The original legend

TCM is showing a night of movies about pandemic diseases this evening, including a truly underrated movie that's been remade a couple of times since: The Last Man on Earth, at 10:15 PM.

Vincent Price stars as a man living in what looks like a sort of postapocalytpic world, of the sort that you might see in Night of the Living Dead. There's no trace of living humans, but there's certainly evidence that people were around, and have been around recently. Only they're not real people any longer; they're vampires. It turns out that a new virus escaped some years back, and killed most of mankind, turning them into some sort of half-zombie/half-vampire people: they need to feast on real humans, but can only do their feeding at night. So Price goes out during the day to gather food and try to kill any of these creatures he can find, while hunkering down at night, trying to keep them at bay for one more night while he can work on trying to find a cure for the disease. (Price himself is immune, having been bitten by a vampire bat before the virus entered the body public.) And then he meets a woman who seems to be as immune to the disease as he is....

If the story above sounds familiar, well, it should. The movie is based on an earlier science fiction story by Richard Matheson called "I Am Legend". The Last Man on Earth, or more accurately the original story, was later remade into the movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith in the Price role. In between, Charlton Heston also played the role in the 1971 film The Omega Man.

Although Vincent Price has long been known as the king of low-budget horror from the 1960s on, this is not quite the sort of movie that compares to the work he was doing with either William Castle or Roger Corman. There's something much more serious and disturbing about it. Price had been acting since the late 1930s and had serious acting chops, as you can see in movies like Laura, which he uses to good effect here, bring much more depth to the character than we see in his films with William Castle.

I don't know how exactly The Last Man on Earth compares with the original story "I Am Legend", but on its own it stands as quite a good film.

José Ferrer, 1912-1992

Today marks the centenary of actor José Ferrer, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 1950 for his starring role in Cyrano de Bergerac. That movie is airing at 8:00 PM, although the last time I saw it on TCM, the print didn't look so good.

Actually, quite a few of Ferrer's films are airing today, which is a bit odd since TCM doesn't often do birthday salutes on the weekend. I've recommended The Caine Mutiny before (October 2009 to be specific), which kicks off the salute at noon. That's followed by another underrated film, Crisis, an August 2009 selection which airs at 2:15 PM.

I don't know if I've recommended I Accuse! (4:00 PM) before. Ferrer plays Alfred Dreyfus in this telling of the Dreyfus Affair, in which Émile Zola wrote the famous open letter J'accuse!. I'm pretty certain I've recommeded The Life of Émile Zola before, which covers much of this same material, albeit in black-and-white and without any location shooting.

Ferrer plays composer Sigmund Romberg in Deep in My Heart (6:00 PM). I very briefly mentioned Sigmund Romberg once, back in May 2008, as part of a post about the short An Intimate Dinner in Celebration of Warner Brothers' Silver Jubilee, in which Romberg has a cameo as one of the men responsible for the songs in musicals.

The last of the Ferrer movies showing today is in fact the first film Ferrer made, the Ingrid Bergman version of Joan of Arc, at 10:00 PM.

Frederica Sagor Maas, 1900-2012

One of the last links -- and almost certainly the last adult link -- to silent cinema, has died. Frederica Sagor Maas, who started as a story editor at the New York branch of Universal back in 1920, was 111 years old.

Maas fairly quickly made her way to Hollywood, where she wound up at MGM, probably most notably writing the screenplay for Greta Garbo's Flesh and the Devil. Hollywood, however, turned out not so well for her and her eventual husband, as they found Hollywood doing all sorts of things to their scripts that the two of them didn't write. This eventually forced the couple back to New York in the 1930s. Maas wrote one more screenplay about the tribulations of pioneering working women, but that turned out just as bad for her when Fox took it and turned it into a light musical comedy, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. (That movie, to be fair, isn't particularly bad; it's just nothing at all like how Maas would have wanted her screenplay to turn out.)

Maas got the last laugh, however, as she outlived everybody she worked with and wrote her memoirs, which were published when she was 99 years old.

Perfect Strangers again

I last mentioned the movie Perfect Strangers back in July 2010, with the post implying that I hadn't seen the film before I first posted about it. For some reason, I thought I might have seen it when Ginger Rogers was Star of the Month, but then, I'm not even certain any more whether it even aired back when Rogers was Star of the Month. Looking through the schedule, Rogers was Star of the Month in March 2010, and the movie aired at 11:30 AM on a Thursday at the end of one of Rogers' "nights". I'm pretty certain the first time I saw Perfect Strangers was in prime time, so I guess I didn't watch it back in March 2010.

At any rate, I bring it up again because the movie is airing again tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on TCM. It's probably worth one viewing, if only to have fun watching Hollywood's warped perception of the legal system.

