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Staph

(6,245 posts)
Tue Sep 11, 2018, 11:47 PM Sep 2018

TCM Schedule for Thursday, September 13, 2018 -- AAFCA Presents: The Black Experience On Film

In the daylight hours, TCM is celebrating Claudette Colbert, born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint-Mandé, France. She moved to the US at the age of three, and started on Broadway at 20. When the Depression hit and many theatres closed, Colbert moved to Hollywood, and the rest, as they say, is history!

This evening, TCM continues their theme of the Black Experience on Film. From the TCM website:

Since Hollywood's earliest beginnings, images of minorities on screen were often presented through a filtered lens of stereotypes and one-dimensional characters. This representation rarely showcased the nuanced differences in experience among racial groups in America, or the connective similarities. African-Americans in particular were largely seen as service workers and background characters with few lines and little complexity.

However, that's not the whole of Hollywood's history of depicting black characters and themes. During cinema's first century, films were made that highlighted the diversity of African-American lives. TCM has partnered with the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) to present a month-long study of these movies. On each night of our Spotlight, 13 different members of the collective will sit in pairs to discuss a variety of films and their attempts to portray the Black Experience.

...

(Tonight's theme -- ) Black Romance in Film includes Anna Lucasta (1958), based on the play by Philip Yordan about a San Diego prostitute (Eartha Kitt) torn between a respectable young man (Henry Scott) and a streetwise sailor (Sammy Davis Jr., in his dramatic debut). A Warm December (1973) stars Poitier as a widowed American doctor who visits London and falls for an African princess (Jamaican actress Esther Anderson). Poitier also directed this charming romance.

by Roger Fristoe


Enjoy!




6:00 AM -- ADA (1961)
A call girl weds an easygoing politician and helps him against corrupt state officials.
Dir: Daniel Mann
Cast: Susan Hayward, Dean Martin, Wilfrid Hyde-White
C-108 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

This film was a disaster at the box office for MGM, resulting in a loss of $2,372,000 ($19.2M in 2017) according to studio records.


8:00 AM -- BOOM TOWN (1940)
Friends become rivals when they strike-it-rich in oil.
Dir: Jack Conway
Cast: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert
BW-119 mins, CC,

Nominee for Oscars for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Harold Rosson, and Best Effects, Special Effects -- A. Arnold Gillespie (photographic) and Douglas Shearer (sound)

The only re-teaming of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert since their Oscar winning performances in It Happened One Night (1934).



10:00 AM -- WITHOUT RESERVATIONS (1946)
A woman writer falls for a war hero who's a perfect match for the hero of her latest novel.
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
Cast: Claudette Colbert, John Wayne, Don DeFore
BW-101 mins, CC,

Claudette Colbert's character travels to Hollywood to make a movie from her best-selling novel. Already cast is Lana Turner in the female lead. She meets John Wayne's character and decides to take him for a screen test, as the perfect type to play the male lead. Wayne would later star with Turner in The Sea Chase, 1955.


12:00 PM -- THE SECRET HEART (1946)
A recent widow tries to help her emotionally disturbed stepdaughter.
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
Cast: Claudette Colbert, Walter Pidgeon, June Allyson
BW-97 mins, CC,

After filming The Secret Heart (1946) together, Claudette Colbert and co-star June Allyson became such great friends in real life Colbert became godmother to Allyson's daughter Pamela.


1:45 PM -- PARRISH (1961)
When his mother marries into the tobacco business, a young man struggles to find himself.
Dir: Delmer Daves
Cast: Troy Donahue, Claudette Colbert, Karl Malden
C-138 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

The final feature film for superstar Claudette Colbert. She appeared in the television mini-series The Two Mrs. Grenvilles in 1987.


4:15 PM -- SKYLARK (1941)
A neglected housewife falls in love with a handsome attorney.
Dir: Mark Sandrich
Cast: Claudette Colbert, Ray Milland, Brian Aherne
BW-94 mins, CC,

Nominee
Oscar Best Sound, Recording
Loren L. Ryder (Paramount SSD)

The hit Broadway production ran 1939-40 for 256 performances with Gertrude Lawrence starring as Lydia (Claudette Colbert in the film), Donald Cook as Tony (Ray Milland), and Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz!) as nasty Myrtle (Binnie Barnes).



