Fedya
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Posts posted by Fedya
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I missed the last challenge, but I'm back for another go round:
June 12-18, 2016
SUNDAY, JUNE 12
British movies I haven't seen in their entirety
0600 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, The Archers, 163 min, p/s) dir. Michael Powell; stars Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook
0845 The Battle of Britain (1969, Spitfire, 132 min, p/s) dir.; stars Michael Caine, Curd Jurgens, Trevor Howard
1100 Look Back in Anger (1959, Orion, 98 min, p/s) dir. Tony Richardson; stars Richard Burton, Clare Bloom, Mary Ure
1245 Passport to Pimlico (1949, J. Arthur Rank, 84 min, p/s) dir. Henry Cornelius; stars Stanley Holloway, Betty Warren, Barbara Murray
1415 Get Carter (1971, MGM UK, 112 min, p/s) dir. Mike Hodges; stars Michael Cain, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland
1615 Vacation From Marriage (1945, London Film, 102 min, p/s) dir. Alexander Korda; stars Robert Donat, Deborah Kerr, Glynis Johns
1800 Madeleine (1950, Cineguild, 112 min, p/s) dir. David Lean; stars Ann Todd, Norman Wooland, Ivan Desny
Prime Time: So that's what Leo Forbstein looks like!
2000 Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934, First National, 89 min) dir. Ray ENright; stars Pat O'Brien, Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers
Short: Here's Howe (1936, WB, 21 min)
2200 Broadway Gondolier (1935, WB, 99 min) dir. Lloyd Bacon; stars Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Adolphe Menjou
Short: Frontier Days (1945, WB, 17 min)
Silent Sunday Nights
0000 The Volga Boatman (1926, DeMille, 120 min, exempt) dir. Cecil B. DeMille; stars William Boyd, Elinor Fair, Robert Edeson
Short: Leave 'Em Laughing (1928, Hal Roach, 21 min)
TCM Imports:
0230 Widower With 5 Daughters (1957, Göttinger Film Atelier, 96 min, exempt) dir. Erich Engels; stars Heinz Erhardt, Susanne Cramer, Helmut Lohner
0415 Drunken Angel (1949, Toho, 102 min, p/s) dir. Akira Kurosawa; stars Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Reizaburo Yamamoto
MONDAY, JUNE 13
Which of these movies are about animals?
0600 Spirit of the Beehive (1973, Ella Querejeta, 95 min, p/s) dir. Victor Ence; stars Ana Torrent, Fernando Fernan Gomez, Teresa Gimpera
0745 The Sign of the Ram (1948, Columbia, 84 min, p/s) dir. John Sturges; stars Susan Peters, Alexander Knox, Phyllis Thaxter
0915 Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion (1965, Ivan Tors, 92 min, p/s) dir. Andrew Marton; stars Marshall Thompson, Betsy Drake, Richard Haydn
1100 A Dog of Flanders (1959, Fox, 96 min, p/s) dir. James B. Clark; stars Theodore Bikel, David Ladd, Donald Crisp
1245 The Story of Seabiscuit (1949, WB, 93 min) dir. David Butler; stars Shirley Temple, Barry Fitzgerald, Lon McCalister
1430 Kes (1969, Kestrel, 110 min, p/s) dir. Ken Loach; stars David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie
1630 An Alligator Named Daisy (1955, Rank, 85 min, p/s) dir. J. Lee Thompson; stars Donald Sinden, Jeannie Carson, James Robertson Justice
1800 Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970, Universal, 116 min, p/s) dir. DOnald Siegel; stars Shirley MacLaine, Clint Eastwood, Manolo Fabregas
Movies named after women
2000 Lorna Doone (1951, Edward Small, 88 min) PREMIERE #1 dir. Phil Karlson; stars Barbara Hale, Richard Greene, Carl Benton Reid
