A
Guide to the Rare and Unusual on TCM
By
Ed Garea
CONTINUING
WHERE WE LEFT OFF LAST MONTH...
Last
month we made it through 28 of the “31 Days of Oscar,” picking an
Oscar winning or nominated film for each day of the month. As there
are three days to go in March, we shall begin this month with the
continuation of last month’s format.
March
1: Today is packed full of excellent movies. There are four
from which to choose: Two
Women (2:30 pm), Ugetsu (4:30
pm), Umberto D (6:15
pm), and Vertigo (10:00
pm). You really can’t go wrong with any of them, but if I had to
choose only one, I think I would go with Two
Women. Though as a film it’s the weakest of the
four, it benefits from having Sophia Loren’s best performance on
film, and for that reason alone I recommend it.
March
2: My choice this day is the often overlooked, but
brilliant What Price
Hollywood? (1:30 am) Expertly directed by George
Cukor, this is the story of a waitress (Constance Bennett) and the
drunken director (Lowell Sherman) who mentors her and turns her into
a star. Said to have been based by writer Adela Rogers St. John on
the marriage of silent screen star Colleen Moore and alcoholic
producer John McCormick, it went on to inspire the much better
known A Star is Born (said to have been based
on the marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay) in 1937. Produced
by David O. Selznick, it was the first “inside Hollywood” film to
treat its subject reverentially, and doesn’t hit one false note
along the way.
March
3: Out
of all the day’s offerings, my choice in Jacques Demy’s The
Young Girls of Rochefort from
1967, which airs at midnight. The director’s homage to the grand
MGM musicals of the late ‘40s and ‘50s, it employed the same
splashy colors as did The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964),
but this time the storyline is much lighter, the songs peppier and
more traditionally interspersed with the dialogue. It stars Gene
Kelly, Danielle Darrieux and George Chakras, but there real reason to
see it is for the Dorleac sisters, Francoise and Catherine (Deneuve).
A more beautiful and enchanting pair of sisters never existed (No,
not even Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine) and watching them
work their charm makes us only realize the loss we suffered when
Franchise Dorleac met her death in an auto accident at the age of
25.
OUT
OF THE ORDINARY
March
5: A wonderful Danish double-feature begins at 3 am with
Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s
Feast (1987). Based on the novel by Karen Blixen
(Isak Dinesen), who is perhaps best known in this country for Out
of Africa, it’s the story of two sisters in a remote 19th
century Danish village who lead a very rigidly structured life that
is centered around their father, the local minister and the church.
Although both have had opportunities to leave the village (one by
marrying a young army officer and the other by marrying a French
opera singer), in both cases their father stepped in to quash their
plans, with the result that they spent their lives caring for him.
Now that he is deceased the sisters hire a French servant, Babette
Hersant, to cook and look after the house. When Babette suddenly
comes into good fortune, she wants to repay the sisters for their
kindness by cooking a French meal for them and their friends on the
100th anniversary of their father’s birth. That’s all I’ll give
away. Tune in and you won’t be disappointed.
Following
at 5 am is Carl Dreyer’s classic, Gertrud,
from 1964. Rather controversial in its day, it concerns a woman who
places her notion of ideal love above everything else – and
suffers immense disappointment because of her choices. Gertrud, a
former singer, is married to politician Gustav Kanning, who, she
claims, puts his work before everything else – in particular, her.
She wants a man who will put love before everything else. Her motto
in life is “Amor omnia,” love is all. She leaves her husband for
composer Erland Jansson, and at first, everything is fine until she
discovers that he only became involved with her to boost his own
stock. She leaves him and journeys to Paris with an old friend to
devote herself to study. She had confided to him that she had the
misfortune only to love men who were incapable of understanding her
or unwilling to give themselves completely to her. Thirty years
later, Axel, the friend, visits her in her hometown and gives her a
copy of his new book. But what seems to be a happy ending is
shattered when she intuits that he wants his old letters back. She
hands them over and he throws them into the fire in front of her
before taking his leave. But before he asks through the door she
reads to him a poem about love, written when she was just 16. Her
uncompromising position on love may be a reflection of Dreyer’s own
position on his films. At any rate, the film is typical Dreyer:
lengthy, with some shots running to 10 minutes, superbly acted, and
paced like a snail running for its life. Though panned at first by
most critics, it has gained in stature over the years and now is seen
as one of the director’s finest efforts. It was also his last film.