6:00 PM -- IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
A newspaperman tracks a runaway heiress on a madcap cross-country tour.
Dir: Frank Capra
Cast: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly
BW-105 mins, CC,

Winner of Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Clark Gable (In 1996, Steven Spielberg anonymously purchased Clark Gable's Oscar to protect it from further commercial exploitation, gave it back to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, commenting that he could think of "no better sanctuary for Gable's only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy".), Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Claudette Colbert (Claudette Colbert was so convinced that she would lose the Oscar to write-in nominee Bette Davis that she didn't attended the ceremony originally. She was summoned from a train station to pick up her Academy Award.), Best Director -- Frank Capra, Best Writing, Adaptation -- Robert Riskin, and Best Picture

Since this movie was filmed near the end of 1933, all of the actors are of course no longer alive. The last surviving credited (and possibly uncredited as well) cast member was the star, Claudette Colbert, who died in 1996 at the age of 92, 62 years after this film's initial release. As the last survivor of this film, she was dumbfounded at its continued popularity and reputation as a classic masterpiece of American cinema decades later for a film that neither she nor Clark Gable wanted to do.




TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: TCM SPOTLIGHT: AAFCA PRESENTS: THE BLACK EXPERIENCE ON FILM



8:00 PM -- ANNA LUCASTA (1958)
A reformed streetwalker falls in love with the man her family wants her to fleece.
Dir: Arnold Laven
Cast: Eartha Kitt, Frederick O'Neal, Henry Scott
BW-97 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

There was a white cast version of this movie made in 1949. It starred Paulette Goddard, who starred in the white cast version of the play that went to Paris. (c. 1947-8). The original play was with an African American cast.


10:00 PM -- A WARM DECEMBER (1972)
A doctor visiting London falls for a mysterious woman.
Dir: Sidney Poitier
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Yvette Curtis, Esther Anderson
C-101 mins, CC,

T.P. McKenna was cast in the role of Dr. Henry Barlow by director and star Sidney Poitier. However, after the scenes were filmed, Poitier decided to re-cast George Baker, and the relevant scenes were re-shot.


12:00 AM -- A PATCH OF BLUE (1965)
A blind white girl falls in love with a black man.
Dir: Guy Green
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Shelley Winters, Elizabeth Hartman
BW-105 mins, CC, Letterbox Format

Winner of an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Shelley Winters

Nominee for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Elizabeth Hartman, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Robert Burks, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- George W. Davis, Urie McCleary, Henry Grace and Charles S. Thompson, and Best Music, Score - Substantially Original -- Jerry Goldsmith

Shelley Winters hated her role as "Rose-Ann", primarily because, as a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, she was very uncomfortable playing a racist. Winters was actually overwhelmed and speechless the night she won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.



2:00 AM -- ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO (1964)
A white divorcee's marriage to a black man could cost her custody of her daughter.
Dir: Larry Peerce
Cast: Barbara Barrie, Bernie Hamilton, Richard Mulligan
BW-92 mins,

Nominee for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- Orville H. Hampton (screenplay/story) and Raphael Hayes (screenplay)

Intermarriage between African-Americans and Caucasians was illegal in 14 states until the US Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia was handed down on June 12, 1967. The court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were unconstitutional. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State." Interestingly, many anti-miscegenation marriage laws were enacted in the wake of African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson's marriages to two Caucasian women, as pointed out in Ken Burns' documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004). Johnson married his white mistress Etta Duryea in late 1910 or early 1911, then married another white woman, Lucille Cameron, soon after his first wife's September 1911 suicide. The two marriages outraged white America, and Johnson and Cameron fled America for Canada and then Europe under threat of lynching. Their relationship was fictionalized in the stage play, and subsequent movie, The Great White Hope (1970), for which the Caucasian playwright Howard Sackler won the Pulitzer Prize. The 1913 Massachusetts anti-miscegenation marriage law, which did not recognize any marriage made in a state forbidding the marriage of different classifications of people (the law left unspoken the racial issue of black and white; in Virginia, blacks were allowed to marry other, non-white "races&quot , was considered inoperative after Loving v. Virginia until in 2005, then-governor Mitt Romney used it as the basis to deny out-of-state couples the right to wed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after the Bay State's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.



4:00 AM -- KING OF HEARTS (1966)
During World War I, a Scottish soldier finds an abandoned town ruled by whimsical lunatics.
Dir: Philippe de Broca
Cast: Alan Bates, Pierre Brasseur, Jean-Claude Brialy
C-102 mins, Letterbox Format

Filmed in Senlis, Oise, France.


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