TCM Schedule for Thursday, May 28 -- Race and Hollywood

[Staph]

This May 11 is Fred Astaire's 105th birthday, and we have a lot of his non-Ginger Rogers musicals to celebrate. In prime time, we've got a return to the occassional series Race And Hollywood, tonight with a quartet of films about Latinos in America. Enjoy!


4:24am -- Short Film: From The Vaults: Claudette Colbert Biography (1962)
BW-4 mins

The vast majority of movie shots taken of Claudette Colbert were of her left profile. She considered her left side to be her best and only rarely allowed full face or right profile shots; an injury to her nose had created a bump on the right. Once an entire set had to be rebuilt so she wouldn't have to show her right side; thus dubbing her "the dark side of the moon".


4:30am -- There Goes My Heart (1938)
An heiress takes a job as a department store clerk.
Cast: Fredric March, Virginia Bruce, Patsy Kelly, Alan Mowbray
Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
BW-83 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring -- Marvin Hatley

According to a New York Times article on 16 October 1938, the Citizen's Chiropractic Committee of New York State sued the film producers, authors and Alan Mowbray for $100,000 claiming damages to the profession. One doctor was very upset that the film implied it was possible to go through a chiropractic school through a correspondence course. The outcome of the suit is not known.


6:00am -- Easter Parade (1948)
When his partner leaves him, a vaudeville star trains an untried performer to take her place, finding love in the process.
Cast: Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Peter Lawford, Ann Miller
Dir: Charles Walters
C-103 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Johnny Green and Roger Edens

Jules Munshin's film debut. He plays the comic waiter who gives very entertaining descriptions of the menu items. The next year, he would play one of the three sailors on leave in New York City in On the Town (1949) with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.


7:44am -- Short Film: From The Vaults: World Famous Musical Hits (2000)
A short promotional reel showcasing six MGM musicals: "Three Little Words," "Because You're Mine," "Till The Clouds Roll By," "The Band Wagon," "Words and Music," and "Singing In The Rain."
C-9 mins

Between them, these six films have six Oscar nominations.


8:00am -- You Were Never Lovelier (1942)
An Argentine heiress thinks a penniless American dancer is her secret admirer.
Cast: Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Adolphe Menjou, Isobel Elsom
Dir: William A. Seiter
BW-97 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Music, Original Song -- Jerome Kern (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) for the song "Dearly Beloved", Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Leigh Harline, and Best Sound, Recording -- John P. Livadary (Columbia SSD)

The character played by Fred Astaire says he is from Omaha, Nebraska -- Astaire's real-life birthplace.


9:38am -- Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Music In Your Hair (1934)
Two neighbors disapprove of their children being together until they perform at a speakeasy.
Cast: Billy Gilbert, Billy Bletcher, Charlie Hall, Ty Parvis
Dir: Charles Parrott
BW-17 mins

Charles Parrott was better known in his day as Charley Chase, silent film comedian.


10:00am -- Broadway Melody Of 1940 (1940)
A vaudeville team breaks up when both men fall for the same gorgeous hoofer.
Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan
Dir: Norman Taurog
BW-102 mins, TV-G

It had been reported that Fred Astaire was intimidated by Eleanor Powell because she was one of the few female tap dancers capable of out-performing him.


11:51am -- Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Dancing On The Ceiling (1937)
A young man follows a pretty girl into her office, a musical dentist office.
Cast: Colin Kenny, James C. Morton
Dir: Murray Roth
BW-9 mins

Included as an extra on the Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection DVD, with Manhattan Melodrama (1934), Evelyn Prentice (1934), Double Wedding (1937), I Love You Again (1940), and Love Crazy (1941).


12:00pm -- Dancing Lady (1933)
A musical star is torn between a millionaire playboy and her stage manager.
Cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, May Robson
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-92 mins, TV-G

Fred Astaire's movie debut. Though he was reported to have appeared years earlier in the silent film Fanchon, the Cricket (1915/I), he and his sister Adele only visited the set; they did not appear on camera in that one.


