By
Ed Garea
NEWS
TCM
BIG SCREEN CLASSICS is featuring the 40th anniversary of
1978’s Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. It
will be screened at selected theaters on April 8 and 11.
And as we always says say: remember, no big-screen TV can match the
thrill of actually seeing a classic where it was meant to be seen –
in the theater. It’s a perfect way to relive seeing it on its
initial run or a chance to see it on the big screen after years of
watching it on the small screen.
Staff
member and valued friend Jonathon Saia has launched his very own
web site at www.jonathonsaia.com and
it’s a keeper. Don’t worry, he’s not leaving us. On the site is
a wonderful and entertaining series of short articles called “Females
of Film,” which covers everyone from Lois Weber to Frances Marion
to Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino. He also provides information on his
film projects. “The mission of my work is to explore the strange
and the unknown; the hated and the taboo; and to color outside the
lines with the brightest of crayons.” So take a peek. You know his
work from our site and his new site only continues the project and
the passion he has for film, it’s history, boundaries and
immense imaginative potential.
MICHAEL
CURTIZ
The
TCM Spotlight for April features the films of director Michael
Curtiz. Born in Budapest on December 24, 1886, he began acting in
films in 1912. Shortly after, he began his directorial career. Moving
to the U.S. in 1926 he began directing for Warner Bros., remaining
with the studio until the early ‘50s. After leaving Warner’s he
freelanced, and his last film was the 1961 Western The Comamcheros.
He returned to the director’s chair in 1967, helming an episode of
MGM’s family TV series Off
to See the Wizard on
ABC. While at Warner Bros, he directed such classics as Captain
Blood, The
Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee
Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mildred
Pierce and Flamingo
Road.
Curtiz’s true value was realized in the early ‘30s, when his
films saved the studio from bankruptcy.
April
4: Enjoy an entire day of
Curtiz films with the morning and afternoon devoted to such Pre-Code
classics as The Cabin in the
Cotton (7:30 am), The
Keyhole (10:15 am), Private
Detective 62 (11:30 am), The
Strange Love of Molly Louvain (12:45 pm), Doctor
X (2:15 pm; read our essay on it here), The
Mystery of the Wax Museum (5:00 pm), and The
Kennel Murder Case (6:30 pm; read our essay on
it here). The evening
features such Pre-Code fare as 20,000
Years in Sing-Sing (10 pm), Jimmy
the Gent (3 am), Mandalay (4:15
am), and Female (5:30
am).
April
11: More from Curtiz,
including The Adventures of
Robin Hood (1938) at 8 pm, Captain
Blood (1935) at 10
pm, and Charge of the Light
Brigade (1936) at 2:15 am. All the films this
night star the studio’s action star, Errol Flynn.
BERGMAN
April
1: TCM is airing a repeat showing of Ingmar Bergman’s
superb family drama Fanny and
Alexander at the usual time of 2 am. Oskar and
Emilie Ekdahl, along within their two children Fanny and Alexander,
comprise a happy theatrical family in Uppsala at the turn of the 20th
century. During the Christmas season Oskar falls ill and passes away,
leaving Emilie devastated. Shortly afterwards she marries Edvard
Vergerus, a rigid and demanding bishop. Their once happy home is now
cold and cheerless and the two children are miserable – especially
Alexander. Extremely imaginative, but also very stubborn, he
frequently butts heads with his unyielding stepfather. Isak, a
Jewish antique shop owner and longtime friend of the Ekdahl family,
agrees to help rescue the children and return them to the warmth and
happiness of the Ekdahl family residence. Fanny and
Alexander premiered in theaters in 1982 during the Christmas
season as a 3-hour release. The following year it was broadcast as a
5-hour miniseries on Swedish television. Many film buffs and critics
regard it as Bergman’s best.
LEILA
HYAMS
April
6: A sparkling green-eyed blonde who was one of the leading
ladies of Pre-Code cinema Leila Hyams was an excellent and
versatile performer, able to take on any role. TCM runs four of her
best-known movies, beginning at 8 pm with Freaks (1932).
Following at 9:15 pm is the classic comedy, Ruggles
of Red Gap (1935), starring Charles Laughton as
an English valet won in a poker game by rancher Charlie Ruggles. At
11 pm, when carnival barker William Haines is caught conning the
local cowboys, he's forced to work off his sentence on the open range
in Way Out West (1930).
Hyams is Molly, the owner of the ranch. And finally at 12:30 am,
Hyams is an admirer of magician John Gilbert, who is accused of
murdering her father in The Phantom
of Paris (1931).
BETTE
DAVIS
April
5: At 4 pm Davis is a flighty heiress who gets into a
marriage of convenience with reporter George Brent in the rarely
seen The Golden Arrow (1936).
