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Special Theme: Addiction & Recovery
TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.
Turner Classic Movies’ monthlong Wednesday night spotlight on memorable movies that have made efforts to put a serious focus on addictions to substances and behaviors concludes with tonight’s six-film lineup.
First is Bigger Than Life (1956), directed by Nicholas Ray and starring and produced by James Mason. The film’s story seems to presage our current opioid epidemic; Mason
plays a schoolteacher and family man who becomes seriously ill and is prescribed cortisone as a treatment. While his illness takes a turn for the better, an even more serious one takes hold as he becomes addicted to
the drug and turns abusive and violent. While not a critical or commercial success in America upon its release, Bigger Than Life was praised at the time by French New Wave filmmaking masters Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut and is now also viewed by
many others as a masterpiece. Up next is Valley of the Dolls (1967), the campy cult drama based on Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel, which follows three women (played by Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate) who try to make it in Hollywood but fall prey to a seamy underworld and addictions to barbiturates (the “dolls” of the title). Following that is The Lady Gambles, a 1949 film noir making its TCM premiere, with Barbara Stanwyck as a wife whose introduction to gambling develops into a full-blown obsession that threatens her life, savings and marriage. The gambling
theme continues with the final two films:
California Split (pictured) (1974), Robert Altman’s comedy/drama starring Elliott Gould and George Segal as a pair of gamblers who find themselves drawn ever more deeply into a sleazy gambling world with increasingly higher stakes; and Tricheurs, a 1984 French drama making its network premiere, about two gamblers, a man and a woman, who team up in a casino and realize the only way you can beat the house is to cheat.