TCM Star of the Month 2020: Patricia Neal

We're in the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, it's Patricia Neal, and TCM is going to be showing her movies every Tuesday night in prime time. So I looked through the blog to see what photos of Neal I've already used that I could reuse in this post:



Tonight kicks off at 8:00 PM with The Fountainhead, an interesting if deeply flawed movie based on the Ayn Rand novel; it's that basis that causes most people to pan the movie outright, because as we saw with Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes recently, a lot of people don't like having their worldview challenged.



The Fountainhead is followed at 10:00 PM tonight by Bright Leaf, which re-teams Neal and Gary Cooper. Unfortunately, it also has Lauren Bacall, who increasingly is becoming one of my less enjoyable actresses as I find her roles uninteresting.



January 21 kicks off at 8:00 PM with A Face in the Crowd, which really should be a warning about what the solons in the media let us see, but instead is used to decry wrongthinkers who become celebrities. Neal helps bumpkin Andy Griffith become famous, and fame goes to his head.



A Face in the Crowd is followed at 10:15 PM on January 21 by Hud, the movie that won Neal an Oscar as the maid to a Texas rancher (Melvyn Douglas, who also won an Oscar), his son Hud (Paul Newman), and the son's nephew (Brandon de Wilde).