TCM Schedule for Thursday, May 27, 2021 -- Guest Programmer Frank Langella

The COVID-19 related theme for the daylight hours is I Miss ... Theatre - and I admit that I really do! Then in prime time, TCM welcomes guest programmer, Frank Langella, with some interesting choices. Frank seems to have a fondness for the 1940s. Tell us more about it, TCM!

Guest Programmer: Frank Langella
By Frank Miller
May 1, 2021

The Oscar-nominated star of Frost/Nixon (2008), who recently won a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the ensemble cast of The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), takes over as TCM programmer Thursday, May 27, to present three of his all-time favorite films. In a career spanning almost 60 years, Langella has played everything from Dracula (on Broadway and in the 1979 film version) to King Lear (at the UK’s Chichester Festival Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music). He made his Broadway debut in Yerma at Lincoln Center, starring Gloria Foster, and he went on to win four Tony Awards. He made his film debut in 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife and has appeared in such notable features as The Twelve Chairs (1970), Those Lips, Those Eyes (1980), Masters of the Universe (1987), Eddie (1996) and Good Night and Good Luck (2005). His released his memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them, in 2012.

Langella’s three programming picks, released during his formative years in New Jersey, are:

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945) — This adaptation of George Victor Martin’s novel stars Edward G. Robinson as a Norwegian-born farmer raising daughter Margaret O’Brien on a Wisconsin farm during World War II. The film is fondly remembered by fans of both stars and notable for its sensitive screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, penned a few years before he was blacklisted.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) — Joseph Kesselring’s uproarious stage farce focuses on two sweet old ladies given to poisoning lonely old men to end their suffering. Josephine Hull and Jean Adair reprised their performances as the murderous maidens from the original Broadway production, though the show’s producers would not release Boris Karloff to film his most famous stage role. Raymond Massey took his place in a film also starring Cary Grant and Peter Lorre.

The Stranger (1946) — Orson Welles had a rare box-office success directing and starring as an escaped Nazi war criminal living under an assumed name in a small Connecticut town. Loretta Young co-stars as his unsuspecting fiancée, with Edward G. Robinson (in a role originally planned for Agnes Moorehead) as the Nazi hunter on his trail. Langella met Young twice and wrote of her in his memoirs, “Miss Young wore [her beauty] like a halo: radiant and definitive….”

Enjoy!


6:15 AM -- Tea for Two (1950)
1h 38m | Musical | TV-PG
An heiress has to say no to every question for 24 hours if she wants to star on Broadway.
Director: David Butler
Cast: Doris Day, Gordon Macrae, Gene Nelson

The girl who dances the Charleston in a red cloche hat at the beginning of this film is Eleanor Donahue who would later achieve TV immortality as the older daughter Betty Anderson in the long-running, family friendly sitcom Father Knows Best.


8:00 AM -- 42nd Street (1933)
1h 25m | Musical | TV-G
The definitive backstage musical, complete with the dazzling newcomer who goes on for the injured star.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Cast: Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent

Nominee for Oscars for Best Sound, Recording -- Nathan Levinson (sound director), and Best Picture

During the "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" number, a woman's hand emerges from the drapes and drops a pair of shoes. Her arm then goes limp and drops, palm up, toward the floor. This suggests a sexual encounter. In addition, all the berths were previously seen to be occupied by women only, making the suggestion even more pointed. After 1934, such scenes would not be permitted in films by censor Joseph I. Breen of the Production Code Administration.


9:45 AM -- Stage Struck (1958)
1h 35m | Romance | TV-PG
A young actress makes all the wrong moves trying to break in on Broadway.
Director: Sidney Lumet
Cast: Henry Fonda, Susan Strasberg, Joan Greenwood

Remake of the movie Morning Glory (1933), starring Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Adolphe Menjou.


11:30 AM -- Kiss Me Kate (1953)
1h 51m | Musical | TV-G
An ex-husband and wife team star in a musical version of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew".
Director: George Sidney
Cast: Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Ann Miller

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- André Previn and Saul Chaplin

In supplemental information on the DVD mention is made that Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore neglected to rehearse their "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" number more than once or twice because they thought it was silly. When it came time to shoot it they made numerous fumbles and mistakes which the director thought was on purpose. He later complimented them on making it look like something a couple of thugs would perform. They never told him the truth.


1:30 PM -- The Producers (1967)
1h 28m | Comedy | TV-14
A Broadway producer decides to get rich by creating the biggest flop of his career.
Director: Mel Brooks
Cast: Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn

Winner of an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- Mel Brooks

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Gene Wilder

Dustin Hoffman, a Greenwich Village neighbor of Brooks and an unknown at the time, was offered the part of Bloom. Hoffman expressed more interest in the role of Franz Liebkind, but Alfa-Betty Olsen has said that was never seriously considered. While Brooks was still casting, Hoffman was offered the part of Benjamin in The Graduate (1967). Brooks allowed him to go off to the audition for the film because his wife Anne Bancroft was in it, and Brooks was convinced Hoffman was utterly wrong for it (as written), and would never be cast.


