Coming distractions: April 2013 on TCM

I thought I’d break the silence on the blog with a new post that previews what’s in store for classic movie lovers on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ in April.  Yes, as always—Laura of Miscellaneous Musings fame has been monitoring to see when Tee Cee Em has its tentative schedule up, and I’ve been using whatever free time I can scrape together these days to assemble it and present it for your edification.  The channel is making a modification to their lineup that will probably interest those of you who like their movies a little on the esoteric or cultish side: TCM Underground, long a late Friday night staple, is moving to Saturday nights beginning in April…which I guess will give the people who put together the theme nights following TCM Essentials a break since some of the upcoming ideas were really starting to show their seams.  (“Ice Cream in the Movies” was one to which they gave serious consideration, for example.  Okay, I sort of made that up.)

TCM’s Star of the Month for April is Sir Laurence Olivier—or “Larry,” as he always insisted I call him.  I have to come clean and admit that while I’m not the world’s most fervent Olivier fan that shouldn’t deter the rest of you from checking out some of the Academy Award-winning actor-director’s sterling moments from the cinema, including a night of his memorable Shakespearean performances.  (And hey—how often does TCM run A Little Romance or Clash of the Titans, I ask you?  If only they could have squeezed in The Jazz Singer—“I hef no son!”)  A total of 26 films will be featured on Wednesday nights, and here’s what the schedule will look like:

Wednesday, April 3

08:00pm Henry V (1944)

10:30pm Hamlet (1948)

01:15am Richard III (1955)

04:00am Othello (1965)

Thursday, April 4

07:00am The Demi-Paradise (1943)

09:00am Fire Over England (1937; also Thursday, April 18 @ 1:15pm)

Wednesday, April 10

08:00pm Sleuth (1972)

10:30pm A Little Romance (1979)

12:30am Clash of the Titans (1981)

02:30am The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)

05:15am Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

Wednesday, April 17

08:00pm That Hamilton Woman (1941)

10:15pm Perfect Understanding (1933)

11:45pm Rebecca (1940)

02:00am Pride and Prejudice (1940)

04:00am Wuthering Heights (1939)

05:45am The Divorce of Lady X (1938)

Thursday, April 18

07:30am Friends and Lovers (1931)

08:45am Westward Passage (1932)

Wednesday, April 24

08:00pm The Entertainer (1960)

10:00pm Term of Trial (1962)

12:00am The Devil’s Disciple (1959)

01:30am The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)

03:30am The Beggar’s Opera (1953)

05:15am 49th Parallel (1941)

Thursday, April 25

07:30am Conquest of the Air (1940)

It was the great philosopher James Brown who once imparted the wisdom that while it may be a man’s world it would be nothing—nothing—without a woman or a girl.  So TCM takes this sage acumen to heart on Friday nights in April by presenting a series of films that demonstrate “A Woman’s World”—though you would think that in doing this, the 1954 film of that same title (Woman’s World) would be on the schedule.  But it is not, nor is it my place to question the programmer why this is not so…so instead feast your eyes on these 20 movies scheduled for Friday nights:

Friday, April 5

08:00pm Mildred Pierce (1945)

10:00pm Stella Dallas (1937)

12:00am Penny Serenade (1941)

02:15am Bachelor Mother (1939)

04:00am Made for Each Other (1939)

Friday, April 12

08:00pm So Proudly We Hail! (1943)

10:15pm Since You Went Away (1944)

01:15am The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)

03:30am Three Came Home (1950)

05:30am The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Friday, April 19

08:00pm His Girl Friday (1940)

10:00pm Woman of the Year (1942)

12:00am Tender Comrade (1943)

02:00am The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

04:00am Norma Rae (1979)

Friday, April 26

08:00pm The Great Lie (1941)

10:00pm Kitty Foyle (1940)

12:00am The Palm Beach Story (1942)

01:45am The Women (1939)

04:15am Ball of Fire (1941)

I know what you’re saying.  I can even hear you from where I’m sitting—though in your defense, it could be the kids next door.  Be that as it may, someone is saying “That’s all well and good for the first two courses…but what else is on the menu?”  Well, ask and ye shall receive—keeping in mind as always that titles are subject to change, and that the scheduled times are EDT.

April 1, Monday – Lon Chaney celebrates what would have been his 130th birthday today.  (Yowsah!)  As a silent movie aficionado, I will certainly want to be up bright and early for a day of Chaney classics, beginning with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) at 6am and then followed by He Who Gets Slapped (1924; 8am), The Monster (1925; 9:15am), The Blackbird (1926; 10:45am), Tell it to the Marines (1926; 12:15pm), Mockery (1927; 2pm) and Mr. Wu (1927; 3:15pm).  Lon’s only sound film, The Unholy Three (1930) airs at 5pm and then at 6:15 it’s the 2000 documentary Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces.