1:33pm -- Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Snow Gets In Your Eyes (1938)
In an attempt to win the girl of his dreams a sausage salesman enters a department store ski jump contest.
Cast: Roger Converse, Hudson Shotwell, Jim Sutton, Chester Clute
Dir: Will Jason
BW-20 mins

The Dandridge Sisters (Dorothy, Vivian and non-sister Etta Jones) do two numbers, Harlem Yodel and Rhythm Rascals.


2:00pm -- Silk Stockings (1957)
A straitlaced Soviet agent is seduced by Paris and a high-stepping film producer.
Cast: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Janis Paige, Peter Lorre
Dir: Rouben Mamoulian
C-118 mins, TV-G

Cole Porter's original lyrics were slightly bowdlerized for the movie. For example, Astaire sings a line in "Stereophonic Sound" about how audiences don't want to see a kiss "unless her lips are scarlet/and her mouth is five feet wide." In the original Broadway musical, the lyrics were "unless her lips are scarlet/and her bosom's five feet wide."


4:00pm -- A Damsel In Distress (1937)
An American dancer on vacation in England falls for a sheltered noblewoman.
Cast: Fred Astaire, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Joan Fontaine
Dir: George Stevens
BW-101 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Dance Direction -- Hermes Pan for "Fun House"

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction -- Carroll Clark

After learning that Fred Astaire wanted Burns and Allen to audition for him, George Burns hired a vaudeville dancer he knew to choreograph a complex routine with whisk brooms. Astaire enjoyed the performance by George and Gracie so much that he insisted on working it into the film.


6:00pm -- Yolanda And The Thief (1945)
A con man poses as a Latin American heiress' guardian angel.
Cast: Fred Astaire, Lucille Bremer, Frank Morgan, Mildred Natwick
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
C-108 mins, TV-G

The evaluation of Astaire's first screen test: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little."


What's On Tonight: TCM SPOTLIGHT: RACE AND HOLLYWOOD


8:00pm -- The Ballad Of Gregorio Cortez (1983)
A translation error causes tragedy for a Mexican-American family.
Cast: Edward James Olmos, James Gammon, Tom Bower, Bruce McGill
Dir: Robert M. Young
C-105 mins, TV-14

The film was such important a project to Edward James Olmos that he actually ran it in an L.A. theater free of charge to encourage attendance.


10:00pm -- Lone Star (1996)
The sheriff of a sleepy border town investigates his predecessor's murder.
Cast: Kris Kristofferson, Chris Cooper, Matthew McConaughey, Elizabeth Pena
Dir: John Sayles
C-135 mins, TV-MA

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen -- John Sayles

The hands seen laying out the bones in this movie belong to David Glassman, a forensic anthropologist at Southwest Texas State University.


12:30am -- Popi (1969)
A Puerto Rican immigrant hatches a series of zany schemes to insure his children's future.
Cast: Alan Arkin, Rita Moreno, Miguel Alejandro, Ruben Figueroa
Dir: Arthur Hiller
C-113 mins, TV-14

Alan Arkin as a Puerto Rican immigrant? Alan Arkin, the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Germany?


2:30am -- My Family: Mi Familia (1995)
Three generations of immigrants fight to make their way in the U.S.
Cast: Jimmy Smits, Esai Morales, Eduardo Lopez Rojas, Jenny Gago
Dir: Gregory Nava
C-127 mins, TV-MA

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Makeup -- Ken Diaz and Mark Sanchez

The final scene is duplicated shot-for-shot from the final scene of Apur Sansar (1959).

