Tag Archives: turner classic movies

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 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.

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 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.

Dec 26

Metropolis

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I don’t know if there’s anyone reading the blog who doesn’t also follow me on FB or Twitter, but in case there is, I’ll bring you up to speed by telling you I received a DVD of the new restoration of “Metropolis” from my brother and sister-in-law in North Carolina, one of whom had drawn my name (my siblings and in-laws and I drew names this year for the first time).

This was an excellent gift. I’d seen the restoration on TCM last month, and had saved it on my DVR until I got a chance to burn it to DVD. I can’t find the remote to my DVD player/recorder, and while I have a universal remote, only with the original remote can I reach the menu for finalizing a disk.

But the commercial DVD has special features, such as a documentary about the remarkable story of how 25 minutes of footage which was thought lost forever turned up in Argentina (and, no, it had nothing to do with fleeing Nazis). For something like this, I’d much rather have a nice library edition anyway.

The sad part of all this is that my sister-in-law, an English professor who spent a year teaching in Dusseldorf, once wrote a paper on “Metropolis” and its part in German expressionism – and she hasn’t yet seen this newly-restored, almost-complete version which she and my brother gave me. She very much wants to. We didn’t have a chance to watch it during their weekend visit, however. She and my brother have Netflix streaming, so hopefully they can watch it that way at some point.

Nov 16

Moguls & Movie Stars

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I have been thoroughly enjoying Turner Classic Movies’ seven-part documentary “Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,” which premieres each Monday night with several other airings through the week. If you’ve missed the first three episodes, you can probably catch them on the TCM schedule at some time or another — but next week may be when you want to jump in anyhow, because the first three episodes have been an unusually-detailed history of the silent movie era, and we will get to the talkie era next week.
I’ve enjoyed the first three episodes. The very first episode started with magic lanterns and nickelodeons and the very first movies, five-second or ten-second snippets of storyless action intended to amaze the audience with the very fact that motion could be recorded on film.
Last night’s episode, about the prime of the silent movie era, included a very brief summary of the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle scandal. I’ve read that the late Chris Farley wanted to star in a Fatty Arbuckle biopic, and I certainly think someone ought to make one. It’s a fascinating story, albeit a sad one.
This documentary, however, focuses as much on the moguls as the movie stars — the men like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck and Carl Laemmle whose personalities and backgrounds helped shape the outputs of their respecitve studios. One of the books that really got me interested in classic movies was “The Hollywood Studios: House Style In The Golden Age of the Movies,” by Ethan Mordden, now out of print. Mordden explained well what made each studio unique, and the TCM documentary seems headed for a similar approach.
It’s a worthy and well-executed effort, including Christopher Plummer’s evocative narration and a number of great interviews with descendants of the various moguls. I had no idea that the actor Bob Balaban hailed from a family of pioneering theatre owners, by the way.

Jul 01

The Wings of Eagles

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Friday night at 10:30 Eastern / 9:30 Central, AMC is showing a John Wayne / John Ford curiosity about which I’ve blogged here before, in fact more than once. You could argue that it’s a deeply flawed movie and I would be unable to refute you, but I find it fascinating and fun anyway — and if you’re a fan of legendary director John Ford, it’s a must if only for the chance to see Ford stock company regular Ward Bond portraying a cantankerous character based on Ford himself, called “John Dodge.” (Ford … Dodge. Subtle, huh?)

“The Wings of Eagles” is the true story of one of Ford’s good friends, heroic Naval aviator turned scriptwriter Frank “Spig” Wead. It’s an atypical John Wayne role because a good part of the movie has Wead in a hospital bed, trying to regain the use of his legs, and the rest of the movie after that has him on crutches and braces.

It’s also unique because it doesn’t sugar-coat the rollercoaster relationship between Wead and his wife Min, played brilliantly by Wayne’s most compatible female co-star, Maureen O’Hara.

Speaking of rollercoasters, the movie’s great flaw is its rollercoaster tone — silly comedy one moment, tragedy and pathos the next. But I think that’s the way John Ford saw his friend — a larger-than-life character who experienced both hijinks and heartbreak.

I would, of course, prefer for you to watch the movie on TCM, without commercials and without being edited to fit a time slot. But it’s not on TCM this weekend, it’s on AMC, and so if you’ve never seen it that will have to do.

Jun 28

Vote yes, vote yes, vote for independency

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Assuming that you will be out and about Sunday afternoon setting off watermelons or eating ice cold fireworks or grilling hamburgers, set your DVRs to Turner Classic Movies at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, 12:30 here in the Central time zone. “1776″ is on, and a more fun and appropriate cinematic celebration of the holiday would be hard to imagine.

No, it doesn’t feature Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum outfoxing aliens. What it features is Howard Da Silva as a gloriously irreverent Benjamin Franklin, Ken Howard as a reluctant Thomas Jefferson, and, as seen here, William Daniels as a gloriously-stubborn and gloriously-stuffy John Adams:

I’ve pointed this out before, but technically — since Blythe Danner was preggers at the time she appeared in the film — it’s sort of Gwyneth Paltrow’s movie debut.

Go set your TiVo or your DVR or your VCR, if you have to.