More than a moment

Esther Williams starred in The Unguarded Moment, which aired last May when she was TCM's Star of the Month. Tomorrow at 11:15 AM, as part of a birthday salute to Loretta Young, TCM is airing The Unguarded Hour.

The Unguarded Hour is a movie that might remind you of Evelyn Prentice. Young plays Lady Helen, a British woman who is the wife of Sir Alan (Franchot Tone). Sir Alan is a prominent prosecuting attorney, and is in line to become the British equivalent of the Attorney General. There's a small problem, however. It seems as though Alan had a relationship with a married woman many years earlier, and there are some letters from that relationship. Blackmailer Hugh (Henry Daniell) has obtained these letters, and is looking for a substantial sum of money for them, or else he'll make them public. Doing that would scuttle Sir Alan's chances at a promotion, so Lady Helen decides to pay the blackmailer.

Paying the blackmailer involves going to an out-of-the-way location near some of the cliffs that overlook the English Channel. While making her way around the paths, Lady Helen runs across a couple who are arguing, but in which the husband is trying to make his wife watch her step lest she falls over the cliff. Sure enough, the dumb broad falls over the cliff to her death, and the husband gets prosecuted. Unsurprisingly, that prosecution is handled by Sir Alan to make the story more interesting. The defendant claims there was this mysterious female witness, and dammit there certainly was! But for that witness to come out, she would have to reveal she is the wife of the prosecutor, and that she witnessed the accident because she was on her way to pay off a blackmailer.

The Unguarded Hour is a melodramatic movie of the sort that seemed to be popular in the 1930s, as there are a lot of them. Nowadays, I think such stuff would be straight-to-TV on a channel such as Lifetime. To be fair, the movie is reasonably well made, with Young, Tone, and the rest of the cast of MGM regulars doing a creditable job. The only problem is that the story is so frustratingly obnoxious. It's not quite as bad as Madame X or any of its variants, but it's got an ending that will probably be making you scream at your TV.

The Unguarded Hour hasn't been released to DVD, so if you want to see it, you'll have to watch it on TCM.

The Red Danube

Angela Lansbury's movies started tonight at 8:00 PM, but they continue into tomorrow morning. The last of them for this week is The Red Danube, airing at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

Lansbury plays Audrey Quail, an adjutant to British colonel Hooky Nicobar (Walter Pidgeon). Hooky is stationed in the British sector of Vienna back in those days not long after World War II when Austria and Vienna were occupied by the four victorious powers from World War II (you'll probably remember this from The Third Man). As with Berlin, people were trying to make their way from one sector to another in Vienna, in that they wanted to get away from one country or another. Part of the job of the various militaries was to repatriate people back to countries they originally came from, as there were a lot of refugees in the early postwar years.

However, there weren't only refugees, there were people who didn't want to go back to their original countries, especially not the Soviet Union. It's Hooky's job to return them, which in this case means ballerina Olga Alexandrova (Janet Leigh). She's got some people on her side, however, in the form of Mother Auxilia (Ethel Barrymore), a nun who leads a convent and tries to hide escapees when she can; and British major Twingo McPhinister (Peter Lawford). He doesn't see why Soviets should be forcibly repatriated assuming they don't want to go -- and while trying to convince Hooky of this, he falls in love with Olga.

The political situation is in some ways the main part of the story, at least in how it drives the story line of Leigh's character. But there's also the subplot of Lawford's relationship with her, and a second subplot of Pidgeon's loss of faith (he lost his son in the war) and his journey to find it again, helped enormously by Barrymore's Mother Auxilia, who is one of those characters who just won't take "no" for an answer. The movie is quite good at times, showing for example the horrible fate awaiting people who would be repatriated to the Soviet Union. It doesn't do this as well as movies like The Third Man or The Big Lift show the bad life faced by people living in postwar Vienna and Berlin respectively, although it looks like The Red Danube doesn't have nearly as extensive the location shooting that either of the other two movies did. On the other hand, The Red Danube also effectively shows the difficult situation that Western military officials were in when having to deal with the Soviets. By the time of this movie, Berlin had already been blockaded, so the consequences of non-cooperatoin with the Soviets were fairly obvious. (As an aside, the occupation of Austria didn't end until 1955.) On the bad side, the movie has an ending that seems a little too pat.

The Red Danube hasn't gotten a DVD release, which is a bit of a surprise.

Angela Lansbury in Gaslight

Tonight sees the first of several nights of the films of Angela Lansbury as TCM's Star of the Month. I've mentioned Gaslight a number of times in the past, and it's Lansbury's feature film debut. As such it's a good choice to kick off the look at her, and it's airing at 8:00 PM tonight. What I hadn't noticed before is that I've apparently never included a photo of Lansbury to accompany any of the posts I've done; certainly not one of Lansubry in Gaslight. So, I rather shamelessly found a photo from the blog Sage Slowdive and am reusing it here. She doesn't seem to like Lansbury's performance as much as I do, but not everybody can have the same opinion.

