The 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival in Review: Days 3 and 4

May 2, 2025

Welcome to Days 3 and 4 of my 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival recap! In case you missed it, you can read about my adventures on Days 1 and 2 HERE.

Day 3 started rainy and early, patiently waiting in line at the Egyptian for my one nitrate screening of the festival, Daisy Kenyon (1947). I’ve heard of this Joan Crawford melodrama but never seen it. It’s always a treat to see rarely screened nitrate prints, so I figured why not. The odd love triangle between Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda meandered in ways I didn’t think it would, which kept me intrigued and guessing until the very end. (I actually thought Andrews was the most interesting and three-dimensional character.) Donald Bogle’s intro, which put this film in perspective as it pertained to Crawford’s career at the time, was fabulous, as usual. We were also treated to a new short from Bill Morrison, Ghost of the Past (2025), which was actually its world premiere screening! Morrison’s work, frequently incorporating decaying nitrate material, is so haunting, highlighting the surprising beauty in the decomposition.

They're hard to see, but that's Ben Burtt, Eric Braeden, and Craig Barron at Colossus: The Forbin Project. (Photo by Kim Luperi)

Afterward, I made my way over to the multiplex for Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), a sci-fi film I knew nothing about other than the fact that Craig Barron and Ben Burtt were doing a presentation and star Eric Braeden would be there. The line stretched longer than I expected, and I actually wasn’t sure I would make it in, but I did! This turned out to be one of my biggest discoveries of the fest—Burtt and Barron’s intro was fantastic, as I’ve come to expect, and it was wonderful hearing from Braeden, both before and after the movie.

But the film itself stunned me, too. Sci-fi is generally not my thing, and I was pleasantly surprised that the movie fully held my interest (which says a lot for me!). I thought it was paced well, and while the film fell a little off the deep end in the third act, the stakes were high—and wild—enough that I needed to know what would happen. The computer's responses after it became sentient were quite humorous at times, and Braeden’s composure while dealing with an extremely high-stakes situation was unreal; I need his character's poise, please. I’ll discuss this screening, and the fun surprise at the end, more in depth at a later time. But I was very intrigued, and the film’s commentary about society’s interaction with and reliance on technology was extremely relatable and timely a full 50 years later. 

​

After grabbing some lunch and taking a midday stroll to Larry Edmunds Bookshop, I stopped by Club TCM for another talk I was highly anticipating, Fantastic Footage and Where to Find It: Surprise and Delights from the World’s Film Archives. Archivists Brittan Dunham and Ashley Swinnerton shared clips ranging from Hollywood home movies to an Encyclopedia Britannica short to pre-Code bloopers (many of the ones David Stenn shared on Instagram!) and more, highlighting big archival collections like the Library of Congress to educational institutions like UCLA Film and Television Archive to small regional archives like MARMIA (Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive). They also stressed the urgent issues that libraries and archives are suddenly facing with cuts to funding, leaving many in-process projects and work at risk, which I’m very glad they put a spotlight on.  

I had to cut out of the Club TCM program a few minutes early to race over to the TCL Chinese IMAX for a film I figured would be easy to get into, We’re No Angels (1955), but you can never really underestimate the TCMFF crowd when it comes to unique screenings like VistaVision! I nabbed a queue card in the 350s, and while I knew I’d make it in, the theater was much more crowded than I anticipated! 

​

Eddie Muller hosted a delightful conversation beforehand with Paramount’s Charlotte Barker, who shared some history about VistaVision; it’s a horizontal format with 8 perforations per frame, and only about 60 movies were made in the process. It seems that only a handful of projectors are left in the world that can screen VistaVision in its original horizontal format, and I kind of wish they showed that set up on screen so we could see how different it looks from a regular projector. 

​

I honestly didn’t know what to expect from a Michael Curtiz comedy starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, and Aldo Ray as escaped convicts (with Joan Bennett, who I saw the night before in Me and My Gal, 20 years earlier and blonde!). That said, We're No Angels was charming and hilarious; watching the trio upend and fix a family’s problems in surprising and humorous ways was a delight, especially with an enthusiastic audience. The widescreen print was also a beauty—what a treat!

​

After chowing down a late dinner, I grabbed a seat for my final film of the night, Animal Crackers (1930). The intro itself was a trip, with Groucho Marx’s grandson Andy Marx and screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander telling Marx Brothers tales. All of them were charming, but Scott’s was definitely the most memorable and hysterical, reminiscing about the time his dad snuck their family into the 1970s re-release premiere of this movie. (Unsurprisingly, he’s an excellent storyteller.)

I hoped the roars of laughter would keep me awake during this late-night (for me) screening. And while they did at times, a 14+ hour day was starting to take its toll. While I caught several one liners and it was a trip simply getting to experience the Marx Brothers with a TCMFF crowd, I was happy to make my way home just before midnight and fall into bed. 

Compared to the marathon that was Saturday, Sunday, the final day of the fest, was a light one for me. Since I got home late the night before, I slept in. This also allowed me sufficient time (OK, more than enough sufficient time) to line up early for Diamond Jim (1935), a new-to-me Jean Arthur movie. I think I was the only one in line for about an hour! But hey, you never know what the theater 4 queue will look like for a little-seen film introduced by Leonard Maltin, and I didn’t want to take any chances.

​

As Maltin said in his introduction, Diamond Jim is a good movie, not a great one. And I agree. I don’t think I’d ever seen Edward Arnold carry a picture, as he usually appeared as a big personality—in supporting roles. He starred in this film as the real-life businessman Diamond Jim Brady, and he did an admirable job supported by Arthur, Cesar Romero, and Binnie Barnes. There were some confusing bits—it sounded like Arthur was dubbed when we first saw her, and while I’m still trying to confirm that, it could have been because she was briefly playing a different character, a woman her later character, Jane, reminds Arnold’s Jim of—and the movie’s love quad (I think that's what you'd call it?) is a bit much. Nevertheless, it was a title I had never even heard of, and Maltin programmed it because he knew a lot of people hadn’t seen it. I'm glad he did! 

​

Initially, I intended to make it a Jean Arthur double feature and waltz into The Talk of the Town (1942), but I ended up opting for food instead. That gave me plenty of time to relax (and start writing these articles on my phone!) before hopping in line for The Ritz (1976), my final film of the festival. Rita Moreno appearing in person was the initial draw for me, and I bemoaned the fest for putting her in theater 1, the largest of the Multiplex but still, I felt, too small for her. When she unfortunately had to cancel, theater 1 almost became too big for the movie. It ended up being the easiest screening for me to get into. 

Jerry Stiller, Rita Moreno, Jack Weston, and Kaye Ballard in The Ritz.