March
8: We now go from last to first in a sense, as director
Agnes Varda’s first effort, La
Pointe Courte, is airing at 11 am. A director’s
first film is not so much a statement as a promise of things to come,
and with Varda, it’s a large promise indeed that was magnificently
fulfilled over the course of her career. Named after the district in
France where it takes place, the film interweaves two stories that
are connected only by where they take place, a small fishing
community in Sete, a Mediterranean city, located in the southeast of
France. One story concerns the experiences of local citizens as they
go about their jobs, dealing with the petty bureaucrats and their
rules that only make staying in business harder to do. The other
story is about a young Parisian couple, known as Him and Her, as they
cope with a growing marital crisis. He grew up in La Pointe Courte
and loves its sights and sounds, while she was raised in Paris, with
her tastes reflecting those of her cosmopolitan environment. To try
to set things right, they visit the husband’s old neighborhood,
talking their way through their differences.
Varda centers the
movie’s drama in a series of small, but vitally important
questions, such as, with regard to the first story thread, of whether
the man will allow his daughter to marry the man she loves, a man the
father regards as a milquetoast. Will the police crack down on the
fisherman who secured his shellfish from an off-limits stretch of
water? And finally, will our big city couple reconcile their
differences or split up? The answers to these questions are set
against the backdrop of a water-jousting tournament that actually
takes place in Sete each year. Varda is at her best when underlining
the differences between the natives and the visitors, stopping the
city folks short of making the locals seem like ignorant yokels;
instead subtly emphasizing the commonality of both lifestyles. It’s
a film that once seen, tends to stay with the viewer like a good
hearty meal and its influence can be seen in her later works, as it
represented a world-view she never disowned.
March
15: At 3:30 am TCM is showing Rene Clements’s thought
provoking Les Maudits (The
Damned). The 1947 films set during the last days of the Third Reich,
as a group of high-ranking Nazis and French collaborators board a
U-boat in Oslo heading for South America. The film’s narrator
(Henri Vidal) is a doctor who has been kidnapped to tend to the ill
Hilde Garosi (Florence Marly), the wife of one of the passengers and
the lover of another. Realizing that once the woman recovers his life
is forfeit, the doctor tries various ruses to stay live, all to no
avail. We discover that the passengers are on a mission to continue
the war in South America, but as the voyage goes on the mission
begins to deteriorate once they learn that Berlin has fallen and that
a message has gone out for all U-boats to return to port. The film is
firmly in the tradition of claustrophobic dramas such as
Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, with the audience guessing
who and who does not make it to the destination. It is a gripping
film, notable for its depiction of a World War II U-boat and its
tracking shots through the boat. Fans of war films should take this
one in.
PRE-CODE
March
10: The seldom shown Bureau
of Missing Persons (1933) airs at 7:45 am. Pat
O’Brien stars in this comedy-drama as Butch Saunders, a
hard-working detective in the robbery division transferred because of
his brutal tactics. Lewis Stone is his captain. Bette Davis is Norma
Roberts, who reports her husband missing, and Butch takes the case,
falling for Norma along the way, despite some glitches in her
background. Realizing that she’s playing him, Butch sets a trap to
catch her. Look for Glenda Farrell, who steals the movie as Butch’s
estranged wife.
March
13: Katharine Hepburn plays a strong-willed and independent
aviatrix who falls in love with middle-aged nobleman and politician
Colin Clive in Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher
Strong (1933), which will be shown at 6:15 am. It’s
not Arzner’s best, though a lot of the problems have to do with
casting the stodgy Clive as a man of passion and the fact that
Hepburn had the audacity to tell Arzner how to direct her picture.
There is zero chemistry between the two stars, as Hepburn’s Lady
Cynthia Darrington chooses to end her life by crashing her plane
rather than bring disrepute to her lover. Look for Margaret Lindsay
in an unbilled role.
March
14: Joel McCrea is a hardworking fisherman who has to take
on the villainous Gavin Gordon for control of a fishery and the hand
of beautiful society woman Jean Arthur in The
Silver Horde (1930), airing at 9:15 am. Evelyn
Brent is excellent as dance hall gal Cherry Malotte, who proves to be
McCrea’s true love.
