This month on TCM, Mondays and Thursdays in prime time are devoted to “Jazz in Film.” Tonight’s sub-topic is “International Jazz,” and the entries include this Japanese drama, which is about a young pickpocket with a taste for jazz (heard prominently in the soundtrack, and featured in certain scenes), as well as sex (his girlfriend is a prostitute) and, in time, revenge against those who put him in jail. This 1960 movie, also released subsequently under the alternat

2020

Jun

1956: 'TO TELL THE TRUTH' DEBUTS ON CBS By David Bianculli

The CBS version of the quiz show To Tell the Truth debuted today in 1956...

2020

Jun

1954: 'MARTIN KANE, PRIVATE EYE' ENDS By TV WW

This day in 1954 marked the final telecast of the NBC detective drama, Martin Kane, Private Eye...

2020

Jun

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE By David Bianculli

I recommend this 1944 comedy a lot. That’s because I watch it a lot, almost every time it’s televised, even though I own a copy on DVD. There’s something about it: Cary Grant’s cartoonishly broad performance in the leading role, and the craziness of every character around him, from his doting but homicidal elderly aunts to another relative who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. All this, and Peter Lorre, too – but maybe I love it so much because Grant plays a critic

2020

Jun

TARZAN THE APE MAN By David Bianculli

This first movie in the Tarzan series, starring Johnny Weissmuller as the Ape Man hero of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, was released in 1932. That was just before the censorious Hollywood Production Code slapped filmmakers with very conservative rules – and because this Tarzan movie is pre-Code, it affords its audience a look at Maureen O’Sullivan, as Tarzan’s civilized jungle companion Jane, that only one other pre-Code film in the series would permit.

2020

Jun

MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. By David Bianculli

So far in this final season, this ABC series has spent its time on Earth, but in the past – specifically, the pre-WWII 1930s. The climax of last week’s episode had the team making a time jump back to the future – but they didn’t just far enough. As tonight’s episode begins, the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew finds itself visiting the mid-1950s – an excuse to film and frame tonight’s program in black-and-white film noir. Or, at least, the black-and-white mon

2020

Jun

WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL By David Bianculli

MOVIE PREMIERE: This documentary is about one of the premier film critics at a time when the movies arguably were at their most expressive and experimental. Pauline Kael had a bestselling collection of essays and reviews of films, and wrote from her powerful perch at The New Yorker for a generation, rhapsodizing and arguing at length about Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, and Nashville, to name just a few of her influential reviews from the 1960s and 1970s. I

2020

Jun

AMERICAN MASTERS: "MAE WEST: DIRTY BLONDE" By David Bianculli

This new American Masters documentary could be a few notches more insightful – anyone watching the documentary, in this current age, may well ask some questions this program never does, about whether Mae West’s predatory sexual on-screen persona is any more laudable for being a gender-reversal on typical bedroom and boardroom lotharios. But as a stage and screen pioneer, especially in the days just prior to the stifling Hollywood production code, West stands alone, and conf

2020

Jun

FRONTLINE: "THE VIRUS: WHAT WENT WRONG?" By David Bianculli

A lot. And this new Frontline documentary deconstructs the history to answer that question. It’s a question Frontline poses in the past tense, but the going wrong is still very much with us – which makes this particular era, like this particular documentary, a present tense experience. Check local listings. For a full review, see Alex Strachan's TV That Matters.

2020

Jun

ONE DAY AT A TIME ANIMATED SPECIAL By David Bianculli

SPECIAL PREMIERE: What to do when you have a finished script for a show, but can’t gather the cast, in this socially distanced period in time, to film it? Some shows have staged remote, Zoom-meeting-type table reads, letting actors recite their lines as though performing in a radio play. Tonight’s One Day At a Time Animated Special takes another approach: It has the cast of One Day recording its scripted lines, as in a radio play, but then fleshes out that soundtr

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