TCM Schedule for Monday, May 5 -- MICHAEL POWELL

[Longhorn]

5:00am Private Screenings: Ann Miller (1997)
The screen's fastest-tapping lady dancer shares memories of her career. Hosted by Robert Osborne.
Cast: Robert Osborne C-48 mins, TV-G

6:00am Girls In Chains (1943)
A teacher in a women's reformatory searches for evidence to put her crook husband away.
Cast: Arline Judge, Roger Clark, Robin Raymond. Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer. BW-72 mins, TV-PG

7:17am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Imperial Delhi (1939)
C-8 mins

7:30am Bluebeard (1944)
A 19th-century Parisian puppeteer is killing the young women he employs.
Cast: John Carradine, Jean Parker, Nils Asther. Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer BW-70 mins, TV-PG

8:41am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Equestrian Quiz (1946)
BW-10 mins

9:00am Blackmail (1929)
A shopkeeper's daughter fights off blackmail after she kills a young artist who had tried to rape her.
Cast: Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, Cyril Ritchard. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-82 mins, TV-PG

10:30am Our Daily Bread (1934)
When he inherits a small farm, a Depression-weary man turns it into a collective operation.
Cast: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, John Qualen. Dir: King Vidor. BW-74 mins, TV-G

11:50am Short Film: From The Vaults: Northward, Ho! (1939)
BW-10 mins

12:00pm Northwest Passage (1940)
True story of Rogers' Rangers and their fight to open up new frontiers for Colonial America.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan. Dir: King Vidor. C-127 mins, TV-G

2:15pm Long Voyage Home, The (1940)
A merchant ship's crew tries to survive the loneliness of the sea and the coming of war.
Cast: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald. Dir: John Ford. BW-106 mins, TV-G

4:02pm Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Do Someone A Favor (1954)
BW-9 mins

4:15pm Wind And The Lion, The (1975)
An Arab chief triggers an international incident when he kidnaps an American widow and her children.
Cast: Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith. Dir: John Milius. C-119 mins, TV-MA

6:15pm Short Film: From The Vaults: Look At The World Of Soylent Green, A (1973)
C-10 mins

6:30pm 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, The (1958)
Sinbad hunts for a roc's egg to save his love from an evil sorcerer.
Cast: Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant, Torin Thatcher. Dir: Nathan Juran. C-88 mins, TV-G

What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: MICHAEL POWELL

8:00pm Edge of the World, The (1937)
A fisherman fights to prevent changing times from destroying his family.
Cast: John Laurie, Belle Chrystall, Eric Berry. Dir: Michael Powell. BW-72 mins, TV-PG

9:19pm Short Film: From The Vaults: Impression Of The Merriest Musical Of 1938 (1938)
BW-4 mins

9:30pm Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943)
An aging military man looks back on the loves and friends who shaped his life.
Cast: Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook. Dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. C-163 mins, TV-G

12:30am I Know Where I'm Going (1945)
A determined young Englishwoman sets out to accomplish her goals even at the risk of her heart.
Cast: Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey, George Carney. Dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. BW-91 mins, TV-G

2:15am Age Of Consent (1969)
An artist runs off to the South Pacific and falls for a young girl there.
Cast: James Mason, Helen Mirren, Jack McGowran. Dir: Michael Powell. C-107 mins, TV-MA

[Longhorn]

1. Our Daily Bread (1934)

Director King Vidor’s social issue drama, Our Daily Bread (1934) opens with a desperate young couple, Mary (Karen Morley) and John Sims (Tom Keene), struggling to put a chicken on their dinner table during the Great Depression.

The couple gets a needed leg up when Mary’s uncle tells the jobless John about some farm land he owns far from their city lives. With no farming experience but plenty of ambition, John sets out to become a farmer. When an immigrant Minnesota farmer (John Qualen) and his family also searching for work run out of gas at the Sims farm, they become the first worker/residents in a unique experiment. John Sims opens his land to dozens of skilled men and women also out of work. They create a communal farm where everything – money, livestock, food – is shared for the common good. But the Edenic community is jeopardized, first when the land is put up for auction and then, when a devastating drought threatens to kill the first corn crop. John’s interest in the farm is likewise threatened by the arrival of a seductive vamp (Barbara Pepper) who aims to pluck the handsome labor leader off the farm. Director Vidor admitted that the floozy with the Jean Harlow platinum hair was brought in purely for box office.

