TCM Schedule for Thursday, October 7 -- TCM Spotlight -- Adventures in Space

[Staph]

Happy birthday to director Robert Z. Leonard, born on this day in 1889. We have a day of his films, and an evening dedicated to Adventures in Space (SPACE...Space...space....) Enjoy!


6:00am -- Third Finger, Left Hand (1940)
A man-shy fashion editor pretends to be married until a suitor claims to be her husband.
Cast: Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Walburn, Lee Bowman
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-97 mins, TV-G

The director of the Production Code Administation (PCA) had MGM delete several gags that suggested Margot was pregnant, since, he said, illegitimacy could not be the basis for a comedy.


7:45am -- Ziegfeld Girl (1941)
Three showgirls in the Ziegfeld Follies face romantic trials on their way to the top.
Cast: James Stewart, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-132 mins, TV-G

The final shot of the "You Never Looked So Beautiful Before" number is recycled from "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" from The Great Ziegfeld (1936). For the sake of continuity, Judy Garland is costumed and made up to resemble Virginia Bruce, who crowned the "Wedding Cake" set in the earlier film.


10:00am -- Stand By for Action (1942)
A Harvard graduate serving on a battleship is faced with the realities of war.
Cast: Robert Taylor, Charles Laughton, Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-109 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- A. Arnold Gillespie (photographic), Donald Jahraus (photographic) and Michael Steinore (sound)

The world premiere on 31 December 1942 took place simultaneously in 7 US cities: Boston, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; Norfolk, Virginia; San Diego, California and San Francisco, California. Some earlier screenings may have taken place for naval officers on Treasure Island, California and Mare Island, California.


12:00pm -- We Were Dancing (1942)
A Polish princess gives up society for the love of a gigolo.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Melvyn Douglas, Gail Patrick, Lee Bowman
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-95 mins, TV-G

The play consisted of 3 parts, each shown on a different evening. It opened in London on 9 January 1936; the Broadway openings for each part took place on 24 November 1936, 27 November 1936 and 30 November 1936 and starred Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, running for a total of 118 performances for all three shows. There were 2 Broadway revivals.


1:45pm -- The Man From Down Under (1943)
A World War I veteran sneaks two orphans back to his native Australia.
Cast: Charles Laughton, Binnie Barnes, Richard Carlson, Donna Reed
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-103 mins, TV-PG

The four main characters, portraying Australians, are from Great Britain and the U.S.


3:30pm -- Cynthia (1947)
A sheltered girl uses music as a means of winning her independence.
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, George Murphy, S. Z. Sakall, Mary Astor
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-98 mins, TV-G

"Lux Radio Theater" broadcast a 60 minute radio adaptation of the movie on June 23, 1947 with Elizabeth Taylor, George Murphy and Mary Astor reprising their film roles.


5:15pm -- In The Good Old Summertime (1949)
In this musical remake of The Shop Around the Corner, feuding co-workers in a small music shop do not realize they are secret romantic pen pals.
Cast: Judy Garland, Van Johnson, S. Z. "Cuddles" Sakall, Spring Byington
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
C-103 mins, TV-PG

Buster Keaton was working as a gag writer at MGM when this movie was made. The filmmakers approached him to devise a way for a violin to get broken that would be both comic and plausible. Keaton came up with an appropriate fall, and the filmmakers then realized he was the only one who would be able to execute it properly, so they cast him in the film. Keaton also devised the sequence in which Van Johnson inadvertently wrecks Judy Garland's hat, and coached Johnson intensively in how to perform the scene. This was the first MGM film Keaton appeared in since being fired from the studio in 1933.


7:00pm -- Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1972)
Dick Cavett narrates this documentary about the MGM auction and the studio's glorious history.
C-51 mins, TV-G

This documentary can be found on the 2-disc special edition of Meet Me in St Louis (1944).


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: ADVENTURES IN SPACE


8:00pm -- Forbidden Planet (1956)
A group of space troopers investigates the destruction of a colony on a remote planet.
Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens
Dir: Fred McLeod Wilcox
C-99 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- A. Arnold Gillespie, Irving G. Ries and Wesley C. Miller

"Star Trek" (1966) creator Gene Roddenberry has been quoted as saying that this film was a major inspiration for the series. Perhaps not accidentally, Warren Stevens, who plays "Doc" here, would later be a guest star in 1968's "Star Trek: By Any Other Name (#2.22)" (1968), where the true shape of the alien Kelvans, like the Krell in this movie, was implied to be extremely non-humanoid but never shown.

The time aboard the C57D is stated as being 17:01 hours when the ship enters orbit around Altair IV. Gene Roddenberry would later use 1701 as the naval construction contract number of the Starship Enterprise.


