Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will open the 2014 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival with the world premiere of a brand new restoration of the beloved Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1955). TCM's own Robert Osborne, who serves as official host for the festival, will introduce Oklahoma!, with the film's star, Academy Award®-winner Shirley Jones, in attendance. Vanity Fair will also return for the fifth year as a festival partner and co-presenter of the opening night after-party. Marking its fifth year, the TCM Classic Film Festival will take place April 10-13, 2014, in Hollywood. The gathering will coincide with TCM's 20th anniversary as a leading authority in classic film.
In addition, the festival has added several high-profile guests to this year's lineup, including Oscar®-winning director William Friedkin, who will attend for the screening of the U.S. premiere restoration of his suspenseful cult classic Sorcerer (1977); Kim Novak, who will participate in a screening of the charming Bell Book and Candle (1958); actor Ryan O'Neal, who will introduce the depression-era comedy Paper Moon (1973); legendary documentarian Albert Maysles, who will return to the festival for a screening of his masterpiece Grey Gardens (1975); filmmaker Ira Wohl, who will be on hand for his Academy Award®-winning documentary Best Boy (1979); and three-time Oscar®-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Raging Bull, The Aviator, The Departed), who will participate in a special conversation at Club TCM, the festival's central gathering point.
Among the many previously announced events slated for the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival, TCM will honor legendary actor, filmmaker and humanitarian Jerry Lewis with a multi-tiered celebration of his remarkable career. Lewis will have his hand and footprints enshrined in concrete in front of the world-famous TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX. In addition, Lewis will be on-hand for a screening of one of his most memorable films: The Nutty Professor (1963). This year's TCM Classic Film Festival will also pay tribute to Quincy Jones, who will appear at multiple events during the festival, including a 50th anniversary screening of Sidney Lumet's powerful drama The Pawnbroker (1964), which marked Jones' debut as a film composer; and Richard Dreyfuss, with screenings of two of his most beloved films, The Goodbye Girl (1977) and Mr. Holland's Opus (1995).
Other previously announced festival events include a screening of the recently restored Gone with the Wind (1939) and a presentation of The Wizard of Oz (1939) in its stunning new IMAX® 3D format. Both films are celebrating their 75th anniversaries in 2014. The festival will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (1964) with a special presentation, while Mel Brooks will appear for his comedy classic Blazing Saddles (1974), along with Maureen O'Hara for the world premiere restoration of John Ford's Oscar®-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941), and Margaret O'Brien for Vincente Minnelli's perennial musical favorite Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). The festival will also include the following world premiere restorations: Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), which will be celebrating its 70th anniversary; Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958); William Wyler's Best Picture Oscar® winner The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); the Beatles' hit A Hard Day's Night (1964); the Frank Capra comedy-drama Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Godzilla: The Japanese Original (1954); and the Lena Horne musical Stormy Weather (1943). In addition, the festival will feature a screening of the Harold Lloyd comedy classic Why Worry? (1923), with legendary silent-film composer Carl Davis conducting the live world premiere performance of his new original score, as well as recent restorations of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) and Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927), which will feature the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra performing their original score for the film.
Passes for the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival can be purchased exclusively through the official festival website: http://www.tcm.com/festival. Descriptions for the newly announced additions to the festival lineup are included below. Additional screenings and events for the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival will be announced over the coming months.
Opening Night Gala – Shirley Jones and Oklahoma! (1955)
Oklahoma! (1955)
4K restoration presented in collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox
Live appearance by Shirley Jones
Few actresses get to make their big-screen debuts in a film as eagerly awaited as Oklahoma!, but that's just what happened to Shirley Jones when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein chose her over Joanne Woodward to star in the film version of their first big hit. The songwriters held up making the film until they could get just the right picture. With the arrival of Todd-AO, Mike Todd's patented wide-screen process, they finally knew they could reveal the majesty of the frontier in all its glory, including corn as high as an elephant's eye (16 feet tall, to be exact). But despite the production's mammoth size, the focus remained simple, detailing the romance of farm girl Jones and cowboy Gordon MacRae. Agnes de Mille re-created much of her stage choreography, which had introduced modern dance to the stage musical, while director Fred Zinnemann brought a surprisingly realistic approach to the production.
This unique 4k presentation, painstakingly restored from 65mm Todd-AO elements by Twentieth Century Fox and Fotokem, will be screened at 30 frames per second—the same frame rate as when the film was originally released in 1955. The original 6-track soundtrack has been also restored and re-mastered at Twentieth Century Fox, in collaboration with End Point Audio and Chase Audio by Deluxe.
William Friedkin and Sorcerer (1977)
Sorcerer (1977) – U.S. Premiere Restoration
Presented in collaboration with Paramount and Warner Bros.
