Robert Osborne's latest absence

I should have posted something on it yesterday, but I didn't watch Lady For a Day, which kicked off prime time. Those who did watch it would have seen Ben Mankiewicz filling in for Robert Osborne, who is taking another break. I don't think any news has been released about how long Osborne is going to be absent, but it should be remembered that the Osborne and Mankiewicz spots are taped several weeks in advance, so TCM presumably knew about this for some time. The one thing I find interesting is that Osborne's absence started on August 30 and not to coincide with the start of a month or a week.

Blogger Will McKinley goes into a bit more detail. (Note that he is mistaken about Mankiewicz not taking up any of the slack; Mankiewicz hosted the entire Summer Under the Stars last year.)

The Whistler returns

TCM finished up its run of the Rusty series of dog movies at the end of July, just before Summer Under the Stars. Now that August is over and tomorrow, September 1, is a Saturday, it's time for another series, which is The Whistler, tomorrow at 10:45 AM. All five Saturdays in September have a Whistler movie at 10:45 AM; I haven't checked if the series continues into October.

The Whistler movies are followed at noon by movies in the Jungle Jim series, which is what Johnny Weismuller did after he stopped being Tarzan.

Appreciating Aline MacMahon

So I watched The Mouthpiece this morning. I hadn't noticed beforehand that the part of Warren William's secretary was played by Aline MacMahon. She does a good job here, in a role that's similar to the one played by Joan Blondell in Lawyer Man.

In fact, MacMahon had quite a few good supporting roles in her career. She was most active in the 1930s, but was still able to get a few good film roles up until her retirement in the mid-1960s. I'm a bit surprised as to just how many times I've mentioned her. There's films like One-Way Passage or Ah, Wilderness earlier in her career, with great late roles in a movie like I Could Go On Singing, or one I haven't blogged about before, The Man From Laramie, in which she plays a widowed rancher who takes James Stewart in.

MacMahon also showed some flair for comedy in Gold Diggers of 1933. That movie I first blogged about in honor of then birthday star Guy Kibbee, who happens to show up in The Mouthpiece as an Irish bartender. (Kibbee will show up at 8:00 PM tonight in Lady For a Day as well.) And then there's Life Begins, in which MacMahon plays one of the nurses in the maternity ward.

Warren William Day

TCM is putting the spotlight on Warren William tomorrow for his day in Summer Under the Stars. One movie that looks interesting is The Mouthpiece, at 9:45 AM. I haven't seen it before, but it's apparently the original version of Illegal, a movie that I did see when it showed on TCM a couple of years back and one I thought I blogged about. In the latter film, Edward G. Robinson plays a ruthless prosecutor who changes his tune when he discovers that one of the people he sent to the electric chair (DeForrest Kelley in an early role) was in fact innocent. Robinson then decides to use his ruthless talents as a defense attorney (well, it's more that this is what pays the bills). The original sounds interesting in that it's a pre-Code: it doesn't have to have an ending that will please the moral prudes.

Skyscraper Souls, at 11:15 AM, is an interesting movie about William as a man trying to take control of a massive skyscraper in New York, and having to juggle a love life around it. I think I saw it back when TCM had it's month of movie critics selecting films. If memory serves, Leonard Maltin selected this movie, which I suppose says something about whether Maltin has "common" tastes.

Another movie that I saw many years back is The Mind Reader (3:45 PM), which I first saw when Stephen Sondheim selected it for his turn as Guest Programmer back in March 2005. William plays a carnival mindreader; like almost everything else at those old traveling carnivals, this one is a racket. In fact, William is being aided by Allen Jenkins. Unfortunately, one of the people he's trying to scam, Constance Cummings, falls in love with him (and he with her), until she discovers that the mind reading is utterly phony. She insists that he give it up and live honestly, and he tries for her sake, but when he finds himself unable to make an honest living, he goes back to the psychic racket, only this time to a more upscale urban clientele.

One William movie I've blogged about before is Three On a Match, at 1:00 PM.

News of the Weird

I came across the following interesting (but completely unrelated to movies) story in my RSS reader this morning: Lost Woman Looks for Herself in Iceland’s Highlands. To make a long story short, the driver of the tour bus she was on didn't recognize her after she changed clothes, and somehow the passenger count got screwed up. The woman had no idea she was the one they were supposed to be looking for.

There has to be a movie comedy in this somewhere. In fact, I mentioned the lousy movie Go Chase Yourself a month ago, in which Joe Penner doesn't realize at first the police want him, while his wife is only helping the police look for a missing man, not a criminal.

Ray Milland leads a criminal investigation into himself in The Big Clock, although that's only because his boss (Charles Laughton) is forcing him to lead the investigation.

Police would be likely people to pull off such a tactic: commit a crime and then lead the investigation into the crime. One example of this that springs to mind is Van Heflin in The Prowler.

Fred MacMurray as an investigating cop tried to pull off a double-cross in Pushover, which doesn't quite fit the category. At first I was thinking that Double Indemnity didn't fit either, since it's Edward G. Robinson leading the insurance fraud investigation. But then, MacMurray is assisting. Another double-cross occurs in The Money Trap, in which police detective Glenn Ford tries to steal a bunch of money from Joseph Cotten, assisted by his buddy on the beat Ricardo Montalban.

Heydrich redux

Back in February 2010, I mentioned the movie Hangmen Also Die, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who was the Nazi Reichsprotektor for the Czech lands. The Nazis responded by taking a small Czech village and killing all the men while sending the women to concentration camps. The Nazis, contrary to what I wrote in February 2010, made a lot of this public because they knew the plot to kill Heydrich had been hatched by Czech exiles in the UK, and the Nazis wanted to send a message to the Allies that if they tried similar operations in the future, they were going to kill a lot of innocents. (The events in The Heroes of Telemark, or at least the key sabotge events, took place after all this.)

I bring all this up only because tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM, TCM is showing Hitler's Madman, which also happens to be about the Heydrich assassination, and was released the same year as Hangmen Also Die. This one, however, was made at low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation, although it was distributed by MGM. (If memory serves, there's an MGM card at the beginning of the print TCM shows. PRC is also the studio at which Detour was made.) Heydrich was played by John Carradine, and the movie was directed by, of all people, Douglas Sirk. The movie is actually being shown in honor of tomorrow's Summer Under the Stars actress, Ava Gardner. This even though she only has a bit part as a young student. Hitler's Madman has, as far as I know, not gotten a DVD release, so you'll have to catch the TCM showing.

One Sunday Afternoon

The last of today's Gary Cooper movies, airing early tomorrow morning at 4:30 AM, is One Sunday Afternoon. Now, I have to admit that I haven't seen this movie before. However, it's the original movie version of The Strawberry Blonde, which is one of the very first movies I blogged about; so, I at least know the plot.

The movie does seem to have gotten a release from the Warner Archive, but there's a glitch on the TCM website. TCM's schedule page links to the Warner Archive's DVD of the 1948 One Sunday Afternoon, which is also more or less the same story as The Strawberry Blonde, except that it's a Technicolor musical. Amazon links to a DVD of the 1933 version, though, complete with cover art.

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?