TCM Schedule for Thursday, April 10, 2014 -- What's On Tonight - Fan Programmers

[Staph]

Today's fan programmers and their chosen movies are Hannah Kass - Young At Heart, Petri Hawkins Byrd - A Man Called Adam, Matt Roush - The Bad and the Beautiful, and Robert Best - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Enjoy!


6:00 AM -- April Showers (1948)
A family vaudeville act is torn apart by the father's drinking problem.
Dir: James V. Kern
Cast: Jack Carson, Ann Sothern, Robert Alda
BW-94 mins, CC,

"Lux Radio Theater" broadcast a 60 minute radio adaptation of the movie on May 16, 1949 with Jack Carson and Robert Alda reprising their film roles. Dorothy Lamour played Ann Sothern's role.


7:45 AM -- Where Eagles Dare (1969)
An Allied team sets out to free an American officer held by the Nazis in a mountaintop castle.
Dir: Brian G. Hutton
Cast: Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure
C-155 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

The driving force behind the film was Richard Burton's stepson, who wanted to see his stepfather in a good old-fashioned adventure movie. Burton approached producer Elliott Kastner for ideas, who asked Alistair MacLean. At that time, most of MacLean's novels had either been made into films, or were in the process of being filmed. Kastner persuaded MacLean to write a new story. Six weeks later, MacLean delivered the script.


10:30 AM -- The Sins of Rachel Cade (1960)
A female doctor in the Congo is torn between two loves.
Dir: Gordon Douglas
Cast: Angie Dickinson, Peter Finch, Roger Moore
C-123 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Based on the novel Rachel Cade by Charles Mercer.


12:45 PM -- Hide-Out (1934)
Farmers take in an injured racketeer and try to reform him.
Dir: W. S. Van Dyke
Cast: Robert Montgomery, Maureen O'Sullivan, Edward Arnold
BW-81 mins, CC,

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story -- Mauri Grashin

Remade in 1941 as I'll Wait For You, with Robert Sterling, Marsha Hunt, and Virginia Weidler


2:15 PM -- The Lady Vanishes (1938)
A young woman on vacation triggers an international incident when she tries to track an elderly friend who has disappeared.
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas
BW-96 mins, CC,

In Hitchcock/Peter Bogdanovich Interview, Alfred Hitchcock revealed that Lady Vanishes was inspired by that legend of an Englishwoman who went with her daughter to the Palace Hotel in Paris in the 1880's, at the time of the Great Exposition. The woman was taken sick and they sent the girl across Paris to get some medicine, in a horse-vehicle, so it took about four hours, and when she came back she asked, "How's my mother?" "What mother?" "My mother. She's here, she's in her room. Room 22." They go up there. Different room, different wallpaper, everything. And the payoff of the whole story is, so the legend goes, that the woman had Bubonic plague and they dare not let anybody know she died, otherwise all of Paris would have emptied. That was the original situation and pictures like Lady Vanishes were all variations on it.


4:00 PM -- Happiness Ahead (1934)
An heiress falls for a singing window washer.
Dir: Mervyn Le Roy
Cast: Dick Powell, Josephine Hutchinson, John Halliday
BW-86 mins, CC,

Quite unusually for this era, there's a short pre-credit sequence: a complete refrain of the title song is sung before the main title card is shown. The First National logo zooms toward us out of clouds (just as the WB logo more familiarly does) then Dick Powell is superimposed over the same clouds singing "Happiness Ahead" directly to us.


5:30 PM -- Dragon Seed (1944)
Chinese peasants fight to survive the Japanese occupation during World War II.
Dir: Jack Conway
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Aline MacMahon
BW-148 mins, CC,

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Aline MacMahon, and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Sidney Wagner

Filmed in 1943 on the MGM lot in Culver City during the Second World War, the film features an unusual assortment of non-Asian actors with odd accents playing Chinese and Japanese: Russian-born and Stanislavski-trained Akim Tamiroff as Wu Lien; Turhan Bey, Viennese born son of a Turkish father and Czechoslovakian mother as the middle son, Lao Er Tan; New England patrician Katharine Hepburn as his wife; American Aline MacMahon, no longer one of the wisecracking Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), as the wife of Ling Tang; English born Henry Travers (best remembered as Clarence the Angel from It's a Wonderful Life (1946)) as the Third Cousin;" Irish-America J. Carrol Naish as the Japanese Kitchen Overseer; and finally Jewish-American Robert Lewis, co-founder of the Actors Studio and Meryl Streep's teacher at the Yale Drama School as the Japanese Captain Sato.



TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: TCM SPOTLIGHT: FAN PROGRAMMERS



8:00 PM -- Young at Heart (1954)
A cynical songwriter upsets the lives of three musical sisters.
Dir: Gordon Douglas
Cast: Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Gig Young
C-117 mins, CC,

While making this film, Frank Sinatra took an almost immediate dislike to Doris Day's husband, Martin Melcher, thought that Melcher was "using" her to get ahead in the movie business and tried to convince Day of that fact. When Day refused to listen to Sinatra's advice, he had Melcher banned from the set. After Melcher's death in 1968, it was discovered that he had squandered all the money Day had earned during her 20-year film career.


10:15 PM -- A Man Called Adam (1966)
A guilt-ridden jazz trumpeter blames himself for a car accident that killed his family.
Dir: Leo Penn
Cast: Sammy Davis Jr., Ossie Davis, Cicely Tyson
BW-104 mins, CC,

Adam's trumpet playing was actually done by Nat Adderley.


12:15 AM -- The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
An unscrupulous movie producer uses everyone around him in his climb to the top.
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
Cast: Elaine Stewart, Sammy White, Leo G. Carroll
BW-118 mins, CC,

Won Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Gloria Grahame, Best Writing, Screenplay -- Charles Schnee, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Robert Surtees, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- Cedric Gibbons, Edward C. Carfagno, Edwin B. Willis and F. Keogh Gleason, and Best Costume Design, Black-and-White -- Helen Rose

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Kirk Douglas

The character of Shields is regarded as a mixture of David O. Selznick, Orson Welles, and Val Lewton. Georgia, the alcoholic daughter of an iconic actor, is very clearly based on Diana Barrymore. Bartlow, the college professor turned bestselling author turned screenwriter, is thought to be based on Paul Green, a UNC professor who followed a similar career track. Gilbert Roland appearance as "Gaucho" is seen as a self-parody; the Mexican-born actor, once a star in silent dramas, had just appeared as "The Cisco Kid" in a string of B-westerns.


2:30 AM -- The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg (1964)
A young French couple is separated by the war in Algiers.
Dir: Jacques Demy
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon
C-91 mins, Letterbox Format

Nominated for Oscars for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- Jacques Demy, Best Music, Original Song -- Michel Legrand (music) and Jacques Demy (lyrics) for the song "I Will Wait for You", Best Music, Score - Substantially Original -- Michel Legrand and Jacques Demy, and Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment -- Michel Legrand

At the ending scene, Geneviève mentioned about picking up her daughter from Anjou. In reality Anjou is 4.5 hours drive away from Paris, and from Paris to Cherbourg is 3.5 hours in an opposite direction. That makes this "detour" a very long drive.


4:15 AM -- Lola (1961)
A cabaret singer and mother named Lola is courted by two men, yet her heart longs for her long absent lover.
Dir: Jacques Demy
Cast: Anouk Aimée, Marc Michel, Jacques Harden
BW-89 mins, Letterbox Format

Jacques Demy's first film is a tribute to Max Ophuls.