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TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL
The 2026 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival, coming to the heart of Hollywood on April 30th for four days where movie lovers from around the world can gather to experience classic movies on the big screen, has its theme of “The World Comes to Hollywood.”
The film industry publication, “The Hollywood Reporter,” published an article earlier this year about how Los Angeles’ hold on Hollywood film and TV production is slipping, noting data showing a sharp decline in film projects in the city over the past three years.
The article mentions that “superhero movies have fled to London,” and three major studios (Netflix, Paramount and Lionsgate) “have inked expansive deals to build or lease new production bases in New Jersey.”
It is no phenomenon that states like Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico, among others, offer generous tax incentives. Georgia is known as the “Hollywood of the South,” while Illinois benefits from Chicago’s production scene. Even New York offers a tax credit program to be a major hub for film and TV.
The TCM Festival’s theme of “The World Comes to Hollywood” is predicated, as its website notes, on “a remarkable merging of immense creativity and shrewd business sense” that established the filmmaking capital of the world in Hollywood, USA.
The theme celebrates that “men and women of disparate talents and distinct styles journeyed from around the globe to America, already fluent in the same language of cinema as industry veterans, to create and collaborate, and in many instances, just to live another day.”
The film industry is likely to live another day, but maybe not as much in Los Angeles. Still in the planning stage, TCM has announced a slate of films that cover a wide range of programming themes, including its central theme.
The 70th anniversary of “Anastasia” is celebrated with this historical drama in which Ingrid Bergman stars as a mysterious amnesiac woman who comes to believe she is the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.
Her likeness to the missing royal proves so convincing that even her greatest doubters begin to believe she’s the genuine article. Ingrid Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for “Anastasia.”
“Gaslight” is a 1944 psychological thriller directed by George Cukor, and starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton. This is a film for which Ingrid Bergman won her first Academy Award for Best Actress.
Bergman’s Paula inherits the London townhouse of her late aunt, a famous opera singer. Paula wanted to follow in her footsteps by studying opera and ended up being charmed and marrying her accompanist, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer).
Gregory hides a secret of his dual personality, as his former self is connected to the demise of Paula’s late aunt. As a result, Gregory is trying to drive Paula insane to distract her from his criminal acts.
Celebrating its 60th anniversary, “Arabesque” stars Gregory Peck opposite Sophia Loren in director Stanley Donen’s stylish spy thriller about an American professor entangled in a web of espionage with a glamorous woman.
Peck’s professor gets embroiled in international intrigue when he’s asked to decode a cryptic Arabian message, and Loren’s the mysterious beauty who helps him crack the code. The best part of the film is the presence of two great stars working together.
Only three years earlier, Donen directed “Charade,” a romantic screwball comedy mystery film set in Paris where Cary Grant, playing several characters as part of his work for the U.S. government, gets involved with Audrey Hepburn in a caper involving her late husband’s ties to missing gold.
Hepburn’s widow is eluding three crooks who want the fortune stolen by her murdered husband, and it’s up to Grant’s handsome, mysterious stranger and Walter Matthau’s CIA agent to save her. Who can she really trust is the fun part of this film.
“Arabesque,” with its nod to an Alfred Hitchcock theme of an innocent protagonist thrust into perilous situations, would make a great double bill with “Charade,” which is truly a superior film.
Audrey Hepburn’s career is further celebrated with the screening of 1961’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” where she stars as enigmatic socialite Holly Golightly in this adaptation of Truman Capote’s renowned novella.
The naïve, eccentric Holly has weekly visits with an incarcerated mobster and gets involved with George Peppard’s struggling writer who moves into her apartment building. Hepburn’s style and performance earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
So far, the oldest film scheduled for the festival is 1932’s “Blonde Venus,” starring Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant in director Josef von Sternberg’s pre-Code drama about a nightclub singer whose efforts to support her ill husband turn into scandal.
Marlene Dietrich, who started her career as a chorus girl, returns to the stage billed as “Blonde Venus,” where she meets Cary Grant’s Nick Townsend, a wealthy politician and frequent patron of the nightclub.
The scandal for Dietrich’s Helen Faraday is when she starts an affair with Grant’s playboy, and after a lot of family drama she eventually makes her way to Paris.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.