Not Bond. Not James Bond.

One of the more cynical spy movies of the 1960s, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, is airing at 8:00 PM ET tonight on TCM as part of the final day of their Summer Under the Stars look at the films of British actress Claire Bloom.

Richard Burton stars as Alec Leamas, a British spy working in West Berlin. He's part of an operation that goes wrong, and as a result, he gets sent into retirement, trying to live a life as a library assistant. It's not much of a life for him, and he's quickly recruited for one more mission, a complicated one that appears to have him become a double agent for the East Germans, while in fact he's really working for the British, trying to figure out what's happened to one of their agents in East Germany and see if they can rescue him.

Or, maybe it's all part of a much bigger plot to use Leamas, who by now isn't of much value to the British spymasters, as a pawn for.... Well, who only knows what for? Those nasty spymasters don't care about the little people like Leamas. (Not that the little people in the spy business like Leamas care for anybody but themselves.) As for Bloom, she plays Nan, a co-worker at the library who falls in love with Alec. She's a committed socialist or, more accurately, a dupe who fell for the idiotic communist propaganda being peddled by the Eastern bloc in the first half of the Cold War era. Because of both her love for Alec and her communist leanings, she's the perfect person to become part of this whole plot.

Truth be told, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold isn't my favorite movie, in part because Richard Burton has never been one of my favorite actors. The distinct impression I've gotten on watching this movie is that the makers were trying hard to send an earnest message about the futility of the whole spy business, and this message gets in the way of the story it's trying to tell. There are worse spy movies, but there are better ones, too.

If You Could Only Cook

A lesser-known Jean Arthur comedy that I don't think I've recommended before is If You Could Only Cook, airing at 11:45 PM ET tonight.

The movie starts with Jean Arthur on a park bench, unemployed and looking through the want ads. Into her life walks Herbert Marshall. He's an engineer/executive at an automobile manufacturer, who has just had one of his radical new designs rejected by the board. He doesn't tell Arthur this, however, instead sitting down to read the want ads with her. Eventually they come upon an ad for a house that needs both a cook and a butler. On a lark, Marshall decides to join Arthur in applying for the jobs, pretending to be married to her. This causes problems right away, because he's engaged to be married. But, he's about to find out that he's got much bigger problems.

When the two arrive at what is to be their new job, they discover that the place that hired them is actually a group of gangsters! Worse, in an attempt to impress Arthur, Marshall returns to his office to get some of his car designs -- which Arthur promptly takes to a rival company to try to sell. They know that if they tried to use these plans, they'd have the pants sued off them by Marshall's company, so they assume the plans have been stolen, and have Arthur arrested. By this time, Marshall has begun to realize he might be falling in love with Arthur, but can't figure out whether to marry for love or, for the sake of his company, go through with the marriage to his current fiancée.

If You Could Only Cook is a pleasant little movie, but not one that does much to distinguish itself as outstanding. This was 1935, when a whole slew of screwball comedies were released, and it was easy for a smaller movie like If You Could Only Cook to get lost in the crowd. Despite seeming to put every screwball comedy device in the plot, and having a plot that zigs and zags all over the place, If You Could Only Cook is never less than entertaining and, at a little over 70 minutes, doesn't overstay its welcome.

The Silver Horde

For those who find early talkies interesting, TCM are showing a particularly notable one early on Sunday: The Silver Horde, at 6:00 AM ET on August 30.

Top billing is given to Evelyn Brent and Louis Wolheim, both of whom had been popular silent film stars; two of the supporting cast were people relatively new to Hollywood, the new faces and voices for the sound era, who would go on to much bigger things: Joel McCrea and (in a relatively small role) Jean Arthur.

