The January 2014 Schedule for TCM

[JackFavell]

I haven't seen too many of them, but Sporting Blood, Stage Mother and Washington Masquerade are interesting, if not entirely successful films. I think if I had to pick one, Washington Masquerade would be the best of those, with Stage Mother next.

Call of the Flesh is pretty dreadful as I recall, Dorothy Jordan and Novarro seem uncomfortable at best. Jordan is terribly unsure of herself.

[Rita Hayworth]

The only one of these films I've heard of is The Secret of Madame Blanche, starring Irene Dunne, which seems to be a variation on the Madame X story.

Has anyone seen any of these films? Recommendations?

Kingrat ... I have seen The Secret of Madame Blanche and I have been wanting to see this movie for a very, very long time and one of those movies that I was very surprised of how well Irene Dunne did with this movie. I would strongly recommend everyone to watch this adaption of the Madame X storyline.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/1395 ... iler-.html

This is considered Irene Dunne greatest work as an actress and I been wanting to see how well she did during her younger days and this made her name a household name as an actress. I would strongly recommend everyone to see it. Its that good. I provided a link of the TCM Original Trailer.

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

It may interest you to know that Charles Brabin as married to Theda Bara for over 30 years..
He was a very proper British gentleman - sort of a Ronald Colman type. The Brabins were very social types in LA, and were very much mourned when they died in the mid '50's.....

Larry

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

Today I watched "The Old Maid" (1939), a Bette Davis & Miriam Hopkins co-starrer; and was surprised to see Louise Fazenda in it playing the maid, Dora. She had a fair-sized role for a maid and was in it till the end.

It brought back such a warm feeling to me to see her again; she was a very dear person to me. I thought it was hilarious that she was in one of her husbands movies!!
If you see this film again, watch for Louise always with her head reclined away from the overhead lights. Her eyes were injured from these klieg lights over the years and she hated the sun or any bright light.
Miss Fazenda was the first star to wear sun glasses because of this...

I had a good day just thinking about her again.

Larry

[moira finnie]

Hi,

Today I watched "The Old Maid" (1939), a Bette Davis & Miriam Hopkins co-starrer; and was surprised to see Louise Fazenda in it playing the maid, Dora. She had a fair-sized role for a maid and was in it till the end.

It brought back such a warm feeling to me to see her again; she was a very dear person to me. I thought it was hilarious that she was in one of her husbands movies!!

I had a good day just thinking about her again.

Larry, could you please share your impressions of Louise Fazenda's husband, Hal Wallis? Even his biographer, Bernard F. Dick, seemed to find him enigmatic as a person, if not as a producer with enormous staying power (and fantastic credits to his name). The biographer did paint a vivid portrait of a thoughtful, very kind-hearted Fazenda in his book, "Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars."

[Rita Hayworth]

The Secret of Madame Blanche will be playing today 4:45 Eastern and 1:45 Pacific ... later on today ... I will be watching it.

[Vecchiolarry]

Hello Moira,

I knew Hal Wallis more through Adolph Zukor and A.C. Lyles more than through Louise, his wife... I've had tea in Zukor's office 3 times in the 50's (he was more often in NYC than LA); and twice Lyles was with us and once Wallis...

Wallis had produced many high rated movies and was an "on the set" producer, who was a stickler for authenticity and knew how his charcaters should act and react in any given situation... You can always count on a true to life film experience in one of his films.

I know he didn't care for Lizabeth Scott. Once I asked him what happened to her 'E' and he said, "It got lost with her talent"....
He introduced me to Viveca Lindfors, whom both he and Louise adored - so did I...
He championed Shirley Booth and her film career is largely due to his insistance.

He was boss at work but Louise ruled (and pampered) at home... He both loved and loathed her parties - he wanted them outdoors, she did not...

He was very upset when she died (as were we all) and became a recluse for a while. I left LA before he married Martha Hyer (never knew her)...

Larry

[moira finnie]

Thanks, Larry. I love that comment about the lost "E" from Wallis. Too bad your sense of humor and abilities as a raconteur weren't available to Bernard Dick when he wrote his generally excellent book about the producer. The book might have been quite a bit saltier if more stories like that made it into print.

[Rita Hayworth]

The Secret of Madame Blanche


I just loved this movie and its one of Irene Dunne's great role as a young/older mother that lost her son and the Judge at the end of this movie said it all and the dramatic confession of her son saved her from being incarnated. I always felt that these roles for the lovely Irene Dunne showed character, love, and most importantly a chance reunion with her son that she thought she lost for good until 20 years later. I just loved the ending ... can you wait 2 more years to go to America - that's made it all better!

It has two parts in this movie - the young part that led to her birth of her baby and the part that World War I just started and that's makes this movie a great story to tell and shows the lack of character of Lionel Atwill (who played the Grandfather) that shield her son telling him that his Mom has passed away and not knowing what was the real truth behind all this.

I just loved this kind of movie - a chance reunion in life and the acting of Dunne in her finest role in her younger days of Hollywood and its shows how versatile she can be. I haven't seen this movie in 20 years and I just loved it more now than ever before.

I hope some of you saw this ...

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

I watched "The Secret of Madame Blanche" and "Stage Mother" today also.
I liked the Alice Brady film much better and probably because Maureen O'Sullivan was in it - she's always been my favourite star.

The Dunne film to me seemed much more contrived and pretty unreal, although Irene is a great actress and played her part well.
Alice Brady seems to me to be more a motion picture actress as she's always got motion going in face and body.

