The death has been announced of actress Juanita Moore, who played the black maid mother of the mixed-race woman (played by Susan Kohner) who wants to pass for white in the 1950s version of Imitation of Life. Depending on the source, Moore was aged somewhere in her 90s: Variety says 99, but the IMDb says 92.
Hungarian-born ethnic German immigrant Wilhelm Fried was born on this day in 1879. Like many Jews from that part of Europe, his family emigrated to New York, where Wilhelm eventually anglicized his name to William Fox. As William Fox, he eventually bought a nickelodeon, which he parlayed into a chain of early movie theaters, before in 1913 starting his own production company, unsurprisingly known as Fox Films, which of course exists to this day, although there have been several changes along the way thanks to mergers and acquisitions. William Fox himself wsa out of the movie business since the early 1930s, and therein lies what sounds like a very interesting story.
To make a long story short enough for a blog post, in 1929 Fox decided he was going to try to buy Loew's/MGM, which pretty much sent everybody in Hollywood to Washington to get the proposed acquisition declared either an antitrust violation, or not an antitrust violation, depending on which side you were on. Obviously, the acquisition never went ahead, that having to do in part with the stock market crash of October 1929, and in part to Fox's suffering a serious car accident. Fox himself lost a good deal of his fortune in the crash, which is what led to his getting pushed out of the studio that he founded, but which remained named for him.
Eventually, William Fox was forced to declare bankruptcy, and there's another story: Fox tried to bribe a judge as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, and wound up being sent to prison for perjury as a result. Fox was unlamented by the rest of Hollywood when he finally died in 1952, which is sad in a way, but considering how many enemies he must have made and how long he'd been out of Hollywood, I can understand why they wouldn't particularly care much about his passing.
Still, along with the Warner brothers, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, and the others, Fox deserves to be remembered for his pioneering role in the history of film after production left the New York area for California.
At any rate, last night after It Started With Eve, I saw that TCM ran the (presumably) original trailer for That's Entertainment! that would have been seen in theaters back in 1974. There are a few funny things, such as the comment about never seeing the likes of this again. I suppose that might have something to do with the fact that MGM was falling on hard times, and in the 1974 scenes specifically filmed for the movie, the studio is really beginning to look scruffy. But there's also a line at the end of the trailer: "Boy, do we need it now", that sounds a bit odd to me. Sure, there was a lot going on in America at that time, but I don't know if I'd want to use a line like that to promote my film.
I looked on Youtube, and I think, not having watched it, that this is the trailer:
Happy New Year 2014!
I've briefly mentioned the movie Twist Around the Clock a couple of times before, mostly because it's an almost exact remake of Rock Around the Clock. TCM is running a series of rock-and-roll related movies tomorrow as part of their New Year's Eve dance party, and both of these are on the schedule: Rock Around the Clock at 1:45 PM, and Twist Around the Clock at 3:15 PM.
Twist Around the Clock has a promoter (John Cronin) lamenting that the old music he was promoting is going out of style. But he's in some town in the middle of nowhere, and finds that everybody si dancing to some new sound that he's never heard in any big city. That sound is, of course, the twist, and the promoter takes a brother and sister (Mary Mitchell and Jeff Parker) who are great at this new dance and promises to make them and their dance a success.
There's one problem, and this time it's actually different than in Rock Around the Clock. In the previous movie, the promoter had a female boss who was trying to get him in bed or something romantic that didn't violate the production code. In this case he's got a male boss (Tol Avery). But the boss has a daughter (Maura McGiveney), and the boss wants his promoter to marry the daughter, when of course the promoter is falling in love with the sister of the dance act.
