Daylight Saving Time preemption

You'd think the TCM programmers would remember which day marks the start of Daylight Saving Time in the US and program only 9 hours in the prime time/overnight lineup instead of the usual 10. But no; once again the original monthly schedule had a full ten hours of movies starting at 8:00 PM tonight. Tonight also happens to be the start of a new season of The Essentials on TCM, with Drew Barrymore returning for her second season of presenting moives with Robert Osborne. This season's first selection is Grand Hotel at 8:00 PM, which is a well-deserved selection indeed. That's followed at 10:00 PM by Weekend at the Waldorf, a 1945 movie which is more or less a remake of Grand Hotel. That movie is followed by an early Vitaphone sound short, and then the fun begins.

For those of us in the Eastern time zone, the time change will occur during the night's third feature, The Big Chill. The monthly schdeule I downloaded a few weeks back, as well as the on-line schedule for Eastern Time, actually gets the timing on this one right, I think. It starts overnight at 12:30 AM and runs for 105 minutes, which is through the hour to move our clocks ahead. So this 105-minute movie should end just after 3:15 AM EDT, which will still be 1:15 AM CST.

The fourth feature, The Rules of the Game, is listed as starting at 3:30 AM EDT -- but the schedules only gave it a one-hour block despite its being a 106-minute movie. So of course it will actually take two hours to run, and the skipped hour for those of you in the Central and Mountain time zones will come during this movie if you're trying to record it.

The final movie in the Saturday night lineup is Fun on a Weekend at 5:30 AM EDT, a delightful little movie in which poor Eddie Bracken meets equally poor Priscilla Lane and together, the two con their way into high society for a day. That 5:30 AM EDT start time is still 1:30 AM PST, and the spring forward for those of you on the Pacific coast will occur during this film.

The upshot is that the movie which was originally on the schedule for early Sunday morning but has been removed is The Stork Club. It's been replaced by Now Playing: The Show, and the two-reel short Alice in Movieland, in which Joan Leslie plays a newcomer to Hollywood. Note that the on-line schedule lists this block as being at 6:15 AM, when in fact it runs from 7:15 to 8:00 AM.

Saturday movie series return to TCM

TCM has been running various series of movies on Saturday mornings into the afternoons for some time now. They took a month off for 31 Days of Oscar, of course, but the series return tomorrow. At the end of January, TCM ran the last of the Brass Bancroft movies in the pre-noon slot, so now they're kicking off a new series, which is the Perry Mason movies of the mid-1930s. The first of them is The Case of the Howling Dog tomorrow morning at 10:30 AM, starring Warren William as Mason. The scond one, The Case of the Curious Bride, which comes up on the 16th, is of special interest because the murder victim is played by Errol Flynn in one of his earliest Hollywood roles. We don't see that much of Flynn; the murder complete with victim is only shown at the end of the movie with Flynn trying to fight off his assailant.

Before 31 Days of Oscar, TCM was running the Torchy Blane movies in the Saturday at noon slot. Those return tomorrow at noon with Torchy Gets Her Man, which sees Glenda Farrell return to the franchise for the first of three more appearances as Torchy Blane. Barton MacLane and Tom Kennedy are both also along for the ride. There will be one final Torchy movie, Torchy Plays With Dynamite, which has Jane Wyman playing Torchy, on March 30.

Washington then and now

You probably heard in the news on Wednesday or yesterday morning about the junior Senator from Kentucky who filibustered for 13 hours trying to get the Obama administration to make its policy on drones more explicit. Now, I don't want to talk about politics, and I can't think offhand of any good movies about drone aircraft. But what I did find interesting is seeing several people in various comment sections to news articles and blog posts make comments about the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In that clasic 1939 movie, Stewart's Jefferson Smith filibusters the Senate alone, with everybody against him, only admitting defeat when his mentor, Senator Paine (Claude Rains) does what would be called "astrotufing" today: rather than grass roots support for a position, the politician or a lobbyist drums up people who aren't really independently voicing their view. All those telegrams we see were commissioned by Paine's machine, and anybody trying to send a telegram in support of Smith had their messages kept from Smith. Indeed, I even read somebody make the point that the senior senatory from Kentucky must have known what happened to Claude Rains' character, and that's why he made an appearance in favor of his junior colleague.

