Tag Archives: tcm

Dec 17

The Man Who Came To Dinner

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Julio Francesconi, a charming older gentleman who writes beautiful short stories that he allows us to publish in the Times-Gazette, dropped his Christmas story by the paper a week or so ago, and while we were chatting he noted that I was in plays sometime and suggested that I ought to play the lead in “The Man Who Came To Dinner” some time. That led to a conversation last week with a couple of my college-age castmates in “It’s A Wonderful Life” who’d never heard of the play or the wonderful movie adaptation.

Then, tonight, I discovered that the 1942 movie will play tomorrow night, Sunday, on Turner Classic Movies. It’s hilarious fun, starring Monty Wooley in the lead role, which he originated on Broadway. It also includes Jimmy Durante and a rare comedy performance from Bette Davis.

Alexander Woolcott, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, was a critic and radio host. He was a house guest of playwright Moss Hart, and generally took over the house, was pompous and demanding to the point of absurdity, and even wrote an insulting remark in the guest book before leaving. Hart was laughing about the incident with his collaborator George S. Kaufman, causing Kaufman to joke that it could have been worse – Woolcott could have broken his leg and been forced to stay longer.

The two men looked at each other and realized they had just started writing their next play.

“The Man Who Came To Dinner” is about Sheridan Whiteside (Wooley), a columnist and radio commentator making a speaking engagement in a small town. But he slips and falls on the ice, breaking a leg. He’s wheelchair-bound and the doctor won’t let him travel, so he is forced to stay with a local couple, who had intended only to have him over for dinner before the lecture. Whiteside is demanding, insulting, egotistical and obnoxious, the houseguest from hell in all sorts of comical ways (one of which involves live penguins). His long-suffering secretary Maggie (Davis, in the movie version) is at least used to putting up with him. But when Maggie starts falling for the local newspaper editor, a would-be playwright (Richard Travis), Whiteside is scared of losing her and schemes to break up the lovers by tantalizing the playwright with a visit from a glamorous and well-known actress (Ann Sheridan) who just might be interested in starring in the newspaperman’s play.

Also visiting Whiteside is his friend Banjo (Jimmy Durante), a character based on the madcap off-screen personality of another Algonquin Round Table member, Harpo Marx.

The movie is hysterically funny, and well worth DVRing. I’ve also seen a  TV broadcast of the 2000 Broadway revival of the play which starred Nathan Lane and Jean Smart, and that was quite good as well. Both are available on DVD.

Woolcott and Marx ended up starring as their alter egos in a West Coast production of the play. That would have been interesting.

Nov 06

Robert and Drew

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When Turner Classic Movies started its Saturday-night feature showcasing the all-time classic movies, “The Essentials,” it was hosted by directors – Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Peter Bogdanovich. But then they decided on a two-host format including Robert Osborne, the face of TCM and the host of all of its other prime-time movies. Robert was first paired with film critic Molly Haskell – knowledgeable, and a great writer, but with the TV personality of corrugated cardboard (Bogdanovich was nearly as bad, it must be said). Then, he was paired with actress/writer Carrie Fisher and then actress Rose McGowan. I loved the rapport between Osborne and Carrie Fisher.

But for the past two or three years, Robert’s co-host has been Alec Baldwin, and it’s been a lot of fun, especially when they (politely) disagree on whether or why a certain movie is “an essential.”’

For the past couple of months the Saturday night episodes (which were taped well in advance, and some of which have been rerun) have been our only chance to see the vacationing Osborne.

Well, it was announced last week that the new season of “The Essentials,” premiering in March, will be hosted by Robert Osborne and Drew Barrymore. While I hate to see Alec Baldwin go, this could be fun. They’ll do “Dinner at Eight,” from 1933, with Drew’s grandfather John Barrymore and his brother Lionel Barrymore, and while they won’t be doing “E.T.”, they will do “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which is sure to bring out some stories about working with Steven Spielberg. Barrymore has experience producing and directing as well as acting, and I imagine she’ll bring some terrific insight.

Oct 28

36 Hours

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I am home for the day – and I won’t be back at work until Thursday; I’m burning off a few vacation days that I will lose at the end of the year if I don’t take them before then.

Anyway, this will do most of you little good, unless you have online access to your DVR, but a great and relatively-unknown spy thriller, “36 Hours,” will air at noon on TCM. I just saw it in the listings.

