Who owns the rights to the Goldwyn films?

I was surprised in a sad way to notice on TCM's online schedule page that The Best Years of Our Lives, which is airing tonight at 9:45 PM, is apparently not available for purchase from TCM's online shop. IMDb, which partners with Amazon, says that it's avaialable on DVD, and the Amazon links certainly do show DVDs of the movie that you can buy. But they're all overpriced, with the release dates being years and years ago, which implies that the movie is out of print.

I was wondering who has the rights to it, until I did a bit of research. The movie was made by the "Samuel Goldwyn Compnay", but was originally released to theaters by RKO as a distributor. IMDb's "company credits" page for the film lists MGM/UA Home Entertainment as having released the film on DVD back in 2000, but presumably they only contracted with Goldwyn (or its corporate heirs) to release the DVD. Actually, IMDb's use of "Samuel Goldwyn Company" may be a misprint. I don't recall what the credits to the film say -- I think it might just be "Samuel Goldwyn Presents" or something similar -- but the company name at the time was "Samuel Goldwyn Productions", which is a different company from the "Samuel Goldwyn Company", which was founded by Sam Goldwyn, Jr. in the late 1970s. (At least, this is if my cursory Wikipedia research is correct.) Wikipedia says Warner Bros. has the rights to the movies now, with a link to Blu-ray.com listing the Goldwyn films to which WB acquired the rights. (There are a few, such as Porgy and Bess, which have other rights issues.) Theoretically, this means that WHV, which is under the same corporate underlords as TCM (I think) should be able to release The Best Years of Our Lives to DVD and/or Blu-ray.

Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell

TCM's series on disability in film continues at 8:00 PM tonight with Lucky Star, which is going to be a new-to-me movie. Charles Farrell plays a wheelchair-bound World War I veteran who meets Janet Gaynor. She falls in love with him over the objections of her father, who unsurprisingly wants her to marry somebody who can provide for her better. Sounds like a not uncommon plot in silent movies. But, it's one of nine or ten films Gaynor and Farrell made together at Fox; they were one of the more popular screen teamd of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

I've only recommended one of their joint films together, Sunnyside Up, which I really enjoyed. I have to admit, however, that some of their other films I've seen are not quite to my liking. I just couldn't get into their characters in the overlong Street Angel, and the early talkie Delicious, which aired during TCM's look at immigration back in June, played too much to immigrant stereotypes, not being helped by being a creaky early sound picture.

There are people out there who know more about Gaynor and Farrell than I do. This defunct blog has a nice article on them, although the curmudgeon in me objects to the use of .png files for regular pictures: it's a format that's better for things like graphs, and using it for photos is a memory hog that causes pages to load slowly.

Silent Hollywood has a page with several production stills from Street Angel. I haven't checked out the rest of the site.

Spencer Tracy, night two

I finally saw one of the TCM promos for Star of the Month Spencer Tracy, discussing his work on the film Inherit the Wind. As usual, it's a well-done piece, although Inherit the Wind isn't airing until October 29, which is part of a night of work from the end of Tracy's career. This second night of Tracy's turn as Star of the Month feature some of the work he did in the early part of his MGM career, starting with Fury at 8:00 PM. It's a movie I blogged about back in August 2008, and the picture at left is from Fury. If you haven't seen it before, it's one I strongly recommend.

Fury will be followed at 9:45 PM by Libeled Lady, which is an entirely different sort of movie from Fury, but which is equally recommended, especially if you like comedy. I can't believe it was all the way back in March of 2008 that I blogged about it. It was remade in the late 1940s as Easy to Wed with Van Johnson and Lucille Ball, but I note that I already mentioned this in the March 2008 blog post. I don't think I've blogged about Eady to Wed before; in fact, I'm not certain if I've even seen it in its entirety.

Not having seen the movie in its entirety is also something I can say about Edison, the Man, which is airing overnight at 1:45 AM. I caught the ending of it when it was last on a few months back, and it came across as typical of the biopics of the era, especially when you consider this one was made at MGM: hagiographic, and perfectly willing to dispense with reality for the sake of a good story. (What Edison did to poor Nikola Tesla is apparently overlooked. That would make in interesting story in and of itself.)

More young Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe appeared in The Asphalt Jungle at MGM, before starting her several year stint at Fox, where she made most of her most famous films apart from Some Like It Hot. Sadly, The Asphalt Jungle isn't showing up on TCM any time soon. TCM, however, has been able to get the rights to one of Monroe's smaller roles from earlier in her career at Fox, that being Monkey Business, which is airing this evening at 6:00 PM. Monroe only plays a secretary to pharmecutical company president Charles Coburn. The star is Cary Grant, a chemist who discovers an elixir that makes him (or anybody who takes it) act inappropriately young for a while, until the elixir wears off. Monroe gets a car scene with Cary Grant, as well as an argument scene with young-acting Ginger Rogers.

(Unrelated to Monroe, but related to TCM and Fox, they've also gotten the rights to Cheaper By the Dozen, airing at 4:15 PM. Clifton Webb plays an "efficiency expert" who, together with wife Myrna Loy, raises a family of a dozen kids.)

