Gary Cooper films to watch out for

Gary Cooper is getting the Summer Under the Stars treatment tomorrow, August 30. There was a film I thought I hadn't blogged about before that I was going to mention, but it turns out that I have, so I'm just going to list a couple of the more interesting films showing up on TCM tomorrow.

The day kicks off at 6:00 AM with It's a Big Country. This is an anthology about all the different types of people who make up America and make it great. As for Cooper, he plays the stereotypical Texan, giving a deadpan delivery trying to smash all those stereotypes while behind him, every stereotype he mentions plays out. I don't know if Gary Cooper could have done the screwball comedy humor that Cary Grant and William Powell did so well, but when it comes to being deadpan and letting everyone around you be funny, Cooper is great at it. (That having been said, Cooper is quite good in Ball of Fire, which isn't airing.)

At noon, TCM has One Sunday Afternoon. I've mentioned this one before because it's the first movie version of what would be redone in the early 1940s as The Strawberry Blonde and, under the original One Sunday Afternoon title, in the late 1940s as a musical. This one has Cooper in the role of the wrongly convicted man; Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon from TV's Batman) as the fast-talking bad guy; Fay Wray as the fast woman; and Frances Fuller as the woman Cooper's character winds up marrying.

There's also The Wreck of the Mary Deare at 6:00 PM, in which Cooper plays a crewman of a ship that gets scuttled, with him claiming that the scuttling was because there was something nefarious going on. Together with salvage boat operator Charlton Heston, he's out to prove that what he claims is the truth.

In between all this, you can watch Meet John Doe at 1:30 PM, but that one is airing again this coming Tuesday.