The plot is a fairly simple one. McCrea plays a man sent to Alaska to help start up a new salmon cannery. He has aspirations of a high place in society, and indeed has society girl Jean Arthur as his fiancée. However, this is rough-and-tumble Alaska, which is no place for a girl like Arthur. Indeed, Brent is probably the woman who can help him, as she has the experience dealing with the rougher edges of society that show up in a place like Ketchikan, Alaska. This is important, because there's already a cannery in Ketchikan, and McCrea has to compete with the people running that business, who naturally want to drive McCrea out of town. However, she's also a woman of questionable morals, the sort that McCrea naturally thinks is wholly unsuitable for him, despite the fact that he finds her "interesting" to say the least.

To be honest, in addition to being a simple plot, it's a fairly unadventurous plot, which ends up making The Silver Horde more a curiosity than anything truly great. It's a lot of fun watching the always sturdy and dependable McCrea early in his career, before he started doing all those westerns. It's even more interesting watching Arthur at the very beginning of her career, before she was given the chance to show off her outstanding comedy chops. And, there's some location footage of Alaska that shows up in documentary-style footage of canneries. Unfortunately, the story never quite gets to the level of, say, Red Dust a few years later. For those who aren't into 1930s movies, starting with something like Red Dust might be a better choice. But for people who are already movie buffs looking for something less-known, The Silver Horde isn't a bad choice.

Donald O'Connor, 1925-2003

It was on this day in 1925 that Donald O'Connor was born. I've already recommended Singin' In the Rain before so instead, I'd like to mention what was to be his final film, Out to Sea.

O'Connor isn't the star; that honor goes to Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, making one of their many appearances together in a movie. Lemmon is a recent widower, having lost his wife to a long illness. Matthau plays his scheming brother-in-law, and decides that his late sister's husband could do with some cheering up, so he convinces Lemmon to accompany him on a Caribbean cruise. What Matthau neglected to mention though, is that he was able to get such a good deal on the trip because he signed the two of them up to be dance hosts, spending their evenings dancing with any of the elderly widowed women who don't have a dance partner of their own.

Thus begins the comedy. Fraternization between the dance partners and the women outside of the confines of the dance floor is strictly forbidden, per the rules of a martinet of a cruise director played by Brent Spiner (best known as Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation). Matthau, schemer that he is, came on the cruise specifically to find a rich woman he could persuade to marry him. Instead, he finds Dyan Cannon, who is herself a gold digger and thinks that Matthau is actually a rich man. Despite being a recent widower, Lemmon also falls in love all over again, with Gloria De Haven. As for O'Connor? He's one of the fellow dance hosts (along with Hal Linden), and even gets a dance all his own, in which he, despite being a septuagenarian, completely shows up everybody else.

Out to Sea isn't great by any means; it's the sort of movie Lemmon and Matthau could have done in their sleep. They, and everybody else in the cast, however, are professionals, and give us a really nice little movie with a nice ensemble cast of actors in their golden years (Spiner, at 48, is by a good ways the youngest of the main cast members). Like most more recent movies, it's also been released to DVD.

Another airing of Suddenly

It's been a good 15 months since TCM aired Suddenly. It's airing again, but as with last time, it's showing up in the overnight hours; this time, at 4:30 AM ET Saturday, August 29.

Normally, TCM are pretty good about trying to vary the hours at which they air movies, so that people on the east
coast and those out in the Pacific Time Zone can each get a chance to watch a movie at a reasonable hour. So, it's a bit sad to see Suddenly at such a god-awful hour. But at least it's available on DVD.

Ida Lupino vs. Bette Davis

As part of Ida Lupino's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, you can watch The Hard Way at 10:00 PM ET tonight.

Lupino stars as a woman jumping off a bridge, with a seeming case of amnesia. When the doctors revive her in the hospital, she eventually starts revealing who she is in a flashback.... Years earlier, she had lived in a grimy midwestern industrial town with a husband who had little prospects of greatness. Her kid sister (Joan Leslie) had a bit of talent, and when a travelling vaudeville team (Dennis Morgan and the always-underrated Jack Carson) show up, Lupino decides that if she can't make a name for herself, she'll make a name for her kid sister by being the world's most overprotective stage sister.

