TCM Schedule for Thursday, December 13

[Staph]

This morning TCM features variations on the "heiress meets and loves the common man" theme (It Happened One Night is the classic version). In the afternoon Larry Parks plays Al Jolson in two Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning films. And tonight Star of the Month Irene Dunne shows her vocal skills in six varied film musicals. Roberta and Show Boat are personal favorites of mine.



5:00am -- Love Is A Racket (1932)
A beautiful girl convinces a reporter to cover up her involvement in a murder.
Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Frances Dee, Ann Dvorak.
Dir: William A. Wellman.
BW-71 mins, TV-G

Based on a novel by Rian James, who also wrote 42nd Street (1933), Stand Up and Cheer! (1934), and Swing Time (1936).


6:15am -- Cross Country Romance (1940)
A runaway heiress hides in a doctor's trailer for a rollicking trip to San Francisco.
Cast: Gene Raymond, Wendy Barrie, Billy Gilbert.
Dir: Frank Woodruff.
BW-69 mins, TV-G

Born Marguerite Wendy Jenkins, Wendy Barrie's godfather and future stage-namesake was the Scottish novelist-playwright J.M. Barrie, in whose "Peter Pan" was a character called Wendy.


7:30am -- It Happened One Night (1934)
A newspaperman tracks a runaway heiress on a madcap cross-country tour.
Cast: Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Walter Connolly.
Dir: Frank Capra.
BW-105 mins, TV-PG

The first film to sweep the five major Oscar catagories, by winning Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Clark Gable (In 1996, Steven Spielberg anonymously purchased Clark Gable's Oscar to protect it from further commercial exploitation, gave it back to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, commenting that he could think of "no better sanctuary for Gable's only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy".), Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Claudette Colbert (Claudette Colbert was so convinced that she would lose the Oscar to write-in nominee Bette Davis that she didn't attended the ceremony orignally. She was summoned from a train station to pick up her Academy Award.), Best Director -- Frank Capra, Best Writing, Adaptation -- Robert Riskin, and Best Picture.

If you've never seen this one, I envy you the chance to see it for the first time!


9:30am -- Eve Knew Her Apples (1945)
A radio star tries to escape the limelight in the car trunk of a reporter who is eager for a story.
Cast: Ann Miller, William Wright, Ray Walker.
Dir: Will Jason.
BW-64 mins, TV-G

A sort of a something of a so-so remake of It Happened One Night, with Ann Miller as a radio star rather than as an heiress.


10:45am -- You Can't Run Away From It (1956)
A reporter stumbles on a runaway heiress whose story could salvage his career.
Cast: Jack Lemmon, June Allyson, Charles Bickford.
Dir: Dick Powell.
C-95 mins, TV-G

Direct remake of It Happened One Night, also based on the Samuel Hopkins Adams story Night Bus. Adams was a muckracking journalist, whose articles about the false claims of the makers of patent medicines led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.


12:30pm -- Baby Face (1933)
A beautiful schemer sleeps her way to the top of a banking empire.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, John Wayne.
Dir: Alfred E. Green.
BW-76 mins, TV-PG

Because the original cut was rejected by the New York State Censorship Board in April 1933, the film was softened by cutting out some of the sexually suggestive material. The producers also inserted new footage and tacked on a new ending. In June 1933 the New York Censorship Board passed the revised version, which then had a successful release. The uncensored version remained lost until 2004, when it resurfaced at a Library of Congress film vault in Dayton, Ohio. The restored version premiered at the London Film Festival in November 2004. In 2005 it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry and also was named by Time.com as one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years.


2:00pm -- Wicked As They Come (1957)
A ruthless woman takes advantage of gullible men to climb up the social ladder.
Cast: Arlene Dahl, Philip Carey, Herbert Marshall.
Dir: Ken Hughes.
BW-95 mins

Interesting choice of Arlene Dahl as the ruthless woman -- she has been married six times, dated JFK before either of them were married, and posed semi-nude for Playboy in 1962 (while married to husband number three).


