The May 2013 TCM Schedule

[CineMaven]

This was remade into a film featuring Henry Fonda, Barbara BelGeddes, Vincent Price, Ann Dvorak film.

[JackFavell]

Thanks! I'll see if I have it. It's also available on Netflix.

The Long Night is one of the first movies on TCM that Andrew actually sat through just because he liked it and wanted to. Yay!

[Sue Sue Applegate]

Thanks, David. I did enjoy it, and appreicate your comments to enlighten me about an aspect of foreign film that I am unfamiliar with. I also read that it was one of the earlier flashback sequences filmed and that explains the "gauzy veil"
effect. SPOILER: I enjoyed how the crowd was begging him not to do something he would regret, and give himself up.
Collective concern and pity is not something that you see that often in a noirish setting.

Jackie, Cinemaven, and David, now I know I would like to see Litvak's The Long Night.

[Rita Hayworth]

War Movies - May 25th - All Times Eastern

10:00 AM
DESTINATION TOKYO (1943)

A U.S. sub braves enemy waters during World War II.
Dir: Delmer Daves Cast: Cary Grant , John Garfield , Alan Hale .
BW-135 mins, TV-PG, CC,

12:30 PM
TORPEDO RUN (1958)

A submarine commander is forced to blow up a Japanese prison ship carrying his family.
Dir: Joseph Pevney Cast: Glenn Ford , Ernest Borgnine , Diane Brewster .
C-95 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

2:15 PM
RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP (1958)

Officers on a WWII submarine clash during a perilous Pacific tour.
Dir: Robert Wise Cast: Clark Gable , Burt Lancaster , Jack Warden .
BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

6:00 PM
OPERATION PACIFIC (1951)

A dedicated submarine commander sacrifices everything to defeat the enemy.
Dir: George Waggner Cast: John Wayne , Patricia O'Neal , Ward Bond .
BW-109 mins, TV-PG, CC,

10:30 PM
SERGEANT YORK (1941)

True story of the farm boy who made the transition from religious pacifist to World War I hero.
Dir: Howard Hawks Cast: Gary Cooper , Walter Brennan , Joan Leslie .
BW-134 mins, TV-G, CC,

[Rita Hayworth]

War Movies - May 26th - All Times Eastern

11:00 AM
BACK TO BATAAN (1945)

An Army colonel leads a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese in the Philippines.
Dir: Edward Dmytryk Cast: John Wayne , Anthony Quinn , Beulah Bondi .
BW-95 mins, TV-PG, CC,

1:00 PM
THEY WERE EXPENDABLE (1945)

A Navy commander fights to prove the battle-worthiness of the PT boat at the start of World War II.
Dir: John Ford Cast: Robert Montgomery , John Wayne , Donna Reed .
BW-135 mins, TV-PG, CC,

3:30 PM
GREEN BERETS, THE (1968)

After vigorous training, two Army detachments see service in Vietnam.
Dir: John Wayne Cast: John Wayne , David Janssen , Jim Hutton .
C-142 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

6:00 PM
FLYING LEATHERNECKS (1951)

A World War II Marine officer drives his men mercilessly during the battle for Guadalcanal.
Dir: Nicholas Ray Cast: John Wayne , Robert Ryan , Don Taylor .
C-102 mins, TV-PG, CC,

7:50 PM
UNITED STATES MARINE BAND (1942)

A patriotic wartime short showcasing the U.S. Marine Corps Band and famous songs of the Marine Corps.
Dir: Jean Negulesco
BW-9 mins,

8:00 PM
BATTLEGROUND (1949)

American soldiers in France fight to survive a Nazi siege just before the Battle of the Bulge.
Dir: William Wellman Cast: Van Johnson , John Hodiak , Ricardo Montalban .
BW-119 mins, TV-PG, CC,

10:15 PM
BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965)

A crack Nazi unit holds off the Allies during World War II.
Dir: Ken Annakin Cast: Henry Fonda , Robert Shaw , Robert Ryan .
C-170 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

[Rita Hayworth]

War Movies - May 27th - All Times Eastern

6:15 AM
BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE (1957)

The Japanese Army forces World War II POWs to build a strategic bridge in Burma.
Dir: David Lean Cast: William Holden , Alec Guinness , Jack Hawkins .
C-161 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

