Classic Movies

  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. Classic Movies

Spotlight on...Space

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

This month is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Celebrate by revisiting the alien landing at Devil's Tower.

Classic Sci-Fi

Classic Movies Spotlight10

Laurie's Classic Movies Blog

Mooning About on TCM

Wednesday July 15, 2009
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, Turner Classic Movies is doing 24 hours of classic movies about the moon and the space program, including the awesome 1989 documentary For All Mankind.

Also on offer is the movie many believe might be the first real sci-fi film, Destination Moon, as well as the massively entertaining The Right Stuff. (A bunch of real astronauts and NASA types walked out of the Right Stuff premiere in Houston -- not quite the way they remembered it!)

You might also want to tune in for the 12-minute 1902 French hit, A Trip to the Moon, which seems charmingly quaint today but was a sensation for its time. And of course don't miss the magnificently awful Capricorn One, in which the government fakes a Mars landing. Really, really bad.

Astronaut David Scott salutes the flag/Getty Images

Movies on the Mall in Washington DC

Tuesday July 14, 2009
One of the great summer events in Washington, DC is the annual "Screen on the Green" festival, showing classic movies outdoors on the National Mall, surrounded by the lighted monuments, in view of the glowing marble of the capitol buidling.

This year's festival runs Monday nights from July 20th to August 10th, and they're starting with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It should be utterly spectcular, given the big screen and the setting.

(For the uninitiated, the "mall" in Washington is a wide, tree-lined park that stretches from the capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, with the Washington Monument in the middle, and the lovely buildings of the Smithsonian Institution stretching along the sides. It's a glorious place.)

The National Mall at night/Getty Images

Hitchcock Waxes Directorial in Hollywood

Thursday July 9, 2009
The Hollywood branch of Madame Tussaud's has unveiled its new figure of Alfred Hitchcock, which will be on exhibit to the viewing public starting August 1.

Wax museums have always creeped me out (thank you, Vincent Price), and I've never quite understood the allure. I suppose it's chance to exclaim things like, "I never knew he was so short!"

And some of the figures are just...off, somehow, and all the more creepy as a result. At least this one is a faithful likeness of the director, who in life celebrated the morbid and the macabre. So, at least for Hitchcock, it's a fitting tribute.

The director in 1956, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

TCM to Honor Karl Malden July 10th

Tuesday July 7, 2009
Turner Classic Movies honors the late Karl Malden this Friday night, filling its primetime schedule with three of his finest and best-known performances:
8:00 p.m. Eastern On The Waterfront
10:00 p.m. A Streetcar Named Desire
12:15 a.m Birdman of Alcatraz
Malden, the very definition of a character actor, took hom his one and only Oscar for his role as Blanche Dubois's hopeless, hapless suitor in Streetcar, a role he created on Broadway. He stars in both Streetcar and On the Waterfront with the young Marlon Brando; and in Birdman with Burt Lancaster.

Discuss

Community Forum

Explore Classic Movies

About.com Special Features

Movie Comedies in 2009

Find out what belly laughs are in store at the 2009 box office. More >

Scrapbook Technique Gallery

Use these ideas to inspire your own uniquely beautiful pages. More >

Classic Movies

  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. Classic Movies

©2009 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company.

All rights reserved.