Short: I Love My Mother-In-Law, But... (1949, MGM, 8 min)
2145 Marjorie Morningstar (1958, Beachwold, 128 min) PREMIERE #2 dir. Irving Rapper; stars Gene Kelly, Natalie Wood, Clarie Trevor
0000 Susan Slade (1961, WB, 116 min, p/s) dir. Delmer Daves; stars Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, Dorothy McGuire
0200 Presenting Lily Mars (1944, MGM, 104 min) dir. Norman Taurog; stars Judy Garland, Van Heflin, Fay Bainter
Short: A Wife's Life (1950, MGM, 8 min)
0400 Cass Timberlane (1947, MGM, 119 min) dir. George Sidney; stars Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner, Zachary Scott
TUESDAY, JUNE 14
Burl Ives birthday salute
0600 Our Man in Havana (1959, Kingsmead, 111 min, p/s) dir. Carol Reed; stars Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara
0800 Ensign Pulver (1964, WB, 104 min, p/s) dir. Joshua Logan; stars Robert Walker Jr., Burl Ives, Walter Matthau
0945 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, MGM, 108 min) dir. Richard Brooks; stars Eilzabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives
1145 Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960, Columbia, 105 min, p/s) dir. Philip Leacock; stars Burl Ives, Shelley Winters, James Darren
1330 The Big Country (1958, UA, 165 min, p/s) dir. William Wyler; stars Gergory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker
1615 The Power and the Prize (1956, MGM, 98 min) dir. Henry Koster; stars Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Müller, Burl Ives
Carl Esmond birthday salute
1800 Her Highness nad the Bellboy (1945, MGM, 112 min) dir. Richard Thorpe; stars Hedy Lamarr, Robert Walker, June Allyson
STAR OF THE MONTH: ANDY DEVINE
2000 Romeo and Juliet (1936, MGM, 125 min) dir. George Cukor; stars Andy Devine, Edna Mae Oliver, C. Aubrey Smith
2215 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960, MGM, 107 min) dir. Michael Curtiz; stars Andy Devine, Judy Canova, John Carradine
0115 The Red Badge of Courage (1951, MGM, 69 min) dir. John Huston; stars Andy Devine, Audie Murphy, Royal Dano
0230 Two Rode Together (1961, Columbia, 109 min, p/s) dir. John Ford; stars Andy Devine, Shirley Jones, Richard Widmark
0430 Yellow Jack (1938, MGM, 83 mni) dir. George Seitz; stars Andy Devine, Buddy Ebsen, Charles Coburn
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15
0600 Affair in Trinidad (1952, Columbia, 92 min, p/s) dir. Oscar Saul; stars Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Alexander Scourby)
0745 Christopher Columbus (1949, Gainsborough, 99 min, p/s) dir. David McDonald; stars Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Francis L. Sullivan
0930 The Tamarind Seed (1974, ITC, 119 min) PREMIERE #3 dir. Blake Edwards; stars Julie Andrews, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quayle
1130 The Emperor Jones (1933, UA, 72 min, p/s) dir. Dudley Murphy; stars Paul Robeson, Dudley Digges, Ruby Etzy
1245 The Comedians (1967, MGM, 152 min) dir. Peter Glenville; stars Richard Burton, Elizaeth Taylor, Alec Guinness
Short: Island Windjammers (1956, RKO, 8 min)
1530 The Cuban Love Song (1931, MGM, 86 min) dir. WS Van Dyke; stars Lupe Velez, Jimmy Durante, Louise Fazenda
1700 The Ghost Breakers (1940, Paramount, 85 min, p/s) dir. George Marshall; stars Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Paul Lukas
1830 A Lady Without Passport (1950, MGM, 74 min) dir. Jospeh Lewis; stars Hedy Lamarr, John Hodiak, James Craig
