TCM Schedule for Friday, September 18 -- Starring Harry Belafonte

[Staph]

Happy birthday, Greta Garbo! She was born 104 years ago today. And tonight we've got an evening of Harry Belafonte. Enjoy!


6:00am -- Mata Hari (1931)
Romantic biography of World War I's notorious lady spy.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone
Dir: George Fitzmaurice
BW-89 mins, TV-PG

Major Thomas Coulson's 1930 book, "Mata Hari: Courtesan and Spy", piqued interest in turning it into a movie, but an MGM executive said that no one book was the basis of their movie. Mata hari translates to "eye of the day" in Indonesian (and Malay), and is the most common word for "sun" in those languages. Censors of many cities required cuts in the movie, which was typical of many pre-code films. When MGM applied to the Hays Office for a certificate in 1936 for re-release, it was refused. However, a certificate was issued in 1939, when the movie was re-released.


7:30am -- Grand Hotel (1932)
Guests at a posh Berlin hotel struggle through scandal and heartache.
Cast: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery
Dir: Edmund Goulding
BW-113 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Picture (the only Best Picture winner not to be nominated for any other Academy Awards)

Originally conceived by MGM production chief as one of the first All-Star vehicles. Conventional wisdom of the time was that you put no more than one or two of your biggest stars in a picture so as to lower production cost and to maximize profits. Grand Hotel (1932) featured 5 of MGM's top tiered stars and was one of the highest grossing pictures in studio history.


9:30am -- Greta Garbo Part 1: The Temptress (1986)
In the first part of this rarely-seen Swedish documentary tracks Garbo's rise to ultra-stardom, from her early film career in Sweden to her introduction to the studio system .
BW-60 mins, TV-MA

Her parents were Karl and Anna Gustafson, and she also had an older sister and brother, Alva Garbo and Sven Garbo. Her father died when she was 14 of nephritis, and her sister was also dead of lymphatic cancer by the time Greta was 21 years old. Before making it big, she worked as a soap-latherer in a barber's shop back in Sweden.


10:30am -- Greta Garbo Part 2: The Clown (1986)
In the second part of this series, Garbo's career in talking pictures and her life off the screen is discussed. Featuring interviews and film clips of some of her best work.
BW-59 mins, TV-PG

Garbo, according to movie director Jacques Feyder: "At 9 o'clock a.m. the work may begin. "Tell Mrs. Garbo we're ready" says the director. "I'm here" a low voice answers, and she appears, perfectly dressed and combed as the scene needs. Nobody could say by what door she came but she's there. And at 6 o'clock PM, even if the shot could be finished in five minutes, she points at the watch and goes away giving you a sorry smile. She's very strict with herself and hardly pleased with her work. She never looks rushes nor goes to the premières but some days later, early in the afternoon, enters all alone an outskirts movie house, takes place in a cheap seat and gets out only when the projection finishes, masked with her sunglasses".


11:30am -- Two Faced Woman (1941)
A woman pretends to be her own twin sister to win back her straying husband.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett.
Dir: George Cukor.
BW-90 mins, TV-G

Greta Garbo's last film -- the movie was originally condemned by the National Legion of Decency for its immoral attitude towards marriage, and impudent suggestive scenes, dialogue and situations, and costumes. After the original print was revised, it was removed from the condemned list.


1:15pm -- I Take This Woman (1940)
A tenement doctor's marriage to a European refugee threatens his practice.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, Verree Teasdale, Kent Taylor
Dir: W. S. Van Dyke II
BW-98 mins, TV-G

Production of the film started in October 1938 and had a troubled history. Director Josef von Sternberg quit because of artistic differences. Director Frank Borzage took over, but the production was shelved in early January 1939 for more than 10 months, when W.S. Van Dyke took over and practically re-shot the whole film, with many different cast members. One contemporary reviewer quipped the film should have been called "I Re-Take This Woman".


3:00pm -- Hold Your Man (1933)
A hard-boiled babe and a con man wear down each other's rough edges.
Cast: Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess
Dir: Sam Wood
BW-87 mins, TV-PG

Third of six films co-starring Gable and Harlow.


