Indeed, even a momentous event  like the death of Osama Bin Laden could just barely penetrate TCM’s  mix of Hollywood fantasy and scholarship. For me, the news first came as I overheard another filmgoer during an intermission of “West Side Story,” which I had popped in on just to see how good the 70mm print was, say to another. “No, he’s really dead.” I figured it was another classic film star gone forever. George Chakiris, who played Sharks leader Bernardo, had introduced the screening, but how were Jets Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn doing?

Walking away from the theater and heading toward the closing night party, I saw a lone car driving quickly down Hollywood Boulevard with its occupants yelling and waving American flags. Had the U.S.A. won an important soccer game or something? I eventually figured out what had happened, but it took hours for the news to sink in and, while people were mentioning it, most of the conversations I heard at the closing night party were about movies, understandably enough. The weird part was how several of the films I had seen dealt with the bloodier aspects of 20th century world history, which doesn’t seem to be letting up all that much here in the 21st.

Though you could see both “The Godfather” and “Taxi Driver” this year at the festival, in a funny way no film was more shockingly honest about violence than a film I’d managed to catch a second screening of just a few hours prior. “Went the Day Well,” a shockingly blunt and hugely effective piece of British wartime propaganda from 1942. Well regarded in England, the film, from the famed Ealing studios, was to some degree overtaken on its initial release by good news in the allied war effort and has become obscure even among the cinephile set. That may change as it is about to be re-released by Rialto Films. Directed by Brazilian expatriate Alberto Calvacanti and drawn from a short story by Graham Greene, “Went the Day Well” opens with a resident of a British town proudly telling us how several German names ended up in the town cemetery after it was the focal point of an abortive invasion.

From that opening, you’d have every right to expect to a tale of plucky Brits keeping a stiff upper lip as they bravely outwit the cruel Nazis. That’s what you get, more or less, but the surprise here is howviolent the film is by standards of the time and place it was released — enough to draw audible gasps from a modern day audience. The English have historically been much harsher on film violence than most other countries and it’s easy to imagine that the film might well have been effectively banned or severely cut if it wasn’t government sanctioned propaganda. It’s far from graphic, of course, but it’s bluntness is a real surprise to anyone familiar with films of the era.

More conventionally for a British propaganda film, it’s one with a collective protagonist, in this case an assortment of ordinary British people of various classes. The cast features numerous actors that looked vaguely familiar to this classic film fan, but few I could pick out of line-up. That doesn’t matter because most of them are doing very good work creating well-rounded charactes. I did recognize David Farrar from “Black Narcissus,” an actor with slightly odd rhythms,  and was wowed by a young Harry Fowler, a real treat as a borderline juvenile delinquent with heroic tendencies that I would have loved to see an entire film about. (Today, Fowler is probably best known for his uncredited bit in “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which Peter O’Toole teaches a disbelieving William Potter the not-so easy “trick” to putting out a match with your fingers.)

Perhaps surprisingly for a classic film festival, it’s possible that this year tales pitting the West against Soviet-style communism seemed to outnumber movies about World War II’s fight against fascism. 1934’s “British Agent,” made by a l0w-budget division of Warner Brothers, is the sort of curiosity only a real film geek can love and a real relic of pre-war confusion about where the Soviets fit it into a quickly realigning Europe.  Despite two very good leads in Leslie Howard and Kay Francis, who is assigned a next to impossible role, and first class production values overseen by director Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood”) the movie only works as a historical curiosity, though on that level it’s pretty darn interesting.

Technically an espionage tale, “British Agent” is really more of a romantic melodrama about a British diplomat (Howard) whose careless habit of decoding foreign cables in a loud voice leads to his new girlfriend (Francis) hearing some sensitive news. Since she’s not just his ladyfriend but Nikolai Lenin’s secretary, and he’s willing to foment a counter-revolution if it’ll keep Russia in World War I, it becomes a sticky wicket. The film is often criticized as jingoistic because of Howard’s ruthlessly Angl0centric behavior.

However, “British Agent” been better written, I think it would be read today as more as a realistic depiction of real politik from a frankly British point of view. It certainly makes no clear attempt to demonize the Soviets, who were still a year or two away from launching the infamous “great purges” of the 1930s, which killed millions. In fact, it’s oddly soft on the already not-so-swell human rights record of the early Soviet Union and even portrays a Stalin-like character as a not entirely bad bloke.