That all having been said, Twist Around the Clock isn't the sort of movie you watch for the plot. Instead, you watch for the music, and Twist Around the Clock might be a fair bit better than Rock Around the Clock in that regard. One plus is that with the twist being a bit of a novelty, there were a lot of people doing knockoff twist songs, much in the way that a recording artist could do a Christmas song without having it seem like they were doing something completely different. So while we get the Platters in the former movie, who clearly aren't rock and roll no matter how talented they are, we get the Marvelettes doing their one twist song, "Merry Twistmas". We also get Chubby Checker, who isn't an actor, but was the guy who made the twist popular and is at least passably engaging playing himself. Dion DiMucci was reasonably successful, and the Marcels are well-known for their version of the old standard "Blue Moon", although that's not the song they sing here.
Rock Around the Clock and Twist Around the Clock both received a DVD release at one point or another, but they both seem to be out of print. Watch either or both for the curiosity value if you haven't seen them before.
After spending half a day honoring Joan Fontaine and half a day honoring Peter O'Toole, TCM is spening tonight's prime time lineup doing something ever so slightly different. This time, it's honoring a whole bunch of people who died over the past year, with one movie each. Those honorees are:
Deanna Durbin in the comedy It Started With Eve, in which she helps Bob Commings please his dying father Charles Laughton, only for things to get complicated, at 8:00 PM;
Annette Funicello on the beach with Frankie Avalon in Bikini Beach at 9:45 PM;
Eileen Brennan as part of a murder mystery in The Cheap Detective at 11:30 PM;
Jonathan Winters gets a dual role in the dark funeral spoof The Loved One, overnight at 1:15 AM;
Karen Black falls for Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, at 3:30 AM;
Julie Harris falls in love with James Dean in East of Eden at 5:15 AM; and
John Kerr has an inappropriate relationship with Deborah Kerr (no relationship in real life) in Tea and Sympathy at 7:15 AM.
This is the sort of programming that I really love from TCM, and that few if any other channels here in the US would ever do. I'm not really just referring to the actual names from decades ago being honored; I don't expect somebody like John Kerr to be a big story in the news when he dies. But there's something about TCM's salutes that comes across as far more thoughtful and even tasteful than anything you'd get from, say, the "pop culture" channels. Even Game Show Network, back when Marcia Wallace died, only looked for a few episodes from the shows they're currently running on their schedule when she was a celebrity player -- and even that's is still not as bad as when I flip through the channels and come across one or another of the entertainment news shows, which are almost entirely gossip and often not about entertainment at all but the latest lurid trial of the day; the sort of trial reminiscent of Anatomy of a Murder.
Anyhow, getting back to the movies on TCM's lineup tonight, four of them seem to be available from the TCM shop: It Started With Eve, Bikini Beach, Five Easy Pieces, and Tea and Sympathy. I'm really surprised that there's no "Buy DVD" icon next to East of Eden.
TCM is spending this morning and afternoon honoring the recently deceased Joan Fontaine. They're going to be spending tonight honoring Peter O'Toole, who died the day before Fontaine. He's only getting three movies, in part because one of his films runs nearly four hours:
Peter O'Toole gets his first Oscar nomination for playing Lawrence of Arabia at 8:00 PM.
That's followed by an interview he did with Robert Osborne at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival, which is on at midnight.
At 1:00 AM you can see O'Toole's fourth Oscar nomination, in the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
The last movie is O'Toole's seventh nomination, for My Favorite Year, at 3:45 AM.
It's a bit difficult to program a salute like this to Peter O'Toole. The thing is, you can't really omit Lawrence of Arabia, and if you put it in a less-than-prime slot, you're probably going to have people complaining. And there goes four hours of your schedule. There's a short on following My Favorite Year, so in theory you could get rid of the short and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which isn't one of my favorites -- and O'Toole himself knew he couldn't sing very well; there's a "Word of Mouth" piece that shows up from time to time about this movie. But that only frees up three and a quarter hours, which means you'd have to find two shortish movies to fit in that slot, shich si going to be quite difficult for O'Toole. The Lion in Winter needs a 2:30 slot; so does Becket.