Like so many directors before him, Texas-born Vidor began in Hollywood filling a number of roles, first as an extra, then as a script-clerk and then as a writer in the story department at Universal. When his mentor, George Brown, left Universal to start his own company, Vidor was brought on as a director for his Brentwood Company. His first feature was The Turn in the Road (1919) inspired by the teachings of Christian Science, a harbinger of the director’s lifelong interest in films with a social message and metaphysical content.

Vidor’s first certifiable “smash” was the film he called “an honest war picture”. Until then they’d all been very phony, glorifying officers and warfare.” His The Big Parade (1925) was based on the Laurence Stallings play What Price Glory? and according to the director, it “put me on the map.” The enormously successful picture led to a long-term deal with MGM and affirmed Vidor’s status as a courted, important screen auteur.

“There were no Academy Awards at the time,” said Vidor in The Celluloid Muse. “But, had we had them, I probably would have swept the whole field. It was a tremendous triumph.”

Vidor went on to direct a number of notable pictures including the film Irving Thalberg dubbed Vidor’s “experimental” work, The Crowd (1928), whose star James Murray would end up an alcoholic suicide. Equally innovative was Vidor’s first sound film, the all-black musical Hallelujah! (1929), although some felt it was condescending toward its characters. The Champ (1931), Stella Dallas (1937), Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949) all followed.

Vidor was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest career as a film director, spanning 67 years. Vidor also directed the black and white segments of The Wizard of Oz (1939) when Victor Fleming left that production to helm Gone with the Wind (1939); Vidor was not credited for his work.

Taken from a Reader’s Digest article, Vidor’s drama Our Daily Bread was, the film proclaimed, “inspired by headlines of today.” So firm was Vidor’s belief in the merit of the project he produced it with his own money. He later said he “just about broke even.”

Like his phenomenal silent picture The Crowd, about the soulless, inhumane machinery of city life, Our Daily Bread has at its heart an empathy for people, and the daily economic and moral struggles that complicate their lives, especially during national crises like the Great Depression. The film’s goodhearted message about cooperation and honest work did not, however, endear it to the Hearst press who dubbed Our Daily Bread “pinko.”

The New York Times was more complimentary, calling the film “a social document of amazing vitality and emotional impact.”

Vidor has remained, along with Frank Capra, John Ford and D.W. Griffith, one of the essential native voices in American cinema. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg rightfully call the director, “a poet of Americana.” But Vidor wasn’t the only idealist onboard Our Daily Bread. Actress Karen Morley, who played the devoted, but infidelity-fearful wife Mary Sims, was also a progressive thinker, though her beliefs got her into serious trouble. Morley was eventually fingered by actor Sterling Hayden as a suspected Communist Party member and blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She never made another film.

Vidor saw Our Daily Bread as the second film after The Big Parade as his War-Wheat-Steel trilogy. An American Romance (1944), about an immigrant who rises from the iron mines and steel mills of America to become an industrialist, was the third film in that trilogy.

Nominated for a Best Director Academy Award five times, Vidor was eventually given an honorary Oscar® in 1979 and was honored with an annual King Vidor Film Festival in his hometown of Galveston.

Director: King Vidor
Producer: King Vidor
Screenplay: Story by King Vidor, scenario by Elizabeth Hill, dialogue by Joseph Mankiewicz
Cinematography: Robert Planck
Music: Alfred Newman
Cast: Karen Morley (Mary Sims), Tom Keene (John Sims), Barbara Pepper (Sally), Addison Richards (Louie Fuente), John Qualen (Chris), Lloyd Ingraham (Uncle Anthony).
BW-78m.

by Felicia Feaster