A very different kind of outsider’s take on the Russian revolution is offered in “Reds,” but here the movie itself was somewhat eclipsed by a very rare post screening appearance by the film’s director, co-writer and star, Warren Beatty, being interviewed by Alec Baldwin. It was high comedy as fans of Beatty were treated to the actor-producer-director’s apparently inborn inability to answer a simple question with a straight answer. He did, however, promise a return to filmmaking now that his children were old enough to be tired of him.

The movie itself is a romantic melodrama-cum-biopic, starring Beatty as radical American writer John Reed, who wrote the acclaimed history, 10 Days That Shook the World — which I actually managed to wade through after seeing “Reds” the first time — and wound up being the only American buried in the Kremlin. Co-starring Diane Keaton as his sometimes estranged life partner and fellow writer-activist, Louise Bryant, “Reds” is fairly straightforward in its depiction of both the ups and downs of radicalism and relatively blunt about the state-sponsored terror that arose early on in the Soviet Union. It won’t surprise Beatty’s many conservative detractors that it’s also pretty blunt about the lack of real civil liberties in Woodrow Wilson’s America.

As an ambitious Hollywood entertainment, the first half is thoroughly engaging and high on witty dialog. The second half is a bit more of a slog as the story takes us to more chilly emotional and geographic climes, but the entire effort is peppered with strong supporting performances. Chief among them is a restrained Jack Nicholson, before he’d developed some of his more recent bad acting habits, as playwright Eugene O’Neil, Maureen Stapleton as legendary anarachist earth-mother Emma Goldman, and the ever-great Gene Hackman in a two-scene cameo as a not-at-all-radical newspaper editor. Keaton and Beatty don’t make any attempt to veer away from their usual star personas and are not afraid to play up the comedic aspects of the story, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

If Warren Beatty was reasonably honest about the inhumanity of Soviet-style communism, Billy Wilder waged a hilarious iced Cold War against it in his semi-forgotten classic, “One, Two, Three.” As the very entertaining Michael Schlesinger pointed out in a funny live intro, it’s the kind of late-career summing up film for Wilder that “North by Northwest” and “Rio Bravo” were for Wilder’s peers, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. True, it’s a lot less well known than those two classics and perhaps just a hair or two lower on the rung of absolute cinematic greatness — except I don’t quite believe that. Like Schlesinger, I love this movie beyond all reason, even it’s too-silly, reality-breaking jokes.

Drawn from a one-act play by Hungarian author Ferenc Molnár, which I’d love to read or see in translation, “One, Two, Three” stars James Cagney as a manic Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who is not about to let his bosses’s teen daughter (Pamela Tiffin) and her sudden marriage to an ardent East German commie (Horst Buchholz) drag down his corporate ambitions. Aside from what it bought from Molnar, it features borrowed and refurbished characters and plot elements from such past Wilder classics as “Ninotchka,” which Wilder co-wrote in 1939, as well as “Some Like It Hot,” which was only a few years old in 1961.

Like “Hot,” it’s one of the very few true film farces — a very specific type of comedy — that actually works. (“A Fish Called Wanda” might have been the last really effective movie farce.”) Central to its genius is an absolutely brilliant performance by Cagney that fuel’s the film’s breakneck pace, which is vastly more caffeinated than a case full of Coke. It’s exhililirating to watch but apparently the filmmaking process — made more difficult by the reported obnoxiousness of co-star Horst Bucholz and the fact that the film was actually made as the Berlin Wall was being constructed, setting the stage for an actual Cold War crisis — was so exhausting that when Cagney heard a friend talk about taking a relaxing boat trip, he was so envious he decided to retire for the next twenty years.

It was one very well-earned retirement. Watch “One, Two, Three” and you’ll see why. True, he already had some competition from a certain James Brown, but every moment Cagney is on screen he’s the hardest working man in show business.

If you’re betting on this weekend, you should probably demand some odds if your choice for the #1 spot is not “Just Go With It.” At least on paper, this is a smartly designed movie in terms of attracting a mass audience. To be stereotypical about it, there’s a little romance for the women, and little raunchy comedy for the men and a slightly unusual pairing of rom-com reliable Jennifer Aniston and raunch-com superstar Adam Sandler.