Live appearance by William Friedkin
This adaptation of the novel by Georges Arnaud, which also inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's suspense classic The Wages of Fear (1953), is director William Friedkin's favorite of all his films, mainly because it came closer than any other to his original vision. This tale of four men in a South American backwater who sign on to drive a cargo of dynamite through perilous terrain started as a low-budget film. As Friedkin expanded his vision to include nail-biting sequences as the trucks cross a rickety rope bridge and navigate treacherous mountain roads, the budget rose to $22 million. Initially a critical and box-office failure, partly because of overwhelming competition from Star Wars (1977), the film has enjoyed a critical renaissance in recent years. Now hailed as one of the masterpieces of the '70s, the film has been praised for its economical storytelling, lavish production values and Friedkin's expert manipulation of the themes of fate and human responsibility. In 2013, the director supervised this new, digital restoration that premiered to great acclaim at the Venice Film Festival.
Kim Novak and Bell Book and Candle (1958)
Bell Book and Candle (1958)
Presented in collaboration with Sony Pictures
Live appearance by Kim Novak
The same year James Stewart and Kim Novak co-starred in Vertigo, which was recently declared the greatest movie ever made by the British Film Institute, they also teamed for this amiable romantic comedy with a supernatural twist. The two very different films are closely associated, as Paramount and Columbia worked out a deal to cast Stewart in this film and use Novak's services on the Hitchcock picture. Novak stars as a Greenwich Village witch who casts a love spell on Stewart to steal him from an old college rival. It's hard to believe she would need magic to make a man fall in love with her, particularly with James Wong Howe's cinematography capturing her at her most beautiful. And as if Novak weren't alluring enough to turn anyone to the dark arts, she has a family of delightful eccentrics – brother Jack Lemmon and aunt Elsa Lanchester – to sweeten the deal. A year before he shot to stardom in Some Like It Hot (1959), Lemmon steals all of his scenes as a mischievous warlock who plays bongos at the local jazz club and uses his magic to punk passersby.
Ryan O'Neal and Paper Moon (1973)
Paper Moon (1973)
Presented in collaboration with Paramount Pictures
Live appearance by Ryan O'Neal
Peter Bogdanovich's love affair with the past served him well in this adaptation of Joe David Brown's novel Addie Pray. Not only does he lovingly re-create rural Kansas and Missouri during the Depression, but his work reflects the best of Hollywood's top Golden Age directors. The deep-focus black-and-white landscapes capture the scenic expanses of John Ford's films (at one point, the leads pass a movie theatre showing Ford's 1935 film Steamboat Round the Bend), while the fast-paced banter between con artist Ryan O'Neal and real-life daughter Tatum, as the tough little girl who becomes his partner in crime, echoes the comic dialogue in Howard Hawks' films. One critic even referred to the picture as Preston Sturges' last film. Bogdanovich had been eager to work with O'Neal again after they made What's Up, Doc? (1973) and convinced O'Neal's daughter to take a stab at acting. He got such a good performance out of her that she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, even beating co-star Madeline Kahn, who plays the carnival dancer with whom O'Neal memorably takes up.
Albert Maysles and Grey Gardens (1975)
Grey Gardens (1975)
Presented in collaboration with Janus Films and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Live appearance by Albert Maysles
This poignant and strikingly original documentary is a tribute to two women who, for more than 20 years, colored outside the lines and did it beautifully. Once the queens of society, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith Bouvier Beale, withdrew from the world in the '50s only to be rediscovered by pioneering documentarians Albert and David Maysles. The brothers originally set out to do a film about Princess Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' sister. When they met the Beales during their research, however, they were so intrigued by the world they had created in their decaying East Hamptons mansion, they decided to make a film about them instead. One of the Maysles' greatest gifts in films like Gimme Shelter (1970) and Salesman (1968) is to take themselves out of the picture, and that gift is evident here. In filming mother and daughter, "Big Edie" and "Little Edie," they let their subjects shape the film through their daily routines, reminiscences, spontaneous musical performances and frequent bickering. The result is a poetic, often comic evocation of eccentricity and of two women who never stopped being themselves.
Ira Wohl and Best Boy (1979)
Best Boy (1979)
Live appearance by Ira Wohl
Family and time are the foci of this intensely moving documentary currently marking its 35th anniversary. Filmmaker Ira Wohl spent four years following his elderly aunt and uncle as they dealt with the need to create a future for their mentally challenged son, Philly. Originally, Wohl had simply set out to help Philly become more independent. Two days before Philly's first meeting with a neurologist to determine exactly what his potential for independent living was, Wohl decided to film the encounter. Within a day, Wohl realized that this was a story he needed to tell, so he continued to document Philly's growing independence and his development of an extended family of caregivers, as well as the effect this had on his family relationships. Best Boy was met with glowing reviews and won the Oscar® for Best Documentary. It inspired a sequel, Best Man (1997), focusing on Philly's life in a group home and the preparations for his Bar Mitzvah.
About the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival
For the fifth consecutive year, thousands of movie lovers from around the globe will descend upon Hollywood for the TCM Classic Film Festival. The 2014 festival is set to take place Thursday, April 10 – Sunday, April 13, coinciding with TCM's 20th anniversary as a leading authority in classic film. Over four packed days and nights, attendees will be treated to an extensive lineup of great movies, appearances by legendary stars and filmmakers, fascinating presentations and panel discussions, special events and more.
Passes for the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival can be purchased through the festival website at http://www.tcm.com/festival. Pass availability is limited, so those wishing to attend the festival are encouraged to buy their passes quickly.