A lame knockoff of It Happened One Night, it’s known
among film buffs as The Straw That Broke Davis’ Back (or Warner
Bros. contract). After she finished retakes on the film she
immediately fled to England and tried rot get out of her contract
with Warner’s. As she told an interviewer in England, “I knew
that, if I continued to appear in any more mediocre pictures, I would
have no career left worth fighting for.” She ultimately lost and
had to return to the studio, but in 1943, Olivia de Havilland
brought a similar case to court and won. Studio contracts were
limited to seven years, period. No more could the studios add
the time for a which a performer had been suspended to the end of the
contract.
OUT
OF THE ORDINARY
April
14: At 9:30 pm it’s derring-do in the air during World War
1 in Howard Hughes’ Hell’s
Angels (1930). Starring Ben Lyon and James Hall
as daredevil pilots and best friends and Jean Harlow perfectly awful
as Helen. Looking at her performance, it’s hard top believe that
only two short years later she would become the hottest thing in
Hollywood and a terrific actress.
At
3:45 am a common friend's sudden death brings three men (Ben Gazzara,
Peter Falk and John Cassavetes), married with children, to reconsider
their lives and ultimately leave together. But their regained freedom
will be short-lived in Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).
Read our essay on it here.
April
15: Rita Tushingham gives a sensitive performance as a teenager
impregnated by a sailor in the Kitchen Sink drama, A
Taste of Honey, Unable to rely on her alcoholic mother
(a marvelous performance from Dora Bryan), she turns to a gay
would-be textile designer, played by Murray Melvin. It’s a Must See
for those who haven’t had the pleasure.
At
8 pm Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers are a young couple who inherit
a debt-ridden old movie theater, appropriately nicknamed "The
Flea Pit," and the three eccentric senior citizens (Margaret
Rutherford, Peter Sellers and Bernard Miles) who work there in the
1957 comedy The Smallest Show on
Earth (aka Big Time Operators).
PRE-CODE
April
15: Barbara Stanwyck is a nurse who uncovers a scheme to
starve two children to death for their trust fund in William A.
Wellman’s 1931 Night Nurse at
6 am.
PSYCHOTRONICA
AND THE B HIVE
April
5: Is the new roomer at the boarding house none other than
Jack the Ripper? That’s the question poses in The
Lodger, a 1944 mystery from 20th Century Fox and
director John Brahm. Merle Oberon, George Sanders and Laird Crager
star.
April
6: Stranglers dominate the early morning fare with Night
of the Strangler (1975), starring Mickey Dolenz
(!?) at 2 am, and Victor Buono as a lab technician terrorizing
freeman nurses in The
Strangler (1964) at 3:45 am.
April
7: At 8 am B.O. Skunk tries desperately to win the love of a
girl, any girl, even going to such lengths as imitating Frank Sinatra
in Tex Avery’s Little
‘Tinker (1948)
Johnny
Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan return as the jungle’s
favorite couple in Tarzan’s Secret
Treasure (1941) at 10 am, preceded by a 1933 B&W
Popeye cartoon, Seasin’s
Greetink’s.
April
8: A night of Gidget starts at 8 pm with Sandra Dee as the
precocious teenager in 1959’s Gidget,
followed by Deborah Walley taking over the role in Gidget
Goes Hawaiian, from 1961.
April
10: Amnesiac Robert Webber stumbles right into a murder plot
in Hysteria (1965),
directed by Freddie Francis.
April
12: Robert Montgomery is so convincing as a psychopathic
murderer in Night Must Fall (1937)
that it sometimes seems as if he’s not acting. Rosalind Russell and
Dame May Whitty co-star. The fun begins at 6 pm.
April
13: Oliver Reed is a mad psychotherapist whose technique of
Psychoplasmics, a treatment that encourages patients to give form to
their inner conflicts and anger, has unexpected results in patient
Samantha Eggar in David Cronenberg’s The
Brood (1979) at 2 am. Following at 3:45 am,
Catherine Deneuve is a Belgian manicurist repelled by sex who slowly
goes mad when her sister goes on vacation with her married boyfriend
and leaves her alone in the apartment in Roman Polanski’s 1965
psychotronic masterpiece, Repulsion.
April
14: Tex Avery’s 1954 cartoon, Drag-a-Long
Droopy, airs at 8 am.
At
10 am it’s the last in MGM’s Tarzan series, Tarzan’s
New York Adventure (1942). The King of the Apes
would move over to RKO for a series of increasingly funny
B-features, but without O’Sullivan, who was glad to shed her sexy
frock. Preceding it is another B&W Popeye cartoon, Wild
Elephinks (1933).
SILENTS
PLEASE
April
8: Norma Shearer shines in a dual role as Molly, a woman of the
streets and Florence, the pampered daughter of an affluent judge
in Lady of the Night (1924).
As fate (and a shamelessly sentimental script, TCM’s Bret Wood
notes in his essay) would have it, both fall in love with the same
man: David (Malcolm McGregor), an ambitious young inventor. The film
sealed Shearer’s status as a leading lady at the recently formed
MGM and won the notice of Irving Thalberg, who Shearer would marry a
few years down the road.
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