TCM Classic Film Festival to Open With ‘Pulp Fiction’

Now’s the perfect time to cue up Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.”

A 30th anniversary, 35mm screening of Pulp Fiction — complete with an appearance by John Travolta — will kick off the 15th annual TCM Classic Film Festival at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on April 18, it was announced Thursday.

“Pulp Fiction is one of the most important and influential movies of the 1990s. It was Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus and the beginning of a well-deserved comeback for John Travolta,” TCM primetime anchor Ben Mankiewicz noted in a statement. “Like Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather, it changed our thinking about the type of stories Hollywood could tell.”

Reporting from Cannes in 1994, Duane Byrge of The Hollywood Reporter wrote in his original review that the Miramax film was “plugged with more good stuff than you fence after a riot. Some of Tarantino’s lines are so pure, you could mix ’em with 80 percent talcum powder and still make a big haul by selling in an alley somewhere. Visually, Tarantino’s got the thing covered too. The thing comes at you in even crazier ways than you’d expect from a room full of head cases.”

Tarantino received the Palme d’Or at Cannes for his work, then added the Academy Award for original screenplay. Pulp Fiction also was nominated for best picture but lost to Forrest Gump on Oscar night.

As previously announced, actor Billy Dee Williams and makeup artist Lois Burwell will be honored at the festival while author Jeanine Basinger will receive the Robert Osborne Award, which recognizes an individual who has helped keep the cultural heritage of classic film alive for future generations.

Williams will introduce Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), and Burwell will appear with Almost Famous (2000) and Lincoln (2012). Both also will sit down with a TCM host for conversations at Club TCM in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel.

Basinger, meanwhile, has chosen to introduce a screening of Westward the Women (1951).

TCM also announced seven additional titles that will screen during the festival: Grand Hotel (1932), National Velvet (1944), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Big Heat (1953), Sabrina (1954), Murder, She Said (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964).

The festival, with the theme “Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film,” runs through April 21. For more information, click here.