4:30pm -- Dust Be My Destiny (1939)
A young misfit lands on a prison chain gang and falls for the foreman's daughter.
Cast: John Garfield, Priscilla Lane, Alan Hale, Frank McHugh
Dir: Lewis Seiler
BW-88 mins, TV-G

The original ending of the film called for Joe and Mabel to be shot to death, but the commercial failure of You Only Live Once (1937), which had a tragic ending, compelled the Warner Bros. studio heads to demand a happy ending. When writer Robert Rossen refused to write the new ending, Seton I. Miller was brought in to write it.


6:00pm -- Strange Cargo (1940)
Devil's Island escapees are changed forever by a prisoner who thinks he's Jesus.
Cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Ian Hunter, Peter Lorre
Dir: Frank Borzage
BW-113 mins, TV-PG

Joan Crawford and Clark Gable shot a scene where they are running through the marshlands. At one point, they pass a snake hanging in a tree. After they shot the scene once, Joan suddenly realized that the snake was real. "That son-of-a-b**th is alive!". When informed that the snake's mouth had been tied shut with a rubber band, she said "And what happens if the f**king rubber band snaps!" and refused to shoot the scene again.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: STARRING HARRY BELAFONTE


8:00pm -- Carmen Jones (1954)
A sultry factory worker seduces a young soldier then dumps him for another man.
Cast: Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, Olga James
Dir: Otto Preminger
C-105 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Dorothy Dandridge, and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Herschel Burke Gilbert

The singing voices of Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge were dubbed by LeVern Hutcherson and Marilyn Horne respectively, even though Belafonte and Dandridge were both accomplished singers. However, neither had the training nor the range to sing operatic roles. Catherine Hilgenberg, a soloist with the Roger Wagner Chorale (morphed later into the Los Angeles Master Chorale), was originally signed to sing the Carmen role, and a number of the arias were already recorded (with piano, on a separate track), when director Otto Preminger's bullying behavior became too much for her and she quit. Horne ("Jackie") was a 19-year-old music student at nearby USC. She auditioned for the part and was immediately hired - for $300. But it was a terrific break for her, and she grabbed it, and did an outstanding job, re-recording what Hilgenberg had already sung, plus the balance of the music. It's also fun to note that Horne was a singer for Tops Records, a company that made sound-alike recordings of hit records with identical arrangements (in those days arrangements could not be copyrighted) and "stand-ins" who could mimic the artists who made the hit record. Jackie Horne, later to become a major 20th-century opera star, was funding her college expenses, in part, by recording Kay Starr's hits. Starr was famous for belting out her songs with a certain razzmatazz style, and Horne's rendition was a dead-ringer. The Tops Records offices, it should be noted, were within walking distance from the USC campus.


10:00pm -- Buck and the Preacher (1972)
A con man helps a group of former slaves survive the perils of the wild West in their search for the promised land.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Cameron Mitchell
Dir: Sidney Poitier
C-103 mins, TV-14

First time director Sydney Poitier took over the job from Joseph Sargent when he became dissatisfied with the film's point of view.


12:00am -- The Angel Levine (1970)
An angel helps an embittered man find life's meaning.
Cast: Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte, Ida Kaminska, Milo O'Shea
Dir: Ján Kadár
C-106 mins, TV-G

Based on a story by Bernard Malamud, who also wrote The Natural (1984).


2:00am -- Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Three go-go dancers resort to murder in search of a family's hidden treasure.
Cast: Tura Satana, Haji, Lori Williams, Sue Bernard
Dir: Russ Meyer
BW-83 mins, TV-14

Russ Meyer named the movie like this because he claims that a movie has everything when it contains speed (faster), sex (pussycat) and violence (kill,kill).


3:40am -- Short Film: Pat Neal Is Back (1968)
This short focuses on Patricia Neal's return to motion pictures three years after she suffered a near-fatal stroke.
Cast: Patricia Neal, Jack Albertson, Martin Sheen
Dir: Edward Beyer
C-8 mins

"Variety", the entertainment newspaper, mistakenly reported in their February 22, 1965 headline that Patricia Neal had died from her multiple strokes five days earlier. In truth, she remained in a coma for 21 days. Pregnant at the time, her daughter, Lucy Dahl, was born healthy.


