Uhm, no. The whole point of becoming an adult is not to do away with childish things but to get away with childish things. Yeah, sure, in my balding middle-age I’ve given up a few childish things like immunizations and optimism, but other than that most of my free time is dedicated to junk food, sitting too close to the TV and watching “things that are bad for me.”

And Bruce Lee movies. A regular rotation of Bruce Lee movies. Especially “Enter the Dragon.”

In the mid-to-late ‘70s this eleven year old would pack a lunch, grab his allowance, lie to his parents about going to the museum and jump on a downtown bus for a full day of losing himself in whatever schlocky, R-rated grinder was playing that Saturday afternoon. It was a glorious rotation of cheesy horror, kick-ass blacksploitation, urban actioners, and poorly dubbed kung-fu genre flicks, and before my family would move far away from the bus lines, the two best years of bang-for-the-buck movie-going I would ever experience.

The audience was half the fun and didn’t care that these were second, third and fourth run films they’d seen so many times before. Like me, most were underage but also there for an immersive good time. In the back rows the alcoholics slept one off and make-out artists practiced their art, while dead in the middle of the action I’d sit quietly munching peanut butter sandwiches lost in the wonder of it all. When the movies sucked – which was most of the time – the audience became the entertainment, but when the audience was quiet – enraptured — that meant more than any critics’ thumbs up … and never do I remember more silence than during these four minutes:

–

No wire work, no shaky-cam, no hyper-editing, nothing speeded up in post…  Other than sound-effects and rehearsal this is the real deal — all Bruce Lee – pulling off what for my money ranks as the greatest fight scene of its kind. I love how the camera stays on Lee; how he holds his ground as the faceless henchmen come to him; how Lee’s eyes focus on nothing so they can focus on everything; and oh how I love those nun chucks.

Most of all, I love that thirty-years on “Enter the Dragon” still thrills.

Don’t think. FEEL. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

The villain is Han (Kien Shah), a renegade Shaolin Monk who’s now the crime lord of his own private island where he traffics in drug-addicted sex slaves and holds a tri-annual martial arts tournament. To avenge his sister and restore honor to the Shaolin Temple Han disgraced, Lee (Bruce Lee) agrees to work with the authorities and enter the tournament undercover in order to gain access to the island and collect evidence.

Bruce Lee and John Saxon

The contestants are taken by water taxi to the island. Through flashback we learn that Roper (John Saxon) is a gambling addict with the mob looking to punch his ticket and Williams (Jim Kelly) is a wanted man after getting into a racial scuffle with a couple of racist cops. Both served in Vietnam together. Both hope a tournament win might mean a second chance.

It is difficult to associate these horrors with the proud civilizations that created them: Sparta, Rome, The Knights of Europe, the Samurai… They worshipped strength, because it is strength that makes all other values possible. Nothing survives without it. Who knows what delicate wonders have died out of the world, for want of the strength to survive.

To put these plot points into place, 45 minutes will pass before the tournament gets under way – about twice the time a modern actioner might take – but well worth it.

Jim Kelly talking to “Mr. Han-Man!”

Lee’s charisma and incredible fight choreography are why you watch, but the subplot involving Roper and Williams is the heart of the picture, the love story if you will, and why “Dragon” endures even more than Lee’s other films. Everything comes down to a point where Saxon’s desperate and somewhat sordid character is offered all he’s ever wanted and he’s ready to go for it until a particular moment arises when he’s asked to look the other way. His decision is the film’s one major turning point and a very satisfying one

Boards don’t hit back.

At sixty years of age and sporting a fierce widow’s peak, our villain Han isn’t what you expect. I’m unaware of any evidence that might back this, but I’ve always believed Han was meant to be a stand-in for then President Nixon. This was 1973 and most B-grinders came with a hearty dose of “social consciousness.” Going after The Man (and in the early ‘70s Nixon was The Man’s Man) not only appealed to audiences but served as a fig leaf of social importance for all the sex and violence.

