The second edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood….

It began and it ended in that most magical of all super-Hollywood movie palaces, Grauman‘s Chinese Theatre — with two great examples of the kind of things Hollywood does best: A classic Gene Kelly Hollywood Musical and a classic Walt Disney feature length cartoon: An American In Paris in the first case, and Fantasia in the second.

And in both cases there was the same well-spoke guide on stage: The Turner Classic Movie Channel’s genial, silver-haired raconteur-host Robert Osborne, there to look natty, talk sharp and mellow, introduce the shows and smoothly interview the stars, moviemakers or movie experts, afterwards.

In the case of An American in Paris, the onstage reminiscences came from one of the four or five movie actresses with whom I fell instantly in love after seeing a particular performance: Leslie Caron, the wide-eyed, wide-smiling, jubilant Parisian gamin of American in Paris — the French ballerina who danced with the peerless Kelly (“Mr. Mool-igan“), danced to the music of the nonpareil Gershwin brothers (George the tunes, Ira the lyrics, “I Got Rhythm“ to “Embraceable You“), and finally danced away with all our hearts.

And Gene Kelly, of course, danced away with them too, hoofing up the usual Kelly-ish storm, especially in that MGM musical masterpiece (inspired by The Red Shoes), with its décor inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec, Dufy, Rousseau and others: the “American in Paris” ballet.

There were marvelous dancers in Fantasia too. But they tended to be terpsichorean practitioners of another breed, of the more pachydermal, prehistoric, demonic and mythological varieties: dancing hippos and crocodiles and ostriches whirling and leaping to Ponchielli‘s “Dance of the Hours,” the soaring Pegasus family and the romping centaurs and drunken old Bacchus and his inebriated donkey, cavorting to Beethoven‘s “Pastoral Symphony (No. 6)”; the nighttime demons and morning worshippers of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” blended (profane with sacred) with Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” the dinosaurs gone all Stravinsky in “The Rite of Spring.“

And more: Waltzing fairies and mushrooms spinning merrily to Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite”; the lyrical abstractions inspired by Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D” (orchestrated by the film’s conductor, Leopold Stokowski) and, of course, little Mickey Mouse, cutting up magically out of his league, and facing the broom-infested consequences in Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” That one is a magical little cartoon with a magical coda: little Mickey (with Walt’s squeakified voice) dashing up to the podium, childishly enthusiastic, squeaking out “Congratulations, Mr. Stokowski!” And Stokowski in silhouette, bowing and grandly answering “And congratulations to you too, Mickey.“

And congratulations to you too, TCM. There is, it seems to me, no better festival for classic movie lovers of all varieties, no more wondrous super-cinematical Hollywood experience. If you love films, and movies, if you love and miss the way they transported you to other lands and peoples and realms of gold when you were young, this festival is a cinematic feast: probably as heart-stirring as Cannes, probably more exciting and movie-ish than Venice, probably more razzle-dazzle-ful than Berlin. (Don’t know; never been.) The sun dances over it. The moon bathes its last midnight hours. (The Mummy, The Tingler). And the ghosts of movies past proudly rise up and take a stroll down Hollywood Blvd. to their grad old haunts: the Egyptian, the Chinese.

In Hollywood, Dreamland tosses you pearls, and even the occasional clunkers are charming. So you sit there watching Frank Sinatra and Greta Garbo and Marlon Brando and Marlene Dietrich and Marcello Mastroianni and Bette Davis and Buster Keaton and Elizabeth Taylor, all stars from the past (yet still vibrant, still alive, in the medium that, someone said, cheats death. And you see also the survivors of the Golden Age and ages since, like Leslie Caron, Kirk Douglas, Mickey Rooney, Barbara Rush, Angela Lansbury, Roger Corman, Mariel Hemingway, Warren Beatty, Alec Baldwin, Debbie Reynolds, Hayley Mills, George Chakiris, Richard Roundtree, Eva Marie Saint. And Peter O’Toole, immortalized now in Grauman cement.

Who can tell why movies cast their spell? We love them; we hate them. We can’t get away from them. At times, we long for them to be better, try to pay due when they are. And maybe as they get older, and last longer, they do become better. Maybe. (Were we wrong?) Certainly everything I re-saw at the TCM fest had taken on luster:

Marilyn writhing under the sheets in Niagara, James Cagney barking out reveille for the arts of Cold War and Coca Cola in Billy Wilder‘s Berlin Express train One, Two Three, Bobby De Niro prowling his cab through N.Y. mean streets soaked in neon and Bernard Herrmann‘s last great score, and Frank Sinatra sweating cold turkey in Kim Novak’s apartment in Otto Preminger‘s movie of Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm. (I’ve always thought “Arm” was too studio-bound to evoke city streets. On the big screen, it looked great.) 

