Several masterpieces on TCM Tues Dec 20

Cafe Society
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4pmE/1pmP:Love Affair
1939
dir: Leo McCarey
Charles Boyer, Irene Dunne, Maria Ouspenskaya

The original of one of the most beloved love stories of all time. McCarey remade his own movie as An Affair to Remember in 1957, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. (The jury’s out on which is the masterpiece; for me, it depends on which one I’m watching.) Warren Beatty fumbled it in 1994 as a vehicle for himself and his wife Annette Bening, and a swan song for Katharine Hepburn. You can’t do much better for curling up around a box of kleenex with.

8pmE/5pmP:Father of the Bride
1950
dir: Vincente Minnelli
Spencer Tracey, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Bennett, Don Taylor

Really a perfect movie. There isn’t a single misstep anywhere in the whole exercise. This is one of those movies I can watch anytime, anywhere, and never want to miss a second of it: I just about quiver with pleasure at every scene. The amount of story that is conveyed in the spaces between the words is a nearly unique achievement in sound pictures, if you ask me: the depth of communication that occurs between the members of this ensemble as they pause to gather their thoughts or listen to the other speak, or say what they’re not saying, is truly uncanny. Spencer Tracey’s best role, hands down, in my book, and Elizabeth Taylor will knock the wind out of you with her otherworldly beauty. Plus I have a crush on Don Taylor, so there’s that.

4amE/1amP:The Thing from Another World
1951
dir: Christian Nyby (but really Howard Hawks)
Margaret (Who?) Sheridan, Kenneth (Who?) Tobey

One of the greatest scifi pics of all time. Remade (sensing a theme here?) in 1982 by John Carpenter as The Thing. Howard Hawks’s trademark mastery at keeping an ensemble clipping along applied here to a genre that was considered beneath such an A-List director in 1951. If you’ve only ever seen the Carpenter, seriously try to catch this. The monster is a bit laughable by modern standards, but has the saving grace of being played by James Arness.

5.30amE/2.30amP:Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1956
dir: Don (Dirty Harry) Siegel
Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter

Another masterpiece of scifi, another subject of frequent remakes. But most notable, if you ask me, as a brilliantly consistent allegory for Cold War paranoia. This is the movie where the concept of pod people comes from—you know, the one where everyone around you is being replaced by alien pod people, and you don’t know where to turn for help . . . When it’s over, try to imagine it without the tacked on happy ending that the Production Code office required; it works much better as a scary movie with its original scary ending.

Other movies on TCM tomorrow that have their followings as masterpieces, and also subjects of remakes—the day’s theme:

12amE/9pmP: The Shop Around the Corner, 1940 (remade as You’ve Got Mail); and
2amE/11pmP: Sabrina, 1954

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Thanks for posting this. I’ve seen The Thing and Invasion, but not the others. I love Maria Ouspenskaya.

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Yeah, she’s one of my favorite characters from the old days. Her and Edna May Oliver. I keep wanting to start a thread on the old character actors who turn up in all the old movies.

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Don’t forget Bachelor Apartment (1931), a very rare talkie starring real-life Norma Desmond, Mae Murray, Dec. 20 at 6:00 a.m. (When will they replay Mae’s best talkie, High Stakes?)

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Thanks; nothing in the TCM capsule made that one stick out for me. I’ll fire up the TiFaux.

I’m nearing the bottom of my second 100-spindle of DVD-R’s collecting such rarities off of TCM.

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I can’t believe I never thought of doing this. Probably because I wouldn’t know how, but I know people who do.

I’m setting the TiVo for Bachelor Apartment. I didn’t know Norma Desmond was based on one particular actress. I thought she was a composite of all the faded actresses of the 20’s and 30’s. Cool. :slight_smile:

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Well THAT was a pleasant little diversion. And Miss Murray was one of its distinctest pleasures. She reminds me a little of my cousin.

