Documentary heads up

TCM is running a 45-minute documentary on Gary Cooper tomorrow as part of Cooper's day in Summer Under the Stars. That documentary, titled Gary Cooper: American Life, American Legend, will be on at 9:45 AM and is narrated by Clint Eastwood. According to the TCM schedule, it's not on DVD, so you'll have to catch it on TCM.

On Sunday night at 8:00 PM, TCM's Essentials Jr. selection is Ball of Fire. I wrote back in February 2010 that it's available on DVD, but the DVD seems to be out of print, similar to what I mentioned earlier today regarding Witness for the Prosecution. As for it being an Essentials Jr. selection, I think it's another of those movies that's almost completely unobjectionable, but one that younger children might have problems with for long stretches.

It's out of print?!

I was looking at TCM's schedule for today, and was surprised to see that Witness For the Prosecution (airing overnight tonight at 2:30 AM) doesn't have a "Buy DVD" icon next to it. Oh, sure, it's gotten a DVD release, or mutliple releases if you believe Amazon. It's just that none of those DVD releases seems to be in print any longer. So you'll either have to stay up late, record it, or pay big bucks for an old DVD.

I would have thought that Witness For the Prosecution was one of those movies that was well-enough known to deserve more frequent DVD print runs, but then, what do I know about the business?

Anchors Aweigh question

I tuned in to Anchors Aweigh on TCM yesterday just in time for the animated sequence: Gene Kelly talks to a bunch of animals in the forest about how their king has banned music and dancing, and then visits the king, played by Jerry the mouse. Kelly then teaches Jerry how to dance. It is, of course, a famous scene. I saw in one of the documentaries on Kelly (I think) that aired on TCM that Kelly wanted to use Mickey Mouse in the dance, but that Walt Disney was unsurprisingly opposed. Disney afterwards was apparently quite impressed by what Kelly had done. But I would have thought that the suits at MGM wouldn't have liked using Mickey Mouse when they had their own cartoon mouse, as opposed to Hollywood Party back in 1934.

Anyhow, there was one thing that struck me about the dance scene: Jerry tapped! I don't mean that he was doing the same sorts of steps that Gene Kelly was; that's to be expected. But I could swear that I heard Jerry's steps making tapping sounds! It's not as if Jerry had any tapping shoes on; in fact he was naked as the day God made him, as opposed to Mickey, who at least has the decency to wear short pants. So where was the sound coming from? Well, presumably Jerry added the taps in post-production. :-) But don't they have a continuity editor for this stuff?

Madame Blanche

Back in February 2009, I very briefly mentioned the movie The Secret of Madame Blanche. It's airing tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM on TCM, and if you like movies like Madame X, you'll probably like this one, too.

Irene Dunne plays the lead role, this time as a showgirl in the 1890s instead of the married woman of Madame X. She falls in love with Phillips Holmes, and even gets knocked up by him. But Daddy (Lionel Atwill) doesn't approve of the relationship, cutting his son off which leads the son to commit suicide. At this point, Grandfather takes custody of his grandson (ie. the child of Dunne's and Holmes' relationship).

Fast forward 20 years. Dunne has been working as a barkeep in France to make a living, and it's now World War I. What British soldiers should wind up in the place where Dunne is working but the son she gave birth to all those years ago? Naturally, there's no good way she can tell him the truth. At this point, things get either interesting or melodramatic, depending upon your opinion of this sort of movie. The son is seeing a girl whose father doesn't like him, and there's a scuffle in which the son kills his girlfriend's father. And what does Madame Blanche do? She tries to take the rap for it!

As I said, it's the sort of movie that 80 years on can be a bit tough because the plot is just so unlike the stuff we're used to nowadays. Dunne does a reasonably good job, though, and this is a movie worth watching either for the people who are fans of Madame X, as I've already mentioned, or those who haven't seen any movies in this genre. As for the rest of you? Well, you've been warned.

The Secret of Madame Blanche has, as far as I'm aware, not received a release to DVD.