The movie stars James Garner and Rod Taylor. Garner is an American officer with knowledge of the D-Day invasion. He’s kidnapped and turned over to Taylor, an American-raised Nazi psychologist with a perfect accent – and an unlikely plan. Garner awakens, suddenly gray at the temples, in an elaborate simulation of an American VA hospital and is told that the war ended six years ago and that he’s had occasional bouts of amnesia since that time due to injuries suffered during the war. He’s presented with a “wife” (Eva Marie Saint) he doesn’t remember marrying. Taylor tells him that the best way to recover his lost years is to talk about the last things he remembers before waking up at the hospital. He’s hoping to get Garner to talk about the plans for the invasion.

It sounds outlandish, and I guess it is, but Taylor and Garner manage to sell it anyway.

Oct 08

It was a very good year

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“Gunga Din” is on TCM’s “The Essentials” right now, and in their introduction Messrs. Osborne and Baldwin made reference to 1939. If you’re not an old movie buff, you may not realize that this is the peak of Hollywood’s Golden Age – a single year so amazing that books and documentaries have been made about it. Some of the movies that were released in 1939 include, as mentioned, “Gunga Din,”  “Stagecoach,” “Ninotchka,” “Only Angels Have Wings,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “The Women,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Love Affair,” “The Roaring Twenties,” “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Dark Victory,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Destry Rides Again,” “Each Dawn I Die,” “Union Pacific,” “Beau Geste,” “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” “Drums Along the Mohawk,” “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” “Hound of the Baskervilles,” “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Little Princess,” “The Hardys Ride High,” “Babes In Arms” and “Union Pacific.”

… oh, and “The Wizard of Oz.”

… not to mention “Gone With The Wind.”

No other year in movie history has so many heavy hitters.

Aug 23

That is the question

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I’ve probably blogged about it at some point in the past, but one of my favorite movies, “To Be Or Not To Be,” starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, airs Sunday evening on TCM.
This is a classic, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who specialized in sophisticated comedy. Jack Benny plays a character who’s close to, but also a little different from, the eponymous character he played on radio and TV. Here, he and Lombard are husband-and-wife ham actors in a Polish troupe during World War II. They love each other, but Benny’s character is vain and competitive and Lombard’s character is not above entertaining the chaste (so far!) affections of a heroic young pilot (Robert Stack, looking very young indeed) backstage while her husband is on stage performing the famous monologue from “Hamlet.” Benny is insulted as an actor when he sees someone in the audience get up and leave every night as soon as he starts the speech. He has no idea that the speech is Stack’s cue to go backstage and meet Lombard!
Benny, Lombard and their troupe are shut down by the Nazi invasion but then are recruited for some espionage derring-do. They must somehow prevent a beloved but secretly-traitorous professor from turning over a list of Polish resistance members to the Nazis. Benny eventually has to impersonate the professor, and Lombard must seduce a Nazi officer the professor, both with hilarious results.
The film was remade in the 1980s by Mel Brooks, with Brooks and his real-life wife Anne Bancroft in the starring roles. That version is funny as well, but nothing can top the original. It’s well worth your time.
The movie airs at 5:15 p.m. Sunday (6:15 for you Easterners).

Jul 24

Summer under the stars

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Turner Classic Movies now has a PDF schedule on its web site for the “Summer Under the Stars” festival, one of its annual traditions. Each August, the channel devotes each day, from 6 a.m. Eastern to 6 a.m. Eastern, to 24 hours of films featuring the same star. So August 1 will be 24 hours of films with Marlon Brando, August 2 will be 24 hours featuring Paulette Goddard, and so on.

It’s a fun diversion, although by the end of the month you’re ready to go back to the normal random schedule, especially on days featuring stars you aren’t particularly interested in.

Keep in mind that if you’re looking for a particular film, you may find it in a different place than you expected. For example, 24 hours of Humphrey Bogart (Aug. 17) is notably missing “Casablanca” – because, if you scroll down a bit, they do 24 hours of Conrad Veidt (Conrad Veidt!) on Aug. 23, and “Casablanca” is safely ensconced there. Veidt, in real life a fervently anti-Nazi German expatriate, played the Nazi General Strasser.

In the wee hours of the morning, some time after “Casablanca,” they’ll show “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” from 1919, a German expressionist silent horror film which I’ve never seen in its entirety. (I need to make sure my sister-in-law in North Carolina knows about it.) Veidt is in that one as well, naturally.

Jun 19

‘Wings of Eagles’ redux

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I thought about just putting up a Facebook link to one of my earlier blog posts about “The Wings of Eagles,” and then noting in the comment that the movie will air tonight on TCM. But after looking at the old posts, I decided I wanted to start fresh.

“The Wings of Eagles” is a must-see for fans of legendary director John Ford and/or John Wayne. It’s not without its flaws, and while I’m fully aware of those flaws I’m somehow fascinated by the movie despite them.

