That's the lineup on TCM vs. FMC tonight. TCM gives us three movies about President Lincoln, although the first two are set before he was inaugurated:
That's followed by Henry Fonda, in his days at Fox, playing the lawyerly Young Mr. Lincoln at 10:00 PM; and
one I've blogged about before, D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, starring Walter Huston in the title role, at midnight.
Tonight at 10:30 PM ET, the Fox Movie Channel is giving us Nine to Five. Made in 1980, it's one of those movies that would have been a lot of fun as a clean B-comedy several decades earlier, but as a movie isn't so well remembered today.
Jane Fonda stars as Judy Bernly, a woman who just got a divorce and as such is just getting back into the working world after a long time married. She gets a job at the conglomerate Consolidated Companies as a secretary in a big, lifeless office. Judy's immediate supervisor, Violet (Lily Tomlin), is showing her the ropes and letting her know about the myriad of rules and how, in no uncertain terms do you want to violate them: the ultimate boss of the division, Franklin Hart, Jr. (Dabney Coleman), will come down very hard on you, if not fire you. It doesn't help poor Judy that on her first day, she has an accident with the copying machine.
At any rate, Judy quickly finds out just how much of a jerk Mr. Hart is. He's got his personal assistant Roz (Elizabeth Wilson) spying on the workers, to the point that everybody has to check the stalls in the bathroom to see that they're unoccupied before they'll talk about anything in the bathroom -- she takes notes and sends those notes on to Mr. Hart! Hart expects his employees to do personal favors for him, and everybody in the office knows that he's carrying on with his secretary Doralee (Dolly Parton). Matters eventually come to a head when Hart sends Violet and Judy out to buy a scarf for his wife, and they find that the scarf was actually for Doralee. The three all wind up taking the afternoon off and ending up at the same bar, where they find that Hart is in fact not carrying on an affair with Doralee. He's certainly trying, of course, but she doesn't want it. Violet and Judy find that their dislike of Doralee is misplaced and, when the three go to Doralee's house for a pot party, they discuss their fantasies about how they'd deal with Hart if they could get away with it.
Nine to Five is, as I said, a movie that would have worked well as a B-comedy back in the 30s or 40s. Obviously, it would have to be cleaned up, but it's a movie that's entertaining if filled with unbelievable premises and a bit of a throwaway at the end. All three of the female leads show that they were quite good at comedy. Lily Tomlin, we always knew; Jane Fonda's comedic ability should have been remembered from movies like Sunday in New York. But Dolly Parton doing comedy is a revelation. Is she great? Not particularly, but she's more than competent, and considering that comedy isn't easy, that's a compliment. Also in the cast is Sterling Hayden, who gets a brief scene at the end as the CEO of the company.
As I said at the beginning, Nine to Five isn't so well remembered as a movie. That's probably because, in addition to it being somewhat of a fluff piece, the movie is better remembered for the title song. Dolly Parton sang "Nine to Five" over the opening credits, and it's one of those country/pop songs of the early 1980s that's instantly memorable for its great uptempo melody.
TCM aired a couple of Yul Brynner movies today, including The Magnificent Seven. However, while looking through the on-screen guide of my satellite box, the movie was listed under the title The Magnificent Seven, but with a plot synopsis and cast list that clearly belonged to The Seven Samurai (Toshiro Mifune and the 1954 date were dead giveaways). Odd, even though it's reasonably well-known that The Seven Samurai is the original movie on which The Magnificent Seven was based.
More interesting is a movie that came up earlier in the morning: Joan Crawford's 1941 film A Woman's Face. For even more bizarre reasons, the box guide listed this as being from 1938, and starring Ingrid Bergman. In fact, again, the Crawford movie was based upon a Swedish original from 1938, which indeed starred Bergman before she came to the US. (If memory serves, it even got aired on TCM several years back when Ingrid Bergman was Star of the Month.) That having been said, it's probably much less known that A Woman's Face was originally a Swedish picture. How the people sending out the box guide info got this into the schedule is beyond me. Especially since the TCM schedule page correctly listed the Joan Crawford version.
In interesting, if bizarre and ultimately meaningless mystery.
TCM is celebrating the birthday of director Carol Reed tonight with a night of his movies. Wait a second. Carol Red was born on December 30, 1906. So it's just one of those random nights where TCM decides to honor somebody for no particular reason other than to show a night of good movies. Not that that's a bad reason to honor anybody, of course! As for Reed, he's probably best known for two movies: winning the Oscar for Oliver! (not airing tonight), as well as directing The Third Man (airing overnight at 3:15 AM ET). One of his movies that's not as well known but really deserves attention is Odd Man Out, which shows up at 11:30 PM tonight.