I'd rather forgotten that Lansbury shows up in National Velvet, which follows at 10:00 PM. But yes, she's in there.

At least they changed the names

If you watched much of William Powell's turn as TCM's Star of the Month back in December, you will probably have seen The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. It's a 1937 film in which Powell plays an elegant jewel thief who teams up with Joan Crawford, only to see her be pursued by Robert Montgomery. Hollywood has never been original, so it may not surprise you to know that the William Powell film is a remake of one from 1929, starring Norma Shearer in the Crawford role, and Basil Rathbone in the Montgomery role. In fact, both are versions of an earlier stage play, something that was relatively common in the early days of sound films -- they needed a lot of material back then, and this was stuff that already had pre-written dialogue.

What you might not know is that MGM made the movie a third time, in 1951, as The Law and the Lady, which you can see tomorrow morning at 11:15 AM on TCM. This time, the lady is played by Greer Garson, who really isn't right for the role. Michael Wilding is suitably dashing, but nothing spectacular, redoing the Powell role; and Fernando Lamas plays the Montgomery role. The location has also been moved from England to San Francisco in the days before the earthquake of 1906. (I doubt MGM still had any sets left over from San Francisco.) Perhaps the one highlight is Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle) as the woman Garson and friends are trying bilk.

Marion Davies Day

TCM is honoring actress Marion Davies (1897-1961) tomorrow on the anniversary of her birth. The salute goes from 6:00 AM until the start of prime time with nine of Davies' films. Davies is an actress who doesn't get the credit nowadays she deserves. In part it's because her career ended in the late 1930s, but I think it has a lot more to do with Orson Welles and the movie Citizen Kane. Marion Davies was the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, who was married to another woman, one who wouldn't grant him a divorce. Citizen Kane, of course, was a fairly thinly-veiled look at a media magnate based on the life of Hearst. In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane takes a chorus girl (Dorothy Comingore) and tries to make a serious opera star out of her, with disastrous results. As Marion Davies' career had already ended and there were no outlets for re-watching old films, critics looked at the Comingore storyline and unsurprisingly compared her character to Marion Davies, giving the impression that Davies was a lousy actress who only got where she did thanks to Hearst.

That's somewhat unfair. Hearst certainly did try to do as much as he could for Davies' career, to the point that he had his own production company (Cosmopolitan Productions) to put Davies in its films. But Davies was actually a fairly competent actress, and she had started making movies before meeting Hearst. Davies was best at more comedic films; her silent Show People is a spoof on Hollywood which is excellent. It's unfortunate that TCM is only looking at the talkies tomorrow. Still, Davies was able to do creditable jobs in films like The Florodora Girl, which kicks off the salute at 6:00 AM. Here, Davies plays a chorus girl who is unable to attract a rich man the way all the other chorus girls do. Then, wealthy Lawrence Gray (who had made a number of silents with Davies) comes along, although he may not have the best of intentions -- until he hits a financial reversal and he and Davies have to decide whether love will conquer all.

The Florodora Girl ends with a two-strip Technicolor sequence which would be better if the print were better, but it's a nice look at turn-of-the-last-century fashion. And this was one of Davies' problems. Although The Florodora Girl is a romantic comedy, it's also a period piece, and that's the sort of movie Hearst preferred she be in. Still, The Florodora Girl, along with the rest of tomorrow's Davies movies, are worth watching.

The end of the Fox Movie Channel

Well, not quite, but I don't think it's unsafe to say the end is near. Three months ago, the folks at Fox who run the Fox Movie Channel decided they were going to "rebrand" the channel effective January 1, 2012. According to the press release,

The new FXM block will air contemporary movies with limited commercials from 3 p.m.-3 a.m. daily, while maintaining its current commercial-free format of classic films from 3 a.m.-3 p.m.

Pardon me if I roll my eyes at that use of the term "limited". I'm reminded of one of the Simpsons episodes, where Marge makes a comment to the effect that "they turned Fox into a soft core porn channel so gradually I hardly even noticed". As with IFC a year ago, these things start off slowly, but within six months, the identity of the channel is totally changed, and we'll have a Fox version of AMC, which has mostly recent movies -- when they have movies. The rest of the time it's commercials and crap like Mad Men. (Yes, I'm aware I'm one of the few who doesn't like Mad Men, but I think I've mentioned quite a few times how I don't care for the constant revisionist rehashing of the 1960s.)

Besides, from what I can tell (it took a long time before FMC's website updated the schedule for January 1 and beyond), the movies airing in the "classic" block are rather less classic than before. I'd presume the FXM block films are going to be edited for content as well.

So enjoy the rest of the Fox Movie Channel while you can; it's probably not going to be around much longer.