And I wouldn't want to remove the TCM Film Festival interview. It only runs an hour, which is a bit of a shame. I wasn't there, but somebody who was posted on the TCM message boards that O'Toole apparently really liked to regale everybody with stories from Lawrence of Arabia and the other movies, since the interview actually ended up going on for over two hours and the editors had to excise quite a bit. If memory serves, the interview as it airs also includes a fair bit of O'Toole talking about his early life before the movies.
Joan Fontaine (l.) with Judith Anderson in Rebecca (1940)
TCM has set aside its previously scheduled programming to honor the recently deceased Joan Fontaine with seven of her films. Those movies will be airing tomorrow, December 29, during the morning and afternoon:
Blond Cheat, one of the B-comedies she made at the start of her career, kicks things off at 6:30 AM.
That's followed by The Women at 7:45 AM;
Fontaine as a bad girl in Born to Be Bad at 10:15 AM;
The costume drama Ivanhoe, based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott, at noon;
The Constant Nymph finds Fontaine in love with Charles Boyer at 2:00 PM;
Fontaine wins an Oscar for Suspicion at 4:00 PM; and
Fontaine becomes Laurence Olivier's second wife in Recebba, at 5:45 PM.
Suspicion was already on the schedule for tonight at 10:00 PM. As for the availability on DVD, TCM lists all of them as being on DVD with the exceptions of Blond Cheat (not too surprising) and Born to Be Bad.
TCM is showing The Magnificent Ambersons tonight at 8:00 PM in honor of costume designer Edward Stevenson. I have to admit that this is one of those movies that I've always found a tough slog for whatever reason, and I don't think I've actually seen it all the way through. It's one of those movies that I first learned about, I believe, from watching some documentary or another on PBS back in the days where you had to be in a huge city to have more than four or five TV channels. It was mentioned, of course, because it's the Orson Welles movie that was "destroyed" by the studio. Those evil studio bosses, ruining the movie!
Ever since I first tried to watch the movie, though, I've wondered how much of the problem I had is because of the studio editing it, and how much is down to the movie perhaps not being quite as good as it's cracked up to be. Finally having done a bit of online research, I'm still not certain. Apparently, Orson Welles' original edit of hte movie was quite a bit longer than the roughly 90-minute version we have today. There's nothing wrong with longer movies, of course; even Welles' previous Citizen Kane ran two hours and is damn good at that running time. But, for whatever reason, the preview audiences didn't like the first cut, or a second preview that had brief edits. It's after this tht the big changes were made.
Robert Wise, who worked as an editor on the film, this being before he became a top-notch director, would later claim that Welles' original wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Composer Bernard Herrmann, on the other hand, so a large portion of his score go when about a third of the movie was excised, to the point that he decided he didn't want his name on the credits. They also changed the ending, although supposedly the studio ending is more true to the book. I haven't read the original book either, and my relatively brief searching didn't yield much information on what Tarkington himself thought. He died four years after the movie was released but was blind by the end of his life.
The impression I'm beginning to get now is that there probably was a great movie to be made from Tarkington's original source material, but that neither the 1942 movie we got, nor what Orson Welles conceived, was quite it. Kind of like Greed in that regard. But judge for yourself.
Tonight at 11:49 PM, following Billy Liar (10:00 PM, 99 min), is the short Penny Wisdom. This is one of those shorts I'm not certain if I've seen before, since I've seen so many of them that all blend together, and because it's more or less a remake of an earlier short.
It's a Pete Smith short, whcih means you're not going to get dialog from the characters, but snarky commentary from Smith instead, and humor which may or may not be to your liking. The plot, such as it is, involves an upper-class wife whose cook quits on her on the very day that hubby is bringing home the boss for an important dinner. At least nobody dropped the aspic or rushed off to Florida, leaving our hosewife two guests short. Actually, this woman isn't quite a housewife, in that she's useless around the house. What's a woman to do in such a situation? Why, call a newspaper cooking columnist. Gone are the days when you could get her recipes by sending in a self-addressed, stamped envelope care of your local newspaper; at any rate, for the purposes of this short, the columnist actually comes over to help out our wife in distress, showing her how to cook some nice stuff that's not too difficult.
