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11:00 PM Turner Classic Movies
Crumb (1994 USA): Poor Robert Crumb. The talented misanthrope came to prominence during the hippy era and his artwork was embraced by the pot-smoking counterculture. Crumb, however, was not interested in any of that, his predilection for old time jazz, natty hats, and suits standing in sharp contrast to the stoned noodlings of lank-haired losers like Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Grateful Dead. Of course, there’s a lot more (much of it quite unpleasant) about Crumb, and its all covered in Terry Zwigoff’s compelling documentary, which makes its TCM debut tonight. Keep on truckin’!

Saturday 12/22/12

3:30 AM Encore Family
Challenge to be Free (1975 USA): For some reason, there was a huge market for family-friendly nature films in the 1970s, and even old time director Tay Garnett got into the act. Garnett, who’d got his start in Hollywood in 1920, helmed this Alaska-set adventure in which he also appears as a grizzled frontier sheriff. The film’s real star, however, is fellow veteran Mike Mazurki, here playing Trapper, a rugged individualist/lunatic fleeing civilization (and the police) in the Great White North. I haven’t seen this film since it first came out, but I recall it featuring a lot of snow.

6:15 AM Turner Classic Movies
Twist of Fate (1954 GB): Here’s one of those British films tarted up with an American star (Ginger Rogers) and a glamorous foreign setting (the French Riviera) but shot on the Shepperton backlot. Rogers plays Johnny Victor, an actress involved with shady (and married) businessman Louis Galt (Stanley Baker). Galt stashes Johnny away in a villa pending his rumored divorce from wife Marie (Margaret Rawlings), but she runs into the equally shady Emile Landosh (Herbert Lom) at a casino and...well, things get exceedingly far-fetched after that (and no, it doesn’t involve anyone "going Galt"). Also on hand: Coral Browne, Eddie Byrne, Ferdy Mayne, and John le Mesurier (playing "man at baccarat table").

1:35 PM Starz in Black
Five Minarets in New York (2010 TUR-USA): I haven’t seen this thriller yet, but judging from the comments on IMDb it sounds interesting and controversial, in a good way. Written and directed by Turk Mahsun Kirmizigül, the film - released in some territories as The Terrorist, in others as Act of Vengeance - features Danny Glover, a sure sign of a film with an underlying left-wing political message. Then again, it also features Robert Patrick, which suggests that futuristic killer robots forged from liquid metal may also be involved. We’ll just have to watch and find out.

Monday 12/24/12

1:00 AM Turner Classic Movies
Hell’s Heroes (1929 USA): You can never go wrong when Charles Bickford is on the job. Here he’s cast as Bob Sangster, one of a quartet of bank robbers who stumble across a dying woman in the course of their getaway and "adopt" her newborn infant. It’s the old Three Godfathers story, shot by William Wyler in lovely Bodie, California (the town with the most extreme climate in the state), and is worth watching for Bickford’s performance alone.

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