Short: Colorful Curacao (1939, MGM, 9 min)
Prime Time: Incredible Characters: the 50s
2000 Francis Goes to West Point (1952, Universal International, 81 min, IC-Exempt) dir. Arthur Lubin; stars Donald O'Connor, Lori Nelson, Francis the Talking Mule
2130 Magnificent Obsession (1954, Universal-International, 108 min, p/s) dir. Douglas Sirk; stars Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Agnes Moorehead
2330 The Brothers Karamazov (1959, MGM, 145 min) dir. Richard Brooks; stars Yul Brynner, Lee J. Cobb, William Shatner
0200 Nights of Cabiria (1957, de Laurentiis, 117 min, p/s) dir. Federico Fellini; stars Giulietta Masina, François Perier, Franca Marzi
0400 Knights of the Round Table (1953, MGM, 115 min) dir. Richard Thorpe; stars Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer
THURSDAY, JUNE 16
Nobody watches musicals because nobody likes them ;-)
0600 Camelot (1967, WB, 179 min) dir. Joshua Logan; stars Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero
0900 Funny Girl (1968, Columbia, 155 min, p/s) dir. William Wyler; stars Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Kay Medford
1145 It's Always Fair Weather (1955, MGM, 101 min) dir. Stanley Donen; stars Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse
1330 Good News (1947, MGM, 93 min) dir. Charles Walters; stars June Allyson, Peter Lawford, Patricia Marshall
1515 Show Girl in Hollywood (1930, First National, 80 min) dir. Mervyn LeRoy; stars Alice White, Jack Mulhall, Blanche Sweet
1645 Sunny (1930, First National, 78 min) dir. William A. Seiter; stars Marilyn Miller, Lawrence Gray, Joe Donahue
1815 The Cuckoos (1930, RKO, 97 min) dir. Paul Sloane; stars Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Dorothy Lee
Prime Time: A Constancy of Constances
2000 Red Skies of Montana (1952, Fox, 99 min) PREMIERE #4 dir. Joseph M. Newman; stars Richard Widmark, Constance Smith, Jeffrey Hunter
2145 The Perils of Pauline (1947, Paramount, 96 min, p/s) dir. George Marshall; stars Betty Hutton, John Lund, Constance Collier
2330 Movie Crazy (1932, Paramount, 98 min, p/s) dir. Clyde Bruckman; stars Harold Lloyd, Constance Cummings, Kenneth Thomson
0115 All Fall Down (1961, MGM, 111 min) dir. John Frankenheimer; stars Eva Marie Saint, Warren Beatty, Constance Ford
0315 Shock Corridor (1963, Allied Artists, 101 min) dir. Sam Fuller; stars Peter Breck, Constance Towers, Gene Evans
0500 A Virtuous Vamp (1919, p/d, 50 min) dir. David Kirkland; stars Constance Talmadge, Conway Tearle, Belle Daube
FRIDAY, JUNE 17
Best Actress nominations I haven't seen
0600 The Little Foxes (1941, Goldwyn, 116 min, p/s) dir. William Wyler; stars Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright
0800 Camille (1936, MGM, 109 min) dir. George Cukor; stars Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore
1000 The Constant Nymph (1943, WB, 113 min) dir. Edmund Goulding; stars Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, Alexis Smith
1200 Valiant Is the Word for Carrie (1936, Paramount, 110 min) PREMIERE #5 dir. Wesley Ruggles; stars Gladys George, Arline Judge, John Howard
1400 The Rose Tattoo (1955, Paramount, 117 min, p/s) dir. Daniel Mann; stars Anna Magnani, Burt Lancaster, Marisa Pavan
1600 Sudden Fear (1952, Joseph Kaufmann, 110 min) PREMIERE #6 dir. David Miller; stars Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, Gloria Grahame