Come nightfall, the channel celebrates the end of “the void” and the beginning of baseball season at 8pm with one of the best pictures on the subject of America’s pastime, the 1949 comedy-fantasy It Happens Every Spring.  That’s followed by the similar fantasy outing Angels in the Outfield (1951) at 9:30 and then it’s The Kid From Left Field (1953; 11:15pm), Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949; 1am), Fireman, Save My Child (1932; 2:45am) and finishing out the night at 4am, a great William Bendix comedy (with Una Merkel!), Kill the Umpire (1950).

April 2, Tuesday – Reggie Miller is the channel’s Guest Programmer this month, and while I normally would say something at this time along the lines of “Who is he and what does he do when he’s not tending bar?” my family, being the basketball fanatics they are (apparently that’s some sport that takes place during “the void”) have kept me fully informed that Mr. Miller is a former pro basketball player, who played (his entire career, even) with the Indiana Pacers.  Miller now works for TNT, which probably explains why they got him so easily…and his chosen quartet of films for the evening are Strangers on a Train (1951; 8pm), Cool Hand Luke (1967; 10pm), The Graduate (1967; 12:15am) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967; 2:15am).

April 3, Wednesday – The fact that Doris Day celebrates her 89th birthday (knock wood) today is not why I’m sad—I’m sad because it reminds me that it will still be a few more weeks before I am finally through with Mayberry Mondays and we can start in on Dodo’s 1968-73 sitcom.  In the meantime, celebrate her natal anniversary with The West Point Story (1950; 6:45am), On Moonlight Bay (1951; 8:45am), By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953; 10:30am) and Calamity Jane (1953; 12:15pm).

April 3 would have also been Marlon Brando’s 89th birthday (the actor passed away in 2004), and so TCM will cut him a slice of cake, too, by devoting the afternoon to The Wild One (1953; 2pm), On the Waterfront (1954; 3:30pm) and Guys and Dolls (1955; 5:30pm).

April 4, Thursday – It’s that time of year again—Anthony Perkins’ birthday.  Perhaps it’s just me but I could swear they trot out the same Perkins movies to celebrate year after year after year.  Oh, well—the festivities start at 10:45am with The Actress (1953), followed by Friendly Persuasion (1956; 12:15pm), Green Mansions (1959; 2:45pm), Tall Story (1960; 4:30pm) and Goodbye Again (1961; 6pm).

At 8pm, TCM’s scheduling of The Corn is Green (1945) ushers in a night of “Wales Tales”…which should be fairly explanatory.  How Green Was My Valley (1941; 10pm), The Proud Valley (1940; 12:15am), A Run for Your Money (1949; 1:45am) and The Citadel (1938; 3:15am) round out the evening’s viewing.

April 5, Friday – Ennui breaks out en masse over the Internets as classic film fans celebrate the birthday of Melvyn Douglas.  The channel rises to the occasion with showings of Prestige (1932; 6:30am), The Vampire Bat (1933; 7:45am), Dangerous Corner (1935; 9:30am), She Married Her Boss (1935; 10:45am), I’ll Take Romance (1937; 12:15pm), Women of Glamour (1937; 1:45pm), The Shining Hour (1938; 3pm), The Toy Wife (1938; 4:30pm) and Our Wife (1941; 6:15pm).

April 6, Saturday – TCM finishes up the Warner Bros. Perry Mason series today and the following Saturday (April 13) with The Case of the Black Cat (1936) and The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937)—both films air at 10:45pm.  Then on April 20: the return of RKO’s Falcon franchise with The Gay Falcon (1941), with A Date with the Falcon (1941) airing the week after (April 27).  (Those two films also air at 10:45am.)

At noon, the distaff side of sleuthing is heard from as Dame Margaret Rutherford stars in those wonderful Miss Marple films produced by MGM in the 1960s: Murder She Said (1961; April 6), Murder at the Gallop (1963; April 13), Murder Most Foul (1964; April 20) and Murder Ahoy (1964; April 27).

TCM Essentials’ scheduling of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) at 8pm means that I’ll have to have a strong pot of coffee ready a night of films dealing with “desert warfare” is in store for the discriminating Tee Cee Em viewer.  Following at midnight is one of my favorite Bogie films, Sahara (1943) and then TCM Underground takes over at 2am with that 2007 documentary I still haven’t seen, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.

