TCM Schedule for Thursday, July 3 -- Girl Crazy!

[Staph]

A biblical day (Samson and Delilah and Solomon and Sheba - a sort of early day Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice) and a glorious night with two of my personal favorites -- Sabrina (the 1954 version) and Tom Jones. Enjoy!


5:40am -- Short Film: Larry Clinton and Orchestra with Carol Bruce (1938)
In this short, Larry Clinton and his orchestra bring in two guest performers.
Cast: Larry Clinton, Carol Bruce.
Dir: Lloyd French.
BW-10 mins

Larry Clinton, "The Old Dipsy Doodler", was a musician who played trumpet, trombone and clarinet, arranged and wrote music, and served as the leader of his own dance band.


6:00am -- Action In Arabia (1944)
An adventurous reporter tangles with Nazis in the desert on the eve of World War II.
Cast: George Sanders, Virginia Bruce, Lenore Aubert.
Dir: Leonide Moguy.
BW-75 mins, TV-PG

Desert footage was shot by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack in 1937 for an unmade film.


7:15am -- Samson and Delilah (1949)
Epic re-telling of the story of the Biblical strongman laid low by love.
Cast: Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, Angela Lansbury.
Dir: Cecil B. DeMille.
C-128 mins, TV-PG

At the premiere, Cecil B. DeMille asked Groucho Marx what he thought of the film. Groucho replied, "Well, there's just one problem, C.B. No picture can hold my interest where the leading man's tits are bigger than the leading lady's." DeMille was not amused, but Mature supposedly was.


9:30am -- Assignment - Paris (1952)
An international correspondent digs up evidence of a Communist conspiracy.
Cast: Dana Andrews, Marta Toren, George Sanders.
Dir: Robert Parris.
BW-84 mins, TV-G

Leon Askin's first film -- he's better known as General Burkhalter in the television series Hogan's Heroes.


11:00am -- Witness To Murder (1954)
A woman fights to convince the police that she witnessed a murder.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders, Gary Merrill.
Dir: Roy Rowland.
BW-82 mins, TV-PG

When the police confront Cheryl Draper with the second letter she supposedly typed (with her typewriter present, to prove it matches), it isn't in the typeface of the letter we saw Richter retype on her typewriter, but in the quite different typeface of his original typing.


12:30pm -- The Whole Truth (1958)
A woman tries to prove her cheating husband didn't murder his mistress.
Cast: Stewart Granger, Donna Reed, George Sanders.
Dir: Dan Cohen, John Guillerman.
BW-84 mins, TV-PG

Stewart Granger was born James Stewart, but changed his name for the movies to avoid being mistaken for Jimmy Stewart.


2:00pm -- Solomon And Sheba (1959)
Epic tale of the Biblical king's seduction by a pagan queen.
Cast: Yul Brynner, Gina Lollobrigida, George Sanders.
Dir: King Vidor.
C-141 mins, TV-14

Co-producer/star Tyrone Power had completed shooting more than half of the film when he collapsed during a dueling scene with George Sanders and died a few minutes later. Power was replaced in the role of Solomon by Yul Brynner, who refilmed all of Power's scenes. Power, however, is still visible in the film in long shots.


4:30pm -- Dark Purpose (1964)
An American tourist falls in love with an Italian count who harbors a deadly secret.
Cast: Shirley Jones, George Sanders, Rossano Brazzi.
Dir: George Marshall, Vittorio Sala.
C-97 mins, TV-PG

Also known as L'Intrigo.


6:15pm -- Good Times (1967)
Singers Sonny and Cher try to find the perfect script for their movie debut.
Cast: Sonny Bono, Cher, George Sanders.
Dir: William Friedkin.
C-92 mins, TV-PG

This was the first feature film for director William Friedkin and the first starring role for Sonny Bono and Cher.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: GIRL CRAZY


8:00pm -- Sabrina (1954)
Two wealthy brothers fall for the chauffeur's daughter.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden.
Dir: Billy Wilder.
BW-114 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White -- Edith Head

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Audrey Hepburn, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- Hal Pereira, Walter H. Tyler, Sam Comer and Ray Moyer, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Charles Lang, Best Director -- Billy Wilder, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Billy Wilder, Samuel A. Taylor and Ernest Lehman

Although Edith Head won an Oscar for costume design, most of Audrey Hepburn's wardrobe was by Hubert de Givenchy. In fact, Hepburn chose her own clothes to wear from de Givenchy's collection. This was her first time working with the French designer, and he would become her costumer of choice for most of her career.