A
real gem is being shown at 1:30 pm: The
Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), from Mack Sennett and
starring W.C. Fields as Yukon prospector Mr. Snavely, who lost his
only son, Chester (George Chandler) to the temptations of the big
city. Now, years later, Chester, released from prison, has come home
to Ma and Pa in this parody of the melodramas that were the rage of
low-budget movies. Definitely worth a glance, especially for Fields
and his now famous line, “It Ain't a Fit Night Out for Man or
Beast.”
PSYCHOTRONICA
AND THE B HIVE
March
4: At 10:30 am TCM begins showing us another long-running
B-series with Maisie (1939),
starring Ann Sothern as a Brooklyn showgirl with a heart “of spun
sugar” that gets herself into various adventures around the world.
Created by MGM producer J. Walter Ruben and originally intended for
the late Jean Harlow, Ruben found his star in the sassy and
intelligent Sothern, who had recently joined the studio after a stay
at RKO, where she was going nowhere fast, stuck as a supporting
character in B-pictures. Ironically, the film was a hit and typecast
Sothern in yet another B-series, albeit a more lavishly produced one.
The Maisie series became so popular that letters to the star, simply
addressed to “Maisie, U.S.A.” found their way to the MGM studio.
In the opener, Maisie Ravier, stranded and broke, lands in a small
Wyoming town where she meets "Slim" Martin (Robert Young),
the foreman on a Clifford Ames’s (Ian Hunter) ranch. Slim doesn’t
trust women, being as one once did him some serious hurt, and orders
her out of town. But Ames, who is trying to patch up his marriage to
Sybil (Ruth Hussey), hires Maisie as Sybil’s maid. Of course Maisie
and Slim fall in love and Sybil tries to disrupt things, and Maisie
leaves in anger after quarreling with Slim. Ames discovers that Sybil
is cheating on him and kills himself, for which Slim is blamed and
placed on trial. Maisie comes rushing to his defense and all ends
well as Maisie and Slim plan to marry and live on the ranch, which
Ames had willed to Maisie in his suicide note.
March
11: More adventures of Maisie as she is stranded in the
jungle with a romantic doctor (John Carroll) in Congo
Maisie (1940), airing at 10:30 am.
March
12: At 10:00 am it’s that psychotronic classic, Edgar
Ulmer’s Detour (1945),
starring Tom Neal is the ill-fated musician and Ann Savage as the
hitchhiker from hell.
March
14: It’s a classic psychotronic doubleheader beginning at
2:00 am with Richard Roundtree in Shaft (1971),
the film that began the Blaxploitation genre. Immediately following
at 4:00 am is Shaft’s Big Score (1972),
in which Our Hero is back to find who murdered his old friend Cal
Asby (Robert Kya-Hill), a funeral director and beloved businessman
who secretly ran the numbers racket in Harlem. Along for the ride is
Moses Gunn, reprising his role as gangster Bumpy Jonas (loosely based
on real life Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, an ally of Lucky
Luciano). As with most sequels, it’s not up to the original, but
still manages to be quite and entertaining ride nonetheless.
BAD
MOVIE ALERT
March
9: In our upcoming look at Richard Burton and his movies, we
mention he had done quite a few howlers. At 12:45 am comes one of
them, The Sandpiper (1965)
in which he is ably abetted in this exercise in bad moviemaking by
then wife Elizabeth Taylor. Dick is a straight-laced married
Episcopal minister who has those laces undone by Liz as a single mom
beatnik artist in this silly update of Somerset Maugham’s Miss
Thompson. With Charles Bronson playing a sculptor, of all things.
It's directed by Vincente Minnelli after William Wyler had the good
sense to turn it down and scripted by the overrated Dalton Trumbo.
Watch it for its utter pretentiousness; lines dripping with meaning
accompanied by the requisite mugging. It just sits there like a
decaying corpse as its two stars blather on about God-knows-what,
which makes it required viewing.
March
20: Can
you see Katharine Hepburn as an Ozarks Hillbilly? Neither can we,
which is why Spitfire,
from 1934, is a must. It airs at 9:45 am and you can read our essay
on it here.
