I had a feeling that if I kept checking the bookmark I set for TCM’s tentative schedule it would eventually pay off—and it did yesterday morning, as The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ (
ka-ching!) has their
April lineup posted…and as always, the films listed are subject to change at their merest whim. I have a sneaking suspicion that my esteemed blogging colleague Laura of
Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings fame will be doing cartwheels of joy (though when you think about it, I don’t recall ever seeing anybody do a cartwheel of sorrow) at the news that the channel’s Star of the Month is her longtime pretend boyfriend, Ray Milland—who’ll be featured in a total of 29 films (thirty if you count the
Screen Director’s Playhouse episode) every Tuesday night throughout April. Here’s the lineup:
April 5, Tuesday
April 6, Wednesday
April 12, Tuesday
April 13, Wednesday
April 19, Tuesday
April 20, Wednesday
April 26, Tuesday
April 27, Wednesday
I was kind of disappointed to see some of Ray’s classic forays into B-picture villainy left off this list, particularly his nasty turn in
Frogs (1972)…and where the heck is
Escape to Witch Mountain (1975; I know TCM has this, they show it all the time)? There’s a few movies on here that I’m stoked about seeing; I haven’t watched
Reap the Wild Wind since it was on AMC (and I guess you know I don’t have to go there) and I have
So Evil My Love on an unobtainable VHS somewhere in the storage area annex of the dusty
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives, so it will be nice to revisit that one as well. (It would be positively jaw-dropping if the channel could get its hands on some of the rare and early titles in the Milland catalog—like
We’re Not Dressing [1934],
Four Hours to Kill! [1935],
The Glass Key [1935],
The Jungle Princess [1936] and
Easy Living [1937].)
TCM’s other big event for the month is a festival of films with a Civil War theme—or as the people here in the Peach State who didn’t read the newspaper article about the South losing like to call it, “the woah of Nawthun aggreshun.” Every Monday and Wednesday night in April Bobby Osbo (and a guest TBD, I’ll wager) will focus on movies dealing with the War Between the States…and though as a dedicated Yankee (on my mother’s side) I usually stare at flicks like these with only a modicum of interest there is some pretty good stuff scheduled…including a great lineup of silent films on the 11th (they’ll be re-showing Thomas H. Ince’s
The Coward, which Chris Edwards at
Silent Volume recommended to me and I’m most glad that he did). Here’s what’s on tap:
April 4, Monday
April 6, Wednesday
April 11, Monday
April 13, Wednesday
April 18, Monday
April 20, Wednesday
April 25, Monday
April 26, Wednesday
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the other goodies in store for us loyal TCM viewers for the rest of April, shall we?
April 1, Friday – My life’s philosophy can be boiled down to simply this…there are two kinds of people in the world—those who love Jane Powell, and those who—oh, who am I kidding? How could you
not love Janie? But if by some odd chance I’m wrong about this, you might want to find some other way to spend April Fool’s because if the Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise Ms. Powell will turn 81 on that day and TCM will mark the occasion with showings of
Small Town Girl (1953; 6am), T
hree Daring Daughters (1948; 8am),
Nancy Goes To Rio (1950; 10am),
Two Weeks With Love (1950; 12noon),
Rich, Young and Pretty (1951; 2pm),
Hit The Deck (1955; 4pm) and
Three Sailors and a Girl (1953; 6pm).
Later that evening, one of Powell’s co-stars from
Two Weeks with Love—Debbie Reynolds—gets a night of her own with a lineup that spotlights
Tammy and the Bachelor (1957; 8pm),
Mary, Mary (1963; 10pm) and
The Mating Game (1959; 12:15am). After this trio of Reynolds films,
TCM Underground will unspool a pair of Joseph Losey-directed films,
Secret Ceremony (1968) and
These are the Damned (1963) at 2 and 4am, respectively…but
Boom! (1968), a Losey joint that TCM had at one time penciled in and then scrubbed continues to be MIA.
April 2, Saturday – April marks the final month for TCM’s showing of the longest-running feature film series in movie history (48 in all): The Bowery Boys;
Looking for Danger (1957) airs at 10:30am, with
Up in Smoke (1957) the following week (April 9) and the final Boys opus,
In the Money (1958) on the 16th. So what does TCM have planned for that time slot thereafter?
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!!! You read that right; on April 23 the channel shows the first two chapters of the
1939 Universal serial, “Tomorrow’s World” (
11am) and “Tragedy on Saturn” (
11:30am)…and then the week after Chapters 3 (“The Enemy’s Stronghold” at
11am) and 4 (“The Sky Patrol” at
11:30am).