9:00 AM
GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE (1961)

A team of Allied saboteurs fight their way behind enemy lines to destroy a pair of Nazi guns.
Dir: J. Lee Thompson Cast: Gregory Peck , David Niven , Anthony Quinn .
C-157 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

11:46 AM
WHERE EAGLES DARE (1969)

A short documentary providing a behind-the-scenes look at the challenging production of WWII action film "Where Eagles Dare" (1968).
Dir: Brian G. Hutton Cast: Richard Burton , Clint Eastwood , Mary Ure .
C-13 mins,

12:00 PM
DEVIL'S BRIGADE, THE (1968)

Experienced soldiers and misfits join forces to create a World War II commando unit.
Dir: Andrew V. McLaglen Cast: William Holden , Cliff Robertson , Vince Edwards .
C-132 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

2:30 PM
KELLY'S HEROES (1970)

An American platoon tries to recover buried treasure behind enemy lines.
Dir: Brian G. Hutton Cast: Clint Eastwood , Telly Savalas , Don Rickles .
C-144 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

5:00 PM
BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, THE (1946)

Three returning servicemen fight to adjust to life after World War II.
Dir: William Wyler Cast: Myrna Loy , Fredric March , Dana Andrews .
BW-170 mins, TV-PG, CC,

8:00 PM
AIR FORCE (1943)

A bomber crew sees World War II action over the Pacific.
Dir: Howard Hawks Cast: John Ridgely , Gig Young , Arthur Kennedy .
BW-124 mins, TV-G, CC,

10:15 PM
COMMAND DECISION (1948)

A senior officer faces the horror of sending his men on suicide missions over Germany during the last days of World War II.
Dir: Sam Wood Cast: Clark Gable , Walter Pidgeon , Van Johnson .
BW-112 mins, TV-PG, CC,

12:15 AM
GOD IS MY CO-PILOT (1945)

A flyer dismissed as too old fights to prove himself against the Japanese.
Dir: Robert Florey Cast: Dennis Morgan , Dane Clark , Raymond Massey .
BW-88 mins, TV-PG, CC,

2:00 AM
FLIGHT COMMAND (1940)

A cocky cadet tries to prove himself during flight training.
Dir: Frank Borzage Cast: Robert Taylor , Ruth Hussey , Walter Pidgeon .
BW-116 mins, TV-PG, CC,

4:00 AM
DIVE BOMBER (1941)

A crusading scientist fights to prevent bomber pilots from blacking out.
Dir: Michael Curtiz Cast: Errol Flynn , Fred MacMurray , Ralph Bellamy .
C-133 mins, TV-G, CC,

[moira finnie]

One of director Walter Hill's best and grittiest movies is on TCM this evening at 8pm (ET) :



Hard Times (1975) gave Charles Bronson one of his best roles. While it never brought in the crowds like Death Wish, etc., Bronson's physical presence and nearly wordless performance is used better here than most any other role he took in his long career. Bronson appears as a street fighter trying to survive in the brutal world of Depression era New Orleans. James Coburn, Strother Martin, Robert Tessier, and Jill Ireland provide fine support for the impressively fit 55 year old star. Best of all may be the film's atmosphere (always exceptional in every Hill film) and here, under art director Trevor Williams and crew, you can almost feel the humidity, and smell the river at low tide. Worth discovering!

[moira finnie]

THE ARRANGEMENT (1969, dir. Elia Kazan) was chosen by Illeana Douglas for her Second Looks series on TCM. She admitted that some of the directing gimmicks look very dated, such as the use of the zoom lens, the split screen, and even Batman-style graphics, but she praised the performances of Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, and Deborah Kerr, and thought they merited giving the film a second look. In general, I agree with her assessment.

Man, kingrat, you cut this movie a lot more slack than I did. Maybe it was just me, but all I kept thinking while seeing it for a second time was oh, the reputations that hurtled to earth on this one! Even though I was a little kid at the time when this movie came out, the raciness of the movie (the lurid publicity promising us to "See! Kirk & Faye gambol in the sand!" stuff), and the financial and the prestige fallout that accompanied the highly publicized unleasing of The Arrangement on an unsuspecting world was something that even I heard about at the time. Kazan's career was never the same after this debacle, though the director went on to make small scale films, teach, and write after this misstep.