Bruce Lee was never a great actor but on Oscar night you could set off the fire sprinklers in the Kodak Theatre and not wet half the charisma Lee carried so effortlessly. Lee was pure movie star with a one-of-a-kind screen presence. Forget the action scenes. Watch him move. Watch him cross a room. The cult of personality that grew up around his death might be bullshit, but Lee wasn’t. There’s never been anyone like him, and as a fight choreographer he is unequaled.

A good fight should be like a small play but, played seriously. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when the opportunity presents itself, I do not hit. It hits all by itself.

With some exceptions like “The Matrix,” showy stunts, effects and editing only serve to undermine fight sequences. The key to a successful screen brawl is plausibility and this requires precise choreography, a lot of rehearsal and the camera staying the hell out of the way. No matter how big or numerous his opponents, whether it was a single kick or the iconic mirrored climax, Lee’s incredible skills as a performer (he was an accomplished martial artist in real life) and choreographer sold it like few others.

“Enter the Dragon” is Bruce Lee’s masterpiece and while he would live to see the finished film he died of a cerebral edema before it made him the international screen star he worked so hard to become.

He was 32.

Jimmy Cagney in the early 1930s

Produced in 1949, within just a few minutes “White Heat” announces itself as something unlike anything that came before starting with the introduction of Verna Jarrett (29 year old Virginia Mayo), a striking, almost regal beauty shown fast asleep in a close up. Walsh immediately knocks the bark off his perfectly groomed leading lady by having her snore like a sailor after a three day bender. The message is clear: don’t believe everything you see. In just a few more minutes things will move even further beyond normal and straight into disturbing.  

You know something, Verna, if I turn my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there’d be a hole in it.

Verna’s 50 year old husband is Cody Jarrett (Cagney), a thumb-shaped psychotic holed up in the middle of nowhere with a half-dozen cabin-fevered gunsels eager to split the loot they scored in the opening sequence, an audacious train robbery that ended with Jarrett shooting two conductors in cold, grinning, steel-eyed blood. Jarrett’s five-foot-nothing stature means nothing. Swaggering brutality is his currency and though outnumbered he looms over his mutinous gang with the promise that any challenge can only end in death, very likely theirs. They back off.

I told you to keep away from that radio. If that battery is dead it’ll have company.

But the stress of confrontation brings headaches, horrible ones, migraines that throw Cody in a disoriented spin of suffering. He mewls like a cat, bounces off the walls and finds comfort in only one place: the lap of his aged mother (a ghoulish, shark-eyed Margaret Mycherly). Pouty and feeling sorry for himself, he sits there like a toddler with a boo boo as she rubs his ailing head.

Creepy can’t begin to describe the haunting scene of a middle-aged man cradled in the arms of his cold, manipulative mother. The staging of the moment is what makes it so effective and memorable. Nothing prepares you. No score or camera movement announce anything out of the ordinary and the actors play the scene as matter-of-factly as a walk down the street. The net effect is to make you feel like the unlucky witness to something very, very wrong.

Top of the world, Son.
Don’t know what I’d do without you, Ma.

“White Heat” has a whole lot of plot to get through so not much time passes before the cops find Cody and he lands in the Big House. Only thing is that he outsmarted them coppers with a pre-planned alibi to avoid a murder-one rap and the electric chair. Jarrett confesses to a nothing crime he set up in another state and in return receives an air-tight alibi and a two-year stretch. The Los Angeles Treasury Department is on to Cody, however, and arrange for undercover agent Vic Pardo (Edmond O’Brien) to befriend Cody as his cellmate.

And that’s all the plot you’re getting from me.

The Mighty Cagney and The Mighty Edmond O’Brien

Cagney is so good, so overwhelmingly, blazingly good that you have to watch the picture a few times before the greatness around him can come into focus and receive the appreciation deserved, starting with an outstanding story loaded with exciting, unpredictable turning points and paced with precision. Much of the production is filmed on location with a number of impressive shots of downtown Los Angeles.

