Anthony Bourdain’s choices on TCM last night were just brilliant and diverse: “The Searchers” / “Eyes Without a Face/Les Yeux Sans Visage” / “Get Carter” / “Withnail & I.” Robert Osborne asked Bourdain him why he hadn’t made more food-related choices, and Bourdain did then mention “Babette’s Feast” and some controversial film I now want to see called “La Grande Bouffe.” I’m surprised Bourdain didn’t mention anything by Peter Greenaway, e.g., “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” (the structure of which reminds me of the Catholic Mass). Or perhaps “Big Night” with Tony Shalhoub and the increasingly adorable Stanley Tucci. The wag in me now wants guest programmer (and Bourdain irritant) Paula Deen: She’d probably go with films like “Steel Magnolias,” althoug she might pick films made in her town of Savannah (“Glory,” “Forrest Gump,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”). Or maybe films about overweight diabetics (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”).
But back to Bourdain’s choices: ‘Nuf said about ”The Searchers” (John Wayne’s best acting EVER). I had never seen “Eyes Without a Face”: Wow, plus I was delighted to see the still lovely if more matronly Alida Valli as a co-star along with ingenue Edith Scob. Scob recently came to my attention playing the casually elegant matriarch in a lovely elegiac French film (with which I identified) about adult children having to clean out and sell their mother’s beautiful antique- and art-filled home, “Summer Hours/L’Heure d’été”; the eldest son is played by Charles Berling (who played a down-to-earth Marquis in the 1996 film “Ridicule”) and his sister by the ever lovely Juliette Binoche. I knew about “Get Carter” from my friend Ofer, a Michael Caine film I had not seen but was glad finally to view (great location shooting in the north of England). My young colleague Natalie strongly recommended “Withnail”: Great stuff, just wish I hadn’t been so tired watching (2-4AM), Richard Griffiths great, Richard E. Grant his usual manic/eccentric self, Ralph Brown a highlight as Danny the drug dealer, and young Paul McGann as the narrator (had vague recollections of McGann in a WWI British uniform singing “Oh Oh Antonio” to a Strauss tune, must have been in a Masterpiece Theatre production “The Monocled Mutineer”).
Anyway, my suggested line-up would be “Summer Hours” with Scob, then “Eyes Without a Face” with Scob and Valli, then “The Third Man” with Valli — pick a fourth film with either Orson Welles or Joseph Cotten or Trevor Howard (the romantic in me says “Brief Encounter”). Sort of like the “Before and After” category on ”Jeopardy!”
