Oklahoma Film Critics Circle

Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Nov. 9-15, 2009

Piccadilly (TCM, 11pm, Sunday, Nov. 15)

E.A. Dupont was a major German director before his international breakthrough with the movie Variete (Variety in the U.S.) in 1925. He was working in London four years later where he filmed Piccadilly with the Chinese-American star Anna May Wong. Wong’s name became kind of jokey as she descended into sinister Asian roles during WW II, but at the height of her career she was quite the exotic beauty.

In Piccadilly, she’s Shosho, a poor girl who becomes a nightclub dancer and rises to fame on a pile of broken hearts. From a scenario by novelist Arnold Bennett, the film is not atypical of the silent melodramas Graham Greene thought were so unremarkable and easy to forget, but Dupont’s striking camera work—he was one of the first directors to make significant use of the subjective POV—and the unique sensuality of the female lead make Piccadilly an unusual viewing experience. Fans of G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks should definitely take a look.

Sharp-eyed movie lovers should watch for Charles Laughton in a featured comic role as an uneasy to please diner. Watch, too for Cyril Richard as a club dancer.  Richard would soon appear in Britain’s first all-talkie—Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail—and would later become beloved of baby boomers as Capt. Hook in the Mary Martin TV production of Peter Pan. — Doug Bentin

A Matter of Life and Death (TCM, 3am, Tuesday, Nov. 16)

In this mesmerizing romantic fantasy from 1946, David Niven plays a British pilot on an impossible bombing mission during the waning days of World War II. He tells as much to an American radio operator named June (Kim Hunter), with whom he makes contact just before parachuting to what he believes will be certain death. Instead, Niven winds up in a sort of limbo fantasy — or is it? -– in which a celestial trial determines whether he lives or dies. Dripping with inventiveness and a lush Technicolor splendor that typified the canon of the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death is as warm and cozy as a roaring fireplace on a winter’s night. — Phil Bacharach