A new TCM director salute

If you watch as much TCM as I do, then by now you've certainly seen the spots promoting April's TCM salute to director George Stevens. TCM is going to be showing his movies every Monday in prime time this month. Tonight kicks off the salute with the overblown 200-minute soap opera Giant at 8:00 PM. Also showing up are the classic morality play Shane at 1:30 AM ET overnight, and his early Annie Oakley at 3:45 AM.

The most interesting thing about this first night of the salute, however, is probably the lesser-seen documentary about Stevens' life and work, George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey, which airs at 11:30 PM in between Giant and Shane. It's a fairly good introduction to the director, and covers pretty much his entire career, although as is the case with a lot of biographical documentaries, it treats its subject a bit too favorably. (In defense, however, the film was was produced by George Stevens, Jr.)

What really makes the documentary worth watching, though, is the coverage of Stevens' World War II years. Stevens, like many people in Hollywood, eventually became part of the war effort, in his case being given movie cameras to document the experiences of the soldiers during the war. The result is that Stevens ended up with some of the rare surviving color footage of the D-Day invasion and other parts of the march to Berlin, including footage from liberating concentration camps. That alone makes the documentary worth watching.