For all the yap about diversity today, Hollywood had every bit as much variety and a good deal more ingenuity and intelligence in its classic era than has been demonstrated on theater screens in recent years, as this week’s crime and suspense  offerings on Turner Classic Movies clearly demonstrate.

Tuesday: Warren Beatty gets embroiled with a modern Assassination Bureau, Ltd.; he then portrays a lowlife mobster like a latter-day Robert Taylor; and his jokes fall so flat he has to run for his life. In contrast, William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald portray ultra-cool, surpremely efficient policemen trying to rescue a blind kidnap victim.

Wednesday: Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters go slumming.

Thursday: Alec Guinness sells suspicious vacuum cleaners.

Friday: Marlon Brando "coulda been a contenda." Then James Stewart and Doris Day won’t admit that "Que Sera, Sera" when their child is kidnapped.

Saturday: Incorruptible FBI agent Broderick Crawford has his hands full of casework, while all-too-corruptible Woody Allen would have his hands full of other people’s money.

Sunday: Toys have a smashup in one of Hitchcock’s lesser efforts. An atomic scientist would blow up London in order to save the world. And James Coburn is a shrink who could use a shrink when Cold Warriors come after him.

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Tuesday — March 31st

12:00 AM — The Parallax View (1974)
Cast: Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Paula Prentiss
Director: Alan J. Pakula
C-102 mins, TV-MA

"Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, a political thriller with an unmistakable resemblance to the Kennedy assassination, was not the first conspiracy thriller to emerge from Hollywood — you can trace the lineage back to The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 — and it was not a hit when it was fitfully released in 1974. But its reputation and stature has only grown in the years since and it is arguably the definitive conspiracy thriller of the seventies."
(Source: Sean Axmaker on TCM Movie Database)

2:00 AM— Bugsy (1991)
Cast: Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley
Director: Barry Levinson
C-136 mins, TV-MA

"Do you always talk this much before you do it?"
"I only talk this much before I’m gonna kill someone."

"Richard Levinson’s rich-looking Bugsy (1991) tells the story of Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel: mobster, killer, father of Las Vegas and lover of Virginia Hill. A man of humble and criminal beginnings, Siegel also had a pathological desire for respect and wealth. This version of the story is lavishly told, the glamour of Siegel’s milieu far upstaging the violence of his real life, while the romance of the picture resonates most strongly for what it created off-screen: the famous pairing of Beatty and Bening."
(Source: Emily Soares on TCM Movie Database)

4:30 AM — Mickey One (1965)
Cast: Warren Beatty, Alexandra Stewart, Hurd Hatfield, Franchot Tone
Director: Arthur Penn
BW-93 mins, TV-14

"Allegedly inspired by the French New Wave films of the early sixties, Penn’s film is an enigmatic and existential tale of a nightclub stand-up comic who goes on the lam from the mob because of a huge financial debt he can’t repay. Warren Beatty’s title character confesses at the beginning, ‘The ride was over, I was trapped and I find out suddenly I owe a fortune,’ and with no more exposition than that, the rest of the movie repeats a pattern of Mickey One fleeing, hiding, being discovered and repeating the cycle until the unresolved fadeout which is open to interpretation and not the sort of ending the average moviegoer wants to see."
(Source: Jeff Stafford on TCM Movie Database)

6:15 AM — Union Station (1950)
Cast: William Holden, Nancy Olson, Barry Fitzgerald, Lyle Bettger
Director: Rudolph Mate
BW-81 mins, TV-PG

"The people you have to deal with are lice. They never keep their word to anyone about anything; they won’t to you."

"True to its title, the story kicks into gear on a train, where Joyce Willecombe, the personal secretary of wealthy businessman Henry Murchison, notices a series of small but suspicious things: a car racing the train to the next station, the car’s occupants boarding the train while pretending they don’t know each other, and a hidden gun one of them is carrying. Joyce reports on this to a conductor, who treats her as a nuisance but finally gives in and calls the cops, one of whom is William ‘Tough Willy’ Calhoun, chief of the Union Station police. Skeptical at first, Calhoun becomes a believer when further sleuthing by Joyce reveals a suitcase secreted in a locker …"
(Source: David Sterritt on TCM Movie Database)

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Wednesday — April 1st

5:15 PM — What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971)
Cast: Debbie Reynolds, Shelley Winters, Dennis Weaver, Michael MacLiammoir
Director: Curtis Harrington
C-101 mins

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Thursday — April 2nd

11:15 AM — Our Man in Havana (1960)
Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ernie Kovacs
Director: Carol Reed
BW-107 mins, TV-G

"[Graham] Greene based the story on his own experiences in espionage during World War II. While serving in Portugal near the war’s end, he had met some German spies who were sending invented reports back to their dying fatherland in order to keep collecting their paychecks. His first idea was to write a screenplay about an Englishman who does the same thing in pre-war Estonia in order to keep his greedy wife happy. But when the outline was presented to the British film censors it was rejected as derogatory to the British Secret Service. Realizing that he’d have a hard time winning audience sympathy for a character who betrayed England on the eve of World War II, he re-set the story in ’50s Havana, changed the wife into a daughter and published it as a novel."
(Source: Frank Miller on TCM Movie Database)

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Friday — April 3rd

11:30 AM — On the Waterfront (1954)
Cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger
Director: Elia Kazan
BW-108 mins, TV-PG

"You want to know what’s wrong with our waterfront? It’s the love of a lousy buck. It’s making love of a buck — the cushy job — more important than the love of man!"

