Thursday, May 27, 2021

TCM Guest Programmer May 2021: Frank Langella

TCM used to have a mostly monthly Guest Programmer (with the exception of 31 Days of Oscar and Summer Under the Stars), who would pick four of his or her favorite movies and set down with Robert Osborne (at least when he was still alive) to talk about the movies. The Guest Programmer feature became much more irregular after Osborne's death. I'm not certain when the most recent one was, as the last time I actually wrote a post about a Guest Programmer was back in November 2019.

In any case, there's a new Guest Programmer this month, that being Frank Langella who memorably played Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. He's going to be presenting three of his favorite movies, I'm guessing in a video chat with Ben Mankiewicz, which air tonight. Interestingly, all of them are from his youth in the mid-1940s:

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes kicks off the evening at 8:00 PM, with Edward G. Robinson as a Norwegian-American farmer in World War II Wisconsin married to Agnes Moorehead and raising kid Margaret O'Brien.
That's followed at 10:00 PM by Arsenic and Old Lace, in which Cary Grant finds out that his two aunts are taking in lonely old men who have no family and hastening the men's deaths with poisoned elderberry wine.
The night concludes at 12:15 AM with a rather darker movie, The Stranger, starring Orson Welles as a Nazi fugitive who winds up in a small New England town and marries Loretta Young.

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