This Week On Cable: From Beauty Queens to Femmes Fatale

This cable week: an all-you-can-eat graze trove of rarities, satires, freaks and atrocities, led by a flight of vintage Michael Ritchie (why not?) and capped by a refreshing fruit salad of film noir...

Smile (Tuesday, TCM, 1:00 AM)

Director Michael Ritchie, in his Nixon-era heyday, was the rogue prince of American satire, here laying into the rituals, hypocrisies and absurdisms of the small-town beauty pageant, more than 30 years before Little Miss Sunshine. Released in 1975, starring Bruce Dern as a gung-ho organizer, Michael Kidd as a queeny choreographer (what else?) and Melanie Griffith, all of 17 at the time, as a clothes-allergic contestant. Jokes are unnecessary, since the whole thing is one appalling gag.

Downhill Racer (TCM, Tuesday @ 6:15 PM)

This acidic, cold-hearted 1969 movie, Ritchie's first, explores of international skiing championships, with a young Robert Redford as the soulless golden boy and Gene Hackman as his fed-up coach. It's not funny so much as simply incisive. An American New Wave classic, so there isn't an unbelievable frame in it, as all of the slope action is dead real.

Semi-Tough (Action Max, Tuesday @ 6:00 PM)

More Ritchie, and this time it's pro football, with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson as '70s buddy footballers caught in a triangulated romance with Jill Clayburgh and in the decade's profusion of spiritual fads. They can't make them like this anymore.

Ten Minutes Older: Dans le Noir du Temps (Flix, Wednesday @ 6:00 PM)

An abstracted 2002 short by Jean-Luc Godard and so therefore not something you find on cable every day. It's part of an series of director-fueled omnibus films titled Ten Minutes Older which are undistributed in the U.S. (Everybody who's anybody has participated, including Bertolucci, Wenders, Jarmusch, Herzog, Spike Lee, etc.) This is Godard being Godard, so it's required viewing, and leads into a rare cable showing of Truffaut's The 400 Blows immediately thereafter.

The Yes Men (Showtime Showcase, Tuesday @ 2:00 PM)

Irreverent activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno screw with corporate culture: Bichlbaum once reprogrammed the SimCity video game so that its background characters would become gay bodybuilders on certain dates, while Bonanno, as a member of the highly publicized Barbie Liberation Army, participated in the campaign to switch hundreds of Barbie and G.I. Joe voice boxes and then return the toys to store shelves. Together, the boys simply set up a Web site parody of the WTO, dryly cheerleading the institution's economic cut-and-burn tactics, and then they were invited to speak in person -- on CNBC and at economic conferences -- as representatives of the WTO. Which they did, complete with inflatable phalluses. Seeing is believing.

The Entity (Fox Movie Channel, Monday @ 1:45 AM)

I've stumped for this deeply unsettling 1983 horror film before, and I'm doing it again. Barbara Hershey gets raped by a giant invisible spirit. The soundtrack alone could make your pulse stutter.

Right at Your Door (IFC, Wednesday @ 6:15 PM & 5:05 AM)

Chris Gorak's heart-thumping 2006 indie is all ideas: on an average day, a childless L.A. couple (office worker Mary McCormack and unemployed musician Rory Cochrane) is separated, in and out of their home, once the city is hit by multiple dirty bombs. Ash falls on everything, fallout could be anywhere, transportation becomes impossible, life and death boils down to a barrier of duct tape and plastic sheeting, and the protagonists undergo the ultimate test of a modern relationship: Who would you die for?

Raise the Red Lantern (Epix, Tuesday @ 8:45 AM)

The Zhang Yimou proto-feminist epic that cemented the Chinese Fifth Generation wave for international audiences in 1991, and a timeless spellbinder. Gong Li becomes a global icon. What happened to Zhang, anyway?

Little Darlings (Showtime 2, Thursday @ 1:10 PM)

Roundly condemned in 1980 for being tasteless and crummy (it is), this comedy has Tatum O'Neal and Kristy MacNichol, in summer camp, try to see who'll be the first to lose their virginity. Imagine if they remade it today -- Dakota Fanning and Miley Cyrus, step up!

The Killer that Stalked New York (TCM, Monday @ 6:00 PM)

A forgotten noir from 1950, Earl McEvoy's city portrait follows diamond-smuggler Evelyn Keyes as she unknowingly spreads small pox all over the city. Fringe benefits abound, particular on-locations scenes in the old Penn Station, Dorothy Malone vamping around inappropriately as a nurse, and Whit Bissell, actually acting, as a compromised manager of an indigent flophouse, where a postwar lobby sign reads, "Write That Letter Now."

Somewhere in the Night (Fox Movie Channel, Tuesday @ 9:00 AM)

This 1946 sweatbox, directed by first-timer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, has amnesiac WWII vet John Hodiak return to Los Angeles and scour the soul-corrupt cityscape for clues to his identity -- a hunt that inevitably leads to bodies, stolen money, and the nauseous possibility that he's better off not knowing and leaving civilization for good. If Kafka had been born in Mid-Wilshire during the Great War, he could've written it. Co-penned, in fact, by Lee Strasberg, the frankness of the movie's overwhelming anxiety (in the burgeoning postwar period, when cheeks were supposed to be pink and life was good again) can still be shocking. Femme semi-fatale Nancy Guild, in her first role, wowed nobody in the '40s, but today her slithery charm seems altogether hypnotic.

Gun Crazy (TCM, Wednesday @ 9:15 PM)

TCM's evening-long survey of Joseph L. Lewis's sparse canon should be on everybody's record-ometer, starting with this 1949 classic l'amour fou and nutsy gunpowder romance, shot with crystalline brio and acted like a blue-balled nightmare.

My Name Is Julia Ross (Wednesday @ 10:45 PM)

Lewis cannot be pinned down, and so this is less noir than faux-Brit mystery freak: Nina Foch plays (stiffly) a lonesome working girl in London who gets a job as a rich family's secretary -- only to wake up miles away in a seaside mansion and treated by everyone there as if she were a married woman suffering from schizophrenia. Rather Lewtonesque in its particulars (and trailing plot lifts from Rebecca and Gaslight, but pushed to brown-acid extremes), Julia Ross is memorable mostly for the what-the narrative curve, and for George Macready, possibly the least trustworthy actor of the mid-century, as the shady family's psychotic scion, methodically shredding his new "wife's" clothes with a knife and coming close to simply gutting his own mother (Dame May Whitty).