3:41pm -- Short Film: From The Vaults: The Voice That Thrilled The World (1943)
This short traces the history of sound in the movies, beginning with French scientist Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville's experiments in 1857.
Narrator: Art Gilmore.
Dir: Jean Negulesco.
BW-18 mins

Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville invented the earliest known sound recording device, the phonautograph, in 1857. The phonautograph used a horn to collect sound, attached to a diaphragm which vibrated a stiff bristle which inscribed an image on a lamp black coated, hand-cranked cylinder. Unlike Edison's similar 1877 invention, the phonograph, the phonautograph only created visual images of the sound and did not have the ability to play back its recordings. Scott's device was used for scientific investigations of sound waves.


4:00pm -- The Jolson Story (1946)
The singer and star of the first "talkie" risks it all to become a star.
Cast: Larry Parks, Evelyn Keyes, William Demarest.
Dir: Alfred E. Green.
C-130 mins, TV-G

Won Oscars for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Morris Stoloff, and Best Sound, Recording -- John P. Livadary (Columbia SSD)

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Larry Parks, Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- William Demarest, Best Cinematography, Color -- Joseph Walker, and Best Film Editing -- William A. Lyon


6:15pm -- Jolson Sings Again (1949)
After a premature retirement, the legendary singer revives his career to entertain the troops during World War II.
Cast: Larry Parks, Barbara Hale, William Demarest.
Dir: Henry Levin.
BW-96 mins

Nominated for Oscars Best for Cinematography, Color -- William E. Snyder, Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Morris Stoloff and George Duning, and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay -- Sidney Buchman


What's On Tonight: STAR OF THE MONTH: IRENE DUNNE


8:00pm -- Stingaree (1934)
An Australian bandit kidnaps an opera singer and falls in love with her.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Richard Dix, Mary Boland.
Dir: William A. Wellman.
BW-77 mins, TV-PG

Irene Dunne, a professionally trained operatic mezzo-soprano, did her own singing for the film.


9:30pm -- Roberta (1935)
A football player inherits a chic Paris fashion house.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers.
Dir: William A. Seiter.
BW-106 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song -- Jerome Kern (music), Dorothy Fields (lyrics) and Jimmy McHugh (lyrics) for the song "Lovely to Look at".


11:30pm -- Show Boat (1936)
Riverboat entertainers find love, laughs and hardships as they sail along "Old Man River."
Cast: Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson.
Dir: James Whale.
BW-114 mins, TV-G

A novel by Edna Ferber, a 1927 Broadway play, movies in 1929 (mostly silent, with Laura La Plante and Joseph Schildkraut) and in 1951 (with Ava Gardner and Howard Keel), and a filmed stage play on Great Performances in 1989 (with Rebecca Baxter and Richard White).

Irene Dunne was thirty-seven years old (soon to turn thirty-eight) when she played the youthful Magnolia, although many biographies once listed her as being thirty-two at the time. Allan Jones, her love interest, was eight years younger.


1:30am -- Sweet Adeline (1935)
A gay nineties waitress rises from beer gardens to Broadway.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Donald Woods, Ned Sparks.
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy.
BW-88 mins, TV-G

Like many film musicals adapted from stage successes of the time, the plot line and characters of "Sweet Adeline" bear only a faint resemblance to the ones in the original Broadway show. The original musical opened on Broadway, New York City, on 3 September 1929 and closed on 22 March 1930 after 234 performances. In the cast were Helen Morgan as Addie and Charles Butterworth as Rupert.


3:00am -- If I Were Free (1934)
A man and a woman trapped in bad marriages try to make an adulterous affair work.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Clive Brook, Nils Asther.
Dir: Elliott Nugent.
BW-67 mins, TV-G

A melodrama by the author of Gaslight, I Remember Mama, Bell, Book and Candle, and Cabaret.


4:15am -- The Great Lover (1931)
A womanizing opera star falls in love with his innocent young protegee.
Cast: Adolphe Menjou, Irene Dunne, Neil Hamilton.
Dir: Harry Beaumont.
BW-71 mins, TV-G

Neil Hamilton, the other man in this musical triangle and a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West Margaret Hamilton, is probably best known to the television generation as Police Commissioner Gordon in the Batman series.

[Staph]

1. It Happened One Night

A runaway heiress meets a poor but charming newspaper reporter while she's on the lam, antipathy turns to love, and they encounter an assortment of oddball characters. It's the ideal premise for a screwball comedy, and has been the basis for many of them. But none did it better than the original, It Happened One Night (1934), the film that's credited with inventing the genre. Director Frank Capra often said that the making of It Happened One Night would have made a pretty good screwball comedy in itself. Consider the elements: two irascible studio bosses, an impossibly fast schedule, a couple of spoiled stars who didn't want to make the picture and are hostile to the harried director -- yet somehow they manage to produce an enduring classic.