What's left of the Fox Movie Channel is also running some of Monroe's early work. Tomorrow morning at 7:40 AM, they're showing Let's Make It Legal, a movie I first recommended back in May, 2011. That's followed at 9:00 AM by We're Not Married, a film which is rather better than Let's Make It Legal.

Two more shorts

I probably should have mentioned Valiant Venezuela last night. It's airing at 10:30 AM today on TCM, and it's one of those Traveltalks shorts that's not available on DVD. As the title implies, James Fitzpatrick visits Venezuela as it was in 1939, which needless to say is a much different place than it is today. It's interesting that this was scheduled for today, since there's a presidential election coming up in Venezuela, although I doubt that's how it ended up on the schedule. I'm sure it has more to do with the fact that it's following The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. I'm pretty certain I've stated a number of times how much I enjoy Fitzpatrick's Technicolor looks into the past, regardless of how sugar-coated they may be.

Later today, a little after 5:50 PM on TCM, is The Cincinnati Kid Plays According to Hoyle. This is little more than a promo for MGM's film The Cincinnati Kid, which stars Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson as 1930s-era poker players. (TCM doesn't list The Cincinnati Kid as being on any time soon.) It's been a long time since I've seen the movie, and if memory serves Joan Blondell plays the dealer for the climactic poker match. It's a role for which she had to learn how to do professional-style card dealing, and that's more or less what this short discusses, however briefly. Joan and the real professional who taught her are the stars here.

Robert Osborne reminder

A brief reminder that Robert Osborne is not going to be presenting tonight's lineup on TCM. In fact, he's no longer going to be presenting movies on Friday nights at all. Osborne wrote a letter to discuss his somewhat reduced hosting duties going forward.

As I pointed out a week and a half ago, the TCM taping schedule seems to be just right for taping one month's worth of prime time intros in five taping days, which would be a Monday-Friday week for the rest of us. Is you do the math and see that Osborne is taking off Fridays (roughly four Fridays a month) and half of Sunday (roughly equivalent to two nights' worth of movies), you'll see that Osborne is cutting out about the equivalent of six (sometimes seven) nights' worth of intros each month, which oh-so-conveniently comes out to about a fifth of the month, which ought to enable Osborne to tape his work for the month over the course of four days instead of five.

Fridays this month are devoted to a look at movies dealing with American politics, kicking off with an A Night at the Movies documentary, which I presume will be similar to the one they did for genres like horror and epics. (That would be the sort of thing that's a reasonable introduction for the uninitiated, but cursory for the sort of people who read blogs like this and are likely to have seen most of the movies in this series.) According to TCM's press release, Wolf Blitzer is going to be coming in from CNN (who once again conveniently just happen to share the same corporate overlord as TCM) to discuss the films on October 26. I was under the impression he'd be on every Friday night this month, but apparently not.

Marked Woman

I don't think I've ever blogged about the movie Marked Woman before. It's airing overnight tonight at 1:30 AM on TCM.

Bette Davis stars as Mary, a woman who is more or less an escort at a club run by gangsters. Her job is to lure men in, and make certain that they get involved in the high-stakes gambling that goes on -- gambling that is really designed to fleece the men. She leaves the club with one of the men, who hasn't paid off his gambling debt. Eventually, he gets killed and the body discovered with her address, which leads to her being the chief suspect for District Attorney David Graham (Humphrey Bogart). Well, not quite. David logically suspects that it's really Vanning, the guy who runs the club (played by Eduardo Ciannelli), who knows who carried out the murder, and on whose order the murder was committed. But Mary refuses to put the finger on him.

Meanwhile, Bette's apartment is a fun place. It's really more of a rooming house, with Mary and all of her escort friends sharing the premises. Into all this walks Betty (Jane Bryan). She's Mary's naïve kid sister, having just arrived from the small town where they both grew up, thinking that Mary must lead a terribly exciting life. Up to this point, Mary has felt confident, believing that she can handle whatever either Vanning or Graham tries to throw at her, and stay one step ahead of everything, as she says. That wasn't quite the case before, and with her kid sister in town, it's certainly not the case now. Betty is wholly unprepared for the sort of life Mary leads, with the result that when she starts to try the same lifestyle, it's going to get her in a lot of trouble....

But that sort of trouble might be just what was needed to push Mary into cooperating with the DA against Vanning. The problem is that, if Mary does cooperate, it's going to put her in a lot of danger -- unsurprisingly, Vanning doesn't like the idea of anybody turning state's evidence against him.

By the time Marked Woman was made in 1937, Bette Davis was queen of the Warner Bros. lot. (Bogart, still a ways away from truly becoming a star, only gets second billing.) So it's a bit odd that she's in a movie like this that comes across as less than a prestige movie and more in tune with the sort of gangster moviess James Cagney was starring in before the clampdown of the Production Code. (I think the prestige movies at WB at this time were all going to Paul Muni.) Still, Davis takes her role and makes a very entertaining movie out of Marked Woman. It's far from being her most prestigious work, but it's just as entertaining, if not more so, as many of those "big" roles she's get from Jezebel on.