Jack Lemmon night

For some reason I thought I had done a full-length blog post on The Fortune Cookie before, but I haven't. It's airing at 8:00 PM tonight on TCM, and the one-paragraph synopsis is going to have to suffice again, I'm sorry to say.

It's being followed at 10:15 PM by My Sister Eileen, which is of course the 1950s musical version; Lemmon's career not having started when the 1941 Rosalind Russell version was released.

The movie that interests me is one I haven't seen before: Cowboy, at 12:15 AM. The idea of Lemmon in a western is intriguing, although once you read the synopsis, it seems he was well-cast. It's based on the true-life story of writer (played by Lemmon) Frank Harris, who in the 1870 went west to try to remake his life by becoming a cowboy. Glenn Ford plays the leader of the cattle drive. Lemmon's not the first person you'd think of for a western, but if the role is for somebody new to the west, then why not Jack Lemmon?

I've briefly mentioned The Days of Wine and Roses quite a few times; that airs at 2:15 AM. Lemmon and Lee Remick play a husband and wife who together descend into alcoholism. Being the sort of person who only drinks a glass of wine a day, I wouldn't know how realistic this is, so I'd have to rely on reviewers who say it is. At least, the whole thing looks well-done.

Guilty Hands

I mentioned the movie Guilty Hands back in April, saying that it wasn't available on DVD and that I didn't know when it would be airing again. It's still not on DVD, but it's on tonight at 8:00 PM as part of TCM's salute to Kay Francis in Summer Under the Stars.

The comments that I wrote back in April still hold, I think:

And then there's Guilty Hands, which ran this morning. It sounded like an interesting premise -- former district attorney Lionel Barrymore commits murder and tries to pin it on Kay Francis -- but the execution was off. That having been said, the execution was off in a way that makes parts of the movie really interesting.

A few things I didn't mention in April: Barrymore commits the murder thinking that he's doing the right thing for his daughter (Madge Evans), by protecting her from the man she thinks she loves (Alan Mowbray) but that Dad knows would be wrong for her. There's also no mystery in this movie, or at least not the traditional mystery. We know from the start who the killer is, so Hitchcock would probably classify this as suspense: will the killer get away with it? Since the movie dates to 1931, there is a reasonable chance that the killer could well get away with it, which is another thing that makes the movie worth one watch. If it were a movie made after they started enforcing the Production Code, the point of the movie would have to be seeing how the plot goes wrong. Not that you can't make a good movie along those lines; Double Indemnity springs immediately to mind. It's just that pre-Code movies allow for the possibility of something different.

Overall, I think Guilty Hands is the sort of movie that's worth one watching. Not the greatest thing by any stretch, but an enjoyable enough little curiosity, and a window to 1930s values.

Mary Stevens, MD

For those of you who like pre-Code films, Kay Francis is in the spotlight tomorrow as part of Summer Under the Stars on TCM. That means several pre-Codes. One that I don't think I've recommended before is Mary Stevens, MD, which comes on at 7:00 AM

Francis plays the title character, doctor Mary Stevens, who has a thriving practice working with nurse Glenda Carroll (somebody in the script department wasn't very imaginative, as the character is played by Glenda Farrell). She also likes Dr. Donald Andrews (Lyle Talbot), but he's in love with Lois (Thelma Todd), who is the daughter of a wealthy politician. Dr. Andrews marries Lois, while Mary becomes a successful pediatrician. Time passes, and Dr. Andrews, finding he's in a loveless marriage, starts committing embezzlement. But he can't get out of the marriage because it would hurt his father-in-law's political career.

Drs. Andrews and Stevens meet again and he promises her that he'll get a divorce from Lois, but you know that's never going to happen. Dr. Andrews has to agree to remain married to Lois or else he'll get in trouble for his embezzlement Mary, however, is apparently stupid enough to believe that he's going to be able to get a divorce, as she has sex with Dr. Andrews. Now, of course, we don't actually see anything approaching a sex act. They couldn't get away with that even in a pre-Code. But we know there has to have been a sex act, since we soon discover that Mary Stevens is pregnant! It's not like they had test-tube babies back in those days, either (well, only in a movie set in the future like Just Imagine). At this point the movie starts to get strange and take an odd turn.