April 7, Sunday – I’m glad the Warner Archive will be releasing The Guilty Generation (1931) to MOD DVD soon, because it’s scheduled today at noon and there’s no way on this formerly green planet I’ll be able to break the Channel 2 news stranglehold that my father has on the television remote.  At 8pm, a “Masters of Suspense” double feature gets underway with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945)…followed by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955) at 10pm.

Because a second Hitchcock film is scheduled at midnight—the time associated with TCM’s Silent Sunday Nights—I’m hoping that the Blackmail (1929) on the schedule is the silent version of the film…which I have not seen, and would very much like to.  The 1944 Hitch short Aventure Malgache follows at 1:30am, and then a Clouzot film that sounds worth the investment, The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1947) at 2.  (By the way—thanks for the spoiler warning, Henri.)

April 8, Monday – Ladies love outlaws, or so the great philosopher Waylon Jennings used to tell us (good thing I took philosophy in college, huh?)—but whether or not that will have an effect on the female demographic today remains to be seen.  A festival of “outlaw” films gets underway with Lawyer Man (1933; 6am), The Lawless Frontier (1935; 7:15am), King of the Underworld (1939; 8:15am), Bad Men of Missouri (1941; 9:30am), Billy the Kid (1941; 10:45am), Bullets for O’Hara (1941; 12:30pm), The Penalty (1941; 1:30pm), The Outlaw (1943; 3pm), This Side of the Law (1950; 5pm) and The Law and Jake Wade (1958; 6:30pm).

Outlaw or no, if you’ve been afforded the courtesy of having been taken into custody rather than being shot down like a dog in the street—you’ll probably need a good lawyer.  “The Defense Rests” is the theme of films scheduled in primetime and beyond on TCM, with Roxie Hart (1942) at 8pm, followed by Knock on Any Door (1949; 9:30pm), Compulsion (1959; 11:15pm), Anatomy of a Murder (1959; 1:15am) and The People Against O’Hara (1951; 4am).

April 9, Tuesday – Hey kids!  It’s that time again—another installment of Uncle Bobby’s Movie Funhouse.  Yes, the great and powerful Osborne offers up his personal favorites beginning with My Gal Sal (1942) at 8pm, then it’s Orchestra Wives (1942; 10pm), Carnegie Hall (1947; 12mid) and TDOY fave Three Strangers (1946) at 2:30am to finish out the night.

April 10, Wednesday – It’s not Robert Ryan’s birthday…but if you’re as a big a fan of Bob R. as I am it doesn’t matter much in the whole big picture of things.  Of special interest is a movie that I’ve talked about here on the blog in the past, The Woman on Pier 13 (1950; 5:45pm)—originally released with the more sensationalistic title I Married a Communist.  (This is the one where William Tallman runs over John Agar with his car.)  Also on tap are Gangway for Tomorrow (1943; 6am), Crossfire (1947; 7:15am), The Woman on the Beach (1947; 8:45am), Berlin Express (1948; 10am), Return of the Badmen (1948; 11:30am), Act of Violence (1949; 1:15pm), The Set-Up (1949; 2:45pm) and Born to Be Bad (1950; 4pm).

April 11, Thursday – The channel sets aside most of the day for some films helmed by Romanian émigré Jean Negulesco, starting with Count Your Blessings (1959) at 7:15am then Jessica (1962; 9am), Deep Valley (1947; 11am), Nobody Lives Forever (1946; 1pm), Johnny Belinda (1948; 2:45pm), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954; 4:30pm) and Titanic (1953; 6:15pm).

The primetime schedule has been set aside for films showcasing Debra Paget—who celebrated her 79th birthday in August of last year (no birthday tribute for her then because of the whole Summer Under the Stars thing).  Love Me Tender (1956), the film she made with The King of Rock ‘n Roll (Elvis Presley supposedly had a thing for her) kicks things off at 8pm, and then it’s Les Miserables (1952; 9:45pm), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954; 11:45pm), From the Earth to the Moon (1958; 1:30am), Seven Angry Men (1955; 3:30am) and Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961; 5:15am).

April 12, Friday – A festival of kiddie-oriented fare fills the daylight hours on the channel, including two cult faves in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953; 11:45am) and The Phantom Tollbooth (1969; 4:30pm).  Gulliver’s Travels (1939; 7:15am), Sylvia and the Phantom (1945; 8:45am), Jack and the Beanstalk (1952; 10:30am), tom thumb (1958; 1:15pm), Zotz! (1962; 3pm) and The Land That Time Forgot (1975; 6:15pm) round out the rest of the schedule.