Amazon lists Marked Woman as being available on DVD, but TCM doesn't. You'd think Marked Woman is the sort of movie that would be perfect for the Warner Archive, or one of the TCM shop's Bette Davis box sets.

Another apparently no-longer-in-print DVD

This being October, TCM is running a lot of old horror films every Wednesday in prime time, something which is a heck of a lot more interesting than watching two politicians regurgitating the same platitudes they've been doing for months. Anyhow, the horror movies kick off at 8:00 PM with Mystery of the Wax Museum, which I recommended back in October, 2008.

You'll see at the bottom of that post that I pointed out that Mystery of the Wax Museum is available on DVD. Well, you can purchase that DVD at Amazon. However, TCM lists it as not available for purchase from their on-line shopping site. The implication is that the DVD was released some time ago, but it presumably no longer being produced. Certainly, it wouldn't be part of the Warner Archive MOD collection. Indeed, Amazon lists a release date of 2005 for Mystery of the Wax Museum.

So, you might want to watch or record Mystery of the Wax Museum tonight.

Butterflies Are Free

TCM has a month-long programming feature this month called The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film. Every Tuesday night in October, TCM will be showing movies that have characters facing various disabilities, with the movies presented in conjunction with some disability "activist". The movies don't seem to be grouped thematically, with tonight's lineup containing a woman in a wheelchair (Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember at 8:00 PM) followed by two movies with blind characters. It's the second of those films, Butterflies are Free, that I'd like to blog about today. It's airing overnight at 12:15 AM.

Goldie Hawn stars as Jill, a bohemian hippie-type wannabe actress who's living in an apartment in San Francisco. She's dressed in just her undies in her kitchen, which is where she spots the young man in the next apartment on his terrace, apparently watching her like some sort of pervert. So, she goes over to his apartment since he's just next door, and strikes up a conversation with him. Jill finds that Don (Eddie Albert Jr.) is a nice guy. But she also notices that when she takes his ash tray and moves it, he doesn't notice, letting the ashes fall on the table. It's only then that Don tells Jill that he's blind. This is Don's first time living away from home, and he's determined to show everybody that he can be independent. That especially includes his mother, who he feels has been overprotective of him and who definitely doesn't want him living in this sort of apartment in the big city.

Jill begins to fall in love with Don, although at first we wonder whether there's any pity involved, pity being the last thing Don wants from everybody. Still, Jill and Don seem to be getting along fine, unblocking the door between their apartments and even sharing a bed. And then one morning Jill walks into Don's apartment wearing just her undies to make breakfast, and learns that Don's mother (Eileen Heckart) has shown up. What a way to meet mother! Mom isn't particularly happy wirh the arrangement, in no small part because she sees Jill and thinks Jill is going to be too flighty for Don, giving him up when the going gets rough. At least, that's part of the excuse; she's probably got her own issues of being unable to see her son as an independent man. But the concerns about Jill are reasonable, especially since she also seems to have her eye on the director of the play in which she wants a big part. Can love conquer all?

Butterflies Are Free is based on a stage play, which should be obvious from watching the movie. There's a paucity of sets, with most of the movie being set in Jill's and Don's apartments apart from one scene of the two going clothes shopping. But don't let that deter you from watching this movie. Goldie Hawn doesn't get the credit she deserves, despite being an Oscar-winner for Cactus Flower a few years earlier. (To be fair, Ingrid Bergman was just as deserving of an Oscar in Cactus Flower, which may be part of why Hawn gets overlooked.) Hawn does an excellent job here, as in fact do all three of the principals. Heckart got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, making a character we're supposed to root against seem eminently plausible, if not quite sympathetic. (That's not her fault; the script wants it that way.)

Butterflies Are Free is available on DVD.

Star of the Month Spencer Tracy

Now that we've finished up September, there's a new Star of the Month for October on TCM, that being Spencer Tracy. Every Monday night in October, TCM will be putting the spotlight on Tracy's career. In fact, they've got enough movies that the movies will go well into Tuesday morning. Tracy started his career at Fox before moving to MGM, and it is with the early part of Tracy's career that MGM begins this salute to Tracy.

Well, actually, they're beginning it a bit earlier, at 6:30 PM tonight, with The Spencer Tracy Legacy, a documentary from the late 1980s hosted by Katharine Hepburn. I've already blogged about three of the Fox films that are on tonight's schedule, starting with Me and My Gal at 8:00 PM.

The second on, A Man's Castle at 9:30 PM, is one that really sounds as though I saw it on the Fox Movie Channel at some point years ago, but I'm not certain. I do know, however, that I blogged about the two following films: The Power and the Glory at 11:00 PM got a post back in May of 2008.

The last of the Fox films is Dante's Inferno, airing at 12:30 AM. The bad news is, none of these Fox films seems to be available on DVD. The only one of the night's films that does seem to have a DVD release is 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which you can catch at 2:00 AM.