April 1 is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Lon Chaney (Sr.), who died tragically young in 1930. TCM will be spending much of Monday morning and afternoon with him, in such pictures as The Monster, at 9:15 AM. In this one, Chaney plays a doctor at an insane asylum who is obviously hiding some secrets. But more about him later. The movie starts with the normals, including a clerk-turned amateur sleuth (Johnny Arthur) vying for a woman's affection with one of his co-workers. That sleuthing becomes necessary when there's a car accident, and the driver of the car has gone missing. Johnny investigates, and it's that investigation that winds him up in the asylum. The problem is that for the longest time the movie doesn't know whether it wants to focus on Arthur's life in the small town, or on Chaney and the sanitarium, with the result that both get shortchanged in an otherwise interesting film.
It's often said that the first talking picture was The Jazz Singer, but that's untrue. There were experiments in sound on film before that, and the first commercial feature film with synchronized sound was Warner Bros.' Don Juan in 1926. That only had a synchronized score and sound effects, but when it was released, it was released along with several shorts, one of which had Will Hays talking, and a couple of which had people singing. One of those shorts, of an orchestra playing the overture to Richard Wagner's opera "Tannhäuser", will be airing at about 4:49 PM Monday.
Monday is apparently the first day of another boring baseball season. (As I understand it, Ryan Braun hasn't failed a drug test yet, and I'm sure when that happens it will make the Brewers board liven up.) TCM is marking the occasion with a number of baseball movies in prime time, including the short Opening Day at 12:40 AM Tuesday. In this one-reeler, Robert Benchley plays the city treasurer of a city that's just built a new baseball stadium. The mayor is supposed to throw out the first pitch, but the mayor is on vacation, so the duty falls on Benchley. Benchley, using his usual dry humor, manages to turn the event into a major chore, especially because it seems as if he knows nothing about baseball. Benchley's humor can be a bit tedious, but that's something that works here, as you can just imagine the crowd wanted Benchley to just throw the damn ball.
One of those Fox movies I haven't been able to recommend in years since it hasn't been on TV is The Laughing Policeman. Quite the misnomer since this isn't a comedy, the movie stars Walter Matthau as a San Francisco policeman. Somebody gets on a city bus, and proceeds to murder several of the passengers. One of those passengers just happened to be Matthau's (now former) police partner, so that makes the investigation all the more personal. Why was this policeman on the bus at such a strange hour, and who would commit such a crime? The movie goes through the seedy underworld of San Francisco as it was in the early 1970s, which provides some excellent atmosphere. Bruce Dern plays Matthau's new police partner, with a young Louis Gossett playing a fellow police detective. A warning: the movie has a lot of bad language. For example, when they see a suspect going into a popular gay locale, one of the cops refers to him as a "closet fruiter".
Tuesday night brings this month's TCM Guest Programmer: former basketball player turned analyst Reggie Miller. He's selected four films that are reasonably well-known, but they're more or less all worth watching again.
First up, at 8:00 PM, is Strangers on a Train, in which Robert Walker suggests getting rid of Farley Granger's problem wife in exchange for Granger getting rid of Walker's problem mother.
That's followed at 10:00 PM by chain gang member Paul Newman eating a bunch of hard boiled eggs in Cool Hand Luke.
Dustin Hoffman meets cougar Anne Bancroft before such women were called cougars in The Graduate, at 12:15 AM Wednesday; and
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn find that their daughter is going to marry a black man in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner at 2:15 AM Wednesday.
Wednesday is the birth anniversary of two relatively big Hollywood names: Doris Day (still alive and turning 91 if she doesn't die before Wednesday) and Marlon Brando (1924-2004). TCM is honoring both of them, with Day's movies coming up first, with the last of her films showing on Wednesday being Calamity Jane, at 12:15 PM. In Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, Jane (Day, of course) is a tough as the guys woman living on the frontier who's just as good with a gun as they are. She meets Wild Bill Hickok (Howard Keel), who's probably in love with her, although she's in love with a cavalryman (Philip Carey). One day the saloon owner tries to put an actress on stage to perform a show for the love-starved men, but there's a problem when the actress is actually a man in drag. So Calamity Jane goes off to Chicago to get a real actress, the best there is. If you like Doris Day's singing, you'll probably love this movie. If not, it might not be the movie for you.
