How many Fox docudramas can I mention?

One of the first posts I made about the docudramas that Fox produced starting after World War II was in January 2009, regarding the story of Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, whose story was turned into the movie The Iron Curtain. I mentioned at the time that it wasn't available on DVD; in fact, it still hasn't been released to DVD.

I've also commented in the past about how the Fox Movie Channel seems to be programmed: they take a few of their old movies out of the vault, run them over and over for a relatively short time, and then return them to the vault, not to be seen for quite a few years. The Iron Curtain is such a movie, having shown up quite a bit back in 2006 or 2007, only to go missing for a long time. Well, tomorrow being the first day of a new month, it seems a time to introduce a few movies back to the FMC lineup, with The Iron Curtain being one of them, at 1:00 PM ET.

It's followed by another movie I don't think has been on the Fox Movie Channel for quite some time: Pickup on South Street, at 2:30 PM June 1. Indeed, Pickup on South Street is scheduled for a good half-dozen airings on FMC in June and July.

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

By now you've probably heard about the death of actor Dennis Hopper, who died of prostate cancer yesterday at the age of 74. I was somewhat surprised to see just how many movies he appeared in. Sure, I knew about the early appearance in Rebel Without a Cause, the famous portrayal in Easy Rider, and even later works like Hoosiers. But I had forgotten that he was in True Grit and Cool Hand Luke. On the other hand, I'm glad I didn't even know before now about the existence of a Super Mario Bros. movie.

I don't know if TCM have planned a tribute for him. However, Hoosiers was already on the schedule, for 8:00 PM Tuesday. And the Fox Movie Channel often runs Speed.

Fox docudramas go European!

I've recommended several of the Fox docudramas before. Most of them were filmed in part at the actual locations of the events in the movie. 13 Rue Madeleine, however, didn't get to film in Europe despite a good portion of the movie being set there. It would take a few more years for Fox to make a docudrama about World War II that could use European settings. That movie is Decision Before Dawn, which is airing tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM ET.

Gary Merrill stars as an American commander at that point of World War II when the Americans are just about to enter Germany proper. They need more information about German troop strength and positions, but how to get it? Well, there are a lot of German POWs that the Americans have captured, and somebody gets the bright idea of seeing if any of them would be willing to engage in counterespionage, on the hopes that there are some who were only dragooned into fighting by the Nazis. Naturally, it's a risky proposition, since anybody showing willingness to be a double agent may in fact only be expressing such interest as a way of getting out of the POW camp and getting back to Germany. Eventually, Merrill comes up with two men -- Oskar Werner and Hans Christian Blech -- and gives Richard Basehart the task of being their minders. The three men (the two Germans and Basehart) proceed to train for their mission.

The movie really picks up when the three go off to Germany to try to gather the vital information. The movie was made in the American sector of West Germany at a time when a lot of the rubble from all that Allied bombing had still not been cleaned up, creating a very authentic image of a country in chaos. Every able-bodied man would have been needed for the front, and for two German soldiers to be traipsing across the country against the flow of troops amidst the disruptions in rail services is difficult enough, even more so when the Nazis might realize your papers are forgeries. On top of that there's keeping Basehart from getting caught out, and the possibility that one or both of the German POWs might be phonies who will defect back to the Nazis. True, the spy stuff is fairly standard, but done quite well and ably assisted by the accurate locations.

Even though we know the Allies won the war, a good movie like Decision Before Dawn will keep you in suspense right up to the end. It's also been released to DVD, both on its own, and as part of an inexpensive box set.

Gregg Toland, 1904-1948

I mentioned yesterday that The Best Years of Our Lives is this week's TCM Essential, airing at 8:00 PM ET tonight. Interestingly, one of the important members of the crew, Gregg Toland, is also a birthday boy today, having been born on this day in 1904.

Gregg Toland, if you haven't heard the name before, is one of the great cinematographers of the 1930s and 1940s. Probably his most famous work is that on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, where Toland used shadow to help enhance the depth of field. It's a matter of some debate just how much of the unique look of Citizen Kane is due to Welles' direction and how much to Toland's photography, but Toland clearly had quite a bit to do with it.

As for The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the Toland shots to watch for comes when Fredric March has to tell Dana Andrews to stop seeing March's daughter (Teresa Wright). The two are sitting in the bar owned by the uncle of their fellow friend Harold Russell. March and Andrews are sitting toward the back of the place, and March tells Andrews to call Wright, prompting Wright to get up and go to the pay phone, which is in the front of the bar. While Andrews is on the phone, Harold Russell walks in, sees March, and comes to the back of the bar to talk to March. All the time, you can see Andrews in clear focus, talking on the phone to Wright.

Toland was nominated for an Oscar for Citizen Kane (but, surprisingly, not for The Best Years of Our Lives). However, he didn't win; his only Oscar was for Wuthering Heights.

Memorial Day weekend

This being the Memorial Day weekend, TCM is showing three full days of war related movies, which started at 6:00 AM ET this morning. (Normally, they show movies through Memorial Day itself, but this year, Memorial Day happens to fall on Clint Eastwood's 80th birthday, so TCM are honoring that instead.)

There are quite a few good movies being shown this weekend, many of which I've already recommended at some point in the past. Tonight, for example, you can watch Stalag 17 at 8:00 PM, followed by The Great Escape at 10:15 PM. Tomorrow evening's TCM Essential, at 8:00 PM, is The Best Years of Our Lives, a movie I could recommend over and over.

If you don't like war movies, you might want to switch over to the Fox Movie Channel. This week's Fox Legacy is All About Eve, introduced by Fox executive Tom Rothman at 8:00 PM, and repeated at 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM.

