When we showed Hell Drivers (1957) last season, David McCallum was the last of the principle cast still with us. Sadly, he passed away earlier this week, aged 90. He had good roles in features, including The Great Escape and 633 Squadron, but his best work was in television in particular The Man from Uncle, Colditz and the long-running NCIS. When I saw the title in Friday’s listing, I rather hoped that The Comeback Trail was the 1971 film with Buster Crabbe – it wasn’t released until 1982 and is quite rare. Alas, it was the 2020 comedy with Robert De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones!  So, this week’s focus is on films that are new to Freeview. 
BOILING POINT (2021) Saturday 30 September 9.00-10.55pm Film Four    P          
Last Monday, the BBC showed the original 2019 short (very tasty); tomorrow evening, BBC 1 begins the 4-part series. In this feature, Stephen Graham plays a chef whose Friday evening is about to become the stuff of nightmares. Like Russian Ark, it is filmed in a single take; there is lots of swearing, but it can be wickedly funny and entertaining. 
ALI & AVA (2021) Sunday 1 October 10.30pm-midnight BBC 2    P       
The Radio Times gives it 4 stars, but not many of our members did last season! If you would like confirmation as to whether the music track really was that loud, tune in this evening. It is more likely, I suppose, that you haven’t given it much thought since 16 October 2022 . . .
MARI (2018) Sunday 1 October 12 midnight-1.30am BBC 2    P       
You might also like to stay up for a double bill. As you know, we have long championed new directors and Georgina Parris does well with her first feature. A dancer discovers that she is pregnant and goes to spend time with her family, as her grandmother is dying. I believe that some of the locations used are in Dorset, but various checks have – so far – failed to reveal which ones.
THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN (2021) Tuesday 3 October 10.50pm-1.05am Film Four    P            
This is an absorbing, quite brilliant, documentary that makes excellent use of audio clips and archive footage to tell Chaplin’s story. Over a hundred years after his heyday, Chaplin remains, arguably, cinema’s greatest and most influential figure. In 1924, First National – who had been releasing his films from 1918 to 1923 – bought the rights to Papini’s Life of Christ and Charlie was keen to star in the proposed film. It was never made, but it would have been quite something to be sure!

One of the many film books I have in my library is called Private Screenings. In 1995, to celebrate 100 years of cinema, the AFI asked 80 industry personnel, from Debbie Allen to Robert Zemeckis, to select a moment that had a special meaning for them. How on earth do we choose just one, though? And would it be a funny moment or a dramatic one? In my case, it is likely to be something I connected with on an emotional level. For Martin Brest (who directed Scent of a Woman), it occurs in City Lights (1931) when the Flower Girl, no longer blind, realises it was the Little Tramp (Chaplin) who had paid for her operation. The celebrated critic James Agee called it “the highest moment in movies” and, even today, it is hard to disagree. 
RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962) Saturday 23 September 2.05-4.10pm 5 Action (Ch 33)         
Sam Peckinpah’s second film is a superb western (fittingly, it was Randolph Scott’s last) that has two old timers protecting a gold shipment, and rescuing Mariette Hartley from an unsavoury set of brothers. MEMORABLE MOMENT: Joel McCrea’s sublime response that sums up all the taciturn cowboy heroes – “all I want is to enter my house justified”.
PSYCHO (1960) Sunday 24 September 11.30pm-1.15am BBC 2        
Also Thursday BBC 4 9.00-10.45pm; this showing is followed by a repeat of the Scene by Scene interview with Janet Leigh. Psycho remains a classic of terror and audience manipulation. It was a gamble by Hitchcock and cinemagoers were required to take their seats before the film started and asked not to divulge the ending. It all worked to perfection, of course. MEMORABLE MOMENT: it has to be the shower scene – brilliantly constructed and edited, hugely influential and, more recently, analysed in depth for its technical dexterity. 
THE KILLERS (1964) Tuesday 26 September 9.00-10.55pm Legend (Ch 41)        
Just a notch below Burt Lancaster’s 1946 debut classic, Don Siegel’s version was considered too violent for television, after JFK’s assassination, and so was released in cinemas (unusually, it still carries an 18 certificate). Two relentless hitmen are seeking out their next target; Lee Marvin is an immense presence and Ronald Reagan is on the wrong side of the law. MEMORABLE MOMENT: the opening sequence, as they go about their nasty business, sets the film’s unremitting tone so well that the director doesn’t need to show the sort of overt violence that is now commonplace. 