1800 The Blue Veil (1951, Wald/Krasna, 113 min) PREMIERE #7 dir. Curtis Bernhardt; stars Jane Wyman, Charles Laughton, Joan Blondell
Friday Night Spotlight: Artists at Work
2000 The Horse's Mouth (1958, Knightsbridge, 97 min, p/s) dir. Roland Neame; stars Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh, Renee Houston
2145 The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965, Fox, 138 min, p/s) dir. Carol Reed; stars Charlton Heston, Rex Harrison, Diane Cilento
0000 Of Human Bondage (1964, MGM, 100 min) dir. Henry Hathaway; stars Laurence Harvey, Kim Novak, Robert Morley
0145 The Girl From Jones Beach (1948, WB, 78 min) dir. Peter Godfrey; stars Ronald Reagan, Virginia Mayo, Eddie Bracken
0315 The Mystery of Picasso (1956, Filmsonor, 78 min, p/s) dir. Henri-George Clouxot; stars Pablo Picasso
A salute to the greatest year in Hollywood history: 1939
0445 Full Confession (1939, RKO, 73 min) dir. John Farrow; stars Victor McLaglen, Sally Eilers, Joseph Calleia
SATURDAY, JUNE 18
0600 Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939, MGM, 82 min) dir. Richard Thorpe; stars Johnny Weismuller, Maureen O'Sullivan, Johnny Sheffield
0730 Balalaika (1939, MGM, 102 min) dir. Reinhold Schünzel; stars Nelson Eddy, Ilona Massey, Charlie Ruggles
0915 Miracles for Sale (1939, MGM, 71 min) dir. Tod Browning; stars Robert Young, Florence Rice, Henry Hull
1030 These Glamour Girls (1939, MGM, 79 min) dir. S. Sylvain Simon; stars Lew Ayres, Lana Turner, Tom Brown
1200 They Made Her a Spy (1939, RKO, 69 min) dir. Jack Hively; stars Sally Eilers, Allan Lane, Fritz Leiber
1315 Meet Dr. Christian (1939, Rko/pd, 68 min) dir. Bernard Vorhaus; stars Jean Hersholt, Dorothy Lovett, Robert Baldwin
1430 The Day the Bookies Wept (1939, RKO, 64 min) dir. Loeslie Goodwins; stars Joe Penner, Betty Grable, Richard Lane
1545 They All Came Out (1939, MGM, 70 min) dir. Jacques Tourneur; stars Rita Johnson, Tom Neal, Bernard Nedell
1700 Joe and Ethel Turp Call on the President (1939, MGM, 70 min) dir. Robert Sinclair; stars Ann Sothern, Lewis Stone, Walter Brennan
1815 Babes in Arms (1939, MGM, 94 min) dir. Busby Berkeley; stars Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Guy Kibee
The Essentials: Britain at War
2000 Mrs. Miniver (1942, MGM, 134 min) dir. WIlliam Wyler; stars Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright
2230 The Devil's Disciple (1959, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, 83 min, p/s) dir. Guy Hamilton; stars Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier
0000 The Little Princess (1939, Fox, 93 min, p/s) dir. Walter Lang; stars Shirley Temple, Richard Greene, Anita Louise
TCM Underground: Two legends make their screen farewell in 1978
0145 Sextette (1978, Briggs/Sullivan, 91 min, EXEMPT) dir. Ken Hughes; stars Mae West, Timothy Dalton, Tony Curtis
0330 Just a Gigolo (1978, Bayerischer Rundfunk, 147 min, EXEMPT) dir. David Hemmings; stars David Bowie, Kim Novak, Marlene Dietrich
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5:45 PM Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) Sihung Lung, Yu-Wen ****, Chien-lien Wu. Dir: Ang Lee, Ang Lee Prods., 123 mins., P/S
I always enjoyed Yu-Wen ****'s performance myself.
I think I've got 2-1/2 days left to time out, and think I've got enough themes to put into those days. (Thankfully those days include Sunday night, and picking a silent and an import is relatively trivial.) So barring a computer issue, I should have a schedule by Tuesday.