April 13, Saturday – Linda Darnell has the primetime spotlight today, beginning with the TCM Essentials scheduling of Anna and the King of Siam (1946) at 8pm, then a double dose of Linda and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) at 10:15pm.  No Way Out (1950), a particular TDOY fave starring Richard Widmark, finishes things up at 12:15am.

April 14, Sunday – The legendary Walter Huston gets a double feature of his very own beginning at 8pm with his Oscar-winning performance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)…followed by one of his best thespian showcases in the title role of Dodsworth (1936) at 10:15pm.

April 15, Monday – Because of the federal law that gave custody of all Clint Eastwood movies to the once-proud American Movie Classics (now home of The Walking Dead marathon), there are only three Eastwood films that are permitted to be shown on TCM: A Fistful of Dollars (1964; 11am), For a Few Dollars More (1965; 12:45pm) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966; 3pm).  The channel also has Hang ‘em High (1968; 6pm) on the schedule, though—so it’s nice to see the channel sticking it to The Man.

Come nightfall, a tribute to Wayne LaPierre gets underway with “Guns of the West”—and the first movie up is longtime TDOY fave Winchester ’73 (1950) at 8pm.  That’s followed by Colt .45 (1950; 9:45pm), Springfield Rifle (1952; 11:15pm), The Gun That Won the West (1955; 1am), The Fastest Gun Alive (1956; 2:15am) and The Quick Gun (1964; 4am).

April 16, Tuesday – It’s the 124th birthday of the greatest artist the movies has ever produced—so to honor Charlie Chaplin, the films Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914; 6am), Sunnyside (1919; 7:30am), The Gold Rush (1925; 8am), The Circus (1928; 9:15am), Modern Times (1936; 10:30am), The Great Dictator (1940; 12:30pm), A King in New York (1957; 2:45pm) and Limelight (1952; 5pm).  After Modern Times, A King in New York and Limelight will be half-hour discussions on these films (Chaplin Today) that will be hosted by filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Darenne (Modern), Jim Jarmusch (King) and Bernardo Bertolucci (Limelight).

Oscar-winning actor-director Pierre Étaix is in the primetime spotlight—the film for which he nabbed an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject, Happy Anniversary (1962), is on the schedule at 9:45pm.  The other movies to be showcased are Yo Yo (1967; 8pm), Le Grand Amour (1969; 10pm), Rupture (1961; 11:45pm), As Long as You’re Healthy (1966; 12mid) and The Suitor (1963; 1:30am).

April 18, Thursday – “Welcome to The Pearly Gates” is the channel’s primetime theme for this evening…even though they do commit the cinematic sin of saving the best of these movies, The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), for the very last (at 4am).  Before that classic, there’s Carousel (1956; 8pm), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941; 10:15pm), A Matter of Life and Death (1947; 12mid) and Cabin in the Sky (1943; 2am)…so it’s not a total loss.

April 19, Friday – “What are you rebelling against?”  “Whaddya got?”  Yes, a gang (see what I did there?) of juvenile delinquency films crashes the TCM party, beginning at 6am with the campy cult classic Reefer Madness (1936).  That’s followed by Crime in the Streets at 7am—no, not actual crime…the 1956 film—and then The Delinquents (1957; 8:45am), The Young Savages (1961; 10am), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962; 11:45am), Blackboard Jungle (1955; 1:30pm), Rebel without a Cause (1955; 3:15pm) and West Side Story (1961; 5:15pm)—the movie that warned us that juvenile delinquency unchecked often leads to dancing.

April 20, Saturday – I’ll admit that a lot of these “theme” evenings the channel puts together are often kind of lame…but this one has got to be in contention for the silliest.  The theme is “Trapeze Acts”…and while there is a trapeze artist in the TCM Essentials presentation of the Tod Browning horror classic Freaks (1932)—that’s really not the first thing I think of when I watch the film; I find myself paying more attention to the…well, freaks, if you must know.  At 9:15pm, the far more appropriate Trapeze (1956) is scheduled, with The Dark Tower (1943) at 11:15pm and Polly of the Circus (1932) at 1am to finish things out.

Two TCM Underground offerings that are must-sees if you’re not familiar with them: Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962) at 2:15am, followed by The Devil’s Own (1966) at 4am.  (That old black magic has me in its spell.)