One of the things about the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that's decidedly different from what we saw on Wednesday was the messages in support of one side or another. Where we had Sen. Paine drumming up those bogus telegrams, nowadays people can easily comment themselves by going on to Twitter and spilling whatever nonsense thought they've got that they can fit in 140 characters or less. And one of the more surreal scenes from Wednesday's filibuster was of a fellow Senator, supportive of the junior Senator from Kentucky, "asking a question" and using that "question" to read out a bunch of those supportive Twitters. Perhaps if Twitter were around in Jefferson Smith's day those junior campers wouldn't have been assaulted trying to put out their newspaper. The changing technology is actually something I touched on back in September 2011, albeit in regards to cell phones instead of Twitter.

Although several people referred to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it also reminded me that there are only a small number of old movies that really have such a broader cultural relevance. People know that, and The Wizard of Oz -- and in fact there's an Oz-themed movie opening tonight, although it's based on a different one of Baum's stories of Oz, of which there were several dozen. Gone With the Wind would be a third, but beyond that, what is there from the 1930s? Maybe the horror movies. But I really don't think there are too many of them, and it's one of the problems those of us who love classic films and try to promote them face.

Dial 1119

I don't believe I've ever recommended Dial 1119 before. It's airing tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on TCM and is well worth a viewing.

Marshall Thompson plays Gunther, who is an escapee from a mental facility. He's violently insane, and he's trying to get to Dr. Faron (Sam Levene), the psychiatrist who was responsible for getting Gunther committed. When Gunther arrives in Faron's home town by bus, taking the bus driver's gun and shooting him. Nice. Unfortunately, he can't find the doctor, so he goes to a local bar to bide his time. This is 1950, but the bar has something pretty new-fangled for 1950: a big-screen TV, presumably for showing the fights since boxing was a staple of TV back in the early 1950s. The bartender turns on the TV, which is oh-so-conveniently running not fights, but a special news bulletin about Gunther and his being an escaped killer. Obviously the people in the bar know who Gunther is, and he knows they know, so he taks them hostage.

This being a Hollywood movie, there is a motley assortment of people at the bar, some of whom you're wondering what they're doing at such a bar. The bar is also up on the second floor, but that's also another story. Wyckoff calls the police, tells them he's got a bunch of hostages, and demands that the police find Faron and bring him to the bar. Is Gunther looking for help, or is he looking for revenge on Faron? As with a lot of other hostage movies, the various hostages try to defuse the situation in their own ways, all of them unsuccessful. Of more interest is that TV. By this time, news has spread that Gunther is holding these people hostage, so the police and a crowd of onlookers have surrounded the building in which the bar is located. Additionally, there's the TV cameras covering it. (In point of fact, live location work like what's presented here would have been a nightmare to pull off back in 1950.)

Dial 1119 has echoes of a lot of other similar movies. As far as hostage movies goes, I can think of The Incident, while the intrusion of TV crews and the crowd they bring is certainly reminscent of Fourteen Hours. I've also briefly mentioned The Slender Thread before, which also has a hard deadline as a key plot element. Dial 1119 is, I think, the weakest of the four because it looks more studio-bound than the others. But it's also quite interesting for its use of the then relatively-new technology of TV and how the TV cameras would have an effect on the situation -- not only because of the crowd they'd bring, but also because Gunther is able to watch on TV what's going on outside. (Jim McKay, who had the terrible duty of covering the Munich Olympic hostage crisis live, commented that the coverage of the situation caused a problem because the hostage takers were able to see the police preparations in the Olympic Village.) Dial 1119 is also entertaining enough. It's gotten a DVD release on one or another of those low-budget box sets, as part of a film noir collection, a genre I don't think the movie quite fits.

Kim Novak interview

I mentioned Kim Novak on her birthday a couple of weeks ago. Not having looked at TCM's March schedule at the time, I didn't realise that TCM wsa going to be honoring her with a night of her movies tonight.

