TCM Schedule for Monday, May 19 -- TCM GUEST PROGRAMMER: TIM ROTH

[Longhorn]

4:15am Double Dynamite (1951)
A bank teller reaps the rewards of saving a gangster's life, but can't reveal where he got the money.
Cast: Frank Sinatra, Jane Russell, Groucho Marx. Dir: Irving Cummings. BW-81 mins, TV-G

6:15am Gang War (1940)
Rival racketeers fight to control the juke-box business in Harlem.
Cast: Ralph Cooper, Gladys Snyder, Reginald Federson. Dir: Leo C. Popkin. BW-62 mins, TV-PG

7:30am Here Comes the Navy (1934)
A cocky naval cadet clashes with an old friend serving with him.
Cast: James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Dorothy Tree. Dir: Lloyd Bacon. BW-87 mins, TV-PG

9:00am Here Comes The Band (1935)
A songwriters takes on the corrupt publisher who stole his music.
Cast: Virginia Bruce, Harry Stockwell, Billy Gilbert. Dir: Paul Sloane. BW-86 mins, TV-G

10:30am Here Comes Carter (1936)
A radio commentator avenges an old wrong by blowing the whistle on Hollywood scandals.
Cast: Ross Alexander, Glenda Farrell, Anne Nagel. Dir: William Clemens. BW-58 mins, TV-G

11:30am Here Comes Happiness (1941)
An heiress ditches her fortune-hunting fiance to find happiness living on her own.
Cast: Mildred Coles, Edward Norris, Russell Hicks. Dir: Noel Smith. BW-58 mins, TV-G

12:30pm Here Comes Trouble (1948)
A newspaper publisher and his ace reporter try to solve the murder of a blackmailing stripper.
Cast: Bill Tracy, Joe Sawyer, Betty Compson. Dir: Fred Guiol. BW-54 mins, TV-G

1:30pm Here Comes Kelly (1943)
A hot-tempered young process server gets mixed up with gangsters.
Cast: Eddie Quillan, Joan Woodbury, Max 'Slapsie Maxie' Rosenbloom. Dir: William Beaudine. BW-64 mins, TV-G

2:45pm There Goes Kelly (1945)
A radio station page tries to solve a singer's murder.
Cast: Jackie Moran, Wanda McKay, Sidney Miller. Dir: Phil Karlson. BW-59 mins, TV-G

4:00pm There Goes My Girl (1937)
A newspaper editor tries to stop his star reporter from marrying.
Cast: Gene Raymond, Ann Sothern, Gordon Jones. Dir: Ben Holmes. BW-74 mins, TV-G

5:15pm There Goes My Heart (1938)
An heiress takes a job as a department store clerk.
Cast: Fredric March, Virginia Bruce, Patsy Kelly. Dir: Norman Z. McLeod. BW-83 mins, TV-G

6:45pm There Goes the Groom (1937)
A young man strikes it rich in the Alaskan gold mines, then faces romantic complications when he returns home.
Cast: Ann Sothern, Burgess Meredith, Mary Boland. Dir: Joseph Santley. BW-65 mins, TV-G

What's On Tonight: TCM GUEST PROGRAMMER: TIM ROTH

8:00pm Hobson's Choice (1954)
A widower father fights to control the lives of his three strong-willed daughters.
Cast: Charles Laughton, John Mills, Brenda De Banzie. Dir: David Lean. BW-108 mins, TV-G

10:00pm Brief Encounter (1945)
Two married strangers meet in a train station and fall in love.
Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway. Dir: David Lean. BW-86 mins, TV-PG

11:30pm Roman Holiday (1953)
A runaway princess in Rome finds love with a reporter who knows her true identity.
Cast: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert. Dir: William Wyler. BW-118 mins, TV-G

1:30am Cathy Come Home (1966)
A family must rely on the British welfare system when they become homeless.
Cast: Carol White, Ray Brooks, Winifred Dennis. Dir: Ken Loach. BW-77 mins, TV-PG

3:00am This Sporting Life (1963)
A rugby player finds the violence in his professional life tainting his personal relationships.
Cast: Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts, Alan Badel. Dir: Lindsay Anderson. BW-134 mins, TV-MA

5:30am Festival of Shorts #23 (1999)
TCM promotes two 10-minute shorts from 1950 entitled "Screen Actors" and "Moments in Music". This series spotlighted the various arts, crafts, and sciences employed in the making of a motion picture.
BW-21 mins

[Longhorn]

1. Hobson's Choice (1954)

A "Hobson's choice" is a 17th century expression that means the illusion of choice where there really is no alternative. It's made for an apt title for Harold Brighouse's 1915 play, a domestic comedy set in the north of England in the late Victorian era, though it's not apparent until the story winds its way to its third act. The play, beloved in England and regularly revived, had been adapted to the screen twice, in 1920 as a silent film directed by Percy Nash and as an early talkie by Thomas Bentley in 1931, before David Lean released his definitive version in 1954.