[Staph]

1. Lone Star (1996)

In a 1996 Cineaste magazine interview, director John Sayles cuts to the core of his multi-layered, hard-hitting Tex-Mex crime picture, Lone Star (1996). Sayles points out that Lone Star is “a story about borders.” He says that Texas, the state where it’s set, is “unique among the United States in that it was once its own country. It was a republic formed in a controversial and bloody way. And its struggles didn’t end with the Civil War. There is a kind of racial and ethnic war that has continued.”

Sayles isn’t dealing simply in geographical borders. “In a personal sense,” he says, “a border is where you draw a line and say, ‘This is where I end and somebody else begins.’ In a metaphorical sense, it can be any of the symbols that we erect between one another - sex, class, race, age.” In an interview with TV’s Charlie Rose, Sayles put it more bluntly, “Although it’s set on the Texas-Mexican border, a lot of what I was thinking about when I was writing it was Yugoslavia and how you wake up one morning and have somebody come to your house and say, ‘Well, here’s a gun. You’re a Serb. Let’s go kill your next-door neighbor.’” Sayles brings those blind allegiances to the forefront in Lone Star.

There are long-kept secrets in the town of Frontera, TX, right on the border of Mexico, and Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), finds that people on both sides of the line would prefer that the truth not be revealed. A skeleton has been found on the outskirts of town, along with a Sheriff’s badge from 1957. Sam’s attempt to identify the body, and, possibly uncover a murder, is met with a great deal of resistance, if not outright antagonism, by the townspeople.

That would be an interesting story all by itself, but the narrative slips back and forth between the present day and 1957, when Sam’s father, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey), was the Sheriff in Frontera. Back in those days, a vicious racist (Kris Kristofferson) preceded Buddy as the town’s main law officer, but Buddy chased him out of the county, and no one ever saw him again. Through a collection of overlapping stories – and, from a cinematic perspective, through a series of overlapping themes –
Sam is led into the dark heart of the place where he grew up, and possibly into the dark heart of his own father.

Sayles has hired a lot of the same actors over and over again throughout his career. He always works with a small budget (Lone Star came in at $4.5-million), and says landing performers who know the drill is a way to save both time and money. Chris Cooper had worked with the director on Matewan (1987) and City of Hope (1991), so Sayles credits their established rapport with making Lone Star a much easier shoot.

Also, in order to save time trying to draw coherent performances from his actors, many of whom were non-professionals, he wrote up short biographical sketches for each of the more than 50 characters. “I don’t want to be on the set and find (the actors) playing something in a certain way, and when I ask why, they say, ‘Oh, my uncle burned me with an iron when I was 5 years-old.’ Because actors will do that, they’ll fill it in if they think they need to. So I’d rather fill it in for them, so they’re grounded."

Luckily, Sayles didn’t have to jump through his usual hoops trying to find financing for Lone Star. He had worked on a screenplay for director Rob Reiner, the head of Castle Rock Productions, and the company was willing to finance the entire picture. Five million dollars would probably cover the lunch tab on one of Reiner’s larger productions, so there wasn’t as much of a concern in financing the movie. Lone Star received positive reviews, and Sayles was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar®. And it made its money back, which is the key in enabling Sayles to continue with his successful but still under-the-radar career.

Producers: R. Paul Miller, Maggie Renzi
Director: John Sayles
Screenplay: John Sayles
Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh
Art Direction: Kyler Black
Music: Mason Daring
Film Editing: John Sayles
Cast: Stephen Mendillo (Sgt. Cliff), Stephen J. Lang (Sgt. Mikey), Chris Cooper (Sheriff Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar Cruz), Oni Faida Lampley (Celie), Eleese Lester (Molly), Joe Stevens (Deputy Travis), Gonzalo Castillo (Amado), Richard Coca (Enrique), Clifton James (Mayor Hollis Pogue), Tony Frank (Fenton), Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz), Kris Kristofferson (Sheriff Charlie Wade), Jeff Monahan (Young Hollis), Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds), Joe Morton (Colonel Delmore Payne).
C-135m. Letterboxed.

by Paul Tatara