Actually, it's not just a night of her movies. The night is starting off with an interview she did with Robert Osborne at last year's TCM Film Festival. That interview airs at 8:00 PM, and is being rerun at 11:00 for the benefit of the folks out on the Pacific coast, something that tends to happen with a lot of TCM's original programming. I don't know how long the original interview ran, not being at the TCM Film Festival, of course. Somebody on the TCM message boards said that last year's program with Peter O'Toole, which was presented as a one-hour interview, actually ran well over two hours and had to be edited down for what we saw on TV. In between the two airings of the interview, at 9:00 PM, will be Bell, Book, and Candle. I'll repeat what I wrote about it three weeks ago:

Apparently, I've never done a full-length post about another of her films with James Stewart, Bell, Book and Candle, in which she plays a witch who falls for Stewart when she casts a spell for him to fall in love with her, as she's trying to spite her fellow witches and warlocks. I personally don't find it to the greatest, but it's another one that's reasonably entertaining.

The reference to "another" film with James Stweart is of course to Vertigo, which will not be on tonight's schedule. The remainder of the Kin Novak salute will be:

Picnic, at midnight after the second showing of the interview. Novak plays a young woman from the poor side of town who falls in love with William Holden when Holden breezes into town looking for a job from his old friend Cliff Robertson.
The Man With the Golden Arm at 2:00 AM, in which Frank Sinatra plays a heroin addict. Novak plays his next-door neighbor.
Finally, at 4:15 AM, is the 1964 version of Of Human Bondage, which Novak playing the role Bette Davis had in the 1934 version.

Hal LeRoy and June Allyson

Hal LeRoy and June Allyson weren't one of Hollywood's most memorable dance pairs, but you have a chance to see them together in a couple of shorts running on TCM this evening.

First up, at about 7:35 PM, is Ups and Downs, which has Hal as a tap-dancing elevator operator meeting and falling in love with stockbroker's daughter Allyson, even though he's not of her social class. Perhaps giving a good stock tip to her father might help. The second of the shorts, The Knight Is Young, comes on at about 9:35 PM, following Good News. (Good News also stars Allyson, is in the 8:00 PM slot, and runs 93 minutes. It's the first of "Bob's Picks" for this month.) In this second short, Allyson plays an out-of-work girl who talks to the billboard outside her apartment who falls in love with dancing sign-painter LeRoy when he shows up to paint over the current billboard. He invites her to the Sign Painters' Ball (yes, they had a big dance for the sign painters!), and live happily ever after, one presumes.

The movies have next to no plot, which is mildly forgivable considering that you're dealing with two-reelers: there's just not that much time for plot or character development. But if you watch the Crime Does Not Pay shorts or Warner Bros. Technicolor history shorts from the late 1930s, you'll seee that they're so much better than these. Part of that might be down to Hal LeRoy. About the only time I've mentioned him before was in Too Many Girls. Even in that he's the decided weak link. The poor guy has no charisma, and perhaps it should be unsurprising that after Too Many Girls, LeRoy returned to Broadway and the nightclub scene. June Allyson tries, bless her heart, and you can see that she had the makings of a likeable actress in these shorts. But she's not given anything to work with.

In Ups and Downs, watch also for Phil Silvers as a tailor. It's one of his first screen appearances.

John Garfield Centenary

John Garfield in They Made Me a Criminal

I see that a couple of the people in my blogroll have done posts on John Garfield movies. That would probably be because today marks the centenary of his birth. TCM will be running several of his movies through mid-afternoon, and I've done a full-length post about only one of them before: We Were Strangers, about a plot against the Cuban government in the early 1930s, which concludes TCM's proceedings at 2:45. It still doesn't seem to be available on DVD, at least, not in print.

When I blogged about Garfield's birthday back in 2010, I made a brief mention of Between Two Worlds, largely because it's a remake of Outward Bound. Between Two Worlds, which has received a DVD release, is airing at 10:30 AM.

Interestingly, the Garfield movies I most like aren't showing up on TCM today. The Postman Always Rings Twice (the source of the picture at left, in which Garfield is about to bump off unsuspecting Cecil Kellaway) is an MGM film, so TCM ought to have a fairly easy time of getting the broadcast rights, and it might be one of Garfield's best-known stories. And yet, it's not showing up. It's received a couple of releases to DVD, including one on one of those four-movie Warner Archive box sets of murder mysteries.

