TCM Guest Programmer September 2015: Diahann Carroll

Once again, it's time tonight for this month's TCM Guest Programmer. (Obviously, there are no further nights on which they could have schduled the September Guest Programmer.) This month, actress Diahann Carroll has selected four of her favorite films and will be presenting them with TCM host Robert Osborne.

Every now and then, a Guest Programmer will select one of his or her own films; I seem to recall Shirley Jones doing that with Elmer Gantry. (Thelma Schoonmaker selected three films directed by her husband, Michael Powell.) Carroll is another one who is starting off with a movie in which she stars. That movie is Claudine at 8:00, in which she plays a single mother in mid-1970s New York who tries to raise her six children while dealing with the pitfalls of welfare and while falling in love with garbage collector James Earl Jones.

That will be followed at 10:00 PM by Now, Voyager, which I suppose shares something in common with Claudine in that both films involve women trying to navigate uncertain love lives. But I don't know if Diahann Carroll could have a fun breakdown the way Davis does in Now, Voyager.

At 12:15 AM you can catch Gilda, in which Glenn Ford is a gmabler in Buenos Aires who gets hired by casino owner George Macready and finds out his new boss is in love with his old girlfriend (Rita Hayworth). Oh, and the boss has some shady business dealings going on as well.

Finally at 2:15 AM is Glory, about an all-Black unit of soldiers in the US Civil War.

A heads-up on Something Always Happens

Tommorow, September 30, is the birth anniversary of British-born director Michael Powell, who was born on that day in 1905. TCM is running a morning and afternoon of his movies, and one of the highlights for me would be another airing of Something Always Happens, which is on at 7:00 AM.

The reason I consider it a highlight is that it was never intended to be seen in America. As I mentioned in the post linked above, the movie was made at the Teddington Studio, which was Warner Bros.' British arm. Back then, the UK had a protectionist system wherein a certain percentage of movies shown in British cinemas had to be British films. The Hollywood studios dealt with this by setting up shops in the UK to make cheap B movies which they could pair with the prestige movies from Hollywood. TCM got the rights to half a dozen of them several years ago, and the quality ranges about as much as wth Hollywood's B movies. Some of it wasn't all that good; some of it was highly entertaining even if not on a par with the prestige movies. For me Something Always Happens is in that latter category. If you haven't seen Something Always Happens before, I can definitely recommend it. There's a synopsis somewhere in between the length of a brief post like this and a full-length post at the link above.

George Stevens' World War II footage

Tonight is the final night of the Five Came Back spotlight on TCM, looking at five directors who served in World War II. This last installment looks at George Stevens, who after the war would make such classics as A Place in the Sun and Shane.

During World War II, Stevens had access to a home movie camera and a bunch of color film stock, which he used to good effect to film documentary footage of the war in color, with a lot of it being mostly candid. The footage went unknown for decades until after the director's death. When his son George Jr. cleaned out the attic, he found all that footage and made a documentary about his father. (Actually, there are two documentaries: a relatively standard one which does include some of the war footage, and one looking specifically at the war footage.)

TCM is, as far as I know, not showing any of the color footage, since it was more or less Stevens' "personal" films and not the stuff he was doing as part of the war effort. (They have shown George Jr.'s "standard" documentary in the past.) So here is some of that footage:

Consolation Marriage

An interesting and little-known pre-Code is coming up on TCM tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM: Consolation Marriage. It deserves a viewing and a blog post.

Irene Dunne plays Mary, a working girl trying to make her way through the late 1920s with her boyfriend Aubrey (Lester Vail). Unfortunately, he decides that he would be happier marrying into wealth. So he runs off with a rich girl and leaves poor Mary alone. While Mary is licking her wounds, she runs into Steve (Pat O'Brien). He's a newspaperman who has just suffered the same fate as his girl Elaine (a young Myrna Loy) has left him for a better-off partner. There's an obvious solution for these two jilted lovers that you should be able to figure out.

Ah, but there's a twist. Mary and Steve do decide to get married, but they have an agreement that it's going to be a more or less "open" marriage. Not so much in the sense that they're going to be sleeping around, but more that if either of them decides they don't want to be in the marriage any longer, they can just up and end the marriage. Seems like a pretty daring idea for the early 1930s, even taking into account that Hollywood movies probably had more divorces in them than America as a whole. That having been said, the marriage seems to be a reasonably happy one, and one that obviously includes sex, since Mary ultimately has a baby. (I suppose that in true Hollywood tradition, they could have had sex exactly once and that's what produced the baby.)

For a movie like this to be interesting, however, there's going to have to be some dramatic conflict. In Penny Serenade, that conflict involved killing off the poor little child. Consolation Marriage isn't going to be so mean here. And, in fact, it comes up with a more interesting dilemma. Aubrey and Elaine both return to announce that they're not happy with their marriages, and both of them would be happy running off with their old lovers. A fun solution would be for Aubrey and Elaine to marry each other and then live together with Mary and Steve, but the cinema of the early 1930s couldn't be that daring. Instead, what we get is a dramatic conflict over whether Mary, Steve, or both of them will go back to their old lovers. And who's going to take custody of the baby?

