A
Guide to the Rare and Unusual on TCM
By
Ed Garea
MORE
ON MYRNA
December
16: Tonight’s recommendation starts at 8 pm: Broadway
Bill, a Columbia film from 1934 directed by Frank
Capra. Warner Baxter is the son-in-law of business tycoon J.L.
Higgins (Walter Connolly). He hates running Higgins’ paper box
factory. He’d rather be out running his horse, named Broadway Bill,
for his first love is horse racing. Everyone in the family thinks
he’s a screwball except for sister-in-law Myrna Loy, who marches to
her own drummer. It’s a lovely little Capra comedy with matchless
performances from almost everyone in the cast. As it’s not shown
that often, it’s a film Myrna’s fans should not miss.
December
23: Beginning at 8 pm, the entire Thin Man oeuvre is being
shown. It goes against our rule of emphasizing only the lesser seen
and more unusual pictures, but we are talking about one of the
classics of the screen and the five excellent (well, three anyway)
sequels. For those who have yet to see any of the films in this
series, this night’s your chance.
December
30: Two interesting films tonight: Myrna produces excellent
support for star Doris Day in Midnight
Lace (1960) at 8 pm. Doris plays a woman who
can’t get anyone to believe she’s being stalked. It has a plot
that’s on the other side of preposterous and Day gives us
hysterical histrionics throughout. But as a Hitchcock imitation it’s
fun to watch and Loy acquits herself nicely. The other film to check
out is Lonelyhearts (1958),
which airs at midnight. Based on Nathanial West’s novella, Miss
Lonelyhearts, Montgomery Clift stars as a would-be reporter who
is assigned by his publisher Robert Ryan to write an
advice-to-the-lovelorn column, and becomes so involved with the
suffering of those who write to him that it nearly destroys him. One
of the women he becomes entangles with is an actress making her
screen debut – Maureen Stapleton, Edith Bunker herself. Myrna gives
her usual excellent perforate as Ryan’s alcoholic wife.
TCM
SPOTLIGHT: THE GOLDEN YEARS
December
20: At 8 pm it’s Sam Peckinpah’s wonderful Western, Ride
the High Country (1962) starring Randolph Scott
and Joel McCrea as two long-in-the-tooth ex-lawmen who have fallen on
hard times and sign up to escort a shipment of gold from a mining
camp up in the Sierras to the town below. The urge to steal the gold
is becoming too much for Scott, which leads to a rift with ex-friend
McCrea. Along to complicate things even further is the presence of
Mariette Hartley as a young woman running away from her overly stern
fundamentalist father. When her wedding to one of the miners goes
south at a drunken celebration she runs away with Scott and McCrea,
earning the wrath of the other miners. It’s a stylized take on a
familiar Peckinpah theme – the decline of the American West,
focused on the plight of his protagonists, two men who have survived
the chaos of their times but cling steadfastly to their ethics, each
one being an example to the other of what he might have been given
different circumstances. It’s Peckinpah at his best and a film that
should entertain even to those who aren’t crazy about the Western
genre.
December
27: For a change of pace try The
Whales of August (1987, midnight), a gentle drama
of two elderly sisters who have endured an uneasy co-existence over
the years. When it’s revealed that the sisters are played by
Lillian Gish and Bette Davis, the film becomes even more enticing.
The ladies are spending the summer together in a home owned by Gish
but sustained by the wealthier Davis, who is blind and become
embittered over the years. The drama takes place over the course of
one day near the end of the summer season, revolving around an almost
insignificant point: Gish wants to install a picture window to look
out on the sea, but Davis vetoes it, claiming they’re too old at
this point to be considering new things. Gish and Davis are simply
enchanting and they are supported by first-class performances from
Vincent Price, Ann Sothern and Harry Carey, Jr. It was Gish’s last
performance and she went out in style.
REGINALD
OWEN OR ALASTAIR SIM?
This
year TCM is airing both classic film versions of Charles Dickens’ A
Christmas Carol. Fans over the years have always split
over which was the better version, the 1938 MGM version starring
Reginald Owen as Scrooge, which will be shown on December
18 at 9 am, or the 1951 English version, from Renown Film
Productions and United Artists, which will be shown on December
22 at midnight with Alastair Sim as Scrooge? Don’t look to
me on this one. I love and recommend them both. There are slight
differences in both versions and each is gifted with wonderful
performances. In the 1938 version, Gene and Kathleen Lockhart play
the Crotchets with Ann Rutherford shining as the Spirit of Christmas
Past. The 1951 version has Sim as an even meaner Scrooge with Mervyn
Johns and Hermione Baddeley as the Crotchets. A suggestion:
Next year TCM should run both versions back to back with the
delightful Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol following.