The new TCM Star of the Month for April is Laurence Olivier, with TCM putting the spotlight on Olivier every Wednesday this month. Olivier was one of the great Shakespearean actors on stage, and indeed made several movies out of Shakespeare's plays. On this first Wednesday in April, TCM will be showing those Olivier movies based on the Bard's plays.
First up at 8:00 PM is Henry V, about the free-range a-hole who led England during part of the Hundred Years' War and the Battle of Agincourt. The movie was filmed in the British Isles during World War II, using every available bit of color film stock, and it's quite the achievement that the movie was made at all.
At 10:30 PM is Hamlet, which won Olivier a Best Actor Oscar for playing the Danish royal avengind his father's death.
That's followed at 1:00 AM Thursday by Richard III, about the mad King of England with a hunched back.
Finally, at 4:00 AM Thursday is Othello.
Another movie returning to the Fox Movie Channel for the first time in a while is Way... Way Out, which will be on at 3:00 AM Friday and repeated at 1:00 PM Friday. Jerry Lewis stars as an astronaut about to be sent to the USA's base on the moon. There's a problem though, which is that all the men the US has been sending have been sex-starved, which is a problem. So they've decided to send a married couple, which requires them to marry off Lewis to Connie Stevens in a marriage of convenience. The US base is very close to the Soviet base, and the Soviets don't care whether their cosmonauts are married. They've sent up Dick Shawn and Anita Ekberg. The cosmonauts seem perfectly willing, in the interest of friendly relations between the US and USSR, to be more than friendly with our American astronauts.... Oh, it's dated, but the stuff actually done back in the 60s is more interesting than the modern day revisionist look at the 60s.
This Friday sees the first in a new programming theme. Fridays will be having guest hosts, and this month that guest host is Cher, who will be presenting a series of Fridays looking at strong women in the movies. This first Friday in April looks at women as mothers, starting with Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce at 8:00 PM.
That's followed by Barbara Stanwyck sacrificing everything for her daughter as Stella Dallas, at 10:00 PM;
Irene Dunne and Cary Grant adopting a child in Penny Serenade at midnight Saturday (ie. 11:00 PM Friday LFT); and
Ginger Rogers having motherhood thrust upon her when she gets a foundling in the delightful comedy Bachelor Mother at 2:15 AM Saturday.
The new Friday night spotlights mean that TCM Underground is moving, over to the overnight between Saturday and Sunday. So, if you miss your fix of quirky cult movies, you'll only have to wait one extra day. This first week of April brings the documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story at 2:00 AM Sunday. I think I've mentioned this one before. William Castle was a master of low-budget schlock who used various gimmicks to try to enhance the moviegoing experience. Notable among these might be the 1959 movie The Tingler, for which he had some seats in the movie theaters fitted with buzzers that at key points of the movie would give certain viewers a small electric shock, inducing them to scream, which of course was exactly what Castle wanted. Following the documentary is a movie directed by Castle, Macabre, at 3:30 AM. The plot of this one involves a doctor who has to find his kidnapped daughter, who has been buried alive.
Some of you may remember the early Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party, and may remember it more for the presence of Tawny Kitaen. Unfortunately, neither of them appear in the movie The Bachelor Party, which TCM is showing at 10:00 AM Sunday. This one was made back in 1957, and stars Don Murray as a young newlywed who's trying to be a good husband, but finds marriage isn't as easy as he thought. And then, his wife (Patricia Smith) suggests he go to a friend's bachelor party in Greenwich Village. It turns out that the groom-to-be isn't so sure about marriage, and the three married guys at the party are all questioning their marriages in one way or another. Meanwhile, Smith is visited by her sister-in-law, who is married to a doctor and reveals that her marriage isn't all it's been cracked up to be, either. Watch for a young Carolyn Jones as the woman hired for the bachelor party.