3:15 PM -- Funny Girl (1968)
2h 35m | Musical | TV-PG
Comedienne Fanny Brice fights to prove that she can be the greatest star and find romance even though she isn't pretty.
Director: William Wyler
Cast: Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Kay Medford

Winner of an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Barbra Streisand (Tied with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter (1968).)

Nominee for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Kay Medford, Best Cinematography -- Harry Stradling Sr., Best Sound -- Columbia Studio Sound Department, Best Film Editing -- Robert Swink, Maury Winetrobe and William Sands, Best Music, Original Song -- Jule Styne (music) and Bob Merrill (lyrics) for the song "Funny Girl", Best Music, Score of a Musical Picture (Original or Adaptation) -- Walter Scharf, and Best Picture

"The Swan" was written especially for this movie. The original number, "Rat-a-Tat-Tat", was deemed too dated (though appropriate for the setting of the show). Fanny Brice did a similar act dressed in a similar costume complete with a huntsman carrying a bow and arrow in the movie Be Yourself! (1930).


6:00 PM -- The Band Wagon (1953)
1h 52m | Musical | TV-G
A Broadway artiste turns a faded film star's comeback vehicle into an artsy flop.
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Cast: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant

Nominee for Oscars for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay -- Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Best Costume Design, Color -- Mary Ann Nyberg, and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Adolph Deutsch

Betty Comden and Adolph Green made the characters played by Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant a married couple because they felt that the audiences would not accept a male/female writing team who weren't married to each other, even though the characters were based on Comden and Green, who were not married to each other.



WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: PRIMETIME THEME -- GUEST PROGRAMMER FRANK LANGELLA



8:00 PM -- Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945)
1h 45m | Drama | TV-PG
A Norwegian farmer tries to raise two children in the Midwest.
Director: Roy Rowland
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Margaret O'Brien, James Craig

When Martinius (Edward G. Robinson) and Bruna (Agnes Moorehead) have gone over the revenue from the potato harvest, talk turns to the new barn and the needed lumber being controlled by the "WPB". Audiences at the time would know that meant the War Production Board. Established in January 1942, this agency of the federal government was tasked with converting the economy to war production and controlled vital materials and their distribution via rationing, ran scrap drives, controlled wages and prices, and more.


10:00 PM -- Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
1h 58m | Comedy | TV-G
A young man about to be married discovers the two aunts who raised him have been poisoning lonely old men.
Director: Frank Capra
Cast: Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey

Frank Capra was drawn to this project due to its very frivolousness. Capra admitted that the films he had made over the previous seven years had all been serious endeavors with moralistic implications. He delighted in the film's escapism and pure, unpretentious entertainment value. Capra said that the film was "no great document to save the world, [and contained] no worries about whether John Doe should or should not jump; [it was] just good old fashioned theater." The director admitted that making the film was the first time he had really enjoyed himself since making It Happened One Night (1934).


12:15 AM -- The Stranger (1946)
1h 35m | Suspense/Mystery | TV-PG
A small-town schoolteacher suspects her new husband may be an escaped Nazi war criminal.
Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story -- Victor Trivas

Orson Welles originally wanted Agnes Moorehead to play the FBI part. believing that it would be much more interesting to have a spinster lady at the heels of this Nazi but studio head,Goetz didn't like the idea said no and instead gave him Edward G. Robinson. Welles worked on the rewrites with original writer Anthony Veiller and an uncredited John Huston, who was in the army at the time, Welles wrote and shot scenes at the begining of the film which he described as ' a whole series of very wild dreamlike events'. These worried Goetz and producer Sam Spiegel , who at the time was using the pseudonym SP Eagel, so out they came.


2:00 AM -- High Hopes (1988)
1h 52m | Comedy
A satirical look at today's London through the eyes of yuppies, anti-establishment sixties throw-backs, and the upper class bourgeoisie.
Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Philip Davis, Ruth Sheen, Edna Dore

Director Mike Leigh has had a beard since March 1967 because he considers shaving "a time-wasting, filthy, irrelevant and resource-wasting habit".


4:00 AM -- Life Is Sweet (1990)
1h 42m | Comedy | TV-MA
A tale of everyday survival in Thatcher's Britain.
Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner

Aubrey's bizarre recipes were devised by Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall over the course of an evening, and then checked for plausibility with a professional chef, who advised them about which ones were technically impossible to prepare; all the ones that appear in the film are, as Leigh put it, "all feasible, gross as it sounds." The menu of the Regret Rien restaurant includes: Black Pudding and Camembert Soup, Boiled Bacon Comsommé, Saveloy on a Bed of Lychees, Liver in Lager, Pork Cyst, Clams in Ham with Pan-Fried Cocke-based Sauce, Prune Quiche, King Prawn (just one) in Jam Sauce, Duck in Chocolate Sauce, Tongues in a Rhubarb Hollandaise, Tripe Soufflé, Quails on a Bed of Spinach and Treacle, Kidney Vols-au-vent, Chilled Brains, Prune Quiche, Grilled Trotter with Eggs Over Easy.