I thought it was kismet that The Arrangement (1969), one of those films that might or might not be a truly BAD movie, was trotted out for a run around the track on TCM last weekend just as Kirk Douglas' son Michael garnered a Best Actor award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and had a ratings winner for his role as Liberace in the highly stylized biopic Behind the Candelabra on HBO. Each decade has its own interpretation of camp, I guess. And The Arrangement wasn't even trying to be camp...just terribly hip...and chockful of anti-establishment attitudes and poses.



I have mixed feelings about The Arrangement, though one of the things I actually admire about the film--aside from the burnished glow of the cinematography by Robert Surtees--is the take-no-prisoners approach that Kirk takes to his (surprise!) intense character. It was the height of the corrosive Vietnam War, the beginning of the sexual revolution, raised consciousness, and the apex of a period of self-indulgent navel gazing that the world may never see again (I hope). Author and Filmmaker Elia Kazan may have thought he was simply going through a period of honesty and self-assessment appropriate to a man in middle life. However, Kazan was never immune from courting public taste--and indeed, he had led it at times, notably during his years of work with the innovative The Group Theater, the introduction of great modern playwrights to the public (Miller, Odets, Williams, etc.) and realistic actors such as Brando. After seeing his films and reading his autobiography and the Richard Schickel bio on Kazan, I do think he was subject to following trends as well as creating them. As with many artistic people, eventually an individual finds himself trying to make himself over one more time, and there is only a finite amount of artistic capital inside--especially as one ages and tries to keep up with others as well as top yourself.

I suspect that like many people in show business at the time, a desire to stay relevant and marketable to the youth market also led him to craft this pulpy story about Ad Man Eddie Anderson, a big-time American success story who sensed something hollow in it all (gosh, that's a new theme to explore that's never been done before or since!). In his autobiography Kazan admitted that his then wife, Barbara Loden, bitterly resented the casting of Faye Dunaway in the leading role, ("'She's just a lousy imitation of me,' Kazan quotes her as saying). More to the point, when she had read his original manuscript for The Arrangement, Loden had resented the depiction of her own private behavior in the pages of the book, so perhaps it was just as well she avoided the experience of re-living personal intimacies while filming the movie. The actors sure earned their money in this film.

I can't fault the courage (or do I mean chutzpah?) of actor Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway. Kirk had already been a star for twenty years and he had the awards, the larger-than-life quality and intelligence to see that wasn't always a boon to his real talent. I admire Douglas for the chances he took with this part when he chose to dive in head first and work with one of the brightest directors of his generation---too bad that this autobiographical movie was the last time that Elia Kazan would "be given the keys to the car" by any studio. And too bad that Kazan asked Kirk to wrestle with the angst of having a lovely wife (Deborah Kerr, whose thankless role consists of her being rejected by her hubby and mollified by an oily analyst, played nimbly by Harold Gould, as Kingrat points out above), a lousy relationship with his Greek immigrant mother, though he is simpatico with his dreadful, demented Dad, played by Richard Boone, during that good actor's long tumble down into hamminess rounds out most of the unfortunate goings-on, but there are compensations in a few scenes and a couple of others with dramatic potential that might have worked on the page and the stage, but not necessarily on screen this time.

The opening scene of the film is a corker, tapping into the dark urges and fears we've all experienced one time or another while tooling down a highway. A mustachioed, middle-aged man in a sleekly tailored suit and equally streamlined sports car is driving between two massive trucks. Out of a self-destructive sense of mischief, desire for oblivion, or simply boyish curiosity about physics, he gradually removes his hands from the wheel of the high-powered machine he controls. The action in the film spins on from that scene. Too bad nothing quite matches this early epiphany visually or emotionally.



Faye Dunaway was at the pinnacle of her stardom after Bonnie and Clyde when she played the loving, intelligent and fantasy-fulfilling mistress of Douglas. The beautiful, theater-trained Dunaway was very much the "It" girl of the moment just then, it would probably have been a surprise to some back then that she would struggle to fulfill her gifts, only to scale the heights of a kind of weird immortality as entertainment industry Valkyries in both Network and Mommy Dearest. Her striving character, so independent and self-possessed she even leaves her married lover puzzled may choose motherhood and an open relationship with another, more malleable man over Kirk, but I kept wondering..."what will this child be like when he grows up?"



