Every year, the TCM Classic Film Festival has a theme. Had the festival gone on in Hollywood as intended this year, that theme would have been Grand Illusions: Fantastic Worlds on Film. When this year’s festival became an at-home festival, there wasn’t one defining theme connecting the movies aside from the fact that they were all screened at previous festivals or slated for this year’s festival. For me, though, the overwhelming theme ended up being Rediscovery. Out of all the movies I was able to watch during the at-home festival, only one was new to me: Floyd Norman: An Animated Life. But most of the movies I was able to catch were ones that I was overdue to revisit.
When I do the festival in person, I really like to check out a mix of old favorites and things I’ve never seen before. But even though this year ended up skewing heavily toward things I’d seen before, I was able to approach many of them with a fresh perspective. It’s been a few years since I last watched the 1954 version of A Star is Born from beginning to end and it’s probably been ten years since I last saw Network. I couldn’t even remember the last time I watched Deliverance.
As someone who has attended the festival for several years, the schedule for the at-home version also took me on a trip down memory lane. A Hard Day’s Night reminded me of my first ever trip to the Chinese theater and the Faye Dunaway interview brought back memories of how excited I was to be at the taping for it. And then there was the time I saw the line for the first Double Harness screening and just said, “Hahahahaha…no.” Even though I wasn’t able to attend the festival in person this year, it was really nice to have so many great memories to look back on.
The thing I loved most about this at-home festival is how nice it was to just relax and go along with the scheduled programming. I’ve been working from home for a little over a month now and in that time, I’ve ended up putting a lot of thought into the movies I watch. Anything I wanted to watch had been divided into one of three categories: familiar movies I can listen to while working, movies to watch during evenings/weekends, and movies I wanted to save for the at-home festival I was planning before this version of TCMFF was announced. With all that to keep in mind, it was very nice to have few days during which I didn’t have to actively think about what I wanted to watch next.
I also really enjoyed seeing the footage of interviews, introductions, and other events from previous festivals that were broadcast between films. If anything, I wanted to see more of those in their entirety as part of the over-the-air broadcast. However, lots of great things were uploaded to TCM’s YouTube channel instead, like a Club TCM interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Osborne’s conversation with Jean-Paul Belmondo before a screening of Breathless, and a discussion with Norman Jewison, Lee Grant, and Walter Mirisch before In the Heat of the Night on opening night of the festival in 2017. At most, some of those uploads may have been previously available to TCM Backlot members, but there’s a lot on there that I don’t recall ever seeing before.
As far as supplemental content in the live broadcast went, my favorites were the interview with Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau after North By Northwest and the spot they put together to run after Singin’ in the Rain. The Singin’ in the Rain one was really a highlight, featuring footage of Debbie Reynolds from a previous festival along with other archival interview clips of Cyd Charisse and Donald O’Connor.
The thing I missed most in the at-home version of festival was the representation of the midnight screenings. It’s not easy to stay up for those midnight screenings during the festival, but if you can pull it off, they can easily be some of the most fun and memorable events of the festival. Creature from the Black Lagoon was definitely a good late night movie, but not nearly as off-the-rails as some of the ones that have turned up in the midnight time slot during past festivals.
Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most about the at-home version of TCMFF is how quickly it all went by. When I attend TCMFF in person, time flies and it’s completely understandable why: it’s the culmination of months of anticipation and excitement around getting spend some time surrounded by good friends and good movies in a city I only get to visit once a year. But even doing the festival at home, where my only changes of scenery came by moving from one room to another, it still kept me engaged enough that Sunday afternoon caught up to me way faster than I expected. Even though I wasn’t able to spend time with my friends in person this year, I’m glad this version of the festival still gave us a way to connect on some level.