Tag: Turner Classic Movies

Cladrite Radio Remembers

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We suspect we’re not alone in experiencing just the slightest bit of melancholia this time of year.

Perhaps it’s an age thing: We’ve had mixed feelings about birthdays, too, ever since we turned thirty. Before that, both our birthday and New Year’s Eve were purely joyous occasions, but nowadays, both occasions engender bittersweet feelings.

The folks at Turner Classic Movies must feel the same way as they prepare their annual video tribute to those movie makers who have passed on in the previous year.

Nowadays, there aren’t so many folks from the Cladrite Era found among the departed—with each passing year, there are fewer left to leave us—but the 2012 tribute does honor a few names from the old days, including Phyllis Thaxter, Ann Rutherford, Tony Martin, and Celeste Holm.

Starring Barbara Stanwyck…

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Barbara Stanwyck is TCM’s Star of the Month for December, and really, who could hope for a better Christmas-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa present than that? Wednesdays through December, they’ll showing 55 pictures from her illustrious career and one 1991 documentary, Barbara Stanwyck: Fire and Desire, that tries to sum up what it is that made her so special.

David Thomson wrote of Stanwyck in his Biographical Dictionary of Film: “While she was alive, she did not seem to be one of the great stars. But at her death, it was clear how widely she was loved. She was honest, sharp, gutsy, and smart. Terrific.”

Honest, sharp, gutsy and smart. We don’t think Stanwyck can be summed up any better (though Thomson left out sexy, which she certainly was, and in spades).

The month-long celebration kicks off tonight with 24 consecutive hours of Stanwyck pictures, and it’s fitting that the movies being shown over that span reflect the range and diversity of her work.

From pre-code classics like Baby Face (1933) and Ladies of Leisure (1930) to melodramatic “women’s pictures” such as Stella Dallas (1937) and So Big (1932) and even Meet John Doe, the 1941 Frank Capra classic for which she’s so well remembered today, there’s something for everyone in this initial lineup.

So warm up those DVRs, kids. The divine Ms. Stanwyck is in the house.

And to whet your appetite, here’s a memorably snappy scene from Double Indemnity.

Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?

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Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the ads for the TCM Classic Cruises and thought, “That would be fun.”

But then we can’t help but think, “But it would have been much more fun ten or fifteen years ago.” The sad truth is, there just aren’t that many performers left from the 1930s and ’40s and, of course, there are even fewer that date back as far as the silent movie era.

In that latter category, there’s Mickey Rooney and Carla Laemmle (who was never a big star, but did appear in some big pictures, including Lon Chaney‘s Phantom of the Opera and the 1931 version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi).

And then there’s Diana Serra Cary (née Peggy-Jean Montgomery), who was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, albeit at a very young age.

Cary, then known as Baby Peggy, made her film debut in 1921. She went on to make more than 150 shorts for Century Pictures before signing with Universal Pictures in 1923 for $1.5 million a year. Jackie Coogan, the top child star of the day, was growing up, and Universal was hoping Peggy, who would now be starring in feature-length pictures, pick up the slack left by his declining popularity.

Peggy is to have received more than 1.2 million fan letters during her relatively brief time in the spotlight, but by 1925, the bottom fell out of her career. Her father played it tough in negotiating with independent producer Sol Lesser, for whom she had made a couple of features, and Lesser not only declined to work with her any more, he used his influence in Hollywood to see that no one else would hire her, either. She made only one more silent movie, a small role in the 1926 film April Fool, and then began touring in vaudeville.

With the crash of 1929, Peggy’s family fortunes went in the tank. Her parents had spent most of her earnings, and what investments they had made were now worthless. She eventually stooped to doing extra work in the 1930s, but by 1938, at the age of 19, she was through working in pictures.

In later years, Peggy became a writer and author, publishing a number of books about Hollywood, including her 1996 memoir, Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?. She’s still active today, making personal appearances at film festivals and revival houses.

Beginning at 8 p.m. on Monday, December 3, Turner Classic Movies will air a new documentary about Peggy’s life and career, Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room (2012), and four of her pictures (most of which are lost films), three shorts—Carmen Jr. (1923), Peg o’ the Mounted (1924), and Such Is Life (1924)—and one feature, Captain January (1924).

Step by Step with Stan and Ollie

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Stan and Laurel at the bottom of the stepsThe comedy shorts of the 1920s and ’30s were a key part of our youth. You didn’t have to turn to TCM to watch movies of that era in those days (good thing, too—since cable TV wasn’t yet in existence). We spent hours viewing Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies, simply because they were often just about the only things on a kid would care to watch.

So when we paid a visit to Los Angeles some years ago, a visit to the concrete steps that were featured in Stan and Ollie’s The Music Box was high on our list of things to do.

You remember The Music Box—it’s the classic short that finds our boys hired to deliver a piano, and when they arrive at the address, they are faced with an endless cement staircase standing between them and the house that is the piano’s destination. (If you’ve never seen this short, you can rectify that here.)

Back in the day, the area around those steps was a bit more open, but it’s quite developed now—you could never achieve the camera angles necessary to shoot a remake of The Music Box. But the steps themselves are still there, and one enterprising soul has undertaken the task of creating a video comprising then-and-now shots of this memorable location. We enjoyed the video, and we think you will, tool

You screened it for her, you can screen it for me…

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Like most movie buffs, we occasionally are asked to name our favorite movie.

At first thought, it seems a difficult question. After all, there aren’t many genres of movies we don’t enjoy, and we happily watch pictures more than a century old and the latest releases. We have a list of favorite directors as long as our arm and a list of favorite actors and actresses as long as our leg.

But in the end, it’s really not that tough a call. For our money, Casablanca is the perfect movie—or the closest we’ve ever seen to it. Amazing performances from the whole cast, from Bogart and Bergman down to the tiniest bit roles. A witty, suspenseful, and moving script that deftly combines romance, drama, and humor and features some of the most celebrated dialogue and memorable scenes ever committed to celluloid.

We’ve seen Casablanca a dozen times or more, most of those on a big screen, surrounded by a collection of appreciative fellow movie buffs. It’s one of the benefits of living in a city like New York; we get to see an amazing range of movies from across a century-plus of cinema in theatres.

But there are plenty of burgs where a movie classic like Casablanca can be seen only on television, on a DVD or when Turner Classic Movies airs it. So I got excited—not for myself, but for the millions of Americans living somewhere other than NYC or Los Angeles or Chicago or San Francisco or half dozen other cities that have outlets for viewing classic movies in theatres—when I learned that on Wednesday, March 21, TCM is commemorating the movie’s 70th anniversary with a one-time digital screening of this classic in more than 335 theatres across the country. There will be an introductory short starring TCM host Robert Osborne, who will “take audiences behind the scenes of this epic love story.”

Every theatre is showing the movie at 7 p.m., so in each time zone, thousands of moviegoers will be watching it simultaneously. We love that.

There’s a good chance there’s a participating theatre near you. If you’ve never seen this wonderful movie on a big screen with an audience of fellow movie fans, you owe it to yourself to attend. Tickets went on sale today.