Loretta Young night

I've mentioned a couple of times since the start of the year that TCM seems to be having more luck getting movies from Fox. That's the case again tonight, when TCM will be showing a night of movies starring Loretta Young. The night kicks off at as usual 8:00 PM with Born to Be Bad, which I recommended back in June, 2011. Since it's not available on DVD and the Fox Movie Channel was never as available as TCM is, it's nice to see such an obscurity show up on TCM.

In fact, the only one of tonight's films which TCM says is available on DVD is the second film, Eternally Yours at 9:15, in which Young is married to magician David Niven. It's one I don't think I've seen before, and the DVD TCM lists looks to be one of public-domain stuff: fifty movies on twelve DVDs for thirty bucks. I suppose if there aren't better prints available, it's not bad to have such a box set on the market.

Third up ar 11:00 PM is Come to the Stable, which is reminiscent of Lilies of the Field except that it came about 15 years earlier. It also deserves a full-length blog post since the movie co-stars Celeste Holm, who just died recently. However, I still have to write up the post for tomorrow's 24-hour tribute to Ernest Borgnine. Young and Holm star as a pair of French nuns who left France after World War II, looking to build a children's hospital in memory of the children they couldn't save in World War II. They wind up in a small New England town in the farmhouse of artist Elsa Lanchester, and proceed to wheedle everybody, from the locals to the head of their order, into getting the hospital built. It's the sort of Catholic movie Hollywood made plenty of in the days before all the sex-abuse scandals (or Young's actions with Clark Gable that would probably be a sin in Catholicism) became public.

I'm surprised that Loretta Young's Oscar-winning performance in The Farmer's Daughter (12:45 AM) isn't available on DVD, at least not in America. (Amazon lists a Region 2 DVD.) Young plays the adult daughter of a Swedish immigrant farming family who goes off to study nursing, only to wind up working for US Representative Joseph Cotten, and getting involved in politics when she discovers not every politician has the best interests of the people at heart.

The night concludes with the 1942 comedy Bedtime Story at 2:30 AM, and the 1931 pre-Code Big Business Girl at 4:00 AM.