Marion Davies, with Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed
We're into the first week of a new month, which means that it's time again for new programming features on TCM. One of those is a new Star of the Month, and for January 2023 that's going to be Marion Davies, whose career successfully made the transition from silent movies to sound until her retirement in the late 1930s. Davies' movies will be airing the first four Tuesdays in prime time. (January 31 is the fifth Tuesday of the month, but that night has a salute to Jean-Luc Godard.) It looks like the movies are going to air roughly chronologically, with tonight being early silents, January 10 covering the transition to sound, and the following two nights being her 1930s talkies.
Those who have seen Citizen Kane will know that it was a thinly-veiled attack on William Randolph Hearst, who was the lover of Marion Davies. As a result, Davies' star waned not only because of her relatively early retirement. It's a shame, because she was indeed a talented actress who deserved to be better remembered. Thankfully TCM shows a lot of her films, and not just when she's Star of the Month. One that a search of the blog says I haven't done a post on before is the Hollywood-on-Hollywood movie Show People, which you can see at 9:30 PM on January 10.
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