April 3, Sunday – Will I need to remind
Stacia to record
Black Narcissus (1947) at
12 noon? (Turning over 8-ball) It reads: “Signs point to yes.”
April 4, Monday – It’s Anthony Perkins’ natal anniversary, but for reasons unexplained TCM doesn’t get the ball rolling until
10:30am with
The Actress (1953). (I wonder if this means they’ll want a late check-out. Get it? Check-out? Anybody? Bueller?) This is followed by
Green Mansions (1959;
12:15pm),
Tall Story (1960; 2pm),
Goodbye Again (1961;
3:45pm) and
Five Miles to Midnight (1963; 6pm).
A good while back me mate Matthew Coniam
composed a great blog post on British comedy institution The Crazy Gang…and while my first inclination was to see if I could acquire some of their films via Region 2 DVD, my wallet argued vociferously against such a notion. So I’m glad I waited; two of the Gang’s cinematic achievements,
The Frozen Limits (1939) and
Gasbags (1941), will air after the Civil War movies at
3am and
4:30am respectively.
April 5, Tuesday – It’s Macon, GA native Melvyn Douglas’ turn to blow out some candles and while I never really warmed to Mel’s work until he got much older (movies like
Hud [1963] and
The Candidate [1972], for example) TCM will show a B-picture I’ve been on the lookout for at 5:15pm,
Tell No Tales (1939). The other films to be shown are
The Vampire Bat (1933; 6am),
Prestige (1932; 7:15am),
Dangerous Corner (1934; 8:30am),
She Married Her Boss (1935; 9:45am),
And So They Were Married (1936; 11:30am),
Theodora Goes Wild (1936; 12:45pm),
I'll Take Romance (1937; 2:30pm),
Good Girls Go to Paris (1939; 4pm), and
On the Loose (1951; 6:30pm). (Check out this description for
Vampire Bat: “Villagers suspect the town simpleton of being a vampire.” “Hey, Skeeter—Rayford don’t seem to be too tightly wrapped…you suppose he could be one of the blood-suckin’ undead?”)
April 8, Friday – It’s Mary Pickford’s birthday, and TCM celebrates with two of her my very favorites of her silent films:
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917; 6am) and
Sparrows (1926;
7:15am). Unfortunately, what follows is a sterling example of why the Academy Awards are a joke—Pickford’s Oscar-winning turn in
Coquette (1929;
8:45am).
I guess that must be all the Pickford vehicles TCM has permission to show because the channel then turns things over to the delightfully deadpan Virginia O’Brien for a retrospective of her work:
Hullabaloo (1940; 10:45am),
Ship Ahoy (1942; 12:15pm),
Du Barry Was a Lady (1943; 2pm),
Meet the People (1944; 3:45pm),
The Great Morgan (1946; 5:30pm) and
Merton of the Movies (1947; 6:30pm). (Why they do this is a puzzler—O’Brien’s birthday is April 18.)
So by now you’re probably thinking: What could possibly top this Virginia O’Brien salute? Why, a mini-festival starring French actress Suzanne Georgette Charpentier—better known by her nom de screen as Annabella (and also at one-time Mrs. Tyrone Power).
Wings of the Morning (1937) kicks things off at
8pm, followed by
The Baroness and the Butler (1938; 10pm),
Le Million (1931;
11:30am) and
Bridal Suite (1939;
1:00am).
(Oh, check out this description for
Galaxy of Terror [1981], a
TCM Underground movie scheduled at
2:15am: “Members of a space mission are attacked by their deepest fears.” I guess this means I would have to go mano a mano with a Margaret O’Brien film festival.)
Then TCM’s
Sunday Silent Nights gets into the act with Charlie Chaplin’s
The Circus (1928) at
midnight, accompanied by his 1919 short
A Day’s Pleasure at
1:30am.
TCM then journeys across the pond for a showing of French clown Jacques Tati’s
Jour De Fete (1949) at 2am…and then winds up the evening with two movies from one of my favorite Goons, Spike Milligan—
Postman’s Knock (1962; 3:30am) and
Invasion Quartet (1961; 5am). (“It’s all rather confusing, really…”)
April 13, Wednesday – The classic movie gods, outraged by the Margaret O’Brien joke I cracked a few paragraphs ago, get their revenge by cursing my TV with a Shirley Temple festival. I find myself incapable of turning off the TV (it's kind of a nightmarish
Twilight Zone scenario) due to this bad juju as the films
Little Miss Marker (1934;
8:15am),
Poor Little Rich Girl (1936;
9:45am),
Heidi (1937;
11:15am),
The Little Princess (1939;
12:45pm),
Kathleen (1941;
2:30pm) and
Since You Went Away (1944; 4pm) are showcased.