An early great performance from Garfield that's not on TCM today is They Made Me a Criminal, in which Garfield plays a boxer wrongly accused of murder who winds up on the run in Arizona and becoming a hero to the Dead End Kids. Thankfully it's also available on DVD, i quite a few releases, which makes me wonder whether the movie entered the public domain.

Finally, I mentioned He Ran All the Way back in February 2009, and then did a full-length post on the movie in 2010. I mentioned both times that it hadn't gotten a DVD release, and sadly, that still seems to be the case.

The Landlord

31 Days of Oscar is winding up on TCM tonight, including a movie I thought I'd blogged about before but apparently havent: The Landlord, at 10:00 PM.

Beau Bridges plays Elgar Enders, the adult son in a wealthy family that has its estate somewhere on Long Island. Wanting to rebel, Elgar takes some of his money and buys a brownstone in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Nowadays, the area has seen the effects of 40 years of gentrification, with the result that it's turned into one of the more desitable, hip(ster?) sections of Brooklyn. I wouldn't know myself, since I'm not a New York City type, but I've read and heard so from people who know New York a lot better than I do. The movie was released in 1970, however, so back then Park Slope most certainly wasn't hip. Instead, it was a predominantly black section of the borough, with residential buildings that were seriously in need of being fixed up. So as you can imagine, Elgar's parents, notably his mother (Lee Grant) don't take well to his idea to move in to such an area. (As I understand it, the movie was made right around the time when all that gentrification was beginning.)

It also goes without saying that the residents of the building Elgar's bought don't particularly care for him either, but eye him with suspsicion. After all, Elgar's original plan called for him to renovate the whole place, which would have meant evicting the tenants, and who wants that? Besides, they've only known absentee landlords who clearly are only in it for the money. (To be fair, many of the tenants are well behind on the rent, and the building can't maintain itself for nothing.) Elgar, however, is at heart well-intentioned, and and so tries to make peace with the tenants, while only taking the basement apartment as a residence for himself. Marge (Pearl Bailey) is a sort of matriarch of the building, introducing Elgar to Fanny (Diana Sands), another tenant. Fanny and Elgar seem to get along well, but there's a problem, in the form of her boyfriend Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.), who is one of those 1960s militant types who obviously doesn't like the idea of a white guy owning his apartment.

And so it goes. Elgar's mom tries to show that she really can be tolerant by visiting her son, meeting his tenants (especially Marge), and offering to help with the decorating, but she only shows just how clueless she really is. Elgar, for his part, falls in love with Lanie (Marki Bey), a mixed-race woman, as if he's attempting to show that he really is liberal. But things get complicated when Fanny discovers that she's pregnant, and has pretty good reason to believe that Elgar is the father of the child. That is a complication.

The Landlord is entertaining enough, although in many ways its a product of its time that probably couldn't be made today. That being said, it's also a movie that's probably easier to watch today than when it came out in 1970, since the issues covered: issues of race and class, as well as social change not only in race relations, but those brought about by gentrification, would mostly have been more fresh and raw back in 1970. But the issues are handled more deftly and gently than in a film like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is also a big plus. The Landlord is not flawless, but it's more than successful in what it does.

The Train (1964)

Apparently, I have never done a full-length blog post on The Train before. The movie is coming up overnight tonight at 2:00 AM, and seems to be available only on a pricey out-of-print DVD, so DVRing it tonight might be your best option.

Burt Lancaster stars as Labiche, a station master at a train station in the Paris area in 1944. This being 1944, of course means that World War II is going on. Speicifcally, it's late summer 1944, which is not long after the Allies' D-Day invasion and not long before the Allies ultimately liberated Paris. There's still a need for the Underground, and Labiche is the leader of a local Underground cell. Labiche's identity as an Underground member is obviously not known to Von Waldheim (Paul Schofield), a Nazi Army officer who sees the writing on the wall and wants to get out of soon-to-be free France and back to the motherland of Germany. However, he also wants to ensure his future by looting France of as much of its finest art as he can; this would also serve the dual purpose of depriving the enemy of their cultural heritage. But at any rate, Von Waldheim calls upon Labiche, whose station is on the line leading back to Germany, to make certain the line ahead is free for Von Waldheim's train and that Labiche can get the train back to Germany.

