George Raft and James Cagney in Each Dawn I Die (Jan. 14, 8:00 PM)
Once again, we're into the first full week of a new month, and that means it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, that star is George Raft, who is probably best remembered for all the gangster roles he essayed. Raft's films will be showing up on TCM on Tuesday nights in January, kicking off at 8:00 PM this evening with Scarface, a movie to which I gave just enough of a review back in 2011 that I'm not doing a full-length review on it now.
Raft actually got his start as a dancer, and it's there that he shows up uncredited in the 1929 film Side Street (Jan. 8, 1:00 AM), which I think I haven't seen before. At least, a search of the blog reveals it to be one of the few films airing in Raft's honor that I haven't done a blog post on yet. Raft also has a smallish dancing role in Taxi!, airing on January 15 at 3:00 AM.
George Raft (center) in Some Like It Hot (Jan. 29, 12:30 AM)
The movies airing in the tribute are in rough chronological order in that January 7 is from the early part of Raft's career; January 14 is from the late 1930s and early 1940s; January 21 is from the mid- to late 1940s; and the last night is from the 1950s. This last night includes Some Like It Hot and Ocean's Eleven (Jan. 29, 2:45 AM).
There's a lot that TCM isn't showing, mostly because those movies were made away from Warner Bros. and the films aren't quite as accessible to TCM and the old Turner Library. In looking through Raft's filmography, I see he went over to Universal to make a movie I'd never heard of, I Stole a Million, in the late 1930s. Stuff like Black Widow in the 1950s was at Fox, while the Jerry Lewis movies he appeared in in the 1960s were done at Paramount, as was Skidoo.
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