Hobson's Choice (1954) opens with the seriousness of a drama, with the camera quietly taking inventory of a quaint 19th century boot shop on a rainy night. The stillness shattered by the sound thump and a whip pan to the skylight, where a branch is thrashing in the wind. A dark shape casts a shadow on the shop door. It's a moment right out of Lean's Great Expectations (1946), until that shape belches and stumbles drunkenly through the door, loudly slurring his protestations as his daughter tries to whisk him off to bed. The entire tone of the film is set in that reversal of expectations.

Charles Laughton stars as the blustery Henry Hobson, a widower with a thriving business in boots and shoes and three daughters who work his shop without wages. Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales) are young, pretty, empty-headed things with flirtatious natures who are actively courted by the sons of local businessmen. Maggie (Brenda De Banzie), the eldest, runs the shop and the home with hardheaded practicality. When Hobson dismisses Maggie's desire for a husband, branding her an old maid (at the age of thirty) and sentencing her to a life looking after him and running his shop, she rebels against his blithe tyranny and takes her future into her own hands. She sets out to remake her life and embark on her own business, one in direct competition to her father's boot shop. She also lets no man dissuade her otherwise, neither her father or the timorous Willie Mossop (John Mills), the shop's brilliant boot-maker and partner in her plan, whether he knows it or not. "My brains and your talent will make a working partnership," she promises, and proceeds to build his confidence, draw out his potential, and inspire his ambition. Along the way, she finds his way into his affections and reveals her own, and in the final act, offers Henry Hobson the "Hobson choice" that gives the film its title.

Alexander Korda had been approached by the screenwriting team, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who were developing a screen adaptation for a radio comic but had different ideas. So did Korda, who bought the screen rights from under them and offered the project to David Lean, whose career was riding high but had previously directed only a single comedy, Blithe Spirit (1945). Lean saw the opportunity as a great change of pace, a miniature next to the big canvas of his previous film, The Sound Barrier (1952, aka Breaking the Sound Barrier). He started his adaptation from scratch with his associate producer and longtime production manager Norman Spencer. Wynyard Browne, a nom-de-theatre for a husband-and-wife team of playwrights brought in at the beginning of the writing process, share screen credit but left the project after only a few meetings. They weren't needed, as it turned out. "There was a tight little play with everything there," Spencer explained to Lean biographer Kevin Brownlow.

Lean had Roger Livesey in mind for the showcase role of Henry Hobson. Spencer pushed for Charles Laughton. Korda, who had worked with Laughton on The Private Life of Henry VIII (1934) and Rembrandt (1936), as well as the ill-fated and never completed I, Claudius, knew that Laughton could be difficult and obsessive, but realized he would be perfect for the outsized character and told the actor that the part had been written for him. Laughton got on famously with Lean, often socializing with the director after hours, and he has cited the role of Hobson as one of his favorite screen performances, but he was otherwise unhappy during the production. Robert Donat was originally cast in the role of boot-maker Willie Mossop but was in ill health and forced to drop out. Laughton threw a fit, claiming he had only agreed to the film to work with his old friend and that the production was thus in breach of contract. Korda countered by threatening Laughton with a scandal, which could reveal the actor's well-concealed private life (he was homosexual, which was illegal in England). Laughton returned to the set but remained frustrated. He didn’t like his accommodations, was unhappy with playing so many drunk scenes and he loathed his co-star, Brenda De Banzie, a stage actress with only a few films to her credit.

She proved to be a difficult actress in her own right, tangling with the director on the set, and Laughton complained to Lean that: "She doesn't understand the part in the least." On the other hand, David Lean biographer Gene D. Philips suggests that Laughton's dislike was, at least in part, a result of her sharp performance. Brighouse's play is set in the era of the first stirrings of the Suffragist movement and the adaptation keeps the dramatic focus on Maggie's brazen odyssey. Whether or not you see Maggie as an early feminist (as Lean biographer Gene D. Philips suggests), she is a driven, determined, talented woman who defies her ne'er do well father and his patronizing arrogance, as well as prejudices of class and privilege. Though third billed to the male stars, Maggie is the story's engine and the most dynamic character in the film, and De Banzie threatened to upstage the grand theatrical ham, playing her scenes crisply and with elan as he huffed away with indignation at the disrespect served up by his daughters and blustered in his cups at the local pub. She went on to play such major roles as the ambiguous Lucy Drayton in the 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much and Laurence Olivier's wife in The Entertainer (1960), but never really became a leading screen actress.