10:00pm -- Tom Jones (1963)
In this adaptation of Henry Fielding's novel, a country boy in 18th-century England becomes a playboy.
Cast: Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith.
Dir: Tony Richardson.
C-122 mins, TV-14

Won Oscars for Best Director -- Tony Richardson (Tony Richardson was not present at the awards ceremony. Edith Evans accepted the award on his behalf.), Best Music, Score - Substantially Original -- John Addison (John Addison was not present at the awards ceremony. Elmer Bernstein accepted the award on his behalf.), Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- John Osborne, and Best Picture -- Tony Richardson (Tony Richardson was not present at the awards ceremony. David V. Picker accepted the award on his behalf.)

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Albert Finney, Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Hugh Griffith, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Diane Cilento, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Edith Evans, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Joyce Redman, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color -- Ralph W. Brinton, Ted Marshall, Jocelyn Herbert and Josie MacAvin

Hugh Griffith was reportedly drunk through much of the production; the scene in which his horse falls on him was not planned, and many believed he was saved by virtue of his inebriated condition. The film incorporated every frame of footage before rescuers entered the frame to save him.


12:15am -- What's New, Pussycat? (1965)
A fashion editor seeks psychiatric help when he can't stop beautiful women from pursuing him.
Cast: Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen.
Dir: Clive Donner.
C-109 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song -- Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (lyrics) for the song "What's New, Pussycat?"

The movie began as a semi-autobiographical project for Warren Beatty with Woody Allen writing the screenplay. Eventually Beatty's role became smaller than originally intended and producer Charles Feldman ignored his request to cast his then-girlfriend Leslie Caron instead of Capucine. Beatty then left the project and his role was taken by Peter O'Toole.


2:15am -- Shampoo (1975)
A hairdresser expresses his fear of commitment by seducing his female clients.
Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn.
Dir: Hal Ashby.
C-110 mins, TV-MA

Won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Lee Grant

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Jack Warden, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Richard Sylbert, W. Stewart Campbell and George Gaines, and Best Writing, Original Screenplay -- Robert Towne and Warren Beatty

Carrie Fisher said she was cast in the role mainly through family connections. She said when Warren Beatty ran lines with her, he did it while eating. She said the whole thing for her was a lark. She also admitted years later in an article she wrote for Rolling Stone magazine that star Beatty unsuccessfully propositioned her.


4:15am -- What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
Woody Allen dubbed in comic dialogue for this outrageous spoof of secret-agent thrillers.
Cast: Voices of Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Mickey Rose.
Dir: Woody Allen.
C-80 mins, TV-PG

Woody Allen and a group of friends only did 60 minutes of dialogue for the movie. An additional 19 minutes was recorded using an actor mimicking Allen, plus footage of The Lovin' Spoonful. These additions were made without Allen's consultation.

[Staph]

1. Tom Jones (1963)

A lusty historical romp with a cheeky sense of humor and a rollicking energy, Tom Jones (1963) was at once a dramatic and a comic change of direction for director Tony Richardson, a serious young British director and producer and a leader in the "kitchen sink" movement of social realist films. Henry Fielding's 18th century novel "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" is a sprawling satire of high and low society as seen through the adventures of a bastard infant, adopted and raised by a kind and just country squire, and a parody of romantic conventions and epic storytelling with elements of both wry wit and broad burlesque. Richardson's film necessarily cut the 1,000-page novel down to a manageable size but otherwise is true to the tale of the young man sent from his home into the big city of London while pursuing the love of his life. What surprised audiences was the wicked sensibility. Richardson's Tom Jones is no dutifully reverent incarnation of a British classic but a liberating translation of a comic masterpiece with a modern sensibility and a style inspired by the freedoms of New Wave filmmaking.

The story of "Tom Jones, of whom the opinion of all was that he was born to be hanged," begins with the foundling discovered by Squire Allworthy (George Devine) in a scene played like a silent slapstick comedy and accompanied by a bouncy spinet accompaniment (which continues throughout John Addison's playful, Oscar®-winning score). Rising star Albert Finney plays the adult incarnation of the "incorrigible hero" who would rather hunt than study and dally with the "disreputable" peasant girl Molly (Diane Cilento) than just about anything else. Yet his devotion to his adoptive father is sincere and unflagging and his affection for his lovely neighbor Sophie Western (Susannah York, with a sunny smile and a playful spirit) never waivers, even if he never manages to steer clear of other women in the interim. But it's the conniving lies of his hypocritical cousin, Blifil (David Warner in his film debut), a stiff, sour-faced man who schemes behind a show of piety and enlists the household's two tutors in his campaign to discredit Tom, that finally banishes our lively hero from his country manor home and sends him on the road to London, where many more adventures await.

"Heroes, whatever high ideals we may have of them, are mortal, not divine," our narrator (Micheál MacLiammóir) reminds us. "We are as God made us, and many of us much worse." Tom drinks, carouses and duels. He's as quick to save a woman's honor as he is to take it, with her consent and collaboration, of course, and his weakness for the ladies lands him into more scrapes and scandals than Casanova. Finney plays Tom as a rascal, to be sure, but also a kind soul and a brave man and his rakish good looks and devilish smile make him more earthy and errant than immoral or uncaring.

