Golf shorts

At approximately 3:40 AM, between two of Rita Hayworth's movies overnight (specifically, between You Were Never Lovelier and Miss Sadie Thompson), TCM is showing a short called Shoot Yourself Some Golf. I don't think I've ever seen this one before. It stars Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman (to whom Reagan was married at the time) as themselves, both of whom are having trouble with their golf game. So Warner Bros. brings in the champion of the long-drive contest and a trick golfer -- neither of them is a name I recognize, although I don't particularly follow golf or know too terribly much about the history of the sport -- to teach our Hollywood stars a bit about the game. The other thing that's interesting about the short is that it's in color.

I did a search of my blog, and while Blogger may be having search problems again, I really don't think I've ever mentioned Bobby Jones before. Jones is one of those old golf names that's more likely to be remembered by us non-golf fans, as he was one of the world's best in the late 1920s and more or less created the Masters tournament. Jones also starred in two series of shorts. First, in 1931, he made a series of about a dozen called "How I Play Golf"; the second, two years later, is called "How to Break 90" and is half a dozen films. Both series were directed by George Marshall, who directed a lot of movies, and is one of those names that I recognize, but I notice that a lot of his work is not quite A material. There's a couple of Betty Hutton movies from his Paramount days in the second half of the 1940s, and James Stewart's western Destry Rides Again.

TCM airs the Bobby Jones shorts often enough, but trying to find when they're going to show up is a pain, as "How to Break 90" doesn't yield any title matches! Searching for "Bobby Jones" is also problematic: there are a lot of Bobby Joneses out there, but TCMDb doesn't give any titles under each name to disambiguate them.

Marvin Hamlisch, 1944-2012

Composer Marvin Hamlisch died yesterday evening after a short illness. He was 68. Hamlisch won three Oscars, all in 1973: he won the Original Score Oscar for The Way We Were, as well as winning the Original Song Oscar for the title song. (Remember, the Original Song Oscar goes to the songwriter(s), and not the singer.) The third was for music adaptation for The Sting. The Sting is a score that I always find interesting. The movie was set in 1930s Chicago, and when Hamlisch wrote the score, he came up nostalgic music. But the song we best remember from The Sting is Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer", a piano work which was composed -- in 1902! Who would have thought that you could depict the 1930s by using a song that was popular 30 years earlier? And yet, the use of Joplin's music in the movie works.

Hamlisch would be nominated quite a few more times over the course of his career, both for scores like Sophie's Choice, as well as individual songs like "Nobody Does It Better" from The Spy Who Loved Me. And Hamlisch also was busy doing much more than movies. Hamlisch did the score for the hit Broadway musical A Chorus Line, which won him both a Tony award and a Pulitzer Prize. (And when the musical was adapted into a movie, an original song for the movie was also nominated for an Oscar.)

Edge of the City

TCM's star for today's installment of Summer Under the Stars is Sidney Poitier. Some of today's films I've recommended before; one that I haven't and would really like to mention is Edge of the City, which airs overnight at 12:15 AM. (If you're further west, it's not overnight, but rather earlier this evening.)

Poitier is only second-billed; the star is actually John Cassavetes in one of his earliest movies. He plays Axel Nordmann, a man who somewhat mysteriously shows up around the docks one night, looking for a job. The jobs of course don't come open until morning, so Axel sleeps outside the office and gets spotted in the morning by Tommy (Poitier). Tommy's an outgoing man, and willing to strike up a friendship with Axel, while Axel is rather more guarded and gets assigned to work not with Tommy, but with Charles (Jack Warden). Apparently Charles knows a bit about Axel's past, and is part of the racket to get people like Axel their jobs on the waterfront, and Axel has to pay protection money to Charles.

Tommy thinks this is unjust, and strikes up a deeper friendship with Axel. This is something that Charlie really doesn't like, partly because he doesn't want to lose his control over Alex, but also because he's racist and doesn't like a black guy like Tommy. Tommy, for his part, continues to get gloser to Axel, tries to get Axel assigned to work under him, and even tries to set up Axel and a blind date and go out with Axel, the girl, and his wife (Ruby Dee). Axel is still guarded, and still trying to patch up his relationship with his mother, whom he loves, but from whom he had to run away as his father no longer accepted him.

