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9:45 PM Flix
Salesman (1968 USA): Salesman is one of my 50 favorite films of all time. Don’t ask me to pin it down in my top ten or 20 - though on any given day I might put it on either list - but this is one of the most effective, revealing, and truthful documentaries you’ll ever see. Directed by the Maysles Brothers, the film follows four Bible salesmen as they trudge from door to door trying to sell their wares in working-class Catholic neighborhoods across the country. Simple as that. You’ll learn more about human nature from this film than you will living your own life. Well, maybe.

Saturday 6/11/11

9:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946 USA): In this reasonably entertaining series entry, Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) must somehow steer a course between western civilization and barbaric savagery. I guess that’s what happens after you spend a few years fighting Nazis in the jungle! In this case, though, the savages in question aren’t goose stepping Germans but a tribe of leopard enthusiasts determined to keep the internal combustion engine and modern plumbing out of the neighborhood. Oddly, the tribe - seemingly ruled by Caucasians (Edgar Barrier and Acquanetta) - don’t appear to be African at all, a trend that would bafflingly continue in jungle movies throughout the late '40s and '50s.

7:00 PM HBO
Devil (2010 USA): The Devil, they say, is in the details. In this case, however, he’s in the elevator. Set in a broken-down Philadelphia Otis (why Philly, I wonder?) but shot in Canada, Devil brings five people together in the out of order lift, one of whom is Ol’ Scratch himself. Not too surprisingly, he takes full advantage of the moment and starts getting up to all sorts of claustrophobic mischief with his new friends. Lesson: always take the stairs. Also airs at 10:00 PM.

7:15 PM Turner Classic Movies
King and Country (1964 GB): Tom Courtenay plays a World War I deserter in this outstanding Joseph Losey-helmed drama. Courtenay is Private Arthur Hamp, a British soldier who walks off the battlefield one day after deciding he’s had enough after three years of trench warfare, bully beef, hardtack, and wet puttees. No, puttees-those bandages soldiers used to wrap around their lower legs. You have a dirty mind. Anyhoo, Hamp’s decision sits poorly with his superiors, and the lad is hauled before a court martial, where he’s defended by upper-class twit Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde), who slowly begins to understand that his client isn’t the shiftless coward he’s supposed to be. Nominated for four BAFTAs, King and Country suffers a little from its stagy roots (it’s based in part on a play by John Wilson) but is worth scoping nonetheless for its excellent lead performances. Watch for potato-nosed Leo McKern as an unsympathetic sawbones.

Monday 6/13/11

3:45 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929 USA): No, not Lynne - though I would be delighted to see the last of her, too - but Fay (Norma Shearer), a rich widow trying to fend off the amorous advances of Lord Elton (Herbert Bunston, later Dr. Seward in Tod Browning’s Dracula) and Arthur Dilling (Basil Rathbone). There’s a subplot about some stolen jewelry, and the film earned a Best Screenplay Oscar nom, but this is one of those impossibly rigid early talkies where the camera never moves and there’s only one microphone. That said, it’s always a pleasure to watch Shearer, and Rathbone’s pretty good, too.

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