Consolation Marriage is an interesting idea, even if the execution isn't always perfect. But it's that idea that makes it so well worth watching, at least once. Most of us who are into old movies know well about Joe Breen's enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 and how, before then, movies could do things that were more daring. But even then, a lot of what was done is pretty tame compared to what you can show on screen today. The sort of marriage practiced by Mary and Steve, however, is different, and that's one of the things that makes the movie worth a watch.

I don't think Consolation Marriage has been released to DVD here in North America, so you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.

Ooh, I've joined a blogathon!

Today was another day where I couldn't really think of what to blog about. I looked at the upcoming TCM schedule, and saw that Dial M For Murder is on it, tomorrow at noon. It's a movie that certainly deserves a full-length blog post, and, as it turns out, I already did that four and a half years ago.

So, when I was looking down the blogroll, I noticed that one of the blogs has an announcement for a blogathon: the What a Character! blogathon for 2015. Ooh, I enjoy character actors, I thought, so this looks interesting.

The blogathon will be coming up in November, so I'm going to have to remember to actually do a post on the character actor of my choice, although I'll probably just do one well ahead of time and schedule it to show up on the day in question.

It also gave me an idea for a blogathon I might like to start, although my blog tends to be low enough traffic that I'd have to really go out and almost spam other blogs' comment threads to publicize it. :-(

A good place for screencaps

George Raft (the man in the gray hat) in a scene from Some Like It Hot (1959)

Today marks the birth anniversary of actor George Raft. I was going to do a birthday post on him, except it already turns out that I did one four years ago. In looking for a good picture of Raft to use on what was going to be today's post, I decided I was going to look for something with Raft from Some Like It Hot, which is how I came across the above picture. It's from a blog called Pyxurz, which basically has a whole bunch of screencaps on various movies, mentioning who is in each screencap, but other than that mostly uncommented upon.

I don't feel bad about hotlinking, since it's Google that's hosting the images, and since the person who put them up doesn't have the copyright on them, anyway.

James Dean, TV Star

TCM is devoting an entire night tonight to actor James Dean. Now, you'd think that's a bit hard considering that he died young and only made three motion pictures. In fact, TCM will only be showing two of them, East of Eden at 2:30 AM and Rebel Without a Cause at 4:30 AM.

So how are they filling out the rest of the evening? With old TV shows. Back in the day, of course, there were a lot of theater anthologies which would show teleplays that sometimes were not much different from stage plays that you'd go to an actual theater to watch, the likeness coming from the fact that some of the series were broadcast live, at least for the people on the east coast. (I'd presume the folks on the west coast got kinescopes.) Dean did several of these before becoming a movie star, and it's these that are taking up the first half of the evening.

Note an anomlay in the schedule, however. TCM's schedule lists the first program, the Campbell Summer Soundstage, as a 30-minute program starting at 8:00 PM and going to 9:00 PM, which I'd think is wrong. Indeed, the second program, a Studio One show, is 60 minutes but theoretically given a 30 minute slot. Most likely is that Studio One comes on at 8:30 PM and will run 60 minutes, after which point the schedule seems to come together properly.

But of course, this brings up the question: should TCM be running TV series? There are things that I think are clearly appropriate for TCM. Those episodes of the Dick Cavett Show that TCM has shown are all interviews of people involved in classic cinema and as such not all that different from something original to TCM like Private Screenings. Documentaries about movie stars that were originally made for TV are something else that makes sense to show. And then there are some movies which started off as TV movies but were re-edited fot the big screen. Steven Spielberg's Duel is one prominent example, but there were also some episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that were stitched together with some extra material and released as movies.

The old TV drama anthologies, however? I'm not so certain. I'd also question the appropriateness of the Disneyland episodes that TCM have run in the Treasures from the Disney Vault installments, but that's clearly different. Dollars to doughnuts Disney has a big say in what TCM gets to show in those, and they're responsible for those old TV episodes showing up. Does anybody really expect the more prominent animated features to show up?

But if Robert Montgomery Presents can show up tonight, why, logically, shouldn't Alfred Hitchcock Presents show up next? And those are, I think, even more clearly not within TCM's purview.

You learn something new every day

Today is the last night of Susan Hayward's turn as TCM's Star of the Month, and they'll be showing several of her 1960s movies. Among the movies is Stolen Hours at 2:00 AM, which has the following blurb on the TCM schedule:

An American heiress with an incurable disease falls in love with her surgeon.