Interesting cast. I do not like Lowell Sherman. I do not like his face, and I do not like his manner. He is decidedly oily. (Though he turned in an extremely impressive performance in What Price Hollywood?, opposite the incomparable Constance Bennett.) But you can’t go wrong with Irene Dunne, and I do have a softish spot for Noel Francis, of Blonde Crazy. And imdb’ing a little reveals her resume to include some of the best titles in Hollywood History. Along with the aforementioned Blonde Crazy and Bachelor Apartment, we have a virtual smorgasborg of pre-code bad-girl titles: *Her Hired Husband, Rough Romance, Ladies of the Big House, Guilty as Hell, Frisco Jenny, Reform Girl, Her Resale Value, Havana Widows, Good Dame, Fifteen Wives, *and . . . The Man Who Reclaimed His Head. What fun she must’ve had.

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I liked it too. Mae Murray took me aback at first – Agatha seemed a bit strung out and overdone – but after I got used to her, I realized she played it perfectly.

The movie was quite funny and not really dated. I sorta gasped when Carter found a guy in Graham’s bed, instead of Lita.

What was up with Rollins sniffing the cigarette butts in the beginning? Was that a hint that they might have been smoking something extra flavorful?

I’ve set the DVR to record a bunch of TCM stuff over the next week. I didn’t even know that I could search by channel.

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I know! I wasn’t sure where that was going . . . that and the heading popping out from under the bed was pretty dang funny.

It’s possible; such references are certainly not unknown in movies of that era. But I assumed it had to do with lipstick–sorry, lip rouge–or perfume.

Yeah, I have quite a lot coming up. Tonight is a new documentary on Budd Boetticher, one of the great directors of the “anti-Western.” Boetticher’s Westerns are some of the best ever made.

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Mae Murray is an acquired taste. In her last film, High Stakes, she actually gives two performances, one of them very brave and risky (I don’t want to give away the plot). She wasn’t actually “the” Norma Desmond, but is one of the people the character was based on. She lived in a delightful, candy-colored world all her own. And of course, life eventually bit her on the ass, poor soul.

I actually have a crush on Lowell Sherman . . . He was kinda a poor man’s John Barrymore.

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Hah. A VERY poor man’s. He’s the love child of Rodney Dangerfield and Rip Taylor, you ask me.

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I’m recording that, and a couple of his movies following. Entertainment Weekly did a nice piece on Boetticher this week. I’d never heard of him, and never had much respect for Randolph Scott’s westerns. Poor man’s Gary Cooper, to continue the analogy. I often need to be told what to appreciate. :slight_smile:

I liked Lowell Sherman. I thought he was sweet and sincere – not predatory at all. Just a guy having a good time. That type (suave and sophisticated with a little moustache) never appealed to me personally, but he’s not so bad.

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Hmmm. Maybe it’s because I’m a Woman of a Certain Age, but I like Lowell Sherman. Plus, he was a sweetheart who gave Mae Murray work when no one else would touch her. Did you see how he set her off like a cameo in her opening scene, and the background music was her theme song, The Merry Widow Waltz?

Ya gotta love a guy like that.

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True, he usually wins me over by the end of the movie. But his first impression on me is always icky. And like I said, his performance in What Price Hollywood? is one for the ages.

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Huh. TCM has a new, very powerful search database. Here’s High Stakes. Also starring Lowell Sherman; not scheduled at the moment.

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Hey! says here it’s directed by Mr. Sherman as well!

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From the biographical note on Mae Murray:

Mae Murray danced through life as it if were a dream world and she its faraway princess. A romantic, she behaved as if reality simply didn’t exist, and then was wounded to the quick when no one understood her butterfly nature … She was not an actress: she was a dancer with a tantalizing image that the camera captured in a quicksilver flash. On the screen she came vividly alive. Unfortunately, her bright stardust personality depended on youth … In the end, she escaped from her tangled web of self-deceit and took refuge in another dream world, a fantasy land where she ruled and gave royal commands that must be obeyed on the instant.

–DeWitt Bodeen in Films in Review, December 1975.

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I can’t find Mae Murray’s autobiography for less than $125 online. Have you read it, Eve?

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Read it? I tried to write it! I wanted to do a bio of Mae Murray, but that girl really covered her tracks–I couldn’t find any usable biographical material on her pre-1917 (even her birth year, place and parents’ names are unfindable!). I talked to Jane Ardmore, who ghosted Mae’s “autobiography” (and I use the word so loosely it rattles) and she told me she couldn’t get any actual facts out of her.