TCM will celebrate the Lone Star Slate with a slate of films throughout April.
The stars at night will be big and bright throughout April as Turner Classic Movies presents TCM Spotlight: Deep in the Heart of Texas, a 26-film salute to the Lone Star State.
All movies will air on Thursday evenings, starting Thursday, April 2. And the TCM programmers have picked the perfect title to launch the series: Giant, director George Stevens’ epic 1956 adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel that’s often referred to as The National Film of Texas.
That picture will start at 8 p.m. ET, followed at 11:30 p.m. ET by The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s filmization of the late Larry McMurtry’s novel about life and death in a dying Texas town, which copped Academy Awards for supporting players Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman.
These and other movies in the series, according to TCM, “will explore the state’s vast cultural history, its racial dimensions, its shifting demographics, and how it reflects the changing nature of America.”
Among the many other highlights in the TCM Spotlight: Deep in the Heart of Texas lineup:
Lone Star
Writer-director John Sayles’ 1996 masterpiece — starring Matthew McConaughey, Chris Cooper, and Kris Kristofferson – is a richly textured and deeply involving drama about the weight of history and the subjectivity of memory.
More important, the film also is about breaking free of the past — distant and recent, personal, and communal — a rebellion expressed with no little irony when a character announces: “Everything that went before, all that stuff, all that history — the hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.”
Specifically, Lone Star is a story about several interconnected lives in a Texas town where the sins of fathers continue to haunt their sons, and no one can escape the past without a determined struggle. Not incidentally, it’s also a nifty murder mystery. (8 p.m. ET, April 9)
Blood Simple
Filmed in Austin and Hutto, Texas, this debut feature by Joel and Ethan Coen is a textbook example of a subgenre best described as honky-tonk film noir. It begins when a discontented wife (Frances McDormand) and a handsome bartender (John Getz) discover they have more in common than a shared dislike for her husband (John Hedaya). This leads to a chain reaction of illicit love, botched murder attempts, fatal mistakes, and corpses that just won’t stay dead.
Throughout it all, the great character actor M. Emmett Walsh steals every scene that isn’t bolted to the floor as a weaselly private eye who waxes philosophical when he isn’t playing downright dirty. “Now in Russia,” he tells us, “they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else — that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas. And down
here, you’re on your own.”
Why did the Coens set their 1985 thriller in the Lone Star State? Joel explained to me back in the day: “Texas is, A, very famous for its passion murders and, B, potent in terms of the connotations and stereotypes people associate with it. It seemed like it would be fun to spin the characters out of something very specific like that.”
By the way, you might set your recording devices for this one, because it starts extremely late on April 9 — specifically, at 1 a.m. ET, April 10.
Hud
Long before J.R. Ewing of Dallas established himself as The Texan You Love to Hate, Paul Newman made an indelible impression as another beguiling cad from a different part of the Lone Star State.
In Hud — director Martin Ritt’s stark and unsettling 1963 film based on Larry McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By — Newman startled audiences, captivated critics and earned an Academy Award nomination for his fearless performance as Hud Bannon, a charismatically hunky and brazenly amoral Texas Panhandle cattle rancher who dismays his aging father (Melvyn Douglas, who earned an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor), disillusions his worshipful nephew (Brandon De Wilde), and very nearly rapes his cynically feisty housekeeper (Patricia Neal, who claimed the Academy Award as Best Actress of 1963).
Fun fact: In 2018, Hud was one of 25 notable productions inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress because of their cultural, historic, and aesthetic importance to our nation’s film heritage. But one can very easily imagine the irreverent response of Newman’s character had he been told of this honor: “Yeah? Well, it’s about damn time!” (8 p.m. ET, April 16)
Tender Mercies
Robert Duvall earned a richly deserved, long-overdue Academy Award as Best Actor for the unvarnished brilliance of his profoundly affecting performance in this 1983 drama as Mac Sledge, a down-and-out country singer who’s redeemed by the love a good woman (Tess Harper) in rural Texas, then pushed back to the brink by the death of his daughter (Ellen Barkin).
Grown men (including yours truly) have been known to weep while hearing Duvall’s poignant expression of Sledge’s uncomprehending sorrow: “I don’t trust happiness. I never did.”
Note: Tender Mercies also earned an Academy Award for screenwriter Horton Foote. Twenty-one years earlier, Foote got his first Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird — the classic drama in which Duvall made his film acting debut as the enigmatic Boo Radley. (8 p.m., April 23)
Terms of Endearment
Tender Mercies was edged out in the 1984 Oscar race for Best Picture by James L. Brooks’ enduringly popular comedy-drama based on yet another novel by Larry McMurtry. Shirley MacLaine also picked up an Oscar (as Best Actress) for her unforgettable portrayal of a certain type of brassy, classy Texas matron too often played only for cheap laughs: Aurora Greenway, a vainglorious but vulnerable widow who holds court like a condescending queen in the high-toned Houston neighborhood of River Oaks.
Jack Nicholson plays an ex-astronaut who falls in love with Aurora, but the romance remains secondary to Aurora’s often fractious relationship with her equally strong-willed daughter, Emma (Debra Winger). We follow Aurora and Emma through some 30 years of tempestuous love-hate, beginning with Emma’s infancy and ending with a teary bedside vigil. By the end of the film, we feel we have been drawn into the natural rhythms of life itself. (8 p.m. ET, April 30)