I thought to myself that the plot sounded familiar but surprisingly, it took a bit before it hit me: that sounds like a remake of Dark Victory! Sure enough it is a remake of the old Bette Davis chestnut, which is considered a classic but which isn't exactly my cup of tea. That's probably because to me it's one of those films which screams "chick flick", but not in a good way. I'd probably put it in the same category as To Each His Own. (Conversely, I've never had much of that problem with, say, Joan Crawford's Warner Bros. stuff.)

Supposedly Bette Davis didn't like the idea of a remake of Dark Victory, which is really quite silly on her part considering that the material is based on a stage play, so it's not as if her movie was particularly original. Davis and Hayward would go on to work together a year later in Where Love Has Gone, which you can catch tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM. From what I've read, the sparks flew between Davis and Hayward on the set of that one, albeit not to the level of Davis and Crawford making What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.

As for taking a while to spot that Stolen Hours was a remake of Dark Victory, I think that's in part because I was thinking of another pair of movies with a similar theme. Sentimental Journey, released in 1946, stars Maureen O'Hara as a woman who gets married and then, finding out she's dying, adopts a child to keep her husband company after she dies. This one was remade in 1958 as The Gift of Love starring Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack, and it was this remake I was thinking of when I saw Stolen Hours on the schedule.

TCM's Dickie Moore programming salute

Dickie Moore and Barbara Stanwyck in So Big (airing at 8:45 AM)

Actor Dickie Moore died two weeks ago, just shy of his 90th birthday. In order to honor Moore, TCM has changed its programming for the morning and afternoon tomorrow (September) 24, when they will be showing nine of Moore's movies:

6:15 AM Three Who Loved
7:30 AM The Star Witness
8:45 AM So Big
10:15 AM Gabriel Over the White House
11:45 AM The Story of Louis Pasteur
1:15 PM My Bill
2:30 PM Sergeant York
4:45 PM Out of the Past
6:30 PM Bad Boy


Dickie Moore in Out of the Past (airing at 4:45 PM)

Scandal at Scourie

Tomorrow is the birth anniversary of actor Walter Pidgeon. So it's unsurprising that TCM should be sending the morning and afternoon looking at his films. Except that they're looking at his movies from the 1950s which I find somewhat less interesting. Well, I shouldn't say they're uninteresting; it's just that they're 1950s MGM movies which to me has a certain meaning. A good example of this is Scandal at Scourie, airing at 12:45 PM.

Donna Corcoran plays Patsy, a young girl living at a Catholic orphanage in the Anglophone part of Quebec, back at the turn of the century when the province still had a reasonable Anglophone minority. Unfortunately, there's an accident at the orphanage, which results in it being burned to the ground. Thankfully for the nuns, there are other Catholic religious institutions all over the place, so they're able to go west to Manitoba, but with the lack of space at the new place they'd really be grateful if they could adopt off some of the kids they've been caring for.

The train that's taking the nuns and children to Manitoba stops in the town of Scourie, Ontario, and little Patsy gets off to walk around, just like everybody else. However, she meets Mrs. Victoria McChesney (Greer Garson). McChesney and her husband Patrick (Walter Pidgeon) are childless, and she is captivated by poor little Patsy. It doesn't hurt that Patsy is of Irish descent, so she immediately thinks Mrs. McChesney, who is also from the island, is one of her kind. Ah, but she isn't. Mrs. McChesney is from Ulster, and a Protestant. Still, she wants to adopt this charming little girl. The nuns agree, but only on condition that Patsy be raised Catholic, since she was already baptized and everything.

And that's where the problems begin. I mentioned that the McChesneys are Protestant, but more than that, Patrick is involved in local politics. And, wouldn't you believe it, there are people who think that the McChesney's adopting a little Papist girl is a bad thing. They'll have no qualms in using that against him if he decides to stand as a candidate for the legislative assembly. But that's not the only problem. There's another kid from the orphanage who was adopted in Scourie, and that kid is a jerk who has no qualms in saying that it was Patsy who was responsible for the orphanage in Quebec being burned down if doing so will help his new family.

So Patrick gets the idea that perhaps he shouldn't adopt Patsy since he's thinking about himself first. And that causes Patsy to run away, just as the big dangerous storm is about to hit Scourie. This is also where I really start to have problems with the movie. I mentioned at the beginning that this is one of those 1950s MGM films, which implies a lot of things. MGM always seemed glossier than a studio like Warner Bros., and certainly compared to a studio like RKO. That glossiness made movies that ought otherwise have a hard edge, such as Johnny Eager, sometimes unrealistic. But more importantly, by the early 1950s, Dory Schary was in charge at MGM, and wanted to make socially relevant films. In the case of something like Scandal at Scourie, you know this is going to mean we'll get a nice tidy social lesson at the end of the movie and that everything is going to wind up happily for Patsy and the McChesneys. Also, being MGM, it's handled in an oh-so-wholesome way.

Not that the movie is particularly bad. It's well made, and everybody gives a professional performance. It's just that those MGM B movies from the era are of a type, and a type that can sometimes be irritating.

I'm not certain if Scandal at Scourie is available on DVD.