TCM Schedule for Thursday, December 7, 2017 -- What's On Tonight: The Great American Songbook

[Staph]

In the daylight hours, TCM is wandering in the deserts of North America, Africa, and Arabia. Stock up on the liquids of your choice! Then in prime time, TCM is beginning a month of Thursday night's of great films that feature great songs. From the TCM website:

The knowledgeable and irresistibly charming Michael Feinstein is our host for this TCM Spotlight, which considers the Great American Songbook as reflected in classic film. The Songbook, which encompasses the most important and influential popular song and jazz standards of the first half of the 20th century, is continually celebrated by Feinstein in his roles as singer, pianist, educator and archivist.

An assistant to Ira Gershwin until the great lyricist's death in 1983, Feinstein has carved out a dazzling career through his Grammy®-nominated recordings, Emmy®-nominated TV specials, an NPR series, and concerts that span the globe. The PBS series Michael Feinstein's American Songbook, the recipient of the ASCAP Deems/Taylor Television Broadcast Award, was broadcast for three seasons and is available on DVD. Feinstein currently serves as Artistic Director for the Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, IN.

Michael's selection of movies featuring great musical standards ranges from 1933's 42nd Street, with songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin; to 1956's High Society, which features an original film score by Cole Porter as performed by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and others. Crosby's love duet with Grace Kelly, "True Love," was Oscar®-nominated as Best Song.

The Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time (1936) is built around such classics by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields as "The Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance." Hollywood Hotel (1937) features songs by Johnny Mercer and Richard A. Whiting, including the enduring "Hooray for Hollywood." Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) has songs by the incomparable Irving Berlin that include "Blue Skies," "Easter Parade" and, of course, the title tune.

Moving into the '40s, we have the James Cagney vehicle Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) with its roundup of George M. Cohan numbers including "Give My Regards to Broadway," "Over There," and "You're a Grand Old Flag." In Girl Crazy (1943), Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland are treated to a score featuring such George and Ira Gershwin gems as "Embraceable You," "I've Got Rhythm," and "But Not For Me."

Rooney plays lyricist Lorenz Hart to Tom Drake's composer Richard Rodgers in Words and Music (1948), a fictional biography of the pair, with highlights that include Garland belting out "Johnny One Note" and Lena Horne performing "The Lady Is a Tramp." On the Town (1949), based on the Broadway hit with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, highlights such favorites as "New York, New York" and "Come Up to My Place."

Betty Hutton and Howard Keel take the leads in the film version of the Irving Berlin smash Annie Get Your Gun (1950), reveling in such choice tunes as "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," "The Girl That I Marry," and that great show-biz anthem, "There's No Business Like Show Business."

Songwriter bios were big in the 1950s, with Fred Astaire playing lyricist Bert Kalmar and Red Skelton appearing as composer Harry Ruby in Three Little Words (1950), in which their famous songs include "Nevertheless," "I Wanna Be Loved By You," and "Who's Sorry Now?" Danny Thomas plays lyricist Gus Kahn in I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), with Doris Day appearing as Mrs. Kahn and lending her special touch to such standards as "The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else)," "My Buddy," and "Toot, Toot, Tootsie." Deep in My Heart (1954) has Jose Ferrer as composer Sigmund Romberg and features, among other songs, "One Alone," "When I Grow Too Old to Dream" and "Stout-Hearted Men."

One of the greatest of all film musicals, The Band Wagon (1953) has a parade of classics by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz that include "By Myself," "Dancing in the Dark," "You and the Night and the Music" and the song that became the unofficial theme of MGM musicals, "That's Entertainment!"

by Roger Fristoe

Enjoy!


6:00 AM -- THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. (1941)
A pilot and a temperamental heiress are stranded in the desert together.
Dir: William Keighley
Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Stuart Erwin
BW-92 mins, CC,

Ann Sheridan was originally scheduled to play the Bette Davis role but was on suspension by Warners.


7:45 AM -- BAD LANDS (1939)
Indians pick off the members of a posse lost in the desert.
Dir: Lew Landers
Cast: Robert Barrat, Noah Beery Jr., Guinn Williams
BW-70 mins, CC,

A version of Lost Patrol (1929), The Lost Patrol (1934), and Bataan (1943).


9:00 AM -- VALLEY OF THE SUN (1942)
A government spy goes after a crooked Indian agent in Arizona.
Dir: George Marshall
Cast: Lucille Ball, James Craig, Sir Cedric Hardwicke
BW-78 mins, CC,

Based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland.


10:30 AM -- HARUM SCARUM (1965)
An American film star is kidnapped in the Middle East.
Dir: Gene Nelson
Cast: Elvis Presley, Mary Ann Mobley, Fran Jeffries
C-85 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Upon hearing about the movie for the first time, Elvis loved the idea of his character as being somewhat of a sheik. He liked the character because he thought he resembled Rudolph Valentino. During filming in Los Angeles, he would wear the headpiece home and even to the dinner table at his house in Bel-Air. Eventually, he grew tired of the film because his character was made to look like a fool.