And boy is Lupino pushy. She has no qualms about stepping on anybody's toes, first getting her sister a job with the vaudeville troupe, where Leslie falls in love with and marries Carson, and then getting Leslie to leave her husband because dammit, Broadway beckons. Eventually, Lupino and Leslie do make it to what seems like the top, but as is so often the case, life at the top isn't all it's cracked up to be.

There are quite a few parallels here. The story sounds a good deal like All About Eve, as Leslie's rise to the top is bound to push out of the way people already at the top, much like Eve Harrington took over Margot Channing's job. Bette Davis had to fight for everything she got, along the lines of Lupino in The Hard Way, and it's interesting to note that the epitaph at Davis' grave reads "She did it the hard way". What might be more interesting, though, is that legend generally has it that Bette Davis' career is not the allegory for the movie. Instead, that "honor" is generally given to Ginger Rogers, who had a very active stage mother.

The Hard Way is not a perfect movie by any means, but Lupino's performance is quite good, and the movie is never less than entertaining. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have been released to DVD.

W. R. Burnett

I mentioned High Sierra yesterday. One of the screenwriters wsa W.R. Burnett, who also wrote the novel from which the screenplay was adapted. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen it on a bunch of great movies.

Burnett wrote the novel on which The Asphalt Jungle is based, and that was aired as recently as this past Saturday. But that is by no means all; Burnett's long career includes the novels and stories for such previous recommendations as Little Caesar and The Whole Town's Talking.

Dead Kennedys

By now, you've probably heard that US Senator Ted Kennedy died overnight. They say not to speak ill of the dead, so I'll posit that the most appropriate movie would be Dark Victory.

Of course, Hollywood has had its share of actors named Kennedy. I'd love to recommend something by Tom Kennedy, who played Torchy Blaine's friend, Officer Gahagan. But, those movies aren't available on DVD, and because of their relative obscurity, aren't likely to be released any time soon.

There's also Arthur Kennedy, who was nominated five times for an Oscar, although he never won. One of his earliest performances, as the gangster Red in High Sierra, is coming up overnight tomorrow, at 2:00 AM ET Friday, August 28. (That's 11:00 PM Thursday out in the Pacific time zone.)

As for a Kennedy who did win an Oscar, there's George Kennedy for Cool Hand Luke, but he's not dead yet.

Westworld again

I know that I mentioned Westworld almost a year ago, but it's showing up again overnight tonight at 12:45 AM ET on TCM as part of their Summer Under the Stars day of Yul Brynner movies. Watch also for Majel Barrett (Roddenberry), who died earlier this year, as the matron robot running a brothel.

Birthday coincidences

Today marks the 79th birthday of Sean Connery, who is probably most famous for playing James Bond, although he had quite a distinguished career in other movies as well. It is, however, an interesting coincidence that today also marks the birthday of Maurice Binder (1925-1991).

You may not recognize the name, but you've certainly seen his work. He was a title designer, and designed the opening sequence for Doctor No, the first of the Bond movies. Binder was later brought back to do the titles for Thunderball, and continued to do the titles up until Licence to Kill, the last of the Bond movies made before his death. Binder is the man who probably bears most of the responsibility for all those opening credits "washing" against the bodies of scantily clad Bond girls.

Binder wasn't the first to come up with inventive opening titles, although it was particularly uncommon before the middle of the 1950s. Saul Bass came a few years earlier, with the angular lines revealing the opening credits to The Man With the Golden Arm, and used a similar idea when he did the credits to Psycho. Bass is also responsible for the spirograph patterns at the beginning of Vertigo, as well as the New York skyline that changes color which opens West Side Story.

However, before that, most opening credits were on flat, often gray, backgrounds. Sometimes, when Hollywod was adapting a novel, they would get so inventive as to have the opening credits seem to be on the pages of a book. Or, in a movie like Mildred Pierce, the titles would appear to wash ashore with the waves, only to be washed back out to sea when the next wave crashed in to the strains of Max Steiner. One of the few early innovative opening credit rolls might be in the 1930s version of My Man Godfrey, with the credits appearing to be in light-bulb signs, either on the tops or sides of buildings.