There were the movies I missed this time around: like Citizen Kane.

 Ah, Citizen Kane! My favorite movie of all time. The move that made me love movies. (But it’s okay, I’ve seen it over seventy times before. Maybe eighty.)

“Kane,“ Orson Welles’ great cinematic electric train, the best of them all, was shown as part of the Herrmann tribute — with Xanadu’s doors flung open and Kane‘s dying words, “Rosebud“ echoing once again. And “C.K.“ wasn’t the only great movie I felt I could pass up this time. There were also To Kill a Mockingbird, with Gregory Peck‘s stirring lost-cause courtroom speech, and the Sidney Lumet classic (one of his many): Network (“I’m mad as hell!!!”). And more Welles, more Joseph Cotten, along with Graham Greene and Carol Reed in The Third Man. And Bette Davis wall-flowering it in Now, Voyager, or afire in All About Eve; Marlon Brando pursuing fragile, flower-like Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, and then the older Brando, as Don Corleone, surrounded by Al Pacino, Jimmy Caan, Bobby Duvall and Diane Keaton all making us offers we can’t refuse in The Godfather.

More: Kirk Douglas standing among a sea of slave rebels all crying “I am Spartacus!“ O’Toole and his pal Richard Burton in royal revelry and betrayal in Becket; James Mason going crazy on cortisone in Bigger than Life; Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland swinging to more Gershwin tunes in Girl Crazy; and the ethereal romance of Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney set to one of Herrmann’s most romantic scores in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

  More still: Astaire and Rogers, Fred and Ginger to us, answering the ballroom siren call of Shall We Dance, Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris and their gangs (Jets, Sharks) swaggering and jiving the streets to the Bernstein and Sondheim songs in West Side Story; the Marxian madness (Grouchonian, Harponian, Chiconian) of A Night at the Opera (“There ain’t no sanity clause!“). Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong traveling between a dreamy heaven and hell in Cabin in the Sky, the MGM musical anthology (with Kelly and Astaire and Sinatra too) That’s Entertainment; and Clint Eastwood heading west in The Outlaw Josey Wales — a movie that Orson compared to the best Ford and Hawks westerns.

I did catch a couple of films I‘ve never seen before: Alberto Cavalcanti‘s 1942 war tale Went the Day Well?  in which Nazis invade Agatha Christie British provincial territory. And more British countryside in Bryan Forbes’ Whistle Down the Wind, with Alan Bates as the fugitive murderer mistaken by village children (including young Hayley Mills) for Christ, adapted from a novel by Hayley’s mum, Mary Hayley Bell — with the Hayley Mills of today discussing it afterwards. And they were both good movies, worth the effort to brig them back.

All the movies of course, were shown in new, restored, or pristine prints, and they were shown at the big stage on the Chinese, on four smaller Chinese multiplex screens, in that other Grauman‘s gem, the Egyptian — with discussions and special events at the temporary Club TCM set up in The Roosevelt Hotel, and at the Music Box Theater.

 What do these old movies have that the new ones mostly don’t. I almost hate to say it, but one of the major differences is good stories. Good writing. Good scripts. Literacy. Psychology. Real human drama. Maybe we all went too far, demanding that directorial auteurs be recognized. (And of course they have been. Justly.) The writers should have gotten their due as well. In Golden Age festivals like TCM‘s, they often do. (Notice how I’ve avoided, for once giving the possessive directorial credit on many of these movies. Notice also, that I haven’t given the writers their due myself.

Well, here’s a belated roll call and finale: Ben Hecht, Graham Greene, Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, Alan Jay Lerner, Edward Anhalt, Richard Maibaum, Gavin Lambert, Ernest Lehman, Arthur Laurents, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Schrader, Paddy Chayefsky, Woody Allen, Francis Coppola, Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Herman Mankiewicz. And Orson Welles. For Citizen Kane. 

Ben Mankiewicz, of the celebrated Mankiewicz clan, and the other TCM host, was there too of course. In the family style: a good talker.

Movie, in the end, are a collaborative art — and the last collaborator is the audience. How I loved watching these old movies — and the newer post-Golden Age classics TCM brought, right on up to Coppola’s 1972 The Godfather, Gordon Parks’ 1971 Shaft, Woody Allen’s 1979 Manhattan, and Marty Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver. The ‘70s. Still a classic era.

There’s no better way to see these movies, I‘m sure, than this festival. (Osborne even announced an Affair to Remember-ish sounding TCM cruise upcoming. I don‘t know about that…)

Too fluffy? Too glamorous? Too middlebrow? Well, no. The TCM fest was full of art films, and brim-full of the art of film — from Citizen Kane and the others, to a classy foreign import the festival showed in Chinese Multiplex No. One, called La Dolce Vita. Make that Federico Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita. With Marcello and Anita. Now, that’s entertainment.

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