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I think the writer is referring to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which had substantial backing from Disney who presumably wanted it passed before Steamboat Willie would enter the public domain. (At the time, it was scheduled to fall out of copyright in 2003, but the CTEA changed that so that it won't fall out of copyright until 2048. Unless, of course, Disney get the copyright terms extended again.)
My Florida friends tell me that Disney do get some exemptions in Florida law for certain laws that have an exemption for fireworks manufacturers: Disney World is the only one in the state.
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The National Association of Broadcasters (the over the air channels) aren't saints either by a long shot. In the Virginia Postrel article I posted several pages back one of the interesting struggles in the 90s was the "must carry" rules by which the cable operators had to carry OTA channels. They hated this -- until they realized that they had something the satellite providers didn't have, and tried to bar the satellite providers from carrying OTA channels. When that didn't stop the losing of customers to satellite, they did a volte-face and tried to force the satellite operators to carry the OTA channels too on the thinking that the satellite providers would have to drop other channels for lack of bandwidth.Already being done, Fred. Google 'cable television lobbyists'.
The "must carry" rules have been loosened significantly, and as I understand it, cable and satellite providers are certainly under no obligation to carry the digital subchannels.
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We never needed an NBA channel, MLB channel, NFL channel either, things were fine before those.
Just because you don't need those channels doesn't mean nobody else does. I'm sure a lot of people think things were fine before TCM came around.
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As I said earlier, this will eventually be worked out, and the customer will lose. Because the customer will pay more.
Yes, Fedya, everyone in the television business - emphasis on business - is a bad guy. Some are just worse than others.
Not that the customers are unalloyed good guys either. I always see a lot people in discussions about cable channels vs. cable providers and content whose attitude boils down to, "They have a big pile of money, and dammit, that's just not fair!" (Specifically, I'm thinking of the people I saw call for the government to force the NFL to break its contract with DirecTV over the Sunday Ticket because Feelings or something. To hell with contract law.) Heck, it's the attitude behind a whole lot of "consumer" reporting.
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DirecTV Inc. will pay $5.34 million to settle charges that its telemarketers called households listed on the national do-not-call registry to pitch satellite TV programming, Federal Trade Commission officials said Tuesday.
I wish the **** politicians had to adhere to the do-not-call registry, too.
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Which is why Dish viewers are also losing those other channels too. There's also the thing that the channels are sold as a sort of bundle too, in that to get the big channels they have to carry the lesser-interest channels from the same network, with haggling over which tier the channel can be put in.I doubt that TCM has much say in the matter, negotiations are probably handled for all the Turner networks at a corporate level.
There's also this old, but very interesting article on the way in which pretty much everybody in the TV business is a bad guy. (Who remembers how the cable providers used to try to use the law to bar DirecTV and Dish from offering over-the-air channels?)
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You just have to find out when Arthur is going to be there, and shoplift in front of him so he'll pay for the items you took.and shopping at Bergdorfs LOL.
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The documentary was from 2004 or 2005 (Ann Savage has since died, of course). So that's Schallert only 40 years after the Patty Duke Show. But Schallert is in fact still alive at 92. I thought he'd died in the last couple of years myself.I was also amazed that William Schallert was still alive. He didnt look much different than he did on the Patty Duke show 50 YEARS AGO.......
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Correct.If it went to alacarte then there would be dozens of channels that could not survive
First they came for the VH1 viewers, but I said nothing because I don't watch VH1.(what millennial is going to pay to watch MTV, VH1, ETC. which wouldn't bother me any.
Until TCM is one of the channels that can't survive. In a cable world with a lot fewer niche (or at least they were originally conceived as niche) channels, how many providers are going to be happy about a channel like TCM that doesn't have outside commercials?TCM, History, syfy, and other documentary channels is all I usually watch.
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I suggest they watch nice early 20th century movies like Hot Saturday, coming up this Sunday on TCM.
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It does seem as though only the movies airing in the evening theme hours (ie. 8:00 PM to 6:00 AM) get their trailers shown, not movies running during the daytime. Beyond that I've never noticed any pattern.