The movie is John Ford’s lovingly-crafted tribute to one of his good friends, Naval aviator turned screenwriter Frank “Spig” Wead, played by John Wayne. The movie begins with an account of Wead’s adventures in the Navy. Then, at the height of his success, he is felled by a physical tragedy, with a prognosis that he will never use his legs again. Over impossible odds, he partially overcomes this tragedy and learns to walk on crutches. But now he is a man without a mission. He becomes a writer, using his experience to tell realistic stories about military aviators.

When World War II breaks out, he battles the odds again, finding a way to help the war effort in spite of his disability.

The movie also tells the story of Wead’s equally roller-coaster relationship with his wife and daughters. His wife Min is played by Maureen O’Hara, who is always welcome playing against Wayne. She’s especially good here. During Production Code Hollywood, female characters were often painted in broad strokes, either as long-suffering saints or evil temptresses. Min is neither. She’s a real, vivid character, good at heart and strong, but with some character flaws. Her relationship with Wead (who had flaws of his own) is not sugarcoated, and it does not end the way one expects a classic-movie romance to end.

The complaint against the movie, and it’s a legitimate one, is that it veers wildly back and forth between hijinks and pathos. In the early part of the movie, the hijinks include Wayne landing a plane in the middle of an admiral’s garden party. During the second half of the movie, scenes of Wayne struggling to regain the use of his legs are interspersed with laughs about various well-wishers trying to sneak him alcohol through his friend and amateur therapist “Jughead” Carson (a scenery-chewing but not unwelcome Dan Dailey). The rollercoaster tone doesn’t always work, although Ford was deliberate in using it, saying the silly stories were just as true and typical of Wead as the tragic underlying narrative.

But the real reason for any John Ford fan to see the movie is Ward Bond, a member of Ford’s standard stock company, playing movie director “John Dodge,” as he is known in the movie. (Ford … Dodge … get it?) You can see how much fun Bond is having playing a broad caricature of his long-time boss. “Dodge” befriends Wead and hires him to write screenplays.

The movie airs at 9 p.m. Central on TCM. If you haven’t seen it, you ought to. It’s being preceded, right now, by one of Ford’s all-time classics, “Stagecoach.”

Jun 05

Check the Carfax

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Just as happened the last time I blogged about “The Yellow Rolls Royce,” I saw TCM airing a promotional film about the movie just now and hoped it was to promote an upcoming showing. I’ve only seen parts of the movie and have been hoping since that time to watch it start-to-finish.

Well, according to TCM’s web site, the movie won’t be airing until August. So I’ve signed up for one of TCM’s reminder e-mails.

This is an oddity – an anthology movie from 1964, composed of three separate stories, quite different in content, linked only by the title vehicle as it passes from one owner to the next over three decades. The cast includes … get ready … Ingrid Bergman, Rex Harrison, Shirley MacLaine, Jeanne Moreau, George C. Scott, Omar Sharif, Alain Delon, Art Carney (no relation) and Wally Cox, the voice of Underdog and a regular on the early years of the Peter Marshall “Hollywood Squares.” It was the last film of the great British director Anthony Asquith.

I guess I’ll have to wait until August (and, even then, set my DVR – it’s airing at 3 a.m.).

Jun 02

Welcome to Sherwood!

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Today was an intensely busy day at work, but during one of the few bits of down time (more accurately, waiting for someone to call me back time), I was talking to my co-worker Mary Reeves and I brought up the fact that TCM is starting its annual summer series of family-friendly classic movies, “Essentials Jr.,” this Sunday, with one of my all-time movies ever, the glorious 1938 version of “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, Alan Hale (Sr.) and a host of wonderful character actors. Notice in this clip how much Alan Hale looks like his son, Alan Hale Jr., the Skipper from “Gilligan’s Island”:

Also notice that, even in a video embed on your computer screen, the color is brilliant. This movie has to be one of the best uses of the old three-strip Technicolor process ever.

I still hate the name “Essentials Jr.,” but I am delighted about this year’s host, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Bill Hader. I wonder if he’ll break out his Vincent Price impression at some point….

This year’s schedule of movies is excellent, with such classics as “Horse Feathers,” “King Kong” and “Gunga Din.” There are, as usual, a couple of movies that (as much as I , personally, love them) seem odd in this context of introducing kids to classic film. For example, I’m not sure kids will get that much out of “His Girl Friday,” which seems more like a movie for grownups. But I’m not a parent, so maybe I’m way off base on that one.

Anyway, whether you have kids or not, whether you plan to watch any of the other movies or not, tune in this Sunday at 7 (Central) for “Robin Hood.” They do not make movies like that anymore.