Fridays at 8pm | 29 Movies
It has been said that movies are like dreams, perhaps the most dreamlike of any art. And people will often say of a particularly intricate and vivid dream, “It was just like a movie.” No surprise, then, that so many movies incorporate not only dreamlike elements but actual dreams as a way to advance and inform a story or the fantasies their characters can escape into.
For this month-long series over five Fridays in January, TCM gathers more than two dozen films that include dreams as part of the plot and/or style and narrative form. Check the Schedule for a complete list of titles and showtimes.
The series starts off dark, as in noir, with nightmarish sequences to heighten stories of deception and murder. Alfred Hitchcock’s psychiatric thriller Spellbound (1945) showcases one of the most famous dream sequences in cinema history. Because dreams are, by the very definition of the term, surreal, why not get the most famous surrealist artist to design one? Especially for a story flooded with Freudian concepts. Reluctant producer David O. Selznick agreed to hire Salvador Dalí for the task, largely as a publicity gimmick, but balked at the 20-minute sequence delivered by the artist and production designer William Cameron Menzies, who was brought in to direct it while Hitchcock was away. The two minutes that made the final cut were as sharp and vivid as Hitchcock wanted but left out dream footage of Ingrid Bergman, who played the psychoanalyst hoping to cure patient (and love interest) Gregory Peck. Even Hitchcock had to rein in some of Dalí’s wilder ideas, such as having Bergman at one point covered in ants.
Other screenings on this night include the film noir classics Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Even B movies get in on the act: Nightmare (1956) opens with Kevin McCarthy playing a man who has a nightmare where his appearance in a mirrored room leads to a deadly murder. Upon escape and back in the real world, he awakes to find unexplained bruises and blood on his body along with a key from his dream. He enlists the help of his detective brother-in-law, played by Edward G. Robinson, to unlock the mystery of his nightmare.
Did it actually happen or…? That’s the burning question in several movies in the second Friday’s programming, some of them based on children’s literature, such as the Dr. Seuss adaptation The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) and Abbott and Costello’s take on the timeless fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk (1952). Of course, the night opens with the greatest “Was it all a dream?” movie ever made, The Wizard of Oz (1939), perhaps the closest story the U.S. has to a national fairy tale. L. Frank Baum wrote his classic 1900 novel as a straight-up fantasy, even having Dorothy return to the magical land repeatedly, but the studio, perhaps with an eye on previous disappointing box-office receipts for fantasy films, turned the whole story into a dream that Dorothy (Judy Garland) has after being knocked unconscious during a tornado. Today, we’d probably stick to the original and allow Dorothy to have her adventure on her own terms without the movie’s questionable moral lesson that we’d all be happier just to stay home.
The grown-ups take a few spins around dreamland, too. Carefree (1938) infuses a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical with some of the premise of a Hitchcock picture as shrink (Astaire) and patient (Rogers) fall in love in the midst of the talking cure. It was a bit of dream fulfillment for audiences, too, who finally — after five years and eight films — got to see the romantic duo in an extended kiss. The night also includes two other musicals. Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), adapted from the Broadway hit, swapped original star Ethel Merman for Lucille Ball and her impossibly Technicolor red hair along with Cole Porter’s full score with several newly composed songs. My Dream Is Yours (1949) is a star-is-born sort of tale that Martin Scorsese has identified as a major inspiration for his musical New York, New York (1977). Doris Day, in only her second screen role, reunites with the co-star of her debut a year earlier, Jack Carson. The two sing and dance through a dream sequence starring Bugs Bunny.
The third night features protagonists who use elaborate dreams and daydreams to realize their most lofty ambitions, whether it’s a meek, put-upon proofreader (Danny Kaye) imagining himself on brave adventures in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947); a hopelessly romantic young woman (Ginger Rogers) trying to decide which of three men to marry in Tom, Dick and Harry (1941); or a frustrated painter (Dean Martin) making it big in the comic book trade using the wild dreams of his roommate (Jerry Lewis) in Artists and Models (1955). There’s also a Dalí-like dream sequence for Rosalind Russell as a loyal wife driven to distraction by her husband’s lack of jealousy in The Feminine Touch (1941). Surely the quirkiest, most playful and surreal entry in the British New Wave of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s is Billy Liar (1963). The film features Tom Courtenay getting lost in his head even while wooing Julie Christie in one of her earlier roles.
