The Dead, playing on the Sundance Channel on Saturday, February 7 at 9 PM central/10 PM eastern, with a repeat at 2 AM central/3 AM eastern. This was the last movie directed by John Huston--a Christmas story, it was released in December of 1987, less than two months after his death--and he went out in glory. It represented a stretch for Huston, reaching confidently into areas that he'd never explored in his previous films, and it's also different from other movies based on the works of James Joyce, which tend to moisten and fall apart from the directors' accumulated flop sweat as they realize they have no idea how to get the material to play. Huston gave the story a deceptively simple staging, assembling a fine cast of actors--Donal McCann as the hero Gabriel, Donal Donnelly, Dan O'Herlihy, Marie Kean, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll, and Anjelica Huston as Gabriel's wife--and using them to demonstrate what the right voices can do for Joyce's dialogue. (The members of this ensemble are uncanny at acting as if they'd been getting together for these ritual holiday dinners for so many years that they all know each other's weak spots and points of pride.) Then, at the very end, after Anjelica Huston's big monologue, he just steps back and closes on Donal McCann reciting the closing passages of the story, as if he were handing it back to its creator. Inexplicably, this movie is not currently available on DVD, so its reappearance on Sundance after a prolonged drop off the cable radar screen counts as a rare and wondrous thing.
Incidentally, Sundance's weekend schedule also includes multiple showings of Jeff Nichols's white trash tragedy Shotgun Stories, starting on Sunday, February 8 at 5:15 AM central/6:15 AM eastern and with a couple of repeats throughout the day. This information is provided as a public service in light of all the complaints we've been getting from people who haven't been able to find the movie on DVD. It's available on DVD, but there's been a terrific run on the damn things since Paul Clark bestowed upon it the honor of reviewing it by request.
Turner Classic Movies spends February sunk in its annual "31 Days of Oscar" programming, with the schedule decorated wall-to-wall with films that were nominated for Academy Awards. This is not traditionally TCM's most exciting time of the year, but they do generally pull out some oddball titles that have since lapsed into total obscurity, or at least general unavailability. Late tonight, at 2:30 AM central/ 3:30 AM eastern, the channel is showing 1952's The Atomic City, a B-movie thriller with an atomic-age plot gimmick--the villains are Commie spies who kidnap the son of a Los Alamos nuclear scientist in an attempt to get their hands on the formula for the A-bomb--that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. (It was written by Sidney Boehm, whose other credits include The Big Heat.) Then, on Sunday, 7 PM central/ 8 PM eastern, TCM premieres Elia Kazan's directorial debut, the 1945 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, based on Betty Smith's popular novel about family life in the Brooklyn tenements at the start of the the twentieth century. (James Dunn, who plays the ineffectual, drink-damaged patriarch, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.) There's another TCM premiere later that night, 1 AM central/ 2 AM eastern: John Singleton's 1991 Boyz N the Hood. Unique among these movies, it's currently available on DVD, but how many chances are you going to have in this life to see Robert Osborne introduce an Ice Cube movie?