Odd Man Out is another of those movies with a really simple plot. James Mason stars as Johnny McQueen, a member of an IRA-like group in Belfast who has just gotten out of prison and is holed up in the house of one of the group's female supporters and her mother. The group is planning a bank robbery to fund themselves. But, unfortunately, the robbery goes awry, and in the getaway, Johnny is shot and wounded while the rest of the group continues to speed off in the getaway car, unable to go back and retrieve him. So, it's up to Johnny to fend for himself and find a way out of his predicament in the cold winter of Belfast....
The plot really is that simple, but frankly, describing it that simply doesn't do justice to the movie. As with so many of the British movies of the early postwar period, it's full of a more realistic darkness than the Hollywood noirs; it's also got its fair share of oddball characters, including a painter living in a derelict apartment and a priest who wants Johnny to do the right thing; and of course it has a plot with a lot of twists and coincidences. James Mason is quite good, but the rest of the cast adds just as much to the movie.
Odd Man Out was apparently released to DVD in Europe, but the TCM website lists it as not being available on DVD, while Amazon lists a small number of import copies available. So, you're better off catching one of the TCM showings.
Sure, ever since movies like Heaven's Gate were huge bombs (and why did we even get Kevin Costner's Waterworld?), we've known that spending the entire budget of Lesotho on a movie doesn't guarantee it will be any good; nor does putting more stars in it than there were in Dinner at Eight (which, coincidentally, is airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM ET on TCM) automatically make for a classic. TCM is running three "comedy epics" tonight, and one of them clearly doesn't stand up today: The Great Race, overnight at 2:30 AM ET.
Tony Curtis plays the Great Leslie, a handsome and virtuous daredevil in th efirst decade of the 20th century who performs feats of danger that wow the ladies. He's got a rival, though, in the form of Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), who tries to sabotage all of Leslie's stunts. Leslie decides, in conjunction with one of the early automobile makers, that his next stunt should involve taking part in (and winning, of course) a car race from New York to Paris, via a transpacific crossing. Professor Fate learns about this, and immediately decides he has to enter the race, and ensure that nobody else can win.
The two rivals, however, are not alone. Maggie Dubois is a suffragette who, in trying to raise the status of women, insists on forcing the publisher of one of New York's newspapers (Arthur O'Connell) to give her a job as a correspondent. And what would be the perfect job? Going on the "great race" in a Stanley Steamer and reporting on the race. The publisher doesn't like the idea, but his wife (Vivian Vance, TV's Ethel Mertz in one of her rare movie roles) is rather warmer to the idea, so off goes Maggie. You know that the two male rivals are going to compete over her as well, although they've got a third rival, in the form of her ideals. As for the race, it sets off, with Leslie being a team with his longtime assistant Hezekiah (Keenan Wynn), and Prof. Fate having assistant Max (Peter Falk) accompanying him.
The problem with The Great Race is that the humor largely falls flat, if not inducing cringes. The movie all too slowly makes its way through the American west, followed by a trip across the Bering Strait on a melting iceberg, and eventually ends up in an unnamed eastern European principality in a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda. The Zenda sequence, in particular, goes on much too long, climaxing with a pie fight that's much more tedious than funny.
Still, some people may enjoy The Great Race, and Natalie Wood gets some nice period costumes to wear. (Although, how she could pack all those changes of clothes is a mystery.) For those are new to the "epic comedies", the first two are rather better:
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at 8:00 PM; followed by
Around the World in 80 Days at 11:15 PM.
I knew that Gloria Stuart is turning 100 today. She unfortunately appeared in the dreadful James Cameron version of Titanic, and that's what she'll probably be remembered for when she dies and all the media outlets run their prepared obituaries. Of course, if you want to see an interesting version of Titanic, it ought to be the Nazi version. She made a lot of movies back in the 1930s, however, and earlier this year I recommended Island in the Sky.
IMDb's front page didn't have Stuart as the featured birthday person, which surprised me slightly. Instead, that honor went to Gina Lollobrigida, who turns 83 today. She'll be showing on on TCM later this week in Trapeze. (I believe it's 8:00 PM ET Wednesday, but check your listings.) Another person who turns 83 today is prolific playwright Neil Simon. I just recommended his Plaza Suite last week.
Stephen Boyd would be 79 if he hadn't died young. Boy do I wish The Oscar were available on DVD.
Finally, and for an excuse to post a photo I've used before, I note that today is the 86th birthday of Eva Marie Saint, who won an Oscar for playing Marlon Brando's girlfriend in On the Waterfront. The picture here is from the beginning of the movie, when her brother has just been killed, and priest Karl Malden is providing the last rites for the deceased.