It’s always “somebody tipped them.” Never “the cops are smart.”

Better still, ‘White Heat” takes you deep into the gears of the then-modern world of investigative procedure and does what great movies do, shows you around on a tour of how things work. The Treasury Dept. uses all kinds of interesting stuff to locate and track Jarrett: Fingerprinting, facial casts, this coolio gizmo called a spectrograph, and this even cooler thing called an oscillator that’s about the size of a toaster and works as an automobile tracking device.

Yes, on top of all that flinty dialogue, elaborate heisting, a visit to the Big House, and Cagney at his menacing, charismatic best, you’re watching “CSI: Fedora.”

You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood, would ya?
No, I’ll let ya warm up a little.

Max Steiner is his usual genius setting the proceedings to a score that enhances without ever getting in the way and as Verna, Virginia Mayo gives the performance of her career as the worst of the bunch. Other than her own pleasure, Verna is loyal to nothing and no one – just a beautiful, dangerous, not very bright, bundle of relentless need.

Edmond O’Brien – an Oscar-winning character actor who deserves more recognition – plays it cool and professional, an excellent plan for any actor hoping to not get swamped by a Jimmy Cagney who excelled at scene stealing, and was never above using a prop to do so. One of my favorite actorly moments is a scene where as soon as his lines begin Cagney grabs O’Brien’s prop (a stick). Believe me, Cagney understood the power of an actor fiddling with something, which brings me to that chicken leg…

There are three unforgettable scenes, my personal favorite being Jarrett’s cavalier revenge-killing of a man locked in a car trunk.

How ya doin’, Parker?
It’s stuffy in here, I need some air.
Oh, stuffy, huh? I’ll give ya a little air.

As Jarrett gives Parker a little air with four bullet holes through the trunk, he munches a chicken leg – the kind of touch that adds a vibrant dynamic to the scene whether you consciously notice it or not.

Remarkably, Cagney wasn’t even nominated for his now-iconic work here. Not to begrudge those who were but did any one of these nominees carry off a moment even close to this?

Or this?

“White Heat” remains as powerful and entertaining sixty-years on because the goals of its creators are grounded in the modest, timeless idea of gathering together the most gifted of artists to tell the best story possible. That might sound like an old-fashioned concept among the sophisticates, but long after the intellectual fad of postmodernism joins the hula hoop and the lava lamp, Cody Jarrett will live on.

8pm PST - The 27th Day (1957) – Aliens give five people from different nations the power to destroy their enemies. Cast: Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovec, Arnold Moss Dir: William Asher BW-76 mins, TV-PG

What makes the “The 27th Day” unique from the more renowned 1950s sci-fi flicks is how the story takes a few wild philosophical turns you never expect, especially if you’re familiar at all with the genre. Everything starts out like “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” with one of those morally superior aliens coming to tsk-tsk mankind for our warlike ways as though the reasons behind the Cold War didn’t matter, but then ends in a surprising but emotionally satisfying fashion that avoids all that cynical moral relativism which is not only unjust but cliche.

This story of five ordinary people given the power to destroy the world might not be as good as “Earth Stood Still,” but intellectually it’s just as fascinating and with a much stronger moral clarity. Leftists will write it off as “jingoism” and “anti-Communist propaganda” (translation: patriotism they don’t like), but there’s nothing to justify those complaints. Ultimately, “The 27th Day” isn’t about nation or country or race or politics; it’s about liberty and hope and how good and similar we all are. And don’t let the cheap, recycled effects fool you. This is an under-appreciated gem with superb performances and a compelling concept played out efficiently. 

For whatever reason, you won’t find this on DVD and TCM doesn’t screen it all that often, so  you might want to set the DVR if only in the hope of seeing something unexpected. And if I’m wrong, it cost you a mere 75 minutes.

