As TYG couldn’t attend the March Mensa gathering in Greenvile with me I spent time alone in my hotel room. That was fun—it’s not often I get to sit by myself free of pets—and it also led to me watching a lot of the Turner Classic channel when I was taking breaks from socializing (this is a repost from Atomic Junk Shop as last weekend’s con means I’m short of films to review).
I couldn’t resist tuning in, even knowing I wouldn’t be in the room long enough to finish anything. We don’t have cable at home — TYG cut the cord long before I moved up to join her in Durham — but back in Florida I loved TCM. Even though I have plenty of films available by streaming or my own DVDs, it was oddly cool to watch a film simply because it was on at that exact minute. Which is not to say the watching was always fun …
Case in point: I came in on the first film to find a family in a log cabin confronting a crisis. I had no idea what crisis at first but it turned out I’d tuned in The Yearling (1946) right before the boy protagonist has to shoot the injured deer he’s adopted as a pet. Aaaagh! I hate films and books where pet death, let alone killing your pet, becomes some kind of life lesson for children. But that’s the case here: at the end of the film, a relieved Gregory Peck tells his wife that their boy has grown — he’s no longer a yearling!
FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1950) was a lot more palatable, as witness I watched the whole thing after returning home. This stars Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as the parents who realize daughter Elizabeth Taylor is all grown up and in love; what follows is a low-key comedy of manners tackling such questions as whether Taylor’s in-laws will offend if they offer her parents a drink when they meet. Tracy shines as a guy struggling to adjust to the inconvenience of the wedding planning and to his shifting role in his daughter’s world. Some parts show their age — this was an era when marrying at 20 seemed perfectly normal — and Don Taylor as the bridegroom is too bland to match the rest of the cast.
Next up, 1936’s THE GREAT ZIEGFELD starring William Powell as the legendary showman and Broadway producer. I came in just as he’d resorted to some possibly illegal tricks to bring in a quartet of critics who think he’s lost his producing mojo. See any of his four current shows, he tells them, and they’ll change their minds.
After they leave Flo tells a friend it doesn’t matter what they think: he’s invested all his money in stocks bought on margin! When he cashes in, he’ll be so rich he’ll be on easy street! Why yes, the Black Friday crash of 1929 ruins him and he dies broken and penniless, little realizing how much joy his shows have brought to thousands. I might watch all of this sometimes, if only to see 1920s comedienne Fanny Brice (I’ve listened to some of Brice’s “Baby Snooks” radio routines and they’re hilarious).
After that I couldn’t bring myself to rewatch the 1931 tearjerker THE CHAMP with Wallace Beery as a drunken boxer struggling to take care of his kid. In case you’re wondering, this was 31 Days of Oscar month from TCM so naturally that includes a lot of tearjerking, tragedy and death.
Trying to find an alternative to The Champ reminded me not being bound by network schedules has its upside. While I knew the networks were no longer airing cartoons on Saturday morning, I didn’t realize it’s all news — specifically chatter about the Oscars. When I tried Cartoon Network, the channel glitched; SyFy was airing an infomercial.
CIMARRON (1931) did something none of the others did, push me to go online to read TCM’s schedule. I came in on a scene set apparently in an antebellum residence (judging by the faithful black servants) so I assumed it was some drama about the wonderful, nostalgic days of the old South when white men were men and the sheep were nervous. Nope, it turned out the home was just a launching pad for Richard Dix and Irene Dunne to head out west and homestead, accompanied by a goofy black kid servant providing not-aged-well comic relief.
All I knew about Cimarron before catching the piece of it that I did was that it was by Edna Ferber who also wrote Showboat (the online synopsis indicates it has some of the same marital tropes). Oh, and film historian Peter Stanfield cites it as the kind of serious Western like Stagecoach that critics love but did less box office and hit theaters much less frequently than the oft-disdained singing cowboy films of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.
In any case, I won’t be catching the rest of it. I’m not much of a Western fan and Dix’ Southern accent falls into what for me is the nails-on-a-chalkboard range.
Overall the weekend didn’t leave me missing TCM as much as I’d have expected. But it was still fun.
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