Labiche doesn't really care about the art. But, there's duty, and besides, the Nazis summarily execute one of Labiche's workers who, the Nazis claim, was trying to sabotage the train's engine so it couldn't get back to Germany. What's a station master to do? He needs to stop the train, but he also needs to make certain that the Allied bombers don't bomb the train and destroy the art inside. Eventually, a plot is devised to trick Von Waldheim into thinking the train has made it back to Germany, while in fact it is still on French soil. But of course, you know things aren't going to go smoothly....

The Train is an engrossing, well-made thriller. If you've watched enough TCM, you probably know a fair bit about the movie even if you haven't seen it, because it's featured prominently in a piece narrated by its director, John Frankenheimer, about its star, Burt Lancaster. Frankenheimer comments about how Lancaster did all of his own stunts on this film, and that Frankenheimer learned more from Lancaster in this one film than he could have learned in an entire career otherwise. Frankenheimer in that piece also mentioned the camera angles he used in directing Lancaster's earlier The Young Savages, and there are quite a few long shots and zooms here as well. So, in the end, the movie is down to the good work of all three of the main crew members: Frankenheim as director, and Lancaster and Scofield as the stars. There are one or two slow scenes, such as when Lancaster is hiding out in a Resistance-owned hotel, but all of the train scenes are tense and pulled off well. If you haven't seen The Train before, it's highly worth watching.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Another movie that's returning to the Fox Movie Channel lineup in March is Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It's airing today at 1:00 PM, but don't worry if you don't read today's post until later in the day. You have another chance to catch the movie tomorrow at 9:30 AM, and then Sunday at 4:00 AM. (There are also several airings in April.)

Walter Pidgeon stars as Adm. Harriman Nelson, the designer of the Seaview, the newest and best submarine in the US Navy's nuclear fleet. At the beginning of the movie, he's putting the sub through its paces up in the Arctic, when something surprising happens: pieces of icebergs are breaking off and "raining" down on the sub below. This is, to put it mildly, highly unusual. The reason for the icebergs breaking up is even more unusual. Solar flares or something have caused the Van Allen radiation belts (which had only been discovered a couple of years before the movie was released) a couple thousand miles above the earth to catch fire! It's a problem that could doom mankind to a fiery death, and nobody knows how to solve it!

So, the scientists of the world have been brought together by the United Nations to figure out what to do, and understandbly, they can't reach any agreement, since this is a problem they've never seen before, and there's no way to do experiments. But, the scientists that the political leaders of the world consider the "best and brightest" minds, tend to think that the fire will burn itself out, and that mankind should be able to survive until this happens. Adm. Nelson, on the other hand, has a different idea. He thinks he can use the missiles on board his ship as a sort of fire extinguisher, but to do so requires getting to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in the ocean, at a precise time to fire the missile. It goes without saying that the scientific establishment thinks this is cockamamie, and may only make the problem worse.

Adm. Nelson, for his part, sets off for the Marianas Trench, with the navies of the world sending subs after the Seaview to try to prevent Adm. Nelson from carrying out his plan. Adm. Nelson has his old friend, Commodore Emery (Peter Lorre) along, who supports Nelson's scientific belief. Many of the crew, however, aren't so certain, led by the ship's commanding officer (Robert Sterling). Joan Fontaine plays a psychologist who had come aboard to study the stress submarine crews face, and God knows they're going to get a lot of stress on this mission. Barbara Eden was along for eye candy in Five Weeks in a Balloon, which I recommended yesterday; she's here as well, playing Nelson's secretary who is also the fiancée of Sterling's character. And for the teens, there's not Fabian, but Frankie Avalon.

The movie is scientific nonsense for the most part. This does not, however, mean that the movie can't be entertaining. It recycles a lot of clichés about ship- and submarine-bound films, to be sure, and there are also some terrible effects, notably with the giant squid. Some of the plot points are also badly telescoped. A point is made of making certain everybody on board the Seaview has a radiation detector clipped to their shirt, so you know at some point one of those detectors is going to indicate a fatal dose of radiation poisoning. Still, as with yesterday's Five Weeks in a Balloon, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is one of those popcorn movies: sit back with a bowl of popcorn and prepare yourself for an implausible by entertaining enough ride.