John Mills, so marvelous in Lean's Great Expectations eight years earlier, was the last-minute replacement for Donat in the role of Willie. The 45-year-old Mills, whose career had shifted from romantic leads to heroic leaders, was initially uncertain about taking the role of a shy, passive, working class bloke, but delivers a marvelously attenuated comic performance as the timorous Willie, a man who has aged into a sense of inferiority that Maggie has to literally drive out of him. And if Prunella Scales (as the youngest of the Hobson sisters) looks familiar, it might be for a role she played decades later: John Cleese's tart-tongued wife in the cult TV comedy Fawlty Towers.

Lean creates a vivid sense of place and atmosphere and fills it with a colorful cast of Dickensian folk. This is no picaresque cobblestone and quaint storefront recreation of an idealized past, but a ruddy industrial town where a walk in the park ends by a river scummy with pollution and lined with acres of industrial plants sprouting smokestacks into the sky. Many of the exteriors were shot on location in Salford, including the couple's first attempted kiss, a sweetly romantic moment played against a squalid slum, and the canal scene (which Lean and company proceeded to pollute with rubbish and detergent powder when they discovered the town had cleaned it up for the shooting). Jack Hildyard's rich photography manages to make even this squalor look stunning.

The rest was built in the studio by Wilfred Shingleton. His delightfully detailed sets include not just the cramped quarters filled with evocative décor (from the cozy but overstuffed quarters in back of Hobson's shop to the dank, dark basement apartment and shop of Maggie and Willie) but the central cobblestone lane where the film's signature set piece, The Dance of the Puddles, takes place. On a stumbling walk home from Moonrakers, Hobson "chases" the moon from puddle to puddle on the wet cobblestone street, trying to catch the reflection that keeps outrunning him (the effect was accomplished with a simple backlit drawing on opaque paper suspended above the set). As he steps into one puddle, the ripples subside to reveal not the moon but his own bleary pumpkin face staring back. The scene ends with Hobson battling the chains around an open chute in the sidewalk that drops into a deep storage cellar. It's a deft piece of physical comedy, like a Charlie Chaplin silent movie pantomime, thanks to the assistance of Billy Russell, an old music hall clown who Laughton insisted on hiring to help choreograph and rehearse the scene.

Hobson's Choice is a crisply directed comedy of lively and quirky characters in a vivid world of social snobbery and working-class life, but for all the deftly-played humor, it's Lean's warmth that makes the film so satisfying. A hit in England and a modest box-office success in the United States, the film went on to win the Golden Bear at the 1954 Berlin Film Festival and BAFTA for Best British Film.

Producer: David Lean
Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Wynyard Browne, David Lean, Norman Spencer; Harold Brighouse (play)
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard
Art Direction: Wilfred Shingleton
Music: Malcolm Arnold
Film Editing: Peter Taylor
Cast: Charles Laughton (Henry Horatio Hobson), John Mills (Willie Mossop), Brenda De Banzie (Maggie Hobson), Daphne Anderson (Alice Hobson), Prunella Scales (Vicky Hobson), Richard Wattis (Albert Prosser), Derek Blomfield (Freddy Beenstock)
BW-107m.

by Sean Axmaker

[lavenderdiva]

2. I just set my DVR to record this.....

Thank you for sharing the background on 'Hobson's Choice'. I have never seen it before. I am a HUGE fan of David Lean films, and also love John Mills, so I'm sure I'll enjoy this one!

[CBHagman]

3. "Hobson's Choice" deserves to be better-known.

One of my best friends at university was a theater major and attended film courses. One of her professors had a educational television series on film, and Hobson's Choice was one of the movies he aired and analyzed.

It boggles my mind to hear that Robert Donat was considered for the role of William Mossop. The great John Mills simply owns that part, in my mind, and you simply have to see him in action (in inaction, in some cases). He has some crucial scenes with Brenda De Banzie that -- well, I'm not going to spoil the surprise. Just see the movie.

De Banzie is brilliant as well, and her Maggie at first appears to be all steel spine but turns out to have some unexpected tenderness and a well-thought-out attitude of humility. It's a great cast all around but wouldn't be the same without the three leads.

"By gum!"