TCM Classic Film Festival 2023
Share
Angie Dickinson will be in Los Angeles on Thursday to help kick off the fourteenth TCM Classic Film Festival, which will then run through the weekend. At the TCL Chinese Theatre in the heart of Hollywood, Dickinson will look back with TCM host Ben Mankiewicz on the making of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959), in which she costarred with John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson. In 1985, Dave Kehr called Rio Bravo “Hawks’s finest western, and perhaps his finest film,” and in 2003, Quentin Tarantino referred to it as his “favorite ‘hangout’ movie.”
Thursday night will see the world premiere of a new 4K restoration; Rio Bravo is one of ten films Warner Bros. has recently restored as part of its multiyear partnership with The Film Foundation. During its monthlong celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Warner Bros.—and of course, it should immediately be mentioned that both the network and the studio are owned by Warner Bros. Discovery—TCM is spotlighting these ten films with fresh introductions from such luminaries as Film Foundation founder Martin Scorsese as well as Wes Anderson, Joanna Hogg, and Ethan Hawke.
Two dozen of the more than eighty features lined up for this year’s festival are Warner Bros. classics, including Raoul Walsh’s The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001). As in years past, the festival programming will also encompass landmark films from around the world such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952).
Special guests will include Film Foundation board members Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, and there will be special tributes to production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein and actor, dancer, choreographer, director, and artist Russ Tamblyn. The fourth Robert Osborne Award will be presented to film historian Donald Bogle. The author of the 1973 classic Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in Films as well as a 1997 biography of Dorothy Dandridge will be on hand for Saturday evening’s screening of Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954).
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.
