TCM Schedule for Wednesday, June 4 -- STAR OF THE MONTH: SOPHIA LOREN

[Longhorn]

4:45am Targets (1968)
An aging horror star and a psychotic veteran come face to face at the premiere of the star's most recent film.
Cast: Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff, Peter Bogdanovich. Dir: Peter Bogdanovich. C-90 mins, TV-PG

6:30am MGM Parade Show #7 (1955)
Ray Bolger performs in a clip from "The Great Ziegfeld"; Debbie Reynolds introduces a clip from "The Tender Trap." Hosted by George Murphy.
BW-26 mins, TV-G

7:00am They Won't Forget (1937)
Bigotry flares when a Jewish businessman is accused of killing a small-town girl in the South.
Cast: Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Allyn Joslyn. Dir: Mervyn LeRoy. BW-95 mins, TV-G

8:45am Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933)
A woman doctor decides to have a baby without benefit of marriage.
Cast: Kay Francis, Lyle Talbot, Glenda Farrell. Dir: Lloyd Bacon. BW-72 mins, TV-G

10:00am In a Lonely Place (1950)
An aspiring actress begins to suspect that her temperamental boyfriend is a murderer.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. Dir: Nicholas Ray. BW-93 mins, TV-PG

11:35am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Chimp, The (1932)
A jealous husband thinks two tenants sneaking a pet chimp into their apartment are carrying on with his wife.
Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Billy Gilbert. Dir: James Parrott. BW-25 mins

12:00pm Sabotage (1936)
An unhappily married woman discovers her husband is an enemy agent.
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oscar Homolka, John Loder. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-77 mins, TV-PG

1:23pm Short Film: From The Vaults: Action On The Beach (1964)
BW-6 mins

1:30pm Muscle Beach Party (1964)
The beach gang goes head-to-head with the bodybuilders of a new gym that's interfering with their strip on the sand.
Cast: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Luciana Paluzzi. Dir: William Asher. C-95 mins, TV-PG

3:11pm Short Film: From The Vaults: Sky Divers, The (1969)
C-15 mins

3:30pm Producers, The (1968)
A Broadway producer decides to get rich by creating the biggest flop of his career.
Cast: Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Kenneth Mars. Dir: Mel Brooks. C-90 mins, TV-14

5:00pm Role Model: Gene Wilder (2008)
Gene Wilder sits down with Alec Baldwin for an intimate conversation about Wilder's extensive career.
BW-59 mins, TV-14

6:00pm Talk Of The Town, The (1942)
An escaped political prisoner and a stuffy law professor vie for the hand of a spirited schoolteacher.
Cast: Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman. Dir: George Stevens. BW-117 mins, TV-G

What's On Tonight: STAR OF THE MONTH: SOPHIA LOREN

8:00pm Too Bad She's Bad (1954)
A taxi driver falls in love with the young thief who helped steal his cab.
Cast: Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni. Dir: Alessandro Blasetti. BW-95 mins, TV-PG

9:45pm Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963)
Three tales of very different women using their sexuality as a means to getting what they want.
Cast: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Aldo Giuffre. Dir: Vittorio De Sica. C-114 mins

12:00am Millionairess, The (1961)
When the world's richest woman falls for an ascetic Indian doctor, they plan a test to decide whose dreams will come true.
Cast: Sophia Loren, Peter Sellers, Alastair Sim. Dir: Anthony Asquith. C-86 mins, TV-PG

1:37am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Visiting Italy (1951)
A moving postcard of Italy showing Rome, Assisi, Florence, plus many other stunning sights.
C-7 mins

1:45am It Started In Naples (1960)
An American lawyer trying to settle his brother's affairs in Italy falls for one of the man's in-laws.
Cast: Clark Gable, Sophia Loren, Vittorio de Sica. Dir: Melville Shavelson. C-100 mins, TV-PG

3:30am Lady L (1965)
A beautiful laundress rises through European society.
Cast: Sophia Loren, Paul Newman, David Niven. Dir: Peter Ustinov. C-109 mins, TV-PG

[Longhorn]

1. They Won't Forget (1937)

They Won't Forget (1937) is widely regarded as the film that launched the career of Lana Turner. Prior to it, the teenaged Judy Turner had only appeared as an uncredited extra in a few films. Even though she is only onscreen for a few minutes, the newly renamed Lana Turner makes a lasting impression.

They Won't Forget is based on the Ward Greene novel, Death in the Deep South and Turner plays a southern schoolgirl named Mary Clay who is murdered on campus. The two main suspects are a black janitor and a northern teacher. The District Attorney (Claude Rains) decides it would be more of a challenge and a better boost for his political career to successfully convict the northern teacher, Robert Hale (Edward Norris). Local papers emphasize that the accused is from the north and before long everyone but his wife and mother believes he is guilty. So, based only on circumstantial evidence, the prejudiced jury convicts Hale and sentences him to death. The governor, however, recognizes the injustice and commutes his sentence to life in prison. But on the way to the jail, a lynch mob abducts Hale and dispenses its own form of justice. According to Variety, "The film pulls no punches, indicting lynch law and mob fury with scalpel-like precision...It pounds across a powerful story with a maximum of quiet dramatic impact."

Ward Greene based his novel on the notorious Leo Frank case. In 1913, Frank was accused of murdering thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan at a pencil factory in Atlanta. Frank, a northern Jew, was convicted on circumstantial evidence and then killed by a lynch mob. The incident sparked numerous books and movies.

Lana Turner's twelve minutes on screen in They Won't Forget caught the attention of film critics and moviegoers, mostly for the seventy-five foot tracking shot that follows her walking down the street wearing a tight sweater, skirt, and spiked heels. According to producer and director Mervyn LeRoy, "It was very important that the girl in our story have what they call 'flesh impact.' She had to make it look like it was a sex murder. You'll notice we never use the word 'rape' in the screenplay. We couldn't say things like that in those days. I figured that a tight sweater on a beautiful young girl would convey to the audience everything we couldn't say outright." Turner recalls going to the theater with her mother to see the film and being shocked at the way she looked on screen. In The Films of Lana Turner, the actress describes herself as an object in They Won't Forget, "She was enough to start a reaction leading up to a murder all right. But she certainly did not seem to be me." The whistles from the audience also surprised her. Turner states, "For quite a while I was ashamed to face people. I also found it embarrassing to turn my back on them."

Lana Turner may have felt like hiding, but critics knew she would be back. Kenneth McCaleb of the New York Daily Mirror wrote, "a girl named Lana Turner exits from the screen much too early to suit me; I want to see more of her and have no doubt that I shall, for she looks to me like a natural." Twenty years later when the film was reissued, Turner was billed as the main star.

Director/Producer: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Aben Kandel and Robert Rossen. Based on a novel by Ward Greene.
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art Direction: Robert Haas
Music: Adolph Deutsch
Cast: Claude Rains (District Attorney Andy Griffin), Gloria Dickson (Sybil Hale), Edward Norris (Robert Hale), Otto Kruger (Gleason), Allyn Joslyn (Bill Brock), Lana Turner (Mary Clay).
BW-96m. Closed captioning.

by Deborah Looney