Howard Keel Day

Another musical star gets his day on TCM in the form of Howard Keel. To be honest, my first memory of Keel is seeing him play the second husband of Barbara Bel Geddes on Dallas, after the actor who played the first one died. In fact my first memories of Barbara Bel Geddes are from Dallas, too; I was just a kid at the time and would have been much too young for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Looking through the Wikipedia page on Dallas, it says that Donna Reed substituted for Bel Geddes for a season in the mid-1980s. I didn't know about Larry Hagman's appearances in films such as Fail-Safe, but then, he probably would have been better-known at the time he was tapped for Dallas for his starring role in I Dream of Jeannie. And then of course there was Charlene Tilton's ample bust.

But Howard Keel could sing, and that's what got him on Broadway first, and then noticed by Hollywood, where he appeared in musicals such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (9:45 PM). I think that showed up on one of the independent channels back in the day, and at the time I found it very boring. (I also remember it getting turned into a TV series for a season in the early 1980s.) I stil don't care that much for it

As for a Keel movie without music, I've blogged about Callaway Went Thataway (1:30 AM) before, and it's a fairly entertaining B-movie. And it's got another supporting player most of us would first remember from TV, that being Natalie Schaefer, who played Lovie Howell on Gilligan's Island.