TCM’s Memorial Day Marathon Line-up
Starting May 27, 2012 at 7AM
COMMAND DECISION
BATAAN
FIRST TO FIGHT
BREAKTHROUGH
THE HILL
THE STEEL HELMET
MERRILL’S MARAUDERS
SERGEANT YORK
TORA! TORA! TORA!
WEST POINT (1928)
GERMANY YEAR ZERO
PT 109
BATTLE OF BRITAIN
THE GREEN BERETS
WHERE EAGLES DARE
THE GUNS OF NAVARONE
THE GREAT ESCAPE
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
KELLY’S HEROES
AN ANNAPOLIS STORY
Cliff Robertson as John F. Kennedy in PT 109 (1963)
When President Kennedy saw early footage of parts of the film, his only complaint was that Cliff Robertson was parting his hair on the right, while JFK’s hair parted on the left. Robertson dutifully parted his hair on the left for the film.
Schindler’s Workforce, from Schindler’s List
Composed and conducted by John Williams
Fritz Lang recalls his encounter with Joseph Goebbels.
Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl with Adolf Hitler
Being sorry isn’t nearly enough, but I can’t tear myself apart or destroy myself. It’s so terrible. I’ve suffered anyway for over half a century and it will never end, until I die. It’s such an incredible burden, that to say ‘sorry’… it’s inadequate, it expresses too little.
— Leni Riefenstahl, in 1993, commenting on her work with the Nazi Party
A screencap from Elem Klimov’s horrific war film Come and See (1985).
Directed for baroque intensity, Come and See is a robust art film with aspirations to the visionary — not so much graphic as leisurely literal-minded in its representation of mass murder. (The movie has been compared both to Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, and it would not be surprising to learn that Steven Spielberg had screened it before making either of these.) The film’s central atrocity is a barbaric circus of blaring music and barking dogs in which a squadron of drunken German soldiers round up and parade the peasants to their fiery doom…The bit of actual death-camp corpse footage that Klimov uses is doubly disturbing in that it retrospectively diminishes the care with which he orchestrates the town’s destruction. For the most part, he prefers to show the Gorgon as reflected in Perseus’s shield. There are few images more indelible than the sight of young Alexei Kravchenko’s fear-petrified expression. By some accounts the boy was hypnotized for the movie’s final scenes — most viewers will be as well.
— J. Hoberman (Village Voice, 2001)