From everything I've read, food photography in general is difficult. Sure, in these days of cell-phone cameras, it's easy enough to take a picture of what's on your plate. But it's difficult to photograph food and make it look good. If you've ever watched a TV cooking show and tried to follow the recipes, you'll probably know that the finished product in your own kitchen never looks quite like what the professional chef on TV is able to whip up quickly. It must have been even more difficult for the folks making this short at MGM, since they were doing it in Technicolor, which had those ridiculously bulky cameras back in the late 1930s.
Penny Wisdom is much the same story as a short called Menu, made four years earlier in two-strip Technicolor. I'm pretty certain I've seen that one, although I might be mixing the two up. Penny Wisdom apparently got a DVD release on one of the sets of The Prisoner of Zenda, but it's also available on Youtube.
Over the weekend, TCM showed a movie that's nominally a Christmas film, but really only is set around Christmas: Bush Christmas.
As the movie's opening narration tells us, the movie is set in an out-of-the-way portion of the Australian outback around Christmastime, just after the school has let out for the Christmas holiday, which, being in Australia, is in the middle of summer. Three siblings and their two companions are heading home to the ranch their farmer works, getting on their horses to go home since this being the middle of nowhere in the 1940s, school buses would have been unheard of. There's Helen, the oldest of the bunch; her younger brothers John and "Snow", named for the color of his hair; Michael, a boy who was evacuated here from the UK because of the war; and Neza, the Aboriginal son of the ranch owner's best ranch hand. Although they're supposed to head straight home, one of them gets the idea to take a little detour, and it's on this detour that they meet Long Bill (Chips Rafferty). They don't realize it, but he's a horse thief, which is a big deal in these parts considering the way everybody relies on horses. He gives them some money to keep quiet about having met him, and this gets them in big trouble.
They face even bigger trouble when they wake up th enext morning and discover that that Lucy is missing. Lucy is dad's prized mare, and the kids know just who did it. And they also know that they let on about Lucy, so they feel terribly guilty about what they've done. They try to rectify the situation by telling Dad and the police about the guy they met, but the police don't quite believe their theory about where the horse thieves might have gone. Well, if none of the adults are going to believe them, then the kids are just going to have to find the bad guys by themselves. They say that they're going to go camping for a couple of days -- something the presumably would have been considered completley normal in 1940s Australia, but would make any parent in today's era of helicopter parenting blanch. Kids doing this stuff independently?
The kids are actually legitimately fairly independent and resourceful, although they would have been better served with a few more days' worth of rations, being reduced to hunting snakes to eat, which of course turns one of the kids' stomachs. Not Neza, though; he's vital to the mission as he knows the ways of the outback and can track and hunt with any adult. As for those horse thieves, they get the distinct impression that somebody might be chasing them, especially after they find Helen's hat. And if they didn't think the kids were just lost, they really know something's up when they wake up to discover the kids have ambushed their camp and freed the horses and taken their boots! Still, the penalty for horse thievery must be so severe that the thieves march on, eventually making their way to a ghost mining camp for a climactic scene.
Bush Christmas is a good movie for both children and adults. In many ways, you could think of it as a children's movie because the kids are the most important part of the cast, and because the themes are so simple. But these children seem realistic. They have some smarts but aren't so brilliant that they can't be outwitted at a key point by the horse thieves, who themselves are suitably good villians. More importantly, the kids aren't irritating like a lot of Hollywood child actors can be. Sure, you know there's eventually going to be a happy ending, even if the opening narration didn't imply it. But Bush Christmas is a winner in any case, and a good movie for any time of the year, not just Christmas.
Bush Christmas has received a DVD release, although I wonder from the Amazon entry whether it's out of print as they claim to have only a couple of copies left. The TCM Shop says they have it in stock, although I wonder whether they've confused the 1947 Bush Christmas with a 1983 remake which introduced a young Nicole Kidman to the world.