12:00 PM -- THE DESERT SONG (1953)
A French professor secretly leads a band of desert freedom fighters.
Dir: Bruce Humberstone
Cast: Kathryn Grayson, Gordon MacRae, Steve Cochran
C-111 mins, CC,

Practically all of the lyrics for "The Riff Song" have been rewritten, even the words that did not have to be changed. This was common practice in several Broadway musical adaptations made before 1955; it was done frequently in the Nelson Eddy- Jeanette MacDonald operettas and it was done in the 1954 film version of "The Student Prince". Movie studios did this so that royalties from all sales of sheet music for the film versions would go to the studios that made the films, not to the original lyricists. Exceptions included the 1936 film version of "Show Boat" and all of the songs except "Cotton Blossom" in the 1951 "Show Boat", as well as the 1943 film version of "Girl Crazy".


2:00 PM -- ANOTHER DAWN (1937)
An officer's wife at a British outpost in Africa falls for another man.
Dir: William Dieterle
Cast: Kay Francis, Errol Flynn, Ian Hunter
BW-73 mins, CC,

Originally, the film had a different, much longer ending, in which Errol Flynn's character takes the plane out for the impossible mission and dies, allowing the married couple (Ian Hunter and Kay Francis) to be reconciled, thereby also satisfying the Production Code. However, by the time of the preview, Flynn had become such a hot box office property with female moviegoers, the ending was re-shot with Ian Hunter nobly sacrificing himself allowing Flynn to have the fadeout clinch.


3:30 PM -- ACTION IN ARABIA (1944)
An adventurous reporter tangles with Nazis in the desert on the eve of World War II.
Dir: Leonide Moguy
Cast: George Sanders, Virginia Bruce, Lenore Aubert
BW-75 mins, CC,

Desert footage was shot by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack in 1937 for an unmade film on the life of Lawrence of Arabia.


5:00 PM -- BENGAZI (1955)
Three shady characters team up to search for Nazi gold in the African desert.
Dir: John Brahm
Cast: Richard Conte, Victor McLaglen, Richard Carlson
BW-79 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

The last music score for RKO by Roy Webb, who had been with the studio since 1929.


6:30 PM -- THE MUMMY (1932)
An Egyptian mummy returns to life to stalk the reincarnation of his lost love.
Dir: Karl Freund
Cast: Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners
BW-73 mins, CC,

The discovery of Pharaoh Tutankahmen's tomb and the alleged curse it contained inspired Universal to make this film. In fact, when Howard Carter (funded by Lord Carnarvon) opened the sarcophagus of King Tut in 1925, screenwriter John L. Balderston was present as a reporter for the New York "World."



TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK



8:00 PM -- WORDS AND MUSIC (1948)
Songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart search for love while rising to the top.
Dir: Norman Taurog
Cast: Perry Como, Mickey Rooney, Ann Sothern
C-121 mins, CC,

In the movie Lorenz Hart (Mickey Rooney) is upset over being short. In real life he battled homosexuality which could not be portrayed in films at the time. Since they could not show this in the film they substituted his shortness as the source of his misery.


10:15 PM -- I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS (1951)
Songwriter Gus Kahn fights to make his name, then has to fight again to survive the Depression.
Dir: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Doris Day, Danny Thomas, Frank Lovejoy
BW-110 mins, CC,

This biopic of lyricist Gus Kahn is told from the point of view of his widow Grace who was still alive at the time of filming. Kahn himself had died 10 years earlier.


12:15 AM -- FOR ME AND MY GAL (1942)
An unscrupulous song-and-dance man uses his partner and his best friend to get ahead.
Dir: Busby Berkeley
Cast: Judy Garland, George Murphy, Gene Kelly
BW-104 mins, CC,

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Roger Edens and George Stoll

Gene Kelly's film debut. It is known that Judy Garland got him the job after seeing him in the Broadway musical "Pal Joey".


2:15 AM -- HOLLYWOOD HOTEL (1937)
A small-town boy wins a Hollywood talent contest.
Dir: Busby Berkeley
Cast: Dick Powell, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane
BW-110 mins, CC,

The sequence with the Benny Goodman Quartet - white musicians Goodman on clarinet and Gene Krupa on drums, and Black musicians Ted Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes - performing "I've Got a Heartful of Music" was the first time a racially mixed band was shown in a film.


4:15 AM -- HARRY WARREN AMERICA'S FOREMOST COMPOSER (1933)
In this short film, songwriter Harry Warren performs a number of his own compositions, such as "Forty-Second Street" and "You're My Everything." Vitaphone Release 1544.
Dir: Ray McCarey
BW-9 mins,


4:30 AM -- DAMES (1934)
A reformer's daughter wins the lead in a scandalous Broadway show.
Dir: Ray Enright
Cast: Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler
BW-91 mins, CC,

In the "Dames" number, Dick Powell as a Broadway producer doesn't want to see composer George Gershwin, but when asked by his secretary about seeing Miss Dubin, Miss Warren and Miss Kelly, he lets them enter his office. This is an inside joke, referring to Al Dubin and Harry Warren, who wrote the music for this film, and Orry-Kelly, who was the costume designer.