Since TCM sagely knows that their younger viewing audience is up at three in the morning (well, that’s usually when the Chuck-E-Cheese’s begin closing) they’ve scheduled the Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey comedy
Kentucky Kernels (1934) at
4:30am, right after
General Spanky. (Both movies, as you may have guessed, feature Our Gang member George “Spanky” McFarland.)
TCM will then show
The Glass Key (1942) at
8pm. Will I be able to turn this off should I happen to be watching? (Turning over 8-ball) It reads: “Outlook not so good.”
April 15, Friday – If you were wondering when TCM was going to pick the proper time to showcase films about British prisoners of war, then whoever had the income tax deadline wins the pool. The mini-festival of POW films kicks off with
The Wooden Horse (1950) at 8 pm, followed by the 1955 classic
The Colditz Story at 10 pm and
Breakout (1959) at 12 midnight.
But before that gets underway, TCM rolls out at
7:30pm an installment of
Screen Director’s Playhouse that didn’t make the cut of the January Hal Roach salute:
“It’s Always Sunday” (01/11/56) starring Dennis O’Keefe and Fay Wray and directed by Allan Dwan.
April 16, Saturday – “I’m drivin’ in my car/I turn on the radio…” TCM schedules a mess o’ film titles with the word “fire” beginning at
8pm with my favorite Barbara Stanwyck film,
Ball of Fire (1941) on
TCM Essentials. After that, the lineup will be
Crossfire (1947; 10pm),
Fire Down Below (1957; 11:30pm),
Ring of Fire (1961; 1:30am),
Green Fire (1954; 3:15am) and
Cross Fire (1933; 5am)—the last one being different from the 1947 version in that it’s a Tom Keene B-western with slow burn maestro Edgar Kennedy in the cast.
April 17, Sunday – TCM’s
Silent Sunday Nights has the 1921 Alla Nazimova-Rudolph Valentino version of
Camille on tap at
midnight, so I’ll definitely have to fire up the DVD recorder for that. A pair of films by Chantal Akerman—a director I’ve read about but, sadly, I’m not familiar with her work—follow:
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at 2am and
Hotel Monterey (1972) at 5:30.
April 19, Tuesday – A couple of B-pictures kind of caught my eye; the first entitled
Midnight Court (1937;
11:45am), which is described as “a district attorney sells out to the mob until he falls for an honest girl.”
TDOY fave Ann Dvorak is in it, and so is character great John Litel—he plays the lawyer, and I’m sure you’ll agree this is
quite a stretch for him. The other is
Exclusive Story (1936) at 3:30pm, with Franchot Tone as a legal eagle out to expose a numbers racket. Joseph Calleia is in the cast, and while I don’t want to say anything before all the facts are in I’ll bet dollars to donuts he’s one of the bad guys.
A Man to Remember (1938) gets an airing at
6:30pm—I wrote a good while back that I thought this remake (written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by Garson Kanin) of 1933’s
One Man’s Journey was superior to the original…though I’m certainly willing to consider this might be because I saw
Remember first. Tell you what—
Journey is scheduled on April 15th at
1:15pm; watch ‘em both and then judge for yourself.
April 20, Wednesday – Happy birthday to the third genius: Harold Lloyd. Honest to my grandma, you simply cannot go wrong with such silent comedy classics as
Safety Last! (1923; 7:15am),
Girl Shy (1924; 8:30am) and
The Freshman (1925; 10am)…but as for
Welcome Danger (1929; 11:30am)…well, there’s an alternate silent version of Lloyd’s talkie debut out there that I’d like to see one day because it’s supposed to be an improvement.
April 26, Tuesday –
6,000 Enemies (1939), another little B-picture delight that’s been on my radar for a good while now gets a showing at
7:30am.
April 29, Friday – The channel begins another broadcast day with
One Million Years B.C. (1966) at
6pm…and brother, if that can’t jump-start your motor in the morning it’s time to call the code.
April 30, Saturday – “I love a Gershwin tune/How about you…” Spend the evening with the timeless tunes of George and Ira Gershwin as TCM starts the evening with the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1951,
An American in Paris on
TCM Essentials at 8pm—and then follows this with
Girl Crazy (1943; 10pm),
Rhapsody in Blue (1945; 12mid),
Shall We Dance (1937; 2:30am) and
Give a Girl a Break (1953; 4:30am).
