The most boring man I've met since Ralph Bellamy

TCM is showing a night of pictures featuring one of Hollywood's more frequent second bananas, Ralph Bellamy. Quite often, he played the "other man", who loses the girl to somebody like Cary Grant, in movies such as The Awful Truth, which kicks off the evening at 8:00 PM ET. In The Awful Truth, Bellamy loses Irene Dunne to Cary Grant. Bellamy would go on to lose to Cary Grant again a few years later in His Girl Friday; this time, however, it was Roaslind Russell he lost. His Girl Friday is not airing tonight, though.

As for the Bellamy movies that are airing tonight, you can see one of his earlier movies in Picture Snatcher, at 11:30 PM, in which Bellamy plays James Cagney's boss.

Bellamy got to star later in his career, in one of the roles that defined the second half of his career: Sunrise at Campobello, airing at 1:00 AM. This 1960 movie tells the story of Franklin Roosevelt's contracting polio, and how his wife Eleanor got him to get back into politics. It's the movie version of a Broadway play, in which Bellamy had played the Franklin Roosevelt part, a role with which Bellamy would become identified later in life.

In fact, Bellamy had a long and active career. Sunrise at Campobello came out 27 years after Picture Snatcher, and in between those two, Bellamy made some 65 movie appearances, most of them in substantial, if not leading roles. In fact, he'd make a pretty good Star of the Month for TCM.