Did it seem to you that MGM was trying to make Charles Brabin into Busby Burkley in "Stage Mother"?

Larry

[JackFavell]

I like Stage Mother, but then I too am a big Maureen/Alice Brady fan.

[Rita Hayworth]

Saturday, January 4th
On TCM


On Saturday, starting at Noon - Eastern Standard Time - Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) starring Fredric March and Alexis Smith will be playing and I just wanted to share this information because it is one of my favorite Mark Twain Movies of all time.

[Western Guy]

I agree, Erik. It's also one of my all-time favorite biopics. One of those movies I never tire of.

[moira finnie]

Trying to catch up with the unusual number of Charles Brabin-directed films shown on TCM yesterday, I was entertained and appalled by several of the movies--and kept wondering how Brabin could go from the most static, fuddy-duddy stagings of feeble 19th century dramatics to wonderfully electric, lively pre-code stories filled with well-done action sequences. Here's a rundown of some impressions (spoilers abound below).

Having seen it before, I was particularly taken with the lyrically rough-hewn racing film Sporting Blood (1931), with a very young Clark Gable and sensual Madge Evans. The leads and the horse racing all looked like winners to me (though it is a shame for movie audiences that Evans would soon retire).

Day of Reckoning (1933) with Richard Dix, Madge Evans (again) and Una Merkel (as well as scene-stealer Spanky McFarland) seems to be fairly typical of Brabin's sound films, veering from excessive talkiness to a few gloriously vivid action sequences on location (esp. Dix's fight with the hissable Conway Tearle on a rooftop). Then again, I am a sap for Dix's less well known films in the '30s. The class differences among the characters' shifting positions from success to ignominy to deceit and decency were particularly well drawn in this movie. It still bothers me that Merkel's longing for Dix was never resolved, though that had a realistic feel to it (even though I was chagrined to see her yoked to Stu Erwin's nebbishy but nice milkman).

The Washington Masquerade (1932) was worth seeing for Lionel Barrymore's relatively understated work playing a weak version of a Capraesque hero, as "Jefferson Keane," a newly arrived Senator in the nation's capitol. After initially advocating public ownership of utilities (still a radical notion *sigh*), he was soon toyed with by the manipulative (and luminously gorgeous) Karen Morley, Nils Asther, (who was also gorgeously decorative, though with little to do but be Euro-trash) and the ubiquitous character actor villain in the '30s, C. Henry Gordon. Barrymore's expression when he realizes his own foolishness gives his eventual attempted redemption a sharper poignancy than expected.

One of the Brabin films that I had never seen before, New Morals for Old (1932) featured Laura Hope Crews, warming up her fast ball as a memorable mother from hell, who is particularly adept at making her son (Robert Young) feel guilty. (Crews recreated her noted theatrical appearance in Sidney Howard's The Silver Cord the following year on film at RKO under the good direction of John Cromwell).

Despite the mesmerizing ickiness of Crews' character, the liveliest scenes in New Morals for Old were the two with a lustrously beautiful Myrna Loy in her early Bohemian mode. She encounters a coltish Robert Young in their Parisian tenement when he disturbs her in her atelier and we next see them canoodling in their pajamas the next day. No one suffers because of this encounter and neither pledges undying love; demonstrating a shred of realism that would evaporate after 1934.

It was also interesting to see Robert Young's earnest if untalented painter being told that he did not have the goods as a fine artist, though his sense of composition, color and design might make him a first-class wallpaper designer (the family business)! A major pre-Code element of this story was the subplot concerning Young's sister (Margaret Perry), who lived in sin with a married man (*David Newell*) until he could obtain a divorce. Of course, this event may have led to a fatal stroke suffered by her father (*Lewis Stone*, with a gentle pre-Hardy stuffiness intact), but Perry's character did not have any immediate consequences to suffer as she would after the Production Code. By the end, Perry is told that she is becoming "just like her mother" (that is meant as a compliment in the context of the film) and Young is moving back into the family mansion and in harness down at the wallpaper factory, just like Dad was for forty years. Since this is an example of an adaptation of one of John Van Druten's early plays, it might be that the author intended all this as high comedy, though whatever irony might have been intended is not exactly apparent in the script by Zelda Sears & Wanda Tuchock. Reportedly, L. B. Mayer loved this MGM movie, since its moral was that it is a grand thing to transmogrify into our parents after our youthful delusions are cast aside.

The Ship from Shanghai (1929) was worthwhile for sheer hootworthiness:
Kay Johnson, a lovely and intelligent actress, was saddled with Conrad Nagel, action hero, as they were asked to play two vapid '20s types on a cruise from Hong Kong to San Francisco, during which they deal with a mutiny among the Asian crew and tried to keep evil Louis Wolheim from foaming at the mouth more than necessary to keep things afloat. Despite the class tensions in the script (injected deliberately, according to some, by the screenwriter John Howard Lawson aka "The Kommisar"), the action is quite limp.

This must have been the period when Nagel was Mr. Mayer's pet actor under contract, since he seemed to appear in every other MGM picture of the period (and allegedly gave L.B. lessons in manners and speech on the side). My favorite lines, which I am paraphrasing a bit, are these, from the end of the film. Nagel to Johnson, upon sighting a rescue ship that draws near: "Is that a jazz band I hear? Or is it a choir of angels?" Reply: "Both!" Johnson to Nagel: "Is that ship from heaven?" Reply: "No, America, but it might be the same place!"