4:00am -- Mudhoney (1965)
A drifter with a past falls for an abused small-town wife.
Cast: Hal Hopper, Antoinette Christiani, John Furlong.
Dir: Russ Meyer.
BW-93 mins, TV-MA

Hal Hopper is the father of Jay North, TV's Dennis the Menace.

[Staph]

1. Harry Belafonte Profile

Multi-talented actor and musician Harry Belafonte was the first black performer to win an Emmy Award and the first recording artist to sell over a million copies of an album, though he was doubtlessly most proud of his longstanding work as an activist in international fights against racism, violence and world hunger. Belafonte got his start in New York theater, but his sideline as a nightclub singer propelled his mainstream breakout when his 1954 album Calypso popularized the music of his Jamaican heritage and hit number one on the charts. A respected authority on international folk music and a world-touring performer, Belafonte also enjoyed a career as an actor and producer, where he was involved in important early African-American productions including Carmen Jones (1954), in which he starred alongside Dorothy Dandridge, and Lorraine Hansberry's landmark play "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," which he produced. Whatever the nature of the work, Belafonte's style remained solid - the casual friendliness and warm, jaunty humor were sincere; the fierceness and intensity often surprising.

Harold Belafonte was born in Harlem on March 1, 1927, to a seaman and his Jamaican wife, who worked as a domestic. During his peripatetic childhood, the family was so poor that Belafonte was sent to live in Jamaica, where he bounced around between relatives' homes for five years. He returned as a misfit, a stranger with an unusual accent whose dyslexia made school nearly impossible. He dropped out, spent a year in the Navy during World War II, and returned to Harlem where he held a job as a janitor. One night he attended a performance at the American Negro Theater (ANT), and bitten by the acting bug, he enrolled in classes at Actors Studio and Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. He financed his new passion by singing pop songs at local nightclubs. Belafonte's career advanced quickly in Harlem's thriving creative atmosphere, and he landed a leading role in the ANT's staging of Sean O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock" while his gigs at the Royal Roost Nightclub and the Village Vanguard jazz club won him considerable attention. He also hit the small screen as a regular on the short-lived all-black TV revue, "Sugar Hill Times" (CBS, 1949-1950).

In 1952, Belafonte was signed to a recording deal with RCA Records and released his first single, the popular Caribbean classic, "Matilda." The year 1953 was a watershed one for Belafonte, beginning with his Tony Award-winning supporting role in the musical revue "John Murray Anderson's Almanac." He made his film debut in a leading role as a school principal in the minor but likable "Bright Road" opposite Dorothy Dandridge. He and Dandridge re-teamed in Carmen Jones (1954), Otto Preminger's striking all-black revamp of the classical opera "Carmen." Belafonte's warm, rich voice, soft with the slightest touch of grit, was not deemed appropriate for the operatic songs in this musical melodrama, so his singing - like most of the cast members - was dubbed. However his own voice received a widespread showcase with the release of the million-selling album, Calypso (1955). Belafonte made his contribution to the post-War craze for exotic cultures with his melodious, danceable and witty (indeed, often satirical) sing-alongs from his beloved Caribbean, including "Jamaica Farewell" and "Banana Boat Song," which opened with the singer's famous field call, "Day-o!"

Belafonte's on-again, off-again acting career kept him busiest in the 1950s, though he faced charges of being "too assimilationist" - much like another black star (and friend) whose rise to stardom paralleled his, Sidney Poitier. Such a claim actually placed far too much weight on Belafonte's relatively light skin and on his considerable popularity. The film "Island in the Sun" (1957), though fairly tame, was somewhat innovative in suggesting an interracial romance between him and Joan Fontaine. He also gave an excellent performance in the intelligent film noir "Odds Against Tomorrow" (1959), as part of a trio of mismatched burglars whose grand scheme goes awry. Perhaps more importantly, he also executive-produced the film. "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" (1959) was explicitly anti-racist and coincided with Belafonte's growing involvement in the Civil Rights movement. He was a close friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and used his successful position to help organize and finance efforts to end segregation in the South, where, as his own form of protest, he refused to tour.