April 21, Sunday – A Spencer Tracy double feature consisting of a really good Spence movie in Me and My Gal (1932) at 8 followed by the Tracy film that everyone’s probably already seen, Father of the Bride (1950) at 9:30pm.  (Okay, these two films are scheduled because Tracy’s co-star in both is Joan Bennett.)

April 22, Monday – The star of one of my favorite TV sitcoms, Green Acres, celebrates what would have been his 107th birthday today…so TCM fetes Eddie Albert with a lineup that features one of his best performances as a weaselly infantry captain in the Robert Aldrich-directed Attack! (1956; 3pm).  The other films scheduled are On Your Toes (1939; 6:15am), An Angel from Texas (1940; 8pm), Thieves Fall Out (1941; 9:15am), Bombardier (1943; 10:30am), Ladies Day (1943; 12:15pm), The Fuller Brush Girl (1950; 1:30pm), The Gun Runners (1958; 5pm) and 7 Women (1966; 6:30pm).

On Monday and Tuesday (April 23) in primetime, TCM is presenting a lineup of movies that fall under the heading of “Studio Archives.”  Since I couldn’t come up with a joke for this, here’s the schedule:

Monday, April 22

08:00pm The Wizard of Oz (1939)

10:00pm Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

12:15am Wings (1927)

03:00am Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

04:15am Lilly Turner (1933)

Tuesday, April 23

08:00pm Treasure Island (1934)

10:00pm The Invisible Man (1933)

11:30pm Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

03:30am Gunga Din (1939)

April 23, Tuesday – While Shirley Temple isn’t quite the equivalent of the nails-on-a-blackboard irritation that is Mickey Rooney or—heaven help us all—She Who Must Not Be Named…don’t go thinking I’m mellowing in my old age when I say I would have been truly sorry to see Shirl devoured by wolves as a child.  (Sorry, Page.) Temple turns 85 today, and TCM fetes her the way a child star should be by putting The Little Princess (1939; 6am), Kathleen (1941; 7:45am), The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947; 9:15am), Honeymoon (1947; 11am), That Hagen Girl (1947; 12:15pm), Fort Apache (1948; 1:45pm), Adventure in Baltimore (1949; 4pm) and The Story of Seabiscuit (1949; 5:30pm) on the schedule.

April 25, Thursday – In a nod to my fellow TV blogger Brent McKee’s fondness for the same-titled reality show, TCM devotes the primetime schedule to “Amazing Races”—kicking things off with Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) at 8pm.  (They go uppity-up-up…they go downedly-down-down.)  That’s followed by the first-rate Western Bite the Bullet (1975) at 10:30, then The Great Race (1965; 1am) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) closing it out at 4:15am.

April 27, Saturday – After the last of the Miss Marple movies today, you should pop up a honkin’ big heap of popcorn and settle in for a trio of superlative science-fiction films that starts at 1:45pm with Tarantula (1955—John Agar as an arachnid doody-eating medico!), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957; 3:15pm) and longtime TDOY fave Five Million Years to Earth (1968; aka Quatermass and the Pit) at 4:45pm.

Come nightfall: “Messing with Texas.”  Lone Star State-themed films beginning with the TCM Essentials showing of Giant (1956) at 8pm, then Rio Bravo (1959) at 11:45pm.  (Moving TCM Underground to Saturday nights has sure made creating “theme nights” a lot easier, I have observed.)

April 28, Sunday – Two of the best proto-Bonnie and Clyde movies get a workout in primetime with They Live by Night (1949) at 8pm, followed by You Only Live Once (1937) at 9:45pm.

Also, too: Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975) at 4am.  (“Wheat...lots of wheat...fields of wheat...a tremendous amount of wheat...”)

April 29, Monday – The channel devotes its primetime programming to one of the movies’ blandest leading men: Richard Carlson.  The fun starts at 8pm with the underrated sci-fi classic It Came from Outer Space (1953), followed by The Magnetic Monster (1953; 9:30pm), Riders to the Stars (1954; 11pm), The Power (1968; 12:30am), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954; 2:30am) and Tormented (1960; 4am)

April 30, Tuesday – And finally, to close out the month: the all-too-desperate-sounding “Glenn Ford in the 1940s.”  You see…they’re all movies featuring Glenn Ford…and they were released in the 1940s.  Common sense would dictate that you’d schedule the popular Gilda (1946) first…but no, that’s the last one for the evening (at 4:15am).  Ahead of it is A Stolen Life (1946; 8pm), The Loves of Carmen (1948; 10pm), The Undercover Man (1949; 12mid), Babies for Sale (1940; 1:30am) and Framed (1947; 2:45am).