TCM Schedule for Thursday, December 5

[Staph]

We're treated to a trio of Agnes Moorehead films and a duet of Jean Simmons films today, and this evening features the December Star of the Month, Irene Dunne, in some of her dramatic (or melodramatic) roles. I hope the comedies are featured later in the month -- I love Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife!



5:00am -- The Boob (1926)
In this silent film, a naive farm boy sets out to prove himself by hunting down a band of bootleggers.
Cast: George K. Arthur, Gertrude Olmstead, Joan Crawford.
Dir: William A. Wellman.
BW-61 mins, TV-G

The Book Lover's clubhouse (the speakeasy) is actually the set for the interior of the Hur palace from Ben-Hur (1925), with some minor redressing.


6:15am -- So Big (1932)
A farmer's widow takes on the land and her late husband's tempestuous son.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Bette Davis.
Dir: William A. Wellman.
BW-81 mins, TV-G

The second of three versions of the Edna Ferber novel. The Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis roles were played by Colleen Moore and Phyllis Haver in the 1924 version, and by Jane Wyman and Nancy Olson in the 1953 version.


7:45am -- College Coach (1933)
A timid chemistry major becomes a college football star.
Cast: Dick Powell, Pat O'Brien, Ann Dvorak.
Dir: William A. Wellman.
BW-76 mins, TV-G

Inside look at college football of the 1930s replete with fake grades, non-student players, and the importance of football to a college's reputation. Not too different from today!


9:15am -- Jeanne Eagels (1957)
The famed actress fights drug addiction to build a career and find love.
Cast: Kim Novak, Jeff Chandler, Agnes Moorehead.
Dir: George Sidney.
BW-109 mins, TV-PG

As with most film biographies, this film is more screenwriter's fancy than fact. Among other things, Jeanne Eagels was never a carnival dancer and was never known to have been the cause of another performer's suicide. Further, the character of Sal Satori was a fictional compilation character based upon several men in Ms. Eagels's life.


11:15am -- A Tale Of Two Cities (1958)
Charles Dickens' classic tale of lookalikes in love with the same woman in the years after the French Revolution.
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Lee.
Dir: Ralph Thomas.
BW-117 mins, TV-PG

One of a bazillion different versions of the Dickens story. For me it's a toss-up as to the better Sydney Carton -- either Dirk Bogarde or Ronald Colman in the 1935 version.


1:15pm -- The Bat (1959)
A female mystery novelist turns detective to unmask a demented killer.
Cast: Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead, Gavin Gordon.
Dir: Crane Wilbur.
BW-80 mins, TV-PG

Her role as Judy became the final on-screen feature film role for former child star Darla Hood of Our Gang/Little Rascals fame.


2:45pm -- Jessica (1962)
When a sexy midwife comes to town, the local women abstain from sex rather than risk having her deliver their babies.
Cast: Maurice Chevalier, Angie Dickinson, Gabrielle Ferzetti.
Dir: Jean Negulesco, Oreste Palella.
BW-105 mins, TV-PG

Agnes Moorehead was one of the cast members of the ill fated film The Conqueror (1956), which was filmed in 1954 in the Nevada desert close by to where the government was doing nuclear testing. In later years those tests were suspected to have caused the cancer deaths of several of the film's stars including John Wayne, Dick Powell, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, and Agnes Moorehead.


4:45pm -- A Bullet Is Waiting (1954)
A plane crash strands a policeman and his prisoner in the wilderness.
Cast: Rory Calhoun, Jean Simmons, Stephen McNally.
Dir: John Farrow.
C-82 mins, TV-G

When Rory Calhoun's first wife Lita Baron sued for divorce, she named 79 women with whom he had allegedly committed adultery. Calhoun responded, "Heck, she didn't even include half of them".


6:15pm -- Footsteps in the Fog (1955)
An ambitious housemaid learns her employer murdered his wife.
Cast: Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Bill Travers.
Dir: Arthur Lubin.
C-90 mins, TV-G

Granger and Simmons were married for ten years and had a daughter.


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


8:00pm -- This Man Is Mine (1934)
A woman fights to keep her husband from cheating.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy, Constance Cummings.
Dir: John Cromwell.
BW-76 mins, TV-G

This film was on a "to-be-boycotted" list, compiled by the Catholic Church in Detroit, Michigan.


9:30pm -- The Secret Of Madame Blanche (1933)
A murder brings together a woman and the son she was forced to give up years earlier.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Lionel Atwill, Phillips Holmes.
Dir: Charles Brabin.
BW-84 mins, TV-G

Remake of The Lady (1925), both based on the play The Lady by Martin Brown.


11:00pm -- No Other Woman (1933)
A newly rich couple finds wealth drives them apart.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Charles Bickford, J. Carrol Naish.
Dir: J. Walter Ruben.
BW-58 mins, TV-G

The third film version of Eugene Walter's play Just a Woman.