Mary Stevens decides to go off to Europe to have her baby. I'd guess she was doing the same thing Loretta Young would do a few years later in real life: go off into seclusion, have the baby, and then claim you've adopted a child! Yeah, nobody's going to figure out what really happened. After having the baby, she gets back on a ship to return to the US, but there's an outbreak of "infantile paralysis" (the old-fashioned name they used for polio back in the day), and while she's saving two of the children on board, her own child gets infected! The movie quickly follows the rest of its plot to a strangely happy and conventional ending, which I won't give away here.

Mary Stevens, MD is an interesting idea that I think gets weighed down by a subpar script. Mary ought to be a smart woman, and there's no good reason for her to sleep with Dr. Andrews and get knocked up. The ending also feels tacked on, as if the writers had no idea how they were going to resolve the problems they had. Perhaps is Mary had poisoned a patient like George Bailey stopped Dr. Gower from (accidentally) doing in It's a Wondreful Life when Gower learned his child had died of influenza, there would be a more interesting ending. On the bright side, Mary Stevens, MD didn't get into the territory that Madame X and a whole bunch of imitators did.

Mary Stevens, MD doesn't seem to be out on DVD, not even from the Warner Archive.

William Windom, 1923-2012

The death has been announced of actor William Windom. To be honest, Windom is probably better known for his roles on TV, which include a few starring roles and well over a hundred guest appearances. For those of us who watch the old movies instead, he might be remembered for playing the prosecuting attorney in To Kill a Mockingbird; at least, that's probably the best-known movie in which he appeared. I have to admit that I wouldn't have remembered it being Windom who played the prosecutor.

The role for which I think of Windom is the poor guy who committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the grandstand at Aqueduct in Frank Sinatra's The Detective. That's actually the first time we see Windom's character in the movie; we only learn about his past as Sinatra investigates it and as it's eventually told in a flashback sequence voiced over by Windom.

Some Hitchcock notes

Tonight's selection for TCM's Essentials Jr. is North by Northwest, at 8:00 PM. It's a good movie, and I don't know that there's too much that parents would find highly objectionable, but I just have this nagging feeling that at about 135 minutes, it might be a bit long for the kids. I've also blogged in the past that I believe Saboteur tells much the same story, but better, and in 25 fewer minutes too. I suppose in that regard, The 39 Steps might be best of all at under 90 minutes, but then that has the British accents which might present a bit of a problem for some children.

That having been said, it's not as if TCM has much choice in the matter. North by Northwest was made at MGM, while most of Hitchcock's other movies weren't. Although TCM doesn't have unlimited access to the library that Ted Turner amassed when he purchased MGM, they seem to have a much easier time renting films from their corporate brethern in the Time Warner complex than from other studios. Specifically in the case of Saboteur and other movies whose rights ended up with Universal, those films seem to be showing up on the Encore family of channels right about now. Meanwhile, TCM has been able to come up with a few more showings of I Confess and the other films Hitchcock made at Warner Bros. in the early 1950s.

Following North by Northwest at 10:30 PM is Destination Hitchcock, a 40-minute documentary about the making of North by Northwest, narrated by Eva Marie Saint and well worth the watch.

A short and a not-on-DVD repeat

TCM is in the middle of its 24 hours of movies with Freddie Bartholomew in the cast, as part of his day in Summer Under the Stars. The Essential is Captains Courageous at 8:00 PM, which I've recommended before and which I really don't have to mention anyway since it's on DVD. Just before Captains Courageous, or a little after 7:45 PM, is the short Hollywood Goes to Town, which according to the TCM database is a 1938 short about the premiere of Marie Antoinette. I don't think I've seen the short before, which sounds at least as though it'll be more interesting than most of the trailers the studios made for their movies at the time.

Back in April, 2010, I blogged about Lloyd's of London, another film that TCM has gotten the rights to show from Fox. It's on tonight at midnight ET, and according to TCM's schedule it's not available on DVD. From what little research I've done, it doesn't seem to be art of Fox's MOD archive yet, either. The first set of Fox MOD releases is here, with the second set here.