Second chances

TCM's Friday night spotlight for May is "A Second Look". Illeana Douglas, the director/actress and granddaughter of Melvyn Douglas, will be presenting the movies -- I don't know if she's going to be co-hosting with Robert Osborne or whether they've started having the guest host alone. I suppose I could have watched last night's prime time lineup to see whether Robert Osborne or Ben Mankiewicz was presenting the films, which probably would have been a clue. Anyhow, the point of the "Second Look" is to present movies which were critically panned and/or commercially unsuccessful when they were first released, but over the years have at least deserved a second vieweing, and maybe now we'll conclude that perhaps the opinion of the time wasn't quite right.

The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Paramount's 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland, which has an all-star cast heavily costumed and made up in outfits designed to look like the illustrations that accompanied Lewis Carroll's original books. It's a film that I'm really looking forward to, as I don't think it's aired on TCM before.
At 9:30 PM is No Greater Glory, which I blogged about back in November 2009.
Then, at 11:00 PM, you can see chorus girl Joan Crawford try to catch a rich hubby in the form of Franchot Tone in The Bride Wore Red;
Slum doctor Spencer Tracy marries Hedy Lamarr in I Take This Woman, at 1:00 AM; and
Three Comrades at 3:00 AM has a plot that sounds a bit like Jules et Jim.