Marie Dressler Day tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the birth anniversary of Marie Dressler, and TCM is showing a bunch of her movies all morning and afternon. Dressler won an Academy Award for her performance in Min and Bill, which is on the schedule at 11:00 AM. Dressler received another Oscar nomination for Emma, which is also on the schedule at 3:00 PM tomorrow. A more comedic role is in Dinner at Eight, which concludes the day of Dressler films at 6:00 PM tomorrow.

The first two of those movies are straight up dramas, while Dinner at Eight combines both drama and comedy. Dressler was adept at both, and TCM is showing a number of true comedys as part of tomorrow's salute. There are drawing-room comedies like Let Us Be Gay at 9:30 AM, which is really not a favorite of mine, as I mentioned back in August 2008. A better Dressler comedy would be Reducing at 12:15 PM. Here, Dressler plays the matriarch of a Midwestern family in which the husband has lost his job in the Depression. So, her sister (Polly Moran), who is the well-to-do owner of a New York City day spa/beauty salon, invites the family to New York to try to get back on its feet. Moran even offers Dressler a job at the salon. Dressler's well-intentioned attempts to help out, however, all backfire rather spectacularly.