10:00pm -- Alien (1979)
The crew of a broken down space ship accidentally picks up a deadly alien life form.
Cast: Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton
Dir: Ridley Scott
C-117 mins, TV-MA

Won an Oscar for Best Effects, Visual Effects -- H.R. Giger, Carlo Rambaldi, Brian Johnson, Nick Allder and Denys Ayling

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Michael Seymour, Leslie Dilley, Roger Christian, and Ian Whittaker

To get Jones the cat react fearfully to the descending Alien, a German Shepherd was placed in front of him with a screen between the two, so the cat wouldn't see it at first, and came over. The screen was then suddenly removed to make Jones stop, and start hissing.


12:15am -- Countdown (1968)
An astronaut takes a one-way voyage to the moon.
Cast: James Caan, Joanna Moore, Robert Duvall, Barbara Baxley
Dir: Robert Altman
C-101 mins, TV-PG

This film centers on a flight to the Moon in a Gemini spacecraft modified for a lunar landing. In fact, there were several proposals in the mid-1960s to use modified Gemini craft for lunar orbital and even lunar landings, in lieu of or complementing the Apollo flights. They were rejected for various technical, budgetary, and political reasons.


2:00am -- Marooned (1969)
Three U.S. astronauts face a slow death when their rockets fail during a space voyage.
Cast: Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, James Franciscus
Dir: John Sturges
C-129 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Visual Effects -- Robie Robinson

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography -- Daniel L. Fapp, and Best Sound -- Les Fresholtz and Arthur Piantadosi

Based on a novel by Martin Caidin, who would later write "Cyborg", the basis for the TV series "The Six Million Dollar Man" (1974).


4:15am -- From The Earth To The Moon (1958)
Lifelong rivals collaborate on a 19th-century moon rocket.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, George Sanders, Debra Paget, Don Dobbins
Dir: Byron Haskin
C-100 mins, TV-G

This was one of the last films produced for RKO. By the time it was completed, RKO had ceased production and distribution. It was released through Warner Brothers.

[Staph]

1. Alien (1979)

At the time of its release in summer 1979, Twentieth-Century Fox's Alien felt at once like something old and yet something refreshingly new in motion pictures. Longtime science fiction fans noted the similarities in the plot to such old favorites as It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) and Planet of the Vampires (1965), but the look of Alien was utterly new, bringing the grungy, run-down look of Star Wars (1977) to the horror genre, and introducing the bio-mechanical designs of Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger which, along with the action sequences of visceral gore, became a much-imitated sensibility in science fiction films for years afterward. Alien was also the first box-office hit for director Ridley Scott and made a star of actress Sigourney Weaver.

The story is simple and direct, one of the great virtues of the compact, suspenseful film. In deep space, the large tug Nostromo is returning to Earth carrying a cargo of mineral ore, its small crew in hypersleep chambers. Along the way, they are awakened by the ship's computer, "Mother," when it intercepts a nonhuman transmission from a planetoid, which they are required to investigate by lawful agreement among corporate interests operating in space. The crew consists of the captain, Dallas (Tom Skerritt), second-in-command Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), science officer Ash (Ian Holm), Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), Kane (John Hurt), Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), Parker (Yaphet Kotto), and Jones, a cat. A small team descends to the planet to discover a massive alien ship. The pilot of the craft is dead and the team discovers a chamber full of what appear to be eggs. Leaning over to investigate, Kane is attacked by a life form that springs from an egg, penetrates his helmet, and latches onto his face. The team evacuates Kane to the Nostromo for treatment, not realizing that they have allowed a fearsome Alien creature to play out its life cycle aboard their ship.

Alien had its beginnings when a major film project fell apart in France. Writer Dan O'Bannon had been working on designs for a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, to be directed by Alexandro Jodorowsky. The film never got off the ground and O'Bannon soon found himself sleeping on the couch of fellow writer Ron Shusett in Hollywood. O'Bannon dusted off an old script and with Shusett's help, wrote the story for Alien. One of the artists who was brought on to the ill-fated Dune project as a designer was a surrealist Swiss painter named H. R. Giger. O'Bannon later wrote, "...then we had to figure out the monster. Well, I hadn't been able to get Hans Rudi Giger off my mind since I left France. His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster."

O'Bannon envisioned the film resulting from his script to be a low-budget but efficient little thriller. He enlisted an illustrator friend, Ron Cobb, to do some preliminary paintings and drawings for the project and proceeded to shop the script around to studios. Many showed interest, but a production company called Brandywine (made up of producer Gordon Carroll and producer/ directors David Giler and Walter Hill) won out. Brandywine had a production agreement with Twentieth Century Fox, who set up a budget of eight million dollars, a much bigger budget than O'Bannon ever intended. Walter Hill would have helmed the movie but had to drop out due to another project. The producers instead hired Ridley Scott, who had helmed many high-profile commercials in England, but had only directed one prior feature, the critically-praised box-office disappointment The Duellists (1977). Walter Hill did a final rewrite on the script, which was shown to Scott, who later said, "I read it in forty minutes...and bang! The script was simple and direct; it was the reason why I did the film."