You can see coming from a mile away that there's going to be a boiling over in the conflict between Tommy and Charlie, and that this is presumably going to help bring a resolution to the conflicts in Axel's life, but in a movie like Edge of the City, part of the reason for watching is seeing how the characters get there. Edge of the City achieves that quite well, mostly down to the strong acting from all of the leads.

The only real problem with the movie is Tommy, and that's not Sidney Poitier's fault. If you've seen the piece on Poitier that TCM runs quite a bit, you'll recall film professor Donald Bogle talking about how Poitier had to play the "perfect" black man; the one sort of black person that could appeal to white audiences. That sort of sharply-drawn character wouldn't be problematic if you need your characters to be archetypes, but when you need more nuanced characters, such a lack of drawing the character's opposite side can be grating. Tommy at times comes across as too perfect and too interested in Axel for no good reason. With the state of race relations as they were in the late 1950s, I can't help but think the real-life Tommy would be closer to the character of Ruby Dee's husband in The Incident, or at least a bit closer to what Poitier played in The Defiant Ones.

Jamaica in

I read someplace this morning that today marks the 50th anniversary of Jamaica's independence from the United Kingdom, and it goes without saying that one of things I thought about with respect to this blog is movies that are set in Jamaica. Jamaica Inn would be an obvious guess for anybody who didn't know the story, but despite having the name "Jamaica" in the title, the movie is set solely in the UK. I don't think I've ever seen Cool Runnings in its entirety, the movie which tells the Disneyfied version of the Jamaican bobsled team. I would presume that some of the early scenes before the Jamaicans start bobsledding are in the characters' native Jamaica. One other movie that I think might be set in independent Jamaica is Doctor No, although I know the original Ian Fleming novel came out well before Jamaican independence. The movie's premiere was in the UK in October 1962, and a lot of the filming was done on locatoin in Jamaica. But presumably all the filming would have been before independence, and looking at IMDb, there's a scene where Bond meets the Colonial Secretary.

I believe Jamaica would have been the biggest of Britain's colonies in the Caribbean, and certainly in the western half of the Caribbean, back in the day. (I'd have to look up the size difference between Jamaica and Trinidad; Jamaica is quite a bit more populous nowadays. And frankly, I have no idea about the historical population differences, and when each British colony in the Caribbean was settled.) It would make sense if some of the pirate movies made in the Studio era would have had colonial settings on Jamaica. The Black Swan and Captain Blood both come to mind. I'm sure there are quite a few others.

Tonight's Van Heflin repeats

So it seems I've blogged about tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM before. Well, I haven't blogged about tonight, but it seems that in four and a half years of blogging, I've already done full-length posts on each of the first three movies that TCM is showing tonight in its Summer Under the Stars salute to Van Heflin. The picture at left is Heflin with Glenn Ford in tonight's first selection, 3:10 to Yuma, at 8:00 PM. I don't believe the recent remake is airing any time this week.

3:10 to Yuma will be followed at 9:45 PM by Johnny Eager. I blogged about this one back in April 2010 when Robert Taylor was Star of the Month. As I implied then, there are a lot of better gangster films out that, many of them made over at Warner Bros. instead of MGM. But Van Heflin richly deserved his Oscar for playing Taylor's alcohol-soaked best friend and quasi-conscience. He's by far the best thing in the movie.

Ooh, more pictures! I cribbed an image from somewhere for tonight's third film, The Prowler. It's nowhere near as prestigious a movie as either 3:10 to Yuma or Johnny Eager, but it's one that's just as deserving of a viewing if you haven't seen it before. It's coming on at 11:45 PM. All three films are out on DVD, in case you miss any of the showings.

There are also two interestingly titled Heflin military movies airing as part of Summer Under the Stars, neither of which I think I've seen before: Cry of Battle (not on DVD according to TCM) at 6:15 PM, and Battle Cry overnight at 3:00 AM.

TCM schedule heads-up

TCM was running a promo this week that I think got one of the showtimes wrong. Their Summer Under the Stars promos are highlighting what's coming up on weekends in prime time, and they announced tonight's Claude Rains lineup as:

The Invisible Man at 8:00 PM;
Mr. Skeffington at 9:30 PM; and
The Unsuspected at 12:30 AM.