The two leads commit themselves valiantly to their roles: The pair of them gamely doff their clothes, roll about on the beach, fight, snuggle, separate and work desperately to breath life into this story of too much success. All these actors allowed themselves to be manipulated guided into portraying characters who discover the hollowness of their ultra-hip and successful lives (they are in the "soulless advertising game," a notion that had been more incisively examined in several films back in the '30s, most of which seemed to star Lee Tracy or Warren William). It is not their fault that the characters are difficult to feel empathy for--but it is almost impossible to feel much for Richard Boone either, who plays Douglas' elderly, old world father, now sliding into dementia, exhibiting cruelty and castigating his poor, browbeaten wife. This leads to sequences in which Kirk relives scenes and fights within his family, chiding his mother and feeling sorry for her, but ultimately trying to gain his father's respect. While these went on, these might have been more effective in a stage production, where shifting scenes between the past and present can be achieved with lighting and moods. Yet in film, for some reason, it is not as easy to recreate the kind of memories and consciousness of the past inside a person's head. In any case, Kazan had a helluva time making these clunky sequences work without causing a viewer to think she'd stumbled into a little theater production of O'Neill's Strange Interlude.

BTW, my favorite sequence in the film features The Public Eddie Anderson vs. The Naked (and therefore REAL) Eddie Anderson in one of his interior monologues that is given literal life by a side by side shot that I've never quite forgotten...

[MissGoddess]

wow. i was a little sorry that i mis-programmed my DVR and got 2 hours of Me-TV instead of The Arrangement, but now I think I may have been spared a bad fate. I knew it was probably going to be what you describe (so well), Moira, but what I did NOT know was that Richard Boone played Kirk's father. Boy, that really tells you something about how not taking care of yourself can take its toll. This movie was 1969, right? And Boone, less than a year younger than Douglas, is looking like he really could be Kirk's dad. as i said: wow.

P.S. I saw part of this movie on TV when I was a kid and I remember being so upset that Deborah Kerr was reduced to doing a nude (or semi-nude) scene that I practically swore off watching any movies with my favorite stars made after the 1960s.

[moira finnie]

wow. i was a little sorry that i mis-programmed my DVR and got 2 hours of Me-TV instead of The Arrangement, but now I think I may have been spared a bad fate. I knew it was probably going to be what you describe (so well), Moira, but what I did NOT know was that Richard Boone played Kirk's father. Boy, that really tells you something about how not taking care of yourself can take its toll. This movie was 1969, right? And Boone, less than a year younger than Douglas, is looking like he really could be Kirk's dad. as i said: wow.

I believe that Kingrat liked Boone's performance, though I thought his role and Boone's overacting made his character perhaps the most repellent of all. (Sorry! I like Richard Boone quite often, just not in this film). I am sure that Boone was made up to look old and ill, but you are right about the startling physical difference between the two contemporaries who played father and son.

P.S. I saw part of this movie on TV when I was a kid and I remember being so upset that Deborah Kerr was reduced to doing a nude (or semi-nude) scene that I practically swore off watching any movies with my favorite stars made after the 1960s.

I thought that the role that Kerr was asked to play was very demeaning--but I felt that the film had little sympathy or respect for women in general.

[Sue Sue Applegate]

P.S. I saw part of this movie on TV when I was a kid and I remember being so upset that Deborah Kerr was reduced to doing a nude (or semi-nude) scene that I practically swore off watching any movies with my favorite stars made after the 1960s.

It distressed me that Anna Leonowens had to stoop to this self-indulgent male fantasy, too! But Deborah Kerr was an earthy, common-sense actress who probably wanted to work, whether for money or love of her craft.

I thought that the role that Kerr was asked to play was very demeaning--but I felt that the film had little sympathy or respect for women in general.

Women were, seemingly, part of the measure of a man's success. Having a wife AND a mistress acquiesced to the part of the male ego that demanded the cake and its consumption.

And as David so aptly put it, these characters just aren't "sympathetic."
Loved reading your assessments of The Arrangement, Moira, Miss G., and Kingrat!