11pm PST – Bugsy (1991) The famed gangster running the mobs in Los Angeles tries to turn Las Vegas into a vacation paradise. Cast: Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley Dir: Barry Levinson C-136 mins, TV-MA

Warren Beatty and Annette Bening smolder like Bogie and Bacall in a superb film that only gets better with each passing year. “Bugsy” is one of those rare period pieces made over the last 20 years where the casting’s so perfect no one looks silly in a fedora. Real grown ups placed in a beautifully designed production that never breaks the spell of time and place.

Beatty is marvelous as the charming mobster with a terrifying hair-trigger temper, and Bening is just as memorable as his equal in both the good and the bad. The first time Beatty’s Bugsy blows his stack is an unforgettable Jekyll and Hyde moment, but the heart of the story, the stormy love affair and visionary but doomed (at least for Bugsy) quest to transform Las Vegas makes for one of the last truly great biopics to come out of Hollywood.

The supporting cast shines, but especially Elliott Gould in a small but pivotal role as a sad sack gangster who knows he can always rely on Bugsy for … whatever. You’ll see what I mean.

A truly great film. Plenty violent, but a modern classic well worth your time.

7pm PST - You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) A Broadway dancing team splits up when the male dancer is drafted. Cast: Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Robert Benchley, John Hubbard Dir: Sidney Lanfield BW-89 mins, TV-G

Those 63 seconds say more about this charming film than any number of words ever could. Astaire and Hayworth were giants because in a simple scene with simple choreography, simple costumes, a simple setting and simple dialogue they still somehow managed to completely win you over. The way Hayworth looks at Astaire for those first few seconds is absolutely priceless. You can’t write chemistry and you can only barely direct it. What you need are movie stars, and Fred and Rita are immortals.

9pm PST - Sunrise (1927) – In this silent film, a farmer’s affair with a city woman almost destroys his life. Cast: George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston, Bodil Rosing Dir: F. W. Murnau BW-94 mins, TV-PG

Set your TiVo and prepare yourself for a silent film for those who don’t think they like silent films — what you might call a gateway drug.

Studio chief William Fox brought F.W. Murnau to Hollywood and practically handed his entire studio over to the German director, promising him anything he needed to make the film he wanted. The result was a commercial disappointment, but a pure masterpiece, easily one of the five best films ever made, and something so emotionally haunting it will stay with you for days afterward, or in my case, forever.

If it weren’t for the glorious years of the MGM musical, I would argue the art of film peaked with “Sunrise,” a triumph of visual poetry so achingly beautiful, so bewitching, so exquisite and visually affecting that you won’t feel like you’re watching a movie, but rather a dream, and at times a nightmare.

F.W. Murnau

Sadly, Murnau would only make three more films after “Sunrise” before being killed in a 1941 1931 road accident. But his legacy lived on through John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, and Raoul Walsh, four directors under contract with Fox and encouraged to learn from Murnau. Ford was especially impressed. So much so, in fact, that after he caught an early peak at some “Sunrise” footage he travelled to Germany to visit with the director. It’s hard to imagine a man like Ford deferring to anyone, but at the time Ford called “Sunrise” the greatest film he’d ever seen.  

Somewhere an alternate universe might exist where Murnau never was and those four directors never had a chance to learn from him and others from them.

Sounds like Hell for film lovers.

11:15am PST -  Alamo, The (1960) – Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie join the fight for Texas’ independence from Mexico. Cast: John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Frankie Avalon Dir: John Wayne C-203 mins, TV-14

John Wayne felt it was important enough to tell the story of the brave men of the Alamo that he nearly went bankrupt to fund this dream project he produced, directed, and starred it. This was something he willed into existence, forced into being using every ounce of juice he had as the biggest movie star in the world. Still, for the most part, he was out there on a limb, all on his own and it would take more than a decade of re-releases before the film would earn enough to call itself profitable. The film was popular enough, just too expensive. It was also nominated for 6 Oscars, including Best Picture.