Now I know Mr. Skeffington seems like an overlong movie, but it really only runs 146 mintues, and not a full three hours. With Robert Osborne's introduction and closing remarks, that should make the end of Mr. Skeffington right around midnight, which means the next film could start at 12:15 AM. This, in fact, is what TCM's online schedule and printable monthly schedule say. All three are availalbe on DVD anyhow, so if you miss any of them, you can catch them that way.

TCM's online schedule also doesn't list any shorts today to pad out any of the running times.

Some Like it Hot for Essentials Jr.!

Or, maybe not. Some Like It Hot is showing up tonight at 8:00 PM as part of the regualar Essentials, the one with the introduction by Robert Osborne and Drew Barrymore. For some time, however, I've wondered what younger people would make of a movie like Some Like It Hot.

Sure, it's got cross-dressing, and there are some uptight people who might have a problem with this. But think about why Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are dressed up as lady band members. They've seen a crime, and they've got a bunch of gangsters who want to kill them. What better way to escape than to dress up as members of the opposite sex. It's not too different from the way blackface scenes would understandably be considered offensive, but a movie like Silver Streak can get away with it because the scene has Richard Pryor coming up with the blackface idea, and it's used to help Gene Wilder effect an escape.

Yes, there's also a lot of sexual innuendo, or at least love innuendo. I would think, however, that the fact that Tony Curtis' character falls in love with Marilyn Monroe's character is explained easily enough, when you consider that Curtis is a man and Monroe a woman. Of course men and women fall in love. As for Joe E. Brown's character falling in love with the in-disguise Jack Lemmon, that's fairly easily explained by the fact that Brown has no idea the "woman" he's dancing with is in fact a man. And Lemmon and Curtis both have qualms over how to deal with their lies and how it's going to hurt the people who have fallen in love with them. Or, at least, the disguised characters they've been passing themselves off as: Lemmon's woman and Curtis' millionaire. As I think about it, this part of the plot of Some Like it Hot sounds complicated, but thanks to the excellent writing and the broad humor, it's really quite understandable. If there's really any sexual innuendo, it might just go over the heads of younger viewers. I know I watched James Bond movies when I was a kid, and I'm sure a good portion of the sexual innuendo completely escaped me back then.

Third might be the violence. But is Some Like it Hot any more violent than a lot of the movies of today? And to be fair, there are a lot of movies that I don't think anybody would have a problem considering suitable for children which have a fair amount of violence. Some of the serials that TCM has been running on Saturdays have comic-book characters shooting their way out of situations, and a lot of westerns have sharply-drawn good and bad guys with climactic shootouts. And never mind the violent cartoons. If there are any uptight parents out there, let's just drop a cartoon anvil on their heads. (And speaking of cartoons, I distinctly recall Bugs Bunny cross-dressing both in some Yosemite Sam cartoons, and some of the classic Elmer Fudd cartoons. Most notably would be Bugs as one of the female Wagnerian opera characters in What's Opera, Doc?)

If there's really one thing that's objectionable to certain people, I'd guess it might be the last line, once Jack Lemmon reveals to Joe E. Brown that he is, in fact, a man. Brown's line is one of the all-time greats, but it does technically leave open the possibility of something that would have been taboo for 1959 happening. In fact, I think the ending of Some Like It Hot is more open-ended. There are still some gangsters who would have survived the shooting in the hotel, and they are liable to go looking for Lemmon and Curtis after the escape by boat that ends the movie. If that isn't resolved, then it's perfectly fair to assume the relationship between Btown and Lemmon hasn't been resolved either.

So, then, the only question is, would younger people enjoy the humor of Some Like it Hot?

Time for a Marilyn Monroe box set?

Tomorrow on TCM's Summer Under the Stars brings 24 hours of Marilyn Monroe pictures. Monroe is one of those people who has become an icon, so it's not surprising that studios would use her image to sell DVDs, even in films where she wasn't high up in the billing. It's something I've mentioned before in conjunction with the piffling Fox film Love Nest, which doesn't happen to be part of tomorrow's Marilyn Monroe day, but is unsurprisingly availble on DVD with Monroe's face splashed all over the cover.

In fact, only one of tomorrow's movies on TCM is not available on DVD, which is Clash By Night (airing at 8:00 AM tomorrow), in which Monroe has a smaller role as the girlfriend of Barbara Stanwyck's brother (Keith Andes); the movie is really about Stanwyck, the man she marries (Paul Douglas), and the rough man she falls in love with (Robert Ryan). I find it somewhat surprising that TCM claims it's not on DVD, since it's got Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe, and was made at RKO, whose films are now under the control of Warner Bros. That means Warner Bros. could very easily release it as part of the Warner Archive. In fact, Warner Bros. released a DVD several years ago, but it's apparently out of print.

