Memories of the 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival

*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in May 2011 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available)

In the event-packed hurly burly of TCM’s second annual Film Festival in Los Angeles from April 28-May 1 of 2011, I didn’t have a chance to blog about all of the films or attending guests that I saw but here are a few that linger in the memory and deserve to be singled out –cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler, who participated in a Q&A with Leonard Maltin before a screening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966), Hayley Mills, who appeared after a screening of Whistle Down the Wind (1961) with interviewer/author Cari Beauchamp, a midnight screening of The Mummy (1932) introduced by Boris Karloff fan Ron Perlman, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) accompanied by a live orchestra score by Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks, the MoMA restoration print showing of 1933’s Hoopla (Clara Bow’s final film) and the underrated Ernst Lubitsch Pre-Code delight Design for Living (1933).

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Not Your Typical Hit Man

What other living actor has the sort of cult following that Ron Perlman does? Ever since his film debut in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s prehistoric epic Quest for Fire (1981), Perlman’s unique screen presence has been a key component in more than 200 films and TV shows. Sure, some of them are dreck or forgettable but then there are The Name of the Rose (1986), where he played the hunchback Salvatore, the critically acclaimed TV series Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990), Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children (1995) and several films by Guillermo Del Toro including the lead in Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008). In a change of pace from these often grotesque and larger-than-life anti-heroes, Perlman tries something different in Asher, which opens in theaters around the country on December 7thContinue reading