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Some, but by no means all, trailers get shown. I don't know how TCM decides which films' trailers they're going to show and which they aren't. I'd have guessed that MGM/WB/RKO movies would be more likely to have the trailers show up, but I've seen more than enough trailers for movies from other studios to conclude that there's no pattern.
And I think the Dr. Strangleove trailer has been shown for earlier airings.
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Happy Thanksgiving to all our Canadian posters! May they enjoy their Kraft Dinner and poutine before they sit down on their chesterfields to watch an evening of Curling for Toonies.
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I'd like to see them not do anything on MLK Day, just to watch people have an apoplectic fit.
(By the same token, I'd like to see some large organization announce that they're going to use October to raise awareness of a disease other than breast cancer.)
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Everything TCM does bothers you, it seems.This bothers me.
Edit: Since I wrote the above, I got a PM from TopBilled implying that if I didn't edit it, he'd report me to the moderator. To put what I wrote above another way, I get the distinct impression from reading TopBilled's posts that he has very clear ideas on how TCM should be programmed, and woe betide TCM if they don't program the channel exactly that way.
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Don't confuse him with logic.If Turner is laying off employees they certainly can't afford to operate another station.
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I have the monthly schedules going back to July 2007 on my hard drive, so I decided to look up when Dead Ringer has aired. The search yielded 18 results (not counting the possibility of being run twice in the same month):
Nov 2007
Jun 2008
Aug 2008
Jul 2009
Jun 2010
Oct 2010
Apr 2011
Oct 2011
Jan 2012
Mar 2012
Aug 2012
Dec 2012
Mar 2013
May 2013
Jun 2013
Jul 2013
Oct 2013
Aug 2014
SO there were quite a few airings in 2013, but other than that, I don't think it's been run ridiculously often.
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Damnation Alley is one of those movies that's bad, but a hell of a lot of fun.
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TCM got the rights to the Connery Bonds for one month when he was Star of the Month a few years back.
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I believe this Thursday's airing of Three on a Couch is going to be preempted for Canadian viewers, who will get Three on a Chesterfield instead.
[ducking]
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Probably the same idiot who thought Margaret O'Brien wasn't irritating.I just wanted to smack the kid and wanted to know what idiot at MGM thought to force him into the stellar National Velvet (or any other) cast.
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Perhaps you drank a little too much of Tom's beer, James?
TCM Programming Challenge #27 -- What A Character! (Challenges)
in TCM Program Challenges Archive
Posted
NOTES ON A SCHEDULE
I decided that for this Programming Challenge, I was going to set an extra challenge for myself: program an entire week of movies that I have not seen in their entirety. Now, there's a bit of cheating here. There are movies where I've missed the first five or ten minutes, only to have seen the rest. But there are some movies I've never seen, as well as movies that I've seen some of, but just can't sit all the way through because the parts that I've seen are unappealing. So it's not as if I haven't seen the movies at all; it's just that I haven't seen them beginning to end.
We start off on Sunday morning and afternoon with a bunch of movies made in the UK that I haven't seen before. On Sunday night, we put the spotlight on Leo F. Forbstein. If you've watched enough films on TCM, you'll have seen his name a hundred times as the conductor of the orchestra that played the scores of all those Warner Bros. movies. However, IMDb says he had appearances in two of those movies, unsurprisingly playing a conductor in both. He also wrote music for a small number of movies, including the two shorts.
For Silent Sunday Nights, I simply picked a movie that sounded interesting that fit the time slot and that I hadn't heard of. Of course, it wound up not fitting the time slot as well as I would have liked, and I had to figure out what foreign films to show. Widower With 5 Daughters is a movie my German relatives had on video when I visited them back in 1989, but that I never got around to seeing. (I did watch Mommie Dearest and Psycho dubbed into German on German TV, however.)