The House on 92nd Street

A few weeks back, I mentioned actor Reed Hadley as having provided the voiceover in Fox docudramas such as The House on 92nd Street. That particular docudrama is airing again, tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel.

The setting is sometime not terribly long before the US entered World War II. Although the Nazis weren't officially at war with us, they used front organizations such as the Bund to get information, including intelligence, about America back to Nazi Germany. The Americans knew this was going on, and to try to stop it, the FBI recruited German-Americans loyal to their new country to go back to Germany, take Nazi training, and then work in counterespionage.

Here, all-American boy Bill Dietrich (William Eythe) gets recruited by FBI agent Briggs (Lloyd Nolan). On Dietrich's return from Germany, he's supposed to work as a low-level drone for a Nazi cell being run out of a fashion house in New York. However, the FBI, being Dietrich's real masters, have gotten Dietrich's instructions, and changed them to make Dietrich out to be a much higher-level man. They've given him the task of figuring out who the real, normally unseen head of the cell is, and who in America outside the cell is supporting them. (One of those supporters happens to be Leo G. Carroll.)

The House on 92nd Street is relatively standard for the police/FBI docudrama genre, but that doesn't mean it's bad by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, it's one of the first movies in the genre, and that fact alone makes it interesting. There are also some looks at the old-fashioned technology of intelligence gathering, such as the punch card computers, and an early use of the two-way mirror for clandestine recording. (In the movie, it's actually referred to as an X-ray mirror.) The acting is acceptable, and the story will keep you in suspense until the end. The only real problem might be the voiceovers, with a rah-rah style that might seem clichéd today. But then, this was one of the originals, so the whole technique of using voiceovers and a "now it can be told" style was new.

The House on 92nd Street has been released to DVD, and is well worth watching.

Saturday's Heroes

I briefly mentioned the movie Saturday's Heroes when TCM was showing a day of football-themed movies. It's still not available on DVD, not even from the Warner Archive collection that TCM advertises. Not only that, but the link from TCM's schedule doesn't even give a full synopsis of the movie! What this means is that you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showings, such as the one tomorrow at 2:30 PM ET.

Another rarity showing is the Traveltalks short Mighty Manhattan, New York's Wonder City, at about 5:09 PM, just before Sunday in New York.

John Wayne and Donna Reed

Today marks the birth anniversary of John Wayne, and TCM are showing a bunch of his movies from the 1930s all morning and afternoon, up until Donna Reed gets her final night as Star of the Month. It's slightly interesting to see that TCM scheduled Trouble Along the Way last week, since it stars both Wayne and Reed, and TCM could have killed two birds with one stone, so to say, by putting it on tonight. Instead, the night kicks off with From Here to Eternity at 8:00 PM. That having been said, Trouble Along the Way isn't the only movie Wayne and Reed made together; their other picture, They Were Expendable, is on tonight at 10:15 PM. They Were Expendable also stars Robert Montgomery (on the left in the photo above), who not only starred, but also handled some of the directing duties when John Ford took ill.

To the gal with the hoe

Jeanne Crain (1925-2003) in the conclduing scene to Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Today marks what would have been the 85th birthday of actress Jeanne Crain, who died in 2003. Crain doesn't get too much love on TCM, largely because most of her movies were made over at Fox. I've recommmended quite a few of Crain's movies before, although I see that I've never actually included one of her photos yet. Leave Her to Heaven got two photos, but both of those were of the female lead, the wonderful Gene Tierney. Crain appears as Tierney's half-sister, who falls in love with Tierney's husband and who, because of her green thumb, gets called "the gal with the hoe".

Perhaps the high point of Crain's career came when she got a Best Actress nomination for Pinky, which I just mentioned a month ago.

Again with the literary references

I don't mean to harp on Hollywood's making movies from famous works of literature. It's just that TCM is showing a night of films tonight based on the works of Ernest Hemingway. The night kicks off with the 1940s verson of For Whom the Bell Tolls at 8:00 PM ET, followed by the Spencer Tracy version of The Old Man and the Sea at 11:00 PM, and the 1930s version of A Farewell to Arms at 12:30 AM.

I'm not a huge fan of Hemingway's work, but I'm sure there are people out there who do like it. As for Hollywood, it doesn't seem at all surprising to me that they rely so heavily on works of literature to make their movies. I get the impression that there's been a lot of either laziness or cautiousness (or both) in Hollywood. If, back in the studio era, you had to churn out a movie a week, and you were spending substantial sums of money, you would naturally want to be sure that the movies you were making would be things that people would like. Successful books are, by nature of their success, proof that you've got a story a good number of people like, so adapting it into a movie should be a better bet of a successful movie. Plus, if it's a work of literature that was written a long time ago, you don't have to pay any rights to the author to be able to make a movie out of it, something I'm sure was a consideration at least some of the time in Hollywood. Also, being able to do Shakespeare adaptations, for wxample, could esily be passed off as being high-minded and contributing to the arts. When most of your other movies are geared to the lowest common denominator, being able to produce something based on a classic writer would be another plus.

I guess one of the things I'm saying is that we'll probably always have literary adaptations. True, many of today's summer blockbusters are based on the "literature" of comic books. But they're still based on successful written works. And it's still not uncommon when a "real" novel becomes wildly popular, that there's a fight in Hollywood for the movie rights. I'm looking on IMDb at some of the upcoming releases, and scheduled for December are the latest entry in the Narnia chronicles (based on a series of books by CS Lewis), another version of Gulliver's Travels, and, shockingly, a remake of True Grit which, although probably better remembered as a John Wayne movie, was in fact based on a novel that came out only a year earlier. (Indeed, the author, Charles Portis, is still alive at the age of 75.)