Clash By Night would be a good selection for part of a Monroe box set in those four-film "Legends" DVD box sets that you see advertised on TCM between movies, such as the current Kirk Douglas box set. The only condition would be that there are four films that are part of the Warner library, and I believe there are. In addition to Clash By Night, there's The Asphalt Jungle (tomorrow at 6:00 AM) which was made at MGM, and The Prince and the Showgirl which was made in Britain by Warner Bros. For the fourth movie, a restoration of Home Town Story might be in order. Monroe has a smaller role as a receptionist, but this is one of those MGM Bs from the early 1950s when Dore Schary was trying to be socially relevant. Inexplicably, they let the copyright run out, soe it entered the public domain and is cheaply available from all over the place.

Pre-code Myrna Loy

TCM's star for the second day of Summer Under the Stars is Myrna Loy. Loy is probably best remembered either for playing Nora Charles in the six Thin Man movies (the first airs at 11:00 PM), or for the wives any man could love (and I mean that in a good way) in movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (6:00 PM), The Best Years of Our Lives (8:00 PM) or Cheaper By the Dozen (overnight at 12:45 AM). She's good in all of these movies, but she's really interesting in the movies she did before enforcement of the Production Code became strict in 1934. TCM has been showing a bunch of those this morning, and will be showing one more overnight: Penthouse, at 2:15 AM.

Warren Baxter plays Jackson Durant, a society lawyer who unfortunately finds the sort of law he practices in polite society boring, so he defends gangster Tony Gazotti (Nat Pendleton, who also shows up this evening in The Thin Man). This causes him to lose his job at the society law firm, and be looked down upon by society, to the point that he even loses his fiancée, Sue (Martha Sleeper). So he takes up with Gertie (Myrna Loy), a high-priced call girl, even having her stay in his apartment!

Things are about to get more interesting, though. Sue comes crawling back to Durant. Not because she loves him, but because she needs his help. Her new boyfriend Tom (Phillips Holmes) has been accused of a murder he didn't commit, and she needs Durant to get Tom off. I mean, if Durant could get a gangster to beat the rap, why not a respectable person? And this is a doozie of a crime -- Tom stands accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Mimi (Mae Clarke), who was also a gangster's moll! Durant likes the challenge, and he starts to act like Perry Mason. That is, he doesn't defend the case in court; he solves it before it even gets to court. And, unsurprisingly, he does it with the help of Gertie and even Tony.

Penthouse is one of those movies that I saw ages ago, so my memories may be a bit fuzzy. For example, looking at the plot synopsis given on TCM implies I may have gotten wrong exactly when Durant and Gertie meet. But Penthouse is one of those breezy early 1930s movies, inexpensively made but with a lot of pizazz and entertainment value. If you haven't seen Myrna Loy's early career, this isn't a bad place to start. She played a lot of exotic vampish roles, but some of them were ethnic characters, as in Stamboul Quest or Thirteen Women, which I suppose might be off-putting. (It could be worse; I haven't mentioned the Fu Manchu movie where she plays Chinese!) Penthouse showcases Loy in a role that's not exactly clean, but isn't ethnically incorrect. It's one of the many, many films that have made their way to the Warner Archive, so you can catch it any time you want.

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

Gore Vidal, a novelist and critic who also wrote several screenplays, died yesterday evening at the age of 86. I knew that Vidal had written the screenplay for the movie version of his play The Best Man, but he ald did the screenplay for The Catered Affair and Suddenly Last Summer, along wiht I Accuse!, a late 1950s version of the Alfred Dreyfus story which puts more emphasis on Dreyfus than does The Life of Émile Zola. Vidal also wrote the novel Myra Breckinridge, which was turned into one of the bigger movie messes.

Vidal appeared as a Guest Programmer, I think back during the Month of Guest Programmers in November 2007. One of his selections was That Hamilton Woman, which was my first exposure that movie which tells the story of Horatio Nelson and his lover Lady Hamilton. For some reason I thought I had done a full-length post on it, but apparently not.