When The Spirit of the Beehive aired on TCM last Labor Day, I missed the first few minutes, but that's still enough to allow me to use it here. I decided to pick several films that may or may not be about animals, based on the title.
On Monday night, I picked a bunch of movies where the titles are women's names, both first and last. This was a bit difficult to program and stick to the challenge of using movies I haven't seen before, since I've seen Alice Adams, Marie Antoinette, Stella Dallas, and Annie Oakley among others.
I share my birthday, June 14, with Oscar winner Burl Ives, so I programmed several of his films on that day. However, they didn't fill 14 hours from 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM, so I had to include a movie from Carl Esmond, who was also born on June 14.
For Star of the Month, I immediately picked Andy Devine, and then had to come up with enough of his movies that I haven't seen before, at least not in their entirety. Seeing the opening scenes of Romeo and Juliet, which has Devine and Edna May Oliver(!) trying to deliver Shakespearean dialog, has always been enough to put me off the movie. The rest of the night's lineup is filled with movies that, for whatever reason, I haven't seen.
The last of the movies in the Tuesday night lineup, Yellow Jack, is set at least in part in the Caribbean, so it leads in nicely to the Wednesday lineup of movies set in the Caribbean (including the shorts).
On Wednesday night, we have some "incredible" characters, all from the 1950s. First, the idea of a talking mule is incredible. That's followed by the incredible characters of Magnificent Obsession. Rock Hudson's character is so over the top evil and selfish that nobody could be like that. And the dead doctor is implied to be impossibly virtuous. Then there's the wacky Christian guy who changes Hudson's life. It's usually around this point that I turn off the movie because it's such blunt balderdash. The Brothers Karamazov fits in this lineup because the idea of William Shatner as a Russian Orthodox priest is incredible. The prostitute with a heart of gold is also a fairly unbelievable character, which is why I included Nights of Cabiria. (Or does she lose that heart in the second half?) And the characters in Arthurian legend are all incredible.
I put two movies about Arthurian legend together, because the second is a musical, one of my least favorite genres of films. So I picked a bunch of random musicals I haven't seen before to air on Thursday morning and afternoon.
I didn't realize how many actresses there were named Constance. So we get a constant stream of them on Thursday night. However, I cheated a bit. As far as I'm aware, A Virtuous Vamp is not yet available in a format for viewing on TCM. The IMDb reviews state that the intertitles are only available in a foreign language. But it was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2013, so I figured its existence, and being in the public domain since it's from before 1923, wouldn't bar it from use in the Programming Challenge.
There are a surprising number of Oscar-nominated films I haven't seen, including some nominated for Best Actress. Friday morning and afternoon is the day for those.
The month's Friday Night Spotlight is artists in various forms. That's followed by a salute to the films fo 1939, although most of the movies are B-movies or programmers, with one or two exceptions to get things to time out properly.
I still haven't seen Mrs. Miniver in its entirety. I've seen the last half hour or so, and the boring first half-hour that has Walter Pidgeon going nuts over Greer Garson's roses. So it's a natural for the Essentials. It was also a good place to start a half night of films of Britain at war.
A few days ago, I was listening to a program on German radio where the person being profiled mentioned the movie Just a Gigolo as being Marlene Dietrich's last movie, and with her starring with David Bowie. There's a pair. So I realized I had to use it for the TCM Underground. But what to pair it with? Imagine my great joy when I realized that Mae West's final film was released the same year. They make a natural pair. Or maybe not, since I haven't seen either.
Star of the Month: Andy Devine
Silent Sunday Nights: The Volga Boatman
TCM Imports: Widower With 5 Daughters
Friday Night Spotlight: Artists at Work
TCM Essential: Mrs. Miniver
TCM Underground: Sextette and Just a Gigolo
Non-exempt Premieres (7):
Lorna Doone
Marjorie Morningstar
The Tamarind Seed
Red Skies of Montana
Valiant Is the Word For Carrie
Sudden Fear
The Blue Veil