Design work on Alien proceeded; Chris Foss was brought in to do more concepts on spaceships, but work on the monster itself had yet to begin. O'Bannon finally brought in a book of H. R. Giger's paintings called Necronomicon to show to the director. "I looked down and saw this stunning picture," Scott later said. "I have never been so sure of something in all my life. And I said to Dan, 'Well, either my problems are over or they've just begun.'" Giger was hired for preproduction design work and given a studio space in which to work (the film would be shot largely at Shepperton Studios in England); he also promptly asked for an assortment of animal bones for his work materials. Giger painted a number of large canvases and using the bones as a base, he sculpted his ideas with Styrofoam. He had freedom to depict the life cycle of the Alien, and the stages called for different-looking creatures, dubbed by the crew the Face Hugger, the Chest Burster, and the Big Alien.

To portray the main creature, the filmmakers hired a six-foot-ten, 26-year old Nigerian named Bolaji Badejo, a design student in England. Giger made a cast of his body, and "as I do with all my work, I made the creature look biomechanical. Starting with the plaster core, I worked with Plasticine, rubber, bones, ribbed tubes, and different mechanical stuff like wires. The whole costume is translucent; the head is fiberglass." Scott was determined that the creature would look properly "alien" onscreen, so he opted to show it primarily in close-up views in quick cuts. Only once is the creature seen full-view.

The filmmakers of Alien, and Giger in particular, influenced the look and feel of science fiction films for several years to come. As Brooks Landon wrote in Cinefantastique from a 1988 vantage point, " immersed us in a systematically alien environment, an entire implicit ecology, confronting us with a spaceship at once so vast and so strange looking that it subverted our comfortable distinctions between biology and machinery, our expectations of mechanical forms with implicitly clear functions, and with a creature that threatened us from without and from within." For better or worse, the dark, menacing, and erotic biomechanical combination of "circuitry and slime" became the default sensibility in films such as Saturn 3 (1980), Scared to Death (1981), Galaxy of Terror (1981), Lifeforce (1985), and the 1986 version of Invaders from Mars, among many others.

In the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin called Alien "preposterously scary and surpassingly well-done" and wrote that "not a frame... is flat or casual or perfunctory." Champlin also praised the production design and effects, concluding that "the effects are more persuasively out of this world than any I can remember. The sense of otherness – the sense that this planet, this thing, this alien wreck of a ship derive from no previous models – is very strong. What good is a fantasy that isn't fantastic? Eerie, this one is." On the other hand, Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, does not feel the film is different looking; he writes, "Alien is an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production... It's an old-fashioned scare movie about something that is not only implacably evil but prone to jumping out at you when (the movie hopes) you least expect it. There was once a time when this sort of thing was set in an old dark house, on a moor, in a thunderstorm. Being trendy, Mr. Scott and his associates have sent it up in space."

Even though Alien was a violent, bloody film with a hard "R" rating, Twentieth Century Fox did not hesitate to license the film out for a number of commercial products and toys. (At the time, Fox's Star Wars had been in almost perpetual release for two years and was still enjoying huge merchandising sales). There were Alien books, records, shirts, iron-ons, puzzles, games, bubble-gum cards, a "Blaster Target Set," and most notoriously, a large 18-inch Alien Action Figure. The Alien Action Figure boasted "mechanically operated jaws" (as in the movie, a teeth-bearing tongue extended from the mouth) and "spring loaded arms to crush its victims!" Although commonplace today, this was the first kid's toy marketed from an R-rated film, and it garnered some controversy at the time.

Alien was a natural for a sequel, and seven years later Fox released Aliens (1986), written and directed by James Cameron. This film wisely did not try to duplicate the deliberate horror-suspense mood of Ridley Scott's effort; instead, Cameron presented a non-stop action picture and cleverly expanded on the Alien life cycle.

Producer: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill
Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon (screenplay and story); Ronald Shusett (story)
Cinematography: Derek Vanlint
Art Direction: Roger Christian, Les Dilley
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Film Editing: Terry Rawlings, Peter Weatherley; David Crowther (director's cut)
Cast: Tom Skerritt (Dallas), Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), Veronica Cartwright (Lambert), Harry Dean Stanton (Brett), John Hurt (Kane), Ian Holm (Ash), Yaphet Kotto (Parker), Bolaji Badejo (Alien)
C-117m. Letterboxed.

by John M. Miller

SOURCES:
The Book of ALIEN, Paul Scanlon and Michael Gross, 1979, Simon and Schuster.
"Making ALIEN: Behind the Scenes" by Mark Patrick Carducci and Glenn Lovell, Cinefantastique Magazine, Volume 9 Number 1, 1979.
"Giger: Sliming Technology" by Brooks Landon, Cinefantastique Magazine, Volume 18 Number 4, 1988.