On Saturday morning, I started my day off with a movie that would end up becoming my favorite new-to-me discovery of the festival: All Through the Night. Even though I’m a big Humphrey Bogart fan, I’d never seen it before and when I heard it was a comedic thriller that involved a gambler getting mixed up with Nazi spies after they kill the guy who made his favorite cheesecake, I was really intrigued. As tempted as I was to go see From Here to Eternity over at the Chinese theater in that same time slot, I’m really glad I went with All Through the Night because it was an absolute joy to see that one in a theater with a very appreciative crowd.
All Through the Night was introduced by Michael Schlesinger, who has been lobbying to have this movie shown at the festival for the past 10 years because it has a history of being overlooked. To begin with, its release had rather unfortunate timing. The movie was filmed filmed before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but was released shortly afterward. So by the time audiences had a chance to see it, they were in a very different mindset than they had been a few months earlier. Schlesinger also explained that it tends to get left out of Bogart retrospectives because its director, Vincent Sherman, doesn’t have quite the same wide name recognition as, say, Michael Curtiz or John Huston. But at a festival like TCMFF, All Through the Night finally had an opportunity to be appreciated on its own.
When I read a little bit about All Through the Night, I was excited not just to see Bogart, but Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt. A movie that features a good part of the cast of Casablanca, but was released shortly before Casablanca? That’s a pretty big selling point for me right there. But I somehow totally missed the fact that both Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers were in it, so when Michael Schlesinger mentioned they were in it, I was absolutely delighted. The plot, the cast, I was so into everything about this and I did not leave the theater disappointed. I never knew how badly I needed that scene of Humphrey Bogart and Phil Silvers beating up Nazis in my life
After All Through the Night, I had originally planed to check out Tarzan and His Mate, but ended up deciding to go get lunch instead. There was a huge line and the movie was being screened in the smallest theater of the festival, and even though in theory I could have gotten in, the longer I waited in line, the more I felt like lunch was a better call. But it worked out really well because it gave me a better chance to get in line early for Alicia Malone’s book signing in the lobby of the Roosevelt. I always enjoy the introductions she does at the festival and on TCM, so it was a pleasure to have a few minutes to chat with her.
From there, I headed over to the Chinese theater for another great new-to-me discovery for the festival, Working Girl. I’d been really curious about that movie for a while and since I was already planning to see two of the three Harrison Ford movies playing at the festival, why not go for all three. Before the movie, there was a discussion between Illeana Douglas and casting director Juliet Taylor, during which Taylor gave some brief insights into the process behind casting Working Girl and her working process in general. As for the movie, I absolutely loved it. It’s pure 1980s, but it still holds up extremely well in 2019. The characters are so entertaining and the casting was absolutely flawless.
Once Working Girl was over, I got right back in line at the Chinese to see the Burt Bacharach conversation before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Since I really wanted to see Star Wars that night and I wasn’t entirely sure what the line situation would be like, I wasn’t planning to stay for the whole movie. But I wasn’t about to pass up the chance to see Burt Bacharach in person, especially since he’d be talking about the music for Butch Cassidy.
The discussion was absolutely fantastic. One thing I had never realized is that Butch Cassidy was actually only the second movie he had scored. His career is so incredibly prolific that it’s hard to imagine that such an iconic score came so early in his career. During the conversation, he also talked about some of the behind-the-scenes debates over whether or not the song “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” belonged in the movie and what it was like to go on tour with Marlene Dietrich. While he wasn’t a big fan of some of the songs she performed, he enjoyed working with her and getting to travel all over the world, including places where Dietrich was still very unpopular because of her support for American troops during World War II.
I love Butch Cassidy so there’s part of me that wishes I had stayed and watched the whole movie because it would have been amazing to see it in that theater. But Star Wars: A New Hope is one of my favorite movies and even though it was the Special Edition, I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to see it on the big screen. The only time I’ve seen any of the original trilogy on the big screen was when it was re-released in 1997, so it had definitely been a while. And after seeing it in the Chinese Theater, where it very famously drew such huge crowds on its initial release, complete with a discussion between cinematographer Richard Edlund, visual effects artist Dennis Muren, and sound designer Ben Burtt, I can safely say that if I never have another chance to see Star Wars in a theater again, that’s okay because it’s going to be awfully hard to top that experience. It was an excellent way to end the day.