“The Alamo” is not a great film, but it is a very, very good one — especially this version, Wayne’s longer cut. The Duke did a superb job directing the battle scenes, and everything leading up to the impressively staged climax is more hit than miss, but there are misses and a deliberate pace that may not be to everyone’s taste.

Because too many on the Left make a full time job of deconstructing and tearing down all that is good, the conventional wisdom that John Wayne was some kind of racist was so strong that for years my wife, who was born in Mexico, refused to watch this. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a proud, America-lovin’, Bush-votin’ right-wing extremist who jumped through all the hoops necessary to become a citizen and thinks those here illegally should be herded up and shipped back - but she can’t stand when movies portray Mexicans as greasy, gold-toothed alcoholics, which is what she was told to expect from Wayne.

Some years ago I finally convinced her to give it a look and of course she saw that the exact opposite is true. Wayne not only forgoes stereotypes, there’s a moment in the film when his characters stop to honor the brave men in Santa Ana’s army. It’s one of the stronger dramatic scenes and a display of the class and humanity that defined John Wayne.

3:15pm PST - Hell is for Heroes (1962) – A small U.S. squadron holds off the Nazis in a desperate last stand. Cast: Steve McQueen, Bobby Darin, Fess Parker, Harry Guardino Dir: Don Siegel BW-90 mins, TV-PG

No classic, but damn close and certainly a tough, engrossing WWII actioner, as though director Don Siegel teamed with Steve McQueen could come up with anything else. My favorite scenes involve a very young Bob Newhart putting the telephone bit that made him famous to good use as he fakes phone calls he knows the enemy is listening to in order to create the impression just a few guys, cut off and badly out-numbered, are something just a tad larger.

You look back on films like these and your memory recalls a rich, full, satisfying story. So it’s always surprising to see a run-time of 90 minutes, especially with so many bloated films today that eat up another forty minutes to tell half the story.

Steve McQueen. Yeah, we have some movie stars left, but he was the last of the gods.

Reagan, Jane Wyman, and Wayne Morris in Brother Rat

One of the primary elements that makes Turner Classic Movies so special is its lack of politics. Regardless of the film he’s introducing, Osborne keeps everything within a historical context even if what’s on that night’s schedule is political in nature. TCM is one of the great sources of pleasure in my life, and were it to go off on some ideological deep end… I don’t even want to think about it.

And I’m talking about the channel in general. Obviously, with Alec Baldwin co-hosting “The Essentials” for a season (and he’s a great choice) and with other guests, there have been political moments (both conservative and liberal) but overall TCM is a film lover’s oasis free from the nonsense of the day.

For this reason we should appreciate that TCM’s chosen star of the month for March is none other than Ronald Reagan, which means that every Wednesday night’s schedule is packed with Reagan’s films, including tomorrow tonight.

Naturally the Left has worked overtime to diminish and ridicule Reagan as a second-rate actor, but the truth is that he had a respectable career, made a number of very good films, and projected an impressive presence on the screen. No one, including Reagan himself, would argue he was the second coming of Gary Cooper, but had Reagan not gone on to become one of our greatest presidents, his film career would’ve been a respectable life’s accomplishment all on its own — not to mention his important tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Would TCM recognize Reagan as “Star of the Month” had he not been president? Probably not. But that’s what I love about the channel. Reagan was a United States President who happened to star in a number of old films. Republican or Democrat, you honor that, even if the man’s politics aren’t yours.

Tomorrow night TCM airs six Reagan features and a short. If forced to choose one, it would be “Brother Rat” (5pm PST), an energetic and entertaining military comedy starring the gorgeous Priscilla Lane, and in his film debut, Mr. Eddie Albert. The film also co-stars Jane Wyman, an Oscar-winner and future Mrs. Ronald Reagan. They married just two years later and if memory serves, this is how they met.

Reagan’s not the film’s star (Wayne Morris is), but Reagan’s flair for comedy is obvious enough that someone at Warner Bros. must’ve said, “This guy’s got a future.”

If they only knew….