The cinematic seers and soothsayers referenced over at the L.A. Times and THR differ only very slightly in suggesting that the comedy from Sony/Columbia, will do something in the neighborhood of $30 million, or perhaps a bit more. Neither Aniston nor Sandler have ever been critical darlings and their latest outing isn’t changing that.

The strange aspect of this is that the film is an unheralded remake of 1969’s “Cactus Flower,” which had a screenplay adapted by the later-career collaborator of Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, and starred Walter Matthau and my hugest crush ever, Ingrid Bergman, in the roles now inhabited by Sandler and Anniston. I’ve liked both Sandler and Anniston in movies from time to time but, my God, talk about devolution. I’ve never seen model-turned-actress Brooklyn Decker in anything, so I’ll spare her the comparison to Goldie Hawn, who won an Oscar for her role.

Meanwhile, there’s more than a little mystery about just how much Paramount’s “Justin Beiber: Never Say Never” will make. Apparently, Beiber’s very young, very female fan base is defying marketers’ ability to measure and predict the results for this 3D docu-concert flick. The really weird part of all this is that, of all four movies being released this week, the biographical documentary has the best reviews with a respectable enough 64% Fresh rating over a Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. A sad commentary, perhaps, or just another sign of the show biz apocalypse. Could this film actually top the week’s box office? Probably not, but never say “never.”

Next is the 3D animated comedy, “Gnomeo and Juliet.” Disney apparently wanted to keep this one at arm’s length and is releasing it through Touchstone, usually reserved for racier properties, despite the film’s G-rating. My hunch is that animation chief John Lasseter felt the rom-com suitable for the very young wasn’t quite up to snuff all around. The reviews, however, are not completely awful and the voice cast — which includes James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Sir Michael Caine, Dame Maggie Smith and, in a voice-acting debut, Jason Statham — is beyond first rate. It also boasts music by Elton John and parents can also feel like they’re prepping their kids for Shakespeare even if this is comedy and not tragedy. So, the guess of $15-20 million seems reasonable enough to me.

Finally, we’ve got swords, sandals, Channing Tatum, and Jamie Bell in “The Eagle.” No one seems very excited about this costume actioner and that non-excitement seems to be communicating itself through some underwhelming box office guesses to match its deeply “meh” notices.

In limited release in some 16 theaters according to Box Office Mojo, the world always needs a good, or half-way decent, comedy and the large majority of critics seem to agree that “Cedar Rapids” is just that. With a cast of tip-top comedy veterans including Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, and Anne Heche, among others, it’s hard not to have an upbeat attitude about this one.

One-quarter Japanese, Filipino, Cheyenne-Indian, and Scots-Irish, her story included a childhood stay in Manzanar, one of the internment camps where all Japanese-Americans on the West coast were illegally forced to spend World War II. She was a victim of a childhood rape who, she said, eventually tracked down all her attackers. That anger would later find an outlet in her work, to say the least.

Her performing career began with notoriety as an exotic dancer and martial artist. A gig posing erotically for photographs by aging silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd led Lloyd to suggest a career in movies. She eventually made a brief appearance in Billy Wilder’s “Irma La Douce” and that was followed by her bone-crunching interpretation as the villainous/anti-heroic Varla in Russ Meyer’s insane mix of sexual innuendo and, for the time, shocking violence. She would likely have appeared in later Meyer films, but she was unwilling to do the kind of nudity that was his usual calling card. A certain amount of tragedy followed her later in life and her 1970s career was cut short by a bullet wound, her children, and a second career as a nurse.

Tura wasn’t Dame Judi Dench, but then Dame Judi is no Tura Satana. She was one very cool, very brassy woman who held an audience’s attention in a way that was entirely unique to her and entirely unforgettable.

For more, please do check out some of the links at MUBI and also Kimberly Lindberg’s really great 2007 tribute and bio. After the flip, I have a few key moments of Satana.

Here’s the “Faster” part.

Here’s the “Kill! Kill!” part.

And here’s here in a somewhat more “pussycat”-esque role from Ted V. Mikel’s pre-“Charlie’s Angels” “The Doll Squad” (NSFW for nudity of the pasties-covered sort).

And she never lost the fire.

Looking at past selectees, 26 year-old billionaire Zuckerberg is hardly the only one to have a movie made about his exploits. In terms of sheer footage, he’s got nothing on such occasional film lead figures and frequent supporting players as Nelson Mandela, John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi and, most frequent of all, Adolf Hitler.

