CATCH A CLASSIC
TCM Spotlight: It’s About Time
TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.
Time is running out to enjoy Turner Classic Movies’ monthlong Thursday night spotlight on films that take their characters and viewers away to different times, which concludes with tonight’s lineup that is heavy on fantasy films about visiting, or revisiting, past lives. First is A Matter of Life and Death (1946, aka Stairway to Heaven), the British fantasy/romance starring David Niven as an RAF pilot who pleads with the court in heaven to allow him to remain on Earth
after a heavenly mix-up allowed him to sur
vive his plane crash. Next is Somewhere in Time (1980), the beloved romantic fantasy drama with a screenplay by sci-fi/fantasy master Richard Matheson, who adapted his novel Bid Time Return. Another lovely
musical score from composer John Barry enhances this tale of a playwright (Christopher Reeve) who becomes obsessed with a young woman (Jane Seymour) captured in a 1912 photo and then, with self-hypnosis, wills himself into the past to be with her. Christopher Plummer also stars. Following that are Orlando (1992), the period drama starring Tilda Swinton and loosely based on a Virginia Woolf novel, and Brigadoon (pictured) (1954), the beloved, Oscar-nominated musical led by Gene Kelly, Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse and based on the
Broadway hit about the legendary titular Scottish village that rises from the mists for
only one day every 100 years. The lineup, and the monthly spotlight, concludes early tomorrow morning with Jubilee (1978), a
cult film inspired by the punk aesthetic of its era in which Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) is transported to the film’s present day.