WILDFIRE (2020) Thursday 28 September 11.50pm-1.35am Film Four    P            
Members like Irish dramas, so it is a shame about the late start time. Two sisters try to re-engage after the death of their mother, but there relationship is a feisty one! If you cannot catch this one, then you still have The Quiet Girl to look forward to in October! 

Best Film polls and All-Time Great lists are always fascinating, even if we are bound to disagree with some of the choices. A year ago, Sight & Sound magazine was getting ready to announce the results of its decennial survey; in August of this year, Stephanie Zacharek, Time magazine’s film critic, gave us her selection. As Time is celebrating 100 years of journalism in 2023, she opted for 10 films per decade – and deliberately ignored some big hitters (Citizen Kane) for a lesser work from the same director (The Magnificent Ambersons). Anyway, LRFS has shown 11 films that are on her list, over the years. And what are they? In order of release, they are: TOP HAT (1935); STAGECOACH (1939); BLACK NARCISSUS (1947); SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959); THE NIGHT OF SAN LORENZO (1982); ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999); IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000); FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002); PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006); UNDER THE SKIN (2013) and the German film PHOENIX (2014). I really need to watch Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) again. It makes her list – and I would struggle to include it in my Top 1000 Westerns! Clearly, I missed something . . . . 
GOLD RUN (2022) Saturday 16 September 9.00-10.55pm BBC 4    P         
If, increasingly, subtitled films are not going to have a decent UK cinema release, we can hope that the likes of BBC 4 will continue to show them and at a decent time. Loosely based on actual events, resistance fighters try to hide Norway’s gold reserves as Nazi troops prepare to invade.  
MY MAN GODFREY (1936) Sunday 17 September 3.10-5.00pm TP (Channel 82)        
Here we have another interesting choice from Stephanie Zacharek’s Top 100. Apparent down-and-out William Powell is employed by Carole Lombard as the family butler. The fact that the actors had divorced recently didn’t mar their chemistry, or timing, and the comedy is brilliant. Whether this classic is better than Ms Lombard’s Twentieth Century (1934) or Nothing Sacred (1937) is one for earnest discussion. 
MADEMOISELLE (1966) Monday 18 September 10.05pm-12.10am TP (Channel 82)        
TP are picking up again with rare showings of films that are not well known and that might be described as ‘unusual’ fare. This is a French-British co-production that stars Jeanne Moreau as a teacher whose sexual frustration causes her to behave very oddly. It doesn’t work entirely; by 1966, and after a brilliant run of films, director Tony Richardson seemed to be losing the plot, as it were. Three years later, the same fate was to befall director Bryan Forbes with The Madwoman of Chaillot.
MINARI (2020) Tuesday 19 September 11.10pm-1.25am Film Four    P            
New to Freeview is the third film from our shortened 2021-2022 season; it had a rating of 80% from members. 
THE FAREWELL (2019) Wednesday 20 September 9.00-10.55pm Film Four    P
Film Four are making it a good week for interesting premieres. Relatives (including a granddaughter from New York) fly to China to spend time with their grandmother. They meet under pretext of attending a wedding, as she has cancer and the family don’t want her to know. The Farewell isn’t a sombre drama by any means. It is engaging, has a light touch and is often funny. Without a pandemic, it is one we might well have shown.

BBC 4 is repeating the documentary Voyage to Mars: the Longest Goodbye on Wednesday evening; a timely showing in that plans to visit the Red Planet are likely to gather pace in the next five years or so. Coincidentally, the Legend channel is showing the 1978 film Capricorn One that afternoon. This is the one where the trip to Mars is a hoax, leaving three astronauts earthbound and in peril. More recent dramas, such as The Martian, feature top actors (Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain head a strong cast) and the science is more plausible. This was not the case in the 1950s and 1960s, of course, although Rocketship X-M (1950) was pretty good for a low-budget offering from a minor production company (Lippert); having Lloyd Bridges on board helped. Their original destination was the Moon and they went off course; Abbott and Costello left for Mars in 1953 and somehow ended up on Venus! Conquest of Space (1955) was better; Eric Fleming (who went on to play the trail boss in Rawhide) was the lead and the director, Byron Haskin, went on to make Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). In case you ever wondered, the same year’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians really is one of the worst films ever made – but my record for watching a film to the end has remained intact! 