Richardson directs it all as a rollicking romp full of comic escapades. A country stag hunt has all the dignity of a bacchanal, with riders mercilessly drawing blood as they spur their horses on (don't worry, it's fake), tumbling over in drunken sloppiness and leaving a wake of destruction behind. A "dinner date" with one Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman) at a roadside inn turns eating into a sexual invitation, sucking the meat from lobster shells, slurping fowl lasciviously from bones, devouring fruit like it was the food of love, all the while flirting through mouthfuls and making come-hither eyes over the dishes. This display of lusty appetites, which film critic Arthur Knight called "the funniest and lewdest eating scene ever set to celluloid," is accomplished with nary a hint of nudity or even physical contact. The collision of characters later that evening becomes a bedroom farce filmed to give the actors the accelerated movement of a Keystone Kops comedy. And at any given moment, Tom and other characters may turn to the camera for a cheeky aside, a winking look of conspiratorial indulgence, or even a small speech to the audience to set the record straight.

Tom Jones was the biggest project to date for Richardson, both financially and physically. His previous features – Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and A Taste of Honey (1961) - were contemporary black and white productions set in the dreary realities of working class life. This big period production, shot in color, called for costumes and wigs, props and set dressing, numerous locations and a sprawling cast. There were horses and hounds to hire for the hunt scene, city streets and extras to dress, manor houses to find. Unable to finance it completely through Woodfall, his own production company, he turned to Hollywood and found a willing investor in United Artists, but he maintained control himself. He asked the acclaimed playwright John Osborne, who adapted his plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer for Richardson's film versions, to adapt Tom Jones for the screen. It was "as near as John and I got to collaborating successfully on film," according to Richardson in his autobiography, "The Long Distance Runner." He loved the wit that Osborne brought to the script, but Osborne was resistant to do rewrites and Richardson was forced to rework the screenplay himself through pre-production and even during shooting.

Albert Finney had made his screen debut in The Entertainer and became a leading man in the Richardson-produced Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Richardson thought the part was ideal for the rising star but "Albie didn't like the role," wrote Richardson. "He complained, sulked, and created scenes, and only fitfully… did he display the kind of buoyancy of temperament that his characterization so effectively portrayed on screen." For Squire Western, Sophie's heartily uncouth father, he cast Hugh Griffith: "unique, original, and Welsh." Western lives to hunt and to wench with red faced, wild-eyed bluster, which only becomes wilder when he discovers that Tom, his favorite hunting partner, is the object of his daughter's affections. "Part drunk, part amateur, wholly child, Hugh lives the part of Squire Western in real life," wrote Richardson. He recalls that Griffith was drunk through much of the film, and a terror with the whip that his character carried, mercilessly snapping at other actors until Finney hit back and punched him in the face.

In his autobiography, Richardson confesses that "I felt the movie too incomplete and botched in much of the execution" (in 1989 he trimmed the film by seven minutes for a re-release). United Artists thought the finished cut was a disaster, the London reviews were scathing and purists were appalled at the liberties taken with the literary classic. Yet Tom Jones became a popular box office hit, making an estimated $40 million (in 1963 dollars) on a budget of around $1 million, and won four Academy Awards out of ten nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. (As a side note, the success of the film turned Henry Fielding's novel into a bestseller more than two centuries after it was first published.) Tom Jones was fresh and facetious and young, reinvigorating an 18th century work for a new generation and making the classic swing with a modern sensibility. While it may not feel quite so modern more than forty years after its first release, its cheek and energy are just as entertaining.

Producer: Tony Richardson
Director: Tony Richardson
Screenplay: John Osborne; Henry Fielding (novel)
Cinematography: Walter Lassally
Art Direction: Ted Marshall
Music: John Addison
Film Editing: Antony Gibbs
Cast: Albert Finney (Tom Jones), Susannah York (Sophie Western), Hugh Griffith (Squire Western), Edith Evans (Miss Western), Joan Greenwood (Lady Bellaston), Diane Cilento (Molly Seagrim), George Devine (Squire Allworthy), David Tomlinson (Lord Fellamar)
C-122m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Sean Axmaker

[Matilda]

2. Love this film!

Or should I use the past tense, since it hasn't been shown here since some time in the eighties. I
fell instantly in love with Albert Finney as soon as I set eyes on him, for all that he hated doing
the film. It was excellent casting all round, and very well produced. It was not only very funny,
but also showed us quite graphically the seamy side of life at that time, with all its dirt and
squalor.

This would be a good film to add to the other thread on films that should be on DVD - according to
contributors to IMDb, it has been released, but the quality is dreadful. Obviously hasn't been
remastered; so hard to believe they'd treat such a successful film that way.

If anyone watches it, I'd be interested to know what you think of the quality of the film, because
if they ever release a good remastered version, I'd buy it.