We haven’t seen that one in a dog’s age. It’s always fun to
watch Sim in action. His performance as the sarcastic Inspector
Cockrill in the sublime mystery Green for Danger (1947)
set the stage for the later Inspector Morse character, played by the
incomparable John Thaw.
OUT
OF THE ORDINARY
December
18: Roberto Rossellini captures the essence and spirit of the
Allied occupation of postwar Italy in his superb 1946 episodic
drama Paisa (aka Paisan).
Six vignettes depict the heartbreak and hope that was postwar Italy.
As with Open City, Rossellini used a mostly
nonprofessional cast, along with documentary footage and a script
that was often improved on the spot, written by the director and his
friend Federico Fellini. Ironically, it did not do well at the box
office in Italy. The Italians were already tired of war stories. But
the French loved it and it did well in the United States. See for
yourself and marvel.
December
19: Federico Fellini made many great films during the ‘60s.
None were better than 8 1/2 in
1963. Marcello Mastroianni excels as Guido Anselmi, a famous film
director buoyed by the success of his recent film who suddenly finds
himself at a loss for new ideas. Hounded and nagged by everyone from
his wife to his mistress to the press and even his fans, he retreats
into a mix of memories of childhood and those of all the women he has
loved and lost. It’s autobiographical and is acknowledged to be
Fellini’s masterpiece by many and has many of his trademark
features, such as aerial shots, vertical zooms, lots of jump cuts,
and the Fellini fascination with the unusual, grotesque, bizarre, and
exotic which marks many of his films from La Strada to
Satyricon. The meaning of the title comes from the fact
that Fellini had made six features and three shorts, which add up to
7 1/2. Hence 8 1/2. The film has something of a
reputation of being hard to understand. Nonsense. Viewers can quickly
grasp its theme and plot.
PRE-CODE
December
18: Two great Pre-Codes from our Star of the Month,
Myrna Loy. At 5:00 pm, Myrna is a German spy working for Lionel
Atwill who falls for American medical student George Brent
in Stamboul Quest (1934).
Following at 6:30, Clark Gable is a young doctor who must choose
between his studies and his marriage to alluring society girl Myrna
Loy in Men in White(1934).
The film proved so popular that the Three Stooges parodied it in
their 1934 Columbia short Men In Black.
December
19: Jimmy Cagney and Ruby Keeler hoof it up while Joan
Blondell cleans house in Busby Berkeley’s delightful Footlight
Parade (1933), airing at 10 pm.
December
20: Irene Dunne and Richard Dix fight to survive in the
early days of the Oklahoma Territory in Wesley
Ruggles’ Cimarron (1931).
PSYCHOTRONICA
AND THE B-HIVE
December
17: The Stanley Clements era with the Bowery Boys commences
at 10:30 am with Fighting
Trouble (1956). Stanley, playing Stanislaus
“Duke” Covelske, tries to earn a living with Sach (Huntz Hall) as
news photographers.
At
2:45 am, troubled teenager Suzanne Ling sics her horde of pet
tarantulas on her enemies in the cheapie Kiss
of the Tarantula (1976). Best scene: A couple
making out in a car not noticing the eight-legged wonders crawling on
them. Following at 4:15 am is Alice,
Sweet Alice (1977). When people in an
Italian-American neighborhood are killed, suspicion falls on lonely
12-year old Paula Sheppard. A good shocker filmed in Paterson, N.J.
Young Brooke Shields is the first killed.
December
22: At 1:15 am, it’s Laurel and Hardy in the children’s
classic Babes in Toyland (1934).
Stan and Ollie are inept toy makers whose latest blunder saves the
day when the evil Barnaby (Henry Brandon) unleashes the bogeymen to
destroy Toyland.
December
26: An evening of apocalyptic films begins at 8 pm with
Charlton Heston fighting mutant vampires created after a biological
war in The Omega Man (1971).
At 10 pm, Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer are the only
survivors of a nuclear war in The
World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1959). Dial
ahead to midnight and it’s Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire,
and Anthony Perkins who are among the survivors of an atomic war
in On the Beach (1959).
At 2:30 am comes Five (1951)
from Arch Oboler, about the survivors of yet another nuclear war.
And, finally, at 4:15 am, Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace and Lynne
Frederick are among the few to survive an environmental holocaust
in No Blade of Grass (1970).
December
27: Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine make for a unusual pair
of bank robbers in AIP’s Bunny
O’Hare (1971) at 4:15 am. Davis was so unhappy
with the finished product that she filed suit for damages. Though she
dropped the suit, the damage was done.
December
31: The Bowery Boys are hired on as babysitters for a
temperamental child star in Hot
Shots (1956) at 10:45 am. And at 6:15 pm, it’s
a repeat showing of one of the greatest science fiction films ever
made, The Day the Earth Stood
Still (1951).
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