RED ROCK WEST (1992) Saturday 9 September 9.00-10.55pm Legend (Channel 41)         
Film noir made a modest comeback (in colour) in the early 1990s with two films directed by John Dahl. The most celebrated one was the splendid The Last Seduction (1994), but this earlier work is almost as good. Unemployed Nicholas Cage is mistaken for a hitman and thinks he has it made, until the real assassin turns up – and very few actors could do ‘crazy’ as well as Dennis Hopper. 
CRIME OF PASSION (1957) Monday 11 September 7.00-8.45pm TP (Channel 82)        
Having seen at least 30 of her films, I thought I knew Barbara Stanwyck’s CV pretty well but this late-entry film noir is an unknown quantity! Furthering her husband’s career by sleeping with the chief of police isn’t a problem for her until he looks to promote someone else. Whilst it isn’t Double Indemnity, there is a great cast (Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray and Royal Dano) and director Gerd Oswald was known for making this kind of material very atmospheric. 
LION (2016) Tuesday 12 September 9.00-11.20pm Film Four    P            
Based on a true story, and popular in cinemas, watching Lion will be a pleasant two hours viewing for members. Five-year-old Saroo falls asleep during a train journey, ends up alone in Calcutta and is subsequently adopted by an Australian couple. Dev Patel then plays the grown-up Saroo as he returns to India in search of his family. 
BALLOON (2018) Thursday 14 September 11.40pm-1.35am BBC 4
I highlighted this German drama when it was premiered during lockdown, but it is worth mentioning again. Two East German families plan an audacious escape to the West. It is humorous, tense and a very rewarding watch.

It was in the summer of 2008 that I went to work at the Regent and we had two films that ran for weeks and weeks: Mamma Mia! and Wall.E. The plot of the latter – a robot picks up rubbish on a desolate planet Earth, with occasional input from an indolent and obese human supervisor – struck me as being remarkably prescient. Until, that is, I caught last week’s documentary iHuman. Advanced AI in the hands of the military and a handful of super tech companies or governments doesn’t bear thinking about. Just 24 hours later, X (formerly known as Twitter) was removing the ban on political advertising. Here we go then . . . 
ELMER GANTRY (1960) Sunday 3 September 10.00pm-1.00am TP (Channel 82)         
A first showing on TP for this excellent drama in which a ‘snake oil’ salesman in the 1920s Midwest finds his true calling as an evangelist. It is almost certainly more relevant in 2023, of course. Burt Lancaster is superb and won an Oscar, as did Shirley Jones for her portrayal of his ex-girlfriend turned prostitute. Director Richard Brooks also won for his coruscating script although it was The Apartment that won most of the major awards, that year. 
DEATH RACE 2000 (1975) Monday 4 September 10.05-11.40pm TP (Channel 82)        
Younger members (do we have any?) might be more familiar with Jason Statham’s 2008 update. However, the original is the bee’s knees, for lovers of cult films, and the story (car racers earn extra points for running over pedestrians), actors (David Carradine and a yet-to-make-it Sylvester Stallone) and producer Roger Corman all belong to the 1970s. And this was when I saw it for the first time – at the old Coliseum in Aberystwyth (now a museum and coffee house) with Pam Grier’s Sheba, Baby as the support feature. Such double bills are long gone and we’ll not see their like again. Shame!
BLUE BOX (2021) Tuesday 5 September 10.00-11.25pm BBC 4    P            
Documentary film-maker Michal Weits investigates the work of her great-grandfather, Yosef, who became known as the Father of the Forests for his pioneering work in Israel and Palestine. She discovers that her family are reluctant to discuss this part of their history, and the truths she uncovers are not always palatable. 
FISHERMAN’S FRIENDS (2018) Wednesday 6 September 9.00-11.15pm Film Four    P
I am not ever so keen myself, but if you enjoyed The Phantom of the Open and The Duke (and clearly you did) then settle down in a favourite chair and watch this true story of the Cornish fishermen who signed a record deal. It is light, diverting fare and there is the sequel to look forward to at some future time, no doubt.