In 1959, Belafonte won an Emmy (the first for an African-American performer) for his solo TV special, "Tonight with Belafonte" and gave the first of his now-legendary concerts at Carnegie Hall. His two-night engagement proved so popular that he was invited back to give an encore in 1960. In a performance acclaimed for Belafonte's graciousness in sharing the stage, he introduced such African and African-American talents as Miriam Makeba, Odetta and the Chad Mitchell trio to U.S. listeners. Belafonte received a Grammy Award for the 1960 album Jump Dat Hammer and released the hit albums Jump Up Calypso (1963) and Midnight Special (1962), an album of American folk songs and spirituals featuring then-unknown Bob Dylan on harmonica, but put much of his career on hold to pursue higher callings throughout the remainder of the decade. In 1963, he worked alongside Dr. King to participate in voter registration drives, the interstate Freedom Rides that challenged unconstitutional segregation laws, and helped organize the notorious March on Washington where King gave his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

Belafonte earned a Grammy in 1965 for the album An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba (1965) and teamed up with other female vocalists in television specials, including "Petula" (CBS, 1968) with Petula Clark and "Harry and Lena" (1970), with Lena Horne. He returned to the New York stage to produce Lorraine Hansberry's landmark work "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." In 1970, he played a contrite angel in Jan Kadar's affecting and unusual The Angel Levine (1970) and narrated a documentary about his slain friend, "King: A Filmed Record. Montgomery to Memphis" (1970). He and Poitier co-starred in the Western Buck and the Preacher (1972), and Belafonte was directed by Poitier in "Uptown Saturday Night" (1974), in a take-off of Marlon Brando's "Godfather" characterization. Belafonte released a number of live albums and co-starred in "Grambling's White Tiger" (1981), a TV movie about a white player on the largely black university's famed football team, but activism continued to take center stage in his life's work. Throughout the 1980s, his politically outspoken reputation remained solid when he opposed the U.S. embargo on Cuba, attacked the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and praised Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union's peace initiatives. He became especially vigorous in the fight against apartheid and was instrumental in organizing the vastly successful 1985 supergroup recording, "We Are the World," which raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Named a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 1987, Belafonte returned to Broadway that same year as producer of "Asinamali!" a play about apartheid. He was honored with a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, and in 1990, hosted a three-part PBS music documentary "Routes and Rhythm with Harry Belafonte." He was given the National Medal of Freedom in 1994, and went on to work on behalf of children's causes in Senegal, Rwanda and Kenya, as well as traveled to South Africa on behalf of a HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. After successfully beating prostate cancer in 1996, he added research and education about that disease to his full roster of advocacy pursuits. In the entertainment realm, Belafonte made a much-anticipated return to the big screen in "White Man's Burden" (1995), an intriguing if not wholly successful attempt to reconceptualize America's ongoing race problems, with Belafonte as a racist wealthy man in a society where blacks have the money and the power. He followed up with a turn as a gangster in Robert Altman's period drama "Kansas City" (1996).

In 2001, Belafonte was featured in a documentary about Fidel Castro and earned some press for his outspoken opposition to the George W. Bush administration and the handling of the September 11th attacks. He earned some backlash the following year for characterizing African-American administration officials Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as slaves who turned their backs on their people for the privilege to serve a master in "the house." After having upheld a steady performing schedule of 70 to 80 shows a year, Belafonte announced his retirement from live performing in 2003. In 2006, he and Danny Glover ruffled a few more political feathers when the pair traveled to Venezuela to show support for controversial president Hugo Chavez. Later in the year, Belafonte had a cameo appearance in "Bobby," Emilio Estevez' chronicle of the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy - a close friend of Belafonte's during his civil rights fights of the 1960s.


Films in bold are featured on Friday, September 18