The real treat of the night, however, is the peerless Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr. (1924). He plays a movie projectionist who falls asleep on the job and imagines himself entering the movie screen. Keaton uses this set-up not only for a superb illustration of skewed dream logic; it’s also a fascinating comment on film techniques (of which Keaton was a master) and montage editing. As each cut places him suddenly and precariously in a new shot — a garden wall, a busy city street, a mountain top, a jungle, the middle of the ocean, etc. — he must quickly adjust to his new circumstances. It’s a brilliant showcase for Keaton’s risk-taking athleticism.
January 24 kicks off with the 1955 film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s landmark stage musical from a decade earlier, Oklahoma!. By the time the movie was released, audiences were used to the idea of an “integrated” musical. i.e., a play with a dramatic through-line in which all the elements (dialogue, music, lyrics, set design, costumes) contribute to the development of the characters and the forward motion of the plot. But when the play was produced on Broadway, it was seen as something quite new. Contributing greatly to this theatrical revolution was the dream ballet created by acclaimed choreographer Agnes de Mille, who believed dance was not just entertainment but an insightful and affecting means of telling a story. The actors on stage were temporarily replaced by dancers who played out the central conflicts of the plot.
“The New York Times” called the ballet sequence a “first-rate work of art” and said it accomplished what “many a somber problem play” failed to convey “after several hours of grim dialogue.” De Mille also staged the dances for the film version. She and director Fred Zinnemann came up with a graceful way to transition between singing-acting lead Shirley Jones and dancer Bambi Linn, having them mirror each other momentarily before Linn rushes into the arms of her Curly (James Mitchell, subbing for Jones’ Gordon MacRae) and begins the dance.
Another silent comedy great, Charlie Chaplin, inserts a rather bizarre dream sequence into his tear-jerking, seriocomic The Kid (1921), using angels and demons in a brief exposé on society’s ills. The dream finishes with Chaplin as an angel shot down by police. Heaven plays a big part in the fever dreams of a few other films screening the same night: the all-Black musical Cabin in the Sky (1943), the Jack Benny comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) and the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy musical I Married an Angel (1942).
The universality of dreams and dream imagery is evident in the final night of programming featuring a few foreign films that use the device not just for fantasy, romance or comedy but to shed light on the human condition. In Peter Weir’s thriller The Last Wave (1977), lawyer Richard Chamberlain’s dreams of an apocalyptic flood not only presage impending disaster but also connect him to the spirituality of Australia’s Aboriginal people and the country’s colonial history. Ingmar Bergman uses nightmares of a deserted city to reflect on mortality and past regrets in Wild Strawberries (1957), a film that inspired elements of several Woody Allen films, most notably Deconstructing Harry (1997). Luis Buñuel, a master of surrealism throughout his extensive filmography, filmed a number of his own recurring dreams to take down the pretensions and petty concerns of the privileged class in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The entire movie has a dreamlike quality as a group of well-dressed and supposedly well-mannered people comically attempt over and over to have a meal together.
The dreams, fantasies and memories depicted in Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) link the creative struggles of a famed director (Marcello Mastroianni) with his inability to come to terms with his relationships with the women in his life. The dream sequences here are some of the most imitated and influential in world cinema, as any comparison between the openings of this film and master borrower Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) will demonstrate.
Our spotlight concludes with David Lynch’s singular fever vision Eraserhead (1977), described by the director himself as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” Most of Lynch’s films have the evocative imagery, rhythm and the unsettling effects of our deepest, darkest dreams (for the best example, see Mulholland Drive, 2001). This black-and-white picture, generally identified as a horror movie but arguably less easily categorizable than that, was Lynch’s first feature release and set the tone for his subsequent work. And who could ever forget the disturbing Lady in the Radiator and her musical exhortation that “In Heaven, everything is fine,”? The tune was later covered by bands ranging from The Pixies to Bauhaus to Modest Mouse.