12:15am -- Ann Vickers (1933)
A social worker's fight for reform is compromised by her love for a corrupt judge.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Walter Huston, Conrad Nagel.
Dir: John Cromwell.
BW-76 mins, TV-G

Sarah Padden, who is listed in the cast as "Lil, a black woman", supposedly played her role in black-face, since she is not black. She was not seen in the film, but may have been the prisoner executed by hanging. She is seen in long shot and is not recognizable. Reginald Barlow is barely recognizable as the Chaplain following her and reciting a prayer. J. Carrol Naish has a very brief scene lying in bed in an alcoholic stupor. He has no lines. It is a credit to their agents that these three all received on-screen credits.


1:45am -- Thirteen Women (1932)
A mysterious Eurasian tries to murder the 12 boarding school roommates who treated her like an outsider.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ricardo Cortez.
Dir: George Archainbaud.
BW-60 mins, TV-PG

Myrna Loy as a half-Javanese murderess? Luckily, she soon escaped the exotic roles to play Nora Charles in the Thin Man series.


3:00am -- Symphony Of Six Million (1932)
A doctor fights his way from the slums to Park Avenue.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Ricardo Cortez, Gregory Ratoff.
Dir: Gregory La Cava.
BW-95 mins, TV-PG

Although it was entirely unintentional, and could not have been imagined, there is an uncanny connection between the title of this movie and the holocaust which came to light a decade later.

[Staph]

1. A Tale of Two Cities (1958)

Set on the eve of the French Revolution in both England and France, director Ralph Thomas's adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1859 literary classic, A Tale of Two Cities (1958), follows the intertwined fates of French aristocrat Charles Darnay (Paul Guers) and British lawyer Sydney Carton (Dirk Bogarde).

The film opens by establishing the cruel impact that France's aristocracy has on the peasants and common folk under its domain. When kind doctor Alexandre Manette (Stephen Murray) dares help the ravaged serfs on the estate of the Marquis St. Evremonde (Christopher Lee), he is imprisoned in the Bastille. Decades later, he is freed and his daughter, Lucie Manette (Dorothy Tutin), marries a relative of that debauched aristocrat, now known as Charles Darnay, who has renounced his own affiliation with the cruel tyrannical Evremondes.

When Darnay is accused of treason by the treacherous Barsad (Donald Pleasence), he is defended by Sydney Carton, a jaded lawyer fond of wine and cynicism, who nevertheless wins Darnay's freedom. But Carton's victory is bittersweet. He is also hopelessly smitten with the lovely Lucie, who is in turn in love with Darnay. But fate conspires to test that love when Darnay is imprisoned upon his return to France by a vicious revolutionary mob anxious to execute him as a symbol of the toppled aristocracy.

Bogarde makes the biggest impression in this version of Dickens' classic as a disillusioned man with little faith in humanity who surprises everyone with a self-sacrificing gesture in the film's final act. Besides Bogarde, A Tale of Two Cities features a distinguished cast of British film notables including two prolific stars of the British screen who specialized in menacing performances, Donald Pleasence and Christopher Lee. Over a long film career, Pleasence created many memorable characters, including the tormented psychiatrist trying to stop the killer in Halloween (1978) and its many sequels and his portrait of James Bond's arch nemesis in You Only Live Twice (1967), considered the inspiration for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. After appearing in A Tale of Two Cities, Lee would go on to become one of England's greatest stars in the stylish, iconoclastic Hammer Film Productions horror films of the late '50s and '60s, including The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959).

Thomas's film adaptation is by no means understated filmmaking. His montage of rampaging mobs sacking the city in the midst of the French Revolution is typically hysterical, down to the frenzied, garish expressions of the peasants superimposed on all of that melee. But his filmmaking is also unabashedly button-pushing, as when he sketches the cruel dichotomy between the smug, aloof, uncaring aristocrats with the squalid life of the peasants who are caked in filth, wear tattered cloths, and when a wine barrel spills open in the middle of their street, scramble to drink the mess as it flows into the gutters.

A Tale of Two Cities had been adapted five times previously to Ralph Thomas's 1958 version, though Thomas's retelling is considered one of the most faithful to Dickens' novel.

Director: Ralph Thomas
Producer: Betty E. Box
Screenplay: T.E.B. Clarke from the novel by Charles Dickens
Cinematography: Ernest Steward
Production Design: Carmen Dillon
Music: Richard Addinsell
Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Sydney Carton), Dorothy Tutin (Lucie Manette), Paul Guers (Charles Darnay), Marie Versini (Marie Gabelle), Ian Bannen (Gabelle), Cecil Parker (Jarvis Lorry), Stephen Murray (Dr. Alexandre Manette).
BW-118m.

by Felicia Feaster

[Sparkly]

2. "The Secret of Madame Blanche" sounds like a familiar plot.

I may have seen it, but I know I've seen others plots that might be similar -- one with Lana Turner, another with Barbara Stanwyck (although a daughter, and she gives her well into the film), possibly one with Garbo??

The mothers tend to walk off into the sunset at the end, destroyed yet victorious.