In the early 1930s, Columbia Pictures was considered a "Poverty Row" studio, making cheap B-movies. Luckily, Columbia had a major asset in Capra, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Lady for a Day (1933). Capra and writer Robert Riskin had adapted and renamed a magazine story called "Night Bus," and producer Harry Cohn had arranged to borrow Robert Montgomery from MGM for the lead in the newly named It Happened One Night. But Montgomery balked, saying there were already "too many bus pictures." Instead, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer made Cohn an offer he couldn't refuse. "I got an actor here who's being a bad boy," Mayer reportedly told Cohn. "I'd like to spank him." The bad boy was Clark Gable, who was becoming an important star, and flexing his muscles. He told Mayer he wouldn't play any more gigolo roles, and he wanted a raise. Mayer would punish him by exiling him to Siberia on Poverty Row. Gable arrived for his first meeting with Capra drunk, rude, and angry. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Capra and Gable eventually became friends. Once Gable read the script, he realized the character was a man very like himself, and he enjoyed making It Happened One Night.

Among the stars who had turned down the female lead in It Happened One Night were Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett and Margaret Sullavan. Claudette Colbert, under contract to Paramount, had four weeks free, but she was also a hard sell. She'd made her first film, For the Love of Mike (1927), with Capra directing, and it had been a disaster, so she was not excited about repeating the experience. What did excite her, however, was the prospect of making $50,000 for four weeks of work, since her Paramount salary was $25,000 per film. So she willingly agreed to do it, but, at the same time, she gave Capra a hard time. Although Colbert had gladly disrobed for De Mille in The Sign of the Cross (1932), she refused to be shown taking off her clothes in the motel room sequence in It Happened One Night. No matter. Draping her unmentionables over the "walls of Jericho" made for a sexier scene anyway. More problematic was the hitchhiking scene. Colbert didn't want to pull up her skirt and flash her legs. So Capra hired a chorus girl, intending to have her legs stand in for Colbert's in close-up. Colbert saw the girl posing, and said, "get her out of here, I'll do it -- that's not my leg!" After shooting wrapped, Colbert told friends, "I've just finished the worst picture in the world!"

Colbert's legs and Gable's chest were the sensations of the film. In the motel room scene, Gable demonstrates how a man undresses. When he took off his shirt, he wore no undershirt. Capra explained that the reason for this was that there was no way Gable could take off his undershirt gracefully, but once audiences saw Gable's naked torso, sales of men's undershirts plummeted. The rest of Gable's simple wardrobe -- Norfolk jacket, V-neck sweater, and trench coat -- also became a men's fashion fad. Thereafter, Gable wore a trench coat in most of his films, considering it his lucky garment.

The reviews for It Happened One Night were excellent, but no one really expected much from the film. After a slow opening, it received great word-of-mouth, and the film picked up steam at the box office. James Harvey, in his book Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, believes that the film succeeded because the couple transcended their stock characters. "There was some kind of new energy in their style: slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental -- and powerfully romantic. Audiences were bowled over by it."

At Oscar time, It Happened One Night surprised the industry when it was nominated in all five major categories, and stunned everyone when it won them all: Best Actor, Actress, Picture, Director, and Screenplay. It was the first-ever sweep of the awards, a feat that would not be repeated for another 40 years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Claudette Colbert was about to depart on a train from New York when she was informed that she'd won. She dashed to the ceremony, dressed in a traveling suit, accepted the award, and dashed back to the train, which had been held for her.

Producer: Harry Cohn
Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin (based on the story, "Night Bus," by Samuel Hopkins Adams)
Editor: Gene Havlick
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Costume Design: Robert Kalloch
Art Direction: Stephen Goosson
Music: Louis Silvers
Principal Cast: Claudette Colbert (Ellie Andrews), Clark Gable (Peter Warne), Roscoe Karns (Oscar Shapeley), Henry Wadsworth (Drunk Boy), Claire McDowell (Mother), Walter Connolly (Alexander Andrews), Alan Hale (Danker).
BW-106m. Closed captioning.

by Margarita Landazuri