"Ex-boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) earns an inconsequential living working for waterfront crime
boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). But when he unwittingly lures a rebellious dockworker to his death, Malloy suffers pangs of guilt. Through the love of Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), the murdered man’s sister, and the support of Father Barry (Karl Malden), a crime-fighting priest, Terry finds the moral courage to stand up to Friendly and his goons and accept the violent consequences of his decision."
(Source: Roger Fristoe and Scott McGee on TCM Movie Database)

4:00 PM — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Cast: James Stewart, Doris Day, Brenda de Banzie, Bernard Miles
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
C-120 mins, TV-PG

"You have muddled everything from the start, taking that child with you from Marrakesh. Don’t you realise that Americans dislike having their children stolen?"

"Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller was The Lodger (1927), but it wasn’t until the success of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 that Hitchcock began a near-unbroken string of suspense thrillers that made him world famous. Twenty-two years later, he returned to the scene of the crime for the only remake of his career."
(Source: Brian Cady on TCM Movie Database)

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Saturday — April 4th

7:30 AM — Down Three Dark Streets (1954)
Cast: Broderick Crawford, Ruth Roman, Martha Hyer, Marisa Pavan
Director: Arnold Laven
BW-86 mins, TV-PG

"… a 1954 movie with a film noir-like title, was actually more accurately represented under its original working title Case File: FBI. Far from being a moody melodrama with morally ambiguous leading characters, this Edward Small production is a straightforward documentary-style police drama in the vein of Jack Webb’s then-popular Dragnet series. The film opens with stately music and a solemn narration that leaves no room for doubt that what follows will be a highly respectful love letter to the men of the Federal Bureau of Investigation …"
(Source: John M. Miller on TCM Movie Database)

8:00 PM — Take the Money and Run (1969)
Cast: Woody Allen, Janet Margolin, Marcel Hillaire, Jacquelyn Hyde
Director: Woody Allen
C-85 mins, TV-14

"… the film contains much of the characteristic preoccupations, stylistic innovations, and satirical targets he [Woody Allen] would develop to perfection in his subsequent movies … It’s all here from the start in an embryonic stage: the satires on success, fame, and psychoanalysis; the angst of modern life; the explorations into and comments upon film style and structure; the frustrated romance between the intellectual nebbish Jew and the beautiful ‘shiksa goddess’ of his dreams; and direct asides to the audience. Allen would play out these themes and techniques with increasing complexity in all his films over the years, and knowing what we do of his life and work since then, it’s fascinating and refreshing to see their beginnings, even in a context that many critics noted for a certain sloppiness and occasional lack of coherence."
(Source: Rob Nixon on TCM Movie Database)

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Sunday — April 5th

6:45 AM — Number Seventeen (1932)
Cast: Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, Donald Calthrop, John Stuart
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
BW-61 mins

"Though its initial setting in a spooky old house suggests a straightforward thriller, Number Seventeen soon metamorphoses into a heist story about the various characters searching for the necklace. The film is not among director Alfred Hitchcock’s best work and is perhaps better known for its incredibly complicated, hard to follow plot line which some have attributed to Hitchcock’s lack of interest in the project. Others have attributed to his desire to parody the thriller genre."
(Source: Felicia Feaster on TCM Movie Database)

12:00 PM — Seven Days to Noon (1950)
Cast: Barry Jones, Andre Morell, Hugh Cross, Olive Sloan
Director: John Boulting
BW-97 mins, TV-PG

"As with so many other Boulting projects, Seven Days to Noon is heavy with a social conscience. Barry Jones stars as Prof. Willingdon, a brilliant atomic scientist who is appalled that the world knows so little about the realities of the A-bomb. Over time, Jones is driven mad by society’s indifference, and takes it upon himself to teach everyone a lesson …"
(Source: Paul Tatara on TCM Movie Database)

2:00 PM — The President’s Analyst (1967)
Cast: James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Joan Delaney
Director: Theodore J. Flicker
C-103 mins, TV-14

"The opening disclaimer that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. did not cooperate with filming gives a fair indication of how far against the status quo the storyline goes, with psychiatrist Sidney Schaefer (Coburn) recruited to serve as the new analyst for the loneliest man alive, the President of the United States. Everyone he meets, from black patient Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) to his new girlfriend, Nan (Joan Delaney), conceals a hidden allegiance, and the insanity of the new position (as well as his dangerous habit of talking in his sleep) provokes Schaefer to run for his life. Unfortunately the powers that be have other ideas, as the American secret governmental police, the Soviet Union, the Chinese, and even ‘The Phone Company’ clash against each other to get information out of him first."
(Source: Nathaniel Thompson on TCM Move Database)

— Mike Gray