TCM Guest Programmer: David Steinberg

And so we get to this month's Guest Programmer on TCM: comic writer/director David Steinberg. He's selected four of his favorite films, and will be sitting down with Robert Osborne to present those movies tonight. Those selections are:

The Marx Brothers and Kitty Carlisle spend A Night at the Opera at 8:00 PM;
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance their way through Swing Time at 10:00 PM;
Cary Grant tries to recover his prize dinosaur bone from selfish Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby at midnight; and
Prostitute Giulietta Masina walks the streets of Rome in Nights of Cabiria, at 2:00 AM.

Perhaps more interesting is the short that's coming up in between two of the movies. Just after A Night at the Opera, at about 9:48 PM, is Things You Never See on the Screen. This was Warner Bros. "goof reel" for the year 1935, bloopers from filming that didn't make it into the final cuts for obvious reasons, and which would ultimately be presented at the company Christmas party. People who are even better acquainted with the Warner Bros. movies of that era will have fun trying to figure out which movie each clip is from; James Cagney flubbing his Shakespearean lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the easy one. There's also a somewhat shocking line in an intertitle card about a behind-the-scenes crewman of Italian descent "going home to cook one of his wop dinners".