I mentioned the short The Flag two years ago on Flag Day. As I mentioned, it stars Francis X. Bushman as General George Washington, who commissions Betsy Ross to create what would become the American flag. I pointed out at the time that it wasn't available on DVD; in fact, it seems as though it still hasn't made it to DVD anywhere. You'll have to catch one of the rare TCM showings, which includes tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM ET as part of a day of July 4-themed movies.
One thing I didn't mention two years ago is that there's also a subplot about a pregnant woman, and a young British soldier who crosses the lines in order to be able to see her. It's a rather silly addition to the story, but the movie as a whole is better worth watching for the historical value anyway, not the story. That is, for its place in film history, since the Betsy Ross story is apocryphal.
Movies about building or renovating houses often show the comic side of what can go wrong; it's all funny because it's true. One of the best-known examples of this is Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Several years before that, Jack Benny starred in a movie with a similar theme, George Washington Slept Here. That latter movie is airing overnight tonight at 12:15 AM ET on TCM.
Benny doesn't so much build his dream house, as get roped into it by his wife (played by Ann Sheridan). She's one of the worst tenants imaginable, getting evicted from one tony Manhattan apartment after another. She decides that the best thing she can do is find a house that they can buy, so that they'll never again have to be worried about getting evicted. However, she buys a fixer-upper without telling her husband. Needless to say, this place needs a lot of fixing-upping. All that money spent on repairs could prove costly, though, if they're unable to pay the mortgage on the house -- and they've got a neighbor who wants to make certain they can't pay that mortgage. Help seems on the way, however, with the arrival of their uncle Stanley (Charles Coburn), a wealthy man who spends his year going from one relative to the next.
Although I personally prefer Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House to George Washington Slept Here, the Jack Benny movie has a lot going for it. It's material that's right up Benny's alley, although some of the physical humor may seem a bit painful. The rest of the cast, hoewver, shines around Benny. Ann Sheridan shows she's quite good at comedy. We already knew Coburn was, and his presence in the second half of the movie is another one of those roles that fits an actor like a hand in a good glove. Even though both Sheridan and Coburn are quite good, two othe rsupporting cast members deserve more mention. First is Hattie McDaniel, who plays the long-suffering maid to Benny and Sheridan. If Benny had little choice in moving to this fixer-upper, McDaniel had even less, and has to suffer the consequences even more, as she's now stuck in a kitchen that has none of the conveniences you would have in New York. The other is the place's caretaker, played by Percy Kilbride. Kilbride would go on to play Pa Kettle, and plays the caretaker here in a similar underplayed style in which he's creating comedy but seems totally oblivious to it.
George Washington Slept Here seems not to have been released to DVD, so you're going to have to watch it on TCM.
Tonight being July 1, it's the start of a new month, with new features on TCM. One of those features is a month of teen movies, airing every Thursday night in prime time. This first Thursday in July includes well-known movies such as Rebel Without a Cause at 8:00 PM. But a more interesting movie would be the less well-known The Delinquents, coming up at midnight.
One of the earliest movies directed by Robert Altman, The Delinquents shows the lives of teenagers in Altman's native Kansas City in the mid-1950s. Scotty is a nice young man, who is going steady with Janice, until Janice's parents decide that she's much too young to be going steady with anybody, even somebody as harmless as Scotty. Poor Scotty is heartbroken, and allows himself to be used by a gang of punks led by Cholly. The thing is, Cholly likes Scotty and his innocence. He convinces Scotty to rebel a bit by bring Janice to a house party. What Scotty doesn't realize is that this is going to be a pretty wild party, and that Cholly and his gang have broken into the house to hold the party. When Scotty and Janice realize what's going on, they leave. Luckily for them, it's before the police can raid the place.
However, it's also unlucky for them that they don't get picked up in the raid. Cholly's #2 in the gang, Eddy, has grown jealous of Cholly's relationship with Scotty, and sees this as an opportunity to get back at Scotty by telling Cholly that it was Scotty who snitched to the cops and got the party raided. It's here that the action really begins to pick up, as Cholly and Eddy kidnap Scotty and get him involved with forced drinking and a stickup at a gas station! Poor Scotty: these teen movies seem to have to have a moral about not getting mixed up with the bad kids. (In some ways, this second half of the movie is reminiscent of the really fun Teen-Age Crime Wave.)
Many people may not consider The Delinquents to be as good as, say, Rebel Without a Cause, but to be honest, it's not bad at all, and a really zippy, fun movie. Robert Altman already shows that he's got potential, crafting an interesting story out of what to be honest is fairly routine material. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so you're going to have to catch tonight's TCM showing.