What is unique about Zuckerberg is that “The Social Network” came out the same year as his selection and, in a peculiar way, probably helped him to get it. Reading the Time article about Zuckerberg by geek journalist and fantasy novelist Lev Grossman, I can only marvel at some very shrewd PR work by someone. The article goes out of its way to present a highly sympathetic alternative from the “angry-robot” of the movie to a figure more akin to the stiff but kindly Tin Woodman. If writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher portrayed Zuckerberg as a bit like the treacherous Ash from “Alien,” Grossman turns him into the quirky but lovable Data from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The words “Eduardo Saverin” and the legal troubles portrayed in the film are never mentioned in the online version of the article that I read.

I strongly suspect Zuckerberg’s knowledge of movie history doesn’t extend much further back than “Alien.” However, even with all the image rebuffing a billionaire’s money and power affords him, I’m sure he’d prefer the old days of movie biopics where, if powerful celebrities were portrayed at all, they were portrayed positively. Not only were possibly imaginary warts not added, as they might have been by Sorkin and Fincher, very real ones were actively removed.

I’ve never seen it, but check out the trailer below for Billy Wilder’s 1957 biopic about perhaps the most ironically similar Time Person of the Year (back when it was “Man of the Year”) to Zuckerberg, aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh. As the L.A. Times reminds us, Lindbergh was also the first person chosen and the only one younger than the Facebook fonder. What Zuckerberg feels he is doing to bring people together virtually, Lindbergh was instrumental in doing physically by demonstrating that a nonstop flight from New York to Paris was possible. At this point in history at least, in some ways Lindbergh’s achievement still dwarfs Zuckerberg’s. That may change fairly soon, but there’s no doubt what Lindbergh did commanded a huge personal risk and, eventually, a personal price with the most infamous kidnapping and murder case in American history.

Ironically, while it might said that the Jewish American Sorkin went hammer and tong against the Jewish Zuckerberg, Billy Wilder by all accounts went easy on the famous flyer when, under the circumstances, it would be entirely understandable for Wilder to despise Lindbergh. Working thirty years after the famous flight of “Lucky Lindy,” Wilder was able to completely ignore Lindbergh’s highly controversial early opposition to World War II and qualified support for Hitler as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, his antisemitism, white supremacist beliefs (though hardly unusual at the time), and links to the more openly Jew-hating Henry Ford. Wilder you see, was not just a liberal Jew who advocated for U.S. involvement in the war, but an actual escapee from Hitler’s Europe whose immediate family perished at Auschwitz.

If there was any revenge by Wilder at all, star James Stewart was nearly 50 when the movie was released, double the age Lindbergh was when he came to fame. Jessie Eisenberg might be, unusually for the movies, smaller and less physically fit looking than the real-life Zuckerberg, but at least he’s still only 27.

The trailer that came out last night for “No Strings Attached” isn’t terribly unfunny. It also isn’t all that terribly funny or compelling and, in my view, there’s mostly one reason for that and he’s winking at you right now. See if you agree.

Now, we move along to today’s Red Band (and hence a bit mildly NSWF) trailer for the similarly themed movie with the title you knew someone was going to use: “Friends With Benefits.”

Not necessarily a work of genius but pretty entertaining stuff that had me laughing out loud right at the end. The difference? Well, it’s pretty clear that we have a leading man issue. Though I might be tempted to argue he’s a better producer than director, Ivan Reitman has certainly proven he can make a very decent, or better than decent, comedy. However, Billy Wilder, himself would have probably made a mediocre film if the studio saddled him with an Ashton Kutcher equivalent. Natalie Portman‘s a very good actress who I’m sure will bring out the best in Kutcher, but his best, as far as I can tell, isn’t good.

Starting out as a teen idol, some initially dismissed Justin Timberlake in much the same way I still dismiss Kutcher and, before I actually saw him in anything, I might have expected to feel the same. Funny part is, Timberlake turned out to be a hard working and very likable actor, and his notices for “The Social Network” indicate he’s going to continue to be moving up. He also he has no problem making fun of himself and his career so far. Here, it really pays off and with Mila Kunis — another actor who’s turned out much better so far than I originally expected — he’s really got something to work with. A wise choice by “Easy A” director Will Gluck.

So, my advice to directors considering casting choices is clear: seek the Timberlake; avoid the Kutcher.

H/t Screencrave and /film.