filmed, was created on MGM’s (and the world’s) largest sound stage and covered 52,000 square feet of floor space. Marie Antoinette (1938), another Shearer vehicle whose designs were overseen by Gibbons, painstakingly recreated life at the French royal court of the 18th century, with 98 lavish sets representing the palace at Versailles. In The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Bette Davis and Errol Flynn stride through Tudor England as recreated by Oscar-nominated Anton Grot. 20th Century Settings (September 19), include Richard Day’s Oscar-winning evocation of a steamy New Orleans tenement in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), which is all the more impressive for having been created on a Hollywood soundstage, with only a few exteriors filmed in the real New Orleans. Day’s interior sets were constructed with movable walls so the rooms could "shrink" as the story progresses, emphasizing the panic of Blanche DuBois, the embattled Southern belle played by Vivien Leigh. For Love in the Afternoon (1957), production designer Alexandre Trauner conjures a romantic black-and-white Paris in which Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper share a May-November romance.
Among our Fantasy Worlds (September 26), is the shimmering Shangri-La of Lost Horizon (1937) as imagined by Oscar-winner designer Stephen Groosson, and a brutal Old West theme park of the future as envisioned by Charles Schulthies in Westworld (1973).

TRIBUTE TO TELLURIDE, 9 Movies; Sept. 2-3
The Telluride Film Festival, the most audience-friendly of all movie conventions, takes place each September in Telluride, Colorado. TCM’s tribute recalls the festival’s past honorees beginning with Richard Widmark, honored in 1983 and represented by The Alamo (1960). In John Wayne’s epic about the 1836 battle, Widmark delivers a typically compelling performance as Jim Bowie.
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) is Ray Muller’s documentary about a 1974 honoree, the German film director best remembered for her Nazi propaganda films. Jodie Foster, a 1991 honoree, appears at age 11 as a charming Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer (1973). TCM presents the U.S. television premiere of It Happened Here (1966), a chilling fantasy of what England would have been like under German occupation, co-written and co-directed by 1981 honoree Kevin Brownlow. Among our other Telluride salutes is one to director King Vidor, honored in 1976 and represented by his silent masterwork The Crowd (1928).

OLYMPIAN ATHLETES, 3 Movies and 1 Documentary; Sept. 14
On the eve of the Opening Ceremonies of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, TCM offers a salute to Olympic athletes turned actors and a look back at a controversial documentary. Johnny Weismuller, a Gold Medal swimmer in 1924 and ’28, went on to further glory as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) in that MGM adventure and several of its sequels. Cornel Wilde, the director-producer-star of the World War II drama Beach Red (1967), was a leading member of the U.S. fencing team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but quit to devote his energies to acting. Bruce Bennett, Silver Medal winner as a shot-putter in 1928, had a film career that also included a turn as Tarzan plus a third-billed part in the Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall mystery Dark Passage (1947). Olympia (1938), Leni Reifenstahl’s two-part view of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was intended as Nazi propaganda but is subverted by the exhilarating performance of U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens.

FESTIVAL OF SHORTS VOLUME XXXI, Set Design Shorts
Three shorts; premiering September 4th with encore presentations throughout the month Tying in with our Theme of the Month, "Set Design," are three featurettes that focus on art direction. Anthony Adverse: Making of a Great Motion Picture (1936) affords a view of Anton Grot’s lavish, Oscar-nominated sets, which represent Napoleonic Europe in lavish detail. The Art Director (1949), produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, offers a backstage look at the work of the artist who is responsible for a film’s decor and set construction. Moscow in Madrid (1965) shows how director David Lean and his Oscar-winning art directors, John Box and Terry Marsh, simulated the movie’s "Russian" settings in Spain. Lean had wanted to film in Russia, but fearing official interference there, created the Moscow settings – complete with thousands of daffodils imported from the Netherlands for the spring scenes – on a 10-acre set in Madrid.

MOBS AND MOBSTERS, 5 Movies; Sept. 9
From Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar (1930) to HBO’s The Sopranos, stories about gangsters have enthralled the American public. The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) allows the versatile Robinson to play both a gang leader and the meek clerk who has the misfortune to be a dead ringer for him. Gene Kelly does a rare dramatic turn in Black Hand (1950) as a man avenging his father’s death by the Black Hand society in turn-of-the-century New York City. James Cagney, Robinson’s closest competitor as the movies’ definitive gangster, delivers one of his most memorable performances in Love Me Or Leave Me (1955) as Marty Snyder, a Chicago racketeer and mentor to singer Ruth Etting (Doris Day). Inside the Mafia (1959) stars Cameron Mitchell in a story of rival gangs plotting the murder of a ganglord.

STARRING HENRY FONDA, 4 Movies and 1 Documentary; September 16
TCM’s night-long tribute to Henry Fonda begins with an affectionate look at the legendary superstar through the eyes of daughter Jane in David Heeley’s documentary Fonda on Fonda (1992), and continues with four of the elder Fonda’s films of the 1960s. By that time he had established himself as the quintessential American hero. The Best Man (1964), the film version of Gore Vidal’s political drama, casts Fonda as a presidential contender in the mold of Adlai Stevenson. In The Rounders (1965), Fonda joins Glenn Ford in a comedy-Western about a pair of aging but ingratiating horse wranglers. The Battle of the Bulge (1965) has Fonda as an American lieutenant who makes a gallant stand during the last major German offensive of World War II. In a delightful change of pace in Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), he stars opposite Lucille Ball in a romantic comedy about middle-aged lovers with 18 children between them.

TCM BOOK CLUB
Was Alfred Hitchcock the cinema's "supreme control freak"?
The master of suspense often went to great lengths to promote this image of himself but writer Bill Krohn reveals another side of the director in his new book, Hitchcock at Work (Phaidon Press). Although it is true that Hitchcock prepared extensively for pre-filming, he also left room for accidents, improvisation, and the intrusion of reality during production which Krohn documents extensively in this fascinating study. Unlike other traditional biographies that focus on the filmmaker's personal life, Krohn's book shows a playful, brilliant, and daring director doing what he loved best.
"Film was Hitchcock's life," Krohn explains, "and the best way to understand him is to look over his shoulder while he is doing the thing he loved."
Among the key films Krohn covers in his new book are the 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955), in which it is revealed that the picture ran 34 days over schedule partly due to script re-writes, problems incurred while shooting on location, and partly due to Hitchcock's own perfectionism. Even more telling is the making of Hitchcock's most risky and experimental film, The Birds (1963), a movie entirely about birds, which are almost impossible to control, much less film. Along with the innovative special effects and soundtrack, the making of the film demonstrates the contradiction in Hitchcock as an absolute controller and as a connoisseur of chaos. The author of Hitchcock at Work has been the Hollywood correspondent of the influential movie magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma for more than twenty years. Krohn also co-directed, co-wrote, and co-produced It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, which included a completed version of Welles' Four Men on a Raft. The film won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award and a Humanitas Award, and was one of the best-reviewed films of 1994. Try to win a free copy of Hitchcock at Work in our monthly Book Club sweepstakes and check out our Alfred Hitchcock programming for September.
Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest on Sunday, September 10 at 8:30 pm (ET)/5:30 pm (PT)
North by Northwest on Sunday, September 10 at 9:30 pm (ET)/6:30 pm (PT)
Stage Fright on Wednesday, September 13 at 8:00 pm (ET)/5:00 pm (PT)